"Communism is an historically well-defined political philosophy. It involves the wholesale confiscation of the "means of production" and destruction of the ruling classes. They are to be replaced by a "dictatorship of the proletariat.""
Indeed. The term "Communist government" or "Communist state" is an oxymoron, because communism by definition has no government (or more correctly, everyone is a member of the government, and therefore gets to vote on every decision that affects the group), and without governments, there no states. This is why the USSR stood for "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" -- the people who formed the system were well aware of the fact that Soviets (ruling committees) and Republics (states) are incompatible with communism, so they referred to themselves as socialists instead.
"We also have humane and effective universal health cover in Australia and you can take out private insurance if you want a private room for mum and baby, silicone implants, ect."
That's the way it also works in a lot of European countries (but not of course all of them). Everyone pays for the state system from taxes (so rich people who never use it are paying far more than the poorer ones who do), but there are is also private healthcare funded by those who choose to buy insurance or pay for a one-off item such as "vanity" cosmetic surgery. There are two main advantage to a choice-based environment: (1) the state can concentrate its resources on those who actually need them; and (2) there is secondary set of medical services (beds, doctors, nurses, advanced equipment such as MRI) that the state can pay to use when required, but are entirely maintained at someone else's expense when the state doesn't need them.
(state system funded by everyone) + (private sector paid for by those who want to use it) > (state sector only) OR (private healthcare only)
Note: the following does not represent my views: I'm playing Devil's Advocate here.
"If you weren't planning to buy it, why would you want a copy of it?"
Because digital information is very easy to copy, and the probability of getting caught is so low as to be statistically insignificant, so there is a massive amount of free material out there.
"If you wanted to have the item, then you actually desired to obtain it thus ethically obligated to purchase the item."
Please demonstrate using any generally accepted Western moral or ethical system how people are ethically obliged to pay for something that others are willing to share for free.
"Unfortunately, if everyone had the same ethics as you then he would never make a sale."
Just like people who try to sell anything that's easily available obtained without paying have a hard time unless they offer something else of value as part of the deal. This is not a matter of ethics, but a simple reflection of reality: building a toll road between two points won't earn money if there's an alternative free one that also connects those two points unless it offers something the free one doesn't.
"Oh yea I forgot, depriving income somehow escapes the ethical delima yet the mythical right to posess everything is always assumed in these arguments."
What's depriving people of income is the fact that technology has removed their ability to control the means of distribution, which is vital to an economic model based entirely on maintaining artificial scarcity. The mythical thing in the 21st century is therefore the "right" to charge people for things they can easily obtain without paying, and give to anyone else they wish with equal ease.
"Somehow the easy concept of respecting the wishes of the owner/creator is always ignored. I mean you used the word ethics right?"
Why are we ethically obliged to pay somebody for copies of something we can copy ourselves without paying? Media technology has been making other media technologies obsolete for centuries: scribes died out as a profession when printing presses became common; records, radio and cinema killed music halls; copy typists were made obsolete by word processors; etc., etc., etc. What is morally so special about owners or creators of music and movies that gives them the right to keep earning money from something that technology has rendered worthless, when nobody has been given this privilege in the past?
"On one side you have the cartel performing draconian feats to maintain its control, and the other side believes that copyright should not really exist except of course if it benefits them..."
This is yet another case of both parties trying to maximise the benefits they gain from a situation. Please tell me how this is unusual in any way, or why the consumer's obvious desire to pay as little as possible for a particular product isn't just as important from a moral or ethical perspective as that of the record companies and artists to charge as much as they can get away with.
"Now if twisting logic and using lawyer speak to convince yourself that you are not doing anything wrong makes you feel better, then no amount of reasoning will make you change your mind. We humans are greedy creatures so I expect no less."
It is you who is twisting logic. Under every generally accepted Western moral and ethical framework, the greedy ones would be those who are shouting "Mine, mine, mine, pay, pay, pay, OR ELSE..." with something that is ludicrously easy to copy and distribute, not the people who share it freely.
"Then why don't these supposed majority of artists just go ahead and give it away like Prince appears to be doing?"
It's due to the fact that record company contracts give them the copyrights to recordings, so artists have no more right to redistribute them than any arbitrary member of the public.
"Artist releases CD; artist goes on tour; ticket prices pay the costs of putting on the tour. The artist makes his money when people who came to see him live go out and buy his CD."
I used to be a session musician, and can categorically tell you that touring is profitable, whereas retail CD sales are only marginally so, and in most cases, end up making a loss for the artist. You are right when you say that (with the exception of tier 1 acts who play big venues and charge a lot for tickets) that ticket sales usually only cover costs, but are missing the fact that they have other sources of income from concerts:
1) Sponsorship (i.e. paid advertising). Artists who have any sort of following can usually find several sponsors. 2) Merchandising. T shirts, posters, key rings, books, paid photos of fans with the artists, etc., that are sold at concerts. Sponsors may cover the costs of manufacturing in return for displaying their logos, so earnings can be 100% profit. 3) Direct CD sales. The band gets the vendor's 40%-50% cut of the retail price instead of their usual 5% or so of the wholesale price, -breakages, -advances, -(anything else the record company can think of to deduct), all deducted _after_ the band's manager has taken his usual 20%. These can sell like the proverbial hot cakes when artists turn up and sign the case liners, hence the fact that so many are willing to do this.
"Tours are a marketing scheme. If no-one buys CDs, there will be no tours"
You've got that backwards, because for most artists, recorded music is a marketing scheme for selling merchandise and concert tickets, without which they would be forced to take non-music day jobs to pay their bills. Tier 1 acts (international stars with tens of millions of fans) can and do make significant amounts of money from CD sales, but they're the exception, not the rule -- most artists (and by most, I mean at least 99%) are extremely lucky to not end up owing the record company money from CD sales of several million copies after all the creative deductions have been taken from their royalties.
"OK, so if you buy a CD, several middlemen get a cut. Unless you know the guy's address and can pop a tenner in the post, buying a CD is the only way to support him."
If you really want to support him / her / them, then go to a concert and buy some merchandise, or if that isn't possible, find out where you can the get merchandise without seeing them live (it's often sold from the web sites that most artists have, so Google is your friend). Buying a CD for 15 quid from a shop will result in the artists getting about 30p gross royalties, and the record company and manager deduct from that, so it probably ends up being 2p or so in the end (or more commonly, nothing or a negative sum). If on the other hand you buy that CD for the same price from the artist's web-site or at a concert, you'll be putting around 8 quid directly in their pockets, i.e. the same as they'd end up with from selling 400 CDs through retail outlets.
"Yeah, never mind all that business about hi-res goggle displays, lets do the macro sized version."
Yes, for a mere 1/8th the cost of buying a commercial cinema system that people pay to come and see, you'll be able to have something nearly as good _in your own home_ where you can watch movies that were screened on the commercial system a year ago in much lower definition Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, or spend a week or two downloading the full IMAX version. I personally can't wait for the chance to spend a mere 150 visits to an IMAX cinema for an entire family (food and drinks included) to get my hands on this hardware, even though the media for it will probably cost nearly as much as one of those visits to get a single, out-of-date movie. After all, you can't play World Of Warcraft on the cinema's system using a Microsoft bean-bag mouse, so that's even more added value!
"I wouldn't normally bother, but that particular one reversed the meaning of the sentence:-)."
I'm glad you did, for precisely the reason you stated. This actively demonstrates why published material needs to be proof-read by several people.
"Back in the 80's, I played a lot of wargames and was very interested in these things. It was very interesting to read a summary of what's been going on since then. "
Everything I wrote is public information, so by definition it's not new (new stuff is classified). Most of the armour and penetration technologies I mentioned were already in place by the mid 1960s, and some of them (e.g. APDS, HEAT) were being used in WWII, although they've obviously been refined considerably since then.
"Maybe it was different where you were, but I disagree. I still have many of my 70s records and by and large they sound great"
As I said in the prior post, it depends on the sort of material you listen to. Most records that were produced for popular consumption were extremely compressed, and had been frequency equalised to sound reasonable on AM radio and cheap record players, so they weren't any better (and in many cases were worse) than overly compressed "loud" modern CDs. By contrast, some jazz, rock, and especially orchestral music was well or excellently recorded, but then the same can be said for CDs.
"I also frequented high-end hi-fi dealers, and far from insisting on Dark Side of the Moon they generally said "bring your own records, play what you like.""
Not many of the high-end ones I came across were so amenable, for the simple reason that they didn't want their expensive styluses running on surfaces that might have a tiny, barely visible warp (common with vinyl), which could send 1.2g tracking systems skipping merrily across the grooves.
"These invariably sounded far better on decent equipment than on cheap stuff"
I tended to find that there was a cut-off point at which extra money tended to stop making average records sound better, and began to emphasise their recording / pressing flaws. This was the main reason for me selecting a decent upper midrange system rather than a top-end one at the time -- it made everything sound pretty good instead of being notably excellent for a very narrow range of recordings, but far too analytical for everything else.
"One of the frustrations of vinyl is the amount of investment required to get something approaching the best from it."
Both in money, and time (although to be fair, one can pay in excess of $10,000 for a top-end CD player). The problem with mechanical record decks (which is all we had then) is that they're microphonic, and have to be kept absolutely flat, so one had to acoustically isolate them and ensure that they were correctly adjusted using little spirit levels that were built into the best ones, or could be bought as accessories otherwise. Even when the deck and arm were properly set up, there was a ritual that had to be followed with every play: ensure that the rotational speed is correct using the in-built strobe; carefully take the record out of its sleeve with a special handling device, and wipe both sides with an anti-static cloth; place it on the turntable, and set the wet-tracking system up; lift the tone arm with its little hydraulic lever, move it to the first groove, and let it settle gently on to the rotating record. Repeat when side one has finished. Repeat for next record. And while many audiophiles felt that this was all part of the fun, those who bought good systems for listening to music rather than playing around with weren't particularly keen on it, hence the fact that CDs, with their greater convenience, rapidly displaced vinyl.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
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All Things iPhone
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· Score: 1
"You're thinking about normal people, but I'm thinking especially of executives and designers (or worse - executive designers!)."
I would have thought that my remarks about "special" people fitted executives and designers rather well, i.e. those who should be kept away from dangerous things such as electrical outlets, cables, and items with sharp edges.
"Sadly, these were the very same people most likely to buy the cube."
And they're also the sort of people who buy iPods, and will likely buy iPhones, hence my remarks about Apple having learned an important lesson with the Cube about designing things for "special" individuals. A sealed unit that's too big to be swallowed easily, and has nice, rounded edges that the special among us can't easily blind, brain, or eviscerate themselves with is a perfect gift for designers, executives, and executive designers everywhere.
"Look at tank armor some time. You get a long ways with thickness and deflection"
This used to the case with thickness, but deflection has never been used. The reason sloped tank armour replaced flat planes was because it prevents a thicker cross section to an incoming projectile, and not (as many seem to believe) because it has any deflection value against high speed projectiles. Modern tank armour on the other hand is a series of almost flat planes, much like that of WWII tank armour, although for very different reasons.
Modern tanks basically face three types of threats (from other tanks and infantry -- the likes of hellfire missiles are beyond the scope of this topic): high-energy anti-tank (HEAT), high-explosive squash head (HESH), and APDS (armour-piercing discarding sabot, i.e. long-rod kinetic energy penetrators). Each works differently, so armour incorporates several different mechanisms, each of which is specifically designed to counter one of these.
1) HEAT rounds use plasma jets to burn their way through armour (the classic RPG uses this system). There are four possible counters: a) Spacing. Armour has multiple air spaces in the hope that the jet will consume some layers, leaving the rest intact. It isn't very effective against modern HEAT rounds, but is still much better than a solid layer of equal thickness.
b) Stand-off plates / cages. These have been used for years to protect tank wheels from older, less powerful infantry HEAT weapons, and appeared on the bodies of the less heavily armoured German tanks during WWII. Some infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) in the current Iraq conflict carry "cage" versions, proving that it's still effective against weapons that don't carry tandem-charge warheads.
c) Explosive-reactive armour (ERA). Tanks are covered with small explosive-filled boxes with a metal face-plate. The plasma jet detonates the explosive, and the face plat is thrown laterally in its path to consume it. Not effective against tandem-charge warheads.
d) Ceramic pyramids that remain solid at extremely high temperatures are set inside the armour to dissipate the jet. This is the mechanism used by "Chobham" armour (originally a British design, hence the name); it is effective even against tandem charges, but is extremely costly to manufacture, and also very heavy.
2) HESH. This round flattens against the surface of the tank, and then detonates into the armour, sending a shock wave through it that causes the inner surface of the vehicle to "spall" (i.e. become shrapnel that ricochets around inside it, turning the crew into human sushi). It's fairly easily defeated by a combination of spaced armour and spall liners, which are layers of adhesive plastics on the inside surface of the armour. For this reason, it's primarily used against infantry fighting vehicles nowadays, whose thinner armour has little room for effective air spacing, and therefore spalls very well indeed.
3) APDS / APFSDS. A sabot is used to carry a long, thin, extremely heavy penetrator rod with a point that converts its considerable kinetic energy into very high pressures and temperatures where both the rod and armour become fluids (a process that's analogous to squirting a jet of water into a bucket of oil). The length of the rod must be more or less that same as the armour it's intended to penetrate because the solid rear moves "through" the liquid front (which loses kinetic energy rapidly), becoming liquid itself in the process. A rod that's too short will therefore simply "bore" a hole in the armour, leaving a "hot spot" on the inside that would be likely to burn anyone who touches it rather badly, but has no other effect. Note that DU penetrators are also pyrophoric, i.e. they burn inside the armour in addition to becoming liquid (sintered tungsten doesn't do this, and is also more prone to shatter than DU, although it's far less toxic to both tank crews and the post-battle environment). It can be countered in two ways, both of which are present in the best modern composite ar
Re:Why some of us are excited about iPhone
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All Things iPhone
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· Score: 1
"I don't understand the iphone hype, other than the pretty screen and possibly sexy interface."
I don't understand all the hype about colour bit-mapped graphics displays and mice either, when the only advantage they've got over a traditional teletype terminal is a pretty screen and possibly sexy interface.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
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All Things iPhone
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· Score: 1
"The cube was well designed? Tell that to the users who tried setting a folder or book on top of the thing, only to have it shut down due to overheating"
Because normal people always put stuff on top of what are obviously air vents despite warnings in the manual telling them not to, and then wonder why things overheat. I'm not defending Apple or the Cube here, but pictures of its top make me wonder how those "special" enough to put books on it (thus also blocking access to the CD drive) were allowed to have dangerous electrical outlets and cables in their rubber rooms. The positive thing of course is that Apple learned an important lesson about expecting any intellectual capacity whatsoever from consumers, hence the fact that iPods and the iPhone can't easily be opened with tools that are made of rubber, thus preventing special owners from swallowing batteries, putting transparent bits in their eyes, or trying to cram dismounted click-wheels into their belly buttons.
"Yet oddly WinXP can run programs designed for Win98."
It can run _some_ programs designed for Win9X, not all of them, hence the fact that I still have to keep a Win98 machine around. Some stuff won't install at all, other stuff installs but crashes, and then there are the programs that run, but with garbled displays, sound faults, or occasional crashes, and all imaginable variations thereof. After exhausting all the possibilities of the compatibility wizard, I downloaded the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit. It made some things work slightly better, but in most cases seems to have made little if any difference. This is on XP Pro SP2, but the same issues were there when it was "vanilla" several years ago, so it's not an SP2 thing.
"A scientific "law" (in the sense it is used in "law of gravity", at any rate) is simply a theory that is subjectively fairly firmly established"
No it isn't. A scientific law is something that's derived from observation and measuring which does not require a corresponding theoretical foundation, and didn't have one when it was formulated. Ohm's law for example (V=IR) was derived from measurement, and makes no attempt to explain how or why the derived formula applies, and the same goes for Newton's laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, Boyle's Law, etc., etc., etc.
"The law of gravity is a theory"
It is not. There are various theories of gravity, but these are separate from the Law Of Gravity, which is a formula that Newton came up with which applied minor (but nevertheless important) corrections to Kepler's 3rd law.
As an example of the difference between a law and a theory, I cite Weedlekin's 1st law, which goes thus:
In a given population of Western women, where pulchritude is represented by the letter P, and intellect the letter I, the following formula can be applied with a high degree of reliability: P x I = 1.
Weedlekin's 2nd law:
In a given population of Western women, the pulchritude of a woman's friend (FP) is related to her own pulchritude (P) in the following way: FP=1/P.
I have no concrete theoretical foundation for these laws, but have based them entirely on observation and measurement.
"If you take a look at the waveforms of an album recorded 30 years ago, and compare it to something from a similar genre today, you'll spot the difference immediately. The loud recording results in the high and low bits of the waveform getting "squashed", resulting in a very obvious sort of distortion."
This is actually due to a specific type of compression that's deliberately applied to some modern recordings before they get to a CD master. Compression was also applied to analogue recordings because some sources (especially classical music) exceeded the signal to noise ratio of even the best vinyl playback equipment, so handling the loudest passages without clipping would have meant that the quiet parts disappeared below the noise of the playback medium without compression.
"Vinyl doesn't necessarily suffer from this problem as badly, as it is an analogue medium, and doesn't have strictly defined maximum or minimum amplitudes. "
The maximum and minimum amplitudes are defined by an analogue device's signal to noise ratio, which is around 55db for the best cartridges / laser vinyl players. CD audio on the other hand has a S/N ratio well in excess of 100db, i.e. 100,000 times as much dynamic range.
"All but the very first CDs have serious amplitude problems. One of the only CDs I can think of that was mastered at fairly low levels is 'Brothers in Arms' by Dire Straits"
As was the case with vinyl when it was the dominant format (which, given the fact that I was born in 1960, was a big part of my life for many years), how well recorded something is depends on the sort of music one listens to. Most vinyl pop and rock during the 1960s and 1970s was compressed to hell and had artificially enhanced stereo because it was intended to be played on cheap record players with auto-changers, spring-balanced tone arms, and 3 watt/channel amplifiers connected to 5 inch elliptical full-range speakers that were extremely close to each other. A small number of rock albums had superior recording quality, and therefore became "reference" pieces for hi-fi retailers (e.g. Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon), but most customer demos used classical pieces because they were the only ones that didn't sound worse on a high-end rig than a cheap one. Some expensive classical releases were advertised as being "direct cut", i.e. the signal from the microphones was mixed directly onto grooves instead of being recorded to tape first because audiophiles were willing to pay a lot more for something that had fewer "lossy" stages between musicians and them, and these were commonly used to demonstrate the benefits of extremely expensive component audio systems.
"Ironically, this is one of the primary reasons for the existence of the RIAA. They did a decent job for a while with vinyl, but never established any sort of standard for CDs."
They didn't do anything with vinyl beyond selecting an existing equalisation curve (RCA Victor's New Orthographic Curve) and making it a standard. It was jothing more than recording pre-emphasis / playback de-emphasis system that reduced surface noise and groove size, while making rumble more of a problem, but there was nothing in it to ensure that the initial recording being put on vinyl had decent audio quality, hence the fact that the vast majority of records sounded very bad indeed. R.I.A.A. had no role to play with CD audio parameters, because these had already been set by the Philips / Sony "redbook" standard, which all audio CD players implement (although most modern ones also implement certain newer standards too).
"However, despite that early use in WWI, it was not until WWII, and Germany's use of blitzkrieg tactics, that the tank would radically revolutionize warfare."
Heinz Guderian, the father of Blitzkrieg, credited J.F.C. Fuller and Liddel Hart as the originators of the theories behind it. Fuller had already used Blitzkrieg-like tactics at the Battle Of Cambrai in 1917, and the British pursuit of retreating Germans during late 1918 began to look very much like it indeed, with rapidly advancing tanks being supported by troops in a growing number of armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft, all of which the Germans fought desperate rear-guard actions to stop. The war ended before Fuller's 1919 plan for a fully mechanised army could be realised, but his post-war writings about it and the strategic and tactical advantages it could offer would ironically end up inspiring a new generation of German theorists, while both the British and French military authorities decided to build armies that were beautifully suited to fighting a static trench war. As is often the case in military history, the losing side ends up learning a whole lot more from the experience than the winners, who have a propensity to use the last war as a basis for planning the next one.
The tactics of Blitzkrieg were thus not only already in place during WW1, but actively being used, albeit in a piecemeal fashion by a few visionaries who received little support (and in some cases outright opposition) from people higher up the command ladder. Hitler acknowledge this by inviting Fuller to his birthday party in 1939, where he said "How do you like your children?" while they both watched Germany's mechanised army and airforce parading past them.
"That time was necessary for military theory to catch up to the tank's true implications for warfare"
It was actually more a case of technology having made Blitzkrieg practical in a way that it hadn't been during WW1. Technology in 1918 was more or less up to the job of attacking fixed positions from other fixed positions that were a few miles away, but tanks which can only move at walking pace, have a 1 in three chance of breaking down every five miles, and eat so much fuel that they can only carry enough to go 20 miles wouldn't have been very useful for invading another country, and the aircraft of the time were also severely limited by their engines in speed, range, ceiling, and the amount of ordnance they could carry.
I presume you're thinking of "lozenge" tanks such as the British Mk. 4 with side-mounted guns. These were specifically designed to cross trenches and large shell craters, and are still the finest vehicles ever made for that particular role, being capable of traversing terrain and climbing vertical obstacles that would immobilise a modern tank, despite having 100 HP engines that gave them a power to weight ratio of only 3 HP/ton. Early designs had a turret, but this was discarded in production models for the side-mounted gunnery because it allowed "female" (machine-gun carrying) tanks to fire downwards into a trench while crossing it, while providing "male" (cannon equipped) variants to engage two separate targets simultaneously.
Not all WW1 tanks were lozenges, and some looked quite a bit like early WWII designs, e.g. the Renault FT-17 with its rotating turret and tracks that lie under its body instead of going over the top. Over 4700 of these were built, and the US army bought a fair number of them -- about 2,500 were still in service in France in 1940, and actually scored several kills against German tanks (which were mostly lightly armoured Pzkfw 1 & 2 types in 1940).
"In WWI the role of the tank was basically to provide light fire support, and a slow moving wall for soldiers to walk behind while it crossed the land between the trenches."
This is just plain wrong. British tanks at The Somme and Cambrai were used to storm enemy lines, in both cases with considerable success, although only 49 were used a The Somme itself. At Cambrai, an attack planned by the visionary J.F.C. Fuller smashed through the previously impenetrable Hindenburg Line to a depth of five miles, the biggest single territory gain in the entire land war. Fuller's plan was in most respects classic Blitzkrieg, using mixed tank and infantry formations with air and artillery support (combined arms) that simply bypassed heavily contested positions, the idea being that the could later be mopped up after the fast-moving front had cut their supply lines. Unfortunately for Fuller, the British in typical fashion completely failed to exploit the opening that he'd made.
"A metal dart like a large version of a tank sabot round. The kinetic energy at that speed is nuts - the explosive power is like a small nuclear explosion"
Modern tank APFSDS rounds have a muzzle velocity of between 1600 and 1800 metres / second (depending on whose gun is firing them), which is more or less the velocity of this aircraft. Sabot darts weigh around 9Kg, which is significant, but they do not behave anything like small nuclear explosions.
Re:Witch hunts last until they're unprofitable.
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Judge Deals Blow to RIAA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Serfs often had other assets: houses, tools, money, jewelry."
They didn't have houses because they weren't allowed to own land, or leave the plot they were tied to without permission.
"Serfs typically (depending on country's rules, of course) had an inherited right to farm a PARTICULAR chunk of land for a cut of the profits."
They had no rights, because feudal courts refused to hear claims of villeins (the class most serfs belonged to) against their lords, so a lord could simply expel a villein and his entire family whenever he felt like it without any repercussions whatsoever. You seem to be confusing the fact that serfdom was inherited (i.e. the child of a serf was a serf), and that each serf was _tied_ to a piece of land that they could not leave without permission, with them having a right to that land, when in fact the only person with any rights to it was the owner, who could sell it at any time, and any serfs who lived on it went to the new owner along with the land itself (worked land with serfs living on it was worth a lot more than empty land)
"The serf could become very well-to-do if his land produced lots of crops, the plants were hardier and resisted plant diseases, his wells didn't run dry while everybody else's did, his animals survived bad weather, etc."
This tended to please lords, because such a serf would be paying his taxes when others couldn't. The land a serf lived on had to be worked at his own expense in his spare time, and the vast majority of it was taken up with growing wheat to pay the lord's taxes with (tithes were customarily paid in wheat) because mediaeval agricultural techniques provided extremely low yields. Anything remaining was used to feed his family, pay other taxes such death duties, daughter marriage taxes (the daughter was considered the lord's property), water tithes, milling and baking costs (the lord owned these facilities), tool, cart, and barrel repairs, Easter and Christmas "gifts" to the lord (eggs and geese respectively, which would have to be bartered for by those who didn't produce them), etc., etc., etc. The very small number of those who managed to have anything to sell at market after the lord had taken his whack usually saved up to buy their freedom, after which they ceased to become serfs, so while there may have been some wealthy (by serf standards) serfs, they would have been extremely rare.
"Of course when there was a bad year and everybody else's wells ran dry or crops failed and mistreated, starved, and overcrowded animals got sick, while Mr Hardworking Serf's crops, livestock, and wells did just hunky-dory, it could easily be used to start rumors of witchcraft"
It did indeed. However, such claims were usually levelled at women, the serf varieties of whom were considered to be of little value due to their inability to carry heavy loads for long periods and their exemption from enforced military service, and accusations were invariably from neighbours or church emissaries, not the lords whose lands the peasants worked. This is because it simply didn't make financial sense for a landlord to divide up the meagre wealth of a serf with the state, church, and other serfs, when he could get the whole lot by simply booting them out and keeping all their possessions for himself.
"Once the pesky serf was eliminated, not only were his liquid assets divied up, but the Lord was free of his obligation to let the serf continue farming this particularly good hunk of land"
Lords who wanted to eliminate serfs could do so without the need for resorting to things like witchcraft trials.
"The lord could then add it to his personal estate, farm it with his household staff and get ALL the profits"
As opposed to a mere 99.9% of the profits that he was already making from that farm without any effort whatsoever on his part.
"make a new serfdom arrangement on better-for-the-lord terms with another family, etc."
If there had been a form of serfdom that was better for lords, then it would have bee
"The problem is that I feel that I have lost the right to create and publish my own works. If I write a song, I fear that it might turn out to be an unintentional copy of an existing song. It happened to George Harrison (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music)."
When one considers how derivative most modern forms of entertainment are, the relative dearth of plagiarism cases that get brought to court (let alone won) means that your chances of getting sued for unintentional plagiarism is much lower than the very small probability that your efforts will make you incredibly wealthy and famous.
A generation isn't the average life span of a human, but the time between offspring being born, i.e. a mother and her daughter represent two generations. 300 years would therefore be around 12 generations if one assumes that people _on average_ breed at around age 25 in the US.
"But they're EU members, it shouldn't matter eitherway. that's like Ontario and Quebec bickering over whether the border goes on one side or the other of a border town. In the grand scheme of things, yeah they're different provinces, but really it doesn't matter."
The EU is a collection of separate countries, not a single country, so it's actually rather more like the US and Canada having a dispute over borders despite both being in NAFTA.
"Making all of Ireland belong to Ireland makes sense as it's a friggin Island."
So is the UK mainland, but the Scots, Welsh and English insist that it's three separate countries. Only a very foolish person would go to Scotland or Wales and tell them they're English because "it's a friggin island"...
"But still, eitherway there is a conflict there that the governments have not resolved"
It's a disagreement rather than a conflict nowadays. "The troubles" are well and truly over, much to the relief of nearly everyone on both sides of the border.
"Thus disputing the notion that the USA is the only place with turmoil on Earth [in the first world nation category that is]."
While I agree with what you're saying viz-a-viz the US, Northern Ireland was a poor example to pick in 2007, although it would have been an excellent one in (for example) the 1980s.
Slashdot Mirror
"Communism is an historically well-defined political philosophy. It involves the wholesale confiscation of the "means of production" and destruction of the ruling classes. They are to be replaced by a "dictatorship of the proletariat.""
Indeed. The term "Communist government" or "Communist state" is an oxymoron, because communism by definition has no government (or more correctly, everyone is a member of the government, and therefore gets to vote on every decision that affects the group), and without governments, there no states. This is why the USSR stood for "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" -- the people who formed the system were well aware of the fact that Soviets (ruling committees) and Republics (states) are incompatible with communism, so they referred to themselves as socialists instead.
"We also have humane and effective universal health cover in Australia and you can take out private insurance if you want a private room for mum and baby, silicone implants, ect."
That's the way it also works in a lot of European countries (but not of course all of them). Everyone pays for the state system from taxes (so rich people who never use it are paying far more than the poorer ones who do), but there are is also private healthcare funded by those who choose to buy insurance or pay for a one-off item such as "vanity" cosmetic surgery. There are two main advantage to a choice-based environment: (1) the state can concentrate its resources on those who actually need them; and (2) there is secondary set of medical services (beds, doctors, nurses, advanced equipment such as MRI) that the state can pay to use when required, but are entirely maintained at someone else's expense when the state doesn't need them.
(state system funded by everyone) + (private sector paid for by those who want to use it) > (state sector only) OR (private healthcare only)
Note: the following does not represent my views: I'm playing Devil's Advocate here.
"If you weren't planning to buy it, why would you want a copy of it?"
Because digital information is very easy to copy, and the probability of getting caught is so low as to be statistically insignificant, so there is a massive amount of free material out there.
"If you wanted to have the item, then you actually desired to obtain it thus ethically obligated to purchase the item."
Please demonstrate using any generally accepted Western moral or ethical system how people are ethically obliged to pay for something that others are willing to share for free.
"Unfortunately, if everyone had the same ethics as you then he would never make a sale."
Just like people who try to sell anything that's easily available obtained without paying have a hard time unless they offer something else of value as part of the deal. This is not a matter of ethics, but a simple reflection of reality: building a toll road between two points won't earn money if there's an alternative free one that also connects those two points unless it offers something the free one doesn't.
"Oh yea I forgot, depriving income somehow escapes the ethical delima yet the mythical right to posess everything is always assumed in these arguments."
What's depriving people of income is the fact that technology has removed their ability to control the means of distribution, which is vital to an economic model based entirely on maintaining artificial scarcity. The mythical thing in the 21st century is therefore the "right" to charge people for things they can easily obtain without paying, and give to anyone else they wish with equal ease.
"Somehow the easy concept of respecting the wishes of the owner/creator is always ignored. I mean you used the word ethics right?"
Why are we ethically obliged to pay somebody for copies of something we can copy ourselves without paying? Media technology has been making other media technologies obsolete for centuries: scribes died out as a profession when printing presses became common; records, radio and cinema killed music halls; copy typists were made obsolete by word processors; etc., etc., etc. What is morally so special about owners or creators of music and movies that gives them the right to keep earning money from something that technology has rendered worthless, when nobody has been given this privilege in the past?
"On one side you have the cartel performing draconian feats to maintain its control, and the other side believes that copyright should not really exist except of course if it benefits them..."
This is yet another case of both parties trying to maximise the benefits they gain from a situation. Please tell me how this is unusual in any way, or why the consumer's obvious desire to pay as little as possible for a particular product isn't just as important from a moral or ethical perspective as that of the record companies and artists to charge as much as they can get away with.
"Now if twisting logic and using lawyer speak to convince yourself that you are not doing anything wrong makes you feel better, then no amount of reasoning will make you change your mind. We humans are greedy creatures so I expect no less."
It is you who is twisting logic. Under every generally accepted Western moral and ethical framework, the greedy ones would be those who are shouting "Mine, mine, mine, pay, pay, pay, OR ELSE..." with something that is ludicrously easy to copy and distribute, not the people who share it freely.
"Then why don't these supposed majority of artists just go ahead and give it away like Prince appears to be doing?"
It's due to the fact that record company contracts give them the copyrights to recordings, so artists have no more right to redistribute them than any arbitrary member of the public.
"Artist releases CD; artist goes on tour; ticket prices pay the costs of putting on the tour. The artist makes his money when people who came to see him live go out and buy his CD."
I used to be a session musician, and can categorically tell you that touring is profitable, whereas retail CD sales are only marginally so, and in most cases, end up making a loss for the artist. You are right when you say that (with the exception of tier 1 acts who play big venues and charge a lot for tickets) that ticket sales usually only cover costs, but are missing the fact that they have other sources of income from concerts:
1) Sponsorship (i.e. paid advertising). Artists who have any sort of following can usually find several sponsors.
2) Merchandising. T shirts, posters, key rings, books, paid photos of fans with the artists, etc., that are sold at concerts. Sponsors may cover the costs of manufacturing in return for displaying their logos, so earnings can be 100% profit.
3) Direct CD sales. The band gets the vendor's 40%-50% cut of the retail price instead of their usual 5% or so of the wholesale price, -breakages, -advances, -(anything else the record company can think of to deduct), all deducted _after_ the band's manager has taken his usual 20%. These can sell like the proverbial hot cakes when artists turn up and sign the case liners, hence the fact that so many are willing to do this.
"Tours are a marketing scheme. If no-one buys CDs, there will be no tours"
You've got that backwards, because for most artists, recorded music is a marketing scheme for selling merchandise and concert tickets, without which they would be forced to take non-music day jobs to pay their bills. Tier 1 acts (international stars with tens of millions of fans) can and do make significant amounts of money from CD sales, but they're the exception, not the rule -- most artists (and by most, I mean at least 99%) are extremely lucky to not end up owing the record company money from CD sales of several million copies after all the creative deductions have been taken from their royalties.
"OK, so if you buy a CD, several middlemen get a cut. Unless you know the guy's address and can pop a tenner in the post, buying a CD is the only way to support him."
If you really want to support him / her / them, then go to a concert and buy some merchandise, or if that isn't possible, find out where you can the get merchandise without seeing them live (it's often sold from the web sites that most artists have, so Google is your friend). Buying a CD for 15 quid from a shop will result in the artists getting about 30p gross royalties, and the record company and manager deduct from that, so it probably ends up being 2p or so in the end (or more commonly, nothing or a negative sum). If on the other hand you buy that CD for the same price from the artist's web-site or at a concert, you'll be putting around 8 quid directly in their pockets, i.e. the same as they'd end up with from selling 400 CDs through retail outlets.
"Yeah, never mind all that business about hi-res goggle displays, lets do the macro sized version."
Yes, for a mere 1/8th the cost of buying a commercial cinema system that people pay to come and see, you'll be able to have something nearly as good _in your own home_ where you can watch movies that were screened on the commercial system a year ago in much lower definition Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, or spend a week or two downloading the full IMAX version. I personally can't wait for the chance to spend a mere 150 visits to an IMAX cinema for an entire family (food and drinks included) to get my hands on this hardware, even though the media for it will probably cost nearly as much as one of those visits to get a single, out-of-date movie. After all, you can't play World Of Warcraft on the cinema's system using a Microsoft bean-bag mouse, so that's even more added value!
"I wouldn't normally bother, but that particular one reversed the meaning of the sentence :-)."
I'm glad you did, for precisely the reason you stated. This actively demonstrates why published material needs to be proof-read by several people.
"Back in the 80's, I played a lot of wargames and was very interested in these things. It was very interesting to read a summary of what's been going on since then. "
Everything I wrote is public information, so by definition it's not new (new stuff is classified). Most of the armour and penetration technologies I mentioned were already in place by the mid 1960s, and some of them (e.g. APDS, HEAT) were being used in WWII, although they've obviously been refined considerably since then.
"I know that you know this, but for anyone else: replace "prevents a thicker..." with "presents..."."
Thanks for the correction. Unfortunately, typos are easy to make in long posts, and tend to sneak past several proof-readings!
"Maybe it was different where you were, but I disagree. I still have many of my 70s records and by and large they sound great"
As I said in the prior post, it depends on the sort of material you listen to. Most records that were produced for popular consumption were extremely compressed, and had been frequency equalised to sound reasonable on AM radio and cheap record players, so they weren't any better (and in many cases were worse) than overly compressed "loud" modern CDs. By contrast, some jazz, rock, and especially orchestral music was well or excellently recorded, but then the same can be said for CDs.
"I also frequented high-end hi-fi dealers, and far from insisting on Dark Side of the Moon they generally said "bring your own records, play what you like.""
Not many of the high-end ones I came across were so amenable, for the simple reason that they didn't want their expensive styluses running on surfaces that might have a tiny, barely visible warp (common with vinyl), which could send 1.2g tracking systems skipping merrily across the grooves.
"These invariably sounded far better on decent equipment than on cheap stuff"
I tended to find that there was a cut-off point at which extra money tended to stop making average records sound better, and began to emphasise their recording / pressing flaws. This was the main reason for me selecting a decent upper midrange system rather than a top-end one at the time -- it made everything sound pretty good instead of being notably excellent for a very narrow range of recordings, but far too analytical for everything else.
"One of the frustrations of vinyl is the amount of investment required to get something approaching the best from it."
Both in money, and time (although to be fair, one can pay in excess of $10,000 for a top-end CD player). The problem with mechanical record decks (which is all we had then) is that they're microphonic, and have to be kept absolutely flat, so one had to acoustically isolate them and ensure that they were correctly adjusted using little spirit levels that were built into the best ones, or could be bought as accessories otherwise. Even when the deck and arm were properly set up, there was a ritual that had to be followed with every play: ensure that the rotational speed is correct using the in-built strobe; carefully take the record out of its sleeve with a special handling device, and wipe both sides with an anti-static cloth; place it on the turntable, and set the wet-tracking system up; lift the tone arm with its little hydraulic lever, move it to the first groove, and let it settle gently on to the rotating record. Repeat when side one has finished. Repeat for next record. And while many audiophiles felt that this was all part of the fun, those who bought good systems for listening to music rather than playing around with weren't particularly keen on it, hence the fact that CDs, with their greater convenience, rapidly displaced vinyl.
"You're thinking about normal people, but I'm thinking especially of executives and designers (or worse - executive designers!)."
I would have thought that my remarks about "special" people fitted executives and designers rather well, i.e. those who should be kept away from dangerous things such as electrical outlets, cables, and items with sharp edges.
"Sadly, these were the very same people most likely to buy the cube."
And they're also the sort of people who buy iPods, and will likely buy iPhones, hence my remarks about Apple having learned an important lesson with the Cube about designing things for "special" individuals. A sealed unit that's too big to be swallowed easily, and has nice, rounded edges that the special among us can't easily blind, brain, or eviscerate themselves with is a perfect gift for designers, executives, and executive designers everywhere.
"Look at tank armor some time. You get a long ways with thickness and deflection"
This used to the case with thickness, but deflection has never been used. The reason sloped tank armour replaced flat planes was because it prevents a thicker cross section to an incoming projectile, and not (as many seem to believe) because it has any deflection value against high speed projectiles. Modern tank armour on the other hand is a series of almost flat planes, much like that of WWII tank armour, although for very different reasons.
Modern tanks basically face three types of threats (from other tanks and infantry -- the likes of hellfire missiles are beyond the scope of this topic): high-energy anti-tank (HEAT), high-explosive squash head (HESH), and APDS (armour-piercing discarding sabot, i.e. long-rod kinetic energy penetrators). Each works differently, so armour incorporates several different mechanisms, each of which is specifically designed to counter one of these.
1) HEAT rounds use plasma jets to burn their way through armour (the classic RPG uses this system). There are four possible counters:
a) Spacing. Armour has multiple air spaces in the hope that the jet will consume some layers, leaving the rest intact. It isn't very effective against modern HEAT rounds, but is still much better than a solid layer of equal thickness.
b) Stand-off plates / cages. These have been used for years to protect tank wheels from older, less powerful infantry HEAT weapons, and appeared on the bodies of the less heavily armoured German tanks during WWII. Some infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) in the current Iraq conflict carry "cage" versions, proving that it's still effective against weapons that don't carry tandem-charge warheads.
c) Explosive-reactive armour (ERA). Tanks are covered with small explosive-filled boxes with a metal face-plate. The plasma jet detonates the explosive, and the face plat is thrown laterally in its path to consume it. Not effective against tandem-charge warheads.
d) Ceramic pyramids that remain solid at extremely high temperatures are set inside the armour to dissipate the jet. This is the mechanism used by "Chobham" armour (originally a British design, hence the name); it is effective even against tandem charges, but is extremely costly to manufacture, and also very heavy.
2) HESH. This round flattens against the surface of the tank, and then detonates into the armour, sending a shock wave through it that causes the inner surface of the vehicle to "spall" (i.e. become shrapnel that ricochets around inside it, turning the crew into human sushi). It's fairly easily defeated by a combination of spaced armour and spall liners, which are layers of adhesive plastics on the inside surface of the armour. For this reason, it's primarily used against infantry fighting vehicles nowadays, whose thinner armour has little room for effective air spacing, and therefore spalls very well indeed.
3) APDS / APFSDS. A sabot is used to carry a long, thin, extremely heavy penetrator rod with a point that converts its considerable kinetic energy into very high pressures and temperatures where both the rod and armour become fluids (a process that's analogous to squirting a jet of water into a bucket of oil). The length of the rod must be more or less that same as the armour it's intended to penetrate because the solid rear moves "through" the liquid front (which loses kinetic energy rapidly), becoming liquid itself in the process. A rod that's too short will therefore simply "bore" a hole in the armour, leaving a "hot spot" on the inside that would be likely to burn anyone who touches it rather badly, but has no other effect. Note that DU penetrators are also pyrophoric, i.e. they burn inside the armour in addition to becoming liquid (sintered tungsten doesn't do this, and is also more prone to shatter than DU, although it's far less toxic to both tank crews and the post-battle environment). It can be countered in two ways, both of which are present in the best modern composite ar
"I don't understand the iphone hype, other than the pretty screen and possibly sexy interface."
I don't understand all the hype about colour bit-mapped graphics displays and mice either, when the only advantage they've got over a traditional teletype terminal is a pretty screen and possibly sexy interface.
"The cube was well designed? Tell that to the users who tried setting a folder or book on top of the thing, only to have it shut down due to overheating"
Because normal people always put stuff on top of what are obviously air vents despite warnings in the manual telling them not to, and then wonder why things overheat. I'm not defending Apple or the Cube here, but pictures of its top make me wonder how those "special" enough to put books on it (thus also blocking access to the CD drive) were allowed to have dangerous electrical outlets and cables in their rubber rooms. The positive thing of course is that Apple learned an important lesson about expecting any intellectual capacity whatsoever from consumers, hence the fact that iPods and the iPhone can't easily be opened with tools that are made of rubber, thus preventing special owners from swallowing batteries, putting transparent bits in their eyes, or trying to cram dismounted click-wheels into their belly buttons.
"What the iPhone Doesn't Have:
- Songs as Ringtones"
Oh, please God, PLEASE let this be true...
"Yet oddly WinXP can run programs designed for Win98."
It can run _some_ programs designed for Win9X, not all of them, hence the fact that I still have to keep a Win98 machine around. Some stuff won't install at all, other stuff installs but crashes, and then there are the programs that run, but with garbled displays, sound faults, or occasional crashes, and all imaginable variations thereof. After exhausting all the possibilities of the compatibility wizard, I downloaded the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit. It made some things work slightly better, but in most cases seems to have made little if any difference. This is on XP Pro SP2, but the same issues were there when it was "vanilla" several years ago, so it's not an SP2 thing.
"A scientific "law" (in the sense it is used in "law of gravity", at any rate) is simply a theory that is subjectively fairly firmly established"
No it isn't. A scientific law is something that's derived from observation and measuring which does not require a corresponding theoretical foundation, and didn't have one when it was formulated. Ohm's law for example (V=IR) was derived from measurement, and makes no attempt to explain how or why the derived formula applies, and the same goes for Newton's laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, Boyle's Law, etc., etc., etc.
"The law of gravity is a theory"
It is not. There are various theories of gravity, but these are separate from the Law Of Gravity, which is a formula that Newton came up with which applied minor (but nevertheless important) corrections to Kepler's 3rd law.
As an example of the difference between a law and a theory, I cite Weedlekin's 1st law, which goes thus:
In a given population of Western women, where pulchritude is represented by the letter P, and intellect the letter I, the following formula can be applied with a high degree of reliability: P x I = 1.
Weedlekin's 2nd law:
In a given population of Western women, the pulchritude of a woman's friend (FP) is related to her own pulchritude (P) in the following way: FP=1/P.
I have no concrete theoretical foundation for these laws, but have based them entirely on observation and measurement.
"If you take a look at the waveforms of an album recorded 30 years ago, and compare it to something from a similar genre today, you'll spot the difference immediately. The loud recording results in the high and low bits of the waveform getting "squashed", resulting in a very obvious sort of distortion."
This is actually due to a specific type of compression that's deliberately applied to some modern recordings before they get to a CD master. Compression was also applied to analogue recordings because some sources (especially classical music) exceeded the signal to noise ratio of even the best vinyl playback equipment, so handling the loudest passages without clipping would have meant that the quiet parts disappeared below the noise of the playback medium without compression.
"Vinyl doesn't necessarily suffer from this problem as badly, as it is an analogue medium, and doesn't have strictly defined maximum or minimum amplitudes. "
The maximum and minimum amplitudes are defined by an analogue device's signal to noise ratio, which is around 55db for the best cartridges / laser vinyl players. CD audio on the other hand has a S/N ratio well in excess of 100db, i.e. 100,000 times as much dynamic range.
"All but the very first CDs have serious amplitude problems. One of the only CDs I can think of that was mastered at fairly low levels is 'Brothers in Arms' by Dire Straits"
As was the case with vinyl when it was the dominant format (which, given the fact that I was born in 1960, was a big part of my life for many years), how well recorded something is depends on the sort of music one listens to. Most vinyl pop and rock during the 1960s and 1970s was compressed to hell and had artificially enhanced stereo because it was intended to be played on cheap record players with auto-changers, spring-balanced tone arms, and 3 watt/channel amplifiers connected to 5 inch elliptical full-range speakers that were extremely close to each other. A small number of rock albums had superior recording quality, and therefore became "reference" pieces for hi-fi retailers (e.g. Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon), but most customer demos used classical pieces because they were the only ones that didn't sound worse on a high-end rig than a cheap one. Some expensive classical releases were advertised as being "direct cut", i.e. the signal from the microphones was mixed directly onto grooves instead of being recorded to tape first because audiophiles were willing to pay a lot more for something that had fewer "lossy" stages between musicians and them, and these were commonly used to demonstrate the benefits of extremely expensive component audio systems.
"Ironically, this is one of the primary reasons for the existence of the RIAA. They did a decent job for a while with vinyl, but never established any sort of standard for CDs."
They didn't do anything with vinyl beyond selecting an existing equalisation curve (RCA Victor's New Orthographic Curve) and making it a standard. It was jothing more than recording pre-emphasis / playback de-emphasis system that reduced surface noise and groove size, while making rumble more of a problem, but there was nothing in it to ensure that the initial recording being put on vinyl had decent audio quality, hence the fact that the vast majority of records sounded very bad indeed. R.I.A.A. had no role to play with CD audio parameters, because these had already been set by the Philips / Sony "redbook" standard, which all audio CD players implement (although most modern ones also implement certain newer standards too).
"However, despite that early use in WWI, it was not until WWII, and Germany's use of blitzkrieg tactics, that the tank would radically revolutionize warfare."
Heinz Guderian, the father of Blitzkrieg, credited J.F.C. Fuller and Liddel Hart as the originators of the theories behind it. Fuller had already used Blitzkrieg-like tactics at the Battle Of Cambrai in 1917, and the British pursuit of retreating Germans during late 1918 began to look very much like it indeed, with rapidly advancing tanks being supported by troops in a growing number of armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft, all of which the Germans fought desperate rear-guard actions to stop. The war ended before Fuller's 1919 plan for a fully mechanised army could be realised, but his post-war writings about it and the strategic and tactical advantages it could offer would ironically end up inspiring a new generation of German theorists, while both the British and French military authorities decided to build armies that were beautifully suited to fighting a static trench war. As is often the case in military history, the losing side ends up learning a whole lot more from the experience than the winners, who have a propensity to use the last war as a basis for planning the next one.
The tactics of Blitzkrieg were thus not only already in place during WW1, but actively being used, albeit in a piecemeal fashion by a few visionaries who received little support (and in some cases outright opposition) from people higher up the command ladder. Hitler acknowledge this by inviting Fuller to his birthday party in 1939, where he said "How do you like your children?" while they both watched Germany's mechanised army and airforce parading past them.
"That time was necessary for military theory to catch up to the tank's true implications for warfare"
It was actually more a case of technology having made Blitzkrieg practical in a way that it hadn't been during WW1. Technology in 1918 was more or less up to the job of attacking fixed positions from other fixed positions that were a few miles away, but tanks which can only move at walking pace, have a 1 in three chance of breaking down every five miles, and eat so much fuel that they can only carry enough to go 20 miles wouldn't have been very useful for invading another country, and the aircraft of the time were also severely limited by their engines in speed, range, ceiling, and the amount of ordnance they could carry.
" the tanks of WWI weren't the tanks of WWII"
I presume you're thinking of "lozenge" tanks such as the British Mk. 4 with side-mounted guns. These were specifically designed to cross trenches and large shell craters, and are still the finest vehicles ever made for that particular role, being capable of traversing terrain and climbing vertical obstacles that would immobilise a modern tank, despite having 100 HP engines that gave them a power to weight ratio of only 3 HP/ton. Early designs had a turret, but this was discarded in production models for the side-mounted gunnery because it allowed "female" (machine-gun carrying) tanks to fire downwards into a trench while crossing it, while providing "male" (cannon equipped) variants to engage two separate targets simultaneously.
Not all WW1 tanks were lozenges, and some looked quite a bit like early WWII designs, e.g. the Renault FT-17 with its rotating turret and tracks that lie under its body instead of going over the top. Over 4700 of these were built, and the US army bought a fair number of them -- about 2,500 were still in service in France in 1940, and actually scored several kills against German tanks (which were mostly lightly armoured Pzkfw 1 & 2 types in 1940).
"In WWI the role of the tank was basically to provide light fire support, and a slow moving wall for soldiers to walk behind while it crossed the land between the trenches."
This is just plain wrong. British tanks at The Somme and Cambrai were used to storm enemy lines, in both cases with considerable success, although only 49 were used a The Somme itself. At Cambrai, an attack planned by the visionary J.F.C. Fuller smashed through the previously impenetrable Hindenburg Line to a depth of five miles, the biggest single territory gain in the entire land war. Fuller's plan was in most respects classic Blitzkrieg, using mixed tank and infantry formations with air and artillery support (combined arms) that simply bypassed heavily contested positions, the idea being that the could later be mopped up after the fast-moving front had cut their supply lines. Unfortunately for Fuller, the British in typical fashion completely failed to exploit the opening that he'd made.
"A metal dart like a large version of a tank sabot round. The kinetic energy at that speed is nuts - the explosive power is like a small nuclear explosion"
Modern tank APFSDS rounds have a muzzle velocity of between 1600 and 1800 metres / second (depending on whose gun is firing them), which is more or less the velocity of this aircraft. Sabot darts weigh around 9Kg, which is significant, but they do not behave anything like small nuclear explosions.
"Serfs often had other assets: houses, tools, money, jewelry."
They didn't have houses because they weren't allowed to own land, or leave the plot they were tied to without permission.
"Serfs typically (depending on country's rules, of course) had an inherited right to farm a PARTICULAR chunk of land for a cut of the profits."
They had no rights, because feudal courts refused to hear claims of villeins (the class most serfs belonged to) against their lords, so a lord could simply expel a villein and his entire family whenever he felt like it without any repercussions whatsoever. You seem to be confusing the fact that serfdom was inherited (i.e. the child of a serf was a serf), and that each serf was _tied_ to a piece of land that they could not leave without permission, with them having a right to that land, when in fact the only person with any rights to it was the owner, who could sell it at any time, and any serfs who lived on it went to the new owner along with the land itself (worked land with serfs living on it was worth a lot more than empty land)
"The serf could become very well-to-do if his land produced lots of crops, the plants were hardier and resisted plant diseases, his wells didn't run dry while everybody else's did, his animals survived bad weather, etc."
This tended to please lords, because such a serf would be paying his taxes when others couldn't. The land a serf lived on had to be worked at his own expense in his spare time, and the vast majority of it was taken up with growing wheat to pay the lord's taxes with (tithes were customarily paid in wheat) because mediaeval agricultural techniques provided extremely low yields. Anything remaining was used to feed his family, pay other taxes such death duties, daughter marriage taxes (the daughter was considered the lord's property), water tithes, milling and baking costs (the lord owned these facilities), tool, cart, and barrel repairs, Easter and Christmas "gifts" to the lord (eggs and geese respectively, which would have to be bartered for by those who didn't produce them), etc., etc., etc. The very small number of those who managed to have anything to sell at market after the lord had taken his whack usually saved up to buy their freedom, after which they ceased to become serfs, so while there may have been some wealthy (by serf standards) serfs, they would have been extremely rare.
"Of course when there was a bad year and everybody else's wells ran dry or crops failed and mistreated, starved, and overcrowded animals got sick, while Mr Hardworking Serf's crops, livestock, and wells did just hunky-dory, it could easily be used to start rumors of witchcraft"
It did indeed. However, such claims were usually levelled at women, the serf varieties of whom were considered to be of little value due to their inability to carry heavy loads for long periods and their exemption from enforced military service, and accusations were invariably from neighbours or church emissaries, not the lords whose lands the peasants worked. This is because it simply didn't make financial sense for a landlord to divide up the meagre wealth of a serf with the state, church, and other serfs, when he could get the whole lot by simply booting them out and keeping all their possessions for himself.
"Once the pesky serf was eliminated, not only were his liquid assets divied up, but the Lord was free of his obligation to let the serf continue farming this particularly good hunk of land"
Lords who wanted to eliminate serfs could do so without the need for resorting to things like witchcraft trials.
"The lord could then add it to his personal estate, farm it with his household staff and get ALL the profits"
As opposed to a mere 99.9% of the profits that he was already making from that farm without any effort whatsoever on his part.
"make a new serfdom arrangement on better-for-the-lord terms with another family, etc."
If there had been a form of serfdom that was better for lords, then it would have bee
It also prevents people from distributing (for example) photocopies, or in this digital age, scanned or OCRd copies.
"The problem is that I feel that I have lost the right to create and publish my own works. If I write a song, I fear that it might turn out to be an unintentional copy of an existing song. It happened to George Harrison (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music)."
When one considers how derivative most modern forms of entertainment are, the relative dearth of plagiarism cases that get brought to court (let alone won) means that your chances of getting sued for unintentional plagiarism is much lower than the very small probability that your efforts will make you incredibly wealthy and famous.
A generation isn't the average life span of a human, but the time between offspring being born, i.e. a mother and her daughter represent two generations. 300 years would therefore be around 12 generations if one assumes that people _on average_ breed at around age 25 in the US.
"But they're EU members, it shouldn't matter eitherway. that's like Ontario and Quebec bickering over whether the border goes on one side or the other of a border town. In the grand scheme of things, yeah they're different provinces, but really it doesn't matter."
The EU is a collection of separate countries, not a single country, so it's actually rather more like the US and Canada having a dispute over borders despite both being in NAFTA.
"Making all of Ireland belong to Ireland makes sense as it's a friggin Island."
So is the UK mainland, but the Scots, Welsh and English insist that it's three separate countries. Only a very foolish person would go to Scotland or Wales and tell them they're English because "it's a friggin island"...
"But still, eitherway there is a conflict there that the governments have not resolved"
It's a disagreement rather than a conflict nowadays. "The troubles" are well and truly over, much to the relief of nearly everyone on both sides of the border.
"Thus disputing the notion that the USA is the only place with turmoil on Earth [in the first world nation category that is]."
While I agree with what you're saying viz-a-viz the US, Northern Ireland was a poor example to pick in 2007, although it would have been an excellent one in (for example) the 1980s.