I've never liked Microsoft, but I've never liked the antitrust claims against them either. Google's actions are awesome, and Microsoft's are evil, and I'm not sure why. I certainly hope there's more to it than the popularity contest.
One company leveraged their dominant product directly to push a secondary product that might otherwise have been supplanted in favor of a rival. The other created a product so superior to everything on an already saturated market that they outstipped the competition on sheer technical prowess alone. One company put something free into a product that everyone had to pay for to coexist technologically. The other put their money-making product into a free offering that was among a huge field of other free offerings. Microsoft can subsidize products with their massive revenues, but for them to gain the traction that they do requires that they be incorporated into the one product that many people have to have: their operating system. Google can subsidize their products with their massive advertising revenue, but can't actually tie their products to the purchase of ad space. They still have to rely on technical superiority for adoption. If nobody has a reason to use it (i.e. Chrome), they don't have a customer base that they can foist it off on by unnecessarily tying it to a product many people need. That their advertising revenues benefit from ad placement in their free products attests to the popularity of the product rather than to the tying between it and the advertising. Gmail is a delivery channel for advertising, but had to be compelling in some way to encourage users to voluntarily sign up for the advertising channel over Yahoo! Mail or MS Live (among others in the field).
On first blush, Google and Microsoft can be compared readily. They are dominant in their fields. When you get past that, however, the ways they achieved (and used) their dominance are nearly polar opposites.
I'm not a huge fan of either of them. One is useful but otherwise unremarkable aside from sheer popularity, one is barely tolerated out of necessity. For many people it probably is a knee-jerk popularity contest, but that's to be expected since the vast majority of people have no reason to consider the issue any deeper than what they garner from passing comments and opinions of others.
That's not the only way to look at it. Google could use their advertising clout to harm companies that rely on internet advertising in order to exert influence in that particular industry.
I'm not saying how likely it would be to occur, just that it's possible.
I don't see a huge likelihood of danger from Google based on their advertising monopoly. I do see potential dangers from a monoculture of reliance on Google's other services, much like the problems that have arisen from a Microsoft monoculture. Given that their power is derived from voluntary use of their (mostly) free products, antitrust law could be difficult to apply to their actions in many regards. If Google starts abusing their power, it will likely be a very unique case from a legal standpoint.
Correct. A monopoly position is not illegal. Using it to punish competitors or as a means of compliance is.
Google should be watched for abuse of their monopoly power in advertising, but so far I don't think there is any existing evidence to show abuse.
We have yet another person obtaining a position of power after displaying evidence of prior bias, but that's just how politics work. Fortunately, Google has the resources to vigorously defend themselves against spurious charges of monopoly abuse. Unfortunately, Google has the resources to vigorously defend themselves against non-spurious charges of monopoly abuse.
While the price of any specific item is influenced by multiple factors, the inflation of prices in general leading to a reduction in purchasing power is caused by an expansion of the money supply without a corresponding expansion in the supply of goods and services. While it is possible for inflation to happen with a static money supply as a result of a decrease in the overall supply of goods and services, this is rarely the case, leaving expansion of the money supply (printed and electronic) as the source of inflation.
Lowered interest rates affect prices in certain sectors. They do not affect "inflation" unless the economic definition of the term is misunderstood or intentionally misconstrued. Then again, economics is a soft science at best, leaving those involved to squabble endlessly about "facts" which are actually just conjecture lacking any sort of basis in controlled experiments. I guess that's why there are so many frauds and hacks in economics, since it's the perfect industry to make money in without actually contributing anything useful to society.
When you take out loans, where does that money go? Into your bank account, or into the bank accounts of the people you transact with. The banks still have the money, so the default only costs them profit from interest. It doesn't actually hurt them, it just reduces future revenue.
Loans are created out of thin air in a fractional reserve system. The best way to harm the banks is to reduce their liquidity, leaving them solely with assets that they can't transfer easily. The best way individuals can do that is to withdraw all their money. Those banks that had runs on them last year? Poof. They were in trouble before, but the death blow was the reduction in liquidity that happened when people withdrew all the reserve currency the banks had.
For the most part it appears as though we're in agreement.
Rather he obviously meant that market share can be substantially gained or lost regardless of bundling, that bundling does not necessarily equate to market share.
I think the problem here is that there are senses of the term "lead" that mean "result in" or "cause to pass", which Connor intends and few others recognize.
As far as my reading of the statement, I did take his use of the word "leads" to mean "result in" or "cause to pass." Perhaps I'm just a bit fuzzy tonight, but another reasonable reading of the word didn't occur to me. The ambiguity is in what is left out. "Bundling does not [ever] result in market share" vs "bundling does not [necessarily] result in market share." The latter is a reasonable position while the former is not. In common usage the former is almost universally the rule, implied by the abrupt, authoritative nature of the statement. The phrasing is not one that implies an outcome that is ambiguous, as a reading that includes [necessarily] would indicate. It was an exceedingly poor choice of words and phrasing if he did mean the latter, further compounded by the author ascribing a different position to him as a result of that choice.
If there is something gravely wrong with the author's interpretation, it would leave us without any reasonable means to derive context for the quoted statement. I suppose without more information from Connor himself that may be all we're left with in the end.
I would agree that it is probably a sign of cynicism to assume someone in Connor's position would make a statement of such flawed logic, but then again cynicism is grounded in the dark side of reality, so it's not such an unfounded leap to come to that conclusion.:) Yes, it is an assumption, though one I will readily admit to.
I really hate miscommunication.
Definitely with you there, I prefer to know for sure whether something is truly a difference of opinion/interpretation or just a stumbling block of word usage.:)
Synopsis for the tl;dr or reading-challenged: Bundling leads to market share. Bundling is not the only thing that leads to market share. Bundling does not guarantee retention or growth of market share in the face of competition and informed choices.
I think maybe it's still not clear what he's saying.
It is completely clear what he said. He may have meant something other than what he said, but the words that came out of his mouth are clear enough. Mike said the idea that bundling leading to market share is provably false. I tend to take statements at face value, and on its face his statement is 100% provably wrong. I'm not arguing from the basis of what he might have meant, but rather on the basis of what he actually said.
There are two ways that bundling does not lead to market share. Here:
only bundling leads to market share:False. There are other ways to get market share. Why does Opera need bundling to compete?
Strawman (as is "If bundling is what leads to market share, how did Firefox get 20%?", since the is merely a restatement of that question). Nobody was arguing that only bundling leads to market share. I would in fact agree that bundling is not the only way to get market share. It's a poor substitute for actual competition. This is also not a way for bundling to not (wee! double negatives!) lead to market share, it's an entirely different argument/conclusion. As for Opera, it doesn't need bundling to compete, but that's a whole other discussion.
bundling necessarily leads to market share: False. IE is bundled, yet its share has been dropping.
This is not a valid conclusion. Their rise in market share is as a result of their distribution mechanism. Their drop in market share is as a result of informed choices or reliance on the informed recommendation of others (or trickery, as evidenced by many comments here). Bundling leads to market share. Nobody said reliance on it alone would allow a company to keep that market share, which I'm taking it is the assumption that has lead to the breakdown in understanding.
Let me quote myself: If bundling doesn't lead to market share, where did IE's market share come from? Yes, they would have market share if they distributed IE in only the channels available to other browsers. Is Mike Connor claiming that IE would have as substantial a market share as they do currently if they did not avail themselves to a distribution channel available to nobody else?
Let me make one line from that a bit more direct: Are you claiming IE would have as substantial a market share as they do currently if they did not avail themselves to a distribution channel available to nobody else? If not, to what do you ascribe the difference? If so, that was the entirety of my point.
I wouldn't call that a straightforward interpretation of what he said. Bundling does lead to market share, but as far as I'm aware nobody has ever asserted that it's the only way to attain market share. The only way a claim about bundling leading to market share could be proven false is if it was claimed that no other way exists to attain that share.
Mike Connor's statement is laughable at best. If bundling doesn't lead to market share, where did IE's market share come from? Yes, they would have market share if they distributed IE in only the channels available to other browsers. Is Mike Connor claiming that IE would have as substantial a market share as they do currently if they did not avail themselves to a distribution channel available to nobody else? That's a statement I can't see anyone making with a straight face.
Mike should leave analysis of markets to people who actually have a clue what they're talking about. The subject is obviously not his forté.
I would see the disparity as something good so long as the disparity is not borne directly on the backs of the most unfortunate. It provides insulation for those who are not cut out to seek ways to engage and dismantle the things that hold others down. For many (perhaps most), it serves no useful purpose to cause a forceful confrontation with human suffering that they are not equipped to do anything about. It just serves to create emotional conflict and guilt over extremes that are not really "real" in terms of their worldview.
Shake people up a bit, get them to think outside their little box? I'm all for that. Shake people up with examples that are in proportion to their worldview. Using such extremes to do it only causes more suffering. For your average person who's having a shit day and complaining about it, I could come up and say, "Hey, suck it up. I've got cancer and I'm not complaining." It'll likely shut them up, but it also makes me an ass since they can't actually do anything about the fact that I have cancer. Their concerns are insignificant compared to the concerns of others, but they are no less important to the individual in question. Treating them as such only serves to make them feel unnecessarily bad because of something they have no direct power to rectify.
It intuitively seems wrong because it is based on the assumption that a vastly superior force can win solely on a tactical advantage. Guerrillas have a strategic advantage that allows them to minimize the damage that tactical superiority can provide. This has been amply displayed in almost every insurgency in history. The few that have been put down were done so as a result of genocide, where a racial difference allows for instantaneous positive identification (this occurred in the US through the nearly complete annihilation of Native tribes who fought back).
Groups that have a vast tactical disadvantage can inflict casualties far in excess of their force levels. Examples of this are Vietnam, Afghanistan (against the two largest superpowers of the modern age), Iraq, Northern Ireland, and Spain (the Basque). Without a racial element to identify the insurgency, an army must use a scorched earth policy to have the slightest hope of beating the insurgency militarily. In the case of the US, that means the army must destroy their own homeland in order to win. You can understand why that is an unlikely route to victory.
So not only do we fill our atmosphere with the CO2 produced from burning our own hydrocarbons, but then we fill our atmosphere with the CO2 produced by burning an entire other planet's worth of hydrocarbons. Brilliant!
I suppose we could build sequestration plants on Titan and pump all the exhaust back up there though.
I wouldn't say wars are driven by a need for resources so much as a desire for them by those in power. Power/control could be considered a resource for those driven by desire for more of it.
Those brutally nasty wars based on warped and twisted religious/political/ethnic ideology funneled massive profits into the hands of supporters, be they from looting during the Crusades or manufacturing contracts during contemporary times. A war for resources is not so much about helping a population in general as about enriching those in power. I can't think offhand of a war that has occurred where that was not true.
All those wars you cited ended up enriching the antagonist victors (the very definition of "a war for resources"), and would have enriched those antagonists who lost had they instead emerged victorious.
Entirely true, though unfortunately judges giving abusive jury instructions (i.e. "The prosecution met their burden of proof. You are required to vote guilty or I will set aside your verdict and enter a guilty verdict myself.") are becoming increasingly common these days.
Not that something being illegal automatically makes it ethically or morally wrong.:)
While that is true in general, living below sea level in an area surrounded by a big wall is really, really stupid.
I'm not actually saying that people should have necessarily moved out of New Orleans before Katrina. No, the really stupid thing was people moving back to the undersea city. The only thing worse is people building houses on unstable hills in California, and there the damage is very limited in the scope of its effects on the population of the area. Massive hurricanes hit populated areas way more often than any other natural disaster, with the possible exception of fire.
"Wrong," however, is frequently relative to circumstances. When circumstances change from "I can play offline" to "this game has broken due to my lack of an internet connection," there is certainly a legitimate argument for disabling the thing that breaks the game. For people without the skills to remove the DRM themselves, downloading a cracked copy (while not necessarily safe) fulfills the original spirit of the sale: to play the game.
Then again, this would technically not be piracy since you own the game. It would, however, break the EULA. There is an argument to be made for breaking a contract when the game maker does not fulfill their end of the bargain, especially since a remedy for not agreeing to the EULA is to return the game. Returning the game is an option that is flatly denied pretty much universally, so the manufacturer has included a legal provision that they know cannot be exercised by the consumer. There is no meeting of the minds in an EULA, and they are crafted in such a manner that your only option in not agreeing to the contract after you have purchased the media is to take the loss and sit on it. If they want to base their contract on fraud, there is no ethical dilemma in ignoring the contract to get fulfillment from the manufacturer.
Again, "wrong" is defined by the circumstances surrounding an action. A wrong can quite certainly be transformed into a right, given the appropriate situation. This is true for many legal issues as much as for ethical issues.
Making a compelling argument for the outcome of gun control in the short term is different from recognizing the ultimate outcome should a democratic government fall. I understand that good arguments can be made for it, but only so long as one is willing to understand the overall price that must be paid for taking a short-term view of the issue. The long-term outcome isn't really an opinion open to interpretation. It is an eventuality, just like any other cycle (obviously allowing for something drastic that destroys the particular cycle, but a defense can't be based on something that, while possible, has no prior evidentiary basis). I apologize for not making the scale I was refering to clearer.
While someone good at argumentation and critical thought can present a decent defense of a given position, there are cases that can only be made through oversight, whether intentional or not, of certain information. One can argue reasonably about whether man greatly influences climate, but one cannot argue that the world will not ever enter another ice age, or that greenhouse gases do not affect planetary heat retention, unless a great body of evidence that points to the contrary (or depending on a "what-if" that is not supported by any evidence whatsoever) is ignored.
Sadly I used my last mod points about 5 minutes ago on another story.
Liberal or conservative, I don't tend to lose respect for people on legitimate intellectual differences, but gun control is one of those that has so much historical backing that it should be self-evident. It is not an intellectual difference of opinion, it is the difference between ignorance and being informed and able to think critically about history. There are cons to having open access to firearms in a society, but those cons cannot ever be worse than the worst-case scenarios that have happened time and again without access to them (or when law-abiding citizens give them up voluntarily).
The concept that democratic societies are somehow automagically inoculated against totalitarianism strikes me as hopelessly naive.
We're all in this together as a society, and if you can't trust your law-abiding neighbors with guns, you need to get to know them better.
Truer words have rarely been printed, but sadly there are millions of people who are that hopelessly naive and historically ignorant.
No, this is what judicial gag orders are used for. This evidence would likely be used sparingly in any way it could be leaked into public. More than likely the uses would be to troll for evidence of crimes where they could then look closer and obtain evidence in a more conventional manner.
Not being able to make lawful use of the evidence does not equate to not being able to use it at all. Additionally, records could be compiled on any group they want should something happen to give them an excuse to go after said group. Just because the US is a constitutional republic now, it may not always be. Those records compiled don't disappear the moment the controls on government actions disappear.
I have trouble imagining a college-level instructor even trying, never mind getting away with this. By contrast, I have little trouble imagining this sort of story being spread without verification.
I have little trouble imagining a college professor trying this, since there are those who maintain that lectures are property and any derivatives of that work also belong to them (or that they have the authority to compel the destruction of). I apologize for not having any citations on-hand, but have encountered this mentality from professors in the past.
That said, I can also agree that this is one of those stories that could be entirely fictitious yet still easily be spread without verification.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends entirely on what your objective is. There are many times I'd take a club or mace before a black powder rifle or submachine gun. :)
I've never liked Microsoft, but I've never liked the antitrust claims against them either. Google's actions are awesome, and Microsoft's are evil, and I'm not sure why. I certainly hope there's more to it than the popularity contest.
One company leveraged their dominant product directly to push a secondary product that might otherwise have been supplanted in favor of a rival. The other created a product so superior to everything on an already saturated market that they outstipped the competition on sheer technical prowess alone. One company put something free into a product that everyone had to pay for to coexist technologically. The other put their money-making product into a free offering that was among a huge field of other free offerings. Microsoft can subsidize products with their massive revenues, but for them to gain the traction that they do requires that they be incorporated into the one product that many people have to have: their operating system. Google can subsidize their products with their massive advertising revenue, but can't actually tie their products to the purchase of ad space. They still have to rely on technical superiority for adoption. If nobody has a reason to use it (i.e. Chrome), they don't have a customer base that they can foist it off on by unnecessarily tying it to a product many people need. That their advertising revenues benefit from ad placement in their free products attests to the popularity of the product rather than to the tying between it and the advertising. Gmail is a delivery channel for advertising, but had to be compelling in some way to encourage users to voluntarily sign up for the advertising channel over Yahoo! Mail or MS Live (among others in the field).
On first blush, Google and Microsoft can be compared readily. They are dominant in their fields. When you get past that, however, the ways they achieved (and used) their dominance are nearly polar opposites.
I'm not a huge fan of either of them. One is useful but otherwise unremarkable aside from sheer popularity, one is barely tolerated out of necessity. For many people it probably is a knee-jerk popularity contest, but that's to be expected since the vast majority of people have no reason to consider the issue any deeper than what they garner from passing comments and opinions of others.
That's not the only way to look at it. Google could use their advertising clout to harm companies that rely on internet advertising in order to exert influence in that particular industry.
I'm not saying how likely it would be to occur, just that it's possible.
I don't see a huge likelihood of danger from Google based on their advertising monopoly. I do see potential dangers from a monoculture of reliance on Google's other services, much like the problems that have arisen from a Microsoft monoculture. Given that their power is derived from voluntary use of their (mostly) free products, antitrust law could be difficult to apply to their actions in many regards. If Google starts abusing their power, it will likely be a very unique case from a legal standpoint.
Correct. A monopoly position is not illegal. Using it to punish competitors or as a means of compliance is.
Google should be watched for abuse of their monopoly power in advertising, but so far I don't think there is any existing evidence to show abuse.
We have yet another person obtaining a position of power after displaying evidence of prior bias, but that's just how politics work. Fortunately, Google has the resources to vigorously defend themselves against spurious charges of monopoly abuse. Unfortunately, Google has the resources to vigorously defend themselves against non-spurious charges of monopoly abuse.
While the price of any specific item is influenced by multiple factors, the inflation of prices in general leading to a reduction in purchasing power is caused by an expansion of the money supply without a corresponding expansion in the supply of goods and services. While it is possible for inflation to happen with a static money supply as a result of a decrease in the overall supply of goods and services, this is rarely the case, leaving expansion of the money supply (printed and electronic) as the source of inflation.
Lowered interest rates affect prices in certain sectors. They do not affect "inflation" unless the economic definition of the term is misunderstood or intentionally misconstrued. Then again, economics is a soft science at best, leaving those involved to squabble endlessly about "facts" which are actually just conjecture lacking any sort of basis in controlled experiments. I guess that's why there are so many frauds and hacks in economics, since it's the perfect industry to make money in without actually contributing anything useful to society.
When you take out loans, where does that money go? Into your bank account, or into the bank accounts of the people you transact with. The banks still have the money, so the default only costs them profit from interest. It doesn't actually hurt them, it just reduces future revenue.
Loans are created out of thin air in a fractional reserve system. The best way to harm the banks is to reduce their liquidity, leaving them solely with assets that they can't transfer easily. The best way individuals can do that is to withdraw all their money. Those banks that had runs on them last year? Poof. They were in trouble before, but the death blow was the reduction in liquidity that happened when people withdrew all the reserve currency the banks had.
For the most part it appears as though we're in agreement.
Rather he obviously meant that market share can be substantially gained or lost regardless of bundling, that bundling does not necessarily equate to market share.
I think the problem here is that there are senses of the term "lead" that mean "result in" or "cause to pass", which Connor intends and few others recognize.
As far as my reading of the statement, I did take his use of the word "leads" to mean "result in" or "cause to pass." Perhaps I'm just a bit fuzzy tonight, but another reasonable reading of the word didn't occur to me. The ambiguity is in what is left out. "Bundling does not [ever] result in market share" vs "bundling does not [necessarily] result in market share." The latter is a reasonable position while the former is not. In common usage the former is almost universally the rule, implied by the abrupt, authoritative nature of the statement. The phrasing is not one that implies an outcome that is ambiguous, as a reading that includes [necessarily] would indicate. It was an exceedingly poor choice of words and phrasing if he did mean the latter, further compounded by the author ascribing a different position to him as a result of that choice.
If there is something gravely wrong with the author's interpretation, it would leave us without any reasonable means to derive context for the quoted statement. I suppose without more information from Connor himself that may be all we're left with in the end.
I would agree that it is probably a sign of cynicism to assume someone in Connor's position would make a statement of such flawed logic, but then again cynicism is grounded in the dark side of reality, so it's not such an unfounded leap to come to that conclusion. :) Yes, it is an assumption, though one I will readily admit to.
I really hate miscommunication.
Definitely with you there, I prefer to know for sure whether something is truly a difference of opinion/interpretation or just a stumbling block of word usage. :)
Synopsis for the tl;dr or reading-challenged:
Bundling leads to market share.
Bundling is not the only thing that leads to market share.
Bundling does not guarantee retention or growth of market share in the face of competition and informed choices.
I think maybe it's still not clear what he's saying.
It is completely clear what he said. He may have meant something other than what he said, but the words that came out of his mouth are clear enough. Mike said the idea that bundling leading to market share is provably false. I tend to take statements at face value, and on its face his statement is 100% provably wrong. I'm not arguing from the basis of what he might have meant, but rather on the basis of what he actually said.
There are two ways that bundling does not lead to market share. Here:
Strawman (as is "If bundling is what leads to market share, how did Firefox get 20%?", since the is merely a restatement of that question). Nobody was arguing that only bundling leads to market share. I would in fact agree that bundling is not the only way to get market share. It's a poor substitute for actual competition. This is also not a way for bundling to not (wee! double negatives!) lead to market share, it's an entirely different argument/conclusion. As for Opera, it doesn't need bundling to compete, but that's a whole other discussion.
This is not a valid conclusion. Their rise in market share is as a result of their distribution mechanism. Their drop in market share is as a result of informed choices or reliance on the informed recommendation of others (or trickery, as evidenced by many comments here). Bundling leads to market share. Nobody said reliance on it alone would allow a company to keep that market share, which I'm taking it is the assumption that has lead to the breakdown in understanding.
Let me quote myself:
If bundling doesn't lead to market share, where did IE's market share come from? Yes, they would have market share if they distributed IE in only the channels available to other browsers. Is Mike Connor claiming that IE would have as substantial a market share as they do currently if they did not avail themselves to a distribution channel available to nobody else?
Let me make one line from that a bit more direct: Are you claiming IE would have as substantial a market share as they do currently if they did not avail themselves to a distribution channel available to nobody else? If not, to what do you ascribe the difference? If so, that was the entirety of my point.
I wouldn't call that a straightforward interpretation of what he said. Bundling does lead to market share, but as far as I'm aware nobody has ever asserted that it's the only way to attain market share. The only way a claim about bundling leading to market share could be proven false is if it was claimed that no other way exists to attain that share.
Mike Connor's statement is laughable at best. If bundling doesn't lead to market share, where did IE's market share come from? Yes, they would have market share if they distributed IE in only the channels available to other browsers. Is Mike Connor claiming that IE would have as substantial a market share as they do currently if they did not avail themselves to a distribution channel available to nobody else? That's a statement I can't see anyone making with a straight face.
Mike should leave analysis of markets to people who actually have a clue what they're talking about. The subject is obviously not his forté.
"Free speech" does not protect against fraud or computer intrusion, nor does it apply to speech of a commercial nature.
I would see the disparity as something good so long as the disparity is not borne directly on the backs of the most unfortunate. It provides insulation for those who are not cut out to seek ways to engage and dismantle the things that hold others down. For many (perhaps most), it serves no useful purpose to cause a forceful confrontation with human suffering that they are not equipped to do anything about. It just serves to create emotional conflict and guilt over extremes that are not really "real" in terms of their worldview.
Shake people up a bit, get them to think outside their little box? I'm all for that. Shake people up with examples that are in proportion to their worldview. Using such extremes to do it only causes more suffering. For your average person who's having a shit day and complaining about it, I could come up and say, "Hey, suck it up. I've got cancer and I'm not complaining." It'll likely shut them up, but it also makes me an ass since they can't actually do anything about the fact that I have cancer. Their concerns are insignificant compared to the concerns of others, but they are no less important to the individual in question. Treating them as such only serves to make them feel unnecessarily bad because of something they have no direct power to rectify.
You're both right, but are each focusing on opposing points of inflection of the same cycle.
The taboo of homosexual relations is as old as the acceptance of it, just like gambling, drugs, prostitution, and non-monogamous sexual relations.
It intuitively seems wrong because it is based on the assumption that a vastly superior force can win solely on a tactical advantage. Guerrillas have a strategic advantage that allows them to minimize the damage that tactical superiority can provide. This has been amply displayed in almost every insurgency in history. The few that have been put down were done so as a result of genocide, where a racial difference allows for instantaneous positive identification (this occurred in the US through the nearly complete annihilation of Native tribes who fought back).
Groups that have a vast tactical disadvantage can inflict casualties far in excess of their force levels. Examples of this are Vietnam, Afghanistan (against the two largest superpowers of the modern age), Iraq, Northern Ireland, and Spain (the Basque). Without a racial element to identify the insurgency, an army must use a scorched earth policy to have the slightest hope of beating the insurgency militarily. In the case of the US, that means the army must destroy their own homeland in order to win. You can understand why that is an unlikely route to victory.
So not only do we fill our atmosphere with the CO2 produced from burning our own hydrocarbons, but then we fill our atmosphere with the CO2 produced by burning an entire other planet's worth of hydrocarbons. Brilliant!
I suppose we could build sequestration plants on Titan and pump all the exhaust back up there though.
I wouldn't say wars are driven by a need for resources so much as a desire for them by those in power. Power/control could be considered a resource for those driven by desire for more of it.
Those brutally nasty wars based on warped and twisted religious/political/ethnic ideology funneled massive profits into the hands of supporters, be they from looting during the Crusades or manufacturing contracts during contemporary times. A war for resources is not so much about helping a population in general as about enriching those in power. I can't think offhand of a war that has occurred where that was not true.
All those wars you cited ended up enriching the antagonist victors (the very definition of "a war for resources"), and would have enriched those antagonists who lost had they instead emerged victorious.
Obligatory:
G-Spot may or may not be real but being a slashdotter it is irrelevant to me.
There, fixed that for you.
Entirely true, though unfortunately judges giving abusive jury instructions (i.e. "The prosecution met their burden of proof. You are required to vote guilty or I will set aside your verdict and enter a guilty verdict myself.") are becoming increasingly common these days.
Not that something being illegal automatically makes it ethically or morally wrong. :)
The original would likely have been Chinese to begin with, so being a Chinese knockoff wouldn't necessarily mean anything. :)
While that is true in general, living below sea level in an area surrounded by a big wall is really, really stupid.
I'm not actually saying that people should have necessarily moved out of New Orleans before Katrina. No, the really stupid thing was people moving back to the undersea city. The only thing worse is people building houses on unstable hills in California, and there the damage is very limited in the scope of its effects on the population of the area. Massive hurricanes hit populated areas way more often than any other natural disaster, with the possible exception of fire.
"Wrong," however, is frequently relative to circumstances. When circumstances change from "I can play offline" to "this game has broken due to my lack of an internet connection," there is certainly a legitimate argument for disabling the thing that breaks the game. For people without the skills to remove the DRM themselves, downloading a cracked copy (while not necessarily safe) fulfills the original spirit of the sale: to play the game.
Then again, this would technically not be piracy since you own the game. It would, however, break the EULA. There is an argument to be made for breaking a contract when the game maker does not fulfill their end of the bargain, especially since a remedy for not agreeing to the EULA is to return the game. Returning the game is an option that is flatly denied pretty much universally, so the manufacturer has included a legal provision that they know cannot be exercised by the consumer. There is no meeting of the minds in an EULA, and they are crafted in such a manner that your only option in not agreeing to the contract after you have purchased the media is to take the loss and sit on it. If they want to base their contract on fraud, there is no ethical dilemma in ignoring the contract to get fulfillment from the manufacturer.
Again, "wrong" is defined by the circumstances surrounding an action. A wrong can quite certainly be transformed into a right, given the appropriate situation. This is true for many legal issues as much as for ethical issues.
Making a compelling argument for the outcome of gun control in the short term is different from recognizing the ultimate outcome should a democratic government fall. I understand that good arguments can be made for it, but only so long as one is willing to understand the overall price that must be paid for taking a short-term view of the issue. The long-term outcome isn't really an opinion open to interpretation. It is an eventuality, just like any other cycle (obviously allowing for something drastic that destroys the particular cycle, but a defense can't be based on something that, while possible, has no prior evidentiary basis). I apologize for not making the scale I was refering to clearer.
While someone good at argumentation and critical thought can present a decent defense of a given position, there are cases that can only be made through oversight, whether intentional or not, of certain information. One can argue reasonably about whether man greatly influences climate, but one cannot argue that the world will not ever enter another ice age, or that greenhouse gases do not affect planetary heat retention, unless a great body of evidence that points to the contrary (or depending on a "what-if" that is not supported by any evidence whatsoever) is ignored.
Sadly I used my last mod points about 5 minutes ago on another story.
Liberal or conservative, I don't tend to lose respect for people on legitimate intellectual differences, but gun control is one of those that has so much historical backing that it should be self-evident. It is not an intellectual difference of opinion, it is the difference between ignorance and being informed and able to think critically about history. There are cons to having open access to firearms in a society, but those cons cannot ever be worse than the worst-case scenarios that have happened time and again without access to them (or when law-abiding citizens give them up voluntarily).
The concept that democratic societies are somehow automagically inoculated against totalitarianism strikes me as hopelessly naive.
We're all in this together as a society, and if you can't trust your law-abiding neighbors with guns, you need to get to know them better.
Truer words have rarely been printed, but sadly there are millions of people who are that hopelessly naive and historically ignorant.
No, this is what judicial gag orders are used for. This evidence would likely be used sparingly in any way it could be leaked into public. More than likely the uses would be to troll for evidence of crimes where they could then look closer and obtain evidence in a more conventional manner.
Not being able to make lawful use of the evidence does not equate to not being able to use it at all. Additionally, records could be compiled on any group they want should something happen to give them an excuse to go after said group. Just because the US is a constitutional republic now, it may not always be. Those records compiled don't disappear the moment the controls on government actions disappear.
If that were the case then they should also be held liable. Too bad it would take another civil lawsuit to get them on the hook though.
I have trouble imagining a college-level instructor even trying, never mind getting away with this. By contrast, I have little trouble imagining this sort of story being spread without verification.
I have little trouble imagining a college professor trying this, since there are those who maintain that lectures are property and any derivatives of that work also belong to them (or that they have the authority to compel the destruction of). I apologize for not having any citations on-hand, but have encountered this mentality from professors in the past.
That said, I can also agree that this is one of those stories that could be entirely fictitious yet still easily be spread without verification.