Far too often in these discussion I encounter ideologues that, instead of approaching each potential negotiation and evaluating it on its merits, apply ideological assumptions and assert that we shouldn't "appease" our enemies. The fact of the matter is, all negotiations have a winner and a loser - and as a global hegemon, the US is in a position to make sure we win. Reflexively spurning negotiation for ideological reasons takes one potential tool out of our hands. Part of the problem is the practical difficulty in selling a hard-nosed analysis of a potential treaty to the public: policymakers can't exactly tell the electorate "Don't worry, we're totally taking Ivan to the cleaners on this one" and then turn around and say "Please sign on the dotted line, Mr. Putin." With that in mind, I present some historical examples of successful applications of "soft" power in order to advance a nation's interests.
(1) England and anti-slavery: By the mid 19th century, there was a Western European consensus that slavery was evil. England successfully argued that since it was so evil, nations should have broad authority to investigate and disrupt the slave trade, and secured agreements to that effect. England happened to have the world's largest navy and command of the sea. Obviously, it was incumbent upon them to take their warships and investigate and disrupt your merchant shipping, dock in and poke around the coastal cities of your client states, etc. etc. to defeat the evil practice of slavery. All it all it was a great excuse to give Her Majesty's Navy an excuse to poke their noses into other people's business and ignore traditional maritime borders. (Not that there wasn't genuine abolitionist sentiment behind these agreements as well. That was the beautiful thing: the abolitionist sentiment could be exploited to emphasize England's existing strategic advantages.)
(2)Petraeus and Iraqi Nationalists. Concurrent with the troop surge in Iraq, General David Petraeus reached out to Sunni insurgents who previously were hostile to American forces and started paying their salaries while encouraging them to oppose foreign fighters and join the political process. I suppose appeasement is OK when it comes from a 4-star general. Consequently, the "Anbar Awakening" occurred and former insurgents became the "Sons of Iraq." It may be premature to describe this as a success, as Petraeus himself readily acknowledges that our gains are tenuous unless we build on them, but for now no one - and certainly no one on the right - has stepped up to argue against the all-but-sainted Petraeus' strategy.
(3)1790s America and the Barbary Pirates:In the 1790s the US had no navy to speak of. For about a decade we paid tribute to the Barbary pirates, because it was more cost-effective than letting them sink our ships. Tribute payments accounted for up to 20% of the federal budget at that time. A full fifth of the budget: imagine the neocon howls of outrage at this indignity. Both Washington and Adams were opposed to tribute in principle and understood that tribute would eventually lead to more piracy, but saw that it was the practical solution for the short-term: transatlantic shipping was essential in growing the young nation's tax base, as there was no income tax then and tariffs were a substantial source of federal revenue. By 1800 America had a brand-spanking-new Navy built just in time for the more hawkish Jefferson to suspend tribute payments, send in the Marines, and kick some pirate butt. Many people are familiar with the butt-kicking "Shores of Tripoli" part, but tend to overlook the decade of swallowing our pride and paying up that made it possible.
You're right, whether or not pursuing a treaty is a good idea is going to come down to the issue of verifiability/transparency of compliance, and that's where intelligent policy debate over a potential treaty is going focus. (As opposed to the neocon rabble's reflexive "You can never ever ever negotiate with the enemy! Diplomacy is always a sign of weakness!" No, negotiations have a winner and a loser, just like anything else - you just have to make sure you've stacked the deck so you end up the winner.) I can certainly see that there could be a case made that it's just not going to be possible to ensure compliance, and I won't claim to have a profound understanding of the technical issues involved. But there are few modern weapons systems that have successfully been deployed without live tests working out the kicks, and live testing ASW tends to be rather noticeable when a satellite falls out of the sky. Indeed, to the extent that furtive development of ASW is possible, it seems like the US would be best positioned to conduct that development, because we're the ones that own all the satellites that make the transparency and verification possible. (BTW as a foreign policy realist I'd absolutely advocate that we conduct such development, treaty or no treaty.)
Um... You missed a news report - Iran launched a satellite of its own a few days ago.
Made possible by Russian technology. Read up on the history of Iranian satellite technology - they used Russian launch pads until last year.
Which actually brings up another good point - a nonproliferation agreement has the positive secondary effects of preventing technology transfer to potential rogue states. Again, nonproliferation only works to the extend that compliance is verifiable - which, with ASW, is possible at the testing phase. Note that the Iranians had to do dummy launches, which we detected, for a full year before getting a satellite into orbit. This wasn't some sudden bootstrap of Iranian technology that caught us flatfooted, though you wouldn't know it from reading the sensationalistic press reports.
Obama wants to global ban. No one is suggesting unilaterally stopping development. I know it's difficult for neocons to understand, but there is a long and storied history of strong states using diplomatic agreements to preserve their power or bludgeon weaker states. In the 1800s Britain was particularly good at using the Western European consensus against slavery to leverage their command of the sea, for example.
Because no one will have the weapons to breach those limits. If the there were some way for the UK to successfully negotiate a no-submarine-development treaty in 1900, for example, it would have been absolutely in there interest to do so. Of course, such a treaty is infeasible because compliance is entirely unverifiable. The nice thing about ASW is that their development past the testing phase is sufficiently verifiable that a treaty banning their development is feasible. Obviously, they may try to do as much development as they can, up to the treaty limits - you can bet we definitely will. But given our comparative military spending, I think it's just as likely with a treaty in place ASW development will seem like a frivolity to the Russians/Chinese.
Iran? Certainly not, but it doesn't matter because they don't have the technology and economy required to develop ASW. Their only hope is that someone else invents it and gives it to them (like the Russians or Chinese).
As for the Chinese and the Russians, I agree that it'll be difficult to get them to sign on. But it's worth a shot. Remember, Obama is proposing a worldwide ban here, not unilaterally stopping our own development. Provided that the opportunity costs aren't too high I think it's reasonable for the Obama administration to pursue a ASW testing ban.
Keep in mind, there's plenty of stuff we could negotiate with as incentives to get them to sign on. I'd be perfectly happy to give the Russians North Ossetia if that'll make them sign on, for example. The Georgians really messed up and the Ossetians want to be part of Russia anyway. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything we could give the Chinese at little cost to ourselves, but I imagine there are a few possibilities people in the administration are working on.
Actually, Obama is pursuing a very rational course here. In short, the US does not want to start an anti-satellite arms race, because we're already so far ahead in the satellite race - why reset the game board to zero? A couple of points to consider:
1)In current US military doctrine, superior satellite coverage is a key "force multiplier" by providing C4ISTAR advantages (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance). US military planners are particularly keen on these so-called "force multipliers" because they field a comparatively small force numerically.
2)The US has a huge interest in maintaining the status quo in space. The US has a strategic advantage in satellite coverage, and that advantage is currently very difficult to assault in a wartime, short-time-horizon scenario.
3)For the US, declaring "space" a "neutral zone" would basically mean that a whole bunch of military equipment that makes our soldiers fight better is legally considered off-limits
4)Compliance with a space weapons ban is comparatively easy to monitor, because deployment of anti-satellite technology requires testing.
So for the US, a space weapons ban is a no-brainer. The trick will be getting the Russians and the Chinese to sign on (at this point no one is suggesting a unilateral ban on space weapons and such a policy would obviously be inane from a national security standpoint.)
A comment from the story earlier today about nVidia's new 2-teraflop multicore card:
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
Hah! HAH! While nVidia dicks around with expansion cards measured in mere teraflops, AMD is building a SUPERCOMPUTER. That's a/peta/flop, nVidia! If you don't know what that is, here's a hint: take your teraflop. Then add three zeros to the end. BAM!
AMD's penis is now 500 times larger than nVidia's. It's math.
It's true that Nintendo initially succeeded in this generation by targeting the far casual downmarket, but you can already see their attempts to creep upmarket with games like the new Smash Brothers and Mario Kart. Now these games aren't Bioshock by any means, but they are comparatively more "hardcore" than the pure-casual Wii launch titles. Nintendo will probably continue to try and move upmarket while consolidating downmarket, in hopes that they can bring some of the new/returned gamers they've hooked with Wii along. Keep in mind, the games that are considered "casual" on consoles now, were the bread and butter of consoles three generations ago. There's no bright line demarcating a casual/hardcore, just a demographic spectrum.
Now, I tend agree that Nintendo can only move upmarket so far before it's going to start competing in markets where its brand is particularly weak. But Nintendo could very well succeed in bringing along enough of their new customers to succeed. Keep in mind the "hardcore" gamers today were playing relatively simplistic games like Mario, Joust, Space Invaders, Sonic, etc. decades ago.
The entire paragraph you've somehow misidentified as an "introduction" is only a paraphrase or another article that the writer is responding to. The author only partially endorses the opinions of this other article, and actually goes so far as to parenthetically make points you'd probably agree with.
GoGamer.com currently has the game for $30, a great price for a recent release. Early reviews for the port seem very positive.
I'll be buying this one. As far as voting with my dollar is concerned, I consider this a three-fer: (1) It has no DRM, (2) It has jettisoned the nu-metal "hardcore" posturing of the last two games that affirmed all the worst adolescent gamer stereotypes for the charming storybook quality of Sands of Time, and (3) It's $30, and I think the demand price curve for computer games is such that publishers should be pushing out more titles at lower price points. Oh, and (0) it's supposed to be great fun, as well, naturally.
The movie studies have a very useful business model for their rental partners that could be instructive here. Hollywood studios don't sell their DVDs to rental retailers like blockbuster, instead, they have an arrangement whereby they provide the discs and get a cut of the renter's revenues. Blockbuster wins because their inventory management is much simpler. Hollywood wins because they don't have to worry about vastly undercharging on the most frequently-rented discs. The consumer wins because we don't have to listen to movie studios whine about how renters are destroying the music industry. This is actually one thing the RIAA got right, and it's a classic common action problem that huge industry conglomerates are well-equipped to
resolve.
As for buying and selling used games, well, who do the publishers think the credit I get from trading in all my games at the local EB is spent on, anyway? A secondary market exists for almost all retail goods, and somehow the market for these goods survives. The reason is that a good's value on the secondary market is priced into it's initial retail price (eg Automobiles with a reputation for low depreciation can sustain a higher retail price). Hopefully there's at least one MBA working for these publishers who can explain this very simple concept to the idiots who seem to think that each transaction on the secondary market represents a lost sale. That said, I'm pessimistic and I do believe that the games industry will move in a more restrictive direction: MBAs can be remarkably stupid, and even if they do grasp this concept, there's a prisoner's dilemma involved - "If only _my_ titles were constrained by DLC/resale lockout mechanisms, then consumers could still trade in my competitors' products in order to buy my product at full retail. On the other hand, if DLC/resale lockout mechanisms become the industry standard, I must implement them to keep up." Once again, a massive industry conglomerate that's on top of its game would actually be useful here, to resolve this common action problem.
It's still the only one that small in the $500 price range. Other OEMs are moving into the market - HP is going to reach the market 2nd - but you can bet their ~$500 ultraportable laptops will be similarly specced, as well.
Yeah, MS loves this move. They continue to provide XP to those who want it, except post-switch they get to chalk up every XP "sale" as a Vista sale, keeping adoption numbers presentable. The OEM eats the support/inefficiency costs of this hack, and the consumer eats the price increase of Vista license vs XP license (whatever it is at the uber-OEM discount level; probably not very much.)
... when it's transparent and disclosed. If ISPs believe that traffic shaping is a legitimate cost management solution that most customers wouldn't mind, then fine, make the legitimate case: use traffic shaping and disclose the existence of traffic shaping in your plans the same way maximum bandwidth is disclosed, and we'll let the market decide. Personally, I believe that enough customers wouldn't mind traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling and caps, etc. that in the future we might see different priced "tiers" of internet service, which is fine with me as that would make service pricing more representative of internet use. My ISP wants to bandwidth cap my internet service? Fine, if they disclose these caps at the time that I sign up. Then I'd be free to negotiate with another provider or sign up for a better plan. It's the fact that ISPs today advertise one thing and then deliver another that's truly offensive.
The sneaky underhanded meddling with the service of customers that have existing contracts just undermines the ISPs' case and suggests to regulators and customers that they aren't interested in honestly selling a service.
Also from the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, I learn that selective infanticide, despotism, tribal genocide, and assorted other horrors are perfectly normal expressions of genetic self interest exhibited by numerous social animals in the natural world. From this I can either conclude 1. That as a person who derives their ethics from the natural behavior of animals, I find such things to be perfectly acceptable ethically, or 2. That as a person who doesn't look to a bunch of apes and tigers to guide my sense of ethics, I'll have to figure out right and wrong for my own d__mn self.
Personally, I eat meat, but I advocate as a citizen and prefer as a consumer the humane slaughter of living animals. In the future, the consumption of slaughtered animals will likely be regarded as an artifact of necessity from a less economically developed time, much as human slavery, tribalism, despotism, etc. are regarded today.
Except that when buying a new monitor, WS is never simply a bonus and almost always incurs an opportunity cost in terms of vertical pixels. For example at the same price point, 17" LCD monitors offer 1440x900 in WS or 1280x1024 in 4:3. 19" LCD monitors offer similar resolutions at the same price point. It's harder to do an apples-to-apples comparison on laptop screens, but one imagines a similar tradeoff is happening there. (Keep in mind that because the "inch" measurement is a diagonal one, the 4:3 monitor actually has more surface area than a WS monitor).
I can see the purpose of a WS monitor when you start reaching really high horizontal resolutions, like 1600+, but the 1440x900 and 1280x800 monitors that you see so often on laptops are just useless, and a way for LCD manufacturers to skimp on LCD surface.
Don't get your panties in a bunch, engineers. One of the important things to remember about the assertions made in TFA is that it is explicitly an a posteriori analysis. Which is to say, it asserts that most terrorists are engineers, and submits a few reasons why this may be so. It does not necessarily follow therefore that most engineers are thus terrorists. Simply put, the analysis is running "backwards" not "forwards" - which would be a priori analysis.
For a classic example of the difference, consider that while most murdered married women are killed by their husbands (a posteriori), it does not follow that most husbands will kill their wives (a priori).
Finally, as a liberal arts major, allow me to say that it does not surprise me in the least that we make terrible terrorists. =P
My bad. I forgot, this is/. I'm supposed to comment on the comments, not the article. Well, if you're going to comment on the community's reaction to a certain piece of news, then yeah.
But you seem to be saying that China, if it were informed and its people not repressed enough, obviously would trend towards democracy because democracy just rocks so much.
Do you really think that a democracy is all that feasible for a country of China's population? Yeah, India is a democracy. And India is also a budding world power, isn't it?
I'm ethnically Chinese, and I find this sentiment, frequently expressed by apologists for the totalitarian government, appalling. That it frequently comes from the mouths of fellow Chinese hardly makes it any less offensive. The implication, sometimes explicitly stated, is that "Democracy may work for Western nations but here in Asia we have to do things a little different to run things."
Now I don't want to assert that the U.S. model of government is necessarily a great one - indeed, if anything it has become clear our electoral model and presidential structure is constrained by two-party lethargy and is a decidedly inferior to parliamentary models (and statistical studies of the comparative success rates of new democracies would seem to confirm this). But when people say "democracy" in the vernacular, what they actually mean is "democratic values", also known as "human rights", or "liberalism" in the classic JS Mill sense. The actual act of voting is almost immaterial, and may exist only as a final defense against government overreach.
So what are these values and rights? It's really simple stuff, like a government that has to reasonably demonstrate guilt before it can jail the accused, that doesn't punish you for believing in the wrong ideas or saying the wrong thing, that is accountable to the same rule of law that it holds its citizens, that doesn't shoot you in the street because you happen to be expressing your displeasure at the way things are going (a sentiment that IMO is somewhat misplaced in the Tibet's case, but hey, that doesn't mean you need to shoot the uppity buggers for it), stuff like that. The suggestion that these truly basic, inalienable, natural rights are somehow exclusive to "Western" peoples, and the more pernicious implied suggestion that the Chinese people are a uneducated, backwards and rambunctious lot, unable to civilly exist as a free society, THAT is a racism more profound than anything I've encountered in any of the admittedly imperfect Western countries, which is saying quite a lot.
We already know that for the games, the Great Firewall will be disabled at all of the access points that foreigners are likely to use (luxury hotels, the Olympic, village, etc.) James Fallows wrote an excellent article on the subject in last month's Atlantic Monthly: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall.
As Fallow's notes, the Great Firewall isn't exactly difficult to bypass anyway, for those people who are so inclined. What's truly pernicious about it is its panopticon effect: the Great Firewall it engenders a tolerance for censorship and surveillance among the complacent majority of the Chinese populace so that it becomes simply an accepted part of life. The censorship itself is almost beside the point - the actual objective is social control, so that the population will censor themselves and know what sort of ideas are inappropriate to express/learn about online. It doesn't matter how easy the Great Firewall is to bypass if the citizens know that certain subjects are off-limits and that you can be thrown in jail for violating that barrier.
The only winners of a class action lawsuit are the lawyers. This is very true. But class actions lawsuits - when successful - also create deterrent effects by making some companies into very big losers. The potential threat of class actions lawsuits, and the fiscal liability they represent, must thus be accounted for in a corporation's cost-benefit evaluations when they decide whether or not to shaft the consumers in some way. There should be more of them, frankly, and I say that as someone who once qualified for a trivial class-action award and never bothered to cash it in.
Even if this specific rumor turns out to be false, the broader implication that Sony was willing to sacrifice to ensure the success of Blu-Ray is undeniable. For a while Sony's use of a Blu-Ray player in PS3s was considered a blunder. The fact is, Blu-Ray is more important to Sony than the PS3 was. If coming in behind their competitors in this video game generation is what it cost to make Blu-Ray the HD standard, Sony is perfectly happy with that. Of course, there remains the possibility that Blu-Ray will turn out to be a competitive advantage for the PS3, in which case it would be so much the better. The point is, from Sony's perspective, it didn't matter if the Blu-Ray turns out to be good for the PS3 or not, because they consider it a win either way. If it is, they're obviously happy, but even if it isn't, they're still happy because they still win by massively inflating Blu-Ray's install base. For Sony, Blu Ray>PS3.
In contrast, to MS the 360 was a much higher priority than Toshiba's HD-DVD. MS has been trying to get into our living rooms for over 10 years now. (Bill Gates was already obsessing about it in The Road Ahead and that book was written 13 years ago.) All things being equal they'd prefer Toshiba to win and Sony to lose, of course, but it wasn't important enough to them for them to risk 360's success on.
Slashdot Mirror
Far too often in these discussion I encounter ideologues that, instead of approaching each potential negotiation and evaluating it on its merits, apply ideological assumptions and assert that we shouldn't "appease" our enemies. The fact of the matter is, all negotiations have a winner and a loser - and as a global hegemon, the US is in a position to make sure we win. Reflexively spurning negotiation for ideological reasons takes one potential tool out of our hands. Part of the problem is the practical difficulty in selling a hard-nosed analysis of a potential treaty to the public: policymakers can't exactly tell the electorate "Don't worry, we're totally taking Ivan to the cleaners on this one" and then turn around and say "Please sign on the dotted line, Mr. Putin." With that in mind, I present some historical examples of successful applications of "soft" power in order to advance a nation's interests.
(1) England and anti-slavery: By the mid 19th century, there was a Western European consensus that slavery was evil. England successfully argued that since it was so evil, nations should have broad authority to investigate and disrupt the slave trade, and secured agreements to that effect. England happened to have the world's largest navy and command of the sea. Obviously, it was incumbent upon them to take their warships and investigate and disrupt your merchant shipping, dock in and poke around the coastal cities of your client states, etc. etc. to defeat the evil practice of slavery. All it all it was a great excuse to give Her Majesty's Navy an excuse to poke their noses into other people's business and ignore traditional maritime borders. (Not that there wasn't genuine abolitionist sentiment behind these agreements as well. That was the beautiful thing: the abolitionist sentiment could be exploited to emphasize England's existing strategic advantages.)
(2)Petraeus and Iraqi Nationalists. Concurrent with the troop surge in Iraq, General David Petraeus reached out to Sunni insurgents who previously were hostile to American forces and started paying their salaries while encouraging them to oppose foreign fighters and join the political process. I suppose appeasement is OK when it comes from a 4-star general. Consequently, the "Anbar Awakening" occurred and former insurgents became the "Sons of Iraq." It may be premature to describe this as a success, as Petraeus himself readily acknowledges that our gains are tenuous unless we build on them, but for now no one - and certainly no one on the right - has stepped up to argue against the all-but-sainted Petraeus' strategy.
(3)1790s America and the Barbary Pirates:In the 1790s the US had no navy to speak of. For about a decade we paid tribute to the Barbary pirates, because it was more cost-effective than letting them sink our ships. Tribute payments accounted for up to 20% of the federal budget at that time. A full fifth of the budget: imagine the neocon howls of outrage at this indignity. Both Washington and Adams were opposed to tribute in principle and understood that tribute would eventually lead to more piracy, but saw that it was the practical solution for the short-term: transatlantic shipping was essential in growing the young nation's tax base, as there was no income tax then and tariffs were a substantial source of federal revenue. By 1800 America had a brand-spanking-new Navy built just in time for the more hawkish Jefferson to suspend tribute payments, send in the Marines, and kick some pirate butt. Many people are familiar with the butt-kicking "Shores of Tripoli" part, but tend to overlook the decade of swallowing our pride and paying up that made it possible.
You're right, whether or not pursuing a treaty is a good idea is going to come down to the issue of verifiability/transparency of compliance, and that's where intelligent policy debate over a potential treaty is going focus. (As opposed to the neocon rabble's reflexive "You can never ever ever negotiate with the enemy! Diplomacy is always a sign of weakness!" No, negotiations have a winner and a loser, just like anything else - you just have to make sure you've stacked the deck so you end up the winner.) I can certainly see that there could be a case made that it's just not going to be possible to ensure compliance, and I won't claim to have a profound understanding of the technical issues involved. But there are few modern weapons systems that have successfully been deployed without live tests working out the kicks, and live testing ASW tends to be rather noticeable when a satellite falls out of the sky. Indeed, to the extent that furtive development of ASW is possible, it seems like the US would be best positioned to conduct that development, because we're the ones that own all the satellites that make the transparency and verification possible. (BTW as a foreign policy realist I'd absolutely advocate that we conduct such development, treaty or no treaty.)
Um... You missed a news report - Iran launched a satellite of its own a few days ago.
Made possible by Russian technology. Read up on the history of Iranian satellite technology - they used Russian launch pads until last year.
Which actually brings up another good point - a nonproliferation agreement has the positive secondary effects of preventing technology transfer to potential rogue states. Again, nonproliferation only works to the extend that compliance is verifiable - which, with ASW, is possible at the testing phase. Note that the Iranians had to do dummy launches, which we detected, for a full year before getting a satellite into orbit. This wasn't some sudden bootstrap of Iranian technology that caught us flatfooted, though you wouldn't know it from reading the sensationalistic press reports.
Obama wants to global ban. No one is suggesting unilaterally stopping development. I know it's difficult for neocons to understand, but there is a long and storied history of strong states using diplomatic agreements to preserve their power or bludgeon weaker states. In the 1800s Britain was particularly good at using the Western European consensus against slavery to leverage their command of the sea, for example.
Because no one will have the weapons to breach those limits. If the there were some way for the UK to successfully negotiate a no-submarine-development treaty in 1900, for example, it would have been absolutely in there interest to do so. Of course, such a treaty is infeasible because compliance is entirely unverifiable. The nice thing about ASW is that their development past the testing phase is sufficiently verifiable that a treaty banning their development is feasible. Obviously, they may try to do as much development as they can, up to the treaty limits - you can bet we definitely will. But given our comparative military spending, I think it's just as likely with a treaty in place ASW development will seem like a frivolity to the Russians/Chinese.
Iran? Certainly not, but it doesn't matter because they don't have the technology and economy required to develop ASW. Their only hope is that someone else invents it and gives it to them (like the Russians or Chinese).
As for the Chinese and the Russians, I agree that it'll be difficult to get them to sign on. But it's worth a shot. Remember, Obama is proposing a worldwide ban here, not unilaterally stopping our own development. Provided that the opportunity costs aren't too high I think it's reasonable for the Obama administration to pursue a ASW testing ban.
Keep in mind, there's plenty of stuff we could negotiate with as incentives to get them to sign on. I'd be perfectly happy to give the Russians North Ossetia if that'll make them sign on, for example. The Georgians really messed up and the Ossetians want to be part of Russia anyway. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything we could give the Chinese at little cost to ourselves, but I imagine there are a few possibilities people in the administration are working on.
Actually, Obama is pursuing a very rational course here. In short, the US does not want to start an anti-satellite arms race, because we're already so far ahead in the satellite race - why reset the game board to zero? A couple of points to consider:
1)In current US military doctrine, superior satellite coverage is a key "force multiplier" by providing C4ISTAR advantages (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance). US military planners are particularly keen on these so-called "force multipliers" because they field a comparatively small force numerically.
2)The US has a huge interest in maintaining the status quo in space. The US has a strategic advantage in satellite coverage, and that advantage is currently very difficult to assault in a wartime, short-time-horizon scenario.
3)For the US, declaring "space" a "neutral zone" would basically mean that a whole bunch of military equipment that makes our soldiers fight better is legally considered off-limits
4)Compliance with a space weapons ban is comparatively easy to monitor, because deployment of anti-satellite technology requires testing.
So for the US, a space weapons ban is a no-brainer. The trick will be getting the Russians and the Chinese to sign on (at this point no one is suggesting a unilateral ban on space weapons and such a policy would obviously be inane from a national security standpoint.)
A comment from the story earlier today about nVidia's new 2-teraflop multicore card:
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
Hah! HAH! While nVidia dicks around with expansion cards measured in mere teraflops, AMD is building a SUPERCOMPUTER. That's a /peta/flop, nVidia! If you don't know what that is, here's a hint: take your teraflop. Then add three zeros to the end. BAM!
AMD's penis is now 500 times larger than nVidia's. It's math.
It's true that Nintendo initially succeeded in this generation by targeting the far casual downmarket, but you can already see their attempts to creep upmarket with games like the new Smash Brothers and Mario Kart. Now these games aren't Bioshock by any means, but they are comparatively more "hardcore" than the pure-casual Wii launch titles. Nintendo will probably continue to try and move upmarket while consolidating downmarket, in hopes that they can bring some of the new/returned gamers they've hooked with Wii along. Keep in mind, the games that are considered "casual" on consoles now, were the bread and butter of consoles three generations ago. There's no bright line demarcating a casual/hardcore, just a demographic spectrum.
Now, I tend agree that Nintendo can only move upmarket so far before it's going to start competing in markets where its brand is particularly weak. But Nintendo could very well succeed in bringing along enough of their new customers to succeed. Keep in mind the "hardcore" gamers today were playing relatively simplistic games like Mario, Joust, Space Invaders, Sonic, etc. decades ago.
The entire paragraph you've somehow misidentified as an "introduction" is only a paraphrase or another article that the writer is responding to. The author only partially endorses the opinions of this other article, and actually goes so far as to parenthetically make points you'd probably agree with.
This was originally written in response to a similar ruling in Australia, but Slate's William Saletan had much the same idea:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2008/12/16/is-this-child-pornography.aspx
Does the West past your free speech test now?
GoGamer.com currently has the game for $30, a great price for a recent release. Early reviews for the port seem very positive. I'll be buying this one. As far as voting with my dollar is concerned, I consider this a three-fer: (1) It has no DRM, (2) It has jettisoned the nu-metal "hardcore" posturing of the last two games that affirmed all the worst adolescent gamer stereotypes for the charming storybook quality of Sands of Time, and (3) It's $30, and I think the demand price curve for computer games is such that publishers should be pushing out more titles at lower price points. Oh, and (0) it's supposed to be great fun, as well, naturally.
The movie studies have a very useful business model for their rental partners that could be instructive here. Hollywood studios don't sell their DVDs to rental retailers like blockbuster, instead, they have an arrangement whereby they provide the discs and get a cut of the renter's revenues. Blockbuster wins because their inventory management is much simpler. Hollywood wins because they don't have to worry about vastly undercharging on the most frequently-rented discs. The consumer wins because we don't have to listen to movie studios whine about how renters are destroying the music industry. This is actually one thing the RIAA got right, and it's a classic common action problem that huge industry conglomerates are well-equipped to resolve.
As for buying and selling used games, well, who do the publishers think the credit I get from trading in all my games at the local EB is spent on, anyway? A secondary market exists for almost all retail goods, and somehow the market for these goods survives. The reason is that a good's value on the secondary market is priced into it's initial retail price (eg Automobiles with a reputation for low depreciation can sustain a higher retail price). Hopefully there's at least one MBA working for these publishers who can explain this very simple concept to the idiots who seem to think that each transaction on the secondary market represents a lost sale. That said, I'm pessimistic and I do believe that the games industry will move in a more restrictive direction: MBAs can be remarkably stupid, and even if they do grasp this concept, there's a prisoner's dilemma involved - "If only _my_ titles were constrained by DLC/resale lockout mechanisms, then consumers could still trade in my competitors' products in order to buy my product at full retail. On the other hand, if DLC/resale lockout mechanisms become the industry standard, I must implement them to keep up." Once again, a massive industry conglomerate that's on top of its game would actually be useful here, to resolve this common action problem.
It's still the only one that small in the $500 price range. Other OEMs are moving into the market - HP is going to reach the market 2nd - but you can bet their ~$500 ultraportable laptops will be similarly specced, as well.
Yeah, MS loves this move. They continue to provide XP to those who want it, except post-switch they get to chalk up every XP "sale" as a Vista sale, keeping adoption numbers presentable. The OEM eats the support/inefficiency costs of this hack, and the consumer eats the price increase of Vista license vs XP license (whatever it is at the uber-OEM discount level; probably not very much.)
... when it's transparent and disclosed. If ISPs believe that traffic shaping is a legitimate cost management solution that most customers wouldn't mind, then fine, make the legitimate case: use traffic shaping and disclose the existence of traffic shaping in your plans the same way maximum bandwidth is disclosed, and we'll let the market decide. Personally, I believe that enough customers wouldn't mind traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling and caps, etc. that in the future we might see different priced "tiers" of internet service, which is fine with me as that would make service pricing more representative of internet use. My ISP wants to bandwidth cap my internet service? Fine, if they disclose these caps at the time that I sign up. Then I'd be free to negotiate with another provider or sign up for a better plan. It's the fact that ISPs today advertise one thing and then deliver another that's truly offensive.
The sneaky underhanded meddling with the service of customers that have existing contracts just undermines the ISPs' case and suggests to regulators and customers that they aren't interested in honestly selling a service.
Also from the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, I learn that selective infanticide, despotism, tribal genocide, and assorted other horrors are perfectly normal expressions of genetic self interest exhibited by numerous social animals in the natural world. From this I can either conclude
1. That as a person who derives their ethics from the natural behavior of animals, I find such things to be perfectly acceptable ethically, or
2. That as a person who doesn't look to a bunch of apes and tigers to guide my sense of ethics, I'll have to figure out right and wrong for my own d__mn self.
Personally, I eat meat, but I advocate as a citizen and prefer as a consumer the humane slaughter of living animals. In the future, the consumption of slaughtered animals will likely be regarded as an artifact of necessity from a less economically developed time, much as human slavery, tribalism, despotism, etc. are regarded today.
Except that when buying a new monitor, WS is never simply a bonus and almost always incurs an opportunity cost in terms of vertical pixels. For example at the same price point, 17" LCD monitors offer 1440x900 in WS or 1280x1024 in 4:3. 19" LCD monitors offer similar resolutions at the same price point. It's harder to do an apples-to-apples comparison on laptop screens, but one imagines a similar tradeoff is happening there. (Keep in mind that because the "inch" measurement is a diagonal one, the 4:3 monitor actually has more surface area than a WS monitor). I can see the purpose of a WS monitor when you start reaching really high horizontal resolutions, like 1600+, but the 1440x900 and 1280x800 monitors that you see so often on laptops are just useless, and a way for LCD manufacturers to skimp on LCD surface.
Don't get your panties in a bunch, engineers. One of the important things to remember about the assertions made in TFA is that it is explicitly an a posteriori analysis. Which is to say, it asserts that most terrorists are engineers, and submits a few reasons why this may be so. It does not necessarily follow therefore that most engineers are thus terrorists. Simply put, the analysis is running "backwards" not "forwards" - which would be a priori analysis.
For a classic example of the difference, consider that while most murdered married women are killed by their husbands (a posteriori), it does not follow that most husbands will kill their wives (a priori).
Finally, as a liberal arts major, allow me to say that it does not surprise me in the least that we make terrible terrorists. =P
I'm ethnically Chinese, and I find this sentiment, frequently expressed by apologists for the totalitarian government, appalling. That it frequently comes from the mouths of fellow Chinese hardly makes it any less offensive. The implication, sometimes explicitly stated, is that "Democracy may work for Western nations but here in Asia we have to do things a little different to run things."
Now I don't want to assert that the U.S. model of government is necessarily a great one - indeed, if anything it has become clear our electoral model and presidential structure is constrained by two-party lethargy and is a decidedly inferior to parliamentary models (and statistical studies of the comparative success rates of new democracies would seem to confirm this). But when people say "democracy" in the vernacular, what they actually mean is "democratic values", also known as "human rights", or "liberalism" in the classic JS Mill sense. The actual act of voting is almost immaterial, and may exist only as a final defense against government overreach.
So what are these values and rights? It's really simple stuff, like a government that has to reasonably demonstrate guilt before it can jail the accused, that doesn't punish you for believing in the wrong ideas or saying the wrong thing, that is accountable to the same rule of law that it holds its citizens, that doesn't shoot you in the street because you happen to be expressing your displeasure at the way things are going (a sentiment that IMO is somewhat misplaced in the Tibet's case, but hey, that doesn't mean you need to shoot the uppity buggers for it), stuff like that. The suggestion that these truly basic, inalienable, natural rights are somehow exclusive to "Western" peoples, and the more pernicious implied suggestion that the Chinese people are a uneducated, backwards and rambunctious lot, unable to civilly exist as a free society, THAT is a racism more profound than anything I've encountered in any of the admittedly imperfect Western countries, which is saying quite a lot.
We already know that for the games, the Great Firewall will be disabled at all of the access points that foreigners are likely to use (luxury hotels, the Olympic, village, etc.) James Fallows wrote an excellent article on the subject in last month's Atlantic Monthly: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall.
As Fallow's notes, the Great Firewall isn't exactly difficult to bypass anyway, for those people who are so inclined. What's truly pernicious about it is its panopticon effect: the Great Firewall it engenders a tolerance for censorship and surveillance among the complacent majority of the Chinese populace so that it becomes simply an accepted part of life. The censorship itself is almost beside the point - the actual objective is social control, so that the population will censor themselves and know what sort of ideas are inappropriate to express/learn about online. It doesn't matter how easy the Great Firewall is to bypass if the citizens know that certain subjects are off-limits and that you can be thrown in jail for violating that barrier.
Goatse is so 20th century. 2 girls 1 cup!
Even if this specific rumor turns out to be false, the broader implication that Sony was willing to sacrifice to ensure the success of Blu-Ray is undeniable. For a while Sony's use of a Blu-Ray player in PS3s was considered a blunder. The fact is, Blu-Ray is more important to Sony than the PS3 was. If coming in behind their competitors in this video game generation is what it cost to make Blu-Ray the HD standard, Sony is perfectly happy with that. Of course, there remains the possibility that Blu-Ray will turn out to be a competitive advantage for the PS3, in which case it would be so much the better. The point is, from Sony's perspective, it didn't matter if the Blu-Ray turns out to be good for the PS3 or not, because they consider it a win either way. If it is, they're obviously happy, but even if it isn't, they're still happy because they still win by massively inflating Blu-Ray's install base. For Sony, Blu Ray>PS3.
In contrast, to MS the 360 was a much higher priority than Toshiba's HD-DVD. MS has been trying to get into our living rooms for over 10 years now. (Bill Gates was already obsessing about it in The Road Ahead and that book was written 13 years ago.) All things being equal they'd prefer Toshiba to win and Sony to lose, of course, but it wasn't important enough to them for them to risk 360's success on.