"Hey, humans don't do anything that single-cell organisms couldn't do, just slower and simpler."
This is a dreadful analogy, because humans have many capabilities that single celled organisms lack, e.g:
We perceive the world around us with a variety of senses that are specific to multi-celled creatures. We make tools, and use them to craft a variety of artefacts. We produce art and literature, and thereby leave a record of our individual existence. We abstract the world around us, and model it with complex mathematics.
"But in the end, a human is a different thing despite that, much like an online community is a different thing, even though anyone could mail anyone else 500 years ago."
People were living in communities before the term "person" could properly be applied to them. It is a fundamental part of our nature, and online communities are simply one of many variations that have been applied to the same concept over many thousands of years. Some of the more abstract forms of community such as various religions have been both huge and enduring despite the fact that adherents often spoke different languages and lived many thousands of miles apart.
NB: people could not mail anyone else 500 years ago. Messages were carried by couriers, so they were something that only the rich and powerful could afford to send, and the rigours and dangers of carrying them meant that they often failed to arrive, or arrived so late that the whoever had sent them got wherever they were going before they did. This did not however prevent vast empires from being run very effectively, or huge armies from widely separated countries all of whom spoke different languages from assembling to embark on ambitious expeditions such as the Crusades.
"there are features of online communities that could not emerge if communication would consist of everyone taking 500 letters to 500 people to the post-office and waiting two to three weeks for a reply."
This sounds suspiciously like one of those "what we've always been doing, but on the Internet" patent claims that Slashdotters love to bitch about. Like-minded people have gathered in communal places to gossip, discuss current affairs, play games, entertain each-other, engage in nefarious plots, sell things to one another, and swindle the unwary for thousands of years, so the fact that they now use the Internet for exactly the same things is not in the least surprising (it would be far more remarkable if they didn't). We've also been building sub-communities (communities within communities) for ages as well, e.g. clubs, sects, secret societies, guilds, and various other forms of group that people identify with since time immemorial. Building and maintaining communities is what humans have always spent most of their time doing, so the fact that they also exist on the Internet isn't due to some special attribute of the Internet itself, but merely reflects the nature of those who use it.
"Sure, end users use computers, but really all they do with them is stuff they could've done without them, just faster (according to MS)."
It's actually quite hard to think of something that the majority of people do on computers that they couldn't have done without them. Documents, art, photos, music, and movies all predate personal computing, as does the ability to send such things to virtually anyone in the world; gaming goes back thousands of years, and people were playing "on-line" games as soon as reliable postal services appeared (the Victorian English had play by mail chess games, for example); spreadsheets and accounting software don't actually do anything that hadn't previously been done by a brain, pen, and paper beforehand; databases used to be kept on rolodexes and in filing cabinets; and presentation graphics used to be done with slide projectors and overhead projectors.
This also extends to the way most people use the Internet. Local libraries were (and still are) pretty good research resources, and have the advantage of not needing to sift through thousands of pages of Kelkoo offering to sell you cellular membrane osmosis or crap written by people who know even less about it than you; electronic shopping is an electronic version of going to a mall or high street; email is simply an electronic version of mail; chat software and IP telephony are telephone stand-ins; blogs are electronic newsletters; etc., etc., etc.
"I wonder...is Steve Jobs running at&t wireless now too? You can't help but admire how far his reach has expanded, especially given the relatively short time it has taken."
Steve's reach is incredible. I heard that he's also responsible for Britain's plans to pull it's troops out of Iraq because he wants to maximise the market for the XMas 1997 UK iPhone launch. But there's more: could rumours of the forthcoming iHouse and the problems with the US sub-prime mortgage market completely coincidental? Was the suckiness of Windows Vista really Microsoft's fault, or could Jobs have replaced all Microsoft's departmental heads with iReplicants who ensured that the project went in all the wrong directions, and dedicated vast amounts of resources and time to designing shutdown dialogs? And that asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs, thereby ensuring that man would evolve, and eventually buy Macs, iPods, and iPhones was just a little bit too convenient for comfort, if you ask me.
Of course, none of the above could be true if Steve was a mere human instead of a near immortal alien who hides his vile form beneath black turtle-neck sweaters to disguise the fact that the human-like mask he wears only covers his head.
Any who doubt this should consider the following:
1. Many current Apple products are prefixed by "i". 2. "i" sounds incredibly like "eye", as in "eye of Horus", and also the eye in the Illuminati pyramid that's "concidentally" also on US currency. 3. It also sounds like "aye", an English word of considerable antiquity which indicates blind obedience. 4. The word "conspire" has an "i" in it that sounds uncannily like the "i" in iPod, iPhone, etc. 5. Idol also begins with "i". Could this be because they were originally called "iDolls", and be behind the Old Testament prohibition on worshipping them?
The ancients knew, and tried to tell us, but we didn't listen, and still aren't listening, leaving Jobs free to complete his hundred million year plan of populating an entire planet with mindless ambulent wallets who are genetically compelled to buy and love anything Apple produce, and defend them to the death against criticism by the few valiant geeks whose mighty brains and iron wills have made them immune to the terrible buy rays emanating from a complex hidden in the Earth's core.
"I have, nothing special, just the dutch draft system, but I can tell you that a typical military pack is NOT light."
That was my point. A military field pack is around twice the weight of a typical suit of armour, and it's all concentrated in one place instead of being spread around the body, yet trained soldiers carry them over extremely long distances, and then fight battles. An excellent example of this was British paras and commandos, who fought after marching significant distances over extremely rugged terrain in the 1982 Falklands War carrying not only their own field packs and weapons, but also a variety of heavier armaments such as mortars and the ammunition for them (this was variously termed "yomping" and "tabbing", depending on whether one is talking to a marine or para).
"Sure a trained soldier/warrior will be able to do it, BUT not without a stat hit."
Romans routinely marched 50 miles a day on their roads wearing chainmail or lorica and a metal helmet while carrying a large shield, pilum, short sword, and a pack containing a water / wine skin, food, eating and cooking utensils, weapon maintenance equipment, and various digging and cutting tools. At the end of each day's march, they would use their axes to cut down enough trees to act as supports for earth palisades around the entire army, and then use their digging tools to bank the earth, and excavate a deep ditch around this fortified camp. Remains of such "marching camps" indicate that they were often of considerable size, e.g. the one at Raedykes in Scotland that covers 114 acres.
A true historical incident serves to show how different people who spent every day from the moment they could walk doing hard manual labour were from 21st. century Western blobs of grease. King Harald Godwinson force-marched 1500 men from London to Tadcaster, York (185 miles) in 4 days, where they defeated Harald Hadrada's Viking invaders in a day-long battle so convincingly that only 24 of the original 200 invading ships managed to escape. Then, he heard that William The Bastard had invaded in the south, so he force-marched his army back to London in another 4 days, where they stopped only to gather reinforcements, then marched 105 miles to Hastings, and fought another day-long battle against the fresh Norman troops, who were unable to break their shield wall despite having cavalry. Harald's Saxons still had enough energy to pursue fleeing Breton, Flemish, and Norman forces who routed, and although this pursuit led to Harald's eventual defeat, it is an excellent indicator of how hardy pre-industrial people were, especially when one considers that those forced marches weren't on what either we or the Romans would describe as "roads".
"Remember we are after realism, and if you think someone who has just marched through a forest for the day wearing a full combat outfit is as fresh as a person who hasn't, you must be superman."
Historical accounts from periods ranging from early classical to late mediaeval seem to indicate that there was little effective difference in freshness between armoured and unarmoured troops that was actually caused by its weight rather than other factors such as its tendency to trap heat on hot days, and radiate it on cold ones. However, the fact that people from very hot climates such as Greek hoplites and Persians clibanarii wore it, as well as those from cold ones such as Vikings is an excellent indicator of the fact that the advantages it conferred on its wearer far outweighed any discomfort that they endured.
"If you believe that soldiers wore their full equipment all the time because of ease of transportation I suggest you read up on tactics. You can do this, IF you want your soldiers exhausted when they reach wherever they are going."
Copious historical examples show that this is not the case. If tactical sources diverge from historical fact, then those tactical sources should be revised.
"This is known from roman times with accounts from soldiers on the difference between their march
"You you are a melee class and have chosen heavy armour. Do you know why it is called HEAVY armour? That is right, because it is HEAVY."
People who play role playing games (and write rules for them) routinely overestimate both the weight and encumbrance of armour. The heaviest combat armour from any period (i.e. ancient Greeks to late mediaeval) weighed around 40-50lbs, which is about half a modern military field pack, and unlike said pack, much of the weight was distributed around the body instead of being a heavy lump at the back. There are mediaeval woodcuts of men in full plate armour doing cartwheels, hand-stands, and running and jumping, and Joan of Arc routinely wore it despite being a peasant girl who wasn't trained as a warrior, so it was nothing like as restrictive and heavy as RPG rules (with the notable exception of Chivalry and Sorcery) routinely make it.
NB: many of the myths about mediaeval armour in particular come from the Victorian English, who failed to distinguish between late mediaeval jousting plate and war / combat armour. Jousting plate was massively reinforced on the left-hand side (the lance was couched in the right-hand, pointing to the left, so the left side took the impact), and restricted arm movement to what was necessary for aiming the lance and moving a shield up and down by about a foot, so people wearing it were unable to mount their horses without assistance. Jousting saddles were also specially designed to have low backs so that whoever got hit by a lance slid off instead of arching backwards, which experience had shown was an excellent way to end up as a paraplegic.
"What, you were already wearing? For the entire 6 hour journey through the old forest?"
I suggest you read some history, because people have been wearing armour of all types for periods of far longer than six hours for thousands of years, in climates ranging from winter ice to hot deserts and steamy, humid jungles. The reason for this was logistical: armour had to be transported by some means during campaigns, and wearing it was an excellent means of doing so that left valuable baggage train space free for food, water, missile weapon ammunition, siege artillery parts, and all the other sundry items that an army in the field requires.
"Okay you are entering combat finally, start the counter at 1. What counter you ask? Your exhaustion counter. You do not think you are going to last forever with a ton of steel hanging from your body do you? Ten rounds, that is your max before you are starting to loose it."
The main fatigue factor in pre-firearms battles came from the fact that swinging manual weapons of 2lbs+ around is a lot like chopping down trees with an axe, a notably exhausting activity despite the fact that it isn't usually done while wearing armour. Fatigue might be slightly increased by adding between 20 and 40 lbs of extra weight, but the effect would be minimal due to the fact that most of the warrior class (i.e. D&D fighters) had been training to fight in it since they were seven years old. A far bigger problem once helms with full face protection became common was limited visibility, which made it difficult to deal with threats that weren't directly in front of the armour wearer, thereby rendering them vulnerable to attacks from the side and rear.
"Also heavy armour tends to be very rigid, metals of the age just ain't the flexible, start counter3 to see when it will simply shatter."
The plates that were used in both platemail and full plate were hammer-forged, not cast, so they deformed when struck with sufficient force (i.e. they sustained dents) rather than shattering. There is no documented, or for that matter even mythical account of armour shattering, and there are no existing examples of even the cheapest munition plate (i.e. the stuff that was handed out to foot soldiers, and collected up again for storage) that shows any sign of shattering or cracking, although there are many which either exhibit dents and holes, or signs of dents / holes that ha
"Like a half a dozen political science impaired people before you, you don't understand that the word socialist has multiple meanings and in those countries and actually to most people is isn't the one associated with communism."
And like many reading impaired people, you are answering a point I didn't make, because i didn't say it was associated with communism anywhere in my post. Perhaps I should have restricted myself to words with no more than five letters in them for your benefit.
"Socialism is commonly a concept of social wealth redistribution without any implication on any type of governmental structure."
Again, I fail to see where I said otherwise. You obviously need help with your comprehension, because the phrase: "They were socialists, because there is no state in communism, and therefore no government in the usual sense of the term" does not equate to "socialism requires a state or government", but instead means "communism has no state or government, whereas socialism can have a state or government, ergo the USSR was socialist, hence its name, and not communist".
"It predates Marx."
I fail to see where I said it didn't.
"The confused drivel is the fact that many "capitalists" fail to even try to acknowledge any definition other then the communism one and imply any steps towards social programs such as health care is a step towards communism."
Confused drivel can also be refuting somebody's post by contesting a bunch of points that weren't in it.
"social democracies run under socialist ideals."
They _incorporate some socialist ideals_, but not the central one of collective or state ownership of all property and wealth, hence my phrase "Social democrats seek a society in which many of the the benefits of socialism are achieved without eliminating capitalism", i.e. wealth and property in private hands.
"Just to clarify,
socialism = super set
communism = sub set of socialism "
1) You saying this != it being true.
2) This was not implied in any way by your prior post, which contained the completely unambiguous statement: "Sweden, denmark, Canada etc.. are socialists. USSR, China and Cuba are Communist". No amount of subsequent manoeuvring on your part changes the fact that you said three countries with stock markets, private housing markers, and countless privately owned companies _are_ socialist, just as you also said that three countries with government of the many by the few _are_ communist.
I eagerly await another post refuting the points I didn't make in this one.
"That's great, give them a hard time, they deserve it but how about doing better rather than worse."
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm not defending China, but simply pointing out the hypocrisy of concentrating on their flaws while ignoring our own, both in the present and the recent past.
"I feel absolutely free to critique any political leader from any country, I especially loathe self serving autocrats (I'll give you a hint, no matter how bad democratic leaders have been, the corrupt autocrats were far far worse, even the Chinese ones)."
I agree, but I was actually referring to the entire democratic apparatus in various countries rather than simply the leaders, who come and go even in dictatorships. It's true to say that corruption is usually more obvious in non-democracies, but this doesn't necessarily mean that it's more prevalent than is the case in a country like the US, where getting elected is so expensive that one either has to be very rich, or heavily sponsored by special interests to stand a chance of reaching congress or the senate, let alone forming part of a government. Rich people tend to have have existing ties to various special interests (e.g. the Bush family and big oil, or Cheney's connection to Halliburton), while those who require sponsorship end up indebted to other special interests who helped finance their campaigns. Just because corruption is less obvious doesn't mean it's less endemic, less insidious, or less destructive to ordinary people, whose interests are often diametrically opposed to what the politicians (and increasingly the courts) end up doing.
"What I think you miss is the whole nature of the current Chinese government and it's threat to freedom, democracy and workers rights in the rest of the world and what needs to be done about them to reduce that threat"
Most of the rest of the world has even less in the way of _real_ freedom and workers' rights than China, and unlike many other countries, the situation is improving over there. Don't make the mistake of assuming that 10% of the planet's population which lives in Europe and the US is in any way representative of how the other 90% lives, that the populations of those "Western" countries weren't fighting to establish and maintain those rights until fairly recently, or that the Chinese are anything like the primary threat to them, as well as other rights we used to take for granted (terrorist bogey men, "think of the children" types, and globalisation of Western industries are already doing an excellent job of rights erosion without any help whatsoever from China).
"So, as it turns out not all that much, as long as China continues on it's current course, the pollution they are generating will solve our (workers in democratic countries who want to preserve their rights, fuck so many cents per hour and living in worker/slave dormitories) problems, a bit unfortunate for the countries surrounding China but that's just the way it is."
I think you're severely underestimating the amount of pollution that would be necessary to have any notable impact on the manufacturing capability of a country whose population has reached 1.3 billion, and is still growing. You're also assuming that the Chinese won't clean their act up long before things get to that stage, despite the fact that they've already demonstrated their ability to make drastic changes to societally entrenched ways of living and working in very short periods of time.
"Although I still do support fair trade tariffs, where taxes are loaded onto imported products to cover the cost differences of minimum wage (valid due to global pricing of commodity products), worker safety and conditions, environmental protections, quality inspections, taxation levels (avoiding tax holiday cheating corporations), there is no reason that companies should be forced to compete upon an unequal basis, especially when they support their consumers by providing the local employment rather than pursuing every last cent of profit regardless of the socio economic
"Wise man say, those that pursue the politics of fifty years ago are either historians or idiots."
Wise men don't call others idiots without having some excellent points to refute their arguments with instead of childish excuses for the fact that the Chinese have done far less damage transitioning over a billion people from an agrarian economy to an industrial one than we did in the same period merely sustaining our far smaller population. I suggest you actually check up on what Western industries have been doing, and in many cases still are doing since China started to industrialise in the late 1970s.
"My only concern is what is happening today and what will be happening tomorrow, history is just lessons, that people should not repeat, you kinda missed that whole not repeating history bit didn't you."
It's you that's missed the fact that the US and EU are _still_ polluting far more than China is with half their population. If we can't learn from our own history, then why should the Chinese be expected to do so?
"You kind of idiot logic means it is ok to keep repeating the same mistakes, the same abuses, the same lies over and over and over again."
My kind of logic holds China to the same standard as the rest of us. In case you hadn't noticed, the US generates more pollution than they do with 1/4 their population, so I suggest that you take the advice of a truly wise man, and avoid throwing stones while living inside a glass house.
"Why don't reach further back into history and cite Roman slavery at brick factories, I hear China repeated that example just in the last year, hey that's ok after all the ancient Romans did it too."
We don't need to go anything like as far back as the Romans, because the US and Europe are using slave and forced labour domestically, and their corporations are making big profits from foreign industries that use slaves:
There are plenty of other examples that somebody with enough brain cells to do a little research could find. So once again, we have you, the hypocrite, holding the Chinese up to a standard that your own country doesn't meet. And before you pipe up with some pathetically childish point about slavery being illegal in the Western world, it's also illegal in China, hence the fact that they arrested those responsible for using slaves in the _illegal_ brick kilns you were blathering about.
"as for China, let's have a democracy and really see what the 'Chinese People' actually think, rather than just a few corrupt politicians."
Because democracies have never been governed by a few corrupt politicians.
This however isn't. Sweden, Denmark, and Canada are social democrats, not socialists. Social democrats seek a society in which many of the the benefits of socialism are achieved without eliminating capitalism.
"USSR, China and Cuba are Communist. "
Wrong again. They were socialists, because there is no state in communism, and therefore no government in the usual sense of the term (the collective governs itself by giving everyone a direct say in every decision that's made, or as Marx described it, "a dictatorship of the proletariat"). The reason "USSR" stood for Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics is due to the fact that unlike you, they actually knew the difference between socialism and communism.
"Not only did China get ahead with cheap labour but also with poor working conditions, no pollution restrictions, minimum or no safety/ health conditions and corruption to grease the wheels of profit for those autocrats running the corporofascist society."
China is currently undergoing an industrial revolution, and is actually treating its workers a lot better than Britain did during its industrial revolution, and massively better than Russians during their much later industrial revolution. It looks pretty bad compared to the US and Western Europe today, but people tend to forget that squalid living conditions, non-existent worker rights, dreadful industrial safety, and massive pollution were usual in both Europe and the US only 80 years ago, which means that there are living people who remember a time when a working week was six twelve hour days, and professional gangs of strike breakers beat people to death for trying to get better, safer working conditions and a wage that didn't oblige an entire urban families to live in a single room without its own bath or toilet facilities.
"One reason for the shift to IP instead of production could quite simply be because China is currently quite busily polluting itself to death. As the level of toxic elements rises in the environment it will be interesting to see what future chemical chain reactions will occur and how high the death toll will rise."
Just like other industrialised nations polluted themselves to death until fairly recently. The Great London Smog of 1952 killed 12,000 people, and a mountain of waterlogged mining waste slid onto the town of Aberfan in 1968, killing 144. In the US, LA smog in 1943 reduced visibility to three blocks and people had smarting eyes, respiratory difficulties and vomiting; a 1948 smog containing fluoride emissions from steel mills killed 20 and injured hundreds (many of whom died a short time later) in Donora, Pennsylvania; while a New York smog killed up to 270 people in 1953. We've polluted our rivers and water supplies, polluted the lakes, seas, and oceans, polluted the air, and the ground, in some cases for hundreds of years, so trying to present the Chinese as bad guys because we started cleaning our act up a few decades ago (but still haven't done so as much as we like to think) is utter hypocrisy.
"Meanwhile those who reaped the profits while destroying their country will be seeking means by which to bail with their wealth intact and seek to secure future means of income."
Because nobody in "the West" ever got rich by exploiting both people and the environment with no regard for the welfare of anyone or anything besides themselves. And Western countries haven't operated patently unsafe and incredibly environmentally hostile facilities in countries with cheap labour and lax worker protection laws such as the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, that leaked methyl isocyanate, killing 3800, and permanently disabling thousands of others. We of course wouldn't dream of exporting millions of tons of our own toxic waste to other countries to comply with our own environmental laws, use them to recycle our most toxic products, sell banned pharmaceuticals and contaminated baby formula to them, operate sweat-shops to make consumer goods, or buy sugar from companies that use slave labour. Only the nasty, greedy Chinese would do horrible things like that, because as we all know, Western industry has always been operated by socially responsible people who put people and the planet before crass profit.
"Note that I didn't claim that Xerox invented those technologies; They were simply the first large company to use them AFAICT. In the world of patents, that is unfortunately all that matters."
Not if there's prior art, as was the case with both Englebart and Sutherland, who not only published papers, but were filmed demonstrating their ideas on working systems (Englebart's demo was also attended by around 3,000 people). Alan Kay has categorically stated that the teams involved with UI concepts at PARC in the 1970s were aware of what Englebart and Sutherland had already done, and had great respect for them (Kay reckons Englebart is one of the greatest thinkers in computing), so it's likely that they'd have been very pissed off indeed if Xerox had made them look like a bunch of cheap plagiarists by trying to patent ideas that most of the computer research community knew they hadn't invented.
"The concept of the lone inventor getting a patent, and getting rich licensing it, is only a dream in the current state of affairs."
It was even more of a dream for programmers in the 1960s and 1970s, because software and the ideas it realised couldn't be patented. We are extremely fortunate that this was the case, otherwise large swathes of what we currently take for granted would have been owned by the likes of IBM, DEC, Data General, etc., which means that they'd have taken decades longer to make their way into the mainstream, and some probably wouldn't have appeared at all.
"it's a FUD attack against the product with the largest market share, in this case WinXP. Never mind that the product in question is put out by the same company."
They did the same when Windows XP was launched by running a set of ads showing the Windows 9X BSOD, and a statement about them being things of the past. Irrespective of whether Slashdotters like it or not, the fact of the matter is that during the last decade, Microsoft's effective monopoly in the desktop OS and office automation markets has resulted in their only effective competition being older versions of their own products. People using these older products who aren't corporates don't make any money for Microsoft at all unless they buy said older products with a new machine, but an upgrade sold to 10% of them would earn as much as converting every OS X and Linux desktop out there to Windows, and they'd obviously like much more than 10% of their current users to upgrade, and they won't achieve that by telling them that what they already have is arse-kickingly fabulous.
I stand corrected. Blech! The old rev.1 iMac G5 had pretty anaemic graphics, but they were at least provided by an nVidia chipset with its own video RAM that would have been a better choice for a cheap machine than those dreadful Intel things that use system memory. This is the sort of crap I'd have expected to see in a bottom end $299 desktop system, not something they were expecting people to shell out the best part of $1000 for.
"The one thing I did like was that there was no more Intel video chipset and that they went with a better video chipset."
iMacs never had Intel video. The Mac Mini has it, and so does the MacBook, but the "tablet" iMacs (iMac G5 variants and Intel-based ones) all had nVidia or ATI graphics (depending on model).
"Non free software got it's start by stealing government funded software in the 1980s"
The commercial software industry goes back to the 1960s, when contract programming companies began to sell software that they'd written for one customer to others. The first of these that I can find any reference to is CACI, who began selling the SIMSCRIPT language in 1962, with the most successful early one being ADR's AutoFlow program (1965) which sold several thousand copies, while their MARK IV file manager and report generator earned over a million dollars in revenue within 12 months of being announced.
In 1967, International Computer Programs, Inc. published the first edition of ICP Quarterly, which contained lists and description of commercially available computer software. The first issue had 49 programs in it, but the one from January 1969 contained hundreds. AFAIK None of these were stolen from government funded projects.
"I would not be surprised if lots of CP/M software did have their first PC-DOS versions by little more than a straight recompile (or reassemble)."
Several of them did this, at least in the initial versions, including (but by no means limited to) WordStar, Microsoft's language compilers, and dBase-II. Such programs tended to be.COM files that were limited to the same 64K of RAM as the CP/M originals, and porting ease was increased by the fact that MS/PC-DOS 1.0 was remarkably similar to CP/M in many important respects.
""Boiling water helped decrease disease among city workers."" "This may actually be a major component in why the Industrial Revolution took off in England."
The reason the Industrial Revolution happened in England was largely due to the British Agricultural Revolution, which dramatically increased yields (and therefore the number of people who could be fed per acre of arable land) while also progressively replacing common fields with privately owned ones, displacing those who had previously farmed those fields. The writing was already on the wall by the late 16th century, and agricultural mechanisation in the 18th century sounded the final death knell of both common land farmers and labour-intensive agriculture because it favoured the owners of large tracts of land, who now required far fewer people to work them. Britain had undergone two prior major population explosions (in the 13th and mid 17th centuries), but starvation had resulted in the population falling again due to a lack of adequate agricultural output. The population explosion of the mid 1700s was however sustainable with the new farming techniques, and this led to a permanent (and growing) increase in demand for clothing, pottery, and various other goods that the large and growing labour pool could fulfil by forming cottage industries, which also exploded during this period, and were the precursors to the Industrial Revolution that followed.
Other important factors for Britain were (as you say) its growing trade empire, which led to an accumulation of capital that was looking for profitable investments; a simultaneous scientific and engineering revolution that supplied industry with ever more efficient manufacturing and transport technologies; and significant domestic reserves of coal to drive the new machines. It's also interesting to note that unlike much of the rest of Europe, where countries were often split into separate governmental regions that taxed any items which crossed their borders, Britain was for trade purposes a single nation that allowed products to move freely from any area to any other area, so both manufacturers and food producers had a large and increasingly wealthy domestic market for their wares.
Increased literacy and numeracy were a by-product of the industrial revolution rather than a causal factor (I know you didn't say anything to the contrary, but the theory this topic is based around does). Industries cannot run with manual labour alone: they also need clerks, accountants, secretaries, and other "white collar" workers to handle their many administrative tasks, and such people are also necessary for the large number of financial and service industries that grew up around the factories (banking, transport, postal services, etc.). Such people don't just appear magically from nowhere, but have to be trained, and it didn't take long to realise that the most efficient way to do this was by educating children. A provision of the Factories Act of 1833 made it law for employers of children under the age of 13 to provide them with at least 3 hours of free (i.e. costs could not be deducted from their meagre wages) education per day that they worked, although most large employers had already been doing this for some time because they'd realised that it was a cheap way of turning common labourers into a (then) much rarer and therefore more valuable type of employee. This led to the establishment of the British "middle class" (Americans should note that the British definition of "middle class" isn't quite the same as that of the US).
Ireland IMO stands a pretty good chance of getting the current directive annulled, because it should have been decided according to the relevant EU rules, not EC procedures, which have no jurisdiction over matters of security or foreign policy (the other two pillars of the EU), and therefore cannot legally be used to decide such matters. Any EU legislation that falls outside the jurisdiction of the EC (the EC is the first pillar of the EU) cannot become law without all members agreeing to it, which means that one dissenting member has an effective veto.
The Irish have two other attack routes that they could also use in the European Court of Justice:
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that a person has a right of privacy in "family life, his home and his correspondence". The ECJ has a history of applying this article with a very broad brush, so they'd stand a pretty good chance of getting the directive overturned on the grounds that it violates a citizen's right to private correspondence.
Finally, there's the Data Protection Act. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has opined that the directive contravenes the Act because private companies are required to retain the data, not governments or law enforcement bodies (who have certain exemptions that do not apply to anyone or anything else).
Past ECJ rulings indicate that, unlike "Eurocrats" and politicians, they interpret the spirit of laws rather than strictly adhering to the way they're written, so those who attempt to wiggle through perceived holes in the written rules tend to come badly unstuck.
"That TCE has not been fully ratified does not undermine in any way the Treaty of the European Union (Maastricht 1992)..."
Treaties are not however a European constitution. Contravening the terms of a treaty is therefore illegal, but not unconstitutional.
"In the European Union, things are "unconstitutional" that are incompatible with these key treaties."
They are not, because the treaties are not a constitution, and aren't treated as a constitution.
"Finally, "EC" (if you mean European Community by this) is a distinct legal entity that is part of the EU (European Union), per the Treaty of Rome and Maastricht. "
I know, but I was referring specifically to the EC, not the EU, of which the EC is first (prime) pillar. It is the only pillar where a citizen can use European law to enforce their rights, and where EU law takes precedence over national law -- the other two pillars of the EU (common foreign and security policy, and police and judicial cooperation respectively) are concerned with inter-govenrmental and foreign policy, and have no direct effect on the people who live in EU countries.
"The EC is, however, just a subset of the practical entity that is the EU and the term is generally avoided except when required for legal or technical precision."
Which is precisely the way I used it. The only currently obsolete term is EEC, which is what it used to be called until the Matricht Treaty changed that to EC.
"TCE would abolish the legal and current technical meaning of "EC", although it will probably still get some colloquial use by old people who remember pre-Maastricht days."
It was called the EEC in pre-Mastricht days -- EC is post-Mastricht. Mastricht established the EU, and it also redefined the EC as a political and legal entity rather than an economic one like the older EEC.
"MS is distributing vouchers redeemable for SuSE Linux. According to the lawyers that wrote the GPLv3, that counts as "conveying" SuSE Linux."
This is a ludicrous assertion. Many magazines, newspapers, gas stations, and product boxes carry vouchers that are redeemable against a huge variety of items, but they aren't assumed by law to be distributors of those items, any more than I would be if I gave somebody some money to go to a store and buy said product for themselves. A voucher that entitles one to a free SUSE Linux isn't distributing Linux any more than one that says "Free Big Mac when you show this at any Macdonald's" is distributing Big Macs - Macdonald's are doing the distributing, not whoever is issuing the voucher. If the GPL 3 says otherwise, then it's in for an extremely rough ride when it gets tested in the courts, so I'm pretty sure that it doesn't actually say anything of the sort.
I'm also pretty sure that GPL3 neither implies nor specifically states that those who sell sealed, boxed versions of a compliant Linux distro are bound by it, because that would have raised screams of protest from commercial Linux distros such as RedHat, not to mention being guaranteed a quick and ignominious death if somebody challenged it in court. Even Microsoft haven't got the temerity to try and bind wholesalers and retailers to their software licensing terms (that's why EULA is an acronym for end-user licensing agreement), so it's hard to see why so many people here think that Stallman et al would be stupid enough to try and pull something that even a predatory monopoly with several entire governments in its pocket doesn't think it could get away with.
Something equally important is the fact that they'd need to convince the DA's office that there's enough evidence to warrant bringing a case to court, and if they get past that hurdle, they then have to rely on prosecution lawyers that aren't their own ones to argue it. The defendant on the other hand gets to select his or her legal team, and it's likely that organisations such as the EFF would find some notably able people to represent them "pro bono". A decent team of defence lawyers would have little trouble getting a good proportion of the sort of evidence that are allowed in civil cases ruled inadmissible, and could choose from many expert witnesses who would testify free of charge to establish reasonable doubt about the rest of it. It's likely that they'd also have a notably difficult job finding juries who would consistently and unanimously condemn people to custodial sentences and a life-long criminal record for a first offence of sharing songs or movies over the Internet.
Those members of the *AAs who are pushing for strong criminal sanctions against "casual pirates" should therefore, to paraphrase the old saw, be careful about what they wish for, because they could well get it, after which they will have ample opportunity to lament the fact that unlike civil courts, criminal justice systems that are worthy of the name tend to favour the accused rather than the accuser.
"Do you have a copy of WordStar too? How many versions? Government documents are meant to last for decades, potentially centuries. I have been in places that have large numbers of old WordStar documents, of various formats"
WordStar documents were pretty much like HTML and RTF in that they were plain text with embedded formatting commands, because unlike for example the Microsoft Word document format, WordStar's documents were primarily designed for printing stuff that was nicely formatted, and not as a mechanism for locking people into a single vendor for eternity. In WordStar's case, these commands were of two types: sequences of printing characters such as ".pa" for a page break, and sequences of non-printing characters that usually occur as pairs that bracket a piece of text which should be printed in a certain way (e.g. underlined, superscripted, etc.). This means that all of the actual information in them can easily be viewed with any ASCII-capable text editor, although it's obvious that some of the formatting will be lost (certain types of formatting such as right justification and centred titles were however applied to the text itself, so they'll be retained), and the non-printing sequences will probably be displayed as graphical characters in most modern editors.
It wouldn't take much in the way of programming skill to use such information as the basis of a small utility in Perl or Python to strip the commands out of a WordStar document and turn them into plain text (converting to RTF or HTML could also mostly be done with a simple look-up table), but there isn't really any need to do so because it's directly supported by a wide range of existing commercial, free, and open source software.
Microsoft also removed some standard capabilities from raw sockets in XP SP2 to make it less suitable as a platform for launching certain types of attacks. Unfortunately, this didn't make it any less vulnerable to somebody who was launching said attacks against XP SP2, but it did manage to disable network security testing such as NMAP, thereby preventing admins from using XP SP2 as a platform for ensuring that networks containing other XP SP2 machines weren't vulnerable to that type of attack in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey, humans don't do anything that single-cell organisms couldn't do, just slower and simpler."
This is a dreadful analogy, because humans have many capabilities that single celled organisms lack, e.g:
We perceive the world around us with a variety of senses that are specific to multi-celled creatures.
We make tools, and use them to craft a variety of artefacts.
We produce art and literature, and thereby leave a record of our individual existence.
We abstract the world around us, and model it with complex mathematics.
"But in the end, a human is a different thing despite that, much like an online community is a different thing, even though anyone could mail anyone else 500 years ago."
People were living in communities before the term "person" could properly be applied to them. It is a fundamental part of our nature, and online communities are simply one of many variations that have been applied to the same concept over many thousands of years. Some of the more abstract forms of community such as various religions have been both huge and enduring despite the fact that adherents often spoke different languages and lived many thousands of miles apart.
NB: people could not mail anyone else 500 years ago. Messages were carried by couriers, so they were something that only the rich and powerful could afford to send, and the rigours and dangers of carrying them meant that they often failed to arrive, or arrived so late that the whoever had sent them got wherever they were going before they did. This did not however prevent vast empires from being run very effectively, or huge armies from widely separated countries all of whom spoke different languages from assembling to embark on ambitious expeditions such as the Crusades.
"there are features of online communities that could not emerge if communication would consist of everyone taking 500 letters to 500 people to the post-office and waiting two to three weeks for a reply."
This sounds suspiciously like one of those "what we've always been doing, but on the Internet" patent claims that Slashdotters love to bitch about. Like-minded people have gathered in communal places to gossip, discuss current affairs, play games, entertain each-other, engage in nefarious plots, sell things to one another, and swindle the unwary for thousands of years, so the fact that they now use the Internet for exactly the same things is not in the least surprising (it would be far more remarkable if they didn't). We've also been building sub-communities (communities within communities) for ages as well, e.g. clubs, sects, secret societies, guilds, and various other forms of group that people identify with since time immemorial. Building and maintaining communities is what humans have always spent most of their time doing, so the fact that they also exist on the Internet isn't due to some special attribute of the Internet itself, but merely reflects the nature of those who use it.
"Sure, end users use computers, but really all they do with them is stuff they could've done without them, just faster (according to MS)."
It's actually quite hard to think of something that the majority of people do on computers that they couldn't have done without them. Documents, art, photos, music, and movies all predate personal computing, as does the ability to send such things to virtually anyone in the world; gaming goes back thousands of years, and people were playing "on-line" games as soon as reliable postal services appeared (the Victorian English had play by mail chess games, for example); spreadsheets and accounting software don't actually do anything that hadn't previously been done by a brain, pen, and paper beforehand; databases used to be kept on rolodexes and in filing cabinets; and presentation graphics used to be done with slide projectors and overhead projectors.
This also extends to the way most people use the Internet. Local libraries were (and still are) pretty good research resources, and have the advantage of not needing to sift through thousands of pages of Kelkoo offering to sell you cellular membrane osmosis or crap written by people who know even less about it than you; electronic shopping is an electronic version of going to a mall or high street; email is simply an electronic version of mail; chat software and IP telephony are telephone stand-ins; blogs are electronic newsletters; etc., etc., etc.
"I wonder...is Steve Jobs running at&t wireless now too? You can't help but admire how far his reach has expanded, especially given the relatively short time it has taken."
Steve's reach is incredible. I heard that he's also responsible for Britain's plans to pull it's troops out of Iraq because he wants to maximise the market for the XMas 1997 UK iPhone launch. But there's more: could rumours of the forthcoming iHouse and the problems with the US sub-prime mortgage market completely coincidental? Was the suckiness of Windows Vista really Microsoft's fault, or could Jobs have replaced all Microsoft's departmental heads with iReplicants who ensured that the project went in all the wrong directions, and dedicated vast amounts of resources and time to designing shutdown dialogs? And that asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs, thereby ensuring that man would evolve, and eventually buy Macs, iPods, and iPhones was just a little bit too convenient for comfort, if you ask me.
Of course, none of the above could be true if Steve was a mere human instead of a near immortal alien who hides his vile form beneath black turtle-neck sweaters to disguise the fact that the human-like mask he wears only covers his head.
Any who doubt this should consider the following:
1. Many current Apple products are prefixed by "i".
2. "i" sounds incredibly like "eye", as in "eye of Horus", and also the eye in the Illuminati pyramid that's "concidentally" also on US currency.
3. It also sounds like "aye", an English word of considerable antiquity which indicates blind obedience.
4. The word "conspire" has an "i" in it that sounds uncannily like the "i" in iPod, iPhone, etc.
5. Idol also begins with "i". Could this be because they were originally called "iDolls", and be behind the Old Testament prohibition on worshipping them?
The ancients knew, and tried to tell us, but we didn't listen, and still aren't listening, leaving Jobs free to complete his hundred million year plan of populating an entire planet with mindless ambulent wallets who are genetically compelled to buy and love anything Apple produce, and defend them to the death against criticism by the few valiant geeks whose mighty brains and iron wills have made them immune to the terrible buy rays emanating from a complex hidden in the Earth's core.
"I have, nothing special, just the dutch draft system, but I can tell you that a typical military pack is NOT light."
That was my point. A military field pack is around twice the weight of a typical suit of armour, and it's all concentrated in one place instead of being spread around the body, yet trained soldiers carry them over extremely long distances, and then fight battles. An excellent example of this was British paras and commandos, who fought after marching significant distances over extremely rugged terrain in the 1982 Falklands War carrying not only their own field packs and weapons, but also a variety of heavier armaments such as mortars and the ammunition for them (this was variously termed "yomping" and "tabbing", depending on whether one is talking to a marine or para).
"Sure a trained soldier/warrior will be able to do it, BUT not without a stat hit."
Romans routinely marched 50 miles a day on their roads wearing chainmail or lorica and a metal helmet while carrying a large shield, pilum, short sword, and a pack containing a water / wine skin, food, eating and cooking utensils, weapon maintenance equipment, and various digging and cutting tools. At the end of each day's march, they would use their axes to cut down enough trees to act as supports for earth palisades around the entire army, and then use their digging tools to bank the earth, and excavate a deep ditch around this fortified camp. Remains of such "marching camps" indicate that they were often of considerable size, e.g. the one at Raedykes in Scotland that covers 114 acres.
A true historical incident serves to show how different people who spent every day from the moment they could walk doing hard manual labour were from 21st. century Western blobs of grease. King Harald Godwinson force-marched 1500 men from London to Tadcaster, York (185 miles) in 4 days, where they defeated Harald Hadrada's Viking invaders in a day-long battle so convincingly that only 24 of the original 200 invading ships managed to escape. Then, he heard that William The Bastard had invaded in the south, so he force-marched his army back to London in another 4 days, where they stopped only to gather reinforcements, then marched 105 miles to Hastings, and fought another day-long battle against the fresh Norman troops, who were unable to break their shield wall despite having cavalry. Harald's Saxons still had enough energy to pursue fleeing Breton, Flemish, and Norman forces who routed, and although this pursuit led to Harald's eventual defeat, it is an excellent indicator of how hardy pre-industrial people were, especially when one considers that those forced marches weren't on what either we or the Romans would describe as "roads".
"Remember we are after realism, and if you think someone who has just marched through a forest for the day wearing a full combat outfit is as fresh as a person who hasn't, you must be superman."
Historical accounts from periods ranging from early classical to late mediaeval seem to indicate that there was little effective difference in freshness between armoured and unarmoured troops that was actually caused by its weight rather than other factors such as its tendency to trap heat on hot days, and radiate it on cold ones. However, the fact that people from very hot climates such as Greek hoplites and Persians clibanarii wore it, as well as those from cold ones such as Vikings is an excellent indicator of the fact that the advantages it conferred on its wearer far outweighed any discomfort that they endured.
"If you believe that soldiers wore their full equipment all the time because of ease of transportation I suggest you read up on tactics. You can do this, IF you want your soldiers exhausted when they reach wherever they are going."
Copious historical examples show that this is not the case. If tactical sources diverge from historical fact, then those tactical sources should be revised.
"This is known from roman times with accounts from soldiers on the difference between their march
"You you are a melee class and have chosen heavy armour. Do you know why it is called HEAVY armour? That is right, because it is HEAVY."
People who play role playing games (and write rules for them) routinely overestimate both the weight and encumbrance of armour. The heaviest combat armour from any period (i.e. ancient Greeks to late mediaeval) weighed around 40-50lbs, which is about half a modern military field pack, and unlike said pack, much of the weight was distributed around the body instead of being a heavy lump at the back. There are mediaeval woodcuts of men in full plate armour doing cartwheels, hand-stands, and running and jumping, and Joan of Arc routinely wore it despite being a peasant girl who wasn't trained as a warrior, so it was nothing like as restrictive and heavy as RPG rules (with the notable exception of Chivalry and Sorcery) routinely make it.
NB: many of the myths about mediaeval armour in particular come from the Victorian English, who failed to distinguish between late mediaeval jousting plate and war / combat armour. Jousting plate was massively reinforced on the left-hand side (the lance was couched in the right-hand, pointing to the left, so the left side took the impact), and restricted arm movement to what was necessary for aiming the lance and moving a shield up and down by about a foot, so people wearing it were unable to mount their horses without assistance. Jousting saddles were also specially designed to have low backs so that whoever got hit by a lance slid off instead of arching backwards, which experience had shown was an excellent way to end up as a paraplegic.
"What, you were already wearing? For the entire 6 hour journey through the old forest?"
I suggest you read some history, because people have been wearing armour of all types for periods of far longer than six hours for thousands of years, in climates ranging from winter ice to hot deserts and steamy, humid jungles. The reason for this was logistical: armour had to be transported by some means during campaigns, and wearing it was an excellent means of doing so that left valuable baggage train space free for food, water, missile weapon ammunition, siege artillery parts, and all the other sundry items that an army in the field requires.
"Okay you are entering combat finally, start the counter at 1. What counter you ask? Your exhaustion counter. You do not think you are going to last forever with a ton of steel hanging from your body do you? Ten rounds, that is your max before you are starting to loose it."
The main fatigue factor in pre-firearms battles came from the fact that swinging manual weapons of 2lbs+ around is a lot like chopping down trees with an axe, a notably exhausting activity despite the fact that it isn't usually done while wearing armour. Fatigue might be slightly increased by adding between 20 and 40 lbs of extra weight, but the effect would be minimal due to the fact that most of the warrior class (i.e. D&D fighters) had been training to fight in it since they were seven years old. A far bigger problem once helms with full face protection became common was limited visibility, which made it difficult to deal with threats that weren't directly in front of the armour wearer, thereby rendering them vulnerable to attacks from the side and rear.
"Also heavy armour tends to be very rigid, metals of the age just ain't the flexible, start counter3 to see when it will simply shatter."
The plates that were used in both platemail and full plate were hammer-forged, not cast, so they deformed when struck with sufficient force (i.e. they sustained dents) rather than shattering. There is no documented, or for that matter even mythical account of armour shattering, and there are no existing examples of even the cheapest munition plate (i.e. the stuff that was handed out to foot soldiers, and collected up again for storage) that shows any sign of shattering or cracking, although there are many which either exhibit dents and holes, or signs of dents / holes that ha
"Like a half a dozen political science impaired people before you, you don't understand that the word socialist has multiple meanings and in those countries and actually to most people is isn't the one associated with communism."
And like many reading impaired people, you are answering a point I didn't make, because i didn't say it was associated with communism anywhere in my post. Perhaps I should have restricted myself to words with no more than five letters in them for your benefit.
"Socialism is commonly a concept of social wealth redistribution without any implication on any type of governmental structure."
Again, I fail to see where I said otherwise. You obviously need help with your comprehension, because the phrase: "They were socialists, because there is no state in communism, and therefore no government in the usual sense of the term" does not equate to "socialism requires a state or government", but instead means "communism has no state or government, whereas socialism can have a state or government, ergo the USSR was socialist, hence its name, and not communist".
"It predates Marx."
I fail to see where I said it didn't.
"The confused drivel is the fact that many "capitalists" fail to even try to acknowledge any definition other then the communism one and imply any steps towards social programs such as health care is a step towards communism."
Confused drivel can also be refuting somebody's post by contesting a bunch of points that weren't in it.
"social democracies run under socialist ideals."
They _incorporate some socialist ideals_, but not the central one of collective or state ownership of all property and wealth, hence my phrase "Social democrats seek a society in which many of the the benefits of socialism are achieved without eliminating capitalism", i.e. wealth and property in private hands.
"Just to clarify,
socialism = super set
communism = sub set of socialism
"
1) You saying this != it being true.
2) This was not implied in any way by your prior post, which contained the completely unambiguous statement: "Sweden, denmark, Canada etc.. are socialists. USSR, China and Cuba are Communist". No amount of subsequent manoeuvring on your part changes the fact that you said three countries with stock markets, private housing markers, and countless privately owned companies _are_ socialist, just as you also said that three countries with government of the many by the few _are_ communist.
I eagerly await another post refuting the points I didn't make in this one.
"That's great, give them a hard time, they deserve it but how about doing better rather than worse."
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm not defending China, but simply pointing out the hypocrisy of concentrating on their flaws while ignoring our own, both in the present and the recent past.
"I feel absolutely free to critique any political leader from any country, I especially loathe self serving autocrats (I'll give you a hint, no matter how bad democratic leaders have been, the corrupt autocrats were far far worse, even the Chinese ones)."
I agree, but I was actually referring to the entire democratic apparatus in various countries rather than simply the leaders, who come and go even in dictatorships. It's true to say that corruption is usually more obvious in non-democracies, but this doesn't necessarily mean that it's more prevalent than is the case in a country like the US, where getting elected is so expensive that one either has to be very rich, or heavily sponsored by special interests to stand a chance of reaching congress or the senate, let alone forming part of a government. Rich people tend to have have existing ties to various special interests (e.g. the Bush family and big oil, or Cheney's connection to Halliburton), while those who require sponsorship end up indebted to other special interests who helped finance their campaigns. Just because corruption is less obvious doesn't mean it's less endemic, less insidious, or less destructive to ordinary people, whose interests are often diametrically opposed to what the politicians (and increasingly the courts) end up doing.
"What I think you miss is the whole nature of the current Chinese government and it's threat to freedom, democracy and workers rights in the rest of the world and what needs to be done about them to reduce that threat"
Most of the rest of the world has even less in the way of _real_ freedom and workers' rights than China, and unlike many other countries, the situation is improving over there. Don't make the mistake of assuming that 10% of the planet's population which lives in Europe and the US is in any way representative of how the other 90% lives, that the populations of those "Western" countries weren't fighting to establish and maintain those rights until fairly recently, or that the Chinese are anything like the primary threat to them, as well as other rights we used to take for granted (terrorist bogey men, "think of the children" types, and globalisation of Western industries are already doing an excellent job of rights erosion without any help whatsoever from China).
"So, as it turns out not all that much, as long as China continues on it's current course, the pollution they are generating will solve our (workers in democratic countries who want to preserve their rights, fuck so many cents per hour and living in worker/slave dormitories) problems, a bit unfortunate for the countries surrounding China but that's just the way it is."
I think you're severely underestimating the amount of pollution that would be necessary to have any notable impact on the manufacturing capability of a country whose population has reached 1.3 billion, and is still growing. You're also assuming that the Chinese won't clean their act up long before things get to that stage, despite the fact that they've already demonstrated their ability to make drastic changes to societally entrenched ways of living and working in very short periods of time.
"Although I still do support fair trade tariffs, where taxes are loaded onto imported products to cover the cost differences of minimum wage (valid due to global pricing of commodity products), worker safety and conditions, environmental protections, quality inspections, taxation levels (avoiding tax holiday cheating corporations), there is no reason that companies should be forced to compete upon an unequal basis, especially when they support their consumers by providing the local employment rather than pursuing every last cent of profit regardless of the socio economic
"Wise man say, those that pursue the politics of fifty years ago are either historians or idiots."
r ee%20161001.htmr y-united-states-serious-problemo rts/do.html
Wise men don't call others idiots without having some excellent points to refute their arguments with instead of childish excuses for the fact that the Chinese have done far less damage transitioning over a billion people from an agrarian economy to an industrial one than we did in the same period merely sustaining our far smaller population. I suggest you actually check up on what Western industries have been doing, and in many cases still are doing since China started to industrialise in the late 1970s.
"My only concern is what is happening today and what will be happening tomorrow, history is just lessons, that people should not repeat, you kinda missed that whole not repeating history bit didn't you."
It's you that's missed the fact that the US and EU are _still_ polluting far more than China is with half their population. If we can't learn from our own history, then why should the Chinese be expected to do so?
"You kind of idiot logic means it is ok to keep repeating the same mistakes, the same abuses, the same lies over and over and over again."
My kind of logic holds China to the same standard as the rest of us. In case you hadn't noticed, the US generates more pollution than they do with 1/4 their population, so I suggest that you take the advice of a truly wise man, and avoid throwing stones while living inside a glass house.
"Why don't reach further back into history and cite Roman slavery at brick factories, I hear China repeated that example just in the last year, hey that's ok after all the ancient Romans did it too."
We don't need to go anything like as far back as the Romans, because the US and Europe are using slave and forced labour domestically, and their corporations are making big profits from foreign industries that use slaves:
http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/news/CMA%20ag
http://www.injusticeline.com/slave2.html
http://soc.enotes.com/slavery-today-article/slave
http://www.iabolish.org/slavery_today/country_rep
There are plenty of other examples that somebody with enough brain cells to do a little research could find. So once again, we have you, the hypocrite, holding the Chinese up to a standard that your own country doesn't meet. And before you pipe up with some pathetically childish point about slavery being illegal in the Western world, it's also illegal in China, hence the fact that they arrested those responsible for using slaves in the _illegal_ brick kilns you were blathering about.
"as for China, let's have a democracy and really see what the 'Chinese People' actually think, rather than just a few corrupt politicians."
Because democracies have never been governed by a few corrupt politicians.
"Communism != socialism"
True.
"Sweden, denmark, Canada etc.. are socialists."
This however isn't. Sweden, Denmark, and Canada are social democrats, not socialists. Social democrats seek a society in which many of the the benefits of socialism are achieved without eliminating capitalism.
"USSR, China and Cuba are Communist. "
Wrong again. They were socialists, because there is no state in communism, and therefore no government in the usual sense of the term (the collective governs itself by giving everyone a direct say in every decision that's made, or as Marx described it, "a dictatorship of the proletariat"). The reason "USSR" stood for Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics is due to the fact that unlike you, they actually knew the difference between socialism and communism.
"Stop it with the confused drivel."
I suggest you follow your own advice.
"Not only did China get ahead with cheap labour but also with poor working conditions, no pollution restrictions, minimum or no safety/ health conditions and corruption to grease the wheels of profit for those autocrats running the corporofascist society."
China is currently undergoing an industrial revolution, and is actually treating its workers a lot better than Britain did during its industrial revolution, and massively better than Russians during their much later industrial revolution. It looks pretty bad compared to the US and Western Europe today, but people tend to forget that squalid living conditions, non-existent worker rights, dreadful industrial safety, and massive pollution were usual in both Europe and the US only 80 years ago, which means that there are living people who remember a time when a working week was six twelve hour days, and professional gangs of strike breakers beat people to death for trying to get better, safer working conditions and a wage that didn't oblige an entire urban families to live in a single room without its own bath or toilet facilities.
"One reason for the shift to IP instead of production could quite simply be because China is currently quite busily polluting itself to death. As the level of toxic elements rises in the environment it will be interesting to see what future chemical chain reactions will occur and how high the death toll will rise."
Just like other industrialised nations polluted themselves to death until fairly recently. The Great London Smog of 1952 killed 12,000 people, and a mountain of waterlogged mining waste slid onto the town of Aberfan in 1968, killing 144. In the US, LA smog in 1943 reduced visibility to three blocks and people had smarting eyes, respiratory difficulties and vomiting; a 1948 smog containing fluoride emissions from steel mills killed 20 and injured hundreds (many of whom died a short time later) in Donora, Pennsylvania; while a New York smog killed up to 270 people in 1953. We've polluted our rivers and water supplies, polluted the lakes, seas, and oceans, polluted the air, and the ground, in some cases for hundreds of years, so trying to present the Chinese as bad guys because we started cleaning our act up a few decades ago (but still haven't done so as much as we like to think) is utter hypocrisy.
"Meanwhile those who reaped the profits while destroying their country will be seeking means by which to bail with their wealth intact and seek to secure future means of income."
Because nobody in "the West" ever got rich by exploiting both people and the environment with no regard for the welfare of anyone or anything besides themselves. And Western countries haven't operated patently unsafe and incredibly environmentally hostile facilities in countries with cheap labour and lax worker protection laws such as the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, that leaked methyl isocyanate, killing 3800, and permanently disabling thousands of others. We of course wouldn't dream of exporting millions of tons of our own toxic waste to other countries to comply with our own environmental laws, use them to recycle our most toxic products, sell banned pharmaceuticals and contaminated baby formula to them, operate sweat-shops to make consumer goods, or buy sugar from companies that use slave labour. Only the nasty, greedy Chinese would do horrible things like that, because as we all know, Western industry has always been operated by socially responsible people who put people and the planet before crass profit.
"Note that I didn't claim that Xerox invented those technologies; They were simply the first large company to use them AFAICT. In the world of patents, that is unfortunately all that matters."
Not if there's prior art, as was the case with both Englebart and Sutherland, who not only published papers, but were filmed demonstrating their ideas on working systems (Englebart's demo was also attended by around 3,000 people). Alan Kay has categorically stated that the teams involved with UI concepts at PARC in the 1970s were aware of what Englebart and Sutherland had already done, and had great respect for them (Kay reckons Englebart is one of the greatest thinkers in computing), so it's likely that they'd have been very pissed off indeed if Xerox had made them look like a bunch of cheap plagiarists by trying to patent ideas that most of the computer research community knew they hadn't invented.
"The concept of the lone inventor getting a patent, and getting rich licensing it, is only a dream in the current state of affairs."
It was even more of a dream for programmers in the 1960s and 1970s, because software and the ideas it realised couldn't be patented. We are extremely fortunate that this was the case, otherwise large swathes of what we currently take for granted would have been owned by the likes of IBM, DEC, Data General, etc., which means that they'd have taken decades longer to make their way into the mainstream, and some probably wouldn't have appeared at all.
"Does it make a sound?"
Yes, but to hear it you have to stand in the middle of a forest full of falling trees clapping with one hand.
"it's a FUD attack against the product with the largest market share, in this case WinXP. Never mind that the product in question is put out by the same company."
They did the same when Windows XP was launched by running a set of ads showing the Windows 9X BSOD, and a statement about them being things of the past. Irrespective of whether Slashdotters like it or not, the fact of the matter is that during the last decade, Microsoft's effective monopoly in the desktop OS and office automation markets has resulted in their only effective competition being older versions of their own products. People using these older products who aren't corporates don't make any money for Microsoft at all unless they buy said older products with a new machine, but an upgrade sold to 10% of them would earn as much as converting every OS X and Linux desktop out there to Windows, and they'd obviously like much more than 10% of their current users to upgrade, and they won't achieve that by telling them that what they already have is arse-kickingly fabulous.
I stand corrected. Blech! The old rev.1 iMac G5 had pretty anaemic graphics, but they were at least provided by an nVidia chipset with its own video RAM that would have been a better choice for a cheap machine than those dreadful Intel things that use system memory. This is the sort of crap I'd have expected to see in a bottom end $299 desktop system, not something they were expecting people to shell out the best part of $1000 for.
"The one thing I did like was that there was no more Intel video chipset and that they went with a better video chipset."
iMacs never had Intel video. The Mac Mini has it, and so does the MacBook, but the "tablet" iMacs (iMac G5 variants and Intel-based ones) all had nVidia or ATI graphics (depending on model).
"Non free software got it's start by stealing government funded software in the 1980s"
The commercial software industry goes back to the 1960s, when contract programming companies began to sell software that they'd written for one customer to others. The first of these that I can find any reference to is CACI, who began selling the SIMSCRIPT language in 1962, with the most successful early one being ADR's AutoFlow program (1965) which sold several thousand copies, while their MARK IV file manager and report generator earned over a million dollars in revenue within 12 months of being announced.
In 1967, International Computer Programs, Inc. published the first edition of ICP Quarterly, which contained lists and description of commercially available computer software. The first issue had 49 programs in it, but the one from January 1969 contained hundreds. AFAIK None of these were stolen from government funded projects.
"I would not be surprised if lots of CP/M software did have their first PC-DOS versions by little more than a straight recompile (or reassemble)."
.COM files that were limited to the same 64K of RAM as the CP/M originals, and porting ease was increased by the fact that MS/PC-DOS 1.0 was remarkably similar to CP/M in many important respects.
Several of them did this, at least in the initial versions, including (but by no means limited to) WordStar, Microsoft's language compilers, and dBase-II. Such programs tended to be
""Boiling water helped decrease disease among city workers.""
"This may actually be a major component in why the Industrial Revolution took off in England."
The reason the Industrial Revolution happened in England was largely due to the British Agricultural Revolution, which dramatically increased yields (and therefore the number of people who could be fed per acre of arable land) while also progressively replacing common fields with privately owned ones, displacing those who had previously farmed those fields. The writing was already on the wall by the late 16th century, and agricultural mechanisation in the 18th century sounded the final death knell of both common land farmers and labour-intensive agriculture because it favoured the owners of large tracts of land, who now required far fewer people to work them. Britain had undergone two prior major population explosions (in the 13th and mid 17th centuries), but starvation had resulted in the population falling again due to a lack of adequate agricultural output. The population explosion of the mid 1700s was however sustainable with the new farming techniques, and this led to a permanent (and growing) increase in demand for clothing, pottery, and various other goods that the large and growing labour pool could fulfil by forming cottage industries, which also exploded during this period, and were the precursors to the Industrial Revolution that followed.
Other important factors for Britain were (as you say) its growing trade empire, which led to an accumulation of capital that was looking for profitable investments; a simultaneous scientific and engineering revolution that supplied industry with ever more efficient manufacturing and transport technologies; and significant domestic reserves of coal to drive the new machines. It's also interesting to note that unlike much of the rest of Europe, where countries were often split into separate governmental regions that taxed any items which crossed their borders, Britain was for trade purposes a single nation that allowed products to move freely from any area to any other area, so both manufacturers and food producers had a large and increasingly wealthy domestic market for their wares.
Increased literacy and numeracy were a by-product of the industrial revolution rather than a causal factor (I know you didn't say anything to the contrary, but the theory this topic is based around does). Industries cannot run with manual labour alone: they also need clerks, accountants, secretaries, and other "white collar" workers to handle their many administrative tasks, and such people are also necessary for the large number of financial and service industries that grew up around the factories (banking, transport, postal services, etc.). Such people don't just appear magically from nowhere, but have to be trained, and it didn't take long to realise that the most efficient way to do this was by educating children. A provision of the Factories Act of 1833 made it law for employers of children under the age of 13 to provide them with at least 3 hours of free (i.e. costs could not be deducted from their meagre wages) education per day that they worked, although most large employers had already been doing this for some time because they'd realised that it was a cheap way of turning common labourers into a (then) much rarer and therefore more valuable type of employee. This led to the establishment of the British "middle class" (Americans should note that the British definition of "middle class" isn't quite the same as that of the US).
Ireland IMO stands a pretty good chance of getting the current directive annulled, because it should have been decided according to the relevant EU rules, not EC procedures, which have no jurisdiction over matters of security or foreign policy (the other two pillars of the EU), and therefore cannot legally be used to decide such matters. Any EU legislation that falls outside the jurisdiction of the EC (the EC is the first pillar of the EU) cannot become law without all members agreeing to it, which means that one dissenting member has an effective veto.
The Irish have two other attack routes that they could also use in the European Court of Justice:
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that a person has a right of privacy in "family life, his home and his correspondence". The ECJ has a history of applying this article with a very broad brush, so they'd stand a pretty good chance of getting the directive overturned on the grounds that it violates a citizen's right to private correspondence.
Finally, there's the Data Protection Act. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has opined that the directive contravenes the Act because private companies are required to retain the data, not governments or law enforcement bodies (who have certain exemptions that do not apply to anyone or anything else).
Past ECJ rulings indicate that, unlike "Eurocrats" and politicians, they interpret the spirit of laws rather than strictly adhering to the way they're written, so those who attempt to wiggle through perceived holes in the written rules tend to come badly unstuck.
"That TCE has not been fully ratified does not undermine in any way the Treaty of the European Union (Maastricht 1992)..."
Treaties are not however a European constitution. Contravening the terms of a treaty is therefore illegal, but not unconstitutional.
"In the European Union, things are "unconstitutional" that are incompatible with these key treaties."
They are not, because the treaties are not a constitution, and aren't treated as a constitution.
"Finally, "EC" (if you mean European Community by this) is a distinct legal entity that is part of the EU (European Union), per the Treaty of Rome and Maastricht. "
I know, but I was referring specifically to the EC, not the EU, of which the EC is first (prime) pillar. It is the only pillar where a citizen can use European law to enforce their rights, and where EU law takes precedence over national law -- the other two pillars of the EU (common foreign and security policy, and police and judicial cooperation respectively) are concerned with inter-govenrmental and foreign policy, and have no direct effect on the people who live in EU countries.
"The EC is, however, just a subset of the practical entity that is the EU and the term is generally avoided except when required for legal or technical precision."
Which is precisely the way I used it. The only currently obsolete term is EEC, which is what it used to be called until the Matricht Treaty changed that to EC.
"TCE would abolish the legal and current technical meaning of "EC", although it will probably still get some colloquial use by old people who remember pre-Maastricht days."
It was called the EEC in pre-Mastricht days -- EC is post-Mastricht. Mastricht established the EU, and it also redefined the EC as a political and legal entity rather than an economic one like the older EEC.
"MS is distributing vouchers redeemable for SuSE Linux. According to the lawyers that wrote the GPLv3, that counts as "conveying" SuSE Linux."
This is a ludicrous assertion. Many magazines, newspapers, gas stations, and product boxes carry vouchers that are redeemable against a huge variety of items, but they aren't assumed by law to be distributors of those items, any more than I would be if I gave somebody some money to go to a store and buy said product for themselves. A voucher that entitles one to a free SUSE Linux isn't distributing Linux any more than one that says "Free Big Mac when you show this at any Macdonald's" is distributing Big Macs - Macdonald's are doing the distributing, not whoever is issuing the voucher. If the GPL 3 says otherwise, then it's in for an extremely rough ride when it gets tested in the courts, so I'm pretty sure that it doesn't actually say anything of the sort.
I'm also pretty sure that GPL3 neither implies nor specifically states that those who sell sealed, boxed versions of a compliant Linux distro are bound by it, because that would have raised screams of protest from commercial Linux distros such as RedHat, not to mention being guaranteed a quick and ignominious death if somebody challenged it in court. Even Microsoft haven't got the temerity to try and bind wholesalers and retailers to their software licensing terms (that's why EULA is an acronym for end-user licensing agreement), so it's hard to see why so many people here think that Stallman et al would be stupid enough to try and pull something that even a predatory monopoly with several entire governments in its pocket doesn't think it could get away with.
Something equally important is the fact that they'd need to convince the DA's office that there's enough evidence to warrant bringing a case to court, and if they get past that hurdle, they then have to rely on prosecution lawyers that aren't their own ones to argue it. The defendant on the other hand gets to select his or her legal team, and it's likely that organisations such as the EFF would find some notably able people to represent them "pro bono". A decent team of defence lawyers would have little trouble getting a good proportion of the sort of evidence that are allowed in civil cases ruled inadmissible, and could choose from many expert witnesses who would testify free of charge to establish reasonable doubt about the rest of it. It's likely that they'd also have a notably difficult job finding juries who would consistently and unanimously condemn people to custodial sentences and a life-long criminal record for a first offence of sharing songs or movies over the Internet.
Those members of the *AAs who are pushing for strong criminal sanctions against "casual pirates" should therefore, to paraphrase the old saw, be careful about what they wish for, because they could well get it, after which they will have ample opportunity to lament the fact that unlike civil courts, criminal justice systems that are worthy of the name tend to favour the accused rather than the accuser.
"If the implementation of the data retention directive is declared unconstitutional in Germany but not in Europe"
There is no European constitution, so it isn't possible for an act or law to be unconstitutional in the context of the EC itself.
"Do you have a copy of WordStar too? How many versions? Government documents are meant to last for decades, potentially centuries. I have been in places that have large numbers of old WordStar documents, of various formats"
c /wordstar.txt.
WordStar documents were pretty much like HTML and RTF in that they were plain text with embedded formatting commands, because unlike for example the Microsoft Word document format, WordStar's documents were primarily designed for printing stuff that was nicely formatted, and not as a mechanism for locking people into a single vendor for eternity. In WordStar's case, these commands were of two types: sequences of printing characters such as ".pa" for a page break, and sequences of non-printing characters that usually occur as pairs that bracket a piece of text which should be printed in a certain way (e.g. underlined, superscripted, etc.). This means that all of the actual information in them can easily be viewed with any ASCII-capable text editor, although it's obvious that some of the formatting will be lost (certain types of formatting such as right justification and centred titles were however applied to the text itself, so they'll be retained), and the non-printing sequences will probably be displayed as graphical characters in most modern editors.
The meaning of various WordStar codes and commands is documented in many places on the Internet, e.g.
http://mediasrv.ns.ac.yu/extra/fileformat/text/do
It wouldn't take much in the way of programming skill to use such information as the basis of a small utility in Perl or Python to strip the commands out of a WordStar document and turn them into plain text (converting to RTF or HTML could also mostly be done with a simple look-up table), but there isn't really any need to do so because it's directly supported by a wide range of existing commercial, free, and open source software.
Microsoft also removed some standard capabilities from raw sockets in XP SP2 to make it less suitable as a platform for launching certain types of attacks. Unfortunately, this didn't make it any less vulnerable to somebody who was launching said attacks against XP SP2, but it did manage to disable network security testing such as NMAP, thereby preventing admins from using XP SP2 as a platform for ensuring that networks containing other XP SP2 machines weren't vulnerable to that type of attack in the first place.