Regardless of which device is displaying the subtitles you will be limited to the options provided by that device. There is no reason you can't have the playback device offer different options as far as where text goes. Again, it comes down to complexity. Getting all manufactures of all TVs to decide on a universal way to receive, display & save subtitle preferences seems very unlikely. Would it be nice? Maybe. Is there demand that would make it worth the overall effort, probably not.
HDMI does have the benefit of no digital-to-analog conversion, multiple streams all on a more compact connector, reducing clutter & making connecting devices easier. That was kind of the point of HDMI. I am not sure why you don't think you can do high resolutions over an HDMI cable? I am not sure why you're hating on HDMI for expanding it's capabilities. Also the fact that it was made 10 years ago counts & if you really want to go back, the tech is originally based off of DVI which was developed back in the late 90s. So, yes we do have to go back & look at history for find out why things are the way they are. Would you like it if anytime a new CPU came out it wouldn't run your old programs, but it had all these new features you wanted? No. Backwards compatibility counts for a lot, which is why we probably haven't seen major changes to how video is encoded over an HDMI cable. It's "old tech" is a perfectly valid excuse.
Error: You are right that 8b/10b is used for video & TERC4 is only for data islands. I was incorrect. Still 8b/10b reduces the chance of signal degradation, not true error correction though. Why they excluded error correction? It's probably anybodies guess but most likely has to do with the fact that the original tech was pushing things to the limit back in the late 90s. Adding error correction possibly would have placed too much overhead & not added much benefit in the long run, you add error correction, but how much & do you allow retransmits, how do you handle retransmits, do they matter, i.e complexity. If they wanted to add compression, that adds more complexity as well. Simplicity can get you a long way sometimes & the perhaps they weight the costs & benefits of using a shielded cable, with 8b/10b encoding over short distances and decided error correction wasn't needed for the purposes they intended it for.
None of the benefits of analogue combined with none of the benefits of digital.
Compression: nope; Error-checking/correction: nope; Optical fiber: nope; Text channel (e.g. for closed captioning): nope; Content "protection": yep.
Compression: No, because HDMI is a high speed data links meant to carry uncompressed video streams. Did VGA, component, composite or s-video compress their data? No. Also it would have to have been lossless & it would have add complexity. Remember HDMI was being developed 10 years ago, would you have been happy if they implemented MPEG2 as the mandatory video compression stream? That being said, you can carry compressed audio streams over HDMI. Error correction: HDMI uses TMDS which uses TERC4 & non-video data also gains BCH ECC... Optical Cabling:...okay? Either copper is or is not fast enough & obviously it is. Text Channel: Line 21 VBI was a headache. Captioning & subtitles are better handled by the playback device injecting them into the video stream. This provides a single point of configuration. In the past you had to make sure the DVD player supported closed captioning & the TV supported it & any intermediary supported it & then you had to configure each one to make sure it was turned on and even then it didn't work all the time. Plus TV based closed captioning looks like crap. What with HDMI 1.4 adding a 100mbit Ethernet link, maybe we'll see more flexibility with data/text streaming. I still think closed captioning/subtitles should be handled by the playback device & not the display device. Content protection: Yes indeed, and DVDs had CSS while DVD players added macrovision. Nothing new. It sucks, but it's not like it's predecessors didn't have this negative either.
You should despise corruption over a specific institution. The government & many private institutions are all culpable in the financial meltdown. What safeguards did the private firms have to protect themselves and the economy from meltdown? None. They took advantage of the situation, which is what most corporations do and with the US economy setup to value short-term growth gains over stability you will have a lot of shortsighted investments with most of the prosperity coming in the form of fraudulent growth predicated off a bubble.
...maybe when banks are making million dollar loans to people with no income and no assets the regulators and ratings agencies should take a look-see (you know doing their jobs).
It's kind of hard to be objective when the banks and investment firms fund the regulators and ratings agencies... Definitely not a conflict of interest!
Guess what? There are many places in the US that are as dangerous to live in as a 3rd world country. Not everywhere in the USA and probably not in most places, but you can go downtown to most major cities and see people without homes, food & slowly killing themselves with drugs. You can go to rural south and see dirt roads & poverty all around. You can go to inner city ghettos and find it rife with crime, violence & drugs. While the USA is probably better than a lot of 3rd world countries, it's also a place where a small amount of hardship(illness,loss of job) can make you homeless or spiral into a perpetual cycle of failure.
I don't think we should turn our backs on those who have it harder than us in other countries, but it also really annoys me when people suggest that since we have it better than other people we should "ignore" injustice and malfeasance at home. Just like people say "life could be worse", you can also say "life could be better" & there is no reason to become complacent and stop striving to make your quality of life better for you and everyone around you because that is when things start going into the shitter.
Yes, indeed. One company I worked for was facing hard times. I reviewed the earnings report and it noted that the CEO took a pay cut due to the hard times the company was facing, however if you read down further he got a bonus that was 3x greater than the cut in pay he took, meaning he actually made more that year than the one previous...
So what would this thing actually do and how would it work... I am not sure if you can be anymore vague with what you're describing. Would it be an app that runs on a person's computer? Do they have to leave their computer on all the time or else it goes done? Will it be accessible through a NAT/firewall? Will it upload to a cloud like service when you turn the computer off or maybe it'll make a P2P mesh network that will distribute chunks of your data out to random people and you'll have to store random chunks of other peoples data, encrypted of course. But then P2P can be very fast at times and very slow at times with no one held responsible for it's performance, meaning it'll drop the ball often.
Facebook: Open Browser google or type in facebook enter your info or login find friends and communicate
Your Idea: Install something or it's installed already This thing does stuff, what exactly, not sure??
Yes, Apple & Google would never think of a centralized solution or want to sell you something... Errm...
Decentralization while sounding nifty, usually means things like reliability,speed & ease suffer. People can go to facebook and look up their friends easily. I am not sure how your decentralized approach would allow something as easy as telling someone to go to facebook and put their e-mail in...
Baseball is an athletic competition, the only thing it has in common with combat is running.
No, the point was not about warfare. It was someone being small minded and saying that baseball had nothing in common with warfare besides "running". Essentially he made it sound like sports had no mental aspect to it at all while chess was some holy grail, a teacher of battlefield mechanics which is also, wrong.
Strategy plays a part in everyone's lives. From picking the quickest route home, to making business decisions. Strategy is everywhere. Chess is a strategy game. It really is about as similar to warfare as baseball is. Unlike chess war does have a lot to do with your troops physical fitness, training & troop morale doesn't play a part in war? You need a combo of both physical force & strategy. You could have the greatest strategist but if morale sucks or you have sick or injured troops, or ones who have not been trained to use their weapons you will probably lose.
Chess & baseball are good mental and physical exercise(okay maybe baseball doesn't have a ton of physical exercise), but if we're comparing them to war they are so simplified from war that it'd be silly to suggest a chess champion would make a good war strategist, as much as it would be to say a great manager of a baseball team would as well.
Sports can have a mental aspect at any level. Even little league coaches try to out coach each other. Even a pick-up basketball game could be decided because the point guard knows how to control the game and feed players better. Perhaps chess could be more mentally demanding at some level, but there are many people who will not go beyond a basic understanding of chess where they know what moves each piece makes, but none of the advanced strategy unless they want to invest a massive amount of time into it.
First, just because some people tune in to see atheltes doesn't remove the fact that professional sports has a huge mental aspect to it. On top of that most fans know what's going on in the game & have their own opinions on what should be done in the game. Yes it attracts people who casually watch to see the athleticism, but you can go deeper if you want to.
Second, in many cases the manager/coach or owner of the team is as big a celebrity as the players(e.g. Lou Piniella, George Steinbrenner, Jerry Jones, Bill Belichick, Coach K, Phil Knight Phil Jackson, Urban Meyer, Chip Kelly..etc..etc..etc..).
Baseball & other sports take more mental prowess than you seem to think, at least on the professional level. A lot of a teams success can hang on managements ability to judge the other team, their own personnel & how they use their personnel.
You seem to think it would be easy for a competitor to build their infrastructure. There are just a ton of hurdles you have to jump through. Permits, easements, grunt-work of digging ditches, putting up poles & re-wiring homes, dealing with people who will balk at digging up their yard or putting a pole in front of their house. On top of this, it's not very efficient. If there is already powerful cables already laid down, how is it efficient that we're reinventing the wheel?
On top of all those costs you will have to compete with your well established predecessor who will probably have stockpiles of cash & credit available so they can bleed money until you're dead by doing things such as temporarily undercutting you(once you're dead, prices go back up), starting legal actions against you or buying off politicians who will act on their behalf.
In the long run it seems very unfeasible to expect that a competitor can easily enter the market, even after ten years. Verizon started their FiOS roll-out around 2000 and it has shoddy coverage around the USA, yet it cost them billions of dollars just to get that far.
Movistar (which has always been a private company since it was created) built and paid for the infrastructure, why should competing telcos be entitled to it?
Ultimately then this free market leads to a monopoly & not really a free market. The cost of entry may be so high now that it would be impossible for a competitor to enter the market. For example the capital required to slowly build out capacity along with new constructions will probably be cheaper than someone having to go into existing constructions and retrofit. Additionally this does not breed efficiency. Should we have a telephone pole for each company? Should anytime someone wants to change their phone company, require them to rip up their yard and run a new cable? This isn't very viable as shown here in the USA by Verizon's FiOS service which looks to be slowly dying due to infrastructure costs.
I know it seems unfair that a company invests their money into infrastructure and then has it taken away, but perhaps there is a better solution where companies have rights to monopolize the infrastructure for xxx-years and then it's purchased by a co-op or non-profit which will manage an exchange.
"The government, for the most part, doesn't even have to listen to them."
Nor does a large corporation for that matter... Maybe there is an issue with size, at what point does an organization become so large and powerful that it's detrimental to society?
Yes, you have found the perfect solution: Never get your e-mail compromised by never using your e-mail! Also perhaps you don't value your account, but many people do value their account information & history they've built up with a site.
If you don't want to provide your e-mail, no one is putting a gun to your head telling you to share your e-mail. Also your e-mail alone is not a security risk. I hope those passwords were salted though...
I am not quite convinced that resources being lost is the reason for the drop of the middle-class though. We have smaller wages, but that's being subsidized by cheaper goods from china, meanwhile corporations and those at the top have enriched themselves greatly. This doesn't mean I don't believe that consumerism and massive consumption as a whole is a good idea.
Your jump between prisoners going to war is a pretty big leap. Yeah, that may have happened in the past, but it certainly doesn't happen now & I think it's a bit worse to draft someone against their will, than to give someone convicted of a crime an alternative option.
Your list isn't terrible. Though it would probably take a unicorn being elected in the most 'progressive' European nation for it to happen.
Nice prose full of fluff that let's you try to blame the lower classes for their circumstances. The people who built the Pyramids were not paid, build them or die. Conscripted soldiers were not paid, fight or die. Infrastructure and paying the people cost us more money than that infrastructure produced? Even though citizens and businesses rely on this infrastructure every single day? How about all the "make-workers" in middle or upper management? How about whole companies setup just to stifle competition and leech(patent trolls). How about people in corporations/government to lobby & be buddy buddy with each other to lock out competition? How about an entire industry that was setup to make imaginary financial derivatives that had absolutely no value to them and plummeting the economy into the worst recession/depression since The Great Depression? There is a lot of spinning tires going on at all levels. Usually the people on the bottom are the ones who are actually physically doing the labor and "being productive", those above are usually whipping boys making sure the cattle is getting more productive each year. Rarely are the people at the bottom there because they have tenancies to want to blow people up overseas or stealing from people, more likely it's to survive and they do not have many resources around them to succeed.
Those who go to war & those who do crime usually have something in common: they're poor. The military & crime may offer them the quickest way out of their circumstances. Usually going to war means doing the bidding of rich men. Also I am not sure when was that last time we released our prisoners to go to war? I am not aware of us emptying any of our prisons to send inmates over to Iraq...
Usually middle-class workers "paradise" goes away because "the elite"/Corporatocracy sees that people are getting a bigger piece of the pie and devises ways to extract that piece to make their own piece bigger. This is partially a folly of "growth based" economies where nothing is ever enough. Find, exploit, consume, move on. Or what's been more popular as of late "Fraud, exploit, consume, move on". Most companies in positions are power are not there because they got there honestly. Exploitation, fraud, bribes, wars..etc... It's dirty power and nothing worth looking up to.
Please do define, what resources the middle-class exploited & depleted in the US that caused the downfall of the US middle class? I would suggest the move towards globalism has done more to harm the middle-class, but then again Globalism has brought us cheap plastic stuff from china, that was cheap because it's exploiting the Chinese people. Thought it's been bigger for corporations who can legally pay people slave wages.
How would you suggest we change our modes of production to be more efficient? Can you give some examples? Is that a euphemism for something else? Pointless fluff? Can you give some hard examples where the US can reinvent itself with "modern more efficient modes of production", yeesh sounds like I read that off a PowerPoint presentation.
What if this was accidentally broadcast over public airwaves instead of over the Internet. Should people be fined because they posted on the Internet that you could tune the game in for free on channel 357?
I think the scary part about this is that people are getting in trouble for sharing information that may have the potential to be used for copyright infringement rather than actual copyright infringement. For instance when Blu-ray was cracked there were a ton of take-down notices sent to websites to remove what amounted to a hexadecimal number, essentially Sony was trying to own a hexadecimal number and make it illegal to use it ever again... Seriously?
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of which device is displaying the subtitles you will be limited to the options provided by that device. There is no reason you can't have the playback device offer different options as far as where text goes. Again, it comes down to complexity. Getting all manufactures of all TVs to decide on a universal way to receive, display & save subtitle preferences seems very unlikely. Would it be nice? Maybe. Is there demand that would make it worth the overall effort, probably not.
HDMI does have the benefit of no digital-to-analog conversion, multiple streams all on a more compact connector, reducing clutter & making connecting devices easier. That was kind of the point of HDMI. I am not sure why you don't think you can do high resolutions over an HDMI cable? I am not sure why you're hating on HDMI for expanding it's capabilities. Also the fact that it was made 10 years ago counts & if you really want to go back, the tech is originally based off of DVI which was developed back in the late 90s. So, yes we do have to go back & look at history for find out why things are the way they are. Would you like it if anytime a new CPU came out it wouldn't run your old programs, but it had all these new features you wanted? No. Backwards compatibility counts for a lot, which is why we probably haven't seen major changes to how video is encoded over an HDMI cable. It's "old tech" is a perfectly valid excuse.
Error: You are right that 8b/10b is used for video & TERC4 is only for data islands. I was incorrect. Still 8b/10b reduces the chance of signal degradation, not true error correction though. Why they excluded error correction? It's probably anybodies guess but most likely has to do with the fact that the original tech was pushing things to the limit back in the late 90s. Adding error correction possibly would have placed too much overhead & not added much benefit in the long run, you add error correction, but how much & do you allow retransmits, how do you handle retransmits, do they matter, i.e complexity. If they wanted to add compression, that adds more complexity as well. Simplicity can get you a long way sometimes & the perhaps they weight the costs & benefits of using a shielded cable, with 8b/10b encoding over short distances and decided error correction wasn't needed for the purposes they intended it for.
None of the benefits of analogue combined with none of the benefits of digital.
Compression: nope;
Error-checking/correction: nope;
Optical fiber: nope;
Text channel (e.g. for closed captioning): nope;
Content "protection": yep.
Compression: No, because HDMI is a high speed data links meant to carry uncompressed video streams. Did VGA, component, composite or s-video compress their data? No. Also it would have to have been lossless & it would have add complexity. Remember HDMI was being developed 10 years ago, would you have been happy if they implemented MPEG2 as the mandatory video compression stream? That being said, you can carry compressed audio streams over HDMI. ...okay? Either copper is or is not fast enough & obviously it is.
Error correction: HDMI uses TMDS which uses TERC4 & non-video data also gains BCH ECC...
Optical Cabling:
Text Channel: Line 21 VBI was a headache. Captioning & subtitles are better handled by the playback device injecting them into the video stream. This provides a single point of configuration. In the past you had to make sure the DVD player supported closed captioning & the TV supported it & any intermediary supported it & then you had to configure each one to make sure it was turned on and even then it didn't work all the time. Plus TV based closed captioning looks like crap. What with HDMI 1.4 adding a 100mbit Ethernet link, maybe we'll see more flexibility with data/text streaming. I still think closed captioning/subtitles should be handled by the playback device & not the display device.
Content protection: Yes indeed, and DVDs had CSS while DVD players added macrovision. Nothing new. It sucks, but it's not like it's predecessors didn't have this negative either.
You should despise corruption over a specific institution. The government & many private institutions are all culpable in the financial meltdown. What safeguards did the private firms have to protect themselves and the economy from meltdown? None. They took advantage of the situation, which is what most corporations do and with the US economy setup to value short-term growth gains over stability you will have a lot of shortsighted investments with most of the prosperity coming in the form of fraudulent growth predicated off a bubble.
...maybe when banks are making million dollar loans to people with no income and no assets the regulators and ratings agencies should take a look-see (you know doing their jobs).
It's kind of hard to be objective when the banks and investment firms fund the regulators and ratings agencies... Definitely not a conflict of interest!
Guess what? There are many places in the US that are as dangerous to live in as a 3rd world country. Not everywhere in the USA and probably not in most places, but you can go downtown to most major cities and see people without homes, food & slowly killing themselves with drugs. You can go to rural south and see dirt roads & poverty all around. You can go to inner city ghettos and find it rife with crime, violence & drugs. While the USA is probably better than a lot of 3rd world countries, it's also a place where a small amount of hardship(illness,loss of job) can make you homeless or spiral into a perpetual cycle of failure.
I don't think we should turn our backs on those who have it harder than us in other countries, but it also really annoys me when people suggest that since we have it better than other people we should "ignore" injustice and malfeasance at home. Just like people say "life could be worse", you can also say "life could be better" & there is no reason to become complacent and stop striving to make your quality of life better for you and everyone around you because that is when things start going into the shitter.
Yes, indeed. One company I worked for was facing hard times. I reviewed the earnings report and it noted that the CEO took a pay cut due to the hard times the company was facing, however if you read down further he got a bonus that was 3x greater than the cut in pay he took, meaning he actually made more that year than the one previous...
Hmmm, HTML5 games or HTML-F5 game, what with their servers seemingly hammered...
So what would this thing actually do and how would it work... I am not sure if you can be anymore vague with what you're describing. Would it be an app that runs on a person's computer? Do they have to leave their computer on all the time or else it goes done? Will it be accessible through a NAT/firewall? Will it upload to a cloud like service when you turn the computer off or maybe it'll make a P2P mesh network that will distribute chunks of your data out to random people and you'll have to store random chunks of other peoples data, encrypted of course. But then P2P can be very fast at times and very slow at times with no one held responsible for it's performance, meaning it'll drop the ball often.
Facebook:
Open Browser
google or type in facebook
enter your info or login
find friends and communicate
Your Idea:
Install something or it's installed already
This thing does stuff, what exactly, not sure??
Yes, Apple & Google would never think of a centralized solution or want to sell you something... Errm...
Decentralization while sounding nifty, usually means things like reliability,speed & ease suffer. People can go to facebook and look up their friends easily. I am not sure how your decentralized approach would allow something as easy as telling someone to go to facebook and put their e-mail in...
Can they take out Nicholas Cage while they're at it?
Yep, money/player talent is everything, which must be why they didn't win the World Series this year...
Baseball is an athletic competition, the only thing it has in common with combat is running.
No, the point was not about warfare. It was someone being small minded and saying that baseball had nothing in common with warfare besides "running". Essentially he made it sound like sports had no mental aspect to it at all while chess was some holy grail, a teacher of battlefield mechanics which is also, wrong.
Strategy plays a part in everyone's lives. From picking the quickest route home, to making business decisions. Strategy is everywhere. Chess is a strategy game. It really is about as similar to warfare as baseball is. Unlike chess war does have a lot to do with your troops physical fitness, training & troop morale doesn't play a part in war? You need a combo of both physical force & strategy. You could have the greatest strategist but if morale sucks or you have sick or injured troops, or ones who have not been trained to use their weapons you will probably lose.
Chess & baseball are good mental and physical exercise(okay maybe baseball doesn't have a ton of physical exercise), but if we're comparing them to war they are so simplified from war that it'd be silly to suggest a chess champion would make a good war strategist, as much as it would be to say a great manager of a baseball team would as well.
This has nothing to do with warfare and more to do with brain utilization & strategy used during a sport.
George Carlin is pretty funny though.
Sports can have a mental aspect at any level. Even little league coaches try to out coach each other. Even a pick-up basketball game could be decided because the point guard knows how to control the game and feed players better. Perhaps chess could be more mentally demanding at some level, but there are many people who will not go beyond a basic understanding of chess where they know what moves each piece makes, but none of the advanced strategy unless they want to invest a massive amount of time into it.
Not true.
First, just because some people tune in to see atheltes doesn't remove the fact that professional sports has a huge mental aspect to it. On top of that most fans know what's going on in the game & have their own opinions on what should be done in the game. Yes it attracts people who casually watch to see the athleticism, but you can go deeper if you want to.
Second, in many cases the manager/coach or owner of the team is as big a celebrity as the players(e.g. Lou Piniella, George Steinbrenner, Jerry Jones, Bill Belichick, Coach K, Phil Knight Phil Jackson, Urban Meyer, Chip Kelly..etc..etc..etc..).
Baseball & other sports take more mental prowess than you seem to think, at least on the professional level. A lot of a teams success can hang on managements ability to judge the other team, their own personnel & how they use their personnel.
You seem to think it would be easy for a competitor to build their infrastructure. There are just a ton of hurdles you have to jump through. Permits, easements, grunt-work of digging ditches, putting up poles & re-wiring homes, dealing with people who will balk at digging up their yard or putting a pole in front of their house. On top of this, it's not very efficient. If there is already powerful cables already laid down, how is it efficient that we're reinventing the wheel?
On top of all those costs you will have to compete with your well established predecessor who will probably have stockpiles of cash & credit available so they can bleed money until you're dead by doing things such as temporarily undercutting you(once you're dead, prices go back up), starting legal actions against you or buying off politicians who will act on their behalf.
In the long run it seems very unfeasible to expect that a competitor can easily enter the market, even after ten years. Verizon started their FiOS roll-out around 2000 and it has shoddy coverage around the USA, yet it cost them billions of dollars just to get that far.
Movistar (which has always been a private company since it was created) built and paid for the infrastructure, why should competing telcos be entitled to it?
Ultimately then this free market leads to a monopoly & not really a free market. The cost of entry may be so high now that it would be impossible for a competitor to enter the market. For example the capital required to slowly build out capacity along with new constructions will probably be cheaper than someone having to go into existing constructions and retrofit. Additionally this does not breed efficiency. Should we have a telephone pole for each company? Should anytime someone wants to change their phone company, require them to rip up their yard and run a new cable? This isn't very viable as shown here in the USA by Verizon's FiOS service which looks to be slowly dying due to infrastructure costs.
I know it seems unfair that a company invests their money into infrastructure and then has it taken away, but perhaps there is a better solution where companies have rights to monopolize the infrastructure for xxx-years and then it's purchased by a co-op or non-profit which will manage an exchange.
"The government, for the most part, doesn't even have to listen to them."
Nor does a large corporation for that matter... Maybe there is an issue with size, at what point does an organization become so large and powerful that it's detrimental to society?
"Don't worry! It doesn't want to eat you, it only wants to rape you!"
Yes, you have found the perfect solution: Never get your e-mail compromised by never using your e-mail! Also perhaps you don't value your account, but many people do value their account information & history they've built up with a site.
If you don't want to provide your e-mail, no one is putting a gun to your head telling you to share your e-mail. Also your e-mail alone is not a security risk. I hope those passwords were salted though...
I am not quite convinced that resources being lost is the reason for the drop of the middle-class though. We have smaller wages, but that's being subsidized by cheaper goods from china, meanwhile corporations and those at the top have enriched themselves greatly. This doesn't mean I don't believe that consumerism and massive consumption as a whole is a good idea.
Your jump between prisoners going to war is a pretty big leap. Yeah, that may have happened in the past, but it certainly doesn't happen now & I think it's a bit worse to draft someone against their will, than to give someone convicted of a crime an alternative option.
Your list isn't terrible. Though it would probably take a unicorn being elected in the most 'progressive' European nation for it to happen.
Nice prose full of fluff that let's you try to blame the lower classes for their circumstances. The people who built the Pyramids were not paid, build them or die. Conscripted soldiers were not paid, fight or die. Infrastructure and paying the people cost us more money than that infrastructure produced? Even though citizens and businesses rely on this infrastructure every single day? How about all the "make-workers" in middle or upper management? How about whole companies setup just to stifle competition and leech(patent trolls). How about people in corporations/government to lobby & be buddy buddy with each other to lock out competition? How about an entire industry that was setup to make imaginary financial derivatives that had absolutely no value to them and plummeting the economy into the worst recession/depression since The Great Depression? There is a lot of spinning tires going on at all levels. Usually the people on the bottom are the ones who are actually physically doing the labor and "being productive", those above are usually whipping boys making sure the cattle is getting more productive each year. Rarely are the people at the bottom there because they have tenancies to want to blow people up overseas or stealing from people, more likely it's to survive and they do not have many resources around them to succeed.
Those who go to war & those who do crime usually have something in common: they're poor. The military & crime may offer them the quickest way out of their circumstances. Usually going to war means doing the bidding of rich men. Also I am not sure when was that last time we released our prisoners to go to war? I am not aware of us emptying any of our prisons to send inmates over to Iraq...
Usually middle-class workers "paradise" goes away because "the elite"/Corporatocracy sees that people are getting a bigger piece of the pie and devises ways to extract that piece to make their own piece bigger. This is partially a folly of "growth based" economies where nothing is ever enough. Find, exploit, consume, move on. Or what's been more popular as of late "Fraud, exploit, consume, move on". Most companies in positions are power are not there because they got there honestly. Exploitation, fraud, bribes, wars..etc... It's dirty power and nothing worth looking up to.
Please do define, what resources the middle-class exploited & depleted in the US that caused the downfall of the US middle class? I would suggest the move towards globalism has done more to harm the middle-class, but then again Globalism has brought us cheap plastic stuff from china, that was cheap because it's exploiting the Chinese people. Thought it's been bigger for corporations who can legally pay people slave wages.
How would you suggest we change our modes of production to be more efficient? Can you give some examples? Is that a euphemism for something else? Pointless fluff? Can you give some hard examples where the US can reinvent itself with "modern more efficient modes of production", yeesh sounds like I read that off a PowerPoint presentation.
What if this was accidentally broadcast over public airwaves instead of over the Internet. Should people be fined because they posted on the Internet that you could tune the game in for free on channel 357?
I think the scary part about this is that people are getting in trouble for sharing information that may have the potential to be used for copyright infringement rather than actual copyright infringement. For instance when Blu-ray was cracked there were a ton of take-down notices sent to websites to remove what amounted to a hexadecimal number, essentially Sony was trying to own a hexadecimal number and make it illegal to use it ever again... Seriously?