Of course it cuts both ways. Gun laws give the righteous a weapon so they can defend themselves. They also put guns into the hands of small-time criminals, who wouldn't have one otherwise (let's not talk about the serious criminals, they always have guns no matter how illegal you make them).
In the real world, things level out. For example, there's a famous case of just such a bad guy in my home town, many many years ago. He couldn't get fired because being an asshole isn't illegal, but when it was brought to court, the judge did understand the problem and ruled that while he couldn't be fired, he could be placed in a different position, and even ordered which one. It was one where the roles were reversed - the guy was a chauvinist and was constantly harrassing women around him. He was put in the only part of the company where he was the only guy. The gals had their revenge, and as the story goes, he quit on himself two months later.
Which goes to say that there are the words of the law in the books, and there is the spirit of the law as realized. Courts - at least here - are pretty good at spotting those who try to exploit the words of the law to their benefit while murdering the spirit. And they don't stand for that kind of crap.
Watch your unemployment go up Tom. Thank you for your asshole attitude. These companies just found another reason to outsource the work to third world nations.
Bullshit. They've been selling us that strawman for 10 years now, all the while using it to eliminate employee rights, lower wages and generally destroy the "social" part of our social market economy.
If they were right, those steps should have produced some positive results. They haven't. Oh, wait, corporate profits have gone through the roof.
Now, if we could cut the stupid ad hominem attacks out, it would help. I've never been unemployed in my life except when I choose to (had some money to burn after the dot-com era, for example). But I've worked closely with HR for years, including many 1:1 talks with the head of HR of a medium sized company (~2000 employees). I think I have a much better picture about what makes a company fire people or outsource work than the evening news portray.
First of all the "citizens" seem to be protected (and thus considered "citizens") only if they are employees. Strange. I thought the managers and the shareholders are also citizens...
Laws always protect the weaker party of a contract. The stronger one doesn't need protection. Aside from that, yes, these laws are considered employee protection laws. There are other laws that protect shareholders, for example, from their threats. Which are different. Those laws are about things like fraud, insider trading, etc.
If only Germany would allow that. You see, those "citizens" (translation: slacky employees) know that they can't be fired (unless eating babies alive, or some other gruesome act). Since they can't be fired, they don't work.
Maybe you should try talking about things you know something about.
First, you can review performance, set goals, measure them, and all that. You just can't do it arbitrarily at will, there are some regulations you have to follow. The most important is that companies in Germany elect a workers council, democratically elected representatives of the employees (you do like democracy, don't you?) which have a right to have a say in such matters. Second, of course you can fire. You just can't do it without reason, again there are laws regulating under what conditions you can fire someone. Three, just like pretty much everywhere else in the world, it is idiotic to make one blanket statement about the whole country. There are certainly companies where your words are pretty much true, and there are others where employees would die laughing if they read them.
So please Mr. German, spare me your totalitarian idea that some category is the "citizen" while the others are "non-citizens" (or shall I say... "sub-citizens"??? as in "sub-humans").
Similarly, nothing uncomputable seems to occur in our brains.
No, but every time we've tried to emulate it, or even understand it, we found out that it's a whole lot more tricky than it seemed. It's a bit like fusion, which is always "just 20 years away", in 1960, in 1970, in 1980,... up until today.
More importantly, as science begins to understand the mind-body link better, it appears more and more likely that human-like intelligence requires a human-like body. A disembodied intelligence is likely to be very strange and very much unlike us.
And finally, the entire area of emotions has just begun to catch the interest of AI researchers, while brain scientists are finding out that it is a whole lot more important to the whole thing than we thought, that you can not take it away and end up with an emotionless, but otherwise human being.
So if you want an AI that you can chat with and that understands you, the order is quite tall. You need to understand and code not only reasoning, but also understand and emulate body-feedback and emotions. And at this point, since we don't even know how they work in the human brain, we have no idea how to do that.
My personal belief is that we won't replace ourselves with machine intelligence anytime soon nor anytime not so soon. I'd rather look towards genetic engineering and embedded (into our body) computers than AI. When we finally build AI, it will be for similar purposes than brains in animals evolved - to control a large, complex machine, like a space station or big space craft. As such, it will likely have the senses and the mental processes to deal with that. It may have a feeling comparable to our "hunger" when its energy reserves run low, and react by turning the solar sails much like we would go and eat something (hm, more like a plant than an animal, but you get my drift). It would have emotions, but none that we can relate to. Would it consider us its master, or view us much like we view the bacteria in our guts? Would it even think in terms like that? It's hard to know.
So don't be so quick with assuming that there's machine intelligence out there. There may not be, or they be so alien that neither of us recognizes the other as an intelligence.
Fortunately, here in Germany you can't just fire someone like that, either.:)
You see, our laws work to protect the citizens, not just the corporations. You see, your "rights" as a corporation only exist because the laws of the land grant them to you. Your desire to ignore the (other) laws of the land is a little... stupid.
As I said: Your mental model is closer to slavery than to a contractual relationship between adult citizens.
Most managers don't think like that, unfortunately. Remember that the majority of managers did not get anywhere by being good at anything real. It is mostly politics, connections, and being able to hide the bodies.
To most managers, the top sales guy could be twice as good if he'd just stop slacking off at facebook all day.
They don't understand that it may be an integral part of why he is as good as he is. Try to change him and you may find his performance changes as well - not necessarily in the desired direction.
I pay for the internet connection, electricity, desk, and even for the time you are there, supposed to be working. And I can't check on you ? Does that strike anyone else as utterly ridiculous ?
No, it doesn't. Your mental model isn't of employment, it's of slavery.
I read TFA in the original language, not the crappy translation. We are talking about things like cameras in the toilets here. Yes, you definitely can't check on me there.
And, quite frankly, it says a lot about the control freaks in management that they need to have it spelt out in a law that what I do in my private life after hours is something we used to call "private". Yes, even if I post it on Facebook for all to see. It is private in the sense that as long as my work is according to contract, it is none of your fucking business. I sold myself to you for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, if you want to have anything to do with the other 16 hours and the other 2 days, we need to renegotiate my contract including pay.
No, they look to the government for guidance still. It's in the character. They still don't have real freedom of speech there.
So it is only "freedom" if it is identical to your version of freedom ?
Please, cut down the arrogance a few notches, you'll notice the rest of the world likes you a lot better if you don't go around all the time assuming that your way is the one and only true path to whatever.
Our freedom of speech (I'm german) is as real as yours. We just have some priorities differently. For example, we don't allow people to threaten abortion doctors with murder under the cover of "free speech". Our version of your "free speech" is called "freie Meinungsäußerung". That has three parts: Free, speech and opinion. What it means is you can freely express your opinion. If you leave the area of expressing your opinion - and "we'll kill you" isn't an opinion anymore - you may run into trouble.
And no, we don't look for the government for guidance. In fact, our current government is such a joke, anyone who does look to them for anything except satire is retarded. However, what we do is not share the ridiculous paranoia about the government that is visible in the US. We don't think anything done by the government is automatically evil and to be mistrusted. We view the government as an entity much like many others - capable of both good and evil.
Good luck with that. The "license" for the electronic book-like thing you "purchased" will say you can't return it. It will be a take the money and run scenario.
We'll see. There is more than enough room between misleading advertisement or misrepresentation (they call it a "book", but it is more like a magazine) and outright fraud that a lawyer would take the case. At that stage, settling silently with me is a ton cheaper than the case, the bad press and the risk of getting a precedent set, however small it may be.
In the US, small claims court will usually get you settled.
Same here as the comment in the summary. I'll not buy books with ads, and I'll return them as defective if they put them there without telling me beforehand.
I wonder how long until more people are fed up with being constantly bombarded and there's a counter-movement. We already have adbusters et al, but they don't do it. Too much counterculture. Just counter-ads would be more than enough.
But then again, the majority of people apparently enjoy being treated like cattle. Would never admit it, of course.
Even ICE trains are late often, and while they are comfortable, that's only the ICEs, the flagships, so to speak. The rest of the trains is mostly older than I am, and usually cramped as they have dramatically reduced the number of trains.
Really, when speaking about Deutsche Bahn, compare it with itself 20 years ago. The Deutsche Bahn from 20 years ago would put todays Deutsche Bahn AG out of business within a year.
This is exactly my thought. As far as I know, nobody is saying you CAN'T post photos of these homes.
No, not yet. However, the government is deliberating passing a law that does. This protest is presumably part of the current public debate, a protest against making even more laws regulating what you can and can not do in public.
You can still take pictures of everything in public view, and so can Google.
You're not up to speed. There is currently a public debate about whether or not there should be a law prohibiting Google from doing so. Several members of the government are involved in the debate, so it's not just hot air. The vice prime minister has come out on the "against pictures" side, though I don't recall if he's supporting an explicit law or not, as he's a libertarian and that would be strange, but then again in the realm of politics truth is stranger than fiction.
And, so, as soon as the first firecracker is detonated on a high-speed US train, and maybe even before then, you'll be taking off your shoes, placing your laptop and one-ounce bottles on the conveyer, and stepping into the backscatter microwave to the titillation or, more likely, horror of some TSA flunky tasked with scrutinizing the greasy rolls of fat enveloping like undulating armor the most insecure, paranoid nation of all the tribes of the Earth.
Not so sure.
Trains were blown up by terrorists over here in Europe. Still no security whatsoever. I can go straight from the subway into a high-speed train on the train station, they don't even check my ticket until during travel.
Maybe in the US things would play out differently, but I'm not sure. For air travel, for some reason we accept all the bullshit security theatre. That doesn't mean we'd accept it everywhere. It is all about context. For example, when I visited someone in jail once (work-related), I wasn't surprised at being scanned and having to hand in my mobile phone. If the same were to happen at, say, a restaurant I want to dine in, I'd tell the waiter that was an interesting joke but would he please show me to my table now. And if he insisted, I'd go somewhere where they actually serve food instead of idiocity.
The context of train travel is different than air travel. The mental model of even long-distance high-speed trains is more closely to a subway ride than to an airplane ride. Which sets expectations to being similar.
Since people around the world read this - is there an example of privately run national railroads that actually work, are mostly on time, and are comfortable, clean, etc. ?
The examples I know sound like evidence that a railroad system can not be run by private companies. Trains in the UK are famously dirty (and I was riding 1st class!) and late. Germany used to be famous for its punctual trains - on the minute, no matter the distance - and excellent service, but ever since they've made the train company private, both has been going downhill rapidly.
What seems to work are public railroads (Switzerland, as I recall, is now what Germany used to be) or local, private railroad companies (several good examples exist in Germany).
I wonder why that is, and I wonder if it's a general thing or just a problem with the countries I know.
There are 2-3 million blind (enough) people in the United States alone to make this a hugely attractive market.
For mainstream products, possibly. Then again, mainstream products ride on high volumes, and sometimes a few millions really isn't that much. The thing is: If blind people were such an attractive market, then by the laws of the market, suppliers would be all over them to provide them with stuff. I'm not blind, and I don't know anyone closely who is, but from what I gather, that is not exactly the case.
This a potential multi-billion-dollar industry, they just need to get out of the way if they care about blind people.
They don't. In which country does the government care for anyone except themselves, really? What they do is listen to lobbyists. And the "we are all dying because of piracy!!!" lobby is a little bit larger than the "think of the blind people" lobby.
I'm looking forward to the usual suspects coming forward with the "let the market sort it out" argument.
Please?
So we can follow up with suggestions as to how to create more disabled people so their number grows enough that they are an interesting market segment.
After all, we don't need no stinkin' government regulation, do we? The market will sort it all out. Won't it?
In fact, once we have RFID bullets, I'm thinking about setting up an Internet site that brings mothers of soldiers in contact with the mothers of the enemy soldiers their sons have killed.
It'll be interesting to see how long wars can last after that. War mostly works only because it is anonymous. And we've known that for a long time, it's one of the strongly emotional topics in "Im Westen nichts Neues" ("All Quiet on the Western Front"). We just don't yet have the technology to break through it.
Which explains nicely why we have won the war so quickly and decisively, yes?
How about: It's gotta be rough playing the Americans when every time one of your team mates dies the whole operation gets questioned back home, and resupply is limited. Every time you begin pounding on the enemy, media outrage over "unnecessary violence" and civilian victims cuts into your offense. Where every time you kill a Taliban, two so-far-neutral Afghans sign up for revenge. And your only chance of winning is that your opponent... uh... well... actually, nobody has ever successfully invaded Afghanistan, so you really have no idea how to win.
Porn is a masturbation tool. Soft porn has no use at all, except maybe to pretend to be porn where real porn doesn't or can't exist.
Wrong assumption. Hardcore and softcore serve different purposes. You are mostly right about hardcore. Softcore used to be a replacement for non-adult teens who couldn't get hardcore, but could get softcore. These days, with the Internet and any kind of filth you want one search away, that purpose has vanished.
However, there have been quite a few "erotic movies" made in the past twenty or so years. Sometimes hardcore, sometimes softcore, always with the focus less on masturbation and more on... well, I guess art, drama and other things that you usually find in movies. Since the genre is fairly new, most of the movies are exploratory. For example, Tokio Decadence contains explicit sex, but isn't exactly a masturbation tool, most people find it rather disturbing. Or what about Irreversible? There is a very long (nine minutes) explicit rape scene (including anal) in it, but it is most definitely not a porn movie and the rape scene is the core story element.
So while porn is usually shallow and stupid, simplifications like yours are likewise. If talking about a specific movie, I'd rather check what kind of movie it is first.
And we live it -- it's not a game... EA is very cavalier about it: "Well, it's just a game." But it isn't a game to the people who are suffering from the loss of the children and loved ones.'
Easy solution: Don't buy it, don't play it. There, solved that for you.
Really, we as a society need to get out of this stupid tribal mindset that we are offended by things that other people do with no effect whatsoever on ourselves. I'll admit up front that it isn't the same level of evil, but it is in the same category (semantically) as Taliban who are offended at other people being in love with each other.
And yes, I say that to a griefing mother. Grief makes you irrational, and irrational people should not be the ones who decide how society works. They deserve our support and comfort, but they don't deserve to dictate policy.
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Of course it cuts both ways. Gun laws give the righteous a weapon so they can defend themselves. They also put guns into the hands of small-time criminals, who wouldn't have one otherwise (let's not talk about the serious criminals, they always have guns no matter how illegal you make them).
In the real world, things level out. For example, there's a famous case of just such a bad guy in my home town, many many years ago. He couldn't get fired because being an asshole isn't illegal, but when it was brought to court, the judge did understand the problem and ruled that while he couldn't be fired, he could be placed in a different position, and even ordered which one. It was one where the roles were reversed - the guy was a chauvinist and was constantly harrassing women around him. He was put in the only part of the company where he was the only guy. The gals had their revenge, and as the story goes, he quit on himself two months later.
Which goes to say that there are the words of the law in the books, and there is the spirit of the law as realized. Courts - at least here - are pretty good at spotting those who try to exploit the words of the law to their benefit while murdering the spirit. And they don't stand for that kind of crap.
Watch your unemployment go up Tom. Thank you for your asshole attitude. These companies just found another reason to outsource the work to third world nations.
Bullshit. They've been selling us that strawman for 10 years now, all the while using it to eliminate employee rights, lower wages and generally destroy the "social" part of our social market economy.
If they were right, those steps should have produced some positive results. They haven't. Oh, wait, corporate profits have gone through the roof.
Now, if we could cut the stupid ad hominem attacks out, it would help. I've never been unemployed in my life except when I choose to (had some money to burn after the dot-com era, for example). But I've worked closely with HR for years, including many 1:1 talks with the head of HR of a medium sized company (~2000 employees). I think I have a much better picture about what makes a company fire people or outsource work than the evening news portray.
First of all the "citizens" seem to be protected (and thus considered "citizens") only if they are employees. Strange. I thought the managers and the shareholders are also citizens...
Laws always protect the weaker party of a contract. The stronger one doesn't need protection. Aside from that, yes, these laws are considered employee protection laws. There are other laws that protect shareholders, for example, from their threats. Which are different. Those laws are about things like fraud, insider trading, etc.
If only Germany would allow that. You see, those "citizens" (translation: slacky employees) know that they can't be fired (unless eating babies alive, or some other gruesome act). Since they can't be fired, they don't work.
Maybe you should try talking about things you know something about.
First, you can review performance, set goals, measure them, and all that. You just can't do it arbitrarily at will, there are some regulations you have to follow. The most important is that companies in Germany elect a workers council, democratically elected representatives of the employees (you do like democracy, don't you?) which have a right to have a say in such matters.
Second, of course you can fire. You just can't do it without reason, again there are laws regulating under what conditions you can fire someone.
Three, just like pretty much everywhere else in the world, it is idiotic to make one blanket statement about the whole country. There are certainly companies where your words are pretty much true, and there are others where employees would die laughing if they read them.
So please Mr. German, spare me your totalitarian idea that some category is the "citizen" while the others are "non-citizens" (or shall I say... "sub-citizens"??? as in "sub-humans").
Pfft. What a stupid strawman.
Oh please, they've been saying that for 20 years now. Surprise, there are still plants around, despite all the strawmen of outsourcing.
Outsourcing is not the main contributing factor of unemployment. That's a lie, plain and simple.
Just to add insult to injury: Almost everything in that law already is illegal. It's a typical "quick, someone do something" law.
"Thinks it is an above-average driver and lover."
Similarly, nothing uncomputable seems to occur in our brains.
No, but every time we've tried to emulate it, or even understand it, we found out that it's a whole lot more tricky than it seemed. It's a bit like fusion, which is always "just 20 years away", in 1960, in 1970, in 1980,... up until today.
More importantly, as science begins to understand the mind-body link better, it appears more and more likely that human-like intelligence requires a human-like body. A disembodied intelligence is likely to be very strange and very much unlike us.
And finally, the entire area of emotions has just begun to catch the interest of AI researchers, while brain scientists are finding out that it is a whole lot more important to the whole thing than we thought, that you can not take it away and end up with an emotionless, but otherwise human being.
So if you want an AI that you can chat with and that understands you, the order is quite tall. You need to understand and code not only reasoning, but also understand and emulate body-feedback and emotions. And at this point, since we don't even know how they work in the human brain, we have no idea how to do that.
My personal belief is that we won't replace ourselves with machine intelligence anytime soon nor anytime not so soon. I'd rather look towards genetic engineering and embedded (into our body) computers than AI. When we finally build AI, it will be for similar purposes than brains in animals evolved - to control a large, complex machine, like a space station or big space craft. As such, it will likely have the senses and the mental processes to deal with that. It may have a feeling comparable to our "hunger" when its energy reserves run low, and react by turning the solar sails much like we would go and eat something (hm, more like a plant than an animal, but you get my drift). It would have emotions, but none that we can relate to.
Would it consider us its master, or view us much like we view the bacteria in our guts? Would it even think in terms like that? It's hard to know.
So don't be so quick with assuming that there's machine intelligence out there. There may not be, or they be so alien that neither of us recognizes the other as an intelligence.
Fortunately, here in Germany you can't just fire someone like that, either. :)
You see, our laws work to protect the citizens, not just the corporations. You see, your "rights" as a corporation only exist because the laws of the land grant them to you. Your desire to ignore the (other) laws of the land is a little... stupid.
As I said: Your mental model is closer to slavery than to a contractual relationship between adult citizens.
Most managers don't think like that, unfortunately. Remember that the majority of managers did not get anywhere by being good at anything real. It is mostly politics, connections, and being able to hide the bodies.
To most managers, the top sales guy could be twice as good if he'd just stop slacking off at facebook all day.
They don't understand that it may be an integral part of why he is as good as he is. Try to change him and you may find his performance changes as well - not necessarily in the desired direction.
I pay for the internet connection, electricity, desk, and even for the time you are there, supposed to be working. And I can't check on you ? Does that strike anyone else as utterly ridiculous ?
No, it doesn't. Your mental model isn't of employment, it's of slavery.
I read TFA in the original language, not the crappy translation. We are talking about things like cameras in the toilets here. Yes, you definitely can't check on me there.
And, quite frankly, it says a lot about the control freaks in management that they need to have it spelt out in a law that what I do in my private life after hours is something we used to call "private". Yes, even if I post it on Facebook for all to see. It is private in the sense that as long as my work is according to contract, it is none of your fucking business. I sold myself to you for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, if you want to have anything to do with the other 16 hours and the other 2 days, we need to renegotiate my contract including pay.
No, they look to the government for guidance still. It's in the character. They still don't have real freedom of speech there.
So it is only "freedom" if it is identical to your version of freedom ?
Please, cut down the arrogance a few notches, you'll notice the rest of the world likes you a lot better if you don't go around all the time assuming that your way is the one and only true path to whatever.
Our freedom of speech (I'm german) is as real as yours. We just have some priorities differently. For example, we don't allow people to threaten abortion doctors with murder under the cover of "free speech". Our version of your "free speech" is called "freie Meinungsäußerung". That has three parts: Free, speech and opinion. What it means is you can freely express your opinion. If you leave the area of expressing your opinion - and "we'll kill you" isn't an opinion anymore - you may run into trouble.
And no, we don't look for the government for guidance. In fact, our current government is such a joke, anyone who does look to them for anything except satire is retarded. However, what we do is not share the ridiculous paranoia about the government that is visible in the US. We don't think anything done by the government is automatically evil and to be mistrusted. We view the government as an entity much like many others - capable of both good and evil.
Good luck with that. The "license" for the electronic book-like thing you "purchased" will say you can't return it. It will be a take the money and run scenario.
We'll see. There is more than enough room between misleading advertisement or misrepresentation (they call it a "book", but it is more like a magazine) and outright fraud that a lawyer would take the case. At that stage, settling silently with me is a ton cheaper than the case, the bad press and the risk of getting a precedent set, however small it may be.
In the US, small claims court will usually get you settled.
Same here as the comment in the summary. I'll not buy books with ads, and I'll return them as defective if they put them there without telling me beforehand.
I wonder how long until more people are fed up with being constantly bombarded and there's a counter-movement. We already have adbusters et al, but they don't do it. Too much counterculture. Just counter-ads would be more than enough.
But then again, the majority of people apparently enjoy being treated like cattle. Would never admit it, of course.
You must be a foreigner.
Even ICE trains are late often, and while they are comfortable, that's only the ICEs, the flagships, so to speak. The rest of the trains is mostly older than I am, and usually cramped as they have dramatically reduced the number of trains.
Really, when speaking about Deutsche Bahn, compare it with itself 20 years ago. The Deutsche Bahn from 20 years ago would put todays Deutsche Bahn AG out of business within a year.
This is exactly my thought. As far as I know, nobody is saying you CAN'T post photos of these homes.
No, not yet. However, the government is deliberating passing a law that does. This protest is presumably part of the current public debate, a protest against making even more laws regulating what you can and can not do in public.
You can still take pictures of everything in public view, and so can Google.
You're not up to speed. There is currently a public debate about whether or not there should be a law prohibiting Google from doing so. Several members of the government are involved in the debate, so it's not just hot air. The vice prime minister has come out on the "against pictures" side, though I don't recall if he's supporting an explicit law or not, as he's a libertarian and that would be strange, but then again in the realm of politics truth is stranger than fiction.
And, so, as soon as the first firecracker is detonated on a high-speed US train, and maybe even before then, you'll be taking off your shoes, placing your laptop and one-ounce bottles on the conveyer, and stepping into the backscatter microwave to the titillation or, more likely, horror of some TSA flunky tasked with scrutinizing the greasy rolls of fat enveloping like undulating armor the most insecure, paranoid nation of all the tribes of the Earth.
Not so sure.
Trains were blown up by terrorists over here in Europe. Still no security whatsoever. I can go straight from the subway into a high-speed train on the train station, they don't even check my ticket until during travel.
Maybe in the US things would play out differently, but I'm not sure. For air travel, for some reason we accept all the bullshit security theatre. That doesn't mean we'd accept it everywhere. It is all about context. For example, when I visited someone in jail once (work-related), I wasn't surprised at being scanned and having to hand in my mobile phone. If the same were to happen at, say, a restaurant I want to dine in, I'd tell the waiter that was an interesting joke but would he please show me to my table now. And if he insisted, I'd go somewhere where they actually serve food instead of idiocity.
The context of train travel is different than air travel. The mental model of even long-distance high-speed trains is more closely to a subway ride than to an airplane ride. Which sets expectations to being similar.
Since people around the world read this - is there an example of privately run national railroads that actually work, are mostly on time, and are comfortable, clean, etc. ?
The examples I know sound like evidence that a railroad system can not be run by private companies. Trains in the UK are famously dirty (and I was riding 1st class!) and late. Germany used to be famous for its punctual trains - on the minute, no matter the distance - and excellent service, but ever since they've made the train company private, both has been going downhill rapidly.
What seems to work are public railroads (Switzerland, as I recall, is now what Germany used to be) or local, private railroad companies (several good examples exist in Germany).
I wonder why that is, and I wonder if it's a general thing or just a problem with the countries I know.
Well, at least when I go by the availability of the website, it should be renamed to Age of Empire offline, because it apparently is.
And I dimly remember that "Flight" (or maybe "Flight!") is already taken as a name for a computer game. Not that anyone at MS would care.
as requested in the other comment, my thoughts:
There are 2-3 million blind (enough) people in the United States alone to make this a hugely attractive market.
For mainstream products, possibly. Then again, mainstream products ride on high volumes, and sometimes a few millions really isn't that much. The thing is: If blind people were such an attractive market, then by the laws of the market, suppliers would be all over them to provide them with stuff. I'm not blind, and I don't know anyone closely who is, but from what I gather, that is not exactly the case.
This a potential multi-billion-dollar industry, they just need to get out of the way if they care about blind people.
They don't. In which country does the government care for anyone except themselves, really? What they do is listen to lobbyists. And the "we are all dying because of piracy!!!" lobby is a little bit larger than the "think of the blind people" lobby.
I'm looking forward to the usual suspects coming forward with the "let the market sort it out" argument.
Please?
So we can follow up with suggestions as to how to create more disabled people so their number grows enough that they are an interesting market segment.
After all, we don't need no stinkin' government regulation, do we? The market will sort it all out. Won't it?
In fact, once we have RFID bullets, I'm thinking about setting up an Internet site that brings mothers of soldiers in contact with the mothers of the enemy soldiers their sons have killed.
It'll be interesting to see how long wars can last after that. War mostly works only because it is anonymous. And we've known that for a long time, it's one of the strongly emotional topics in "Im Westen nichts Neues" ("All Quiet on the Western Front"). We just don't yet have the technology to break through it.
Which explains nicely why we have won the war so quickly and decisively, yes?
How about:
It's gotta be rough playing the Americans when every time one of your team mates dies the whole operation gets questioned back home, and resupply is limited. Every time you begin pounding on the enemy, media outrage over "unnecessary violence" and civilian victims cuts into your offense. Where every time you kill a Taliban, two so-far-neutral Afghans sign up for revenge. And your only chance of winning is that your opponent... uh... well... actually, nobody has ever successfully invaded Afghanistan, so you really have no idea how to win.
Porn is a masturbation tool. Soft porn has no use at all, except maybe to pretend to be porn where real porn doesn't or can't exist.
Wrong assumption. Hardcore and softcore serve different purposes. You are mostly right about hardcore. Softcore used to be a replacement for non-adult teens who couldn't get hardcore, but could get softcore. These days, with the Internet and any kind of filth you want one search away, that purpose has vanished.
However, there have been quite a few "erotic movies" made in the past twenty or so years. Sometimes hardcore, sometimes softcore, always with the focus less on masturbation and more on... well, I guess art, drama and other things that you usually find in movies. Since the genre is fairly new, most of the movies are exploratory. For example, Tokio Decadence contains explicit sex, but isn't exactly a masturbation tool, most people find it rather disturbing. Or what about Irreversible? There is a very long (nine minutes) explicit rape scene (including anal) in it, but it is most definitely not a porn movie and the rape scene is the core story element.
So while porn is usually shallow and stupid, simplifications like yours are likewise. If talking about a specific movie, I'd rather check what kind of movie it is first.
And we live it -- it's not a game... EA is very cavalier about it: "Well, it's just a game." But it isn't a game to the people who are suffering from the loss of the children and loved ones.'
Easy solution: Don't buy it, don't play it. There, solved that for you.
Really, we as a society need to get out of this stupid tribal mindset that we are offended by things that other people do with no effect whatsoever on ourselves. I'll admit up front that it isn't the same level of evil, but it is in the same category (semantically) as Taliban who are offended at other people being in love with each other.
And yes, I say that to a griefing mother. Grief makes you irrational, and irrational people should not be the ones who decide how society works. They deserve our support and comfort, but they don't deserve to dictate policy.