There was a time when cars could be designed by 1 person, or a handful on engineers. Nowadays there are a handfull of companies in the world who can afford the billions of dollars it takes to bring a car to market. Although with computers, simulators, robotic controlled milling machines, and off-the-shelf parts, it should be easier than ever to design and build cars, the laws and liability are so strict and the cost of cars are so high that anything less than GM, Toyota, Ford, BMW, can afford to make cars (and actually, looking at the bottom line of a lot of auto companies, even GM and some other companies can't make a profit designing cars).
So all you people who enjoy working on free software, or have dreams of starting your own software company, give it up! The big corporations on the right love government regulation and liability because it squashes little companies, and the socialists on the left love government regulation and liability because it squashes all capitalists but the biggest corporations. When you got these two working together for the same goals, there is no way that things will ever stay as free as they are now.
One day we will all talk about the "good ol' days" when a person was allowed to write a program without a licence, and when there was more than 3 companies that wrote software... And our kids will learn in their schools the horror stories about the days before software was regulated by the government, and hate anyone who would want to bring back that "nightmare".
You are being sarcastic, but what you are saying is true.
In a murder, there is a body. Everyone knows that a crime has been commited, it is just a matter if the person accused of the crime is guilty.
With this, you are going to have a whole bunch of busybody housewives making subtle decisions on the content of games... something that most people who can't or don't want to get out of jury duty are not mentaly capable of doing.
Man, with all these converted Russian ICBMs failing, it makes me think we should have started WWIII. We didn't need the Strategic Defense Initiative to be safe. Maybe a few cities might have got nuked by the missles that didn't explode, but that is a small price to pay for kickin' some commie ass! Yeehaw!
It shouldn't matter. It is totally irrational for it to matter. The people who are upset are, for lack of a better term, "playa haters". In no way does someone else getting a bit extra harm the people who are still getting what they expected and paid for. If you think about it rationally and dispassionatly, there is nothing to be upset about.
Kids just like to argue about who got the bigger cookie. But that doesn't make it news.
Now, if someone was upset that they got the upgraded version (maybe they had the current specs certified for some purpose... maybe the newer specs consume more energy), I can understand them being upset.
I am talking about the manufacturing costs, not the extra costs due to marketing and politics. What you are saying supports my point... it is not that American's don't want European releases, it is that the way movies are distributed makes it unprofitable to sell European movies in North America. I can't just place an order for a European movie from an online store and have it shipped to Canada, and a chain like Best Buy can't just buy 1000 copies of a movie direct from a European company. The movie has to find a North American company to manufacture and distribute it, and if it isn't a big movie, there may not be a company in North America willing to put up the money.
If region codes were eliminated, this would not be a problem.
The lack of Zone 1 DVDs from Europe is the result of the European distributors wanting to get licencing fees from U.S. distributers. It is possible to manufacture your DVDs as region 0 (all regions). The company I used to work for manufactured all it's DVDs that way, because they couldn't afford to create versions for each market. It doesn't cost a penny extra to make your DVD for all regions. And you can sell directly to the U.S. consumer via Amazon and Netflix who have no qualms about selling/renting obscure or foriegn titles.
But that is not how it works for the big guys. A European company will not release an all-region DVD (unless they are a small niche company), they will try to find someone to purchase the North American rights to the film, and manufacutre and market it for North America.
But advertising on Slashdot pretending to be a review or news story is unethical. If you are going to accept paid advertisments, make it clear that they are paid advertisments!
Think of all the big games that get ignored on Slashdot, and then think of the ones that have huge glowing reviews (Hulk, Spiderman), and it is clear that there is some payola going on here.
I already have this. I can select a movie to rent from a menu, it downloads to my cable box hard drive, and I can watch it for 24 hours, after which it erases itself. No need to return it. Most big cities in North America offer this as an option with their digital cable service nowadays, and if they don't they will be offering it very soon!
While this is very convient, and has replaced going down to the local video rental place for me, it isn't revolutionary. The service only has several thousand movies, about the selection of a local video store. And they circulate the movies, so it appears that they only have the technology to offer several thousand movies at one time.
What WOULD be truly revolutionary, is if it had every movie ever made available. For example, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society made a Call of Cthulu movie (the story was on Slashdot a couple days ago). It is available on DVD, but for $20 plus shipping and handling it isn't something a lot of people will buy. But $4 to rent it, I am game.
I am also a big fan of low-budget sci-fi movies. I can purchase them on Amazon for $20, plus SH, but that is an expensive proposition, and I only have so much physical room to store the movies even if I had the money to purchase them. Also, I have to wait half a week to recieve them, so that eliminates impulse purchase.
Having access to ALL movies (or at least a selection that is as good as Amazon.com's DVD selection) would change the way a lot of people watch movies. It isn't the technology of renting videos online or through my cable service that is the key technology (That has already been fully developed, and actually deployed in a lot of places). It is all about the catalog! Choice and diversity is what will make the technology attractive.
If they are just going to put their new releases online, then there is no point really. I am not going to watch the next big blockbuster online, I am going to see it in the movie (or perhaps rent the DVD).
What will make online movie rental or purchase worth something is if they can put a huge catalog of every movie ever made available for download. There are a lot of pretty obscure films out there, that I wouldn't buy the DVD, and the video store will never have, that could be made available.
It is like iTunes... half the music I want just isn't available on iTunes. If iTunes had more than your standard HMV fare, then maybe it would be worth it.
I know a lot of the comments about this will be that fingerprinting is not any more secure than using a CC number... that the digital data of the fingerprint can be intercepted along the way and used.
But couldn't the fingerprint somehow be used as a hashing function. For example, lets say your bank scans in your thumb print in a 1000 x 1000 32 bit array and has it on record.
Now, when you go to the store, instead of the machine scanning in your entire fingerprint and sending it to the bank, the bank sends to the machine "give me the value for 534 x 123" or some other randomly determined location on your thumb. The reader machine, reads that one location and sends the value, and if the value matches the transaction is improved.
The benifit of this system is that even if the data is intercepted, it is only one possible code out of a million possibilities. The likelyhood of that grid point being requested again by the bank is very small.
This is just one possible idea, but I imagine if someone talented spent a lot of time thinking about it they could come up with a lot of good ideas to make this secure.
For a company it is attractive. From a central server, you can configure a bunch of things (for example, many companies require that documents use the official letterhead, use a specific font, etc.). You can seamlessly handle backups. You can monitor the work that your users are doing. You can have them use a web terminal, and therefore they won't be installing unlicenced software which is a huge liability. You don't have to be tied to a single workstation... people can just jump on a terminal and be editing their documents. The software can always be up to date.
If you have ever used some old mainframe software "back in the day", you will realize there is some pretty powerful advantages to the whole client/server model.
Sure, large companies aren't going to be using GoogleOffice. That is for non-commercial home users. Big companies are going to buy OpenOffice servers from Sun, and run it on their company intranet.
The point is to explode the bomb on the plane. The reason planes are big targets is because one well placed bomb can take out 200 people... you would be hard pressed to kill so many people so easily elsewhere.
But I agree with you, terrorists are not going to carry a bomb on a plane just to transport it. They will be built from local materials.
State control != socialism. According to Princeton University, Socialism is defined as: 1: a political theory advocating state ownership of industry. 2: an economic system based on state ownership of capital.
and according to Dictionary.com socialism is: 1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy. 2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
I am using the dictionary definition of socialism in my arguements. I have to sincerly wonder about what they are calling "socialism" in Europe. From the sound of it, "socialist" is the word for "anything I like", and "capitalism" is the word for "anything I don't like".
About half of Europe. I'd bet you money that we have more "freedom" than you, but gambling is probably illegal where you are. Is this the same Europe which passes laws that throw people in jail if they offend a certain religion (as in the UK)? The same Europe that bans religous garb amoung teachers and government workers (like in France)? Or, where an EU official and former French president can declare that "Only Christians should be considered Europeans" without it turning any heads. The same Europe where you can be thrown in jail for 5 years for carrying a pocket knife (like in the UK?). The same Europe where most television and radio is controlled by the state? The same Europe where in some places it illegal for a woman to have an abortion (as in Portugal)? The same Europe where in most countries movies have to be approved by a national film censorship board (as a whole slew of countries)? The same Europe where many of the countries force young people into the military service? Or the same Europe where people can be shot to death in a subway for wearing a backpack, and the police face no charges? Where native born citizens are locked in prison camps, have their assets siezed by the government, and then are deported, because of their race (as happens all the time to Romani peoples)? The same Europe where billionaires are thrown out of department stores "because we thought she was north-african" like in gay Paris?
Maybe G. W. Bush is erroding freedom at an alarming rate in the United States, but it still has 10 or 15 years to go before it starts resembling the police state of Europe. Stop believing your own propoganda, and look at the frightening stuff happening in your own country and on your own continent.
As for the "welfare system" you talk about, the U.S. is about as "socialist" as western Europe by any objective measure (percentage GDP for social spending, per capita social spending, tax rates adjusted for future debt). And, of course the thing your propoganda will never tell you, is that G. W. Bush has passed the largest increases of social spending in the history of the United States. In fact, G. W. Bush is probably the most radical socialist out of North America and Western Europe in terms of massive increases of government social spending. I don't have the numbers, but I wouldn't be suprised if he out-did Hugo Chavez in terms of socialism. He certainly has outdone Fidel Castro - Ol' Fidel is actually liberalizing his economy and making market reforms while G. W. Bush is increasing government spending and government control of the economy.
Don't think I am bragging about that though... Another thing your European propoganda will not tell you is that the American war machine was built by socialists and "progressives" (Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, and of course G.W. Bush is s socialist in practice if not in rhetoric), and that in the history of most of the world, warfare and the police state tend to be proportional to the amount of power a government has over it's economy and how centralized it's government is. The more money and power a government has, the more nasty mischief it will be up to.
There as as many free socialist countries as there are free capitalist ones, just as there are many non-free capitalist societies. Name a free socialist country.
Freedom is freedom. Either you can critize the government or you can't. Either you can buy unrestricted media, or you can't. Your countries fiscal policy is irrelevant. How can you print books critical of the government if all printing presses are owned and controlled by the state? How do you broadcast anti-government messages when radio stations are owned and controlled by the state? How do you set up anti-government websites, when all servers are owned and controlled by the state?
And how can you critize a government, when that government decides where you work, how much money you make, where you can live, what type of health care you recieve, and what type of education your children recieve, and has total power over your survival?
How will people learn anything critical of the state when the media and education is controlled by the state?
Economics touches everything in a society. Total control of the economy by the state = total control by the state.
Hey, no-one is being stoned for being a witch, the woman is allowed to divorce her husband and she was able to choose her husband in the first place, no-one has to worry about starving to death or being beset on by bandits as they drive their SUV, the parents only work 8-10 a day, 5 days a week, and smoking a joint under the deck isn't as bad as drinking a bottle of wiskey.
If what you present is the "suburban nightmare scenerio", lighten up, things aren't that bad. Most people in history, and billions of people around the world could only dream about what you describe. Even the problems you described (a disassociation between the child and parents, and between the husband and wife), probably existed for most of history and in most cultures (the concept of romantic love, and of the friendship between child and parent instead of being a loyal servant of the patriarch, are all pretty new concepts that are the result of mass media and an industrialized society).
Because nearly anything in a specific context can be detrimental to minors, any person who believes the government should regulate things detrimental to minors believes that the government should regulate everything. Which is why we are moving towards a totalitarian society.
Yeah, forget Capitalism. Unless the state decides what you can listen to, consume, buy, sell, and think, we are going to be plauged by these capitalist problems of free-expression and individualism.
We need a healthy society, like exists in North Korea, or Cuba, or existed in the Soviet Union or Communist China. After all, they have solved the problems of poverty and want, their people have vastly highter standards of living than we do, and they have solved the problem of violence (except, of course, for the odd purge killing tens of millions million every once in a while, but those are nasty counter-revolunaries being killed who are not really human beings anyway).
Although this bill in Michigan is a good first step to state control of speech, unless the state has total control of the economy and media, people are going to be doing things, and saying things, that a good deal of other people don't approve of. We just can't be having that.
Because state taxes are supposed to be taxes in the state! I.E. Michigan sales tax is on sales that are in Michigan, not on sales that are in California.
And also, states, counties, and municipalities are not being cheated out of anything. The money of the people belongs to the people, not the government. The people are being cheated out of their property.
There is software that doesn't require you give up liability, but it is usually highly specialized software run in a controlled enviornment. Not consumer software that has millions of users, on millions of different machines, with millions of different configurations.
And even software that requires you give up liability, you are free to hire an insurance company to test, certify, and insure the software against any possible damanges. Once again, doesn't happen much in consumer software (because the costs of consumer software is so low) but there is lots of cases of buisnesses that do this.
A lot of people like to think that they are "sticking it to the corporations" with the idea of lots of product lawsuits. I recently heard someone talk about "Microsoft should be liable for the flaws in their product", and though that this was a great idea to force the decline in Microsoft's power.
However, this is just knee-jerk populist emotional crap which actually helps the big corporations. Big corporations are usually the ones who push the concept of liability and regulation as a tactic to suppress competition.
Think about it. A giant corporation (such as Microsoft), will have huge full-time and well funded legal teams to take on any legal action. And they are so profitable that they will not go bankrupt from legal fees. And on the occasions that they lose, they are so profitable they can afford to pay any damages, they control the market such as all the costs can probably be passed on to the consumer, and their market is so huge that damages will be a tiny percentage of their overall costs. And a big company can most certainly afford any kind of liability insurance.
But think about a small company... or a free software project... if they are sued, damages can easily be much higher (or infinitly higher in the case of free software!:) ) than their profits. For a small company, the legal fees to fight any lawsuit can easily be way beyond their means. A small company is going to have lots of competition, so they can't afford to put the cost of legal fees in the cost of their product (and they certainly can't do that with free software). Even the most frivolous lawsuits with no chance of winning could easily bankrupt more small companies.
Frivolous lawsuits are a boon to big corporations. Don't believe me? In the past 30 years we see a massive increase in lawsuits, a massive increase in govermnet regulations, and a whole slew of other policies designed to keep the corporations in check and to help the "little guy". And in the last 30 years, corporations have become so big and powerful as never before, and it has become harder than ever before for individuals and small buisnesses to make a living. For most of North America and Western Europe, the youngest generation will probably have a lower standard of living than their parents (for the first time since we have been able to keep track of this stuff, really). But people still insist on this empty "feel-good" populist stuff which time and time again has been proven not to work.
After all, it is broadcast on radio frequencies all over the world. Don't worry, we will still let UK taxpayers pay for it, we just want China, Cuba, and North Korea to have a say in the content that is being broadcast into their territory. It just isn't fair that only the UK should control this wonderful resource that is enjoyed all over the world. If only that hateful greedy limey bastards would stop oppressing nations like the Sudan, Indonesia, Venezuala with this agressive imperialist act of not turning over the BBC to the U.N..
Also, the CBC should be put under control of the U.N.... as well as any national broadcast network in any country where the programs can be recieved by those outside that country. After all, the airwaves belong to all of us, and it just isn't fair that a radio station in German, paid for by German tax payers, should not be collectivly controlled by the world.
After that, we need to get the U.N. to take over the Louvre. After all, the Louvre is considered an important part of our World Heritage, and so should be compelled by an international body to eliminate the clearly western bias of most of the artwork contained within. We just aren't going to accept the arrogant attitude that just because the French built the Louvre, paid for the Louvre, and nurtured the Louvre to be the preeminent art mueseum in the world, that they have the right to control it! Zambia, Bolivia, and North Korea have some wonderful ideas of what they are going to do with the place.
ebay != the U.S. government. Ebay is a private system and enforces its own rules (just like you could set up an online auction site on your own server and declare that only people from Tasmania can sell pink fuzzy bunnies).
And, you realize the reason that most countries are pushing for UN control of DNS is in order to "fight extremism", "stop SPAM an criminals", etc... Don't expect the UN to make the internet more free, by any stretch of the imagination. The complaint that most of the countries arguing for UN control have is that there are NOT ENOUGH CONTROLS AND RESTRICTIONS on the internet, not that there are too many.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a time when cars could be designed by 1 person, or a handful on engineers. Nowadays there are a handfull of companies in the world who can afford the billions of dollars it takes to bring a car to market. Although with computers, simulators, robotic controlled milling machines, and off-the-shelf parts, it should be easier than ever to design and build cars, the laws and liability are so strict and the cost of cars are so high that anything less than GM, Toyota, Ford, BMW, can afford to make cars (and actually, looking at the bottom line of a lot of auto companies, even GM and some other companies can't make a profit designing cars).
So all you people who enjoy working on free software, or have dreams of starting your own software company, give it up! The big corporations on the right love government regulation and liability because it squashes little companies, and the socialists on the left love government regulation and liability because it squashes all capitalists but the biggest corporations. When you got these two working together for the same goals, there is no way that things will ever stay as free as they are now.
One day we will all talk about the "good ol' days" when a person was allowed to write a program without a licence, and when there was more than 3 companies that wrote software... And our kids will learn in their schools the horror stories about the days before software was regulated by the government, and hate anyone who would want to bring back that "nightmare".
You are being sarcastic, but what you are saying is true.
In a murder, there is a body. Everyone knows that a crime has been commited, it is just a matter if the person accused of the crime is guilty.
With this, you are going to have a whole bunch of busybody housewives making subtle decisions on the content of games... something that most people who can't or don't want to get out of jury duty are not mentaly capable of doing.
Man, with all these converted Russian ICBMs failing, it makes me think we should have started WWIII. We didn't need the Strategic Defense Initiative to be safe. Maybe a few cities might have got nuked by the missles that didn't explode, but that is a small price to pay for kickin' some commie ass! Yeehaw!
It shouldn't matter. It is totally irrational for it to matter. The people who are upset are, for lack of a better term, "playa haters". In no way does someone else getting a bit extra harm the people who are still getting what they expected and paid for. If you think about it rationally and dispassionatly, there is nothing to be upset about.
Kids just like to argue about who got the bigger cookie. But that doesn't make it news.
Now, if someone was upset that they got the upgraded version (maybe they had the current specs certified for some purpose... maybe the newer specs consume more energy), I can understand them being upset.
I am talking about the manufacturing costs, not the extra costs due to marketing and politics. What you are saying supports my point... it is not that American's don't want European releases, it is that the way movies are distributed makes it unprofitable to sell European movies in North America. I can't just place an order for a European movie from an online store and have it shipped to Canada, and a chain like Best Buy can't just buy 1000 copies of a movie direct from a European company. The movie has to find a North American company to manufacture and distribute it, and if it isn't a big movie, there may not be a company in North America willing to put up the money.
If region codes were eliminated, this would not be a problem.
The lack of Zone 1 DVDs from Europe is the result of the European distributors wanting to get licencing fees from U.S. distributers. It is possible to manufacture your DVDs as region 0 (all regions). The company I used to work for manufactured all it's DVDs that way, because they couldn't afford to create versions for each market. It doesn't cost a penny extra to make your DVD for all regions. And you can sell directly to the U.S. consumer via Amazon and Netflix who have no qualms about selling/renting obscure or foriegn titles.
But that is not how it works for the big guys. A European company will not release an all-region DVD (unless they are a small niche company), they will try to find someone to purchase the North American rights to the film, and manufacutre and market it for North America.
Look, I don't mind advetising. Really I don't.
But advertising on Slashdot pretending to be a review or news story is unethical. If you are going to accept paid advertisments, make it clear that they are paid advertisments!
Think of all the big games that get ignored on Slashdot, and then think of the ones that have huge glowing reviews (Hulk, Spiderman), and it is clear that there is some payola going on here.
COME CLEAN SLASHDOT!!! We know this is a scam!
I already have this. I can select a movie to rent from a menu, it downloads to my cable box hard drive, and I can watch it for 24 hours, after which it erases itself. No need to return it. Most big cities in North America offer this as an option with their digital cable service nowadays, and if they don't they will be offering it very soon!
While this is very convient, and has replaced going down to the local video rental place for me, it isn't revolutionary. The service only has several thousand movies, about the selection of a local video store. And they circulate the movies, so it appears that they only have the technology to offer several thousand movies at one time.
What WOULD be truly revolutionary, is if it had every movie ever made available. For example, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society made a Call of Cthulu movie (the story was on Slashdot a couple days ago). It is available on DVD, but for $20 plus shipping and handling it isn't something a lot of people will buy. But $4 to rent it, I am game.
I am also a big fan of low-budget sci-fi movies. I can purchase them on Amazon for $20, plus SH, but that is an expensive proposition, and I only have so much physical room to store the movies even if I had the money to purchase them. Also, I have to wait half a week to recieve them, so that eliminates impulse purchase.
Having access to ALL movies (or at least a selection that is as good as Amazon.com's DVD selection) would change the way a lot of people watch movies. It isn't the technology of renting videos online or through my cable service that is the key technology (That has already been fully developed, and actually deployed in a lot of places). It is all about the catalog! Choice and diversity is what will make the technology attractive.
If they are just going to put their new releases online, then there is no point really. I am not going to watch the next big blockbuster online, I am going to see it in the movie (or perhaps rent the DVD).
What will make online movie rental or purchase worth something is if they can put a huge catalog of every movie ever made available for download. There are a lot of pretty obscure films out there, that I wouldn't buy the DVD, and the video store will never have, that could be made available.
It is like iTunes... half the music I want just isn't available on iTunes. If iTunes had more than your standard HMV fare, then maybe it would be worth it.
That's right... News for Nerds, and Stuff that matters, and now the coolest place to get corporate press releases and sponsered product reviews!
I know a lot of the comments about this will be that fingerprinting is not any more secure than using a CC number... that the digital data of the fingerprint can be intercepted along the way and used.
But couldn't the fingerprint somehow be used as a hashing function. For example, lets say your bank scans in your thumb print in a 1000 x 1000 32 bit array and has it on record.
Now, when you go to the store, instead of the machine scanning in your entire fingerprint and sending it to the bank, the bank sends to the machine "give me the value for 534 x 123" or some other randomly determined location on your thumb. The reader machine, reads that one location and sends the value, and if the value matches the transaction is improved.
The benifit of this system is that even if the data is intercepted, it is only one possible code out of a million possibilities. The likelyhood of that grid point being requested again by the bank is very small.
This is just one possible idea, but I imagine if someone talented spent a lot of time thinking about it they could come up with a lot of good ideas to make this secure.
For a company it is attractive. From a central server, you can configure a bunch of things (for example, many companies require that documents use the official letterhead, use a specific font, etc.). You can seamlessly handle backups. You can monitor the work that your users are doing. You can have them use a web terminal, and therefore they won't be installing unlicenced software which is a huge liability. You don't have to be tied to a single workstation... people can just jump on a terminal and be editing their documents. The software can always be up to date.
If you have ever used some old mainframe software "back in the day", you will realize there is some pretty powerful advantages to the whole client/server model.
Why do you think that Sun is in on this?
Sure, large companies aren't going to be using GoogleOffice. That is for non-commercial home users. Big companies are going to buy OpenOffice servers from Sun, and run it on their company intranet.
The point is to explode the bomb on the plane. The reason planes are big targets is because one well placed bomb can take out 200 people... you would be hard pressed to kill so many people so easily elsewhere.
But I agree with you, terrorists are not going to carry a bomb on a plane just to transport it. They will be built from local materials.
State control != socialism.
According to Princeton University, Socialism is defined as:
1: a political theory advocating state ownership of industry.
2: an economic system based on state ownership of capital.
and according to Dictionary.com socialism is:
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
I am using the dictionary definition of socialism in my arguements. I have to sincerly wonder about what they are calling "socialism" in Europe. From the sound of it, "socialist" is the word for "anything I like", and "capitalism" is the word for "anything I don't like".
About half of Europe. I'd bet you money that we have more "freedom" than you, but gambling is probably illegal where you are.
Is this the same Europe which passes laws that throw people in jail if they offend a certain religion (as in the UK)? The same Europe that bans religous garb amoung teachers and government workers (like in France)? Or, where an EU official and former French president can declare that "Only Christians should be considered Europeans" without it turning any heads. The same Europe where you can be thrown in jail for 5 years for carrying a pocket knife (like in the UK?). The same Europe where most television and radio is controlled by the state? The same Europe where in some places it illegal for a woman to have an abortion (as in Portugal)? The same Europe where in most countries movies have to be approved by a national film censorship board (as a whole slew of countries)? The same Europe where many of the countries force young people into the military service? Or the same Europe where people can be shot to death in a subway for wearing a backpack, and the police face no charges? Where native born citizens are locked in prison camps, have their assets siezed by the government, and then are deported, because of their race (as happens all the time to Romani peoples)? The same Europe where billionaires are thrown out of department stores "because we thought she was north-african" like in gay Paris?
Maybe G. W. Bush is erroding freedom at an alarming rate in the United States, but it still has 10 or 15 years to go before it starts resembling the police state of Europe. Stop believing your own propoganda, and look at the frightening stuff happening in your own country and on your own continent.
As for the "welfare system" you talk about, the U.S. is about as "socialist" as western Europe by any objective measure (percentage GDP for social spending, per capita social spending, tax rates adjusted for future debt). And, of course the thing your propoganda will never tell you, is that G. W. Bush has passed the largest increases of social spending in the history of the United States. In fact, G. W. Bush is probably the most radical socialist out of North America and Western Europe in terms of massive increases of government social spending. I don't have the numbers, but I wouldn't be suprised if he out-did Hugo Chavez in terms of socialism. He certainly has outdone Fidel Castro - Ol' Fidel is actually liberalizing his economy and making market reforms while G. W. Bush is increasing government spending and government control of the economy.
Don't think I am bragging about that though... Another thing your European propoganda will not tell you is that the American war machine was built by socialists and "progressives" (Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, and of course G.W. Bush is s socialist in practice if not in rhetoric), and that in the history of most of the world, warfare and the police state tend to be proportional to the amount of power a government has over it's economy and how centralized it's government is. The more money and power a government has, the more nasty mischief it will be up to.
There as as many free socialist countries as there are free capitalist ones, just as there are many non-free capitalist societies.
Name a free socialist country.
Freedom is freedom. Either you can critize the government or you can't. Either you can buy unrestricted media, or you can't. Your countries fiscal policy is irrelevant.
How can you print books critical of the government if all printing presses are owned and controlled by the state? How do you broadcast anti-government messages when radio stations are owned and controlled by the state? How do you set up anti-government websites, when all servers are owned and controlled by the state?
And how can you critize a government, when that government decides where you work, how much money you make, where you can live, what type of health care you recieve, and what type of education your children recieve, and has total power over your survival?
How will people learn anything critical of the state when the media and education is controlled by the state?
Economics touches everything in a society. Total control of the economy by the state = total control by the state.
Hey, no-one is being stoned for being a witch, the woman is allowed to divorce her husband and she was able to choose her husband in the first place, no-one has to worry about starving to death or being beset on by bandits as they drive their SUV, the parents only work 8-10 a day, 5 days a week, and smoking a joint under the deck isn't as bad as drinking a bottle of wiskey.
If what you present is the "suburban nightmare scenerio", lighten up, things aren't that bad. Most people in history, and billions of people around the world could only dream about what you describe. Even the problems you described (a disassociation between the child and parents, and between the husband and wife), probably existed for most of history and in most cultures (the concept of romantic love, and of the friendship between child and parent instead of being a loyal servant of the patriarch, are all pretty new concepts that are the result of mass media and an industrialized society).
You have to blame both voters and politicians who think that it is the government's job to solve problems.
Because nearly anything in a specific context can be detrimental to minors, any person who believes the government should regulate things detrimental to minors believes that the government should regulate everything. Which is why we are moving towards a totalitarian society.
Yeah, forget Capitalism. Unless the state decides what you can listen to, consume, buy, sell, and think, we are going to be plauged by these capitalist problems of free-expression and individualism.
We need a healthy society, like exists in North Korea, or Cuba, or existed in the Soviet Union or Communist China. After all, they have solved the problems of poverty and want, their people have vastly highter standards of living than we do, and they have solved the problem of violence (except, of course, for the odd purge killing tens of millions million every once in a while, but those are nasty counter-revolunaries being killed who are not really human beings anyway).
Although this bill in Michigan is a good first step to state control of speech, unless the state has total control of the economy and media, people are going to be doing things, and saying things, that a good deal of other people don't approve of. We just can't be having that.
Because state taxes are supposed to be taxes in the state! I.E. Michigan sales tax is on sales that are in Michigan, not on sales that are in California.
And also, states, counties, and municipalities are not being cheated out of anything. The money of the people belongs to the people, not the government. The people are being cheated out of their property.
There is software that doesn't require you give up liability, but it is usually highly specialized software run in a controlled enviornment. Not consumer software that has millions of users, on millions of different machines, with millions of different configurations.
And even software that requires you give up liability, you are free to hire an insurance company to test, certify, and insure the software against any possible damanges. Once again, doesn't happen much in consumer software (because the costs of consumer software is so low) but there is lots of cases of buisnesses that do this.
A lot of people like to think that they are "sticking it to the corporations" with the idea of lots of product lawsuits. I recently heard someone talk about "Microsoft should be liable for the flaws in their product", and though that this was a great idea to force the decline in Microsoft's power.
:) ) than their profits. For a small company, the legal fees to fight any lawsuit can easily be way beyond their means. A small company is going to have lots of competition, so they can't afford to put the cost of legal fees in the cost of their product (and they certainly can't do that with free software). Even the most frivolous lawsuits with no chance of winning could easily bankrupt more small companies.
However, this is just knee-jerk populist emotional crap which actually helps the big corporations. Big corporations are usually the ones who push the concept of liability and regulation as a tactic to suppress competition.
Think about it. A giant corporation (such as Microsoft), will have huge full-time and well funded legal teams to take on any legal action. And they are so profitable that they will not go bankrupt from legal fees. And on the occasions that they lose, they are so profitable they can afford to pay any damages, they control the market such as all the costs can probably be passed on to the consumer, and their market is so huge that damages will be a tiny percentage of their overall costs. And a big company can most certainly afford any kind of liability insurance.
But think about a small company... or a free software project... if they are sued, damages can easily be much higher (or infinitly higher in the case of free software!
Frivolous lawsuits are a boon to big corporations. Don't believe me? In the past 30 years we see a massive increase in lawsuits, a massive increase in govermnet regulations, and a whole slew of other policies designed to keep the corporations in check and to help the "little guy". And in the last 30 years, corporations have become so big and powerful as never before, and it has become harder than ever before for individuals and small buisnesses to make a living. For most of North America and Western Europe, the youngest generation will probably have a lower standard of living than their parents (for the first time since we have been able to keep track of this stuff, really). But people still insist on this empty "feel-good" populist stuff which time and time again has been proven not to work.
After all, it is broadcast on radio frequencies all over the world. Don't worry, we will still let UK taxpayers pay for it, we just want China, Cuba, and North Korea to have a say in the content that is being broadcast into their territory. It just isn't fair that only the UK should control this wonderful resource that is enjoyed all over the world. If only that hateful greedy limey bastards would stop oppressing nations like the Sudan, Indonesia, Venezuala with this agressive imperialist act of not turning over the BBC to the U.N..
... as well as any national broadcast network in any country where the programs can be recieved by those outside that country. After all, the airwaves belong to all of us, and it just isn't fair that a radio station in German, paid for by German tax payers, should not be collectivly controlled by the world.
Also, the CBC should be put under control of the U.N.
After that, we need to get the U.N. to take over the Louvre. After all, the Louvre is considered an important part of our World Heritage, and so should be compelled by an international body to eliminate the clearly western bias of most of the artwork contained within. We just aren't going to accept the arrogant attitude that just because the French built the Louvre, paid for the Louvre, and nurtured the Louvre to be the preeminent art mueseum in the world, that they have the right to control it! Zambia, Bolivia, and North Korea have some wonderful ideas of what they are going to do with the place.
ebay != the U.S. government. Ebay is a private system and enforces its own rules (just like you could set up an online auction site on your own server and declare that only people from Tasmania can sell pink fuzzy bunnies).
And, you realize the reason that most countries are pushing for UN control of DNS is in order to "fight extremism", "stop SPAM an criminals", etc... Don't expect the UN to make the internet more free, by any stretch of the imagination. The complaint that most of the countries arguing for UN control have is that there are NOT ENOUGH CONTROLS AND RESTRICTIONS on the internet, not that there are too many.