One thing I want to know is if they are going to make the game world true to Middle-Earth or as a more generic D&D based game? The problems with transferring a popular franchise to MMG can be seen in Star Wars where everyone wants to be a Jedi. Hence even though the MMG is set in the time where Jedi should be rare there are tons of Jedi running around. In this case faithfulness to the original storyline is sacrificed because everyone wants to be a hero. For example one of the difficulties I can see with Middle-Earth is that lots of people will want to be a wizard (like Gandalf). However in Middle-Earth wizards are extremely rare. There are only 8 (?) of them and they are not human either but servants sent from Valor clothed in human form. And will magic spells familiar from D&D like fireball be common, because there is actually very little magic actually cast as fireball type spells in LoTR.
When will it be set (the article doesn't say this). I imagine it will be set immediately after the events of the book. But according to the novel magic is dying out in the land during this time. Lothlorien for example is in the process of being abandoned. However lots of people will want to go visit Lothlorien. Will people be able to go to Moria? If they can clean out Moria it would go against canon as Tolkien says Moria was never able to be reclaimed by the dwarves. I think this is a fundamental problem with franchise based MMGs. People will want to go to clear out Moria, they will want to be a wizard and cast fireballs, they will want to go and visit Lothlorien no matter how out-of-character or against canon it is. Will it accurately model the various tensions amongst the different groups of elves? They mention an elvin ship but how do they balance this with the fact that being invited to an elvin ship (if you are not an elf) is extremely rare. How do they balance the fact that in LoTR canon, elves are massively more powerful than humans - being created as perfect beings and thousands of years old? In a single-player game it is easy to control the actions people can take, but in a MMG where the only real aim is to explore how do you balance faithfulness to canon and fun gameplay? Star Wars Galaxies as far as I can tell decided to go "screw canon" - will this Tolkien MMG do the same? Will it really be Middle-earth or will it be Dungeons and Dragons?
Bin Ladin is succeeding in his propaganda war, in large part due to the actions of Bush. Their main aim is to draw the Islamic world and the West into a clash of civilisations. Invading Afghanistan was seen as reasonable by most of the Islamic world - thousands of innocent Americans had just died, there was enormous sympathy and the direct perpetrators were in Afghanistan - that and Afghanistan has no real special religious significance for Muslims, unlike Saudi Arabia or Iraq (The Shrine of Iman Ali, Najaf in general, Baghdad, former capital of the Islamic Caliphate). By invading Iraq, Bush has done more to forward Osama bin Ladin's propaganda than any other action he could have taken. Osama bin Ladin said, that the US will invade your country, the US will take your oil, the US is ruled by Jews and is acting to protect Israel, the US talk about "freedom" but they will crush you under their boots, they will rape your women and torture your men, they will desecrate your holy shrines. So Bush goes and invades one of the most holy Islamic nations which is oil rich, guards the oil ministry while the rest of Baghdad descends into chaos, the neo-cons are well known to be behind the invasion and the original neo-cons were Jews (not the ones now - but they still have very strong ties with Israel's Likud party and Sharon), then there was the torture scandal with reports of rape and torture by American forces, they attack the shrine of Iman Ali and the one of the Sayyids (al Sadr) ie. descendants of The Prophet, which is something only Saddam Hussein and most importantly the caliph Yazid (the worse villain in Shi'ite history) did. Even better, before Iraq only Sunnis formed the Islamic terrorist groups directly attacking the US. Most of the Shi'ite population are as wary of bin Ladin as the US as he considers them heretics. Now by doing a Yazid and attacking the shrine of Iman Ali, all the Shi'ites in the world hate the US as well. For example recently, an elder in one of the Shi'ite strongholds in India warned Americans not to enter the area as he could not guarantee their safety. In Iraq we are seeing Sunni hardliners and Shi'ite hardliners unite for the first time since the war of independence against the British.
Honestly could Bush do anything more to *help* bin Ladin win his propaganda war? Oh, and also because all man-power has been diverted to Iraq, the hunt for bin Ladin has effectively been outsourced to Pakistan (divided loyalties, military dictatorship and all) and the N. Korean threat is being ignored as troops (and White House attention) is rushed from Korea to Iraq.
Personally I think history will see Bush's invasion of Iraq in the same way we currently see the actions taken immediately preceding WWI where a heinous (but not disastrous event like an invasion) led a huge superpower to try to crush a country related to but not directly involved in the event for pre-existing reasons not related to the heinous event in question which led to other countries intervening in a complex system of alliances and ethnic loyalties that cascaded out of control into a war to end all wars. Except this time, a war to end all wars is what bin Ladin actually wants.
I suspect part of the reason why the OS is so crippled is because they are afraid of grey imports back into the US or other developed nations. Let's say they release a full version of XP or even a version not very crippled at a low low price, there will be a big market in the US and other developed nations for a legal copy of XP from MS with no chance of viruses or trojans at an extremely low price. Hence they cripple it. Unfortunately it's so crippled that *no-one* would want it...
Of course being a Disney computer, my first response is - so what's the DRM on it like and how badly is it locked down eg. are you actually *allowed* to do anything on it besides Disney (TM) approved actions? I just keep on thinking of another big megacorp who tries to do hardware and is part of big media *cough*Sony*cough*. They make good hardware that is badly crippled with DRM and anything else their media side wants to put in - and I don't mean crippled as in the Slashdot version "Anything with DRM is bad" but crippled as in it is actually a pain for normal people to use and people keep on mentioning it in reviews "Well this is a great piece of hardware but..." I can just imagine that Disney's dream of a perfect Disney computer is one where you have to ring Disney for permission everytime you want to do something not specifically Disney (TM) approved eg. installing software not on the Disney (TM) approved list.
Vigilantes are common where there is no effective law enforcement. This is not just on the web. In real-life, if there is no effective police force, people will grab a gun and use it to defend their home, work and friends and damn the law. People obey the law when they think it protects them and is fair. This is known as true anarchy. You could see this happening in the post-war looting in Iraq (and still today) where you had surgeons in hospitals wearing scrubs and totting guns. But it is generally true of any society. In crime-ridden areas where there is little effective law enforcement, people form gangs that enforce their own law outside of the proper legal system. People seek protection and order and if the law does not give this to them then they will take matters into their own hands. Hence vigilante actions on the web such as hunting people down are going to continue as long as there is no effective legal recourse that is easily and quickly available to everyone (such as dialing the police).
OTOH "vigilante" actions like writing viruses are a different matter. It's akin to street protests or graffitting public places with slogans. The first type of vigilante action is a matter of personal protection. The second type is to do with making a statement. Perhaps we should use as a yardstick the comfort level we have with street protests? When does a protest or making a statement go too far?
This is stupid. If it is about truancy, those parents who do care are already making sure their kids aren't truant eg. by punishing them when they find out. Japanese schools like many other countries, take roll-calls. Those who don't care - well this scheme won't make them care any more. If it is about protecting the kids - well unless its surgically implanted in their brain any decent criminal will be able to get around it easily and all this scheme provides is a false sense of security.
Personally I wouldn't be so suspicious of Creationist "science" if it wasn't so closely aligned with one particular religious group and not only that that one particular culture as well - the US religious right. For example evolution is widely accepted in many different religions and cultures which is a good thing as science is supposed to be fairly agnostic. However belief in Creationist "science" is not wide-spread except amongst the American religious right and is closely tied with their religious beliefs and culture. Even other Christian nations such as those in Europe simply do not have the fervent belief in Creationist "science" as Americans do. And the nations most closely aligned to America in culture, religion and ethnicity - Canada, England and Australia - the "anglo-saxon" nations also seem to lack strong support for this belief. Other religions such as Chinese religions are perfectly OK with evolution. For example you don't see Chinese Creationist scientists. And before people go it's because of the Communists, the Chinese had this argument centuries ago and came up with the answer that it doesn't matter if a creator exists or not because you can't prove/disprove it either way not to mention that even trying is pathetic because it is saying that the human mind has the ability to understand the ultimate secrets of the universe when it can't even understand its own actions. Not to mention the Chinese creation myth doesn't care either way if there is a creator. The point is Creationist science doesn't seem to have any widespread appeal outside of *one* specific relgious and cultural group and its arguments about Creationism seem to be specifically tailored to *one* Creation myth.
In a case like this, open-source is actually better. You could just look through the code to see if they actually stole the code and used it in a competing program. Quick, easy, simple. However in this case, if Altavista suspects their code is in MSN, they will most likely have to drag MS through a nasty long court case to see the code to check. They are not guaranteed to win. It will take a lot of money in lawyer's fees and drain people's attention from the business. It will take ages and ages (giving MS chance to use the code to make profit and take business from Altavista or to remove the code and hide the evidence). So in a code-stealing case like this, open-source is actually better than closed source as the case of "did they use the code" is something that can be resolved without an expensive long court case.
Well unless the company is like SCO I suppose...But if SCO had attacked a closed-source company, we'd still be going through a long arduous trial because it's just SCO's tactics, rather than a problem with open-source in general.
"Treaty" is a pretty pathetic word for it. To the Chinese of the time and still to many Chinese today, the "treaties" forced on the Chinese were extremely humiliating. It was one of the major forces weakening the Manchurian rulers of China. They were seen to be humiliating themselves in front of the other powers which drove resentment against them amongst the ordinary people. One of the major accusations against the government of the day was that they were letting foreign governments carve up Chinese territory. The rulers were pretty incompetent so even without the treaty problem they probably would have been toppeled, but the sense of extreme national humiliation over the "unequal treaties" definitely helped speed up the process. The grudge against the "unequal treaties" would be nearly on the top of a list of "Chinese greviences against the West". The sense of national humiliation from that time is still driving a lot of Chinese foreign policy, in the sense that there is a determination to be strong enough to never let it happen again. If the UK had refused to hand HK over, historical memories of past humiliations regarding HK would have made the Chinese response disproportionate to the offense. They humiliated us before and they are doing it again! I am sure the British realised this.
While I believe that HK and all of China should ideally be democratic, the British are being particularly hypocritical about democracy in HK as for most of their time there they ruled it as a colonial power, rarely given the local populace much of a direct say under rules of a democracy eg. elections. The system under the British was definitely better than under the Chinese now eg. there was a free press, but as the Economist puts it, under British rule, "Hong Kong had many of the outcomes of democracy, even though it had few of the mechanisms." HK was definitely not democratic under the British. It was only a couple of years before the hand-over before the local population were even allowed to elect members to the Legislative Council! Before that, everyone was hand-picked by the British colonial rulers. Hardly a democratic system!
Kneeling and the kow-tow is normal in Chinese culture. I have to kow-tow when offering sacrifices to my grandfather's shrine. The Chinese forcing Westerners to kow-tow to the Emperor had nothing whatsoever to do with them thinking Westerners were inferior (they did think it but the kow-towing part is not related to this belief). It is part of standard court procedure like say bowing to the king. Everyone had to do it, no matter how high or low they are or what nationality they were. The highest general, the chancellor and even the crown prince had to do it so why shouldn't the English/US/German abassador? *I* have to do it at my grand-father and my great-grand parents' shrines. To the Chinese, the Westerner's refusal to kow-tow would have been considered extremely rude. It would be like if you introduced the US ambassador to Queen Elizabeth and instead of bowing, he put his arm around her and ruffled her hair.
One of the reasons the Chinese mooncake is famous (though why is it translated into English as "cake" when the Chinese word for the mooncake is closer to what they call "cookie/biscuit"? The Chinese word for "cake" is something else entirely. I guess "moon cookie" doesn't sound as great in English) is because it was used in the Han revolt against the Mongolians. As the harsh Mongolian rulers cracked down on normal communications the Han rebels hid messages inside the moon-cakes detailing the plans for the revolution and used this to co-ordinate the attack which overthrew the Yuan dynasty. Perhaps it is time for a new "moon-cake" project to facilitate secure communications in China via SMS and email with the "rebels" communicating with each other via innocent looking programs like animated greeting cards with encryted or hidden messages.
Whenever I read about the way MS improves their stuff when there is actual competition, I wonder what Windows would have been like now if there had been any actual real competition for marketshare in OSes in the last decade or so.
One of the scariest things about this administration is the sheer lack of transparency. While all governments like hiding things, this one seems to think that the public has no right to know anything, of course for their own good. Even Congress seems to be out of the info loop! Everytime someone tries to ask them for transparency or information they stonewall them sometimes with ridiculous reasons like this (or by swearing at them aka. our vice-president). Combine this with laws that reduce rights of ordinary citizens (aka. Patriot Act) and how they are trying to increasingly concentrate power in the hands of the President (who seems to think that Congressional and Judicial oversight of his activities is a bad thing) who professes the theory that a President is legally allowed to do anything to foreign and US citizens eg. torture, infinitely holding them, invading a country etc. and the only reason he doesn't do it is because he's nice (rather than because it's say illegal to torture someone) and America is heading towards dangerous waters.
I don't understand why so many people here find this odd. How exactly is this any more odd than say Hollywood making versions of Japanese manga (or even video games) eg. Akira, Dragonball Z, Evangelion, Streetfighter 2, etc. and redoing them for mass-media American culture (as opposed to mass-media Japanese culture)? Yet that doesn't raise any eyebrows (plenty of comments about the butchering it is likely to get though).
Human rights are not necessary to become a superpower. All superpowers have become superpowers because of force of arms and money eg. Athens (amongst the Greeks), the Romans, the Chinese in most of Asia's recorded history, the Spanish in their day, the British Empire, the USSR, the Ottoman Empire and the US are/were superpowers because at the height of their power they were extremely strong *militarily* and economically (though the two are linked). Sometimes human rights were developed, sometimes not. In some cases they were extremely hypocritical in the development of human rights ie. for our citizens, freedom, liberty etc. are important, for anyone else they can eat our boots. Once they started losing wars they started losing their superpower status, not when they started purges/proscriptions/inquisitions. If the US abolished democracy tomorrow, and developed into a theocratic rule and instituted purges/proscription/inquisition, it would still be a superpower due to its military and economic (actually maybe not economic - it is heavily in debt to the rest of the world which also somewhat underminds its military) power.
The US does a lot of nuclear weapon simulations as well. So does France and any other country with nuclear weapon capability. I imagine the US is doing even more now as it is developing new types of mini-nukes which the government is seriously talking about deploying in conventional warfare. So if you want to cast stones...
Anyway, one idea is that the more computer simulations you do, the fewer real tests you have to do. So increased computer simulations may be beneficial for the minorities and rural Han Chinese living in the remote areas that they do the tests in. Of course it would be best to reduce development on nuclear weapons entirely but I don't see that happening in the present climate anytime soon. When even the leader of the free world is out there advocating the development of new nuclear weapons and uses loopholes in treaties to develop them, what exactly do you think the leaders of the paranoid and not-so-free world will do?
The best part is that in Australia, the "Liberal" party is the mainstream *conservative* ie. right-wing party. John Howard our PM, who is ideological and personal best buddies with your President Bush (eg. he just banned gay marriage) is the leader of the Liberal party. Which I think just blows the contention that liberal==left-wing.
I think that anime is losing out to two things besides what was pointed out in the article. First, the decline in anime has coincided with the rise in the number of drama CDs which are spoken dramatisations of a manga or novel (and are not well known in the West for the obvious reasons that they are just spoken Japanese with a bit of music). Often they will act out the manga word for word. For niche series that in previous years would have been made into OAVs (direct to video) anime releases, many of them are made into drama CDs. Drama CDs are much cheaper than anime to make. Mangaka (manga authors) have been known to fund them out of their own pocket, even being able to hire big name seiyuu (voice actors). They are cheap and popular amongst the series' (Japanese) fanbase. I think seiyuu like them better than anime as well as they have more chance to actually act without worrying about things like timing.
The second thing is gaming. One thing I heard is that the anime industry is losing a lot of young artists to the gaming industry. I don't find that surprising as judging from their freetalks, a lot of mangaka at least seem to be big gamers, including the females (amongst females, Squaresoft games and RPGs seem to be esp. big). I imagine in the anime side this trend would be even more pronounced.
It can amount to the same thing though. It's an old trick in ideology and politics (and I guess business as well) to redefine other groups in such ways as to suit your purposes. For example, what are you willing to bet that groups that are pro-US are not classified as "terrorist" even if they use similar tactics? This then means they are not subjected to the same legal restrictions that groups classified as terrorist are. Note also that while we call extreme Islamic groups 'terrorists' they also call the US 'terrorists' and themeselves as 'holy warriors'. The way you label your enemies and your friends is one way to serve your own interests while being to able to *deny* it. Other way these tricks are played are for example the definition of "poverty-stricken". For example in China recently, the rate of those in poverty suddenly rose over-night, literally, as before that, China had been defining "poverty" in such a way as to exclude people who were literally scraping a bare living so as to be able to reduce the official statistics of who was living in "poverty". They decided to redefine "poverty" because they figured the economy was good enough and the state was stable enough to afford it. Western governments also play tricks like this with the definition of "employment".
The description of this case reminds me of two things. The almost farcial nature of many of the rules and regulations in Catch 22. Secondly the way trials were conducted in China when the Communists came to power. As my grandparents tell it, they'd put you on trial but the best thing is they *won't* tell you OR the public what the charge is! The assumption being that if the government puts you trial, obviously you are guilty and the whole point of the trial is to exact your public confession. To make it even better they were allowed to beat and torture you until you confess. The problem being that not knowing what the charge is, even if you wanted to falsely confess to stop them beating you, you couldn't! The only way around this is if you had contacts amongst the Communist officials who would tell you the charge so you could say "Yes, I stole Mr Lee's chickens last Saturday". You'd get punished, but at least you'd skip the whole beating and torture business. And of course the info on which the trial is based on were usually informants, of whom they never tell you who it is or what the details of the evidence were (as I said, they didn't even tell you the details of the charge) so that you have absolutely no chance of defending yourself against the evidence as you are not allowed to see any of the evidence!
Of course the details of what's going on in the US is doing is different from what my grandparent's described about China, but the whole farcial nature, the whole "Sorry we can't even talk about what the charge is." (at least the defendents are allowed to know), the whole beating and torture until you confess (Guantonomo Bay), the whole lack of oversight to prevent abuses, the whole "we can't allow you to see/challenge the evidence/witnesses" (that trial in the US right now with that guy connected to 9/11) seems very very similar. And with the recent torture cases in US prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan etc the US is sliding down a very slippery slope.
As far as I understand it, during the Manchurian rule of China, Tibet was a vassal state of the Manchurian Empire. When the Han Chinese toppled the Manchurian dynasty they insisted that the agreement that the Tibetans signed with the Manchurian rulers applied to them as well and demanded tribute and obedience. The Tibetans disagreed, saying it was only with the Manchurian rulers (who no longer existed). Hence the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
Actually on the contrary. A lot of developing nations, I think in particular in Africa and S. America are (trying) to use agriculture to boost the long-term standard of living in their country. The reason why it doesn't work very well is not because of something inherent in IT over agriculture but because the rich countries (big culprits being US, EU and Japan) have huge farm and fishery subsidies whilst they are willing to outsource IT with abandon (as many unemployed Slashdotters know). However a recent WTO ruling was that a lot of the current subsidy regime is illegal (I think this was an action brought by Brazil against US sugar subsidies) so we may finally see some action. Also the EU is starting to recognise that its fishery subsidies are helping to destroy European fish stocks.
In a way this reminds me of the good old Communist China a few decades ago. Especially the trials where:
1. You were assumed guilty until proven innocent. 2. They were allowed to beat and torture you until you confessed. 3. Best of all, they never tell you what the actual charge was or who informed on you, so even if you wanted to confess to stop the pain, you couldn't. Which means they just kept on beating and torturing you...
Fortunately for my grandfather one of my Communist party officials liked him (when he was young my grandfather helped him a lot after his dad died) and used to risk his own neck to throw a stone with a piece of paper wrapped around it through my granddad's window at night detailing the charge so my grandfather could "confess" as soon as he was brought to trial to avoid the beating and torture. "Yes, I did steal Mr Lee's chickens last week."
Hmmm...Never I thought I'd see this "the charge itself is so secret we can't tell you" thing in the US as well...At least they tell the *person* charged what the charge is I suppose. I wonder if you can tell your lawyer?
First - the bright side of thing is that army procedures at least are working somewhat - as in there were actual investigations even without publicity (though when the punishment for what the army itself calls "murder" is just being thrown out of the army and never serving any jail time...). However, this seems to be going on *despite* the Pentagon leadership who tried to minimise their scope and people's knowledge of them as much as possible within the boundaries of existing law and is more a testament to the strong structures put in place by previous Pentagon leaders and previous lawmakers rather than any real care for human rights of the current ones (who probably see them as more hinderences to their goals than anything else). This is why we need strong rights and checks and balances in a democracy. This example also shows the need for a strong free press in a democracy. What we are seeing are that the democratic structures in the US that previous generations laboured to put in place are still working.
Now, onto the bad side.
Personally, one of the things I find most repellent about the Pentagon's reaction to this issue is that they seem to see this more as a PR disaster then a humanitarian disaster. Of course they are making noises about how terrible it was blah, blah, blah. But Rumsfeld also complained mightily in his recent interview about how annoyed they are they are restricted by "peacetime rules" and hence can't control the dissemation of photos and videos on the web from servicemen and so the photos are getting to the media first without being vetted by the Pentagon.
"We're functioning in a - with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."
As a result there have been mutterings of increased censorship of servicemen from the Pentagon. Before the photos came out, they tried to suppress the details of the information as much as possible without being able to be accused of doing something illegal eg. press releases released at times they know no-one will be paying attention (an old government trick) with only the barest details (not even the names of the soldiers accused nor any real details of the crimes). Nor was there any attempt to inform Congress at all (even though they were having high level meetings with Congress just a few hours before the photos were published and the Pentagon had known about it for ages as they asked CBS to delay broadcasting them during the fighting at Fallujah). Is it just me, or does *everything* about Iraq seem to shock Congress nowadays? "We didn't know anything!" seems to be their standard response. They are getting to be pretty useless as one of the 3 branches of government. The report about the prison abuses that was leaked to the New Yorker is defined as "Secret" even though the Pentagon admitted there was no real reason for it to be so.
Also the fact that they are trying to pass this off as a few rogue soldiers rather than a systematic problem (which is something their own report and the Red Cross make clear). It almost seems as if the major problem is not that what happened happened, but the fact that the mass media actually found out and are making a big story about it. Now, let's hang some soldiers as scapegoats, make a few noises about "being sorry" and hope it all goes away without us having to make any real changes so we can go back to doing the same thing as before.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I want to know is if they are going to make the game world true to Middle-Earth or as a more generic D&D based game? The problems with transferring a popular franchise to MMG can be seen in Star Wars where everyone wants to be a Jedi. Hence even though the MMG is set in the time where Jedi should be rare there are tons of Jedi running around. In this case faithfulness to the original storyline is sacrificed because everyone wants to be a hero. For example one of the difficulties I can see with Middle-Earth is that lots of people will want to be a wizard (like Gandalf). However in Middle-Earth wizards are extremely rare. There are only 8 (?) of them and they are not human either but servants sent from Valor clothed in human form. And will magic spells familiar from D&D like fireball be common, because there is actually very little magic actually cast as fireball type spells in LoTR.
When will it be set (the article doesn't say this). I imagine it will be set immediately after the events of the book. But according to the novel magic is dying out in the land during this time. Lothlorien for example is in the process of being abandoned. However lots of people will want to go visit Lothlorien. Will people be able to go to Moria? If they can clean out Moria it would go against canon as Tolkien says Moria was never able to be reclaimed by the dwarves. I think this is a fundamental problem with franchise based MMGs. People will want to go to clear out Moria, they will want to be a wizard and cast fireballs, they will want to go and visit Lothlorien no matter how out-of-character or against canon it is. Will it accurately model the various tensions amongst the different groups of elves? They mention an elvin ship but how do they balance this with the fact that being invited to an elvin ship (if you are not an elf) is extremely rare. How do they balance the fact that in LoTR canon, elves are massively more powerful than humans - being created as perfect beings and thousands of years old? In a single-player game it is easy to control the actions people can take, but in a MMG where the only real aim is to explore how do you balance faithfulness to canon and fun gameplay? Star Wars Galaxies as far as I can tell decided to go "screw canon" - will this Tolkien MMG do the same? Will it really be Middle-earth or will it be Dungeons and Dragons?
Bin Ladin is succeeding in his propaganda war, in large part due to the actions of Bush. Their main aim is to draw the Islamic world and the West into a clash of civilisations. Invading Afghanistan was seen as reasonable by most of the Islamic world - thousands of innocent Americans had just died, there was enormous sympathy and the direct perpetrators were in Afghanistan - that and Afghanistan has no real special religious significance for Muslims, unlike Saudi Arabia or Iraq (The Shrine of Iman Ali, Najaf in general, Baghdad, former capital of the Islamic Caliphate).
By invading Iraq, Bush has done more to forward Osama bin Ladin's propaganda than any other action he could have taken. Osama bin Ladin said, that the US will invade your country, the US will take your oil, the US is ruled by Jews and is acting to protect Israel, the US talk about "freedom" but they will crush you under their boots, they will rape your women and torture your men, they will desecrate your holy shrines. So Bush goes and invades one of the most holy Islamic nations which is oil rich, guards the oil ministry while the rest of Baghdad descends into chaos, the neo-cons are well known to be behind the invasion and the original neo-cons were Jews (not the ones now - but they still have very strong ties with Israel's Likud party and Sharon), then there was the torture scandal with reports of rape and torture by American forces, they attack the shrine of Iman Ali and the one of the Sayyids (al Sadr) ie. descendants of The Prophet, which is something only Saddam Hussein and most importantly the caliph Yazid (the worse villain in Shi'ite history) did. Even better, before Iraq only Sunnis formed the Islamic terrorist groups directly attacking the US. Most of the Shi'ite population are as wary of bin Ladin as the US as he considers them heretics. Now by doing a Yazid and attacking the shrine of Iman Ali, all the Shi'ites in the world hate the US as well. For example recently, an elder in one of the Shi'ite strongholds in India warned Americans not to enter the area as he could not guarantee their safety. In Iraq we are seeing Sunni hardliners and Shi'ite hardliners unite for the first time since the war of independence against the British.
Honestly could Bush do anything more to *help* bin Ladin win his propaganda war? Oh, and also because all man-power has been diverted to Iraq, the hunt for bin Ladin has effectively been outsourced to Pakistan (divided loyalties, military dictatorship and all) and the N. Korean threat is being ignored as troops (and White House attention) is rushed from Korea to Iraq.
Personally I think history will see Bush's invasion of Iraq in the same way we currently see the actions taken immediately preceding WWI where a heinous (but not disastrous event like an invasion) led a huge superpower to try to crush a country related to but not directly involved in the event for pre-existing reasons not related to the heinous event in question which led to other countries intervening in a complex system of alliances and ethnic loyalties that cascaded out of control into a war to end all wars. Except this time, a war to end all wars is what bin Ladin actually wants.
I suspect part of the reason why the OS is so crippled is because they are afraid of grey imports back into the US or other developed nations. Let's say they release a full version of XP or even a version not very crippled at a low low price, there will be a big market in the US and other developed nations for a legal copy of XP from MS with no chance of viruses or trojans at an extremely low price. Hence they cripple it. Unfortunately it's so crippled that *no-one* would want it...
Of course being a Disney computer, my first response is - so what's the DRM on it like and how badly is it locked down eg. are you actually *allowed* to do anything on it besides Disney (TM) approved actions? I just keep on thinking of another big megacorp who tries to do hardware and is part of big media *cough*Sony*cough*. They make good hardware that is badly crippled with DRM and anything else their media side wants to put in - and I don't mean crippled as in the Slashdot version "Anything with DRM is bad" but crippled as in it is actually a pain for normal people to use and people keep on mentioning it in reviews "Well this is a great piece of hardware but..." I can just imagine that Disney's dream of a perfect Disney computer is one where you have to ring Disney for permission everytime you want to do something not specifically Disney (TM) approved eg. installing software not on the Disney (TM) approved list.
Vigilantes are common where there is no effective law enforcement. This is not just on the web. In real-life, if there is no effective police force, people will grab a gun and use it to defend their home, work and friends and damn the law. People obey the law when they think it protects them and is fair. This is known as true anarchy. You could see this happening in the post-war looting in Iraq (and still today) where you had surgeons in hospitals wearing scrubs and totting guns. But it is generally true of any society. In crime-ridden areas where there is little effective law enforcement, people form gangs that enforce their own law outside of the proper legal system. People seek protection and order and if the law does not give this to them then they will take matters into their own hands. Hence vigilante actions on the web such as hunting people down are going to continue as long as there is no effective legal recourse that is easily and quickly available to everyone (such as dialing the police).
OTOH "vigilante" actions like writing viruses are a different matter. It's akin to street protests or graffitting public places with slogans. The first type of vigilante action is a matter of personal protection. The second type is to do with making a statement. Perhaps we should use as a yardstick the comfort level we have with street protests? When does a protest or making a statement go too far?
This is stupid. If it is about truancy, those parents who do care are already making sure their kids aren't truant eg. by punishing them when they find out. Japanese schools like many other countries, take roll-calls. Those who don't care - well this scheme won't make them care any more. If it is about protecting the kids - well unless its surgically implanted in their brain any decent criminal will be able to get around it easily and all this scheme provides is a false sense of security.
Personally I wouldn't be so suspicious of Creationist "science" if it wasn't so closely aligned with one particular religious group and not only that that one particular culture as well - the US religious right. For example evolution is widely accepted in many different religions and cultures which is a good thing as science is supposed to be fairly agnostic. However belief in Creationist "science" is not wide-spread except amongst the American religious right and is closely tied with their religious beliefs and culture. Even other Christian nations such as those in Europe simply do not have the fervent belief in Creationist "science" as Americans do. And the nations most closely aligned to America in culture, religion and ethnicity - Canada, England and Australia - the "anglo-saxon" nations also seem to lack strong support for this belief. Other religions such as Chinese religions are perfectly OK with evolution. For example you don't see Chinese Creationist scientists. And before people go it's because of the Communists, the Chinese had this argument centuries ago and came up with the answer that it doesn't matter if a creator exists or not because you can't prove/disprove it either way not to mention that even trying is pathetic because it is saying that the human mind has the ability to understand the ultimate secrets of the universe when it can't even understand its own actions. Not to mention the Chinese creation myth doesn't care either way if there is a creator. The point is Creationist science doesn't seem to have any widespread appeal outside of *one* specific relgious and cultural group and its arguments about Creationism seem to be specifically tailored to *one* Creation myth.
In a case like this, open-source is actually better. You could just look through the code to see if they actually stole the code and used it in a competing program. Quick, easy, simple. However in this case, if Altavista suspects their code is in MSN, they will most likely have to drag MS through a nasty long court case to see the code to check. They are not guaranteed to win. It will take a lot of money in lawyer's fees and drain people's attention from the business. It will take ages and ages (giving MS chance to use the code to make profit and take business from Altavista or to remove the code and hide the evidence). So in a code-stealing case like this, open-source is actually better than closed source as the case of "did they use the code" is something that can be resolved without an expensive long court case.
Well unless the company is like SCO I suppose...But if SCO had attacked a closed-source company, we'd still be going through a long arduous trial because it's just SCO's tactics, rather than a problem with open-source in general.
"Treaty" is a pretty pathetic word for it. To the Chinese of the time and still to many Chinese today, the "treaties" forced on the Chinese were extremely humiliating. It was one of the major forces weakening the Manchurian rulers of China. They were seen to be humiliating themselves in front of the other powers which drove resentment against them amongst the ordinary people. One of the major accusations against the government of the day was that they were letting foreign governments carve up Chinese territory. The rulers were pretty incompetent so even without the treaty problem they probably would have been toppeled, but the sense of extreme national humiliation over the "unequal treaties" definitely helped speed up the process. The grudge against the "unequal treaties" would be nearly on the top of a list of "Chinese greviences against the West". The sense of national humiliation from that time is still driving a lot of Chinese foreign policy, in the sense that there is a determination to be strong enough to never let it happen again. If the UK had refused to hand HK over, historical memories of past humiliations regarding HK would have made the Chinese response disproportionate to the offense. They humiliated us before and they are doing it again! I am sure the British realised this. While I believe that HK and all of China should ideally be democratic, the British are being particularly hypocritical about democracy in HK as for most of their time there they ruled it as a colonial power, rarely given the local populace much of a direct say under rules of a democracy eg. elections. The system under the British was definitely better than under the Chinese now eg. there was a free press, but as the Economist puts it, under British rule, "Hong Kong had many of the outcomes of democracy, even though it had few of the mechanisms." HK was definitely not democratic under the British. It was only a couple of years before the hand-over before the local population were even allowed to elect members to the Legislative Council! Before that, everyone was hand-picked by the British colonial rulers. Hardly a democratic system!
Kneeling and the kow-tow is normal in Chinese culture. I have to kow-tow when offering sacrifices to my grandfather's shrine. The Chinese forcing Westerners to kow-tow to the Emperor had nothing whatsoever to do with them thinking Westerners were inferior (they did think it but the kow-towing part is not related to this belief). It is part of standard court procedure like say bowing to the king. Everyone had to do it, no matter how high or low they are or what nationality they were. The highest general, the chancellor and even the crown prince had to do it so why shouldn't the English/US/German abassador? *I* have to do it at my grand-father and my great-grand parents' shrines. To the Chinese, the Westerner's refusal to kow-tow would have been considered extremely rude. It would be like if you introduced the US ambassador to Queen Elizabeth and instead of bowing, he put his arm around her and ruffled her hair.
One of the reasons the Chinese mooncake is famous (though why is it translated into English as "cake" when the Chinese word for the mooncake is closer to what they call "cookie/biscuit"? The Chinese word for "cake" is something else entirely. I guess "moon cookie" doesn't sound as great in English) is because it was used in the Han revolt against the Mongolians. As the harsh Mongolian rulers cracked down on normal communications the Han rebels hid messages inside the moon-cakes detailing the plans for the revolution and used this to co-ordinate the attack which overthrew the Yuan dynasty. Perhaps it is time for a new "moon-cake" project to facilitate secure communications in China via SMS and email with the "rebels" communicating with each other via innocent looking programs like animated greeting cards with encryted or hidden messages.
Whenever I read about the way MS improves their stuff when there is actual competition, I wonder what Windows would have been like now if there had been any actual real competition for marketshare in OSes in the last decade or so.
One of the scariest things about this administration is the sheer lack of transparency. While all governments like hiding things, this one seems to think that the public has no right to know anything, of course for their own good. Even Congress seems to be out of the info loop! Everytime someone tries to ask them for transparency or information they stonewall them sometimes with ridiculous reasons like this (or by swearing at them aka. our vice-president). Combine this with laws that reduce rights of ordinary citizens (aka. Patriot Act) and how they are trying to increasingly concentrate power in the hands of the President (who seems to think that Congressional and Judicial oversight of his activities is a bad thing) who professes the theory that a President is legally allowed to do anything to foreign and US citizens eg. torture, infinitely holding them, invading a country etc. and the only reason he doesn't do it is because he's nice (rather than because it's say illegal to torture someone) and America is heading towards dangerous waters.
I don't understand why so many people here find this odd. How exactly is this any more odd than say Hollywood making versions of Japanese manga (or even video games) eg. Akira, Dragonball Z, Evangelion, Streetfighter 2, etc. and redoing them for mass-media American culture (as opposed to mass-media Japanese culture)? Yet that doesn't raise any eyebrows (plenty of comments about the butchering it is likely to get though).
Human rights are not necessary to become a superpower. All superpowers have become superpowers because of force of arms and money eg. Athens (amongst the Greeks), the Romans, the Chinese in most of Asia's recorded history, the Spanish in their day, the British Empire, the USSR, the Ottoman Empire and the US are/were superpowers because at the height of their power they were extremely strong *militarily* and economically (though the two are linked). Sometimes human rights were developed, sometimes not. In some cases they were extremely hypocritical in the development of human rights ie. for our citizens, freedom, liberty etc. are important, for anyone else they can eat our boots. Once they started losing wars they started losing their superpower status, not when they started purges/proscriptions/inquisitions. If the US abolished democracy tomorrow, and developed into a theocratic rule and instituted purges/proscription/inquisition, it would still be a superpower due to its military and economic (actually maybe not economic - it is heavily in debt to the rest of the world which also somewhat underminds its military) power.
The US does a lot of nuclear weapon simulations as well. So does France and any other country with nuclear weapon capability. I imagine the US is doing even more now as it is developing new types of mini-nukes which the government is seriously talking about deploying in conventional warfare. So if you want to cast stones...
Anyway, one idea is that the more computer simulations you do, the fewer real tests you have to do. So increased computer simulations may be beneficial for the minorities and rural Han Chinese living in the remote areas that they do the tests in. Of course it would be best to reduce development on nuclear weapons entirely but I don't see that happening in the present climate anytime soon. When even the leader of the free world is out there advocating the development of new nuclear weapons and uses loopholes in treaties to develop them, what exactly do you think the leaders of the paranoid and not-so-free world will do?
The best part is that in Australia, the "Liberal" party is the mainstream *conservative* ie. right-wing party. John Howard our PM, who is ideological and personal best buddies with your President Bush (eg. he just banned gay marriage) is the leader of the Liberal party. Which I think just blows the contention that liberal==left-wing.
I think that anime is losing out to two things besides what was pointed out in the article. First, the decline in anime has coincided with the rise in the number of drama CDs which are spoken dramatisations of a manga or novel (and are not well known in the West for the obvious reasons that they are just spoken Japanese with a bit of music). Often they will act out the manga word for word. For niche series that in previous years would have been made into OAVs (direct to video) anime releases, many of them are made into drama CDs. Drama CDs are much cheaper than anime to make. Mangaka (manga authors) have been known to fund them out of their own pocket, even being able to hire big name seiyuu (voice actors). They are cheap and popular amongst the series' (Japanese) fanbase. I think seiyuu like them better than anime as well as they have more chance to actually act without worrying about things like timing.
The second thing is gaming. One thing I heard is that the anime industry is losing a lot of young artists to the gaming industry. I don't find that surprising as judging from their freetalks, a lot of mangaka at least seem to be big gamers, including the females (amongst females, Squaresoft games and RPGs seem to be esp. big). I imagine in the anime side this trend would be even more pronounced.
It can amount to the same thing though. It's an old trick in ideology and politics (and I guess business as well) to redefine other groups in such ways as to suit your purposes. For example, what are you willing to bet that groups that are pro-US are not classified as "terrorist" even if they use similar tactics? This then means they are not subjected to the same legal restrictions that groups classified as terrorist are. Note also that while we call extreme Islamic groups 'terrorists' they also call the US 'terrorists' and themeselves as 'holy warriors'. The way you label your enemies and your friends is one way to serve your own interests while being to able to *deny* it. Other way these tricks are played are for example the definition of "poverty-stricken". For example in China recently, the rate of those in poverty suddenly rose over-night, literally, as before that, China had been defining "poverty" in such a way as to exclude people who were literally scraping a bare living so as to be able to reduce the official statistics of who was living in "poverty". They decided to redefine "poverty" because they figured the economy was good enough and the state was stable enough to afford it. Western governments also play tricks like this with the definition of "employment".
The description of this case reminds me of two things. The almost farcial nature of many of the rules and regulations in Catch 22. Secondly the way trials were conducted in China when the Communists came to power. As my grandparents tell it, they'd put you on trial but the best thing is they *won't* tell you OR the public what the charge is! The assumption being that if the government puts you trial, obviously you are guilty and the whole point of the trial is to exact your public confession. To make it even better they were allowed to beat and torture you until you confess. The problem being that not knowing what the charge is, even if you wanted to falsely confess to stop them beating you, you couldn't! The only way around this is if you had contacts amongst the Communist officials who would tell you the charge so you could say "Yes, I stole Mr Lee's chickens last Saturday". You'd get punished, but at least you'd skip the whole beating and torture business. And of course the info on which the trial is based on were usually informants, of whom they never tell you who it is or what the details of the evidence were (as I said, they didn't even tell you the details of the charge) so that you have absolutely no chance of defending yourself against the evidence as you are not allowed to see any of the evidence!
Of course the details of what's going on in the US is doing is different from what my grandparent's described about China, but the whole farcial nature, the whole "Sorry we can't even talk about what the charge is." (at least the defendents are allowed to know), the whole beating and torture until you confess (Guantonomo Bay), the whole lack of oversight to prevent abuses, the whole "we can't allow you to see/challenge the evidence/witnesses" (that trial in the US right now with that guy connected to 9/11) seems very very similar. And with the recent torture cases in US prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan etc the US is sliding down a very slippery slope.
As far as I understand it, during the Manchurian rule of China, Tibet was a vassal state of the Manchurian Empire. When the Han Chinese toppled the Manchurian dynasty they insisted that the agreement that the Tibetans signed with the Manchurian rulers applied to them as well and demanded tribute and obedience. The Tibetans disagreed, saying it was only with the Manchurian rulers (who no longer existed). Hence the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
Mandrake 10 CE suffered from this problem. One of the updates after CE came out fixed this problem so Official doesn't have it anymore.
Actually on the contrary. A lot of developing nations, I think in particular in Africa and S. America are (trying) to use agriculture to boost the long-term standard of living in their country. The reason why it doesn't work very well is not because of something inherent in IT over agriculture but because the rich countries (big culprits being US, EU and Japan) have huge farm and fishery subsidies whilst they are willing to outsource IT with abandon (as many unemployed Slashdotters know). However a recent WTO ruling was that a lot of the current subsidy regime is illegal (I think this was an action brought by Brazil against US sugar subsidies) so we may finally see some action. Also the EU is starting to recognise that its fishery subsidies are helping to destroy European fish stocks.
In a way this reminds me of the good old Communist China a few decades ago. Especially the trials where:
1. You were assumed guilty until proven innocent.
2. They were allowed to beat and torture you until you confessed.
3. Best of all, they never tell you what the actual charge was or who informed on you, so even if you wanted to confess to stop the pain, you couldn't. Which means they just kept on beating and torturing you...
Fortunately for my grandfather one of my Communist party officials liked him (when he was young my grandfather helped him a lot after his dad died) and used to risk his own neck to throw a stone with a piece of paper wrapped around it through my granddad's window at night detailing the charge so my grandfather could "confess" as soon as he was brought to trial to avoid the beating and torture. "Yes, I did steal Mr Lee's chickens last week."
Hmmm...Never I thought I'd see this "the charge itself is so secret we can't tell you" thing in the US as well...At least they tell the *person* charged what the charge is I suppose. I wonder if you can tell your lawyer?
First - the bright side of thing is that army procedures at least are working somewhat - as in there were actual investigations even without publicity (though when the punishment for what the army itself calls "murder" is just being thrown out of the army and never serving any jail time...). However, this seems to be going on *despite* the Pentagon leadership who tried to minimise their scope and people's knowledge of them as much as possible within the boundaries of existing law and is more a testament to the strong structures put in place by previous Pentagon leaders and previous lawmakers rather than any real care for human rights of the current ones (who probably see them as more hinderences to their goals than anything else). This is why we need strong rights and checks and balances in a democracy. This example also shows the need for a strong free press in a democracy. What we are seeing are that the democratic structures in the US that previous generations laboured to put in place are still working.
Now, onto the bad side.
Personally, one of the things I find most repellent about the Pentagon's reaction to this issue is that they seem to see this more as a PR disaster then a humanitarian disaster. Of course they are making noises about how terrible it was blah, blah, blah. But Rumsfeld also complained mightily in his recent interview about how annoyed they are they are restricted by "peacetime rules" and hence can't control the dissemation of photos and videos on the web from servicemen and so the photos are getting to the media first without being vetted by the Pentagon.
"We're functioning in a - with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."
As a result there have been mutterings of increased censorship of servicemen from the Pentagon. Before the photos came out, they tried to suppress the details of the information as much as possible without being able to be accused of doing something illegal eg. press releases released at times they know no-one will be paying attention (an old government trick) with only the barest details (not even the names of the soldiers accused nor any real details of the crimes). Nor was there any attempt to inform Congress at all (even though they were having high level meetings with Congress just a few hours before the photos were published and the Pentagon had known about it for ages as they asked CBS to delay broadcasting them during the fighting at Fallujah). Is it just me, or does *everything* about Iraq seem to shock Congress nowadays? "We didn't know anything!" seems to be their standard response. They are getting to be pretty useless as one of the 3 branches of government. The report about the prison abuses that was leaked to the New Yorker is defined as "Secret" even though the Pentagon admitted there was no real reason for it to be so.
Also the fact that they are trying to pass this off as a few rogue soldiers rather than a systematic problem (which is something their own report and the Red Cross make clear). It almost seems as if the major problem is not that what happened happened, but the fact that the mass media actually found out and are making a big story about it. Now, let's hang some soldiers as scapegoats, make a few noises about "being sorry" and hope it all goes away without us having to make any real changes so we can go back to doing the same thing as before.