ou can give me flack for it, but I'm going to go ahead and say that the Slashdot comment interface is very intuitive. I know the reply button starts a reply. The Cancel button cancels it. The option button lets me see various options.
These kinds of unintuitive pyrotechnics are why I'm sticking with the 1.0 discussion system. In my day young man, we had two buttons--"Reply" and "Parent"; and we were happier for it!
Because HTML5 + VIDEO tag draws people away *from Flash* and *into an open standard* that can be found everywhere.
H264 is not an open standard. The video tag is just another lock-in, masquerading as an easy to use core feature.
It's all moot anyway. Without agreement on a codec, the video tag is dead in the water anyway. Lack of a common standard means that the video tag essentially equates to what we already have; the ability to "embed" video which may or may not play in the users browser. Google and Apple killed proper web video because they put their other business interests before giving web users the tag they really wanted. They're not browser companies after all.
Google (or any similar company) has no business reason to use Theora.
This is true. Google is an internet services provider. Unfortunately, they also make a browser now, which means they can pretend to be a browser maker when giving their opinions to W3C on the video tag.
Likewise, it is true for Apple, who are a hardware/online retail company. Again, they also happen to make a browser, so can again pretend to be a browser company when talking to W3C.
Meanwhile, actual browser companies like Opera and Mozilla have every business reason to not touch H264 with a ten foot pole. They tried telling this to W3C--seeing as they have more users than the aforementioned other two companies--but to no avail. They didn't listen.
Sometimes, I think Google just made a browser so they could push the web the way they want it to go.
How do you respond to those who say that the Mozilla Foundation should pay for the h.264 license?
What about other browsers? SeaMonkey, Flock, Konqueror, Dillo, Epiphany? Are all these supposed to become second class citizens of the web with no support for core tags? Konqueror is installed by default in every KDE installation and beyond. You think MPEG-LA is going to overlook that?
If H264 becomes the standard for the HTML video tag, we will be faced with a web divided into browsers which have paid to support core features, and browsers which have not. Imagine this cancer spreading to new or even existing features in the future; where every new web development is the "property" of a private company looking for its protection money. After only three or four such developments, pretty soon, Mozilla literally won't have the money to pay them all off.
It's not worth it. I don't want video in web pages so bad that I'll accept this; and I can already play them in flash when it comes right down to it. As bad as flash is, it's not the potential carcinogen that the video tag has now become.
Mozilla doesn't have to support H.264 themselves, they just have to "get out of the way". They just have to enable the ability for plugins to add support for new codecs. Pretty much every platform comes with some kind of H.264 implementation these days. The plugins would appear very rapidly, if Firefox permitted it.
And you think that will save them when H264 has saturated the web, and MPEG-LA come seeking their pound of flesh? Anyway you look at it, Mozilla is either going to have to end up paying the liecence fee or else and equivalent amount defending itself from legal action.
Chrome up and coming is an even bigger issue because of this. If it works well with youtube, and firefox doesn't, then firefox will lose dramatic market share to Chrome.
WTF? It's just the video tag, a new way to play videos on a site where videos already play.
I don't know where all the crowing against Firefox is coming from in this thread, but people need to put things in perspective. Most users will not even notice that videos play differently across browsers, let alone want to switch over this fact. While IE is still using flash to play video, YouTube and the rest cannot drop the platform and firefox will always fall back on that. Users won't notice. Their videos will keep playing.
Chrome, chrome, chrome. They made a big splash, but not very many people got wet. They certainly didn't thrill me enough to relish the prospect of MPEG-LA and their patents turning into the next Unisys and sinking every browser on the planet. Yes, H264 is technically better than OGG. But JPEG2000 was in the same position against JPEG, and it was--correctly--dropped like a stone due to patent issues.
The video tag is dead. Patent encumbered formats are practical impossibility, not only for FOSS browsers, but even for smaller commercial ones like Opera. If even a company like Opera wasn't going to come to the table over this, you know that something stank about MPEG-LA and their future position on licensing. Apple and Google have other concerns which they judge to override their patent concerns. But we'll see the proof of this in the coming years when MPEG-LA decides to "leverage" its "intellectual property rights". There's a story about a frog and scorpion which might offer insight into this issue.
Mostly it seems Mozilla just do not want to support anything but Theora, and they're making up weak excuses for why they shouldn't use platform libraries to play video.
Using platform libraries is how web video (including flas) already works. Or should I say, already doesn't work.
I consider Enter the Matrix to have been a surprisingly good movie tie in; in fact, I'd consider the game to be the true spiritual successor to the first Matrix film. Missions like the post office and the airport missions has the feel of what you sort of expected was the kind of thing the rebels actually got up to in the Matrix. The game only fell down mission wise when it stuck too close to the film it was bound into supporting.
But let's talk gameplay.
In my opinion, Enter the Matrix gets over looked an awful lot, despite the fact that it did bullet time combat right. Yes the game had glitches. Yes the animations were not the best. Yes the game was short. But the sheer fun and depth of the bullet time and combat system give it a lot of kudos in my eyes. There was a wealth of close combat moves, weapons, takedowns, gymnastics, etc all of which took on a new depth once you pressed the focus button. If you look at the bullet time in titles like Max Payne or Bayonetta, you see its really just a slowdown button and not the "Devil Trigger"-esque upgrade it should be; your short burst of super power, called upon in a pinch.
In addition, the sheer scope of your abilities in that game is matched by very few other titles. When you find yourself thinking "Hmmmm, what way will I kill the next group of enemies", you know the developers did something right. The blending of ranged and close combat worked well, as it the ability to interact with enemies and the environment to pull off stunts and takedowns.
Enter the Matrix had its flaws, but it went on to form the core of the The Path of Neo, which was probably the definitive Matrix title, which took all the concepts from the first game and gave them the polish that was needed.
Well, some people spend ten years in a living hell of a marriage filled with bickering, friction, conflict, betrayal and sometimes physical conflict.
Now, even in these cases, there is sometimes still what could be called "love" there; but the end product is not something others would consider very beautiful.
Most hardcore religious types typically seek to impose their beliefs on everyone else. If they can't do it overtly, they'll adopt this kind of passive aggressive nonsense to get their way. Telling of their convictions is the fact that while they say they've done nothing wrong, they never bothered to tell the army exactly what they were getting.
The rifles should all be refunded. They've essentially all got graffiti on them.
I don't think it's a generational thing. The reality is that most Firefox users are those who migrated from IE; mostly likely IE6 and IE7, both woefully stagnant examples of a browser. Firefox was a big step up and most Firefox users have seen little reason to change, believing that Firefox represents the pinnacle of web browser innovation. And to be fair, up to 18 months ago, there weren't a lot of core features on other browsers compelling enough to get Firefox users to switch.
It's true that Firefox has typically been playing catch up throughout its lifespan. However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside). Process separation, general speed, stability, memory fragmentation, etc. Their stance on self signed certs is also, frankly, backward; putting the brakes on a more secure web for each and every one of their users. And while extensions are all well and good, I personally find that Mozilla have been offloading much needed innovations in their UI and feature-set to third party add-ons (Tab-Mix Plus anyone?); Bare-bones Firefox leaves a lot to be desired. Now we're not likely to see Firefox 4.0 until the end of this year, if that.
I personally think Firefox is going to end up losing a substantial fraction of its userbase over the coming year as competitors--especially Google--keep continually releasing new features and widgets. Killer extensions are not going to save it if the core feature set falls behind.
H264 is an open standard as well in many ways as many academics and companies have contributed to it. it is literally the best because everyone has worked on it for years and years and years. the only potential pitfall is that en/decoders might be covered by patents.
Sounds a bit like JPEG 2000. A provably superior standard, the product of many top minds, yet not one in a million sites ever uses it, and I'm not even sure there's a browser out there that supports it.
Yes H264 is the superior standard. We all know that. But H264 is unusable as a web standard while protection money needs to be paid to MPEG-LA. It's that simple. Google and apple have their eye on embedded devices, where h264 will probably end up working as a standard. But on the web? With site hosts and browser makers both vulnerable to take downs by a single company? It will never work.
JPEG 2000 proved that the web will -- quite rightly -- drop a superior technology if patent restrictions are placed on it(And that was back in the days before a major alternative browser presence). The web is going to do the same for H264. The HTML5 video tag is dead. We're back to ad hoc solutions for video; oh yes, and flash. And it's going to be like this for the next 20 years until the H264 patents expire.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,...". What a joke.
Amen. The modern game controller is the product of thirty years of continuous research, development and feedback. It has evolved in tandem with the control schemes of games in a natural way. The result is that millions of game players now routinely control the movement of characters in a 3D enviornment, while simultaneously and independently controlling the camera, and controlling several other functions such as jumping, firing, item management, etc.
If you told a geek 30 years ago that millions of ordinary people would be able to do these things using complicated devices, he would have laughed at you. Yet here we are.
The level of control needed in modern games cannot be supplied by a Natal or Wii-Mote or whichever new fangled motion controller these companies come up with. If you make the device simple, then only simple actions can be performed. We need the complexity of the modern controller to play modern games.
Forget reputations. The big question here is if there's money to be made in China at all.
Over the last 10 years, there has been a roaring trade between the west and China. Ordinarily, this would be a great thing, but so far trade has been completely one sided. The fact is, the west has very little that the Chinese actually want to buy, or cannot manufacture themselves. Individual companies have been making short term gains by relocating their businesses to China; but in the long term, Chinese competitors (generally state subsidised) quickly emerge and dominate the local market and then the export market. For short term gain, western companies essentially write their own death warrants.
Google has gone into China. It has gotten nowhere. It's not the only company to see this happen. This big market, a fifth or the worlds population, turns out not to actually be worth the effort in most cases. Not only do you have to put up with the nineteenth century nonsense perpetuated by the communist party, you have to accept the fact that local competitors can and will eat you alive, either with state assistance, ruthless exploitation of labour, or by flat out ignoring the IP rules you hold so dear. Tell me the Western company that is making money in China itself. Making the kind of money that's going to help pay the balance of trade deficit that has emerged from the amount of money Chinese exporters have made in the last 10 years. Name me one.
China isn't worth it. At least not now. Come back in 30 years when the country has some human rights, democratic government and respect for trade laws. Then you can do, what is commonly called, business. There'll probably be a lot more money in people's pockets by that time too. Right now the whole country is a shell game you can never win, no matter how much you think the rules have to be the same. There's no point talking about gaining first mover advantage in a country where people can't even change jobs without a bloody chit. Not for the vast majority of companies.
Maybe Google will finally come to realise this. People may think its signals their return to the light side of the force. Personally, I'm inclined to think Google simply has a most ironic stance towards the personal data to compiles on the world population, jealously guarding it from all comers. Either way, Google leaving China will end up being a net positive for the company, its users, and the balance of trade deficit. The Chinese might lose a few search results, but frankly, that's the bed they've made for themselves right now.
Frankly, market is what drives development, not the elitism.
That kind of thinking is what has produced such quality television titles as Big Brother and American Idol, while simultaneously getting good shows canned.
Yet another example of how the market, left to itself, can actually end up tanking its entire industry.
I've read extensively on the Galileo incident and I see no reason to change the the long accepted wisdom that it is a classic case of conflict between religious dogma and authority against scientific investigation..
I have however encountered quite a large number of people who have been persuaded by recent post-modernist type logic that in fact no; it was perfect alright and indeed correct for the church to threaten to burn Galileo alive because either/or 1) He was rude, 2) His finding would overturn centuries of dogma 3) Galileo's concrete observations were not good enough because he lacked the mathematics to describe them
Needless to say, I find such arguments unconvincing.
The Catholic church suppressed science. They threatened to kill Galileo and forced him to retract his theories. People often forget that last part. Galileo went to his grave holding that the Sun went around the Earth. You don't believe me? There's an official confession signed by him to that effect? You think he privately though otherwise? Tough; that confession is the end of the story. The church got what it wanted. Galileo and his works were suppressed.
I don't know exactly where this new apologia for the churches behaviour in the Galileo affair comes from, but I suspect it has more to do with US Culture Wars than actual critical thinking. Ironic, as for years the Galileo affair was a classic incident that Protestants held as demonstrating the abusive and backward position of the Catholic church. It's unfortunate that the relevant Wikipedia pages have been dragged into such revisionism, and in so doing have given it far more credit than it deserves. That's just another problem with Wikipedia and its monopoly on knowledge and viewpoints, but I'll leave that rant for another day.
Someone hijacks a flight passing through US airspace but not landing in it to pull off an attack similar to the attack on the World Trade Center.
To be honest with you, I just don't care anymore. If someone crashes a plane and kills a few thousand Americans, I no longer see that as adequate justification for the nonsense millions of air travellers have to put up with every single day. Sure have your minutes silence at the UN. Have a few for all those victims of starvation and genocide while you're at it.
But please, let me get a flight my country to another country and back without having to take off my shoes and belt, step through a perv machine, give up all my data to third party TSAs, and sit for an hour without a book, drink, mp3 player, laptop or the right to take a piss, just because you think you're so important that I might just hijack the plane, fly it across the Atlantic and crash it into your local Wal-mart.
If we were truly honest about porn it would come with a mental health warning.
I turned on the television a few nights ago and watched Clint Eastwood beat three men unconscious with a axe butt and then casually remark that "you can't beat a good piece of hickory". Should that have come with a mental health warning too?
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These kinds of unintuitive pyrotechnics are why I'm sticking with the 1.0 discussion system. In my day young man, we had two buttons--"Reply" and "Parent"; and we were happier for it!
H264 is not an open standard. The video tag is just another lock-in, masquerading as an easy to use core feature.
It's all moot anyway. Without agreement on a codec, the video tag is dead in the water anyway. Lack of a common standard means that the video tag essentially equates to what we already have; the ability to "embed" video which may or may not play in the users browser. Google and Apple killed proper web video because they put their other business interests before giving web users the tag they really wanted. They're not browser companies after all.
This is true. Google is an internet services provider. Unfortunately, they also make a browser now, which means they can pretend to be a browser maker when giving their opinions to W3C on the video tag.
Likewise, it is true for Apple, who are a hardware/online retail company. Again, they also happen to make a browser, so can again pretend to be a browser company when talking to W3C.
Meanwhile, actual browser companies like Opera and Mozilla have every business reason to not touch H264 with a ten foot pole. They tried telling this to W3C--seeing as they have more users than the aforementioned other two companies--but to no avail. They didn't listen.
Sometimes, I think Google just made a browser so they could push the web the way they want it to go.
What about other browsers? SeaMonkey, Flock, Konqueror, Dillo, Epiphany? Are all these supposed to become second class citizens of the web with no support for core tags? Konqueror is installed by default in every KDE installation and beyond. You think MPEG-LA is going to overlook that?
If H264 becomes the standard for the HTML video tag, we will be faced with a web divided into browsers which have paid to support core features, and browsers which have not. Imagine this cancer spreading to new or even existing features in the future; where every new web development is the "property" of a private company looking for its protection money. After only three or four such developments, pretty soon, Mozilla literally won't have the money to pay them all off.
It's not worth it. I don't want video in web pages so bad that I'll accept this; and I can already play them in flash when it comes right down to it. As bad as flash is, it's not the potential carcinogen that the video tag has now become.
And you think that will save them when H264 has saturated the web, and MPEG-LA come seeking their pound of flesh? Anyway you look at it, Mozilla is either going to have to end up paying the liecence fee or else and equivalent amount defending itself from legal action.
WTF? It's just the video tag, a new way to play videos on a site where videos already play.
I don't know where all the crowing against Firefox is coming from in this thread, but people need to put things in perspective. Most users will not even notice that videos play differently across browsers, let alone want to switch over this fact. While IE is still using flash to play video, YouTube and the rest cannot drop the platform and firefox will always fall back on that. Users won't notice. Their videos will keep playing.
Chrome, chrome, chrome. They made a big splash, but not very many people got wet. They certainly didn't thrill me enough to relish the prospect of MPEG-LA and their patents turning into the next Unisys and sinking every browser on the planet. Yes, H264 is technically better than OGG. But JPEG2000 was in the same position against JPEG, and it was--correctly--dropped like a stone due to patent issues.
The video tag is dead. Patent encumbered formats are practical impossibility, not only for FOSS browsers, but even for smaller commercial ones like Opera. If even a company like Opera wasn't going to come to the table over this, you know that something stank about MPEG-LA and their future position on licensing. Apple and Google have other concerns which they judge to override their patent concerns. But we'll see the proof of this in the coming years when MPEG-LA decides to "leverage" its "intellectual property rights". There's a story about a frog and scorpion which might offer insight into this issue.
Using platform libraries is how web video (including flas) already works. Or should I say, already doesn't work.
I consider Enter the Matrix to have been a surprisingly good movie tie in; in fact, I'd consider the game to be the true spiritual successor to the first Matrix film. Missions like the post office and the airport missions has the feel of what you sort of expected was the kind of thing the rebels actually got up to in the Matrix. The game only fell down mission wise when it stuck too close to the film it was bound into supporting.
But let's talk gameplay.
In my opinion, Enter the Matrix gets over looked an awful lot, despite the fact that it did bullet time combat right. Yes the game had glitches. Yes the animations were not the best. Yes the game was short. But the sheer fun and depth of the bullet time and combat system give it a lot of kudos in my eyes. There was a wealth of close combat moves, weapons, takedowns, gymnastics, etc all of which took on a new depth once you pressed the focus button. If you look at the bullet time in titles like Max Payne or Bayonetta, you see its really just a slowdown button and not the "Devil Trigger"-esque upgrade it should be; your short burst of super power, called upon in a pinch.
In addition, the sheer scope of your abilities in that game is matched by very few other titles. When you find yourself thinking "Hmmmm, what way will I kill the next group of enemies", you know the developers did something right. The blending of ranged and close combat worked well, as it the ability to interact with enemies and the environment to pull off stunts and takedowns.
Enter the Matrix had its flaws, but it went on to form the core of the The Path of Neo, which was probably the definitive Matrix title, which took all the concepts from the first game and gave them the polish that was needed.
No. They just know it comes out of anywhere but newspapers.
Well, some people spend ten years in a living hell of a marriage filled with bickering, friction, conflict, betrayal and sometimes physical conflict.
Now, even in these cases, there is sometimes still what could be called "love" there; but the end product is not something others would consider very beautiful.
Most hardcore religious types typically seek to impose their beliefs on everyone else. If they can't do it overtly, they'll adopt this kind of passive aggressive nonsense to get their way. Telling of their convictions is the fact that while they say they've done nothing wrong, they never bothered to tell the army exactly what they were getting.
The rifles should all be refunded. They've essentially all got graffiti on them.
I don't think it's a generational thing. The reality is that most Firefox users are those who migrated from IE; mostly likely IE6 and IE7, both woefully stagnant examples of a browser. Firefox was a big step up and most Firefox users have seen little reason to change, believing that Firefox represents the pinnacle of web browser innovation. And to be fair, up to 18 months ago, there weren't a lot of core features on other browsers compelling enough to get Firefox users to switch.
It's true that Firefox has typically been playing catch up throughout its lifespan. However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside). Process separation, general speed, stability, memory fragmentation, etc. Their stance on self signed certs is also, frankly, backward; putting the brakes on a more secure web for each and every one of their users. And while extensions are all well and good, I personally find that Mozilla have been offloading much needed innovations in their UI and feature-set to third party add-ons (Tab-Mix Plus anyone?); Bare-bones Firefox leaves a lot to be desired. Now we're not likely to see Firefox 4.0 until the end of this year, if that.
I personally think Firefox is going to end up losing a substantial fraction of its userbase over the coming year as competitors--especially Google--keep continually releasing new features and widgets. Killer extensions are not going to save it if the core feature set falls behind.
Then again, there's always the Adblock factor.
H264 is an open standard as well in many ways as many academics and companies have contributed to it. it is literally the best because everyone has worked on it for years and years and years. the only potential pitfall is that en/decoders might be covered by patents.
Sounds a bit like JPEG 2000. A provably superior standard, the product of many top minds, yet not one in a million sites ever uses it, and I'm not even sure there's a browser out there that supports it.
Yes H264 is the superior standard. We all know that. But H264 is unusable as a web standard while protection money needs to be paid to MPEG-LA. It's that simple. Google and apple have their eye on embedded devices, where h264 will probably end up working as a standard. But on the web? With site hosts and browser makers both vulnerable to take downs by a single company? It will never work.
JPEG 2000 proved that the web will -- quite rightly -- drop a superior technology if patent restrictions are placed on it(And that was back in the days before a major alternative browser presence). The web is going to do the same for H264. The HTML5 video tag is dead. We're back to ad hoc solutions for video; oh yes, and flash. And it's going to be like this for the next 20 years until the H264 patents expire.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,...". What a joke.
Amen. The modern game controller is the product of thirty years of continuous research, development and feedback. It has evolved in tandem with the control schemes of games in a natural way. The result is that millions of game players now routinely control the movement of characters in a 3D enviornment, while simultaneously and independently controlling the camera, and controlling several other functions such as jumping, firing, item management, etc.
If you told a geek 30 years ago that millions of ordinary people would be able to do these things using complicated devices, he would have laughed at you. Yet here we are.
The level of control needed in modern games cannot be supplied by a Natal or Wii-Mote or whichever new fangled motion controller these companies come up with. If you make the device simple, then only simple actions can be performed. We need the complexity of the modern controller to play modern games.
Either way it debunks the Drake Equation in a humorous and easy to understand way. That gives it a plus in my book.
You either received too much money as a kid, or make too little money as an adult.
Forget reputations. The big question here is if there's money to be made in China at all.
Over the last 10 years, there has been a roaring trade between the west and China. Ordinarily, this would be a great thing, but so far trade has been completely one sided. The fact is, the west has very little that the Chinese actually want to buy, or cannot manufacture themselves. Individual companies have been making short term gains by relocating their businesses to China; but in the long term, Chinese competitors (generally state subsidised) quickly emerge and dominate the local market and then the export market. For short term gain, western companies essentially write their own death warrants.
Google has gone into China. It has gotten nowhere. It's not the only company to see this happen. This big market, a fifth or the worlds population, turns out not to actually be worth the effort in most cases. Not only do you have to put up with the nineteenth century nonsense perpetuated by the communist party, you have to accept the fact that local competitors can and will eat you alive, either with state assistance, ruthless exploitation of labour, or by flat out ignoring the IP rules you hold so dear. Tell me the Western company that is making money in China itself. Making the kind of money that's going to help pay the balance of trade deficit that has emerged from the amount of money Chinese exporters have made in the last 10 years. Name me one.
China isn't worth it. At least not now. Come back in 30 years when the country has some human rights, democratic government and respect for trade laws. Then you can do, what is commonly called, business. There'll probably be a lot more money in people's pockets by that time too. Right now the whole country is a shell game you can never win, no matter how much you think the rules have to be the same. There's no point talking about gaining first mover advantage in a country where people can't even change jobs without a bloody chit. Not for the vast majority of companies.
Maybe Google will finally come to realise this. People may think its signals their return to the light side of the force. Personally, I'm inclined to think Google simply has a most ironic stance towards the personal data to compiles on the world population, jealously guarding it from all comers. Either way, Google leaving China will end up being a net positive for the company, its users, and the balance of trade deficit. The Chinese might lose a few search results, but frankly, that's the bed they've made for themselves right now.
Stale Bread!! Luxury! We've lived like kings on stale bread. No, it was potato jackets for us; mouldy ones of course. And we were happier for them!
That kind of thinking is what has produced such quality television titles as Big Brother and American Idol, while simultaneously getting good shows canned.
Yet another example of how the market, left to itself, can actually end up tanking its entire industry.
I've read extensively on the Galileo incident and I see no reason to change the the long accepted wisdom that it is a classic case of conflict between religious dogma and authority against scientific investigation..
I have however encountered quite a large number of people who have been persuaded by recent post-modernist type logic that in fact no; it was perfect alright and indeed correct for the church to threaten to burn Galileo alive because either/or
1) He was rude,
2) His finding would overturn centuries of dogma
3) Galileo's concrete observations were not good enough because he lacked the mathematics to describe them
Needless to say, I find such arguments unconvincing.
The Catholic church suppressed science. They threatened to kill Galileo and forced him to retract his theories. People often forget that last part. Galileo went to his grave holding that the Sun went around the Earth. You don't believe me? There's an official confession signed by him to that effect? You think he privately though otherwise? Tough; that confession is the end of the story. The church got what it wanted. Galileo and his works were suppressed.
I don't know exactly where this new apologia for the churches behaviour in the Galileo affair comes from, but I suspect it has more to do with US Culture Wars than actual critical thinking. Ironic, as for years the Galileo affair was a classic incident that Protestants held as demonstrating the abusive and backward position of the Catholic church. It's unfortunate that the relevant Wikipedia pages have been dragged into such revisionism, and in so doing have given it far more credit than it deserves. That's just another problem with Wikipedia and its monopoly on knowledge and viewpoints, but I'll leave that rant for another day.
Amen. NAT is the Fucking Devil. May it die a slow and horrible death.
To be honest with you, I just don't care anymore. If someone crashes a plane and kills a few thousand Americans, I no longer see that as adequate justification for the nonsense millions of air travellers have to put up with every single day. Sure have your minutes silence at the UN. Have a few for all those victims of starvation and genocide while you're at it.
But please, let me get a flight my country to another country and back without having to take off my shoes and belt, step through a perv machine, give up all my data to third party TSAs, and sit for an hour without a book, drink, mp3 player, laptop or the right to take a piss, just because you think you're so important that I might just hijack the plane, fly it across the Atlantic and crash it into your local Wal-mart.
The WTO is a paper shield. Big countries continue to make and break trade rules as they see fit.
The US has tried and succeeded on several occasion in breaking WTO "rules". What goes around....
I turned on the television a few nights ago and watched Clint Eastwood beat three men unconscious with a axe butt and then casually remark that "you can't beat a good piece of hickory". Should that have come with a mental health warning too?