The problem is not really the competitiveness as such, but the assumption of starting of with equal chances and expecting some kind of 'distributive justice'. It is things like urban sprawl with castles all over the place that makes a fantasy world feel fake. People have come to expect the equal chances. An engaging world should have many different competitive subgames you can excel in, and people should learn not to mind that there are totally random elements in it (e.g. one lucky subscriber gets to be the Emperor).
I don't play MMORPG any more (played Ultima Online for some time). I do play for instance RTS occasionally, and I am well aware that I adapt my strategy to what the game rewards even though I don't like the fact that it makes me a rusher. The game gets the players it deserves.
"Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. "
There were as many styles of table-top RPG as there were people playing them. Some liked a theatrical style, others a storytelling approach that resembled an interactive novel, still others enjoyed hack-and-slash dungeon crawls, and some groups preferred games that mostly revolved around puzzle-solving. No one style can be considered more "correct" than any other, because RPG gaming was about getting together with others to have _fun_, so the only "correct" way was the one that any particular set of players liked the most.
"The stats were _not_ the whole point of the game"
They were for some people, hence the fact that RPG jargon had a term for them: power gamers. They could be quite disruptive in any group that wasn't into the hack-and-slash sub-genre because they quickly became bored by long interactions with non-player characters, passages of scene-setting narrative, or difficult puzzles that required both group discussion and a lot of hunting around for clues.
I never understood why MMORPGs keep recreating the problem of hoarding & hyperinflation of skills, gold, and weapons causing huge disadvantages for new players that enter the game late. Without excessive attention to 'character development' (=hoarding) you simply don't have this problem. You can run a table-top game with a few power gamers, but you can't manage a MMORPG universe filled with them.
I am a former dungeon master with a 'theatrical style', and no player in any of my groups has ever survived to 8th level. Confusion of 'character' and 'role' (as in 'roleplaying') simply cannot work. Players have to accept that in a good epic, tragedy, or whatever there will be protagonists and deuteragonists and tritagonists etc. Not everybody gets the princess and the magic cloak of invulnerability, and you don't have a right to keep them when you get them. There is no such thing a distributive equality in roleplaying, and taking away all sources of scarcity in a MMORPG just kills the game.
The problem of MMORPGs is not the hoarders, but the fact that the games are designed for them. I think the game designers seriously underestimate the commercial potential of a real MMORPG for casual players that are happy to assume a 'role' for some hours instead of building a 'character'.
But why aren't we deploying surveillance drones over Saudi Arabia, or at least Pakistan? And we certainly ought to have every pile of rubble with a roof over it in Afghanistan bugged.
But this continued insistence on domestic surveillance looks for all the world as if the Bush administration is on the side of the terrorists, or is at least gearing up to declare martial law and replace our broken, wobbly charicature of a representative democracy with a theocratic monarchy.
Is that really the biggest problem for 'all the world'? Don't you think, taking into consideration that Afghans can't vote for the US government and can't be part of it, that bugging all houses in Afghanistan, and not in the US, would show total disregard for human dignity to all the world? Few countries in the world really care about what happens in other countries as long as it is homegrown unpleasantness and it doesn't directly threaten international stability or the economy. Entertaining the idea of regime change in faraway countries is something only superpowers do. It's OK if the US becomes a theocratic monarchy, as long as it will be an isolationist one and it doesn't use WMD.
With a substantial number of Slashdot users (a third?) coming from non-American countries, you would notice quite a difference.
I think this would be the only visible consequence for most Internet users: user communities fall apart and many personal web pages and blogs disappear. For people in smaller 'regions' the Internet becomes an empty and liveless place. Americans notice that they no longer meet people with exotic opinions in fora, and some will think that this is a good thing.
Most commercial websites targeted to a general audience (like Slashdot) will obviously be available on all regional networks. Websites are not very expensive to duplicate, and many already have mirrors in different places. Stuff that is illegal in your jurisdiction (encryption software, copyrighted works, some kinds of porn) will obviously disappear, and open source projects will increasingly restrict their attention to the dominant language community involved instead of using English as interlingua for reaching out to the world. Also IT companies and jobs in small regions will relocate to bigger ones. Many people will follow them. The Tuvalu (.tv) 'regional internet' will be the first victim.
I use English, and occasionally German or French, for Google queries all the time. Only for location-specific things (local news, shops, travel planner, train and plane tickets) I use my native language (Dutch). Same thing applies to books: I am not going to pay much more to get a sloppy translation into my native language. Economy of scale is a fact of life.
I read English-language pages in lots of countries: e.g. Russia, China, Japan, India, Spain, Indonesia, Middle-east...
Many English-language websites are not only not based in an English-speaking country but also not primarily targeted to native speakers. It is modern Latin.
| Many politicians defended the new law, amongst them Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, who claimed: 'There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.'
In that case, they either need to lower the maximum sentence for illegal downloads, or raise the maximum sentence for stealing the DVD (or chewing gum). After all, a difference in sentencing constituents a legal distinction...
Even worse, they must shoehorn the unlawful taking of chewing gum that is the property of someone else with the intent of appropriating it with making a copy of a medium made available voluntarily by someone else (probably the owner of of the medium) that contains a work copyrighted by a third party, who is harmed by the act of copying. This is extremely farfetched: nothing is taken, since you don't deprive the copyright owner of his work and the copied medium is not his property in the first place, the owner of the medium allows you to make the copy, and you don't appropriate it in any way by merely copying it. I see no other possibility than a complete overhaul of criminal law.
What is interesting, according to various articles, is that Germany has about 82 million people, but only 127 million CD sales, a nearly 50% drop over 7 years. So each german is buying 1 maybe 2 cds a year.
These statistics make more sense if you approach them from a CDs per household point of view. Married people very often share things like CDs.
Germany actually used to 'export' CDs from their retail industry: many Swiss and Dutch used to buy CDs in Germany because they are cheaper there. I can imagine this market has largely disappeared because of P2P technology and integration of the European market.
I guess not that Germany is a completely a western country, they must learn that the best way to grow a bussiness is to supply products the people want. And, of course, if artificial barriers are erected to try to force consumers to buy stuff they don't want, then those consumers will just find another way to get they stuff they do.
Considering that Germany is the biggest exporter of the world, and that music and film is one of the sectors where they are relatively unsuccesful and foreign (read:American) products dominate the home market, I really fail to see your point.
If the Germans had a protectionist inclination they would not help the American entertainment industry to collect their money in Germany by discouraging piracy. They would instead legalize piracy and use the (higher) fee collected on blank media to subsidize their own entertainment industry exclusively.
European countries should have much less worries about piracy than the US if they approach it from a strictly economic protectionist point of view. The English language market always proportionally suffers the most from piracy, because of:
- economy of scale: finding an uploader of the thing you want is the easiest in the biggest market. - lack of empathy: artists in smaller language markets make less money, even if they are equally successful in the smaller market. People are more inclined to pay for the CD of an artist that speaks your language, regularly appears on your TV, and is not filty rich.
Legalizing piracy probably increases the market share of the non-English entertainment industry in many countries.
So, you can get two years in prison in Germany for stealing chewing gum from a shop? Cool. wo Two years is very little for a maximum prison sentence. The theoretical maximimum sentence for plain theft (diebstahl) in Germany is actually 5 years in prison. I doubt very much whether the maximum has ever been applied for stealing chewing gum. Quoting maxima always makes criminal law seem more draconic than the sentencing guidelines actually are. It is 4 years in the Netherlands, and I believe even 10 years in the UK (but it has a much more comprehensive concept of theft, based on "appropriating property" instead of "taking a (movable, concrete) good" as in Germany/Netherlands/Austria, that includes things that are considered separate crimes in continental jurisdictions).
A tax cut ("credit" in this case) is not a subsidy.
There is just one major difference between tax credits and subsidies. There is a psychological difference for taxpayers between a government "not collecting" part of the money it is entitled to for some policy reason and collecting first and then giving it to some party for some policy reason. Tax credits make it appear that the government collects less from its tax base and spends less, even though it is affecting the market and the distribution of wealth in the exact same way. I do think it is correct to talk of "subsidizing" open source.
Tax cuts in general is another story, in particular if they can't go negative like the "credit" (in the US sense) or can only be offset against a specific type of tax liability. These tend to redistribute money from the middle class to the rich in systems with progressive tax rates, and generally obscure who really pays.
The difference is that even if Iraq didn't have WMD in 2003 they DID have them at one point showing they did have the ability to produce.
Having the chemical agents isn't a great technological achievement (and the precursors where delivered by Western countries). To make chemical agents WMD you need to develop and maintain an efficient way to deliver them, which is costly and in the case of dictators problematic because you need to ensure the loyalty of lots of people involved. The most effective way to "hide" the stuff from the UN inspections is to destroy it, obviously. Besides that, destroying everything he had in the nineties is turning out to be more damaging for the "Great Satan" in the long run than using it against the US Army could ever had been. By using chemical agents he would have legitimized the attack by the US.
More interesting though, is that many of his own top generals and officials didn't know this. They thought he did have the weapons up until nearly the very end.
That's because they were one of the three enemies he feared (the other ones being the Shi'a/Iran and the US). Saddam couldn't possibly have revealed to them (or Iran) that the emperor has no clothes.
Sadam wanted everyone to think he had those weapons. And he did one hell of a job convincing the world. Ironic that it lead to his downfall (we would have had a hard time going in and removing him without that, even though he still needed to be removed).
Saddam was in a catch-22 situation here. He had to prove to the security council that he had no WMD, while at the same time intimidating the Shi'a/Iran and most importantly his rivals at home with his virtual WMD. Seeing the walkover in 2003 and the developments with the Shi'a and Mahdism following that it shouldn't be a surpise that Iraq was totally defenceless against Iran without the threat of WMD and support of the West.
Saddam understood perfectly well that you don't need WMD to get all the advantages of having them. He established his credibility in this area with the terribly inefficient but well-marketed Halabja massacre. What you really need to stay in power is lots of intelligence services that don't communicate with eachother and a population frightened by Halabja.
For the record: North Korea doesn't have nuclear weapons and is not seriously developing them either. They can't afford it. It is just a smoke screen to legitimize the regime. I also said that about Iraq in 2003 in a number of places that I bookmarked, but none of them are accessible now.
Iran does seriously want breeder reactors, because it can afford them now and it knows the oil will run out. It feels it has no choice but to defy the West, and therefore many in Iran also want the nuclear weapons associated with breeder reactors as a deterrence. There is no irony here. Countries don't get attacked because they have WMD. They get attacked because they don't. Iran is tricky: contrary to Iraq it is no paper tiger (think of the Mahdi Army, the Badr brigades, Hizbullah, president Ahmadinejad of Iran being a confessed Mahdist), but on the other hand it can be reasoned with.
Yes. That is exactly the case. It isn't a matter of money. It's a matter of not enough people with the required skillset. The US government has had numerous open jobs looking for people with these skills for many years and they cannot fill them. This led to a lot of the Intel problems we had prior to Afghanistan and Iraq.
People with the required skillset who apply for a job in the intelligence services are in fact suspect, and cannot easily get security clearance since 911. I isn't easy for an intelligence service to hire a large number of reliable people with specific skills.
I think they are forgetting that (for some deranged part of our society), creating Linux was fun.
Bilingual people with enough time and interest in Iraq will read them, but there is really no point in putting effort into translating them unless you think they are relevant for the general public, which they obviously aren't according to the US government.
Doing a good translation into a foreign language is more work than just reading stuff, or even writing for that matter. I don't even want to translate my own code comments, slides, papers, or reports, even though I work in different languages for different clients.
My point was that buying an airframe is not primarily about avionics or weapon systems, but only about the flexibility of use of the airframe in the long run. The JSF was intended as a flexible platform for further development: it's OK to deliver them with alternative 'proof of concept' code as long as it isn't a black box and it flies.
The avionics and weapon systems are going to be replaced every few years anyway, with European stuff unless the US can and wants to sell anything better. The Russians have little to offer in this area for the future: the only wealthy customer they have is India. They must share the advanced stuff with a wealthy customer, because it is the only chance they have at affording it for themselves.
If you are right that it is only about BVR, then Europe has no problem anyway. The development pipeline of Europe is as good as the US at weapons and detection stuff. The UK was/is planning on fitting its JSFs with Meteor missiles (just like its new Eurofighter Typhoons). The US is ahead in stealth. Stealth is what sells the JSF airframe for Europe (and of course the promise of large volume of production). Without the stealth it's just another general purpose F-16, and we are better of buying Gripen, Rafale, or Su-30 as a workhorse. You can't take away stealth without Europe knowing: it's something that can be measured and compared without actual access to the platform and Europe does have plenty of opportunity to try to improve its detection of US stealth aircraft.
I would scrap the JSF requirement anyway, and go for only a limited number of Eurofighter Typhoons (1000 for the EU as a whole) for visual range interception only (because you never know how the systems are going to fail you) and a large number of cheap UCAV based on the EADS demonstrator for BVR and air to surface. Part of Europe was thinking along those lines a few years ago, but the bombers of the 21st century apparently do need pilots after all for some reason.
And anywho, the export versions of all aircraft for military purposes are neutered, don't like it build your own damn aircraft. Simple as that.
That's not how the market works IMO. The US really wants allies to use its platforms. European countries want to buy a good generic airframe that is produced in large numbers and get upgrades from their own or allied defence industry when they become available. They will be available if there are enough potential customers. It worked well for the F-16. Economy of scale.
The problem is picking the right horse. The JSF is only good if at least several thousands are around outside the US. If the UK walks out, the JSF is probably dead as far as Europe is concerned. If Europe then starts defining its own generic fighter/bomber, the US will turn very generous again.
Buying a 'black box' aircraft is actually worse than buying a stripped down or 'neutered' aircraft you can have upgraded later outside the US.
This isn't proper legislative drafting technique for the 18th century either. Compare it legal sources from continental Europe written in that same era. It's written with the philosophy "we don't agree on what the amendment should mean, so let's write down something that you can interpret both ways." They still do that in Washington. Many of the states do write clear and concise legislation.
If that sounds paranoid... US officials have occasionally admitted that one of the goals of the JSF programme, at least it multinational aspect, is to drive other suppliers of combat aircraft out of business and ensure for the USA a monopoly on the supply of advanced defence equipment.
And Europe is perfectly willing to go along with that, as long as the European defence industry can build all parts of the JSF themselves...
JSF is being sold with some very slick capabilities built-in; not quite F-22 level, but pretty close in many respects. Nobody else is selling anything comparable, and the closest competitor is the Eurofighter.
The Eurofighter Typhoon is an interceptor. The JSF is to be a multipurpose fighter/bomber. The Eurofighter Typhoon exists and is being mass produced for customers. The JSF is vaporware. Comparisons of existing products with vaporware tend to favor the vaporware.
The UK is not the only European country with second thoughts about the JSF. Denmark and Norway are getting out, and Italy is reducing its participation from level 2 partner to level 3 partner. If the UK cancels, the Netherlands, also level 2, will also definitely get out because the volume to be produced becomes much too low and the projected volume of production was the major reason to choose participation in the JSF in the first place. JSF is becoming more and more expensive, and the US will probably kill it if it ever decides to aim for a balanced budget again. No UK (second biggest customer) probably means no JSF.
Which makes me wonder: Why are bicycles (both the one-time-use $80 kind you get at WalMart and the real kind you get at a bike shop) intended for commuting/recreational use missing basic features that enable said usage?
Because you guys don't buy enough of them? Bikes with cargo capacity are quite a bit heavier heavier than recreational bikes! I just checked websites of the major bike brands in the Netherlands (Batavus, Giant, Gazelle) and noticed that the English version of the website never advertises 'city' utility and cargo bikes and trikes, only stripped down versions of the recreational series. They do sell those in some other parts of Europe and in Asia (particularly China). Also Workcycles delivers door to door in all of Europe, but despite its English name, not in the US.
Here the city utility bike (with kick stand, fenders and other accessories to make sure you don't get dirty, rear luggage rack, and the obligatory lights) dominate, and nearly everone has a bike. There's also a tax deduction for buying commuting bikes and a (distance-based) tax deduction for biking to work.
It has always puzzled me why the international bike market is so invisible compared to the car market.
| To Goodwin, the Web is a 21st century manifestation of the world depicted in George Orwell's 1984.
1984? That's a bit of a stretch. There, the government controlled all communications; I don't think any one government can control the Internet.
On the contrary. The Internet is the thing that safed us from the world depicted in 1984. That's why it is going to be taken away from us if we don't watch out.
The problem is not the Internet, but the people on the Internet
The people are always the problem. The world would be so much better without people. No crime. No scarcity. No war. Nothing of the sort ever happens on the moon!
If I couldn't get broadband at home, I would sell my house and buy a different one.
A sizable group of people is simply not in the position to do things like that. At some point one group is left out: the people that are too poor to consider having an Internet connection. In this case it is the rural poor. It is not surprising that you are going to hit a ceiling at some point.
It is the Internet that made many Europeans accept the credit card as a method of payment in the first place. No Internet shopping = no credit card, usually.
The perceived security of credit cards and your privacy are of course different things. You can choose on a transaction-by-transaction basis whether you accept that it is traceable to you. Use cash if you don't want it to be traceable (and check that there are no cameras if you are really paranoid, and don't use numbered bank notes directly out of the ATM, etc).
For most people it is easier to hide their tracks in the real world than on the Internet. On the Internet you need to know how it works first.
When are you gun nuts going to learn hwo to read? The Second Amendment states (emphasis mine): "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I think the more pressing question is whether the US legislature is ever going to learn how to write.
At least some of the founding fathers of the US believed in spreading democracy by force:
"The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us the experience for the attack on Halifax, the next and final expulsion of England from the American continent." --Thomas Jefferson, 1812
And of course it was James Madison, Father of the Constitution, who as President ordered the pre-emptive invasion of Canada.
They believed in using force against England. Were Jefferson and Madison acting on a democratic duty, or are you merely equating the the interests of the US and democracy here? Was the US a democracy in those days?
In this case, however, I know more than enough people from China, and Taiwan that have told me more horror stories than I would have liked. Their first hand accounts are what I listen to, not the propaganda my government spins. In this case, however, they happen to be one of the same.
I don't want to suggest that the US government controls what the BBC or the French press reports about some Chinese blogs. I am merely taking what your "founding fathers" said to its logical extreme. I am sure they would the stressed the YOUR in this case. Even the least democratically minded people will jump to the chance of discrediting public enemies. The media know very well that bashing China, Iran etc is without risk and requires no courage. Nobody basging China here is acting on a duty. The democratic duty applies first and foremost to your own government.
1. SW Africa, by an empire 2. Cambodia, by communists 3. Congo, by a business consortium
Note that China's Great Leap Forward is not in this list. The involved numbers are of course very large in China.
The business of separating and counting national populations is very subjective, of course. I can think of at least one genocide, the Banda massacre, by a company from my country (the Netherlands) on march 11, 1621 that killed over 90% of an island population, and should be in first place in this list if you accept it as a national population, but there are obviously many more. There are no English sources on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not really the competitiveness as such, but the assumption of starting of with equal chances and expecting some kind of 'distributive justice'. It is things like urban sprawl with castles all over the place that makes a fantasy world feel fake. People have come to expect the equal chances. An engaging world should have many different competitive subgames you can excel in, and people should learn not to mind that there are totally random elements in it (e.g. one lucky subscriber gets to be the Emperor).
I don't play MMORPG any more (played Ultima Online for some time). I do play for instance RTS occasionally, and I am well aware that I adapt my strategy to what the game rewards even though I don't like the fact that it makes me a rusher. The game gets the players it deserves.
"Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. "
There were as many styles of table-top RPG as there were people playing them. Some liked a theatrical style, others a storytelling approach that resembled an interactive novel, still others enjoyed hack-and-slash dungeon crawls, and some groups preferred games that mostly revolved around puzzle-solving. No one style can be considered more "correct" than any other, because RPG gaming was about getting together with others to have _fun_, so the only "correct" way was the one that any particular set of players liked the most.
"The stats were _not_ the whole point of the game"
They were for some people, hence the fact that RPG jargon had a term for them: power gamers. They could be quite disruptive in any group that wasn't into the hack-and-slash sub-genre because they quickly became bored by long interactions with non-player characters, passages of scene-setting narrative, or difficult puzzles that required both group discussion and a lot of hunting around for clues.
I never understood why MMORPGs keep recreating the problem of hoarding & hyperinflation of skills, gold, and weapons causing huge disadvantages for new players that enter the game late. Without excessive attention to 'character development' (=hoarding) you simply don't have this problem. You can run a table-top game with a few power gamers, but you can't manage a MMORPG universe filled with them.
I am a former dungeon master with a 'theatrical style', and no player in any of my groups has ever survived to 8th level. Confusion of 'character' and 'role' (as in 'roleplaying') simply cannot work. Players have to accept that in a good epic, tragedy, or whatever there will be protagonists and deuteragonists and tritagonists etc. Not everybody gets the princess and the magic cloak of invulnerability, and you don't have a right to keep them when you get them. There is no such thing a distributive equality in roleplaying, and taking away all sources of scarcity in a MMORPG just kills the game.
The problem of MMORPGs is not the hoarders, but the fact that the games are designed for them. I think the game designers seriously underestimate the commercial potential of a real MMORPG for casual players that are happy to assume a 'role' for some hours instead of building a 'character'.
But why aren't we deploying surveillance drones over Saudi Arabia, or at least Pakistan? And we certainly ought to have every pile of rubble with a roof over it in Afghanistan bugged.
But this continued insistence on domestic surveillance looks for all the world as if the Bush administration is on the side of the terrorists, or is at least gearing up to declare martial law and replace our broken, wobbly charicature of a representative democracy with a theocratic monarchy.
Is that really the biggest problem for 'all the world'? Don't you think, taking into consideration that Afghans can't vote for the US government and can't be part of it, that bugging all houses in Afghanistan, and not in the US, would show total disregard for human dignity to all the world? Few countries in the world really care about what happens in other countries as long as it is homegrown unpleasantness and it doesn't directly threaten international stability or the economy. Entertaining the idea of regime change in faraway countries is something only superpowers do. It's OK if the US becomes a theocratic monarchy, as long as it will be an isolationist one and it doesn't use WMD.
With a substantial number of Slashdot users (a third?) coming from non-American countries, you would notice quite a difference.
...
I think this would be the only visible consequence for most Internet users: user communities fall apart and many personal web pages and blogs disappear. For people in smaller 'regions' the Internet becomes an empty and liveless place. Americans notice that they no longer meet people with exotic opinions in fora, and some will think that this is a good thing.
Most commercial websites targeted to a general audience (like Slashdot) will obviously be available on all regional networks. Websites are not very expensive to duplicate, and many already have mirrors in different places. Stuff that is illegal in your jurisdiction (encryption software, copyrighted works, some kinds of porn) will obviously disappear, and open source projects will increasingly restrict their attention to the dominant language community involved instead of using English as interlingua for reaching out to the world. Also IT companies and jobs in small regions will relocate to bigger ones. Many people will follow them. The Tuvalu (.tv) 'regional internet' will be the first victim.
I use English, and occasionally German or French, for Google queries all the time. Only for location-specific things (local news, shops, travel planner, train and plane tickets) I use my native language (Dutch). Same thing applies to books: I am not going to pay much more to get a sloppy translation into my native language. Economy of scale is a fact of life.
I read English-language pages in lots of countries: e.g. Russia, China, Japan, India, Spain, Indonesia, Middle-east
Many English-language websites are not only not based in an English-speaking country but also not primarily targeted to native speakers. It is modern Latin.
| Many politicians defended the new law, amongst them Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, who claimed: 'There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.'
In that case, they either need to lower the maximum sentence for illegal downloads, or raise the maximum sentence for stealing the DVD (or chewing gum). After all, a difference in sentencing constituents a legal distinction...
Even worse, they must shoehorn the unlawful taking of chewing gum that is the property of someone else with the intent of appropriating it with making a copy of a medium made available voluntarily by someone else (probably the owner of of the medium) that contains a work copyrighted by a third party, who is harmed by the act of copying. This is extremely farfetched: nothing is taken, since you don't deprive the copyright owner of his work and the copied medium is not his property in the first place, the owner of the medium allows you to make the copy, and you don't appropriate it in any way by merely copying it. I see no other possibility than a complete overhaul of criminal law.
What is interesting, according to various articles, is that Germany has about 82 million people, but only 127 million CD sales, a nearly 50% drop over 7 years. So each german is buying 1 maybe 2 cds a year.
These statistics make more sense if you approach them from a CDs per household point of view. Married people very often share things like CDs.
Germany actually used to 'export' CDs from their retail industry: many Swiss and Dutch used to buy CDs in Germany because they are cheaper there. I can imagine this market has largely disappeared because of P2P technology and integration of the European market.
I guess not that Germany is a completely a western country, they must learn that the best way to grow a bussiness is to supply products the people want. And, of course, if artificial barriers are erected to try to force consumers to buy stuff they don't want, then those consumers will just find another way to get they stuff they do.
Considering that Germany is the biggest exporter of the world, and that music and film is one of the sectors where they are relatively unsuccesful and foreign (read:American) products dominate the home market, I really fail to see your point.
If the Germans had a protectionist inclination they would not help the American entertainment industry to collect their money in Germany by discouraging piracy. They would instead legalize piracy and use the (higher) fee collected on blank media to subsidize their own entertainment industry exclusively.
European countries should have much less worries about piracy than the US if they approach it from a strictly economic protectionist point of view. The English language market always proportionally suffers the most from piracy, because of:
- economy of scale: finding an uploader of the thing you want is the easiest in the biggest market.
- lack of empathy: artists in smaller language markets make less money, even if they are equally successful in the smaller market. People are more inclined to pay for the CD of an artist that speaks your language, regularly appears on your TV, and is not filty rich.
Legalizing piracy probably increases the market share of the non-English entertainment industry in many countries.
So, you can get two years in prison in Germany for stealing chewing gum from a shop? Cool.
wo
Two years is very little for a maximum prison sentence. The theoretical maximimum sentence for plain theft (diebstahl) in Germany is actually 5 years in prison. I doubt very much whether the maximum has ever been applied for stealing chewing gum. Quoting maxima always makes criminal law seem more draconic than the sentencing guidelines actually are. It is 4 years in the Netherlands, and I believe even 10 years in the UK (but it has a much more comprehensive concept of theft, based on "appropriating property" instead of "taking a (movable, concrete) good" as in Germany/Netherlands/Austria, that includes things that are considered separate crimes in continental jurisdictions).
A tax cut ("credit" in this case) is not a subsidy.
There is just one major difference between tax credits and subsidies. There is a psychological difference for taxpayers between a government "not collecting" part of the money it is entitled to for some policy reason and collecting first and then giving it to some party for some policy reason. Tax credits make it appear that the government collects less from its tax base and spends less, even though it is affecting the market and the distribution of wealth in the exact same way. I do think it is correct to talk of "subsidizing" open source.
Tax cuts in general is another story, in particular if they can't go negative like the "credit" (in the US sense) or can only be offset against a specific type of tax liability. These tend to redistribute money from the middle class to the rich in systems with progressive tax rates, and generally obscure who really pays.
The difference is that even if Iraq didn't have WMD in 2003 they DID have them at one point showing they did have the ability to produce.
Having the chemical agents isn't a great technological achievement (and the precursors where delivered by Western countries). To make chemical agents WMD you need to develop and maintain an efficient way to deliver them, which is costly and in the case of dictators problematic because you need to ensure the loyalty of lots of people involved. The most effective way to "hide" the stuff from the UN inspections is to destroy it, obviously. Besides that, destroying everything he had in the nineties is turning out to be more damaging for the "Great Satan" in the long run than using it against the US Army could ever had been. By using chemical agents he would have legitimized the attack by the US.
More interesting though, is that many of his own top generals and officials didn't know this. They thought he did have the weapons up until nearly the very end.
That's because they were one of the three enemies he feared (the other ones being the Shi'a/Iran and the US). Saddam couldn't possibly have revealed to them (or Iran) that the emperor has no clothes.
Sadam wanted everyone to think he had those weapons. And he did one hell of a job convincing the world. Ironic that it lead to his downfall (we would have had a hard time going in and removing him without that, even though he still needed to be removed).
Saddam was in a catch-22 situation here. He had to prove to the security council that he had no WMD, while at the same time intimidating the Shi'a/Iran and most importantly his rivals at home with his virtual WMD. Seeing the walkover in 2003 and the developments with the Shi'a and Mahdism following that it shouldn't be a surpise that Iraq was totally defenceless against Iran without the threat of WMD and support of the West.
Saddam understood perfectly well that you don't need WMD to get all the advantages of having them. He established his credibility in this area with the terribly inefficient but well-marketed Halabja massacre. What you really need to stay in power is lots of intelligence services that don't communicate with eachother and a population frightened by Halabja.
For the record: North Korea doesn't have nuclear weapons and is not seriously developing them either. They can't afford it. It is just a smoke screen to legitimize the regime. I also said that about Iraq in 2003 in a number of places that I bookmarked, but none of them are accessible now.
Iran does seriously want breeder reactors, because it can afford them now and it knows the oil will run out. It feels it has no choice but to defy the West, and therefore many in Iran also want the nuclear weapons associated with breeder reactors as a deterrence. There is no irony here. Countries don't get attacked because they have WMD. They get attacked because they don't. Iran is tricky: contrary to Iraq it is no paper tiger (think of the Mahdi Army, the Badr brigades, Hizbullah, president Ahmadinejad of Iran being a confessed Mahdist), but on the other hand it can be reasoned with.
Yes. That is exactly the case. It isn't a matter of money. It's a matter of not enough people with the required skillset. The US government has had numerous open jobs looking for people with these skills for many years and they cannot fill them. This led to a lot of the Intel problems we had prior to Afghanistan and Iraq.
People with the required skillset who apply for a job in the intelligence services are in fact suspect, and cannot easily get security clearance since 911. I isn't easy for an intelligence service to hire a large number of reliable people with specific skills.
I think they are forgetting that (for some deranged part of our society), creating Linux was fun.
Bilingual people with enough time and interest in Iraq will read them, but there is really no point in putting effort into translating them unless you think they are relevant for the general public, which they obviously aren't according to the US government.
Doing a good translation into a foreign language is more work than just reading stuff, or even writing for that matter. I don't even want to translate my own code comments, slides, papers, or reports, even though I work in different languages for different clients.
My point was that buying an airframe is not primarily about avionics or weapon systems, but only about the flexibility of use of the airframe in the long run. The JSF was intended as a flexible platform for further development: it's OK to deliver them with alternative 'proof of concept' code as long as it isn't a black box and it flies.
The avionics and weapon systems are going to be replaced every few years anyway, with European stuff unless the US can and wants to sell anything better. The Russians have little to offer in this area for the future: the only wealthy customer they have is India. They must share the advanced stuff with a wealthy customer, because it is the only chance they have at affording it for themselves.
If you are right that it is only about BVR, then Europe has no problem anyway. The development pipeline of Europe is as good as the US at weapons and detection stuff. The UK was/is planning on fitting its JSFs with Meteor missiles (just like its new Eurofighter Typhoons). The US is ahead in stealth. Stealth is what sells the JSF airframe for Europe (and of course the promise of large volume of production). Without the stealth it's just another general purpose F-16, and we are better of buying Gripen, Rafale, or Su-30 as a workhorse. You can't take away stealth without Europe knowing: it's something that can be measured and compared without actual access to the platform and Europe does have plenty of opportunity to try to improve its detection of US stealth aircraft.
I would scrap the JSF requirement anyway, and go for only a limited number of Eurofighter Typhoons (1000 for the EU as a whole) for visual range interception only (because you never know how the systems are going to fail you) and a large number of cheap UCAV based on the EADS demonstrator for BVR and air to surface. Part of Europe was thinking along those lines a few years ago, but the bombers of the 21st century apparently do need pilots after all for some reason.
And anywho, the export versions of all aircraft for military purposes are neutered, don't like it build your own damn aircraft. Simple as that.
That's not how the market works IMO. The US really wants allies to use its platforms. European countries want to buy a good generic airframe that is produced in large numbers and get upgrades from their own or allied defence industry when they become available. They will be available if there are enough potential customers. It worked well for the F-16. Economy of scale.
The problem is picking the right horse. The JSF is only good if at least several thousands are around outside the US. If the UK walks out, the JSF is probably dead as far as Europe is concerned. If Europe then starts defining its own generic fighter/bomber, the US will turn very generous again.
Buying a 'black box' aircraft is actually worse than buying a stripped down or 'neutered' aircraft you can have upgraded later outside the US.
This isn't proper legislative drafting technique for the 18th century either. Compare it legal sources from continental Europe written in that same era. It's written with the philosophy "we don't agree on what the amendment should mean, so let's write down something that you can interpret both ways." They still do that in Washington. Many of the states do write clear and concise legislation.
If that sounds paranoid... US officials have occasionally admitted that one of the goals of the JSF programme, at least it multinational aspect, is to drive other suppliers of combat aircraft out of business and ensure for the USA a monopoly on the supply of advanced defence equipment.
And Europe is perfectly willing to go along with that, as long as the European defence industry can build all parts of the JSF themselves...
JSF is being sold with some very slick capabilities built-in; not quite F-22 level, but pretty close in many respects. Nobody else is selling anything comparable, and the closest competitor is the Eurofighter.
The Eurofighter Typhoon is an interceptor. The JSF is to be a multipurpose fighter/bomber. The Eurofighter Typhoon exists and is being mass produced for customers. The JSF is vaporware. Comparisons of existing products with vaporware tend to favor the vaporware.
The UK is not the only European country with second thoughts about the JSF. Denmark and Norway are getting out, and Italy is reducing its participation from level 2 partner to level 3 partner. If the UK cancels, the Netherlands, also level 2, will also definitely get out because the volume to be produced becomes much too low and the projected volume of production was the major reason to choose participation in the JSF in the first place. JSF is becoming more and more expensive, and the US will probably kill it if it ever decides to aim for a balanced budget again. No UK (second biggest customer) probably means no JSF.
Which makes me wonder: Why are bicycles (both the one-time-use $80 kind you get at WalMart and the real kind you get at a bike shop) intended for commuting/recreational use missing basic features that enable said usage?
Because you guys don't buy enough of them? Bikes with cargo capacity are quite a bit heavier heavier than recreational bikes! I just checked websites of the major bike brands in the Netherlands (Batavus, Giant, Gazelle) and noticed that the English version of the website never advertises 'city' utility and cargo bikes and trikes, only stripped down versions of the recreational series. They do sell those in some other parts of Europe and in Asia (particularly China). Also Workcycles delivers door to door in all of Europe, but despite its English name, not in the US.
Here the city utility bike (with kick stand, fenders and other accessories to make sure you don't get dirty, rear luggage rack, and the obligatory lights) dominate, and nearly everone has a bike. There's also a tax deduction for buying commuting bikes and a (distance-based) tax deduction for biking to work.
It has always puzzled me why the international bike market is so invisible compared to the car market.
| To Goodwin, the Web is a 21st century manifestation of the world depicted in George Orwell's 1984.
1984? That's a bit of a stretch. There, the government controlled all communications; I don't think any one government can control the Internet.
On the contrary. The Internet is the thing that safed us from the world depicted in 1984. That's why it is going to be taken away from us if we don't watch out.
The problem is not the Internet, but the people on the Internet
The people are always the problem. The world would be so much better without people. No crime. No scarcity. No war. Nothing of the sort ever happens on the moon!
If I couldn't get broadband at home, I would sell my house and buy a different one.
A sizable group of people is simply not in the position to do things like that. At some point one group is left out: the people that are too poor to consider having an Internet connection. In this case it is the rural poor. It is not surprising that you are going to hit a ceiling at some point.
It is the Internet that made many Europeans accept the credit card as a method of payment in the first place. No Internet shopping = no credit card, usually.
The perceived security of credit cards and your privacy are of course different things. You can choose on a transaction-by-transaction basis whether you accept that it is traceable to you. Use cash if you don't want it to be traceable (and check that there are no cameras if you are really paranoid, and don't use numbered bank notes directly out of the ATM, etc).
For most people it is easier to hide their tracks in the real world than on the Internet. On the Internet you need to know how it works first.
When are you gun nuts going to learn hwo to read? The Second Amendment states (emphasis mine): "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I think the more pressing question is whether the US legislature is ever going to learn how to write.
At least some of the founding fathers of the US believed in spreading democracy by force:
"The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us the experience for the attack on Halifax, the next and final expulsion of England from the American continent." --Thomas Jefferson, 1812
And of course it was James Madison, Father of the Constitution, who as President ordered the pre-emptive invasion of Canada.
They believed in using force against England. Were Jefferson and Madison acting on a democratic duty, or are you merely equating the the interests of the US and democracy here? Was the US a democracy in those days?
In this case, however, I know more than enough people from China, and Taiwan that have told me more horror stories than I would have liked. Their first hand accounts are what I listen to, not the propaganda my government spins. In this case, however, they happen to be one of the same.
I don't want to suggest that the US government controls what the BBC or the French press reports about some Chinese blogs. I am merely taking what your "founding fathers" said to its logical extreme. I am sure they would the stressed the YOUR in this case. Even the least democratically minded people will jump to the chance of discrediting public enemies. The media know very well that bashing China, Iran etc is without risk and requires no courage. Nobody basging China here is acting on a duty. The democratic duty applies first and foremost to your own government.
Communism has been responsible for more pain and suffering than any other form of government in the history of men.
Top 25 of highest percentages of national populations killed during periods of mass brutality:
1. SW Africa, by an empire
2. Cambodia, by communists
3. Congo, by a business consortium
Note that China's Great Leap Forward is not in this list. The involved numbers are of course very large in China.
The business of separating and counting national populations is very subjective, of course. I can think of at least one genocide, the Banda massacre, by a company from my country (the Netherlands) on march 11, 1621 that killed over 90% of an island population, and should be in first place in this list if you accept it as a national population, but there are obviously many more. There are no English sources on this one.