Does this explain why religion is on the decline? As less people are infected, less display symptoms of schizophrenia, such as "feeling the divine presence", and "talking to God". Maybe true devotion in the middle ages was a neurochemical imbalance caused by a parasite, and now that humans are living more cleanly, the "faith" we have left is just residual from the earlier teachings?
No! Are you suggesting that Christianity is caused by rats? Please be so kind as to inform us which country you reside in, so that we can burn down your embassy and demand an apology from your government.
I just discussed a similar phenomenon yesterday with a colleague: the people who ask the most moronic RTFM-type questions on open source mailing lists, also give the least informative descriptions of their problem, don't thank people for their attention, and then are most likely to start being abusive if they don't like the answer or don't get one.
That this is not merely a kind of lazyness, or lack of interest, is proven by the length of the rants they can write. Antisocial behaviour is usually simply a manifestation of stupidity.
Our prime minister has been strong, but he was let down by opposition parties, Blair, Bush, Chirac, the EU and many others, who otherwise love to praise themselves for defending freedom.
I can assure you that the parliament in the Netherlands voted to express support to Denmark, but they know they don't get much attention for that anyway.
Islam does ban idolatry, but it is not clear if pictorial representations of human figures including prophets are banned. It's pretty much the slippery slope argument and pictures of prophets would be the first step. There's plenty of disagreement about this among Islamic scholars both modern and historical.
Iconoclasm is common in Christianity, in particular of the Orthodox and Calvinist type, too. The Bible forbids the making and worshipping of graven images, and there is plenty of disagreement about what that means too. To Calvinists it basically means that God is only manifested in his words, and anything imputed to God beyond his words is idolatry.
In the Netherlands, itself home to the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566, the crime of blasphemy fell into desuetude because of a landmark court opinion in 1968 that embodies a cynical kind of Iconoclastic reasoning: the court argued that it cannot impute attributes or opinions to God, and therefore declared itself incompetent to judge whether some description of God is blasphemous and deferred the case to God. This is an elegant line of reasoning in dealing with heathens and heretics, and one that is consistent with freedom of religion: let God/Allah judge them.
The most obvious are the things the US doesn't have and never had. It doesn't have:
- a credible coast defense, - standard air defenses over important locations (as 911 so painfully showed), - enough interceptors in the air (even the small European countries have at least two fighters in the air), - a large force of main battle tanks (Europe always had more), - bunkers, - prepared defensive lines inside the country, - conscription and a total mobilization plan.
Admitted, the odds of the US being surprised at home are minimal: this is the traditional advantage of the US, recalling that the US army right before WWII was no larger than the Dutch or Belgian army. But it is clear that the Department of Defense spends little time and effort on preparing the defense of the US proper.
The US army is structured as a pre-WWII European colonial army, making it a waste not to use it in times of peace (in particular because it is also by far the most expensive army). Imperial overstretch is what hampered the British, French, and Dutch in 1940: the most experienced forces were abroad and not structured, prepared, and armed for fighting technological equals.
I think it is scary (as a European, obviously) that European countries are increasingly following the American example (suspending conscription, and cutting air defences, main battle tanks, and supplies for mass mobilization, in lieu of more helicopters, more transport, lighter vehicles, professional soldiers) to be more 'relevant' when it comes to projection of forces abroad. To me the reassuring thing about the 'total war' philosophy inherited from WWII and the cold war is that every voter gets to fight in the war he voted for.
Believing it and having credible insider testimony aren't the same thing.
The US government is not the only source of intelligence information in the world. Last time I checked the standard method for detecting fraud was still comparison of information from independent sources. You don't need a confession to establish that the crime has occurred.
Much of the rest of the world population witnessed the disappointment and disbelief of retired army generals, intelligence experts, UN advisors, etc. of their own nationality, invited as experts live on tv to discuss the 'evidence' Powell would present. They clearly didn't buy it. Still many of those experts chose to believe that there existed more convincing evidence that the US was at that point not able to present, and that we would hear about in the future, because they simply trusted the US.
At least the Aussies had some guts and were breaking the damned things.
Did that help in Australia? In the Netherlands the torching and knocking over of speed cameras (all links of the page point to photos of destroyed speed cameras) only resulted in a transfer of responsibility for repairing them from municipal governments (who sometimes ran out of budget and stopped repairing them) to the national government, and in more advanced speed measurement systems that are more difficult to destroy.
What I'm seeing is a general cluelessness about how to respond to a large moving object.
I agree. Most likely this is not about unfamiliarity with horses per se, but a consequence of adults -- the other readily available example of big moving objects to a child -- always giving children the right of way. At least some survival skills are definitely not innate.
This is like the old dropping the leaflets out of the planes with the "Surrender or you will be attacked" in different languages.
Propaganda is apparently often more insidious than that. The British propaganda messages of WWI spectacularly backfired in WWII: if you lie in WWI about industrial production of glue from human bodies by the Germans, nobody will believe you if you tell them in WWII that the Germans are gassing the Jews and turning them into soap. The part about the soap is an untruth, btw, and one that may have actually been invented by the Nazis as a lie about themselves. Hitler, being after all a soldier in the German trenches of WWI, believed for a long time that he could get away with the Holocaust because it was too outrageous to be credible. As Hitler put it: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?".
The "Surrender or you will be attacked" leaflets are really intended for consumption by the home audience. Propaganda works best against home audiences anyway: nearly any side in any war succeeds in convincing its home audience that they are the good guys. Convincing foreign audiences is a lot harder.
From TFA: "Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," [..] The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.
I'm calling bullshit. The Iraqi newspapers are intended for consumption by Western journalists who want to be deceived. The purpose of this "declassified document" propaganda is to portray US propaganda as 1) clumsy and non-threatening, and 2) not targeted at the home audience.
More to the point, someone who can't communicate with the rest of the party is a serious liability in any dangerous situation. For many people, the fun of games like this lies in cooperation with a group to overcome dangerous situations.
Isn't multilingual cooperation in a group even more fun? The trick is to make sure you have a somewhat bilingual leader for each language group, and develop a restricted command vocabulary over time. In this case you need just one Chinese-English translator.
I have never been a member of a purely monolingual party, and it is not uncommon in Europe in my experience to have someone in the party responsible for some countrymen that don't understand the Lingua Franca of the group (well enough). It doesn't have to be a disadvantage: I have seen an Unreal Tournament team that didn't have a shared language win a team competition that lasted a year because they eventually became a better team than the others. The different languages force everyone to listen to their squad leader. No needless discussion or individual initiative.
I haven't played WoW-like games myself since UO, but I find it hard to believe that the demographic is so radically different that you can't get people to follow orders if you invest some time in them. Most people are willing to cooperate after some time if they see that the team works.
Think of artificial administration languages from the past like Osman in the Ottoman empire or Latin and later "fiscal German" in the Habsburg Empire. People don't need to speak the same language to conquer the world together.
Just 10-15% percent of the European population will be in church.
Note that the Netherlands scores second lowest (10.2%) in Firefox usage, while it has the lowest percentage of Christians (about 35% now, down from 50% in 1996) in Europe. Ireland, which is the most religious country in Europe is close to the average. These facts don't suggest a strong correlation between IE use and religion.
Firstly, building a search engine is not reinventing the wheel. Dozens of search engines funded by DARPA (US), IST (EU) or other R&D funds have been built in the past, and many more will be built in the future. I know of multiple IST projects in the past dealing with multilingual search and translation (which is a great problem for the EU bureaucracy itself). Getting the right results is not a solved problem, just like building 'the right car' is not a solved problem. Google is just the T-Ford of search engines, except that the economy for cars works differently from the economy for search results.
Secondly, Google is certainly not a perfect search engine. It is nearly unusable now for real open-ended search. It can't tell apart pages with a copied wikipedia entry surrounded by some ads from real information, and is heavily biased towards a few frequently visited sites. I have seen many better search engines, but unfortunately none that achieve the coverage of Google. The company Google might come up with better ones, or it might not, but there is always a market to be taken for a better one. Just being able to properly tell languages apart would be for instance great. The Dutch version of Google insists in giving me Danish and Swedish hits when I ask for Dutch ones only.
Thirdly, the US heavily subsidizes IT-related R&D. The original Internet itself was built with billions of DARPA money. The EU can't compete: as a whole, the US invests nearly twice as much in R&D as the EU. The EU is just catching up.
Chirac's statement is typical of his lack of modesty: the R&D project is just one of many competing with Google R&D, and he is only allowed to subsidize the R&D phase. You are right about Chirac's ego, but wrong about reinventing wheels.
Judges aren't The Borg. One judge's opinion (and that's little-o opinion, not an opinion handed down) is hardly a watershed event.
I don't think the courts are the problem. The vast majority of software patents are invalid, and most judges competent in that area, and the lawyers who prepare patents, know that perfectly well. They just don't share their little-o opinion about it very often.
The problem is patent law. Patents are valid until proven otherwise in court. They can be abused for intimidation of smaller competitors, and in a modern high tech economy it becomes profitable to do so.
The obvious course is to change patent law, but then we get to the next, and bigger, problem: there are some people in high places who believe that copyright and patent law, and the long arm of the law, are the right tools to save Western Civilization from the consequences of fair competition with the rest of the world. This idea is based on the notion of a knowledge economy, combined with the belief that only we are capable of inventing really important new stuff. These people want to introduce software patents, and since they consider themselves economic realists (and their opponents naive or closet communists) they are very hard to reason with. These people are not judges, or engineers.
No, Racism is forming your opinions about somebody because of their race.
The odd thing about most definitions of racism is that they stress the superiority of the race of the racist over other races. Umberto Eco on the other hand explains that stereotypical fascists have a strangely ambiguous relation to the enemy: they are at the same time superior (the Jewish conspiracy, Jewish Lobby, Jews as inventors of communism and initiators of about anything in world history, Jews as capitalists) and inferior (vermin, nonhuman, parasites). They are simply the enemy.
Your description is better, but some of the vilest expressions of racism are not about perceived qualities of someone as a member of their race, but about transfer of responsibility. You are guilty by association of the things members of your race/nation did. The Jews killed Jesus, and his blood is on them, and stuff like that. The Nazi party capitalized on hostility to capitalism by carefully distinguishing evil Jewish capitalists and decent native ones, and attacking the former, and then also sent the Jewish hairdresser to Auschwitz for the perceived crimes of the evil Jewish capitalist.
Some 'antiracists' get very close to this kind of guilt by association rhetoric. I once met one (African American, in a train in Britain, I am Dutch) who started to rant about slave trade and damage payments after guessing my nationality. I politely tried to explain that it is legally not feasable to recognize any pre-WWII claims in our country, and adviced him to try again if Germany ever pays damages to us (when hell freezes over). I can accept this kind of damages argument about a specific legal personality (like a company) that has survived since those days, but in this case it was plain racist expression.
The reason that the allegations of racism are incorrect is that they are based unsubstantiated assumptions. It is more likely, in my opinion, that the motivation for these assumptions is that satisfy hostile feelings toward the corporation in question than that somebody is getting rich from them.
Isn't the fundamental unsubstantiated assumption maybe that there must be some white crypto-racist(s) somewhere in the organization that made this happen by act or omission? If there wasn't any act of conscious will involved, then surely we must live in a racist universe if this event in itself is racist?
Actually, the Dutch, and last time I checked we were still Europeans, spent a lot of time transporting slaves from Africa to the Americas. Even back then the dirty work got outsourced...
Most colonial powers traded in slaves, and some (Spanish, Potuguese, Dutch, French) used them in some sparsely populated colonies. The difference is that none of them tolerated slavery in the home country. In the US there is a large ethnic group that descends from slaves and is as native to the country as most other ethnic groups (i.e. just a few generations). Parallel situations are only found in the Americas.
So far I've seen 5 posts modded up pretty high for saying that this isn't as offensive as it sounds, and is even in some ways appropriate. Give me a break. Is racial insensitivity so DEAD in your country that you can't see how putting four influential black icons onto the same page as a B-movie about monkeys is offensive?
According to Amazon, people who bought George Orwell's Animal farm, which is about farm animals, also bought the Schindler's List DVD, which is about Jews. Is that insensitive to Jews, in your opinion?
POTA is an allegory about civil rights, not a story 'about monkeys'. Relating it to documentaries 'about monkeys' is inappropriate. Looking at the recommendations for Animal Farm it is clear that Amazon's algorithm doesn't understand allegory, just like it doesn't understand political correctness.
I bet people would be singing a different tune if it were four documentaries about 9/11 mixed with Mahmoud Darwish's The Shahid?
Amazon doesn't sell it. 9/11 did lead to a substantial increase in sales of books about radical Islam. This just shows that 9/11 and radical Islam are linked in many minds. I don't want Amazon to only recommend books to me that are not 'offensive' for people in my IP range.
The POTA allegory morally supports civil rights activists like MLK. This is a different kind of association to the one you are making. Some people are actually interested in trying to understand the enemy's point of view. For every one copy sold to a radical youth 9 are sold to disinterested avid readers that want to know what the fuss is about. In the same way as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, Rudolf Hoess's memoirs, and Albert Speer's diary are relevant to understanding the mindset leading to the Holocaust, and therefore are related to the Holocaust, Mahmud Darwish's words are relevant to understanding the mindset of radical Muslims. Of course this point is moot, since Amazon doesn't sell any of these works.
Well, to be fair, what you say is true of London and other major cities in the UK, and any of the tourist 'honeypot' destinations. Poor service, poor standards, poor value because they don't have to make an effort.
True. Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam are the same. Poor service, small rooms, high prices. It is the combination of more demand than supply throughout the year (so that there is never an opportune moment for refurbishing the room) and high real estate prices (so that it is hard for competitors to enter the market in a good location).
I do agree with TS that British hotels in inner cities are often exceptionally dirty, even by Parisian standards. Hotels in Germany, Norway, Austria, and Switzerland are the cleanest on average in my experience. I might try this coffin hotel some day, if only because it is new.
They have no right to come down to someone's dry cleaning business and tell the owners they have to do the military's laundry for free, or else they will be fined millions of dollars.
Yes they can and they do. The only reason that they don't want dry cleaning businesses to do their laundry is because these kinds of burdens are very illiquid and they prefer to collect VAT on the dry cleaning businesses. Democratic governments habitually impose burdens on companies and they are entitled to do so in the public interest. Protecting the market from anticompetitive behaviour is a legitimate interest. This isn't really a problem as long as companies have to abide by the same general rules, and governments don't randomly put some burden on one dry cleaning business alone, harming its position in the market.
Governments are now usually more circumspect about taking property from companies than in the past, but that is just because more voters are shareholders nowadays. In the end it doesn't really make a difference whether you take the property from companies or from people.
The fact that it is a foreign company that can easily escape punishment by moving out of the EU (since it doesn't have factories and other assets that are hard to move) is interesting, but from an appropriation point of view it isn't really relevant in a globalized market. Most shareholders generally spread their money worldwide anyway, and should accept that investing in companies that behave badly carries more risk. Shareholders should also accept that the limited liability associated with publicly traded shares makes it hypocritical to complain about being stolen from by a government. You risk everything you invest in the company, and nothing more. That's the deal.
Anyways, yes, if you revise your previous statement and say that these specific rulings are within the bounds of a democratic government (as opposed to saying a democracy can do whatever it wants, if you don't like it leave), you have something that is at least debatable. Of course since you have yet to make a case for this specific ruling, so you really still havn't gotten anywhere.
I just fail to see which established right of natural persons is violated by fining a company for misbehaviour. Please give me a hint.
First, it wasn't just companies that were affected then, it was also the people living there. Second, many companies couldn't leave as the state assumed control over them. Third, are you seriously suggesting there was nothing wrong with the laws that were passed back then, that if those living there didn't like them they should have moved to where, Poland? France?
My point was, just because a nation is a democracy does not give them carte blanche to do whatever it wants as your post implied.
There is a fundamental difference between natural persons and non-natural persons created by law. Natural persons have the right, and the moral duty towards other members of their society and towards their posterity, to resist tyranny. The state - a non-natural person itself - only exists by the grace of the natural persons that recognize that state, and those natural persons share responsibility for what that state does.
Non-natural persons are legal fictions, and only exist by the grace of the state and its law. The agency metaphor is limited: the non-natural person cannot commit crimes, it cannot be imprisoned, its natural rights cannot be violated because it has none, etc. A responsible management will realize that an international company pretending to be directly 'resisting' a government is non sequitur: the company cannot instruct its employees in the EU to disobey the law and accept the responsibility itself. The only option for the company (besides lobbying, influencing public opinion, etc.) is to dissociate itself from that state to prevent damage to the company's reputation.
The natural persons working for that company have other responsibilities. Regarding your analogy to appropriation of company resources by the Nazis: it is the responsibility of natural persons to do whatever is possible to destroy, hide, or move company resources if they feel it is their moral duty to do so. With the benefit of hindsight I believe that it would have been better if people had been less loyal to the various non-natural persons they served, and had destroyed records, disabled trains, hidden their army rifle after the capitulation of their state instead of following orders to turn themselves in, etc. Most people would have been better people in WWII if they had not taken their employer, church, state etc. so seriously as they did in those days, and foreign war profiteers like IBM, GM, Ford, Du Pont, and Standard Oil should have gotten out.
In this case Microsoft is simply being fined for a novel kind of anticompetitive behaviour. This is unremarkable: many companies in the EU and US get fined every year for all kinds of anticompetitive stratagems. The EU appears to be more heavy-handed than the US in this area in recent years. European companies also get fined by the US for things (business with Cuba or Iran, for instance) most Europeans have no issue with.
People are not going to go out and buy a new computer if they are unemployed and their nation's economic growth looks bleak.
It's still a big market if it doesn't grow very fast, and recent pc sales have actually been much better. Microsoft definitely doesn't want to leave.
No, thats absolutely not true. Just because a country is a democracy does not give them a right to pass any law they want to. Think Germany back in the '30s.
A socially responsible company would have left that country at some point. Microsoft should either follow EU law or leave. The US government may lean heavily on the EU to make it lessen its demands, but Microsoft is eventually going to comply, if only for symbolic reasons.
The European economy hasn't exactly been the strongest in recent years, I doubt dropping Europe would really matter that much.
The EU and the US both have a GDP of roughly 11 USD trillion, of the 50 USD trillion world GDP.
The EU has more inhabitants than the US and they are generally rich enough to own a computer, so there are more licenses to be sold. Because the dollar has been sinking against the Euro over the last few years, exporting companies like Microsoft have actually been making most of their profit in Europe.
In addition the EU exports three times as much (3,025 USD billion, 43% of world exports) as the US (1,021 USD billion, 13.8% of world exports). Microsoft's licenses, and software licenses in general, are an increasingly important part of those US exports. That's why the US is so aggressive on international enforcement of copyright and patents: the US government is aware its economy is increasingly running on hot air.
Since the US has a huge trade deficit, the executive board of Microsoft will not only get fired by the shareholders if they pull out of Europe but they will probably also be tortured to death by their own government.
If you don't like MS, use a different operating system, don't have your government bully around companies and force them to comply with unreasonable demands.
That's democracy. A socially responsible company subjects itself to the rules of the jurisdictions it trades in. If you think a government is unreasonable, then stay out of that country.
Whats next, NATO demanding Google remove their ads from gmail or the UN demanding Nintendo stop selling games that involve graphic violence?
I doubt it. NATO and the UN do not have the power to ban companies from a 11 trillion USD market. The EU and US do.
Yeah, right! The teacher controls very little in rote, and has little feedback with which to refine that control. If you didn't get it the first time, sorry, there's no going back. If you get an F that's it, no retaking the class. If you get any other grade, that's it too!
That has little to do with the method. If you fail, you should retake the class. If you keep failing, you will eventually drop out.
Allowing children the freedom to 'discover' things at their own pace causes more dropouts, and mostly tests motivation and discipline instead of talent. This favours children from well educated and performance oriented parents.
All you are saying is that you are now attracting lesser equipped students and the better equipped students are going elsewhere.
When I am talking about 'we' I refer to the universities in the country. The students are going nowhere: even migration levels inside the country are very low due to religious, linguistic, and cultural division in the country. We do get a lot of foreign students these days at our university.
Instructions are dependent on order. Procedures are independent of order.
Consult a proper dictionary.
I don't see how you can say that and then say with a straight face that your education system works well.
I already referred to the international PISA student assessment, which is based on comparison on randomly selected groups from age cohorts in different countries. We still have a top ranking in education, and a highly skilled work force. To get the most out of children it is better to differentiate early, and send them to a school type that suits their talents.
The Koreans, Japanese, etc. have been following that example, and not the Anglosaxon/Mediterranean one of undifferentiated high schools. PISA proves they are right. To evaluate education systems you also have to take into account how expensive the education system is: Hungary and the US for instance have similar scores in PISA in the bottom of the pack, but the US spends many times more per student. In Hungary you can have >100 students per teacher.
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Does this explain why religion is on the decline? As less people are infected, less display symptoms of schizophrenia, such as "feeling the divine presence", and "talking to God". Maybe true devotion in the middle ages was a neurochemical imbalance caused by a parasite, and now that humans are living more cleanly, the "faith" we have left is just residual from the earlier teachings?
No! Are you suggesting that Christianity is caused by rats? Please be so kind as to inform us which country you reside in, so that we can burn down your embassy and demand an apology from your government.
I just discussed a similar phenomenon yesterday with a colleague: the people who ask the most moronic RTFM-type questions on open source mailing lists, also give the least informative descriptions of their problem, don't thank people for their attention, and then are most likely to start being abusive if they don't like the answer or don't get one.
That this is not merely a kind of lazyness, or lack of interest, is proven by the length of the rants they can write. Antisocial behaviour is usually simply a manifestation of stupidity.
Our prime minister has been strong, but he was let down by opposition parties, Blair, Bush, Chirac, the EU and many others, who otherwise love to praise themselves for defending freedom.
I can assure you that the parliament in the Netherlands voted to express support to Denmark, but they know they don't get much attention for that anyway.
Islam does ban idolatry, but it is not clear if pictorial representations of human figures including prophets are banned. It's pretty much the slippery slope argument and pictures of prophets would be the first step. There's plenty of disagreement about this among Islamic scholars both modern and historical.
Iconoclasm is common in Christianity, in particular of the Orthodox and Calvinist type, too. The Bible forbids the making and worshipping of graven images, and there is plenty of disagreement about what that means too. To Calvinists it basically means that God is only manifested in his words, and anything imputed to God beyond his words is idolatry.
In the Netherlands, itself home to the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566, the crime of blasphemy fell into desuetude because of a landmark court opinion in 1968 that embodies a cynical kind of Iconoclastic reasoning: the court argued that it cannot impute attributes or opinions to God, and therefore declared itself incompetent to judge whether some description of God is blasphemous and deferred the case to God. This is an elegant line of reasoning in dealing with heathens and heretics, and one that is consistent with freedom of religion: let God/Allah judge them.
The most obvious are the things the US doesn't have and never had. It doesn't have:
- a credible coast defense,
- standard air defenses over important locations (as 911 so painfully showed),
- enough interceptors in the air (even the small European countries have at least two fighters in the air),
- a large force of main battle tanks (Europe always had more),
- bunkers,
- prepared defensive lines inside the country,
- conscription and a total mobilization plan.
Admitted, the odds of the US being surprised at home are minimal: this is the traditional advantage of the US, recalling that the US army right before WWII was no larger than the Dutch or Belgian army. But it is clear that the Department of Defense spends little time and effort on preparing the defense of the US proper.
The US army is structured as a pre-WWII European colonial army, making it a waste not to use it in times of peace (in particular because it is also by far the most expensive army). Imperial overstretch is what hampered the British, French, and Dutch in 1940: the most experienced forces were abroad and not structured, prepared, and armed for fighting technological equals.
I think it is scary (as a European, obviously) that European countries are increasingly following the American example (suspending conscription, and cutting air defences, main battle tanks, and supplies for mass mobilization, in lieu of more helicopters, more transport, lighter vehicles, professional soldiers) to be more 'relevant' when it comes to projection of forces abroad. To me the reassuring thing about the 'total war' philosophy inherited from WWII and the cold war is that every voter gets to fight in the war he voted for.
Believing it and having credible insider testimony aren't the same thing.
The US government is not the only source of intelligence information in the world. Last time I checked the standard method for detecting fraud was still comparison of information from independent sources. You don't need a confession to establish that the crime has occurred.
Much of the rest of the world population witnessed the disappointment and disbelief of retired army generals, intelligence experts, UN advisors, etc. of their own nationality, invited as experts live on tv to discuss the 'evidence' Powell would present. They clearly didn't buy it. Still many of those experts chose to believe that there existed more convincing evidence that the US was at that point not able to present, and that we would hear about in the future, because they simply trusted the US.
At least the Aussies had some guts and were breaking the damned things.
Did that help in Australia? In the Netherlands the torching and knocking over of speed cameras (all links of the page point to photos of destroyed speed cameras) only resulted in a transfer of responsibility for repairing them from municipal governments (who sometimes ran out of budget and stopped repairing them) to the national government, and in more advanced speed measurement systems that are more difficult to destroy.
The new average speed measurement systems take a coordinated effort, or timed explosives, to destroy the control boxes and they are guarded with cameras now, but on the plus side it takes the government many weeks to replace the computers.
What I'm seeing is a general cluelessness about how to respond to a large moving object.
I agree. Most likely this is not about unfamiliarity with horses per se, but a consequence of adults -- the other readily available example of big moving objects to a child -- always giving children the right of way. At least some survival skills are definitely not innate.
This is like the old dropping the leaflets out of the planes with the "Surrender or you will be attacked" in different languages.
Propaganda is apparently often more insidious than that. The British propaganda messages of WWI spectacularly backfired in WWII: if you lie in WWI about industrial production of glue from human bodies by the Germans, nobody will believe you if you tell them in WWII that the Germans are gassing the Jews and turning them into soap. The part about the soap is an untruth, btw, and one that may have actually been invented by the Nazis as a lie about themselves. Hitler, being after all a soldier in the German trenches of WWI, believed for a long time that he could get away with the Holocaust because it was too outrageous to be credible. As Hitler put it: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?".
The "Surrender or you will be attacked" leaflets are really intended for consumption by the home audience. Propaganda works best against home audiences anyway: nearly any side in any war succeeds in convincing its home audience that they are the good guys. Convincing foreign audiences is a lot harder.
From TFA:
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," [..] The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.
I'm calling bullshit. The Iraqi newspapers are intended for consumption by Western journalists who want to be deceived. The purpose of this "declassified document" propaganda is to portray US propaganda as 1) clumsy and non-threatening, and 2) not targeted at the home audience.
1. Put bag on floor with opening to the side.
2. Wait until curious cat goes into bag to investigate.
3. Profit.
Is this a pump and dump operation to get rid of copper? Copper is not running out.
More to the point, someone who can't communicate with the rest of the party is a serious liability in any dangerous situation. For many people, the fun of games like this lies in cooperation with a group to overcome dangerous situations.
Isn't multilingual cooperation in a group even more fun? The trick is to make sure you have a somewhat bilingual leader for each language group, and develop a restricted command vocabulary over time. In this case you need just one Chinese-English translator.
I have never been a member of a purely monolingual party, and it is not uncommon in Europe in my experience to have someone in the party responsible for some countrymen that don't understand the Lingua Franca of the group (well enough). It doesn't have to be a disadvantage: I have seen an Unreal Tournament team that didn't have a shared language win a team competition that lasted a year because they eventually became a better team than the others. The different languages force everyone to listen to their squad leader. No needless discussion or individual initiative.
I haven't played WoW-like games myself since UO, but I find it hard to believe that the demographic is so radically different that you can't get people to follow orders if you invest some time in them. Most people are willing to cooperate after some time if they see that the team works.
Think of artificial administration languages from the past like Osman in the Ottoman empire or Latin and later "fiscal German" in the Habsburg Empire. People don't need to speak the same language to conquer the world together.
Just 10-15% percent of the European population will be in church.
Note that the Netherlands scores second lowest (10.2%) in Firefox usage, while it has the lowest percentage of Christians (about 35% now, down from 50% in 1996) in Europe. Ireland, which is the most religious country in Europe is close to the average. These facts don't suggest a strong correlation between IE use and religion.
Firstly, building a search engine is not reinventing the wheel. Dozens of search engines funded by DARPA (US), IST (EU) or other R&D funds have been built in the past, and many more will be built in the future. I know of multiple IST projects in the past dealing with multilingual search and translation (which is a great problem for the EU bureaucracy itself). Getting the right results is not a solved problem, just like building 'the right car' is not a solved problem. Google is just the T-Ford of search engines, except that the economy for cars works differently from the economy for search results.
Secondly, Google is certainly not a perfect search engine. It is nearly unusable now for real open-ended search. It can't tell apart pages with a copied wikipedia entry surrounded by some ads from real information, and is heavily biased towards a few frequently visited sites. I have seen many better search engines, but unfortunately none that achieve the coverage of Google. The company Google might come up with better ones, or it might not, but there is always a market to be taken for a better one. Just being able to properly tell languages apart would be for instance great. The Dutch version of Google insists in giving me Danish and Swedish hits when I ask for Dutch ones only.
Thirdly, the US heavily subsidizes IT-related R&D. The original Internet itself was built with billions of DARPA money. The EU can't compete: as a whole, the US invests nearly twice as much in R&D as the EU. The EU is just catching up.
Chirac's statement is typical of his lack of modesty: the R&D project is just one of many competing with Google R&D, and he is only allowed to subsidize the R&D phase. You are right about Chirac's ego, but wrong about reinventing wheels.
Judges aren't The Borg. One judge's opinion (and that's little-o opinion, not an opinion handed down) is hardly a watershed event.
I don't think the courts are the problem. The vast majority of software patents are invalid, and most judges competent in that area, and the lawyers who prepare patents, know that perfectly well. They just don't share their little-o opinion about it very often.
The problem is patent law. Patents are valid until proven otherwise in court. They can be abused for intimidation of smaller competitors, and in a modern high tech economy it becomes profitable to do so.
The obvious course is to change patent law, but then we get to the next, and bigger, problem: there are some people in high places who believe that copyright and patent law, and the long arm of the law, are the right tools to save Western Civilization from the consequences of fair competition with the rest of the world. This idea is based on the notion of a knowledge economy, combined with the belief that only we are capable of inventing really important new stuff. These people want to introduce software patents, and since they consider themselves economic realists (and their opponents naive or closet communists) they are very hard to reason with. These people are not judges, or engineers.
No, Racism is forming your opinions about somebody because of their race.
The odd thing about most definitions of racism is that they stress the superiority of the race of the racist over other races. Umberto Eco on the other hand explains that stereotypical fascists have a strangely ambiguous relation to the enemy: they are at the same time superior (the Jewish conspiracy, Jewish Lobby, Jews as inventors of communism and initiators of about anything in world history, Jews as capitalists) and inferior (vermin, nonhuman, parasites). They are simply the enemy.
Your description is better, but some of the vilest expressions of racism are not about perceived qualities of someone as a member of their race, but about transfer of responsibility. You are guilty by association of the things members of your race/nation did. The Jews killed Jesus, and his blood is on them, and stuff like that. The Nazi party capitalized on hostility to capitalism by carefully distinguishing evil Jewish capitalists and decent native ones, and attacking the former, and then also sent the Jewish hairdresser to Auschwitz for the perceived crimes of the evil Jewish capitalist.
Some 'antiracists' get very close to this kind of guilt by association rhetoric. I once met one (African American, in a train in Britain, I am Dutch) who started to rant about slave trade and damage payments after guessing my nationality. I politely tried to explain that it is legally not feasable to recognize any pre-WWII claims in our country, and adviced him to try again if Germany ever pays damages to us (when hell freezes over). I can accept this kind of damages argument about a specific legal personality (like a company) that has survived since those days, but in this case it was plain racist expression.
The reason that the allegations of racism are incorrect is that they are based unsubstantiated assumptions. It is more likely, in my opinion, that the motivation for these assumptions is that satisfy hostile feelings toward the corporation in question than that somebody is getting rich from them.
Isn't the fundamental unsubstantiated assumption maybe that there must be some white crypto-racist(s) somewhere in the organization that made this happen by act or omission? If there wasn't any act of conscious will involved, then surely we must live in a racist universe if this event in itself is racist?
Actually, the Dutch, and last time I checked we were still Europeans, spent a lot of time transporting slaves from Africa to the Americas. Even back then the dirty work got outsourced...
Most colonial powers traded in slaves, and some (Spanish, Potuguese, Dutch, French) used them in some sparsely populated colonies. The difference is that none of them tolerated slavery in the home country. In the US there is a large ethnic group that descends from slaves and is as native to the country as most other ethnic groups (i.e. just a few generations). Parallel situations are only found in the Americas.
So far I've seen 5 posts modded up pretty high for saying that this isn't as offensive as it sounds, and is even in some ways appropriate. Give me a break. Is racial insensitivity so DEAD in your country that you can't see how putting four influential black icons onto the same page as a B-movie about monkeys is offensive?
According to Amazon, people who bought George Orwell's Animal farm, which is about farm animals, also bought the Schindler's List DVD, which is about Jews. Is that insensitive to Jews, in your opinion?
POTA is an allegory about civil rights, not a story 'about monkeys'. Relating it to documentaries 'about monkeys' is inappropriate. Looking at the recommendations for Animal Farm it is clear that Amazon's algorithm doesn't understand allegory, just like it doesn't understand political correctness.
I bet people would be singing a different tune if it were four documentaries about 9/11 mixed with Mahmoud Darwish's The Shahid?
Amazon doesn't sell it. 9/11 did lead to a substantial increase in sales of books about radical Islam. This just shows that 9/11 and radical Islam are linked in many minds. I don't want Amazon to only recommend books to me that are not 'offensive' for people in my IP range.
The POTA allegory morally supports civil rights activists like MLK. This is a different kind of association to the one you are making. Some people are actually interested in trying to understand the enemy's point of view. For every one copy sold to a radical youth 9 are sold to disinterested avid readers that want to know what the fuss is about. In the same way as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, Rudolf Hoess's memoirs, and Albert Speer's diary are relevant to understanding the mindset leading to the Holocaust, and therefore are related to the Holocaust, Mahmud Darwish's words are relevant to understanding the mindset of radical Muslims. Of course this point is moot, since Amazon doesn't sell any of these works.
Well, to be fair, what you say is true of London and other major cities in the UK, and any of the tourist 'honeypot' destinations. Poor service, poor standards, poor value because they don't have to make an effort.
True. Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam are the same. Poor service, small rooms, high prices. It is the combination of more demand than supply throughout the year (so that there is never an opportune moment for refurbishing the room) and high real estate prices (so that it is hard for competitors to enter the market in a good location).
I do agree with TS that British hotels in inner cities are often exceptionally dirty, even by Parisian standards. Hotels in Germany, Norway, Austria, and Switzerland are the cleanest on average in my experience. I might try this coffin hotel some day, if only because it is new.
So far I have eaten cow, pig, chicken, duck, deer, reindeer, whale, kangaroo, pigeon, cornish hen, and ostrich. I need to eat more!
Perfect time of year to add goose and turkey to that list: both very tasty.
Or pheasants, partridges, quails, rabbits, hares. I also missed lamb and horse in that list.
They have no right to come down to someone's dry cleaning business and tell the owners they have to do the military's laundry for free, or else they will be fined millions of dollars.
Yes they can and they do. The only reason that they don't want dry cleaning businesses to do their laundry is because these kinds of burdens are very illiquid and they prefer to collect VAT on the dry cleaning businesses. Democratic governments habitually impose burdens on companies and they are entitled to do so in the public interest. Protecting the market from anticompetitive behaviour is a legitimate interest. This isn't really a problem as long as companies have to abide by the same general rules, and governments don't randomly put some burden on one dry cleaning business alone, harming its position in the market.
Governments are now usually more circumspect about taking property from companies than in the past, but that is just because more voters are shareholders nowadays. In the end it doesn't really make a difference whether you take the property from companies or from people.
The fact that it is a foreign company that can easily escape punishment by moving out of the EU (since it doesn't have factories and other assets that are hard to move) is interesting, but from an appropriation point of view it isn't really relevant in a globalized market. Most shareholders generally spread their money worldwide anyway, and should accept that investing in companies that behave badly carries more risk. Shareholders should also accept that the limited liability associated with publicly traded shares makes it hypocritical to complain about being stolen from by a government. You risk everything you invest in the company, and nothing more. That's the deal.
Anyways, yes, if you revise your previous statement and say that these specific rulings are within the bounds of a democratic government (as opposed to saying a democracy can do whatever it wants, if you don't like it leave), you have something that is at least debatable. Of course since you have yet to make a case for this specific ruling, so you really still havn't gotten anywhere.
I just fail to see which established right of natural persons is violated by fining a company for misbehaviour. Please give me a hint.
First, it wasn't just companies that were affected then, it was also the people living there. Second, many companies couldn't leave as the state assumed control over them. Third, are you seriously suggesting there was nothing wrong with the laws that were passed back then, that if those living there didn't like them they should have moved to where, Poland? France?
My point was, just because a nation is a democracy does not give them carte blanche to do whatever it wants as your post implied.
There is a fundamental difference between natural persons and non-natural persons created by law. Natural persons have the right, and the moral duty towards other members of their society and towards their posterity, to resist tyranny. The state - a non-natural person itself - only exists by the grace of the natural persons that recognize that state, and those natural persons share responsibility for what that state does.
Non-natural persons are legal fictions, and only exist by the grace of the state and its law. The agency metaphor is limited: the non-natural person cannot commit crimes, it cannot be imprisoned, its natural rights cannot be violated because it has none, etc. A responsible management will realize that an international company pretending to be directly 'resisting' a government is non sequitur: the company cannot instruct its employees in the EU to disobey the law and accept the responsibility itself. The only option for the company (besides lobbying, influencing public opinion, etc.) is to dissociate itself from that state to prevent damage to the company's reputation.
The natural persons working for that company have other responsibilities. Regarding your analogy to appropriation of company resources by the Nazis: it is the responsibility of natural persons to do whatever is possible to destroy, hide, or move company resources if they feel it is their moral duty to do so. With the benefit of hindsight I believe that it would have been better if people had been less loyal to the various non-natural persons they served, and had destroyed records, disabled trains, hidden their army rifle after the capitulation of their state instead of following orders to turn themselves in, etc. Most people would have been better people in WWII if they had not taken their employer, church, state etc. so seriously as they did in those days, and foreign war profiteers like IBM, GM, Ford, Du Pont, and Standard Oil should have gotten out.
In this case Microsoft is simply being fined for a novel kind of anticompetitive behaviour. This is unremarkable: many companies in the EU and US get fined every year for all kinds of anticompetitive stratagems. The EU appears to be more heavy-handed than the US in this area in recent years. European companies also get fined by the US for things (business with Cuba or Iran, for instance) most Europeans have no issue with.
People are not going to go out and buy a new computer if they are unemployed and their nation's economic growth looks bleak.
It's still a big market if it doesn't grow very fast, and recent pc sales have actually been much better. Microsoft definitely doesn't want to leave.
No, thats absolutely not true. Just because a country is a democracy does not give them a right to pass any law they want to. Think Germany back in the '30s.
A socially responsible company would have left that country at some point. Microsoft should either follow EU law or leave. The US government may lean heavily on the EU to make it lessen its demands, but Microsoft is eventually going to comply, if only for symbolic reasons.
The European economy hasn't exactly been the strongest in recent years, I doubt dropping Europe would really matter that much.
The EU and the US both have a GDP of roughly 11 USD trillion, of the 50 USD trillion world GDP.
The EU has more inhabitants than the US and they are generally rich enough to own a computer, so there are more licenses to be sold. Because the dollar has been sinking against the Euro over the last few years, exporting companies like Microsoft have actually been making most of their profit in Europe.
In addition the EU exports three times as much (3,025 USD billion, 43% of world exports) as the US (1,021 USD billion, 13.8% of world exports). Microsoft's licenses, and software licenses in general, are an increasingly important part of those US exports. That's why the US is so aggressive on international enforcement of copyright and patents: the US government is aware its economy is increasingly running on hot air.
Since the US has a huge trade deficit, the executive board of Microsoft will not only get fired by the shareholders if they pull out of Europe but they will probably also be tortured to death by their own government.
If you don't like MS, use a different operating system, don't have your government bully around companies and force them to comply with unreasonable demands.
That's democracy. A socially responsible company subjects itself to the rules of the jurisdictions it trades in. If you think a government is unreasonable, then stay out of that country.
Whats next, NATO demanding Google remove their ads from gmail or the UN demanding Nintendo stop selling games that involve graphic violence?
I doubt it. NATO and the UN do not have the power to ban companies from a 11 trillion USD market. The EU and US do.
Yeah, right! The teacher controls very little in rote, and has little feedback with which to refine that control. If you didn't get it the first time, sorry, there's no going back. If you get an F that's it, no retaking the class. If you get any other grade, that's it too!
That has little to do with the method. If you fail, you should retake the class. If you keep failing, you will eventually drop out.
Allowing children the freedom to 'discover' things at their own pace causes more dropouts, and mostly tests motivation and discipline instead of talent. This favours children from well educated and performance oriented parents.
All you are saying is that you are now attracting lesser equipped students and the better equipped students are going elsewhere.
When I am talking about 'we' I refer to the universities in the country. The students are going nowhere: even migration levels inside the country are very low due to religious, linguistic, and cultural division in the country. We do get a lot of foreign students these days at our university.
Instructions are dependent on order. Procedures are independent of order.
Consult a proper dictionary.
I don't see how you can say that and then say with a straight face that your education system works well.
I already referred to the international PISA student assessment, which is based on comparison on randomly selected groups from age cohorts in different countries. We still have a top ranking in education, and a highly skilled work force. To get the most out of children it is better to differentiate early, and send them to a school type that suits their talents.
The Koreans, Japanese, etc. have been following that example, and not the Anglosaxon/Mediterranean one of undifferentiated high schools. PISA proves they are right. To evaluate education systems you also have to take into account how expensive the education system is: Hungary and the US for instance have similar scores in PISA in the bottom of the pack, but the US spends many times more per student. In Hungary you can have >100 students per teacher.