I think this whole "we're lawless sociopaths at heart" line can be overplayed. Yes, there are riots and there are looting, but if humans were truly as sociopathic as some make out, law and order would be impossible. What I think most riots, for instance, demonstrate is not how lone wolf we can be, but quite the opposite, how immediate peer pressure can make even sensible people behave badly. In short, people tend follow the strongest personalities, and as often as strong personalities may be leading people to create public health care or build bridges to expand trade or whatever, they can also lead people to smash in windows, steal flat-screen TVs, assemble large armies to go smack some poor bastards on the head for their land/women/grain/whatever or even get them to organize death camps and march in millions of poor bastards who have somehow been identified as the "others" to their deaths.
We are very much a social species, for all the good AND evil that means. Our behaviors and social structures are more complex, but basically, watch a chimpanzee tribe's behavior, leaders controlling inferiors for the good of the tribe, and for their own good (ie. using the tribe to smack down or even kill competitors for the top spot), and you get an idea as to how socialization can be an enormous force for good and evil. Think about it, do you think chimps when they make war on an enemy tribe (the only other critter besides us on the planet who does such a thing), that they're exhibiting sociopathic tendencies, or in fact, exhibiting just how powerful social tribalism can be?
They're using their flimsy patents to prevent anyone with a product that could damage their market penetration. Now I'll admit it isn't an illegal monopoly yet, but at what point does such anti-competitive behavior cross the line? I think the market wouldn't be very healthy if Apple was the only game in town and was able to use its patents to prevent anyone from producing a reasonable competing product, would you? Do you think that Apple's current penetration and willingness to use its portfolio for explicitly offensive maneuvering a good thing? Wouldn't it be better to have that power stripped from Apple one way or the other? After all, we're not talking about patents on actual mobile technology or indeed on any hardware at all, but apparently on the shape of the product and its interface, and last time I checked you couldn't patent interfaces.
But hey, who am I, right? If I'm not bowing down at the temple of Apple and its almighty products, I suppose I must be a troll. If I think Apple's dominance here is looking distinctly like one it intends to maintain by spurious court cases that it knows can potentially delay competitors for 12 to 18 crucial months, and that signals its intention to keep meaningful competitors at a perpetual disadvantage, that makes me a troll. If I think its rather selective application of how it uses said spurious patents suggests that it is only interested in competing products that do have a chance at biting into its market share, I must be a troll.
It couldn't be because Apple is trying to maintain an unfair playing field. We're finally reaching a point where the last evil monopoly player is losing its hold, and now we have assholes like you basically bragging about the next evil player trying to establish a monopoly.
You were just bragging a couple of posts up that Apple had this impenetrable hold on the market. Now suddenly you seem to be saying it doesn't. Was your first post just fanboyish bravado, or do you actually think Apple has an unbreakable hold on the tablet market? And if it is unbreakable, do you presume that to be a healthy position for consumers?
But you just finished saying they have an unbreakable hold on the tablet market. Clearly this is unhealthy and Apple needs to be smashed to pieces to prevent it from permanently cornering said market, right?
So what you're saying is that it's time to break Apple up as it now has a monopoly on a product type. I mean, if Android has no chance at penetration, clearly we must make sure the market performs properly, and forcing Apple to spin off a chunk of its tablet division is the only solution.
Unless, of course, you're just another fucking useless fanboy.
Will they fix the underlying problems with roaming profiles? You know, where if you do anything beyond a bit of browsing, your roaming profile quickly grows to hundreds of meg, or even gig. Can't wait to use Shiny Windows 8 Tablet and have it take three hours to load my roaming profile over some shitty WiFi network.
Anyone who thinks the Taliban are incapable of wreaking destruction hasn't been watching what's going on in the Swat Valley. They're biding their time until NATO walks out the door, and then they'll be back. The worthless, corrupt Mayor of Kabul and his cronies that currently make up Afghanistan's "government" will either be caught and literally strung up at that point, or more likely, will have fled the country with briefcases full of American currency.
Until Pakistan can bring order to its tribal regions, and until the Pakistani security services can be cleansed of the Islamists and other clandestine elements, nothing will change permanently.
As I said, there are targeted attacks, but those are not going to solve the larger problem. Killing bin Laden and the odd Taliban leader they can get their hands on is a good thing, it's just not good enough to actually solve the larger problem, which is the fact that the border is utterly meaningless to the Taliban, that Pakistan is incapable of bringing anything approaching law and order to tribal areas like the Swat Valley, let alone actually secure the border, and worst of all that elements of the Pakistani security services and government are making sure the Taliban are equipped.
It's long been observed that if the object is to wipe out Central Asian Islamism, then NATO is fighting the war in the wrong country. No matter how friendly a leadership the US may get in Pakistan, the state itself is so schizophrenic that it's pretty much irrelevant. There's a whole barely-concealed government working against almost every aim of the "real" government.
I'm confused. When did Microsoft ever actually create cool new things? I guess you've got to give it up to MS-BASIC, which certainly became THE BASIC interpreter in the old 8-bit days, though it wasn't the first 8-bit BASIC interpreter. But for the most part what Microsoft has been masterful at is strategic deals (PC-DOS on IBM PCs) and ultimately using its market muscle to smash its competition.
They've done targeted attacks. The US is not fighting a mass ground war in Pakistan. The US has little hope of ever meaningfully damaging the Taliban in Pakistan.
I still can't figure out where Iraq ever fit into this. All it did is remove one of Al Qaeda's most vicious opponents and give them a whole new arena of operation.
He was elected by the Chilean people. It was their desire for him to do what he promised. And yes, the United States gave Pinochet the thumbs up to stage the coupe.
Ignoring 9-11 would have been absurd, and no civilization in the past, now or in the future would ever permit its leaders to simply ignore it.
The appropriate debate is not whether or not the US should have responded. That's fucking ludicrous, and if you're not a complete idiot I think you know it. The appropriate debate was how to deal with it. I can certainly say that toppling Hussein was counterproductive and cost the US billions of dollars to get to a point where we have a shaky government whose future no one can have that much confidence in. The destruction of the Taliban might have made more sense, since they were directly linked to Al Qaeda. The problem being that the US's "ally", Pakistan, it now turns out, was playing both sides of the fence, and has undermined almost everything the US and NATO tried to do.
But certainly I think most people can agree that bin Laden was an arch-criminal who had to be pursued, and furthermore tackling Al Qaeda as much as possible was a worthwhile goal. Again the debate is over methods, and there is no lack of criticism in that department.
They are worse the the worst of the Nazi's - and deserve whatever can bee brought on them at every opportunity.
The worst of the Nazis came up with an industrial system of mass murder than killed to 10 to 11 million people. The worst of the Nazis are so much worse than the worst of the Islamist terrorists, or any terrorists for that matter, that ti beggars belief that you could, unless you're a complete ignoramus, make such a statement.
There's not enough distance between what guys like Mao and Stalin turned Communism in their countries into and religion to safely take a piss. It had everything; cult of personality, orthodoxy and ritual-like observances. You might almost call them atheist religions. Certainly that's what the Kims in North Korea did.
I doubt you'll find any atheist humanist suggesting we copy what Mao did. What Mao ultimately did was to duplicate the emperor cult.
Thinning out the Taliban? What are you talking about? The pourose border with Pakistan means the Taliban can move with relative ease to escape NATO forces. What's more they're receiving aid from Pakistani security services, so it's not like they don't have important allies.
The minute NATO leaves, the government will be overrun, collapse and everyone will be back where they started.
But there was still a political component to it. Bin Laden and his ilk hoped to build a new Caliphate, to restore the early unity of Islam. It may have been an improbable ideal, but never imagine for a moment that Al Qaeda was purely religious in its motives.
I think that's probably a little too convenient. I'd rather state that because religion is one of the major tribal markers, it is a powerful tool and motivation for going to war. Whether those instigating the wars are being sincere or not is another question. Take the Crusades. While there's no doubt that all those Christian Princes wanted to gain access to trade routes that went through the Holy Land, and the Papacy wanted to get a leg up on the Orthodox Church, I still think you'll find until the later crusades that there was sincere belief on all counts that the Christians of the Byzantine Empire needed to be saved.
The guy believed himself a Knight Templar and wanted Catholicism restored in Europe, not to mention getting rid of Muslims in Europe. I think religion was very much a part of his ideology.
During the War, Stalin essentially ignored the previous decades of Communism and invoked Russian nationalism (hence it being called the Great Patriotic War in Russia). Beyond that, while the Russian Orthodox Church did at various times face persecution, sometimes extreme persecution, at the hands of the Soviet authorities, in the end it basically aligned itself with the Soviet government and remained a large influence on Russian society.
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I think this whole "we're lawless sociopaths at heart" line can be overplayed. Yes, there are riots and there are looting, but if humans were truly as sociopathic as some make out, law and order would be impossible. What I think most riots, for instance, demonstrate is not how lone wolf we can be, but quite the opposite, how immediate peer pressure can make even sensible people behave badly. In short, people tend follow the strongest personalities, and as often as strong personalities may be leading people to create public health care or build bridges to expand trade or whatever, they can also lead people to smash in windows, steal flat-screen TVs, assemble large armies to go smack some poor bastards on the head for their land/women/grain/whatever or even get them to organize death camps and march in millions of poor bastards who have somehow been identified as the "others" to their deaths.
We are very much a social species, for all the good AND evil that means. Our behaviors and social structures are more complex, but basically, watch a chimpanzee tribe's behavior, leaders controlling inferiors for the good of the tribe, and for their own good (ie. using the tribe to smack down or even kill competitors for the top spot), and you get an idea as to how socialization can be an enormous force for good and evil. Think about it, do you think chimps when they make war on an enemy tribe (the only other critter besides us on the planet who does such a thing), that they're exhibiting sociopathic tendencies, or in fact, exhibiting just how powerful social tribalism can be?
If that makes you feel better.
They're using their flimsy patents to prevent anyone with a product that could damage their market penetration. Now I'll admit it isn't an illegal monopoly yet, but at what point does such anti-competitive behavior cross the line? I think the market wouldn't be very healthy if Apple was the only game in town and was able to use its patents to prevent anyone from producing a reasonable competing product, would you? Do you think that Apple's current penetration and willingness to use its portfolio for explicitly offensive maneuvering a good thing? Wouldn't it be better to have that power stripped from Apple one way or the other? After all, we're not talking about patents on actual mobile technology or indeed on any hardware at all, but apparently on the shape of the product and its interface, and last time I checked you couldn't patent interfaces.
But hey, who am I, right? If I'm not bowing down at the temple of Apple and its almighty products, I suppose I must be a troll. If I think Apple's dominance here is looking distinctly like one it intends to maintain by spurious court cases that it knows can potentially delay competitors for 12 to 18 crucial months, and that signals its intention to keep meaningful competitors at a perpetual disadvantage, that makes me a troll. If I think its rather selective application of how it uses said spurious patents suggests that it is only interested in competing products that do have a chance at biting into its market share, I must be a troll.
It couldn't be because Apple is trying to maintain an unfair playing field. We're finally reaching a point where the last evil monopoly player is losing its hold, and now we have assholes like you basically bragging about the next evil player trying to establish a monopoly.
You mean like trying to use dubious patents to maintain a perpetual cycle of litigation?
You were just bragging a couple of posts up that Apple had this impenetrable hold on the market. Now suddenly you seem to be saying it doesn't. Was your first post just fanboyish bravado, or do you actually think Apple has an unbreakable hold on the tablet market? And if it is unbreakable, do you presume that to be a healthy position for consumers?
But you just finished saying they have an unbreakable hold on the tablet market. Clearly this is unhealthy and Apple needs to be smashed to pieces to prevent it from permanently cornering said market, right?
So what you're saying is that it's time to break Apple up as it now has a monopoly on a product type. I mean, if Android has no chance at penetration, clearly we must make sure the market performs properly, and forcing Apple to spin off a chunk of its tablet division is the only solution.
Unless, of course, you're just another fucking useless fanboy.
Will they fix the underlying problems with roaming profiles? You know, where if you do anything beyond a bit of browsing, your roaming profile quickly grows to hundreds of meg, or even gig. Can't wait to use Shiny Windows 8 Tablet and have it take three hours to load my roaming profile over some shitty WiFi network.
Fine. Let's build the reactors in space.
Anyone who thinks the Taliban are incapable of wreaking destruction hasn't been watching what's going on in the Swat Valley. They're biding their time until NATO walks out the door, and then they'll be back. The worthless, corrupt Mayor of Kabul and his cronies that currently make up Afghanistan's "government" will either be caught and literally strung up at that point, or more likely, will have fled the country with briefcases full of American currency.
Until Pakistan can bring order to its tribal regions, and until the Pakistani security services can be cleansed of the Islamists and other clandestine elements, nothing will change permanently.
As I said, there are targeted attacks, but those are not going to solve the larger problem. Killing bin Laden and the odd Taliban leader they can get their hands on is a good thing, it's just not good enough to actually solve the larger problem, which is the fact that the border is utterly meaningless to the Taliban, that Pakistan is incapable of bringing anything approaching law and order to tribal areas like the Swat Valley, let alone actually secure the border, and worst of all that elements of the Pakistani security services and government are making sure the Taliban are equipped.
It's long been observed that if the object is to wipe out Central Asian Islamism, then NATO is fighting the war in the wrong country. No matter how friendly a leadership the US may get in Pakistan, the state itself is so schizophrenic that it's pretty much irrelevant. There's a whole barely-concealed government working against almost every aim of the "real" government.
I'm confused. When did Microsoft ever actually create cool new things? I guess you've got to give it up to MS-BASIC, which certainly became THE BASIC interpreter in the old 8-bit days, though it wasn't the first 8-bit BASIC interpreter. But for the most part what Microsoft has been masterful at is strategic deals (PC-DOS on IBM PCs) and ultimately using its market muscle to smash its competition.
They've done targeted attacks. The US is not fighting a mass ground war in Pakistan. The US has little hope of ever meaningfully damaging the Taliban in Pakistan.
I still can't figure out where Iraq ever fit into this. All it did is remove one of Al Qaeda's most vicious opponents and give them a whole new arena of operation.
He was elected by the Chilean people. It was their desire for him to do what he promised. And yes, the United States gave Pinochet the thumbs up to stage the coupe.
Ignoring 9-11 would have been absurd, and no civilization in the past, now or in the future would ever permit its leaders to simply ignore it.
The appropriate debate is not whether or not the US should have responded. That's fucking ludicrous, and if you're not a complete idiot I think you know it. The appropriate debate was how to deal with it. I can certainly say that toppling Hussein was counterproductive and cost the US billions of dollars to get to a point where we have a shaky government whose future no one can have that much confidence in. The destruction of the Taliban might have made more sense, since they were directly linked to Al Qaeda. The problem being that the US's "ally", Pakistan, it now turns out, was playing both sides of the fence, and has undermined almost everything the US and NATO tried to do.
But certainly I think most people can agree that bin Laden was an arch-criminal who had to be pursued, and furthermore tackling Al Qaeda as much as possible was a worthwhile goal. Again the debate is over methods, and there is no lack of criticism in that department.
I suspect that there wouldn't have been a 9-11 if US security services hadn't basically atrophied after the end of the Cold War.
The worst of the Nazis came up with an industrial system of mass murder than killed to 10 to 11 million people. The worst of the Nazis are so much worse than the worst of the Islamist terrorists, or any terrorists for that matter, that ti beggars belief that you could, unless you're a complete ignoramus, make such a statement.
There's not enough distance between what guys like Mao and Stalin turned Communism in their countries into and religion to safely take a piss. It had everything; cult of personality, orthodoxy and ritual-like observances. You might almost call them atheist religions. Certainly that's what the Kims in North Korea did.
I doubt you'll find any atheist humanist suggesting we copy what Mao did. What Mao ultimately did was to duplicate the emperor cult.
Thinning out the Taliban? What are you talking about? The pourose border with Pakistan means the Taliban can move with relative ease to escape NATO forces. What's more they're receiving aid from Pakistani security services, so it's not like they don't have important allies.
The minute NATO leaves, the government will be overrun, collapse and everyone will be back where they started.
But there was still a political component to it. Bin Laden and his ilk hoped to build a new Caliphate, to restore the early unity of Islam. It may have been an improbable ideal, but never imagine for a moment that Al Qaeda was purely religious in its motives.
I think that's probably a little too convenient. I'd rather state that because religion is one of the major tribal markers, it is a powerful tool and motivation for going to war. Whether those instigating the wars are being sincere or not is another question. Take the Crusades. While there's no doubt that all those Christian Princes wanted to gain access to trade routes that went through the Holy Land, and the Papacy wanted to get a leg up on the Orthodox Church, I still think you'll find until the later crusades that there was sincere belief on all counts that the Christians of the Byzantine Empire needed to be saved.
I don't exactly see a lot of atheists planning on burning Qur'ans. Can't say the same for some Christians.
The guy believed himself a Knight Templar and wanted Catholicism restored in Europe, not to mention getting rid of Muslims in Europe. I think religion was very much a part of his ideology.
During the War, Stalin essentially ignored the previous decades of Communism and invoked Russian nationalism (hence it being called the Great Patriotic War in Russia). Beyond that, while the Russian Orthodox Church did at various times face persecution, sometimes extreme persecution, at the hands of the Soviet authorities, in the end it basically aligned itself with the Soviet government and remained a large influence on Russian society.