"The reality is that all of those call centers are using VOIP on their end and it's all IP that's carrying that voice traffic to and from the US. There's no way call center outsourcing would be economically viable using traditional circuit-switched phone networks, not to mention that advanced features that VOIP allows enabling data to be sent with the call improving call duration (the all-important metric for most call centers)."
Indeed. But those packets require network infrastructure, not DNS. So the location of DNS root servers, who gets to administer them, etc., has no relevance to call center outsourcing as long as both sides have an IP address.
"Of those things ONLY eminent domain has enjoyed a popular backlash. And you know what is happening there? A myriad of local state laws to prevent abuse."
Indeed. And I agree with your point about the DMCA, and would add patents and copyrights. But that's because, when push comes to shove, all the corporate money funneled into election funds counts for nothing if the public won't vote for someone, so sheer political survival means that politicians can't simply ignore strong public feeling. However, this is clearly not the case with those who want to wrest control of DNS from the US: the EC is not a democratic institution, and neither are most of the non-EC countries who are pushing for this. So they don't give a hoot about what the public wants, because their jobs aren't on the line if people get dissatisfied in large numbers.
"Well that point is irrelevant since they [China] have already been selected."
But that was my point. China has been selected despite the fact that they continue to abuse human rights in a large number of ways, have been occupying Tibet by force for decades against the manifest wishes of its populace, etc. So the IOC doesn't care how a country behaves towards its own people or anyone else as long as the right palms get greased.
"Political backlash from other countries (especially the U.S.) could be enough to derail the selection of China as host country though, if they start seeming overly militaristic."
There was a considerable US backlash against the 1980 Moscow Olympics. They even boycotted the games, but it made absolutely no difference -- they went ahead as planned, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had begun its invasion of Afghanistan almost a year earlier. So the IOC has never given a damn about a host nation's militarism, and never demonstrated any willingness to consider what the US thinks about it. And if they don't regard invading another sovereign nation as being an impediment to hosting the games, they're hardly likely to worry about a political spat over who gets to administer something that most of them have never heard of, let alone care about, irrespective of what the almost universally reviled Bush administration happens to think about it.
The loudest members of any group are seldom representative of the majority, but it is a sad fact that their very loudness means that they get noticed, and therefore others from outside the group paint its other members with the same brush.
You are indeed massive consumers. But the number of foreign products that you buy directly from foreign web-sites is minimal, so it even those countries that do significant business with the US will not suffer any noticeable impact from not having access to US root servers any more. Most of the massive US trade deficit comes from things destined directly for the retail sector, i.e. stuff that's sold in stores. And it's not just known foreign brands like Sony or BMW that accounts for most of it, but items carrying US brand names, much of which is either made under contract by foreign companies (principally Chinese ones these days), has parts made abroad, or in some cases is simply a re-badged generic item (e.g. things sold very cheaply by major retail chains that have a weird brand name which only they carry).
And the same goes for foreigners who buy US products. It's actually very difficult for those of us outside the US to buy from most major US manufacturers directly, even if they do have direct-purchase web stores, because most of them will route us to a foreign subsidiary or middle-man who charges a lot more for the same thing. And many US retailers are restricted by the manufacturers who supply them to domestic markets for many goods, which often carry "not for sale outside the US and Canada" stickers on their packaging, so they can't sell to us either. In some cases this is justified because of differing standards and laws that must be complied with, but it's also true of things like software, even when there's no technology in it that requires export restrictions of any sort.
And so both the US and its adversaries can posture and execute their power plays in sure knowledge that their corporate overlords won't care one way or the other. In fact, a good many of them stand to benefit because people in Europe for example won't be able to see that US citizens pay less for the same stuff even if it's produced in their own country. Of course, a lot of smaller retailers and specialist manufacturers on both sides stand to get hurt, but they haven't got the funds to buy political representation, so nobody cares about them any more than they do you or me.
Actually, you only did that after he declared war on you just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Before then, the US took a profoundly isolationist stance, and Roosevelt had to publicly agree with it despite lending covert assistance to Britain in particular. However, even this was mainly due to his conviction that the Nazis would become a significant threat to the US if they were allowed to consolidate their empire.
Thus, the US was acting in its own interests when helping to liberate those bits of Europe that the Russians didn't "liberate" first (not that there's anything wrong with this, of course: few nations would commit manpower and resources on that kind of scale out of altruism). Note though that the Allies could not have defeated Germany as quickly as they did (or even at all) if over 70% of Hitler's forces and materials weren't occupied fighting the Russians, a fact conveniently overlooked by most US-oriented WWII fare.
"Who suffers most if India or China get really cut off from communications with America?"
The Internet is not "communications" -- it is one form of communicating, but by no means the only one that businesses can use. There was a substantial global trade network before the Internet appeared, and there will still be one if it ceases to be in its present form. Not even pure Internet companies like Google would suffer in the long term, because they already operate services for most countries using resources outside the US anyway (same with Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
"look at which way the money flows. All that outsourced work stops taking place and India/China get no checks... U.S. companies just shrug and either outsource to some country that still is on the same network as us, or simply hires local talent and sucks up the cost "
Again, an erroneous assumption that the Internet is necessary for outsourcing, and a change in its nature (or even its entire removal) will therefore close everything down. Do you actually know what the biggest single outsourcing industry in India is? Call centers. These have loads of people with telephones who answer calls from other people with telephones instead of using the line to send IP packets. China's main outsourcing services on the other hand are manufacturing based, i.e. they get sent a design, and build it for a US company extremely cheaply. Neither of these depend on the Internet in any shape or form, because major corporations do not use Google to short-list call center providers or manufacturers, and don't sign contracts or send confidential designs on-line or by EMAIL -- they send people to do these things, which is why airlines have all those ads targeting business travelers!
"sidenote: Then find they save billions of dollars by not wasting time trying to communicate across continents and using far fewer raw numbers of people; but I digress"
Yes. Because business people are so stupid that they haven't realized how paying US workers fifteen times the wages of the outsourced ones, adding social security and medical benefits to that, and housing them is an air-conditioned environment that conforms to all the US regulations is actually cheaper than some phone calls, letters, or even putting one guy on a plane three times a year. Gee, what a bunch of idiots!
"For that reason it hardly matters if China and/or India break off into a separate network. Companies will find some way to communicate with each other; money dictates it be so and that's what makes the world go round. A lot of companies already have their own dedicated fiber and they would simply tunnel the U.S. internet where it needed to go overseas."
The first sensible thing you've said. However, what makes you think they'd bother tunneling to the US Internet, when there are plenty of other potential options that avoid many of its pitfalls (spam, viruses, getting hacked, and vast amounts of bandwidth being consumed by crap)? The primary benefit of the US Internet is for reaching consumers, not commercial operations between (for example) Apple and the Chinese companies who actually make their products. It may be news to you, but there are in fact close to no companies in India or China who depend on direct on-line sales to US consumers for a substantial portion of their business!
"Also, how do you think the citizens of all those countries would like being suddenly cut off from all U.S. sites? I don't think they would take it well. Not at all."
Newsflash: most of the world's population doesn't speak English, and therefore has little use for US sites, so the only thing they'd probably notice is a complete drying up of all that spam in English (that they can't read) trying to sell mortgages, prescription drugs, and Viagra to people in the US.
"Considering only what governments want to do is not realistic when it differs substantially enough from what people WANT to do."
So people in the US want to have their property seized by corrupt politicos serving large corpo
I've been using and developing on UNIX and MS OS offerings since the early 80s, and for CP/M before then. I bought an iMac G5 for my wife in February this year so she could EMAIL me when I work abroad (which is quite frequently): my wife is not computer literate, and did not wish to be ever since I tried to introduce her to Windows. She does however love the Mac, and strangely, I have also come to do the same, even though I didn't expect to when I bought it.
My growing admiration for the Mac is not because of its pretty UI, the fact that it "just works", its freedom from viruses, Spotlight, widgets, or any of the reasons usually cited. What impresses me is the fact that the system feels like it was designed as a whole instead of being cobbled together from a load of separate bits, each of which grew organically in response to the changing requirements of people who were working in isolation from those who wrote the other parts
As an example of the above, OS X has a bunch of little apps, each of which does one or two basic jobs. There's an address book, a dictionary / thesaurus that also acts as a spell-checker, a calendar / appointments manager, and various others, none of which is anything special in its own right. However, the fact that they are present in the OS _and_ have a set of APIs that application programs can use means that all properly written OS X apps take advantage of them. You only have to manage one contact list, one set of appointments, one spell-checker, etc., and any changes you make to them will be instantly available everywhere.
Compare this with for example Windows, where the Windows Address Book supplied with Outlook Express (which comes with the OS and gets updated when you update IE) isn't used by anybody because it's so limited and has such a horrid, draconian set of APIs. Even Microsoft's own Outlook shuns it, so they can hardly expect third-parties to bother with it for anything beyond importing data into their own, proprietary address books. And of course, Windows itself doesn't come with an appointment manager or spelling checker -- they're part of Office, which not everyone has, so developers are faced with writing their own versions. Result: lots of duplicated data in different formats and locations, all of which the hapless user is left to synchronize.
And this attention to detail in making things work together shows up everywhere in OS X, even on the humble command-line terminal. Open a terminal window, drag a desktop icon or file, or a folder or app in Finder on to it, and the full path and file name appear at the prompt. Highlight text in the terminal window, drag it on to the desk top or Finder, and a file is created with that text in it. Drag that file on to another terminal window, and the text appears in it -- text can also be dragged between one terminal window and another. What's more, this doesn't just work for the raw command prompt: you can drag text from (for example) the Safari browser into a terminal with VIM in it, and the text will be pasted into VIM's buffer, where you can edit it.
So IMO the greatest lesson Linux can learn from OS X is that programmers should consider each application they write as being part of a coherent system that should not only work with, but also offer services to other applications in a language-independent way. Microsoft's OLE Automation and later COM technologies were trying to achieve this, and it's what.NET is supposed to improve on today, yet Linux software can't even reliably copy and paste a piece of simple text between two arbitrary programs, let alone offer the sophisticated level of interop that MS, Apple, and others had achieved years ago.
Strange that, wanting extra money for smaller stuff. Just like those greedy laptop makers who charge more than a much better desktop PC, or the really greedy ones who want even more than that for extra thin, light laptops that have less stuff in them than the cheap, fat, heavy ones.
It isn't only theatre releases and DVD sales, but also video / DVD hire, TV / cable / satellite broadcasting rights, and product tie-ins. Yes, artists also benefit from product tie-ins, but there is a vast difference in scale between (for example) the amount of money that a major movie release makes from licensing tie-ins versus that of even the most successful music artist.
I don't see anything in my post that indicates my position on what Taiwan is doing. I was merely pointing out that the US (and as you say, other Western nations) have done exactly the same thing when they felt that the situation warranted it. And they haven't merely taken intellectual property, but also physical property: land, buildings, vehicles, ships, horses, mules, dogs, and many other things have been siezed during times of emergency with no restitution whasoever being paid to their owners.
And this situation continues to the present day. If you own a patent that gets used by a contractor on something that is even tenuously related to national security, then you'll probably receive nothing for it, and there's damn all you can do about it. In these cases, it's usually big corporations with fat defence contracts who stiff some little company or individual inventor so they can keep all the profits for themselves.
However, while I agree in general that such acts are deplorable, I make an exception in the case of La Roche. This company made a fortune by simply stealing the work of others, and they have been truly nasty in countless ways, so anything bad that happens to that odious bunch of shites is OK by me.
I am completely in context regarding the post I was replying to which said (quote):
"I purely put the blame on microsoft - they started this whole protecting your ip patent extortion scheme to fight linux.
you never heard the word IP before microsoft started using it in their defense against linux."
The above is patently crap, as I said. Even if we restrict ourselves to software patents (which is not indicated by anything in your original post), Microsoft are by no means the first company to use them, and as yet have not used them against Linux (although they may well do in the future). SCO haven't used software patents against Linux either: their claims are based on copyright, which has been used to protect software for at least three decades, and is the foundation upon which the GPL rests. And Microsoft were by no means the first to use the term "intellectual property" with reference to software.
As to Microsoft "courting companies to sue people over Linux", please provide some evidence before stating that such things are facts. Yes, they funnelled money into SCO, but this happened _after_ Darl & Co started the ball rolling, not before -- certainly a case of opportunism, but not evidence of them "courting companies to sue".
I wonder how much of the Chinese determination to use open source, develop their own microprocessors, and generally make moves towards implementing an internally self-sustaining IT infrastructure may be driven by a profound distrust of Western governments and companies. After all, both have treated China pretty badly in the past, and they probably feel that we only allow them to trade with us today if they play by rules which benefit us far more than them. Add to this the fact that the US in particular has displayed a penchant for suddenly prohibiting the sale of certain technologies to countries that it doesn't like, and you have a set of very good reasons why the idea of not becoming dependent on Microsoft, Intel, or any other Western company could look very attractive to them.
It is also likely that they are telling the truth about Linux' better security being a key feature for them. Totalitarian regimes are invariably paranoid, and even if MS could prove that the versions of Windows being sold in China haven't got back doors that the US government can use to spy on them, the fact that it is rife with keyloggers, bots, etc. is pretty good evidence that the CIA or similar could infect their systems with spying software quite easily. Far safer then to use not only an OS with a pretty good security track record in its own right, but also one with source code that they can examine for freedom from back doors, and modify with their own specialised security features if they want.
Read up on the history of Sino-Western relations over the last couple of centuries, and then ask yourselves one question: if you were them, would you trust us not to totally fuck them over if there was a buck in it somewhere?
And because MS sell tech rather than content, they license their DRM to third parties, because that was the reason for them developing it in the first place. Unfortunately, Apple, who sell both tech. and content, developed FairPlay for their own use, and won't license it to third parties, so organisations like the BBC are pretty much forced into the Microsoft camp.
The really sad part of all this is that it displays typical Apple short-sightedness. With the iPod phenomenon, they had the chance to establish FairPlay as the de-facto standard for DRM'd music, thereby raking in royalties on every commercial download even if the iPod and iTunes fade into quaintness with time (as they undoubtedly will in our lovely, fast-paced tech. world). Yet they have chosen instead to milk a short-term market for all it's worth, and once again leave MS to cede their technology to the competition. We all know what happened the last time they did that, so I can only hope for their sake that this is not a case of somebody repeating history because they haven't learned from it.
More likely UV, which many insect eyes are sensitive to, hence the fact that many flowers reflect UV very efficiently, and bug-zapping lamps use actinic light tubes.
Why would they want to break the base? Surely, being able to say "look, our stuff is so great that even people running Linux and OS X want to emulate us" is great for them, especially if the emulation is eight years behind their release wave-front and even less reliable than the notably crash-prone Win9X series that they've now completely abandoned.
And worse still (for me at any rate) is the fact that I inevitably end up sitting through the same plot that I've already seen twenty times in the past, but with a different cast and locations. It's like Hollywood screenwriters have got four pre-printed story templates, each with a few blank words that they pencil in to order so that somebody can blow 200 million making it, and then act surprised when the public can't be bothered to go and see it at a cinema.
Indeed. Most cats that hunt large prey (in relation to them) tend to suffocate it. This leaves very distinctive wounds on the necks of animals that look more or less like movie vampire bites, i.e. deep punctures caused by long canines that are designed to hold the cat's jaws in position until death occurs. It is for this reason that members of the cat family are very protective of their canines, as losing one can severely impair their ability to hunt effectively (damaged claws on the other hand tend to grow back after a while).
NB: leopards in particular have on several occasions disembowelled humans. This is however probably not the leopard's initial intention, but is the result of it trying to climb up a biped's body (much as it would a tree) so that it can use its normal suffocating bite.
Yeah, large carnivores one or two generations from the wild that haven't had to hunt are real softies. When they rip the odd keeper who gets overconfident, stage magician, or member of the public with a deathwish to bloody shreds, they invariably do it in a gentle, "but of course I've been raised in captivity" way, not like their wild brethren who boorishly leap around and snarl and cover everything in drool.
And it goes without saying that a raised-in-captivity bengal tiger, kodiac bear, or nile crocodile can have the shit totally kicked out of it by a geek who gets nose-bleeds after sliding a 19" monitor three whole inches. Because being raised in captivity and never having hunted means it'll just sit there and take the abuse, just like true domestic animals such as Rottweillers and Spanish fighting bulls do.
So anybody who is planning on visiting a safari park should take a geek with them. Then, if you break down or get a puncture in the lion enclosure, you can get out and fix it in the sure knowledge that your geek can just pick up one of those pesky cats by the tail and use it to club any others into mewling submission, assuming of course that they were all raised in captivity and never had to hunt.
Correct. And this situation exists because the record companies have been dominant for so long that there is effectively no equivalent of "venture capital" that new artists can get to launch their careers from any other source, despite the fact that talented artists with the right kind of guidance and exposure can generate far more ROI than some of the half-arsed business ventures that do get funded.
I firmly believe that this will change in a few years. The Internet has already removed the need for a centralised manufacturing and distribution process, and other digital technologies have also made specialist recording studios much less important than they once were, at least for certain types of music. So the only vital roles played by record companies nowadays are not in recording and distributing, but financing, advertising, and taking care of legal matters, and their monopoly on these can only be sustained while nobody else is willing to step in and offer precisely the same services in a single package with better terms. When that happens (and I don't think it's a case of if, because somebody with capital is inevitably going to realise that they can make a lot of money this way), then the days of RIAA members really will be numbered.
"The record industry survived the transition from 78s to LPs, and the launch of the cassette tape, and the CD"
They squalled mightily about the cassette though, because it could be used to copy stuff, record from the radio, etc. I'm old enough to remember the recording industry's "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign from the 1970s, which led to every cassette-based device that is capable of recording having to carry microphone jacks that nobody wants so the manufacturer can claim that it has legitimate, non-infringing uses. The government levies in many countries on blank cassettes were also a direct result of this campaign.
As to the other "transitions", they weren't "survived", but rather greeted with open arms because each new system was cheaper to manufacture than the old one, could be produced in higher volumes per time period, yet sounded better, which meant that they could charge people more for what was essentially the same thing. And of course, these were all play-only technologies that allowed the industry to maintain its dominance over artists and consumers alike. By contrast, they've gone screaming to legislators whenever some new, cheap, and convenient recording system appears, and have been pretty successful over the years at convincing most that they have a right to earn large sums of money for basically just being there (probably because, unlike most people, legislators also earn large sums of money for just being there).
What crap -- people were suing others over patents, copyrights, and trademarks long before Gates and Ballmer were born. And MS did not invent the term "intellectual property": it was used in the 18th century, and may well be even older.
Slashdot Mirror
"The reality is that all of those call centers are using VOIP on their end and it's all IP that's carrying that voice traffic to and from the US. There's no way call center outsourcing would be economically viable using traditional circuit-switched phone networks, not to mention that advanced features that VOIP allows enabling data to be sent with the call improving call duration (the all-important metric for most call centers)."
Indeed. But those packets require network infrastructure, not DNS. So the location of DNS root servers, who gets to administer them, etc., has no relevance to call center outsourcing as long as both sides have an IP address.
"Of those things ONLY eminent domain has enjoyed a popular backlash. And you know what is happening there? A myriad of local state laws to prevent abuse."
Indeed. And I agree with your point about the DMCA, and would add patents and copyrights. But that's because, when push comes to shove, all the corporate money funneled into election funds counts for nothing if the public won't vote for someone, so sheer political survival means that politicians can't simply ignore strong public feeling. However, this is clearly not the case with those who want to wrest control of DNS from the US: the EC is not a democratic institution, and neither are most of the non-EC countries who are pushing for this. So they don't give a hoot about what the public wants, because their jobs aren't on the line if people get dissatisfied in large numbers.
"Well that point is irrelevant since they [China] have already been selected."
But that was my point. China has been selected despite the fact that they continue to abuse human rights in a large number of ways, have been occupying Tibet by force for decades against the manifest wishes of its populace, etc. So the IOC doesn't care how a country behaves towards its own people or anyone else as long as the right palms get greased.
"Political backlash from other countries (especially the U.S.) could be enough to derail the selection of China as host country though, if they start seeming overly militaristic."
There was a considerable US backlash against the 1980 Moscow Olympics. They even boycotted the games, but it made absolutely no difference -- they went ahead as planned, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had begun its invasion of Afghanistan almost a year earlier. So the IOC has never given a damn about a host nation's militarism, and never demonstrated any willingness to consider what the US thinks about it. And if they don't regard invading another sovereign nation as being an impediment to hosting the games, they're hardly likely to worry about a political spat over who gets to administer something that most of them have never heard of, let alone care about, irrespective of what the almost universally reviled Bush administration happens to think about it.
The loudest members of any group are seldom representative of the majority, but it is a sad fact that their very loudness means that they get noticed, and therefore others from outside the group paint its other members with the same brush.
You are indeed massive consumers. But the number of foreign products that you buy directly from foreign web-sites is minimal, so it even those countries that do significant business with the US will not suffer any noticeable impact from not having access to US root servers any more. Most of the massive US trade deficit comes from things destined directly for the retail sector, i.e. stuff that's sold in stores. And it's not just known foreign brands like Sony or BMW that accounts for most of it, but items carrying US brand names, much of which is either made under contract by foreign companies (principally Chinese ones these days), has parts made abroad, or in some cases is simply a re-badged generic item (e.g. things sold very cheaply by major retail chains that have a weird brand name which only they carry).
And the same goes for foreigners who buy US products. It's actually very difficult for those of us outside the US to buy from most major US manufacturers directly, even if they do have direct-purchase web stores, because most of them will route us to a foreign subsidiary or middle-man who charges a lot more for the same thing. And many US retailers are restricted by the manufacturers who supply them to domestic markets for many goods, which often carry "not for sale outside the US and Canada" stickers on their packaging, so they can't sell to us either. In some cases this is justified because of differing standards and laws that must be complied with, but it's also true of things like software, even when there's no technology in it that requires export restrictions of any sort.
And so both the US and its adversaries can posture and execute their power plays in sure knowledge that their corporate overlords won't care one way or the other. In fact, a good many of them stand to benefit because people in Europe for example won't be able to see that US citizens pay less for the same stuff even if it's produced in their own country. Of course, a lot of smaller retailers and specialist manufacturers on both sides stand to get hurt, but they haven't got the funds to buy political representation, so nobody cares about them any more than they do you or me.
"Blatantly and intentionally harbor terrorist, and you run the risk of invasion."
If you are small and weak.
"If you house an entity that has declared war on the US, you best either kick them out or deal with them yourself."
If you are small and weak.
"If you pull what the Taliban pulled, which was to not only allow them to stay, but give them funding and positions of power within the government,"
whilst at the same time being small and weak,
"don't be surprised when the US comes knocking - with bombs."
Actually, you only did that after he declared war on you just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Before then, the US took a profoundly isolationist stance, and Roosevelt had to publicly agree with it despite lending covert assistance to Britain in particular. However, even this was mainly due to his conviction that the Nazis would become a significant threat to the US if they were allowed to consolidate their empire.
Thus, the US was acting in its own interests when helping to liberate those bits of Europe that the Russians didn't "liberate" first (not that there's anything wrong with this, of course: few nations would commit manpower and resources on that kind of scale out of altruism). Note though that the Allies could not have defeated Germany as quickly as they did (or even at all) if over 70% of Hitler's forces and materials weren't occupied fighting the Russians, a fact conveniently overlooked by most US-oriented WWII fare.
"Who suffers most if India or China get really cut off from communications with America?"
The Internet is not "communications" -- it is one form of communicating, but by no means the only one that businesses can use. There was a substantial global trade network before the Internet appeared, and there will still be one if it ceases to be in its present form. Not even pure Internet companies like Google would suffer in the long term, because they already operate services for most countries using resources outside the US anyway (same with Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
"look at which way the money flows. All that outsourced work stops taking place and India/China get no checks... U.S. companies just shrug and either outsource to some country that still is on the same network as us, or simply hires local talent and sucks up the cost "
Again, an erroneous assumption that the Internet is necessary for outsourcing, and a change in its nature (or even its entire removal) will therefore close everything down. Do you actually know what the biggest single outsourcing industry in India is? Call centers. These have loads of people with telephones who answer calls from other people with telephones instead of using the line to send IP packets. China's main outsourcing services on the other hand are manufacturing based, i.e. they get sent a design, and build it for a US company extremely cheaply. Neither of these depend on the Internet in any shape or form, because major corporations do not use Google to short-list call center providers or manufacturers, and don't sign contracts or send confidential designs on-line or by EMAIL -- they send people to do these things, which is why airlines have all those ads targeting business travelers!
"sidenote: Then find they save billions of dollars by not wasting time trying to communicate across continents and using far fewer raw numbers of people; but I digress"
Yes. Because business people are so stupid that they haven't realized how paying US workers fifteen times the wages of the outsourced ones, adding social security and medical benefits to that, and housing them is an air-conditioned environment that conforms to all the US regulations is actually cheaper than some phone calls, letters, or even putting one guy on a plane three times a year. Gee, what a bunch of idiots!
"For that reason it hardly matters if China and/or India break off into a separate network. Companies will find some way to communicate with each other; money dictates it be so and that's what makes the world go round. A lot of companies already have their own dedicated fiber and they would simply tunnel the U.S. internet where it needed to go overseas."
The first sensible thing you've said. However, what makes you think they'd bother tunneling to the US Internet, when there are plenty of other potential options that avoid many of its pitfalls (spam, viruses, getting hacked, and vast amounts of bandwidth being consumed by crap)? The primary benefit of the US Internet is for reaching consumers, not commercial operations between (for example) Apple and the Chinese companies who actually make their products. It may be news to you, but there are in fact close to no companies in India or China who depend on direct on-line sales to US consumers for a substantial portion of their business!
"Also, how do you think the citizens of all those countries would like being suddenly cut off from all U.S. sites? I don't think they would take it well. Not at all."
Newsflash: most of the world's population doesn't speak English, and therefore has little use for US sites, so the only thing they'd probably notice is a complete drying up of all that spam in English (that they can't read) trying to sell mortgages, prescription drugs, and Viagra to people in the US.
"Considering only what governments want to do is not realistic when it differs substantially enough from what people WANT to do."
So people in the US want to have their property seized by corrupt politicos serving large corpo
I've been using and developing on UNIX and MS OS offerings since the early 80s, and for CP/M before then. I bought an iMac G5 for my wife in February this year so she could EMAIL me when I work abroad (which is quite frequently): my wife is not computer literate, and did not wish to be ever since I tried to introduce her to Windows. She does however love the Mac, and strangely, I have also come to do the same, even though I didn't expect to when I bought it.
.NET is supposed to improve on today, yet Linux software can't even reliably copy and paste a piece of simple text between two arbitrary programs, let alone offer the sophisticated level of interop that MS, Apple, and others had achieved years ago.
My growing admiration for the Mac is not because of its pretty UI, the fact that it "just works", its freedom from viruses, Spotlight, widgets, or any of the reasons usually cited. What impresses me is the fact that the system feels like it was designed as a whole instead of being cobbled together from a load of separate bits, each of which grew organically in response to the changing requirements of people who were working in isolation from those who wrote the other parts
As an example of the above, OS X has a bunch of little apps, each of which does one or two basic jobs. There's an address book, a dictionary / thesaurus that also acts as a spell-checker, a calendar / appointments manager, and various others, none of which is anything special in its own right. However, the fact that they are present in the OS _and_ have a set of APIs that application programs can use means that all properly written OS X apps take advantage of them. You only have to manage one contact list, one set of appointments, one spell-checker, etc., and any changes you make to them will be instantly available everywhere.
Compare this with for example Windows, where the Windows Address Book supplied with Outlook Express (which comes with the OS and gets updated when you update IE) isn't used by anybody because it's so limited and has such a horrid, draconian set of APIs. Even Microsoft's own Outlook shuns it, so they can hardly expect third-parties to bother with it for anything beyond importing data into their own, proprietary address books. And of course, Windows itself doesn't come with an appointment manager or spelling checker -- they're part of Office, which not everyone has, so developers are faced with writing their own versions. Result: lots of duplicated data in different formats and locations, all of which the hapless user is left to synchronize.
And this attention to detail in making things work together shows up everywhere in OS X, even on the humble command-line terminal. Open a terminal window, drag a desktop icon or file, or a folder or app in Finder on to it, and the full path and file name appear at the prompt. Highlight text in the terminal window, drag it on to the desk top or Finder, and a file is created with that text in it. Drag that file on to another terminal window, and the text appears in it -- text can also be dragged between one terminal window and another. What's more, this doesn't just work for the raw command prompt: you can drag text from (for example) the Safari browser into a terminal with VIM in it, and the text will be pasted into VIM's buffer, where you can edit it.
So IMO the greatest lesson Linux can learn from OS X is that programmers should consider each application they write as being part of a coherent system that should not only work with, but also offer services to other applications in a language-independent way. Microsoft's OLE Automation and later COM technologies were trying to achieve this, and it's what
Strange that, wanting extra money for smaller stuff. Just like those greedy laptop makers who charge more than a much better desktop PC, or the really greedy ones who want even more than that for extra thin, light laptops that have less stuff in them than the cheap, fat, heavy ones.
It isn't only theatre releases and DVD sales, but also video / DVD hire, TV / cable / satellite broadcasting rights, and product tie-ins. Yes, artists also benefit from product tie-ins, but there is a vast difference in scale between (for example) the amount of money that a major movie release makes from licensing tie-ins versus that of even the most successful music artist.
Because this is a public forum, and any posts are likely to be read by others, not just you.
I don't see anything in my post that indicates my position on what Taiwan is doing. I was merely pointing out that the US (and as you say, other Western nations) have done exactly the same thing when they felt that the situation warranted it. And they haven't merely taken intellectual property, but also physical property: land, buildings, vehicles, ships, horses, mules, dogs, and many other things have been siezed during times of emergency with no restitution whasoever being paid to their owners.
And this situation continues to the present day. If you own a patent that gets used by a contractor on something that is even tenuously related to national security, then you'll probably receive nothing for it, and there's damn all you can do about it. In these cases, it's usually big corporations with fat defence contracts who stiff some little company or individual inventor so they can keep all the profits for themselves.
However, while I agree in general that such acts are deplorable, I make an exception in the case of La Roche. This company made a fortune by simply stealing the work of others, and they have been truly nasty in countless ways, so anything bad that happens to that odious bunch of shites is OK by me.
I am completely in context regarding the post I was replying to which said (quote):
"I purely put the blame on microsoft - they started this whole protecting your ip patent extortion scheme to fight linux.
you never heard the word IP before microsoft started using it in their defense against linux."
The above is patently crap, as I said. Even if we restrict ourselves to software patents (which is not indicated by anything in your original post), Microsoft are by no means the first company to use them, and as yet have not used them against Linux (although they may well do in the future). SCO haven't used software patents against Linux either: their claims are based on copyright, which has been used to protect software for at least three decades, and is the foundation upon which the GPL rests. And Microsoft were by no means the first to use the term "intellectual property" with reference to software.
As to Microsoft "courting companies to sue people over Linux", please provide some evidence before stating that such things are facts. Yes, they funnelled money into SCO, but this happened _after_ Darl & Co started the ball rolling, not before -- certainly a case of opportunism, but not evidence of them "courting companies to sue".
I wonder how much of the Chinese determination to use open source, develop their own microprocessors, and generally make moves towards implementing an internally self-sustaining IT infrastructure may be driven by a profound distrust of Western governments and companies. After all, both have treated China pretty badly in the past, and they probably feel that we only allow them to trade with us today if they play by rules which benefit us far more than them. Add to this the fact that the US in particular has displayed a penchant for suddenly prohibiting the sale of certain technologies to countries that it doesn't like, and you have a set of very good reasons why the idea of not becoming dependent on Microsoft, Intel, or any other Western company could look very attractive to them.
It is also likely that they are telling the truth about Linux' better security being a key feature for them. Totalitarian regimes are invariably paranoid, and even if MS could prove that the versions of Windows being sold in China haven't got back doors that the US government can use to spy on them, the fact that it is rife with keyloggers, bots, etc. is pretty good evidence that the CIA or similar could infect their systems with spying software quite easily. Far safer then to use not only an OS with a pretty good security track record in its own right, but also one with source code that they can examine for freedom from back doors, and modify with their own specialised security features if they want.
Read up on the history of Sino-Western relations over the last couple of centuries, and then ask yourselves one question: if you were them, would you trust us not to totally fuck them over if there was a buck in it somewhere?
And 1900s. Many home-grown and foreign patents were ignored during WWII, too.
And because MS sell tech rather than content, they license their DRM to third parties, because that was the reason for them developing it in the first place. Unfortunately, Apple, who sell both tech. and content, developed FairPlay for their own use, and won't license it to third parties, so organisations like the BBC are pretty much forced into the Microsoft camp.
The really sad part of all this is that it displays typical Apple short-sightedness. With the iPod phenomenon, they had the chance to establish FairPlay as the de-facto standard for DRM'd music, thereby raking in royalties on every commercial download even if the iPod and iTunes fade into quaintness with time (as they undoubtedly will in our lovely, fast-paced tech. world). Yet they have chosen instead to milk a short-term market for all it's worth, and once again leave MS to cede their technology to the competition. We all know what happened the last time they did that, so I can only hope for their sake that this is not a case of somebody repeating history because they haven't learned from it.
Isn't "money grubbing" and "do anything for a buck" a pretty good description of all corporations?
More likely UV, which many insect eyes are sensitive to, hence the fact that many flowers reflect UV very efficiently, and bug-zapping lamps use actinic light tubes.
Why would they want to break the base? Surely, being able to say "look, our stuff is so great that even people running Linux and OS X want to emulate us" is great for them, especially if the emulation is eight years behind their release wave-front and even less reliable than the notably crash-prone Win9X series that they've now completely abandoned.
And worse still (for me at any rate) is the fact that I inevitably end up sitting through the same plot that I've already seen twenty times in the past, but with a different cast and locations. It's like Hollywood screenwriters have got four pre-printed story templates, each with a few blank words that they pencil in to order so that somebody can blow 200 million making it, and then act surprised when the public can't be bothered to go and see it at a cinema.
No, I'm a Sporloringian. We're known for our lack of humour (probably due to a sprinkling of Germanic genes).
Indeed. Most cats that hunt large prey (in relation to them) tend to suffocate it. This leaves very distinctive wounds on the necks of animals that look more or less like movie vampire bites, i.e. deep punctures caused by long canines that are designed to hold the cat's jaws in position until death occurs. It is for this reason that members of the cat family are very protective of their canines, as losing one can severely impair their ability to hunt effectively (damaged claws on the other hand tend to grow back after a while).
NB: leopards in particular have on several occasions disembowelled humans. This is however probably not the leopard's initial intention, but is the result of it trying to climb up a biped's body (much as it would a tree) so that it can use its normal suffocating bite.
Yeah, large carnivores one or two generations from the wild that haven't had to hunt are real softies. When they rip the odd keeper who gets overconfident, stage magician, or member of the public with a deathwish to bloody shreds, they invariably do it in a gentle, "but of course I've been raised in captivity" way, not like their wild brethren who boorishly leap around and snarl and cover everything in drool.
And it goes without saying that a raised-in-captivity bengal tiger, kodiac bear, or nile crocodile can have the shit totally kicked out of it by a geek who gets nose-bleeds after sliding a 19" monitor three whole inches. Because being raised in captivity and never having hunted means it'll just sit there and take the abuse, just like true domestic animals such as Rottweillers and Spanish fighting bulls do.
So anybody who is planning on visiting a safari park should take a geek with them. Then, if you break down or get a puncture in the lion enclosure, you can get out and fix it in the sure knowledge that your geek can just pick up one of those pesky cats by the tail and use it to club any others into mewling submission, assuming of course that they were all raised in captivity and never had to hunt.
Correct. And this situation exists because the record companies have been dominant for so long that there is effectively no equivalent of "venture capital" that new artists can get to launch their careers from any other source, despite the fact that talented artists with the right kind of guidance and exposure can generate far more ROI than some of the half-arsed business ventures that do get funded.
I firmly believe that this will change in a few years. The Internet has already removed the need for a centralised manufacturing and distribution process, and other digital technologies have also made specialist recording studios much less important than they once were, at least for certain types of music. So the only vital roles played by record companies nowadays are not in recording and distributing, but financing, advertising, and taking care of legal matters, and their monopoly on these can only be sustained while nobody else is willing to step in and offer precisely the same services in a single package with better terms. When that happens (and I don't think it's a case of if, because somebody with capital is inevitably going to realise that they can make a lot of money this way), then the days of RIAA members really will be numbered.
"The record industry survived the transition from 78s to LPs, and the launch of the cassette tape, and the CD"
They squalled mightily about the cassette though, because it could be used to copy stuff, record from the radio, etc. I'm old enough to remember the recording industry's "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign from the 1970s, which led to every cassette-based device that is capable of recording having to carry microphone jacks that nobody wants so the manufacturer can claim that it has legitimate, non-infringing uses. The government levies in many countries on blank cassettes were also a direct result of this campaign.
As to the other "transitions", they weren't "survived", but rather greeted with open arms because each new system was cheaper to manufacture than the old one, could be produced in higher volumes per time period, yet sounded better, which meant that they could charge people more for what was essentially the same thing. And of course, these were all play-only technologies that allowed the industry to maintain its dominance over artists and consumers alike. By contrast, they've gone screaming to legislators whenever some new, cheap, and convenient recording system appears, and have been pretty successful over the years at convincing most that they have a right to earn large sums of money for basically just being there (probably because, unlike most people, legislators also earn large sums of money for just being there).
What crap -- people were suing others over patents, copyrights, and trademarks long before Gates and Ballmer were born. And MS did not invent the term "intellectual property": it was used in the 18th century, and may well be even older.