The benefits of globalization are pretty neutral but the corps are pushing certain aspects of globalization that benefit them and attempting to hold back others that would benefit the consumer. Unfortunately the 'consumer advocates' instead of pushing for the globalization aspects that would help the consumer, just protest against globalization period. A huge mistake, that we're all paying for.
Good luck getting your digital camera to output digitally to a computer. EU has the same problems (perhaps more), it just screws over different groups.
A little side note, you and the rest of the boycotters are currently being categorized as Napster inspired pirates and used as an exhibit on the evil effects of Napster by the very corporations you are protesting.
Cartel inspired lawsuits are only a winner when you don't have a loser pays system. The US doesn't have such a system. The trial lawyers love this because they get to blackmail people with the threat of crippling lawsuits irregardless of merit. If the MPAA/RIAA had to pay defendents legal expenses if they lost as a rule, there would be far fewer examples of this kind of aggressiveness through lawsuit.
But the most common way that cartels enforce their agreements is to buy politicians and get them to use their force to kill off competitors. That's why politics is so important. Without politicians that are willing to sell out the country for money, cartels are largely powerless and become irrelevant.
I always thought the American environmental regulations controlling toilet flow creating a black market in old toilets was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, just wait until we see old analog A/V equipment becoming more and more of a prized possesion, so people can make reasonable use of the products and software (i.e., music, movies, etc) they buy.
For toilets, you can always go to Canada where they are legal and the US customs office can't stop their importation because of NAFTA.
The world is truly bizarre. But then, there's the sugar market which is even worse.
Philly to New York is just about the practical limit. I actually met 4 people who did that daily commute. It was really sad, 2 hrs+, each way. It would be 6+ each way from Philly to Boston.
Ah, but here's the rub, if this offends you, you can keep your potential competition around as a threat pretty cheaply. This drop prices to drive out competition theory only works if the competition stays away long enough to recoup your lost profits and your lost reputation.
In any area where the entry costs are low, it just doesn't work. News flash, other than for government controlled goods, entry costs get lower over time and generally are quite low.
That just begs the question. We can kill the old, the disabled, and the young easier than we can kill a bull. If might makes right, why are the first three unacceptable but not the last?
Not only the cooperative v. competitive economy, take a look at the "cooperative" contribution to internation relations. Compare the progress France and Germany had to the Serbs and Croats.
In Europe, they don't let firewire cameras send to computers for copyright reasons. The hardware is all there but to sell to that market you have to nEUter them via software.
Of course there is a brisk business in wiping the software on the black market.
One other thing you should remember, the rest of the world subsidizes at a rate and with a scope that is simply breathtaking. Cheap deals are often due to tax subsidies, expensive ones to tax penalties but it's often very hard to figure out which government is at fault.
I thought that the new digital TV signal is universal. Manufacturers want to control marketing on *their* schedule, not on the political decisions of various national standards bodies.
Actually, not true. When God comes back, if he cares to share the truth of the story and *he* debunks the literal interpretation of Genesis then even the scientific creationists are going to fall in line.
Another method that will swallow up the scientific creationists is for Christian unity under one of the more sophisticated varieties of Christianity that is evolution compatible.
Other than those two methods, I can't think of any other method either.
So I am an extremist because I am concerned because all of the IT managers above me are White even though Houston Texas is ~25% Hispanic and ~20% Black?
Either you are an extremist or there is a cheap pool of IT talent that isn't being exploited. The best revenge in these sorts of situations isn't to get mad, it's to hire the racially discriminated against at lower wages and drive those racist companies into the ground with your cost advantage. You'll either end up on top, pissing on their corporate grave, or your wage advantage will be arbitraged away by racists waking up to the fact that they're going to have some chicano laughing at them as they go bankrupt and they cut that crap out.
Now isn't getting rich a lot more attractive than whining and moaning on slashdot?
Actually, the people you are aiming your post at is not christians but fundamentalists. Catholics and Orthodox, shake their heads and laugh at this stuff too.
But you may want to watch out. Athiests are making efforts to wrap their non-scientifc beliefs in the cloak of science. True scientists need to be as on guard with that pseudo-science threat as they are with the threat from pseudo-science creationists.
Actually, it's the noisy ones that are getting noticed and I don't think that they hold the majority opinion. You need to be quite careful in your definitions here. The idea that God created, by a mechanism that is not specified in the Bible and could possibly well be evolution but it's not been proved one way or the other is actually the position of the Catholic Church and has no bones to pick with science at the current time. Now saying that evolution exists and is not divinely inspired is an entirely different thing, but certainly you can't say that it's science.
Hey, great anti-catholic bigotry! It might have had a bit more credibility if you could actually spell catholic. The Catholic church didn't really need to call itself by that name until the great schism when the eastern half peeled off, calling itself Orthodox and the western half ended up calling itself Catholic. Of course Rome had already fallen centuries before so that trips your timetable right up but who's going to let a little reality get in the way of a good libel.
The christianity that was persecuted by Rome had no force of arms and had no forced conversions. It did say that their God was the only true God but it certainly did that nonviolently.
People were forced to give sacrifice to the divine Caeser of the time. If they wouldn't do it, they were killed. Most other faiths were cool with worshipping another God on a part time basis but Christians would rather die. They did just that in great numbers.
Nice straw man. The Christianity that declared gnosticism heresy were the Catholic/Orthodox who had not yet split. The fundamentalists that you gleefully skewer weren't to appear for well over a millenia afterwards.
I think you meant to say that religious fundamentalists will never believe in...
The Pope has already opened the door to the idea that evolution was God's mechanism of creation. Catholics and Orthodox are a lot more careful about what's possible and what's not since they've been around for so much longer and have seen so much more error.
No, left and right refer to a political shorthand derived from how the french were seated in their parliament. It never was purely economics and all your moaning isn't going to change history.
As far as disease prevention using condoms, the failure rate for condoms is not exactly advertised prominently in sex-ed and it's quite defensible to prefer that your children take a safer route than safe sex. BTW: do *you* know which venereal diseases are not blocked by condom use and which are?
As for pregnancy, I have no desire to have any future daughter of mine get pressured into having an abortion because it is 'inconvenient' to the future career of some bastard. Beyond that, the link between breast cancer risk and abortion is pretty convincing in the studies that I've read and the politicized nature of abortion facilities means that they don't have the health safety supervision that other medical facilities have. In my book, that pretty much takes it out of the black and white 'astoundingly simple good sense' box that you glibly put it in.
Actually, the reason Galileo got in trouble was that he started doing Bible interpretations and saying that the flat earthers were religiously incorrect. He pissed off the Jesuits who were his closest supporters and generally did everything to be disagreeable and nasty and turn his judgers against him. Of course that doesn't justify what happened to him.
The church sinned in not forgiving all of that and judging on the merits of the case. They finally got over it and apologized and if you dig, you can read about the apology on the Vatican web site.
Slashdot Mirror
The benefits of globalization are pretty neutral but the corps are pushing certain aspects of globalization that benefit them and attempting to hold back others that would benefit the consumer. Unfortunately the 'consumer advocates' instead of pushing for the globalization aspects that would help the consumer, just protest against globalization period. A huge mistake, that we're all paying for.
DB
Good luck getting your digital camera to output digitally to a computer. EU has the same problems (perhaps more), it just screws over different groups.
DB
A little side note, you and the rest of the boycotters are currently being categorized as Napster inspired pirates and used as an exhibit on the evil effects of Napster by the very corporations you are protesting.
DB
Cartel inspired lawsuits are only a winner when you don't have a loser pays system. The US doesn't have such a system. The trial lawyers love this because they get to blackmail people with the threat of crippling lawsuits irregardless of merit. If the MPAA/RIAA had to pay defendents legal expenses if they lost as a rule, there would be far fewer examples of this kind of aggressiveness through lawsuit.
But the most common way that cartels enforce their agreements is to buy politicians and get them to use their force to kill off competitors. That's why politics is so important. Without politicians that are willing to sell out the country for money, cartels are largely powerless and become irrelevant.
DB
Of course, your drop in demand is currently being blamed on Napster by the RIAA.
DB
I always thought the American environmental regulations controlling toilet flow creating a black market in old toilets was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, just wait until we see old analog A/V equipment becoming more and more of a prized possesion, so people can make reasonable use of the products and software (i.e., music, movies, etc) they buy.
For toilets, you can always go to Canada where they are legal and the US customs office can't stop their importation because of NAFTA.
The world is truly bizarre. But then, there's the sugar market which is even worse.
DB
Philly to New York is just about the practical limit. I actually met 4 people who did that daily commute. It was really sad, 2 hrs+, each way. It would be 6+ each way from Philly to Boston.
DB
Ah, but here's the rub, if this offends you, you can keep your potential competition around as a threat pretty cheaply. This drop prices to drive out competition theory only works if the competition stays away long enough to recoup your lost profits and your lost reputation.
In any area where the entry costs are low, it just doesn't work. News flash, other than for government controlled goods, entry costs get lower over time and generally are quite low.
DB
That just begs the question. We can kill the old, the disabled, and the young easier than we can kill a bull. If might makes right, why are the first three unacceptable but not the last?
DB
Not only the cooperative v. competitive economy, take a look at the "cooperative" contribution to internation relations. Compare the progress France and Germany had to the Serbs and Croats.
Oh wait...
DB
In Europe, they don't let firewire cameras send to computers for copyright reasons. The hardware is all there but to sell to that market you have to nEUter them via software.
Of course there is a brisk business in wiping the software on the black market.
One other thing you should remember, the rest of the world subsidizes at a rate and with a scope that is simply breathtaking. Cheap deals are often due to tax subsidies, expensive ones to tax penalties but it's often very hard to figure out which government is at fault.
DB
I thought that the new digital TV signal is universal. Manufacturers want to control marketing on *their* schedule, not on the political decisions of various national standards bodies.
DB
Or they could be preset code waiting for the next rev to release.
B-)
DB
Actually, not true. When God comes back, if he cares to share the truth of the story and *he* debunks the literal interpretation of Genesis then even the scientific creationists are going to fall in line.
Another method that will swallow up the scientific creationists is for Christian unity under one of the more sophisticated varieties of Christianity that is evolution compatible.
Other than those two methods, I can't think of any other method either.
DB
Either you are an extremist or there is a cheap pool of IT talent that isn't being exploited. The best revenge in these sorts of situations isn't to get mad, it's to hire the racially discriminated against at lower wages and drive those racist companies into the ground with your cost advantage. You'll either end up on top, pissing on their corporate grave, or your wage advantage will be arbitraged away by racists waking up to the fact that they're going to have some chicano laughing at them as they go bankrupt and they cut that crap out.
Now isn't getting rich a lot more attractive than whining and moaning on slashdot?
DB
Actually, the people you are aiming your post at is not christians but fundamentalists. Catholics and Orthodox, shake their heads and laugh at this stuff too.
But you may want to watch out. Athiests are making efforts to wrap their non-scientifc beliefs in the cloak of science. True scientists need to be as on guard with that pseudo-science threat as they are with the threat from pseudo-science creationists.
DB
Actually, it's the noisy ones that are getting noticed and I don't think that they hold the majority opinion. You need to be quite careful in your definitions here. The idea that God created, by a mechanism that is not specified in the Bible and could possibly well be evolution but it's not been proved one way or the other is actually the position of the Catholic Church and has no bones to pick with science at the current time. Now saying that evolution exists and is not divinely inspired is an entirely different thing, but certainly you can't say that it's science.
DB
Constantine was master of what was to become the Eastern Roman empire and the religious practices that he adopted were eastern christian, not western.
Oh, and eastern christianity is alive and well thank you but it is not Roman Catholicism (maybe Byzantine Catholicism).
DB
Hey, great anti-catholic bigotry! It might have had a bit more credibility if you could actually spell catholic. The Catholic church didn't really need to call itself by that name until the great schism when the eastern half peeled off, calling itself Orthodox and the western half ended up calling itself Catholic. Of course Rome had already fallen centuries before so that trips your timetable right up but who's going to let a little reality get in the way of a good libel.
DB
The christianity that was persecuted by Rome had no force of arms and had no forced conversions. It did say that their God was the only true God but it certainly did that nonviolently.
People were forced to give sacrifice to the divine Caeser of the time. If they wouldn't do it, they were killed. Most other faiths were cool with worshipping another God on a part time basis but Christians would rather die. They did just that in great numbers.
DB
Nice straw man. The Christianity that declared gnosticism heresy were the Catholic/Orthodox who had not yet split. The fundamentalists that you gleefully skewer weren't to appear for well over a millenia afterwards.
Nice try at historical revisionism.
DB
I think you meant to say that religious fundamentalists will never believe in ...
The Pope has already opened the door to the idea that evolution was God's mechanism of creation. Catholics and Orthodox are a lot more careful about what's possible and what's not since they've been around for so much longer and have seen so much more error.
DB
No, left and right refer to a political shorthand derived from how the french were seated in their parliament. It never was purely economics and all your moaning isn't going to change history.
As far as disease prevention using condoms, the failure rate for condoms is not exactly advertised prominently in sex-ed and it's quite defensible to prefer that your children take a safer route than safe sex. BTW: do *you* know which venereal diseases are not blocked by condom use and which are?
As for pregnancy, I have no desire to have any future daughter of mine get pressured into having an abortion because it is 'inconvenient' to the future career of some bastard. Beyond that, the link between breast cancer risk and abortion is pretty convincing in the studies that I've read and the politicized nature of abortion facilities means that they don't have the health safety supervision that other medical facilities have. In my book, that pretty much takes it out of the black and white 'astoundingly simple good sense' box that you glibly put it in.
DB
Actually, the reason Galileo got in trouble was that he started doing Bible interpretations and saying that the flat earthers were religiously incorrect. He pissed off the Jesuits who were his closest supporters and generally did everything to be disagreeable and nasty and turn his judgers against him. Of course that doesn't justify what happened to him.
The church sinned in not forgiving all of that and judging on the merits of the case. They finally got over it and apologized and if you dig, you can read about the apology on the Vatican web site.
DB
Thank you for taking the time to state your opinion. It's pretty much my own problem with the evolution debate (and several others).
Scientists who put down their science tools and use propagandists tools instead are doing a tremendous disservice to science.
State your theory, present your evidence, and let everybody try to poke holes in it, if they can. If that's not what you see, it's not science.
DB