Also, if you've got fond memories of those DOOM era games, you could try reliving those days with DOSBox. Not all of those games have aged well, but some, like X-COM, are still as much fun as ever.
How are they going to use this for protecting crops? If ants are repelled, wasps and bees will be, too, and there goes your pollination.
Still useful (if it really works) for protecting fruit though. Once the blossom is gone and the fruit starts to develop, pollination is no longer an issue.
But in order to bring it to video game console units they had to dumb it down to Civilization Revolutions.
Interesting that you should say that. I like Revolutions (DS) precisely because it reminds me of Civ II. (Still the best one in my book. Though Call to Power also has a strong claim to that title.) III and IV added a lot of features, but I find that most of those detract from the core gameplay. Revolutions DS feels like it took Civ II, added the best elements of III and IV (cultural influence and great persons), and ran with it.
Sorry for all the parentheses. Hope you like LISP.;-)
Colossus was the first (electronic digital programmable) computer, but none of the original machines survive. The Harwell apparently is the oldest original computer in the UK that is still around.
When you brought out 4e, it was supposed to be a self-contained series of books. There were three books - the DM guide, the Player's Handbook, and the Monster Manual.
There's nothing preventing you from playing 4E with just the original three core books, just as with previous editions. In fact, thousands of gamers are doing just that, myself included.
Then you wanted $15/month to access your online content.
And how is it wrong for WotC to charge $15 a month for access to all the new optional content they put on their website? It's not like Dungeon and Dragon magazines were free either. Plus they had ads and came out once a month instead of every couple of days.
Then you announced that there were more CORE books coming out. There's a release party every month now. Twelve books a year? Are you insane?
Yes, WotC is releasing multiple core books for 4E. So what? You don't need them to play the game. And I suppose you just forgot that 3E had 2 PHBs, 2 DMGs and 4 MMs. Plus another one of each if you count 3.0 and 3.5 separately. Also, why is it a problem that WotC releases products every month? (The vast majority of which are not, in fact, core books.) You don't have to buy them you know. Are you also complaining when Nintendo is releasing a game every month? Most gamers would be delighted.
Then you killed the SRD.
Granted, 4E is not nearly as open as 3E/OGL/d20 was, but there is still a 4E SRD, and 3E is still open source.
You see me as a cash cow. Fuck you. I'm not paying you a thousand dollars to get all the books when the full set was supposed to be a hundred - or just fifty online.
You had to pay thousands of dollars to get all the books for 2E and 3E too. 4E is no different in that. But just as with those previous editions, you don't actually need any books beyond the 3 original core books. I know I'm having a blast playing with just those and I did pay just $50 for them.
You're liars, you're fuckups, and I do not reward incompetence with my cash.
You're either a liar or an ignoramus, a copyright-infringer, and you have a twisted sense of entitlement.
Some years ago I was using this service (called LAUNCHcast at the time). It's basically like Pandora or Last.FM in that it profiles your taste in music and lets you listen to music that fits your profile.
Obviously, this was a service that I didn't mind profiling me. (Limited to my taste in music and some basic demographics, of course.) I know that the service had a pretty good picture of my taste in music, as it was pretty good at suggesting music that I enjoyed. As such, Y!M was well aware that I'm fond of metal, don't much care for hip-hop, and dislike R&B. I explicitly allowed it to learn this information about me. I also explicitly allowed it to use this information for determining the content of the audio stream it served me.
In all the time I used the service, I did not get even one audio ad related to metal. Not even one, even though it could have easily led to a sale. Instead, I was bombarded with ads for the new Eminem album, the new Destiny's Child single, and more stuff that the service knew I absolutely didn't care about.
I'm torn on whether or not the marketeers involved were some of the dumbest or some of the most sadistic people in the business.
Or what about people who happen to have the same name as you?
I have a fairly uncommon name, yet there is someone who has the exact same one, and who happens to be rather active on the internet. Google my name, and the first bunch of results are about him.
Fortunately, in my case, this other person seems to be a proper, law-abiding citizen (with a damn impressive resume, I should add; sadly, he obviously works in a different industry than I do:P), but what if he happened to be a neo-Nazi?
Oh come on, you're blowing this way out of proportion.
Right now, the EU is highly dependent on proprietary software from the US. Is it really so strange that they don't like this? No country likes to be dependent on another country for essential goods. It's not much different from the US disliking their dependence on foreign oil.
And rather than demanding non-US software, the EU just wants guarantees in the form of less restrictive licensing (open source). Does this make it easier for other countries to compete? Yes, it does. Does it mean that the US is disadvantaged? No, it doesn't. As long as the US produces quality software for a reasonable price, the EU will keep buying.
Oh, and for the record: I'm an EU citizen who is employed by a major US software house.
This game could become the first MMO that I will play, but only if there is a roleplaying server that I can join. The KOTOR games were immensely enjoyable, but to me at least, that was because of the atmosphere, the great characters, the backstory, the moral dilemma's and other roleplaying related things. The combat honestly wasn't particularly great.
If I can play a KOTOR MMO full of Kreia's and HK-47's, I'll be a very happy guy, but if it's going to be a world full of LrdKillMeister123's, then I don't even want to get anywhere near it.
That's interesting. In my experience the auto-scaling actually destroys much of the story.
In Morrowind, I really liked how the world didn't revolve around me. The world just was. It didn't seem like it needed the player to justify its existence. That really increased my immersion in the game. I also really felt that my character was developing. Challenges (both in and out of combat) that I couldn't handle before eventually became doable, and later trivally easy. That really complemented the story in which you became a truly legendary character.
You could also effectively choose how difficult the game was for you. If you wanted to be a pilgrim, a merchant, or some other non-combat profession you could easily do that. You'd just have to avoid the really dangerous areas of the map, which was straightforward, and you would still have huge areas to enjoy. In Oblivion this doesn't work anymore. If you level on non-combat skills, the whole world becomes more and more dangerous until the point where you're constantly assailed by opponents you can't handle, wherever you go. Leveling now becomes a punishment instead of a reward.
Also, I find it really destroys suspension of disbelief when eventually every highwayman wields magical items that are worth a small kingdom, peaceful lands are roamed by packs of minotaurs and trolls, and all sewers are filled to the brim by epic goblins. And besides that, it's simply annoying. I don't want highwaymen to remain challenging. They're just not interesting enough for that. Once I'm a renowned hero, I should be able to dispatch them with ease. Beowulf, Achilles, or Aragorn struggling with a band of nameless thugs every couple of minutes when traveling through peaceful lands, does not a good story make.
Don't forget Magic Carpet. That game was bloody amazing!
Imagine this: it's just a year after the original Doom was released with its (for the time) amazing 2.5D game engine. Now this other game comes along that has dynamically lighted, fully morphable terrain. It has dynamic music that changes when the player enters a fight, reflections in the water, distance fog, transparency, a particle system, mouse controls, 8 player multiplayer, support for VR headsets, and, get this, it even had a red-green Stereogram mode! (Think those 3D images that you look at with red-green glasses.)
And the spells, my god. The things you could do with those. You had spells that would cause the ground to rise up at any place of your choosing and form a castle that would act as your base, you could cause tornadoes to appear, or meteors to crash down and leave a huge crater. You still don't see effects like that in most games, and Magic Carpet did it all in 1994!
To this day it's still by far the most amazing game I've ever played.
With all due respect to The Register, this is just hearsay. The article doesn't mention any sources for the statement that VBA won't be in the next Office for Windows.
The MS announcement does state that they won't license VBA to third parties anymore, and that they are moving their resources to VSTA/VSTO. While this is surely an indication that MS wants to stop supporting VBA completely, it doesn't mean that it will be gone in the next Office release for Windows. If they do mean to do that, they'd better be very upfront about it. Too many companies (including multi-billion dollar multinationals; I'm currently working for one) use VBA all over the place.
Ah, interesting. I didn't know where the name "Parrot" came from. But I was referring specifically to release 0.3.0 (see the/. article I linked to) which was codenamed "Alex".
I'm also pretty sure that one of the releases of Parrot (the perl6 VM) was named after him. If that doesn't make his death "News for Nerds", then I don't know what does.
Heh, well, unless I misunderstand your post, I actually don't disagree with you at all:-)
What I was trying to say in my previous post (apparently not very clearly) is that the difference between Dutch and English is smaller than the difference between German and English. Of course, they're still much closer to each other than to English; I'm not denying that.
Actually, it seems to me that Dutch is more closely related to English than German is. Which I guess would make sense, as the countries are geographically nearer, and historically had a lot of interaction due to the fact that both were naval powers.
Also, since there are fewer Dutch speakers, I expect that the language is easier corrupted/changed. I certainly have way more trouble reading 17th century Dutch documents than English documents, even though Dutch is my first language. But maybe English has just been very resistant to change... I dunno.
Anyways, in your example the word order changes less in Dutch than in German. "if int1 == 3" would be something like "als int1 gelijk is aan 3" ("if int1 equal is to 3"). The syntax quite nicely matches the Dutch structure.
I guesstimate that I've spent some 1200 euros (about 1600 USD right now) on 3.0/3.5/d20 products over the years. That's a lot of money! And in retrospect, some of those books really weren't very good.
But then I consider what I spent on my current computer... And I don't think it'll provide me much gaming fun after 8 years, unlike those 3rd edition books. Hell, there are lots of 2nd edition books that I still would like to get, even though I can no longer stand the system. The setting material, adventure hooks, artwork, etc. are still good.
I don't know if the new edition will be a significant improvement over 3rd. As long as it's sufficiently better (or just different enough) to make me and my friends excited about rolling up new characters, though, the 90 bucks or so that the new core books will cost will be very well spent. It's not easy to get more hours of fun for that kind of money.
Yes, that they are, fortunately. The Dutch supreme courts have ruled in 2004 that demolishing a building does not violate the moral rights of the architect. (The LJN number of that case is AN7830, for those who are interested.)
IANAL, but this may be about the moral rights of the authors, which includes things like the right of attribution. In some countries/jurisdictions these rights can go quite far and cannot be transfered or waived. For instance, in The Netherlands, artists can object to defilement of their work. This can have nasty implications, for instance, when you want to alter a building you own in a way that the architect or interior designer objects to. My alma mater cannot alter the interior design of one of its libraries for this reason.
IANAL, but I'd say that it says so in section 4 (specifically 4d) of the LGPL v3 and sections 5 and 6 of the LGPL v2.1.
Excerpted from v3:
4. Combined Works.
You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, if you also do each of the following:
[...]
d) Do one of the following:
* 0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.
* 1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.
Excerpted from 2.1:
5. A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
However, linking a "work that uses the Library" with the Library creates an executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library), rather than a "work that uses the library". The executable is therefore covered by this License. Section 6 states terms for distribution of such executables.
[...]
6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.
You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to the copy of this License. Also, you must do one of these things:
* a) Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library including whatever changes were used in the work (which must be distributed under Sections 1 and 2 above); and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable "work that uses the Library", as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library. (It is understood that the user who changes the contents of definitions files in the Library will not necessarily be able to recompile the application to use the modified definitions.)
* b) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (1) uses at run time a copy of the library already present on the user's computer system, rather than copying library functions into the executable, and (2) will operate properly with a modified version of the library, if the user installs one, as long as the modified version is interface-compatible with the version that the work was made with.
* c) Accompany the work with a wri
If I may intrude myself upon this discussion: I do not believe that science is necessarily naturalistic. Physics, chemistry and biology, however, are natural sciences, while your concern belongs to the field of philosophy (where it has been studied at least since Descartes), which is not a natural science.
The disagreement in this discussion stems from the fact that an issue from one field of science is drawn into a field of science that does not concern itself with such issues. Naturally, this proves unhelpful for both sides of the argument.
1The notion that *only* USA companies would be sued for that is totally bogus and plainly untrue. It may be that USA-ones *seem* to happen more because:
1)It gets a higher profile when one is sued, because they make more fuss about it (together with the 'look, it's the EU against USA' attitude)
2)USA corporations are more prone to anti-competitive behaviour (maybe due to the inherent strong corporatism in the USA where one easily buys politicians)
3)EU-corporations are as bad as USA ones, only they can cover it up better
You're very close with number 1, but the biggest reasons (IMHO) are:
1) US news only reports when the EU fines a US company. 2) Slashdot only reports when the EU fines an IT company and most of them are from the US.
For those who truly feel that the EU is specifically after US companies: do some searching on European news outlets on companies fined by the EU for anti-competitive behavior. Many, if not most of them, are from the EU itself. For instance, in the past year Siemens (German) has been fined 397 million euros, Akzo Nobel (Dutch) has been fined 25.2 million euros, Solvay (Belgian) 167 million euros, Total (French) 78.6 million euros, Edison (Italian) 58.1 million euros.
And those are just from the first 2 cases I found on a quick search. Hardly a month goes by that I don't read about another big case.
You're not the first one to come up with that joke (as you may already know). Turing Award winner Edsger Dijkstra called his Volkswagen camper the Touring Machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, if you've got fond memories of those DOOM era games, you could try reliving those days with DOSBox. Not all of those games have aged well, but some, like X-COM, are still as much fun as ever.
How are they going to use this for protecting crops? If ants are repelled, wasps and bees will be, too, and there goes your pollination.
Still useful (if it really works) for protecting fruit though. Once the blossom is gone and the fruit starts to develop, pollination is no longer an issue.
But in order to bring it to video game console units they had to dumb it down to Civilization Revolutions.
Interesting that you should say that. I like Revolutions (DS) precisely because it reminds me of Civ II. (Still the best one in my book. Though Call to Power also has a strong claim to that title.) III and IV added a lot of features, but I find that most of those detract from the core gameplay. Revolutions DS feels like it took Civ II, added the best elements of III and IV (cultural influence and great persons), and ran with it.
Sorry for all the parentheses. Hope you like LISP. ;-)
Colossus was the first (electronic digital programmable) computer, but none of the original machines survive. The Harwell apparently is the oldest original computer in the UK that is still around.
Though I must say your version fit in well with this story. :-)
Nice job being a dick.
There's nothing preventing you from playing 4E with just the original three core books, just as with previous editions. In fact, thousands of gamers are doing just that, myself included.
And how is it wrong for WotC to charge $15 a month for access to all the new optional content they put on their website? It's not like Dungeon and Dragon magazines were free either. Plus they had ads and came out once a month instead of every couple of days.
Yes, WotC is releasing multiple core books for 4E. So what? You don't need them to play the game. And I suppose you just forgot that 3E had 2 PHBs, 2 DMGs and 4 MMs. Plus another one of each if you count 3.0 and 3.5 separately. Also, why is it a problem that WotC releases products every month? (The vast majority of which are not, in fact, core books.) You don't have to buy them you know. Are you also complaining when Nintendo is releasing a game every month? Most gamers would be delighted.
Granted, 4E is not nearly as open as 3E/OGL/d20 was, but there is still a 4E SRD, and 3E is still open source.
You had to pay thousands of dollars to get all the books for 2E and 3E too. 4E is no different in that. But just as with those previous editions, you don't actually need any books beyond the 3 original core books. I know I'm having a blast playing with just those and I did pay just $50 for them.
You're either a liar or an ignoramus, a copyright-infringer, and you have a twisted sense of entitlement.
That reminds me of Yahoo! Music.
Some years ago I was using this service (called LAUNCHcast at the time). It's basically like Pandora or Last.FM in that it profiles your taste in music and lets you listen to music that fits your profile.
Obviously, this was a service that I didn't mind profiling me. (Limited to my taste in music and some basic demographics, of course.) I know that the service had a pretty good picture of my taste in music, as it was pretty good at suggesting music that I enjoyed. As such, Y!M was well aware that I'm fond of metal, don't much care for hip-hop, and dislike R&B. I explicitly allowed it to learn this information about me. I also explicitly allowed it to use this information for determining the content of the audio stream it served me.
In all the time I used the service, I did not get even one audio ad related to metal. Not even one, even though it could have easily led to a sale. Instead, I was bombarded with ads for the new Eminem album, the new Destiny's Child single, and more stuff that the service knew I absolutely didn't care about.
I'm torn on whether or not the marketeers involved were some of the dumbest or some of the most sadistic people in the business.
Or what about people who happen to have the same name as you?
I have a fairly uncommon name, yet there is someone who has the exact same one, and who happens to be rather active on the internet. Google my name, and the first bunch of results are about him.
Fortunately, in my case, this other person seems to be a proper, law-abiding citizen (with a damn impressive resume, I should add; sadly, he obviously works in a different industry than I do :P), but what if he happened to be a neo-Nazi?
Oh come on, you're blowing this way out of proportion.
Right now, the EU is highly dependent on proprietary software from the US. Is it really so strange that they don't like this? No country likes to be dependent on another country for essential goods. It's not much different from the US disliking their dependence on foreign oil.
And rather than demanding non-US software, the EU just wants guarantees in the form of less restrictive licensing (open source). Does this make it easier for other countries to compete? Yes, it does. Does it mean that the US is disadvantaged? No, it doesn't. As long as the US produces quality software for a reasonable price, the EU will keep buying.
Oh, and for the record: I'm an EU citizen who is employed by a major US software house.
Ah, that's one of many Quantum Cop jokes from Casey & Andy. (Not saying you stole it, just that C&A did it too.) Wish that comic was still alive...
This game could become the first MMO that I will play, but only if there is a roleplaying server that I can join. The KOTOR games were immensely enjoyable, but to me at least, that was because of the atmosphere, the great characters, the backstory, the moral dilemma's and other roleplaying related things. The combat honestly wasn't particularly great.
If I can play a KOTOR MMO full of Kreia's and HK-47's, I'll be a very happy guy, but if it's going to be a world full of LrdKillMeister123's, then I don't even want to get anywhere near it.
That's interesting. In my experience the auto-scaling actually destroys much of the story.
In Morrowind, I really liked how the world didn't revolve around me. The world just was. It didn't seem like it needed the player to justify its existence. That really increased my immersion in the game. I also really felt that my character was developing. Challenges (both in and out of combat) that I couldn't handle before eventually became doable, and later trivally easy. That really complemented the story in which you became a truly legendary character.
You could also effectively choose how difficult the game was for you. If you wanted to be a pilgrim, a merchant, or some other non-combat profession you could easily do that. You'd just have to avoid the really dangerous areas of the map, which was straightforward, and you would still have huge areas to enjoy. In Oblivion this doesn't work anymore. If you level on non-combat skills, the whole world becomes more and more dangerous until the point where you're constantly assailed by opponents you can't handle, wherever you go. Leveling now becomes a punishment instead of a reward.
Also, I find it really destroys suspension of disbelief when eventually every highwayman wields magical items that are worth a small kingdom, peaceful lands are roamed by packs of minotaurs and trolls, and all sewers are filled to the brim by epic goblins. And besides that, it's simply annoying. I don't want highwaymen to remain challenging. They're just not interesting enough for that. Once I'm a renowned hero, I should be able to dispatch them with ease. Beowulf, Achilles, or Aragorn struggling with a band of nameless thugs every couple of minutes when traveling through peaceful lands, does not a good story make.
Don't forget Magic Carpet. That game was bloody amazing!
Imagine this: it's just a year after the original Doom was released with its (for the time) amazing 2.5D game engine. Now this other game comes along that has dynamically lighted, fully morphable terrain. It has dynamic music that changes when the player enters a fight, reflections in the water, distance fog, transparency, a particle system, mouse controls, 8 player multiplayer, support for VR headsets, and, get this, it even had a red-green Stereogram mode! (Think those 3D images that you look at with red-green glasses.)
And the spells, my god. The things you could do with those. You had spells that would cause the ground to rise up at any place of your choosing and form a castle that would act as your base, you could cause tornadoes to appear, or meteors to crash down and leave a huge crater. You still don't see effects like that in most games, and Magic Carpet did it all in 1994!
To this day it's still by far the most amazing game I've ever played.
With all due respect to The Register, this is just hearsay. The article doesn't mention any sources for the statement that VBA won't be in the next Office for Windows.
The MS announcement does state that they won't license VBA to third parties anymore, and that they are moving their resources to VSTA/VSTO. While this is surely an indication that MS wants to stop supporting VBA completely, it doesn't mean that it will be gone in the next Office release for Windows. If they do mean to do that, they'd better be very upfront about it. Too many companies (including multi-billion dollar multinationals; I'm currently working for one) use VBA all over the place.
Ah, interesting. I didn't know where the name "Parrot" came from. But I was referring specifically to release 0.3.0 (see the /. article I linked to) which was codenamed "Alex".
Also, Alex has been covered by Slashdot before. Here's a previous Slashdot article about the fact that he may have grasped the concept of zero.
I'm also pretty sure that one of the releases of Parrot (the perl6 VM) was named after him. If that doesn't make his death "News for Nerds", then I don't know what does.
Heh, well, unless I misunderstand your post, I actually don't disagree with you at all :-)
What I was trying to say in my previous post (apparently not very clearly) is that the difference between Dutch and English is smaller than the difference between German and English. Of course, they're still much closer to each other than to English; I'm not denying that.
Actually, it seems to me that Dutch is more closely related to English than German is. Which I guess would make sense, as the countries are geographically nearer, and historically had a lot of interaction due to the fact that both were naval powers.
Also, since there are fewer Dutch speakers, I expect that the language is easier corrupted/changed. I certainly have way more trouble reading 17th century Dutch documents than English documents, even though Dutch is my first language. But maybe English has just been very resistant to change... I dunno.
Anyways, in your example the word order changes less in Dutch than in German. "if int1 == 3" would be something like "als int1 gelijk is aan 3" ("if int1 equal is to 3"). The syntax quite nicely matches the Dutch structure.
I guesstimate that I've spent some 1200 euros (about 1600 USD right now) on 3.0/3.5/d20 products over the years. That's a lot of money! And in retrospect, some of those books really weren't very good.
But then I consider what I spent on my current computer... And I don't think it'll provide me much gaming fun after 8 years, unlike those 3rd edition books. Hell, there are lots of 2nd edition books that I still would like to get, even though I can no longer stand the system. The setting material, adventure hooks, artwork, etc. are still good.
I don't know if the new edition will be a significant improvement over 3rd. As long as it's sufficiently better (or just different enough) to make me and my friends excited about rolling up new characters, though, the 90 bucks or so that the new core books will cost will be very well spent. It's not easy to get more hours of fun for that kind of money.
Yes, that they are, fortunately. The Dutch supreme courts have ruled in 2004 that demolishing a building does not violate the moral rights of the architect. (The LJN number of that case is AN7830, for those who are interested.)
IANAL, but this may be about the moral rights of the authors, which includes things like the right of attribution. In some countries/jurisdictions these rights can go quite far and cannot be transfered or waived. For instance, in The Netherlands, artists can object to defilement of their work. This can have nasty implications, for instance, when you want to alter a building you own in a way that the architect or interior designer objects to. My alma mater cannot alter the interior design of one of its libraries for this reason.
Excerpted from v3:
Excerpted from 2.1:
If I may intrude myself upon this discussion: I do not believe that science is necessarily naturalistic. Physics, chemistry and biology, however, are natural sciences, while your concern belongs to the field of philosophy (where it has been studied at least since Descartes), which is not a natural science.
The disagreement in this discussion stems from the fact that an issue from one field of science is drawn into a field of science that does not concern itself with such issues. Naturally, this proves unhelpful for both sides of the argument.
1The notion that *only* USA companies would be sued for that is totally bogus and plainly untrue. It may be that USA-ones *seem* to happen more because:
t _winst_Siemens.htmla rtelboete_van_EU.html
1)It gets a higher profile when one is sued, because they make more fuss about it (together with the 'look, it's the EU against USA' attitude)
2)USA corporations are more prone to anti-competitive behaviour (maybe due to the inherent strong corporatism in the USA where one easily buys politicians)
3)EU-corporations are as bad as USA ones, only they can cover it up better
You're very close with number 1, but the biggest reasons (IMHO) are:
1) US news only reports when the EU fines a US company.
2) Slashdot only reports when the EU fines an IT company and most of them are from the US.
For those who truly feel that the EU is specifically after US companies: do some searching on European news outlets on companies fined by the EU for anti-competitive behavior. Many, if not most of them, are from the EU itself. For instance, in the past year Siemens (German) has been fined 397 million euros, Akzo Nobel (Dutch) has been fined 25.2 million euros, Solvay (Belgian) 167 million euros, Total (French) 78.6 million euros, Edison (Italian) 58.1 million euros.
And those are just from the first 2 cases I found on a quick search. Hardly a month goes by that I don't read about another big case.
Sources (in Dutch):
http://www.nu.nl/news/955922/32/rss/EU-boete_druk
http://www.nu.nl/news/725210/32/rss/Akzo_krijgt_k
You're not the first one to come up with that joke (as you may already know). Turing Award winner Edsger Dijkstra called his Volkswagen camper the Touring Machine.