> I know Doom3 is comming out almost concurently on PC/Mac and Linux, but that's the exeptiond and FAR from the rule.
Sadly enough it is indeed the exception when looking at the gamign market..
That said, it is the rule and has been the rule for ID software for a long time. They also happen to have been kinda influential in the gaming market.. so I think it is a bit early to give up hope there really.
Modern 'digital' HDTV sets do definitely have a 3 frame lag. One of my close friends is involved in developing the hardware for such sets, and 3 frames is the absolute minimum you will get on a set that can do 480p or better.
Why?
Because of the moronic thing called telecine.
In order to get an anywhere near acceptable display of a ntsc tv broadcast of what was originally a 24fps movie on a non-interlaced screen, you do need to de-interlace the video, and a simple frame-merging will not do the trick. You will actually have to reverse the telecine process to ensure you are not going to create severe tearing of about half of the frames.
The telecine process generates 3 video frames out of 2 movie frames, and you will have to detect the start of each such sequence, what is more, you need to detect if you have to do this at all since a tv station (or videotape) is not going to tell you about it.
Having to detect this means holding up 3 frsames and looking for similarities between the seperate fields that make up those frames.
The simpel result is a 3 frame delay.
A good set will introduce an equivalent delay in audio so you will not get any sync problems, but it will be noticable when playign games in some specific cases still.
U just wonder... do you have any idea how anti aliassign works?
THere are a few rules of thumb here...
You can NEVER make a screen show more detail then its resolution allows.
Whenever you use anti aliassing, you in effect lose a little bit of detail in order to get a better picture. This picture is less sharp but more plwasing to the eye because you will not notice some artifacts that normally occur with the too sharp pictures generated by a computer system.
> TV's also have this thing called a "couch" going for them. I love my couch, it's much better than my computer chair.
I suggest gettign a cough or much better chair at your computer..
> I also prefer a game controller to the repetitive stress injuries from my mouse and keyboard. Not every game is an FPS you know.
This may be news.. but there have been usb gamepads for quite some time now.. it seems that with some efford you can even get the conrtollers of some consoles to work with your pc..
I think the Xbox is showing that with anti-aliasing resolution is moot, especially with HDTV sets.
Anti aliassing is a trick, and while it makes diagonal lines and such look better, it actually makes you lose detail.
I mostly play FPS games myself, and in quite a few, resolution matters a lot, simply because it allows you to see enough detail even when someone is far away. Why? because something that is 6 pixels on a 800x600 screen will be 24 pixels in 1600x1200. 6 wont make for being able to see if its friend or foe, 24 has a much better chance.
I was responding to your comemnt about the possibility to be thrown from your land if you don't own the mineral rights. I have no idea how that is in the USA, but I was pointing out that in such a case, that similar 'rules' apply as when they want to use it for for example building a road, at least overhere (the Netherlands). I bet that is because in our case, the mineral rights are always with the government to begin with;P
> My main beef with him is enviromental policy, foreign is fine. I wish there was a president who had his tough foreign-policy but more socially-liberal. But this doesn't seem to be an option.
And of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but tell me, what exactly gives the USA the right to force theirs on other countries? because that is exactly what the current foreign policy comes down to. You'd agree with other countries doing the same to the USA? (provided they'd have the power to do so)
A policy that ispurely based on who is the strongest is simply bound to discard any forms of justice. If you don't believe me on that one, I suggest you go make a nice study of why any system of justice tries (not always succesfully so) to remove such differences between parties and look at the facts and arguments instead.
With regards to that, the Bush administration has brought up many arguments, but a large part of those arguments have been shown to be at the very least rather shaky. For as far as facts go, even many republicans seem to agree now that if they had known now what they knew when deciding on Iraq, they would not have given the government a free hand in that, so I think we can very easily say that the facts were not there, at least not in the form in which they were suggested to be there.
For now, what your president is acomplashing with his foreign policy is rapidly losing any allies and friends that the USA used to have around the world. If you believe that is a good policy, be my guest.
> When he has a has an Approval Rating http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm of 45% I don't think you can say that Bush is the most hated Administration you've seen.
Last time I looked them up in a dictionare, 'to disapprove and to hate did not have the same meaning.
This also means that the approval ratings say absolutely nothing whatsoever about this.
In the last 6 months I have heard a simple question from quite a few republicans and democrats alike.. why is it that we hate eachother over who we might elect as the next president?
Compaigns in the USA have always been a bit 'rough', but I think this is still the first one where we have seen both major parties (by means of a proxy at times) comparing eachother with nazis, including using pictures to suggest this.
I do not know if he started it, but president Bush did contribute a lot to that atmosphere with his 'you are with us or against us' attitude, leaving no room whatsoever for things like discussion or disagreement. If you disagree, you are obviously against me, and I must want you dead..
There is a simple problem with this (and no, you are not the first one to come up with this idea really)
Lets try an example:
John owns this nice fatory that employs some 800 people. This facory has an approx value of $20000000
Now, when he dies in the current system, his property (most of which consists of the 20m dollar factory) goes to his son or daughter and stays together, and keeps benefitting those 800 people, who also have some level of assurance that things will continue as they did so far.
In your system, there are a few possibilities: - company becomes public property (which in practise means government property in any society that ever tried such an idea) - company is sold off, money is distributed. Sold off to whom? In such a system, who can have the money to buy it? - factory is split up and small parts are sold off, 800 people without a job.
> I'm against taxes of most every description, but I'm also deeply troubled by the current state of CR/Patent/TM abuse.
I just wonder.. how do you suggest public services and such are payed for then?
Tax is not an instrument for putting pressure on society, and using it that way is imho one of the thigns whihc makes most tax systems work badly.
It is a way to provide the government with enough funding to do their job, any other use will distract from doing this oen thign properly, and will result in more taxes for society.
Speaking from a country where miniral rights do not go with the land..
> Hint to those of you living somewhere that mineral rights do not normally go with property: your property value had better go down by more than the value of those rights. Down more because someone has the rights to kick you off "your" land and you need compensation for that potential loss.
Not exactly. The only one who could try that is the government, and they will have to pay me quite a bit of compensation for that.
This is in fact no different from when the government needs a strip of your land because it is the only way for them to build a road that is needed. They will fidn a way to get the land back from you.
The answer to your question lies in another question.
> If I, or an heir, proceed to lend it to someone to listen to, is it still not mine? Does that person, just because it's 50 years after recording, or 100 years after my death, have an automatic (moral) right to copy it?
Can you explain why they would not have a right to do so, regardless of how long passed after recording?
The only reason why they cannot is because society has granted you a limited protection on work you created. This protection is limited in time, and gives you your exclusive rights with regards to your creative work. When the protection expires, your rights expires.
It might be a good thing to realize that there are parts of the world (large parts of eastern Asia for example) that untill recently had no such thign as copyright, and rather worked with the concept that any ideas made public were exactly that, public (ie, property of the public if yoy want to talk about property). This just points out that copyright is definitely not some form of natural property.
If you would never ever let anyone listen to that recording then you'd keep it secret, and indeed it won't enter the public domain as long as it is kept secret.
That is similar to how a trade secret lasts for as logn as it lasts while a patent has a limited term.
Public domain is a rather well defined concept, and I don't see why it needs any change.
Its a really simple deal:
- You create somethign and make it available to the public in one form or another - In exchange, you get an exclusive right on distribution for a limited time.
You do some work, you get some reward. Your work is not infinite in nature, neither is the reward.
After that, the protection goes, and everyone can do with it what they want.
> And you're assuming that everyone who uses the net is using it for international communications.
When you are usign an international site like for example Orkut, or to quite some extent, Slashdot, yes definitely.
> Many people could care less about people in other countries, and use the net for a plethora of non-international reasons.
Why should i use English in an interntational forum or social networking site when talking to a fellow DUtchie?
When the conversation is private, there is no problem in that. When it is on a public forum, we should be using English, or we shoudl setup our own forum.
Why? because it is the only way in which things will ever work at all.
And add a webserver with ssl and a webmail program (openwebmail, sqwebmail or such) and you can have your webmail as well.
Webmail has quite some advantages, tho you must be able to trust the machine you are browsing from (but hey, thats still true when using a character based method, if your client is compromised, you are in trouble)
At any rate, I don't care that much about individual mail being read.
What I care about in case of Google would be that personal mails generate hits on their advertisements. This together with something like Orkut with its mapping of social networks gives too much information about me to a company to my taste. That they can obtain that information in either illegal ways, or by putting in a lot of efford, well, that is another case, that costs them a lot more then a few gig diskspace.
Definitely, and I don't have a problem with gmail itself, it is more like I am not going to use google for everything that relates to my onlien activities.
Do I use a local ISP for most of them? yeah, but in that case I also have a local court to goto when it goes terribly wrong.
Besides.. I run my own servers for a reason, no ISP except for the sending one will be storing mail for me, it will be transfered through their network tho, but to that other laws apply.
> Hmmm, well, if the company gets bought or divvied up then you are out of luck if you accepted one of those horrible "we can change the deal at any time in any way for any reason or none whatsoever" clauses. I'd like to see such overbroad provisions declared unenforceable.
I agree, that would be a nice thing.
However, what I was talking about isn't so much about what is in the terms and conditions but about the intentions of those in charge of the company.
I definitely agree with your impression regardign trusting Google over many other companies involved in the same business.. yet them being both into social networking, searches and advertising, oh, and add webmail tot hat now, makes for a too powerfull combi to my taste, hence I'll be selective with using them... Searches and adsense are pretty cool tho and can be shown to work in the advantage of everyone:)
> The enemy of my enemy is my friend - at least temporarily - and at least about this issue.
Ah yes... that is the exact strategy that got us all kinds of nice things... like... we did get the Russians out of Afghanistan with help of our 'friends' there... too bad those same friends decided later it was a good idea to fly planes into buildings..
Sorry to pull in that bit of not so nice world history, but this way of reasoning is so amazingly short sighted and stupid, how much more proof of that do you need really??
Before you ever consider anyone a friend, look first what motive they have for being friendly to you right now..
You can have a temporary alliance with what is normally your enemy in order to fight a bigger, common enemy... but never ever regard such an alliance as 'friends', it is a big and often repeated historical mistake that time and again proves itself to be a really really serious mistake.
In other words... ICAN is on the same side as many of us are in this issue, well, good, but it won't change in any way what I think about them, the only way to change that is by actually addressing their internal problems.
> Google has, and continues to do so, proven that doing the right thing can bring commercial reward and brand loyalty.
You nor I know what Google is really upto. I'm not using their gmail service, and not using Orkut for a number of reasons, all of which come down to me not liking it when a company, regardless of which company, gets interested too much in my social activities and contacts.
Are they evil with it? I don't think so, but the issue is also that they don't have to be evil for it to go wrong anyway.
The simple problem is that in the end, they are bound to have too many conflicting activities, and will screw up without any intention of doing so.
Oh, and I do use their search and advertisement services, don't get me wrogn here, so far they have definitely shown to be a decent company, and its not like they don't deserve my business or such, but a s a matter of principe I do not want companies to try stick their noses into my private life too much, the risks of it going wrong are too big even when all involved do have the best intentions... What happens when the company gets bought out or merges with another one? or goes bankrupt? or what if there is some employee there who decides he wants to make a point??? Way too much can go wrong, and the more power you collect in one place, the bigger the chance that it will go wrong in a horrible way...
Last time I checked ebay.de was doing quite well.. Paypal just seems to have added local services there also..
So despite those laws, it seems that ebay isn't suffering that badly;P
On the other hand.. there is a bit of truth in the sentiment of your message from what I experience (spending about a quarter of my time in Germany, my girlfriend lives in Berlin).
There is quite a bit lacking with regards to freedom there, but it is very funny to hear someone proclaim the ultimate freedom of the USA where it often comes down to being free to choose between following the line of his oil majesty Bush or being a traitor. (and yeah, I know there are a lot of you Americans out there who are a lot more open minded then that, just pointing out there is soemthing wrong with freedom in most places.. or actually... different societies make slightly different compromises to freedom in order to make their society work at all)
> I often feel sorry for the Germans (I'm not Jewish, otherwise I wouldn't),
No need for that, feeling sorry won't help anybody. I also wonder what not being jewish has to do with this. I come from a country that was invaded by the nazis, my granddad has spent the last year of the war in a camp (and returned), my family lost basicly everythign when their house got bombed out.. what does it all matter now?
The people living there are for a large part not involved in any way with all that, nor am I and are most people who are alive now. Lets learn from what happened, but lets also try to put an end to it doing damage still.
> You buy something that costs $99.95, give the clerk a hundred dollars, and get back a 5 cent coin with polite 'Thank You, Have A Nice Day'. Try doing that anywhere else in the civilized world!
Uh?
Last time I was there it was a lot more like.. thats 99,95 + 9,95 sales tax, but if you would be so kind to return this form, you will get a $20 rebate..
Slashdot Mirror
> I'm dubious. I think that if anything, online play will eventually be slightly easier on the console, because it's a closed environment.
As long as that closed environment works with your ISP that is..
> I know Doom3 is comming out almost concurently on PC/Mac and Linux, but that's the exeptiond and FAR from the rule.
Sadly enough it is indeed the exception when looking at the gamign market..
That said, it is the rule and has been the rule for ID software for a long time. They also happen to have been kinda influential in the gaming market.. so I think it is a bit early to give up hope there really.
Modern 'digital' HDTV sets do definitely have a 3 frame lag. One of my close friends is involved in developing the hardware for such sets, and 3 frames is the absolute minimum you will get on a set that can do 480p or better.
Why?
Because of the moronic thing called telecine.
In order to get an anywhere near acceptable display of a ntsc tv broadcast of what was originally a 24fps movie on a non-interlaced screen, you do need to de-interlace the video, and a simple frame-merging will not do the trick. You will actually have to reverse the telecine process to ensure you are not going to create severe tearing of about half of the frames.
The telecine process generates 3 video frames out of 2 movie frames, and you will have to detect the start of each such sequence, what is more, you need to detect if you have to do this at all since a tv station (or videotape) is not going to tell you about it.
Having to detect this means holding up 3 frsames and looking for similarities between the seperate fields that make up those frames.
The simpel result is a 3 frame delay.
A good set will introduce an equivalent delay in audio so you will not get any sync problems, but it will be noticable when playign games in some specific cases still.
U just wonder... do you have any idea how anti aliassign works?
THere are a few rules of thumb here...
You can NEVER make a screen show more detail then its resolution allows.
Whenever you use anti aliassing, you in effect lose a little bit of detail in order to get a better picture. This picture is less sharp but more plwasing to the eye because you will not notice some artifacts that normally occur with the too sharp pictures generated by a computer system.
> TV's also have this thing called a "couch" going for them. I love my couch, it's much better than my computer chair.
I suggest gettign a cough or much better chair at your computer..
> I also prefer a game controller to the repetitive stress injuries from my mouse and keyboard. Not every game is an FPS you know.
This may be news.. but there have been usb gamepads for quite some time now.. it seems that with some efford you can even get the conrtollers of some consoles to work with your pc..
I think the Xbox is showing that with anti-aliasing resolution is moot, especially with HDTV sets.
Anti aliassing is a trick, and while it makes diagonal lines and such look better, it actually makes you lose detail.
I mostly play FPS games myself, and in quite a few, resolution matters a lot, simply because it allows you to see enough detail even when someone is far away. Why? because something that is 6 pixels on a 800x600 screen will be 24 pixels in 1600x1200. 6 wont make for being able to see if its friend or foe, 24 has a much better chance.
I was responding to your comemnt about the possibility to be thrown from your land if you don't own the mineral rights. I have no idea how that is in the USA, but I was pointing out that in such a case, that similar 'rules' apply as when they want to use it for for example building a road, at least overhere (the Netherlands). I bet that is because in our case, the mineral rights are always with the government to begin with ;P
I should not try posting when not awake..
> many republicans seem to agree now that if they had known now what they knew when deciding on Iraq,
Shoudl have read.. many republicans agree now that if they knew what they know now about Iraq...
> My main beef with him is enviromental policy, foreign is fine. I wish there was a president who had his tough foreign-policy but more socially-liberal. But this doesn't seem to be an option.
And of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but tell me, what exactly gives the USA the right to force theirs on other countries? because that is exactly what the current foreign policy comes down to. You'd agree with other countries doing the same to the USA? (provided they'd have the power to do so)
A policy that ispurely based on who is the strongest is simply bound to discard any forms of justice. If you don't believe me on that one, I suggest you go make a nice study of why any system of justice tries (not always succesfully so) to remove such differences between parties and look at the facts and arguments instead.
With regards to that, the Bush administration has brought up many arguments, but a large part of those arguments have been shown to be at the very least rather shaky. For as far as facts go, even many republicans seem to agree now that if they had known now what they knew when deciding on Iraq, they would not have given the government a free hand in that, so I think we can very easily say that the facts were not there, at least not in the form in which they were suggested to be there.
For now, what your president is acomplashing with his foreign policy is rapidly losing any allies and friends that the USA used to have around the world. If you believe that is a good policy, be my guest.
> When he has a has an Approval Rating http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm of 45% I don't think you can say that Bush is the most hated Administration you've seen.
Last time I looked them up in a dictionare, 'to disapprove and to hate did not have the same meaning.
This also means that the approval ratings say absolutely nothing whatsoever about this.
In the last 6 months I have heard a simple question from quite a few republicans and democrats alike.. why is it that we hate eachother over who we might elect as the next president?
Compaigns in the USA have always been a bit 'rough', but I think this is still the first one where we have seen both major parties (by means of a proxy at times) comparing eachother with nazis, including using pictures to suggest this.
I do not know if he started it, but president Bush did contribute a lot to that atmosphere with his 'you are with us or against us' attitude, leaving no room whatsoever for things like discussion or disagreement. If you disagree, you are obviously against me, and I must want you dead..
There is a simple problem with this (and no, you are not the first one to come up with this idea really)
Lets try an example:
John owns this nice fatory that employs some 800 people. This facory has an approx value of $20000000
Now, when he dies in the current system, his property (most of which consists of the 20m dollar factory) goes to his son or daughter and stays together, and keeps benefitting those 800 people, who also have some level of assurance that things will continue as they did so far.
In your system, there are a few possibilities:
- company becomes public property (which in practise means government property in any society that ever tried such an idea)
- company is sold off, money is distributed. Sold off to whom? In such a system, who can have the money to buy it?
- factory is split up and small parts are sold off, 800 people without a job.
Somewhat off-topic maybe but..
> I'm against taxes of most every description, but I'm also deeply troubled by the current state of CR/Patent/TM abuse.
I just wonder.. how do you suggest public services and such are payed for then?
Tax is not an instrument for putting pressure on society, and using it that way is imho one of the thigns whihc makes most tax systems work badly.
It is a way to provide the government with enough funding to do their job, any other use will distract from doing this oen thign properly, and will result in more taxes for society.
Speaking from a country where miniral rights do not go with the land..
> Hint to those of you living somewhere that mineral rights do not normally go with property: your property value had better go down by more than the value of those rights. Down more because someone has the rights to kick you off "your" land and you need compensation for that potential loss.
Not exactly.
The only one who could try that is the government, and they will have to pay me quite a bit of compensation for that.
This is in fact no different from when the government needs a strip of your land because it is the only way for them to build a road that is needed. They will fidn a way to get the land back from you.
The answer to your question lies in another question.
> If I, or an heir, proceed to lend it to someone to listen to, is it still not mine? Does that person, just because it's 50 years after recording, or 100 years after my death, have an automatic (moral) right to copy it?
Can you explain why they would not have a right to do so, regardless of how long passed after recording?
The only reason why they cannot is because society has granted you a limited protection on work you created. This protection is limited in time, and gives you your exclusive rights with regards to your creative work. When the protection expires, your rights expires.
It might be a good thing to realize that there are parts of the world (large parts of eastern Asia for example) that untill recently had no such thign as copyright, and rather worked with the concept that any ideas made public were exactly that, public (ie, property of the public if yoy want to talk about property). This just points out that copyright is definitely not some form of natural property.
If you would never ever let anyone listen to that recording then you'd keep it secret, and indeed it won't enter the public domain as long as it is kept secret.
That is similar to how a trade secret lasts for as logn as it lasts while a patent has a limited term.
Public domain is a rather well defined concept, and I don't see why it needs any change.
Its a really simple deal:
- You create somethign and make it available to the public in one form or another
- In exchange, you get an exclusive right on distribution for a limited time.
You do some work, you get some reward. Your work is not infinite in nature, neither is the reward.
After that, the protection goes, and everyone can do with it what they want.
> It's you are in the presence of Americans, bow down and speak our language.
;P
You happen to be aware that that language is called English and that it is in fact named after another country? Just thought i should point it out
> You silly American bitch who can even properly write correctly!
You silly Portuguese nobrains who can't user grammer properly.
Hoepel nou toch op met je taal onzin!
> And you're assuming that everyone who uses the net is using it for international communications.
When you are usign an international site like for example Orkut, or to quite some extent, Slashdot, yes definitely.
> Many people could care less about people in other countries, and use the net for a plethora of non-international reasons.
Why should i use English in an interntational forum or social networking site when talking to a fellow DUtchie?
When the conversation is private, there is no problem in that. When it is on a public forum, we should be using English, or we shoudl setup our own forum.
Why? because it is the only way in which things will ever work at all.
Well.. they kinda started by building almost a decade of experience designing and operating the equipment.
And add a webserver with ssl and a webmail program (openwebmail, sqwebmail or such) and you can have your webmail as well.
Webmail has quite some advantages, tho you must be able to trust the machine you are browsing from (but hey, thats still true when using a character based method, if your client is compromised, you are in trouble)
At any rate, I don't care that much about individual mail being read.
What I care about in case of Google would be that personal mails generate hits on their advertisements. This together with something like Orkut with its mapping of social networks gives too much information about me to a company to my taste. That they can obtain that information in either illegal ways, or by putting in a lot of efford, well, that is another case, that costs them a lot more then a few gig diskspace.
> Something to think about atleast...
Definitely, and I don't have a problem with gmail itself, it is more like I am not going to use google for everything that relates to my onlien activities.
Do I use a local ISP for most of them? yeah, but in that case I also have a local court to goto when it goes terribly wrong.
Besides.. I run my own servers for a reason, no ISP except for the sending one will be storing mail for me, it will be transfered through their network tho, but to that other laws apply.
> Hmmm, well, if the company gets bought or divvied up then you are out of luck if you accepted one of those horrible "we can change the deal at any time in any way for any reason or none whatsoever" clauses. I'd like to see such overbroad provisions declared unenforceable.
I agree, that would be a nice thing.
However, what I was talking about isn't so much about what is in the terms and conditions but about the intentions of those in charge of the company.
I definitely agree with your impression regardign trusting Google over many other companies involved in the same business.. yet them being both into social networking, searches and advertising, oh, and add webmail tot hat now, makes for a too powerfull combi to my taste, hence I'll be selective with using them... Searches and adsense are pretty cool tho and can be shown to work in the advantage of everyone :)
> The enemy of my enemy is my friend - at least temporarily - and at least about this issue.
Ah yes... that is the exact strategy that got us all kinds of nice things... like... we did get the Russians out of Afghanistan with help of our 'friends' there... too bad those same friends decided later it was a good idea to fly planes into buildings..
Sorry to pull in that bit of not so nice world history, but this way of reasoning is so amazingly short sighted and stupid, how much more proof of that do you need really??
Before you ever consider anyone a friend, look first what motive they have for being friendly to you right now..
You can have a temporary alliance with what is normally your enemy in order to fight a bigger, common enemy... but never ever regard such an alliance as 'friends', it is a big and often repeated historical mistake that time and again proves itself to be a really really serious mistake.
In other words... ICAN is on the same side as many of us are in this issue, well, good, but it won't change in any way what I think about them, the only way to change that is by actually addressing their internal problems.
> Google has, and continues to do so, proven that doing the right thing can bring commercial reward and brand loyalty.
You nor I know what Google is really upto.
I'm not using their gmail service, and not using Orkut for a number of reasons, all of which come down to me not liking it when a company, regardless of which company, gets interested too much in my social activities and contacts.
Are they evil with it? I don't think so, but the issue is also that they don't have to be evil for it to go wrong anyway.
The simple problem is that in the end, they are bound to have too many conflicting activities, and will screw up without any intention of doing so.
Oh, and I do use their search and advertisement services, don't get me wrogn here, so far they have definitely shown to be a decent company, and its not like they don't deserve my business or such, but a s a matter of principe I do not want companies to try stick their noses into my private life too much, the risks of it going wrong are too big even when all involved do have the best intentions... What happens when the company gets bought out or merges with another one? or goes bankrupt? or what if there is some employee there who decides he wants to make a point???
Way too much can go wrong, and the more power you collect in one place, the bigger the chance that it will go wrong in a horrible way...
Fine, but without my data.
Last time I checked ebay.de was doing quite well.. Paypal just seems to have added local services there also..
;P
So despite those laws, it seems that ebay isn't suffering that badly
On the other hand.. there is a bit of truth in the sentiment of your message from what I experience (spending about a quarter of my time in Germany, my girlfriend lives in Berlin).
There is quite a bit lacking with regards to freedom there, but it is very funny to hear someone proclaim the ultimate freedom of the USA where it often comes down to being free to choose between following the line of his oil majesty Bush or being a traitor. (and yeah, I know there are a lot of you Americans out there who are a lot more open minded then that, just pointing out there is soemthing wrong with freedom in most places.. or actually... different societies make slightly different compromises to freedom in order to make their society work at all)
> I often feel sorry for the Germans (I'm not Jewish, otherwise I wouldn't),
No need for that, feeling sorry won't help anybody. I also wonder what not being jewish has to do with this. I come from a country that was invaded by the nazis, my granddad has spent the last year of the war in a camp (and returned), my family lost basicly everythign when their house got bombed out.. what does it all matter now?
The people living there are for a large part not involved in any way with all that, nor am I and are most people who are alive now. Lets learn from what happened, but lets also try to put an end to it doing damage still.
> You buy something that costs $99.95, give the clerk a hundred dollars, and get back a 5 cent coin with polite 'Thank You, Have A Nice Day'. Try doing that anywhere else in the civilized world!
Uh?
Last time I was there it was a lot more like.. thats 99,95 + 9,95 sales tax, but if you would be so kind to return this form, you will get a $20 rebate..