You CAN tell someone you want to hire them to kill someone else, and it is totally legal.
Examples:
1. You are filming a movie. An actor in the movie tells another actor that they are going to pay someone to commit a murder. 2. You are saying it in a humorous or satirical way. 3. You are repeating something that someone else said.
Hiring someone to kill someone else does not become a crime unless money changes hands, a person gets together the guns and weapons to commit the murder, or real physical actions are set in motion to make the killing inevitable.
It is not the speech that is the crime, but rather it is the exchange of money or the actualy physical preperation or physical murder that would get you punished.
I personaly have engaged in contract killing transactions, in video games, many times when playing GTA!:) But it wasn't illegal, because the speech isn't illegal, it is the whole killing people part that is illegal.
No one is trying to ban the film in the United States. The film will be show all over the United States. It will be sold on DVD in the United States. Certain theater chains have decided it is inappropriate, and will not show the movie. Others will show the movie, and most likely make a nice profit doing so.
If you cannot understand the difference between a private theater deciding not to show a movie, and the government throwing people in prison for what they say, then it is no suprise that the UK is going for this kind of though-crime legislation.
The command economy is a nessicary ingredient of totalitarianism. Most people who claim to be "Socalist" nowadays want a command economy (one where the economy, or at least the most "vital" resources and functions of the economy, are controlled by the state). While Socialism isn't nessicarily Totalitarianism, the sort of total government economic controls and central planning that Socialists almost universaly support are prerequisites of Totalitarianism. I mean, very few people who call themselves Socialists are talking about living in Anarchistic communes... Usually they want the means of production to be controlled by the state (TOTAL state control of the economy - i.e. economic TOTALitarianism).
Also, the worst governments that history has known have called themselves "Socialist". Not only that, at the time those states were commiting grave crimes, most people calling themselves "Socialist" supported them. At one time, nearly everyone calling themselves a Marxist or Communist supported the Soviet Union. You could be kicked out the of Communist party in any Western nation for critisizing Stalin, until long after his death. George Orwell was lambasted by Marxists, Communists, and Socialists, for his critism of Stalinism in Animal Farm and 1984. It is fashionable for Marxists, Communists, and Socialists to condemn Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, NOWADAYS... but the overwelming majority of Socialists, Communists, Marxists, etc, did not condemn them contemporary to their crimes.
Now, I am not saying ideas should not be judged on their own merits. But don't be so utterly stupid as to deny there are very good, very sensible reasons to be highly highly sceptical of what people call "Socialism". Given the history of regimes claiming to be Socialist commiting aweful attrocities... Given the history of people claiming to be Socialist ignoring the attrocities... and given the almost total power that people claiming to be Socialist want to give the government... You should totally understand, and be sympathetic with those who are highly highly sceptical of anyone claiming to be "Socialist", and even those who are outright hostile towards socialism.
It is not uncommon to see quite nasty things written about the president being carried around right outside the White House, including things that could quite easily be interpreted as violent (I have never seen a sign that says "Fire the rocket launcher in 5 minutes", but you can see all sorts of stuff just short of that). In the press, I can remember one cartoonist drew a picture of Bush in a snipers crosshairs, with the caption "Regime Change". The South Park guys did an episode where G. W. Bush shits on an American flag, Jesus shits on an American flag, Bush and Jesus cover each other in shit, and then have sex rolling around having sex with each other American flag.
I think you would be pretty damn suprised at what you can get away with, speech wise, in the United States.
The problem is that you are deciding that Huckberry Finn is not hate speech, and so therefore you are assuming that the people responsible for enforcing the laws, and the people who are responsible for making judgement, will see things the way you do.
First of all, politicians tend to be populist. If the vast majority of people are against a book (say there was a book about a fictional assasination of the Pope that was published in Catholic Ireland), and a politician decides they want to ban the book because of the popular outrage against it, delcaring it "hate speech" or an "incitment to violence" is a good way to legitimize what is really outright policical censorship.
Or lets say I dislike your political views. Lets say you are critical of the U.S. foriegn policy. I take a phrase or statement you might have made out of context, and claim that you are making hate speech against Americans. Even if you are eventually found not guilty, or the police decide not to pursue legal action, the investigation can be used to harrass or intimidate you. Maybe you are a recreational drug user, and when the police search your house for hate material they might find your drug stash. Or maybe you have critized the police in the past, and I know they are going to be harsh about interrigating you or trashing your house looking for evidence. The fact is, that "hate speech" is a concept so subjective that virtually anybody can make a claim against anyone that they want to harrase, and the police are obligated to investigate all accusations of hate crime.
Or what about attempts to ban pornography by having it declared "hate speech", as it is demeaning to woman? Or attempts to ban religious groups from cetain debates, arguing that certain verses in the Bible or Koran condemn homosexuality and are therefore "hate speech"?
Specific to Huckleberry Finn, there have been public school districts that have banned the book from school libraries in the U.S. for being "hate speech". (There is no "hate speech" laws in the U.S. because of the first amendment, but I am sure if the U.S. had political censorship laws like the U.K. there would be many places in the U.S. where Huckleberry Finn would be declared "hate speech" and banned).
No, laws against hate speech increase and protect hate.
If hateful speech is allowed:
1. I can say things to counter hate speech. 2. I can know who is hateful, and so I can be prepared if I suspect they may cause trouble. 3. I can get an understanding of how wide spread a problem is. 4. Hate speech isn't the forbidden fruit. When alchohol was made illegal in the U.S. in the 1920s, alcohol consumption actually increased, because it became "cool" and "dangerous" to break the law against alcohol. 5. People who are innocent of hate speech, will not be harrased by being accused of hate speech. 6. It will be harder for the government to expand hate-speech censorship to other non-hate forms of speech.
Incest/rape is a boogy man. While it probably happens to a very small extent in all societies, it is against the social norm of virtually all societies and cultures for the last 500 years.
However, rape, incest, and sexual deviancy fears are very useful to disparage a religion, culture, or group. From the old Nazi propoganda posters of charactures of "hooked-nose" Jews stealing away virtuous German woman, to the stereotypes in deep south U.S. about black men without sexual control, or the alternate stereotype of the inbred redneck, to the Communist propoganda about "Homosexual Capitalism"... over an over again you see stereotypes or generalizations about sex being used to disparage or spread fear about a certain group.
There is absolutly no evidence that rape, molestation, or incest is any more common amoung Amish than any other group of people. However, Amish are a religious minority, and they largely exist outside the realm of government control, corporate consumerist advertising, and modern day "political correctness". As one of the last groups to resist becoming assimilated into the rest of society and to come under control of the power elite, there is an agenda to disparage them, to undercut peoples respect for their lifestyle, and for building popular support for the final destruction and assimilation of the Amish people. The people with that agenda, both in the government and the media have been spreading FUD about the Amish being a bunch of perverts, based on a handful of isolated cases that were not really any different than what happens every day to non-Amish people.
No, he was not "inciting murder". He didn't offer anyone money to commit murder. He did not try to organize an actual murder. He was simply spewing hatful, inflamitory speech. Inciting murder is often invoked to make censorship and thought crimes laws more acceptable, but his speech was no more an incitment to murder than gangsta rap.
Why don't you just admit that you do not support freedom of speech? If you said "Freedom of speech is too dangerous - people may say things so horrible and terrible that free speech must be eliminated", then we could reasonably discuss the merits of your arguments. But you insist on saying "I support freedom of speech", and then your want political censorship on certain types of speech.
It was a great show... I own it on DVD... but to say it is "too sophisticated" for the TV watching audience is a bit much. Serenity had almost no allegory or subtext, the stories were dead simple, and it really wasn't sophisticated at all. It was extremly well done and compelling, probably because it was so simple.
Your average Nascar fan loves shows like Lost, Deadwood, the Sopranos, which are much more complicated than Serenity.
The reason why the show failed, was because when people hear "cowboys in space", they think "Damn, that must be aweful!". When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded aweful. It should have been aweful! Cowboys in space should totally suck. It just so happens that this time it didn't.
There's absolutely nothing xenophobic about one's economic survival
You are assuming that economic survival is zero sum... that when India gets wealthy, we get poor, and when India gets poor we get wealthy. This is a xenophic concept. There is no reason the interests of the U.S. and the interests of India can be mutual. No one is "stealing jobs", as jobs aren't property or a scarce resource, they are a consentual relationship between employer and employee. Claiming India is going to steal jobs and is bad for America is like claiming that lesbians are going to steal women away from heterosexual men and therefore lesbians are bad for men - you can't steal a relationship with a person!
and take matters in their own hands the way previous Americans did.
The United States has historicly had a liberal trade policy. The major exception to this was shortly after the crash of '29, when the U.S. and other countries rushed into protectionism... and it cause the Great Depression. Previous generations of Americans took matters into their own hands by doing better work, investing in new technology, and out producing the competition regardless of labor cost... not by protectionism.
The U.S. is the richest and most powerful country in the world. If a U.S. worker is completly interchangable with a third world worker, then we are a third world country living off the previous generations accumulated capital, and no amount of trade restrictions are going to help us. In a country as rich as the United States, Americans should have such a high education level, work ethic... our infrastructure and services offered should be so overwelmingly superior, that an American worker should not be replacable at any price. If an American worker only has the same skills and habits of a person in a third world country, if we don't have better telecommunications, transportation, or lower corruption than a third world country... if the U.S. offers no benifit for keeping a factory in the U.S. other than threatening people - then sorry, the U.S. has non-trade problems that won't disapear just because you ban Indian products or services.
Previous generations of Americans competed with foriegn labor in the past by having such high technology, high education, good infrastructure, good work ethic, and therefore high productivity that doing buisness in the U.S. was well worth paying more for labor. Jobs are moving from the United States to India, because America is now so comparible in many types of technology, education, and especially work ethic, to India and the Third World, that why pay an American 100 times more for third world level labor?
And there's nothing special about India - they have to survive off the jobs offshored to them because they're not talented enough to create their own industries.....talk sense, sonny....
Um, lets not forget about 400 years of British Imperial control, plundered natural resources, and completly failed British economic central planning and paternalistic social planning, that left India in dire poverty when they finally got independence in 1947.
I agree with you that a photo of a painting or statue should not infringe on copyright... but unfortunatly it does. Try taking a picture at the Louvre... or manufacturing a product with a photo of the Lone Cypress (which is a tree, it isn't even a sculpture) on it... and see how far it gets you!
No, Europeans don't have any such right to protect their information from their own governments. In Norway, you cannot demand that your government erases the information it keeps on you. European countries keep vast stores of private information on all its citizens. There is no way you can have a nationalized health care and education system, and government economic central planning, and a whole bunch of social controls and legislation, without the government collecting vast amounts of private data on its citizens.
You don't fear the fact that your government holds vast information about you, because you have been conditioned to fear corporations and to trust the government implicitly. But both are just as likely to intentionally abuse your privacy, or to accidentally compromise it. (and that doesn't even take in consideration that foriegn spy agencies can easily take whatever information your government has at its leisure, and then share it with politically connected corporations in its home country. If the CIA and NSA could steal state military secrets from a paranoid totalitarian Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, BEFORE information was digital and easily copied.. they can most certainly take whatever they want from Norway in the digital age. So can the spy agencies of most countries.)
The "privacy protection" Europe has is as much useless rhetoric designed to make citizens feel that the government is "doing something about the problem", as the terrorism "protection" in the U.S. that you are so against. If governments were serious about protecting the privacy of it's own citizens, not only would it stop creating national databases that are most certainly compromised by foriegn governments and corporations... but it would also abolish things like social insurance numbers that provide a single, easy way to track or steal identities.
While I agree that the U.S. should drop all the security requirements it has on planes traveling to the U.S. (it doesn't improve security, and frustrates visiters to the U.S.), I think you must not be very well traveled if you think that U.S. security restrictions are very difficult to deal with, or U.S. security is bad. No-one is going to boycott the U.S. when E.U. citizens are treated far worse in other places. You are simply used to getting your news from U.S.-centric news sources (like Slashdot), and are probably a bit U.S.-obsessed, so you are more aware of U.S. security issues than say those of Burma, or Belarus, or some other non-EU country.
You are also missing the point that if European airlines refuse to fly to the United States, that U.S. airlines still can. It would be a boon to the U.S. airline industry.
While privacy is certainly a good thing, most likely the CIA and the NSA (and the spy agencies of other governments) already have a whole dossier of information on you, and no doubt that information ends up in the hands of corporations.
Your own government collects tax information, occupational information, health care information, education information. This information is not kept secure the same way defense and security information is kept secure by your government, because it would be cost ineffective to do so and at the same time make the info available to provide services and charge taxes. No doubt, any government with a basic spy apperatus infiltrates and collects the information your government keeps on you.
This agreement simply gives the TSA and the people who are responsible for U.S. airline security the information... if you don't want the TSA to have your information, then it might be a concern. But if you are worried about corporations being able to get your personal information, well your own government is already doing the job of collecting your personal information to give to corporations.
If you truly were worried about privacy, you would not trust your own government to keep vast stores of information about you (which will eventually end up in the hands of politically connected corporations via government spy agencies). Flying to the U.S. is really the least of your concerns.
I don't know how easy it is to bribe a police officer to get away with murder in any country, as I don't have much practicle experience with that kind of thing.:) And I suspect that either in the West, or India, it is too rare to make any sort of absolute judgements. But bribing a police officer to get away with murder (or to commit murder on your behalf), is not unheard of in the developed world either.
Are you saying that a security expert in the UK couldn't provide security in India, because he can't speak Hindi? What does language ability have to do with Security skills?
Come on, we are talking about the UK... Where you can beat and rob people in the streets, invade their homes, or do any criminal act you want, and the victim is more likely to be prosecuted than the criminal (See the recent store of a grandmother who was robbed and beaten by thugs, who broke her arm... the police decided to only press charges against the grandmother, not the thugs, because she pushed one of the thugs when they were robbing and assaulting her.)
Most likely if someone was blatently caught in the act stealing data in the UK, they would face no jail time whatsoever. Where as, on the other hand, I would assume that India would probably have more severe punishment than the UK.
Of course, there isn't any reason to believe that private data couldn't be illegally sold in the UK... or in the U.S., or France, or Canada, or Germany, or Japan, or whereever. In fact, data theft has most certainly happened in all those countries!
But you are going to have a salvo of posts demonizing India as a place to do buisness. People with either a xenophobic agenda, or a protectionist agenda will jump on this with the whole "India is evil! Don't outsource to India" paranoia and hysteria, when in fact there is no reason to believe your data is more secure anywhere else.
I couldn't find statistics on employee occupation distribution, but since DOI manage land, dams, and other natural resources, I would say that the vast majority of those 70,000 are probably field workers or support staff, where as most of the people goofing off are of the much smaller administrative staff working behind a desk in DC.
Slashdot is taking payments to hype products and push opinion on the site. It is called guerilla advertising. Take what stories slashdot selects to post with a grain of salt.
Sony has a huge mindshare... there are a whole generation of kids who use the word "Playstation" interchangably with "Game Console". There is a huge Sony fanboy presence on the internet. Sony is in decent shape.
They might lose a lot of ground to the 360, but they are not going to be wiped out of the market. The console race will just be more of a split, instead of Sony dominating everything like the last generation.
By online, he means the internet. By downloadable, he means digital PVRs and video-on-demand and the like. On my cable box, I can order movies, download them, watch them for 24 hours, then they are deleted.
While I would not consider downloading a movie on the internet right now (too much hassle, too low quality), I have no problem downloading movies on my cable box as the system is very well developed, efficent, and goes straight to my television.
The Fairness Doctrine was some pretty totalitarian stuff. It basicly gave the government 100% control over all media, with the justification that by controlling what could be said and what couldn't, it would make things "fair". ("Fair", of course, as determined by those currently in power). You realize that if the fairness doctrine was in place, a government officer appointed by Bush could demand that the Daily Show air segments that the Bush administration deemed would "make it fair", and the Bush administration could demand segments of the Daily Show that was "unfair" be cut? People should know better than to believe that you can make a law with a totally vauge and subjective demand ("Make things fair and balanced"), and that is just gonna work out as intended.
Second, you are mischaracterizing the media if you think it is "corporate propoganda"... Aside from the rediculous idea that there would be a single "corporate agenda" (as corporations are in competition, and their interests are in direct conflict with other corporations), if you actually paid attention you would see that places like CNN and Fox are Yellow Journalism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism ). Bill O'Reilly is just as likely to go off on "corporate criminals" like Martha Stewart, or to demand that the government set oil prices or nationalize the oil industry or some other socialist scheme, or to support farm subsidies, as they are to support "conservative" issues. The stance that the mainstream media takes is usually what they think the public most wants to hear. So left wing people thing the media is right wing biased, and right wing people think the media is left wing bias... where really the media is biased to confirm the knee-jerk beliefs of middle America - which tends to be a schitzophrenic reactionary fear of "big buisness" and personal freedom, and xenophobic fear of criminals and foriegners, along with an unhealthy dose of nationalism.
It's not a partisian issue. It's a freedom issue.
Yeah, because nothing says freedom like having the government tell you what to say and what not to say.
But what happens when something goes wrong, and a paid user gets locked out of their operating system? What happens when I sneak a peak at your Microsoft licence number while you are working on your PC at the airport, and I post it on a website, and then Microsoft restricts your licence?
I have no problem with Microsoft restricting the OS for non-users, but there is inevitably going to be colateral damage. Many paying customers will get locked out of the OS. And people who absolutly depend on their computers, are not going to be able to use a Microsoft OS... the risk of having your OS locked is just too great.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, your analogy fails.
:) But it wasn't illegal, because the speech isn't illegal, it is the whole killing people part that is illegal.
You CAN tell someone you want to hire them to kill someone else, and it is totally legal.
Examples:
1. You are filming a movie. An actor in the movie tells another actor that they are going to pay someone to commit a murder.
2. You are saying it in a humorous or satirical way.
3. You are repeating something that someone else said.
Hiring someone to kill someone else does not become a crime unless money changes hands, a person gets together the guns and weapons to commit the murder, or real physical actions are set in motion to make the killing inevitable.
It is not the speech that is the crime, but rather it is the exchange of money or the actualy physical preperation or physical murder that would get you punished.
I personaly have engaged in contract killing transactions, in video games, many times when playing GTA!
You have refuted your own arguement.
No one is trying to ban the film in the United States. The film will be show all over the United States. It will be sold on DVD in the United States. Certain theater chains have decided it is inappropriate, and will not show the movie. Others will show the movie, and most likely make a nice profit doing so.
If you cannot understand the difference between a private theater deciding not to show a movie, and the government throwing people in prison for what they say, then it is no suprise that the UK is going for this kind of though-crime legislation.
The command economy is a nessicary ingredient of totalitarianism. Most people who claim to be "Socalist" nowadays want a command economy (one where the economy, or at least the most "vital" resources and functions of the economy, are controlled by the state). While Socialism isn't nessicarily Totalitarianism, the sort of total government economic controls and central planning that Socialists almost universaly support are prerequisites of Totalitarianism. I mean, very few people who call themselves Socialists are talking about living in Anarchistic communes... Usually they want the means of production to be controlled by the state (TOTAL state control of the economy - i.e. economic TOTALitarianism).
Also, the worst governments that history has known have called themselves "Socialist". Not only that, at the time those states were commiting grave crimes, most people calling themselves "Socialist" supported them. At one time, nearly everyone calling themselves a Marxist or Communist supported the Soviet Union. You could be kicked out the of Communist party in any Western nation for critisizing Stalin, until long after his death. George Orwell was lambasted by Marxists, Communists, and Socialists, for his critism of Stalinism in Animal Farm and 1984. It is fashionable for Marxists, Communists, and Socialists to condemn Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, NOWADAYS... but the overwelming majority of Socialists, Communists, Marxists, etc, did not condemn them contemporary to their crimes.
Now, I am not saying ideas should not be judged on their own merits. But don't be so utterly stupid as to deny there are very good, very sensible reasons to be highly highly sceptical of what people call "Socialism". Given the history of regimes claiming to be Socialist commiting aweful attrocities... Given the history of people claiming to be Socialist ignoring the attrocities... and given the almost total power that people claiming to be Socialist want to give the government... You should totally understand, and be sympathetic with those who are highly highly sceptical of anyone claiming to be "Socialist", and even those who are outright hostile towards socialism.
It is not uncommon to see quite nasty things written about the president being carried around right outside the White House, including things that could quite easily be interpreted as violent (I have never seen a sign that says "Fire the rocket launcher in 5 minutes", but you can see all sorts of stuff just short of that). In the press, I can remember one cartoonist drew a picture of Bush in a snipers crosshairs, with the caption "Regime Change". The South Park guys did an episode where G. W. Bush shits on an American flag, Jesus shits on an American flag, Bush and Jesus cover each other in shit, and then have sex rolling around having sex with each other American flag.
I think you would be pretty damn suprised at what you can get away with, speech wise, in the United States.
The problem is that you are deciding that Huckberry Finn is not hate speech, and so therefore you are assuming that the people responsible for enforcing the laws, and the people who are responsible for making judgement, will see things the way you do.
First of all, politicians tend to be populist. If the vast majority of people are against a book (say there was a book about a fictional assasination of the Pope that was published in Catholic Ireland), and a politician decides they want to ban the book because of the popular outrage against it, delcaring it "hate speech" or an "incitment to violence" is a good way to legitimize what is really outright policical censorship.
Or lets say I dislike your political views. Lets say you are critical of the U.S. foriegn policy. I take a phrase or statement you might have made out of context, and claim that you are making hate speech against Americans. Even if you are eventually found not guilty, or the police decide not to pursue legal action, the investigation can be used to harrass or intimidate you. Maybe you are a recreational drug user, and when the police search your house for hate material they might find your drug stash. Or maybe you have critized the police in the past, and I know they are going to be harsh about interrigating you or trashing your house looking for evidence. The fact is, that "hate speech" is a concept so subjective that virtually anybody can make a claim against anyone that they want to harrase, and the police are obligated to investigate all accusations of hate crime.
Or what about attempts to ban pornography by having it declared "hate speech", as it is demeaning to woman? Or attempts to ban religious groups from cetain debates, arguing that certain verses in the Bible or Koran condemn homosexuality and are therefore "hate speech"?
Specific to Huckleberry Finn, there have been public school districts that have banned the book from school libraries in the U.S. for being "hate speech". (There is no "hate speech" laws in the U.S. because of the first amendment, but I am sure if the U.S. had political censorship laws like the U.K. there would be many places in the U.S. where Huckleberry Finn would be declared "hate speech" and banned).
No, laws against hate speech increase and protect hate.
If hateful speech is allowed:
1. I can say things to counter hate speech.
2. I can know who is hateful, and so I can be prepared if I suspect they may cause trouble.
3. I can get an understanding of how wide spread a problem is.
4. Hate speech isn't the forbidden fruit. When alchohol was made illegal in the U.S. in the 1920s, alcohol consumption actually increased, because it became "cool" and "dangerous" to break the law against alcohol.
5. People who are innocent of hate speech, will not be harrased by being accused of hate speech.
6. It will be harder for the government to expand hate-speech censorship to other non-hate forms of speech.
Incest/rape is a boogy man. While it probably happens to a very small extent in all societies, it is against the social norm of virtually all societies and cultures for the last 500 years.
However, rape, incest, and sexual deviancy fears are very useful to disparage a religion, culture, or group. From the old Nazi propoganda posters of charactures of "hooked-nose" Jews stealing away virtuous German woman, to the stereotypes in deep south U.S. about black men without sexual control, or the alternate stereotype of the inbred redneck, to the Communist propoganda about "Homosexual Capitalism"... over an over again you see stereotypes or generalizations about sex being used to disparage or spread fear about a certain group.
There is absolutly no evidence that rape, molestation, or incest is any more common amoung Amish than any other group of people. However, Amish are a religious minority, and they largely exist outside the realm of government control, corporate consumerist advertising, and modern day "political correctness". As one of the last groups to resist becoming assimilated into the rest of society and to come under control of the power elite, there is an agenda to disparage them, to undercut peoples respect for their lifestyle, and for building popular support for the final destruction and assimilation of the Amish people. The people with that agenda, both in the government and the media have been spreading FUD about the Amish being a bunch of perverts, based on a handful of isolated cases that were not really any different than what happens every day to non-Amish people.
No, he was not "inciting murder". He didn't offer anyone money to commit murder. He did not try to organize an actual murder. He was simply spewing hatful, inflamitory speech. Inciting murder is often invoked to make censorship and thought crimes laws more acceptable, but his speech was no more an incitment to murder than gangsta rap.
Why don't you just admit that you do not support freedom of speech? If you said "Freedom of speech is too dangerous - people may say things so horrible and terrible that free speech must be eliminated", then we could reasonably discuss the merits of your arguments. But you insist on saying "I support freedom of speech", and then your want political censorship on certain types of speech.
It was a great show... I own it on DVD... but to say it is "too sophisticated" for the TV watching audience is a bit much. Serenity had almost no allegory or subtext, the stories were dead simple, and it really wasn't sophisticated at all. It was extremly well done and compelling, probably because it was so simple.
Your average Nascar fan loves shows like Lost, Deadwood, the Sopranos, which are much more complicated than Serenity.
The reason why the show failed, was because when people hear "cowboys in space", they think "Damn, that must be aweful!". When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded aweful. It should have been aweful! Cowboys in space should totally suck. It just so happens that this time it didn't.
There's absolutely nothing xenophobic about one's economic survival
You are assuming that economic survival is zero sum... that when India gets wealthy, we get poor, and when India gets poor we get wealthy. This is a xenophic concept. There is no reason the interests of the U.S. and the interests of India can be mutual. No one is "stealing jobs", as jobs aren't property or a scarce resource, they are a consentual relationship between employer and employee. Claiming India is going to steal jobs and is bad for America is like claiming that lesbians are going to steal women away from heterosexual men and therefore lesbians are bad for men - you can't steal a relationship with a person!
and take matters in their own hands the way previous Americans did.
The United States has historicly had a liberal trade policy. The major exception to this was shortly after the crash of '29, when the U.S. and other countries rushed into protectionism... and it cause the Great Depression. Previous generations of Americans took matters into their own hands by doing better work, investing in new technology, and out producing the competition regardless of labor cost... not by protectionism.
The U.S. is the richest and most powerful country in the world. If a U.S. worker is completly interchangable with a third world worker, then we are a third world country living off the previous generations accumulated capital, and no amount of trade restrictions are going to help us. In a country as rich as the United States, Americans should have such a high education level, work ethic... our infrastructure and services offered should be so overwelmingly superior, that an American worker should not be replacable at any price. If an American worker only has the same skills and habits of a person in a third world country, if we don't have better telecommunications, transportation, or lower corruption than a third world country... if the U.S. offers no benifit for keeping a factory in the U.S. other than threatening people - then sorry, the U.S. has non-trade problems that won't disapear just because you ban Indian products or services.
Previous generations of Americans competed with foriegn labor in the past by having such high technology, high education, good infrastructure, good work ethic, and therefore high productivity that doing buisness in the U.S. was well worth paying more for labor. Jobs are moving from the United States to India, because America is now so comparible in many types of technology, education, and especially work ethic, to India and the Third World, that why pay an American 100 times more for third world level labor?
And there's nothing special about India - they have to survive off the jobs offshored to them because they're not talented enough to create their own industries.....talk sense, sonny....
Um, lets not forget about 400 years of British Imperial control, plundered natural resources, and completly failed British economic central planning and paternalistic social planning, that left India in dire poverty when they finally got independence in 1947.
I agree with you that a photo of a painting or statue should not infringe on copyright... but unfortunatly it does. Try taking a picture at the Louvre... or manufacturing a product with a photo of the Lone Cypress (which is a tree, it isn't even a sculpture) on it... and see how far it gets you!
No, Europeans don't have any such right to protect their information from their own governments. In Norway, you cannot demand that your government erases the information it keeps on you. European countries keep vast stores of private information on all its citizens. There is no way you can have a nationalized health care and education system, and government economic central planning, and a whole bunch of social controls and legislation, without the government collecting vast amounts of private data on its citizens.
You don't fear the fact that your government holds vast information about you, because you have been conditioned to fear corporations and to trust the government implicitly. But both are just as likely to intentionally abuse your privacy, or to accidentally compromise it. (and that doesn't even take in consideration that foriegn spy agencies can easily take whatever information your government has at its leisure, and then share it with politically connected corporations in its home country. If the CIA and NSA could steal state military secrets from a paranoid totalitarian Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, BEFORE information was digital and easily copied.. they can most certainly take whatever they want from Norway in the digital age. So can the spy agencies of most countries.)
The "privacy protection" Europe has is as much useless rhetoric designed to make citizens feel that the government is "doing something about the problem", as the terrorism "protection" in the U.S. that you are so against. If governments were serious about protecting the privacy of it's own citizens, not only would it stop creating national databases that are most certainly compromised by foriegn governments and corporations... but it would also abolish things like social insurance numbers that provide a single, easy way to track or steal identities.
While I agree that the U.S. should drop all the security requirements it has on planes traveling to the U.S. (it doesn't improve security, and frustrates visiters to the U.S.), I think you must not be very well traveled if you think that U.S. security restrictions are very difficult to deal with, or U.S. security is bad. No-one is going to boycott the U.S. when E.U. citizens are treated far worse in other places. You are simply used to getting your news from U.S.-centric news sources (like Slashdot), and are probably a bit U.S.-obsessed, so you are more aware of U.S. security issues than say those of Burma, or Belarus, or some other non-EU country.
You are also missing the point that if European airlines refuse to fly to the United States, that U.S. airlines still can. It would be a boon to the U.S. airline industry.
While privacy is certainly a good thing, most likely the CIA and the NSA (and the spy agencies of other governments) already have a whole dossier of information on you, and no doubt that information ends up in the hands of corporations.
Your own government collects tax information, occupational information, health care information, education information. This information is not kept secure the same way defense and security information is kept secure by your government, because it would be cost ineffective to do so and at the same time make the info available to provide services and charge taxes. No doubt, any government with a basic spy apperatus infiltrates and collects the information your government keeps on you.
This agreement simply gives the TSA and the people who are responsible for U.S. airline security the information... if you don't want the TSA to have your information, then it might be a concern. But if you are worried about corporations being able to get your personal information, well your own government is already doing the job of collecting your personal information to give to corporations.
If you truly were worried about privacy, you would not trust your own government to keep vast stores of information about you (which will eventually end up in the hands of politically connected corporations via government spy agencies). Flying to the U.S. is really the least of your concerns.
The U.S. will "twist" the information from the E.U. nipples, instead of "pulling" the information from the E.U. underwear.
I don't know how easy it is to bribe a police officer to get away with murder in any country, as I don't have much practicle experience with that kind of thing. :) And I suspect that either in the West, or India, it is too rare to make any sort of absolute judgements. But bribing a police officer to get away with murder (or to commit murder on your behalf), is not unheard of in the developed world either.
Are you saying that a security expert in the UK couldn't provide security in India, because he can't speak Hindi? What does language ability have to do with Security skills?
Come on, we are talking about the UK... Where you can beat and rob people in the streets, invade their homes, or do any criminal act you want, and the victim is more likely to be prosecuted than the criminal (See the recent store of a grandmother who was robbed and beaten by thugs, who broke her arm... the police decided to only press charges against the grandmother, not the thugs, because she pushed one of the thugs when they were robbing and assaulting her.)
Most likely if someone was blatently caught in the act stealing data in the UK, they would face no jail time whatsoever. Where as, on the other hand, I would assume that India would probably have more severe punishment than the UK.
Of course, there isn't any reason to believe that private data couldn't be illegally sold in the UK... or in the U.S., or France, or Canada, or Germany, or Japan, or whereever. In fact, data theft has most certainly happened in all those countries!
But you are going to have a salvo of posts demonizing India as a place to do buisness. People with either a xenophobic agenda, or a protectionist agenda will jump on this with the whole "India is evil! Don't outsource to India" paranoia and hysteria, when in fact there is no reason to believe your data is more secure anywhere else.
I couldn't find statistics on employee occupation distribution, but since DOI manage land, dams, and other natural resources, I would say that the vast majority of those 70,000 are probably field workers or support staff, where as most of the people goofing off are of the much smaller administrative staff working behind a desk in DC.
Slashdot is taking payments to hype products and push opinion on the site. It is called guerilla advertising. Take what stories slashdot selects to post with a grain of salt.
Sony has a huge mindshare... there are a whole generation of kids who use the word "Playstation" interchangably with "Game Console". There is a huge Sony fanboy presence on the internet. Sony is in decent shape.
They might lose a lot of ground to the 360, but they are not going to be wiped out of the market. The console race will just be more of a split, instead of Sony dominating everything like the last generation.
By online, he means the internet. By downloadable, he means digital PVRs and video-on-demand and the like. On my cable box, I can order movies, download them, watch them for 24 hours, then they are deleted.
While I would not consider downloading a movie on the internet right now (too much hassle, too low quality), I have no problem downloading movies on my cable box as the system is very well developed, efficent, and goes straight to my television.
The Fairness Doctrine was some pretty totalitarian stuff. It basicly gave the government 100% control over all media, with the justification that by controlling what could be said and what couldn't, it would make things "fair". ("Fair", of course, as determined by those currently in power). You realize that if the fairness doctrine was in place, a government officer appointed by Bush could demand that the Daily Show air segments that the Bush administration deemed would "make it fair", and the Bush administration could demand segments of the Daily Show that was "unfair" be cut? People should know better than to believe that you can make a law with a totally vauge and subjective demand ("Make things fair and balanced"), and that is just gonna work out as intended.
Second, you are mischaracterizing the media if you think it is "corporate propoganda"... Aside from the rediculous idea that there would be a single "corporate agenda" (as corporations are in competition, and their interests are in direct conflict with other corporations), if you actually paid attention you would see that places like CNN and Fox are Yellow Journalism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism ). Bill O'Reilly is just as likely to go off on "corporate criminals" like Martha Stewart, or to demand that the government set oil prices or nationalize the oil industry or some other socialist scheme, or to support farm subsidies, as they are to support "conservative" issues. The stance that the mainstream media takes is usually what they think the public most wants to hear. So left wing people thing the media is right wing biased, and right wing people think the media is left wing bias... where really the media is biased to confirm the knee-jerk beliefs of middle America - which tends to be a schitzophrenic reactionary fear of "big buisness" and personal freedom, and xenophobic fear of criminals and foriegners, along with an unhealthy dose of nationalism.
It's not a partisian issue. It's a freedom issue.
Yeah, because nothing says freedom like having the government tell you what to say and what not to say.
But what happens when something goes wrong, and a paid user gets locked out of their operating system? What happens when I sneak a peak at your Microsoft licence number while you are working on your PC at the airport, and I post it on a website, and then Microsoft restricts your licence?
I have no problem with Microsoft restricting the OS for non-users, but there is inevitably going to be colateral damage. Many paying customers will get locked out of the OS. And people who absolutly depend on their computers, are not going to be able to use a Microsoft OS... the risk of having your OS locked is just too great.