RTFA. Less popular music will also be lowered in price. So, unless you listen to Britney, this might result in lower prices for music. Paying the same price for a new Wil Smith single that you pay for a track of some unknown orchestra playing public domain music is ludicrous. One is underpriced, the other is overpriced. It's about time they do this.
I really agree that the music shouldn't be uniformly priced. Music is not a commodity. The idea that all songs were the same price was ludicrous, and completely detached from reality. Different songs have different aquisition costs, and different popularity. Just like in real life, they should've been able to lower the cost of songs which weren't selling to try and capture at least a few sales. It was ridiculous that classical music and the latest overproduced pop music were the same price given the hugely different cost to produce each. If their prices were more appropriate, I'd actually consider buying music off of iTunes.
First, I'm sorry about the guy who modded you. I think they should do away with negative mods sometimes, because they are almost always ideologically based. Second, I would guess the reason for the plating wasn't financial but (1) the designers were too incompetent to put it in in the first place, (2) the DOD was too inefficient to start the process earlier when they realized they needed it and (3) once they made the decision to do so, it just fricking takes time to do shit like have plating built for hundreds of vehicles. My understanding is that right now the holdup is entirely in manufacturing.
I'm almost certain money had nothing to do with the delay in getting proper plating for the troops.
4 out of 5 swinging dicks recommend more steel plates for their humvees, not another toy for the flyboys.
You're assuming that the government considers money to be a finite conserved quantity. That is not in evidence. Unlike the real world, the Pentagon does not need to subtract money from one project to get more money for another. All it needs to do is talk to some key commitee members in congress and mention a few key phrases, like: "blah blah blah laser blah blah built in your state blah blah" or "blah blah parents of troops from your state" or maybe even "blah blah blah satellite photos of your mistress in cancun."
The problem is, why should every person and their lawyers EACH get the $229 million. This was just the first of many lawsuits to come. Anyway, thanks for the article. I'll check it out.
When it comes to reading, I do most of it on the computer, and the majority of people from my generation do most of their reading online. The library just isnt as cool as it once was simply because no one wants books anymore. We outnumber folks like you so if you dont like it, go to Barnes and Nobles or hit up Amazon.
Rebelling against the previous generations used to be about stuff like war or freedoms. You've chosen reading and libraries. Congratulations on having the worst chosen generational gap ever. So, what's the best book you've ever read on a PDA?
Also, would you care to show me data that says people who read only in electronic form are a majority?
I kind of agree with you. What REALLY bugs me, though, is when people call themselves 'progressive'. Assuming your superiority in your very description of your politics is pretty obnoxious. Why not just call yourself politically totally-fucking-right?
CAMBRIDGE GUY: Well, you know, I'm a progressive, politically. Very progressive. I just wish the other people around here were as progressive as I.
ME: Dude. Totally. In fact, politically, I'm totally-fucking-right. I used to be progressive, but moved past that when I started showering and reading books. Now I'm really leaning toward totally-fucking-right politics. We are currently trying to get Massachusetts to relax its gun control laws.
CAMBRIDGE GUY: Not cool, dude. As a progressive, I really think the gun control laws should stay exactly the way they are.
Interesting points. You'd think the pharma industry would be self-policing, too, though. They have just as much to lose when it turns out their products are defective. I can't help but think that part of the basis for the Vioxx scandal is, ironically, our tort system. We've got such a ludicrous liability system that companies are afraid to do the right thing, because they'll get sued even if they act on good faith to address the problem. Their only chance is to cover it up and hope nobody finds out.
If Google were the government you'd have $2 deducted from your paycheck for each search, they'd deliver half the e-mail to the wrong address and would convince Amazon.co.uk to help them defeat Mac fundamentalism by invading Apple. If you tried to search for "Bin Laden" you'd get nothing except 4 billion pages about Terry Schiavo. All gay porn sites would automatically forward to www.patrobertson.com (unless the HTTP request comes from Karl Rove's IP).
I agree with you. Regulation is where I generally get stuck with a lot of libertarians. One could argue that FDA kills more people than it helps, and there's the fact that our general aviation industry is the safest in the world despite being, by far, the least regulated. Having said that, I must admit I really like FAA, especially when I get on an airplane. I don't know what the ideal level of government is, but I think we've overshot it by a mile.
I think a lot of libertarians are really just people who hate paying taxes. I think the good ones recognize government is a natural phenomenon that has its place, including in regulation of public spaces, like commerce.
I just can't help but notice that our country functioned surprisingly well back when the average person paid just 10% of their income to taxes (about 80 years ago) and now that we pay over 50%, I don't think we're getting 5 times the service. Liberals talk about anything prior to the New Deal as a dark age, but I just don't see it. We went from nothing to the biggest power on earth with the smallest government of any Western nation, and now that we've caught up to the rest of them in terms of heavy government, we're now starting to lose our competitive edge to places like China and India. I don't see that as a coincidence. I think there would be a revolt if we truly knew the cost of our government after factoring in their currency inflation and the sum total of fees and taxes at all levels.
Sort of like how small government conservatives expand the role of government when they gain power.
George Bush is not really a conservative (he's just religious) and he was never for small government. Anyway, assuming you're talking about things like the misnamed PATRIOT act, such powers would be hard for the government to take were it not for a century of government expansion and loosening of civil liberties brought on by both parties. It's very easy for law enforcement to violate the privacy of Americans when Americans are all catalogued by their Social Security number in hundreds of government program databases. We wouldn't have the facilities to even do so were it not for the massive enforcement infrastructure required by our regulations and prohibitions. (For example, it was liberals who created the ATF, a famous violator of civil rights.) It's quite easy for a nanny state to turn into a big brother state, and so I find it frustratingly amusing when the left becomes shocked when the big government they helped setup suddenly turns on its own citizens. "My God! You were never supposed to use the social security database to track Americans like that! It was supposed to be a friendly citizen tracking scheme! And you're using the trust fund for WHAT?" Only a very naive person would think you could have a government that is so intimately involved in the daily lives of its citizens, and in control of so much of our wealth, and have it never turn ugly.
So, yeah, I blame both sides. The Republicans may have pulled the trigger, but the Democrats helped load the gun. Neither side operates on principle, only convenient opportunities to gain more power. Right now the Dems are just pissed they aren't the ones getting to choose which rights are violated, so they pose as champions of liberty. When the tables turn (and they will, after the phenomenal fuckup the second Bush term will be) it will be the Repubs who are whinging about Democrat's profligate spending, but only because they are frustrated they aren't choosing where to waste our money.
So, my guess is that we probably don't disagree at all. I think it's terribly duplicitous of Bush to even claim to be a conservative, when he's just a really shitty liberal with too much fundamentalism. My point is that both sides are completely full of shit at this point, and really only differ (to the little extent they truly differ) in the principles they chose to violate.
I don't see where libertarianism suggests government lets corporations run amok. In fact, if our government weren't so busy engaging in corporate welfare (conservative stupidity enabled by liberal government expansion, as in my original argument) we'd have more resources to devote to fighting corporate malfeasance. And if the federal government weren't such a centralized source of money and power, it wouldn't be such a target for corporate influence. A small government with minimal resources just isn't going to be worth the effort. But you give the government control over healthcare, for example, and now Merck suddenly gets interested in making donations. Anyway, I'm not sure I'd agree with most big "L" Libertarians, and I'm quite certain my post wasn't libertarian, so what's your deal? And what's my deal, for that matter, responding to an AC troll?!?
It is of course easy to win any argument when you found your argument on putting viewpoints into the mouths of your opponents.
I'm not sure which part of my "strawman" argument you've got a problem with. It is an unwritten rule of fairness that after you dismiss somebody's argument with one of the standard refutations, you explain exactly HOW you think the refutation applies. Otherwise, you're not really arguing, just proving you took freshman philosophy in college. Was it my exaggeration to refer to controlling "everything"? Was it the word "control", itself? Do you feel liberals enjoy small government and local control? Anyway, be happy you got modded up simply for disagreeing with me without any substance behind your disagreement.
Funny how liberal statists want the central government to control everything, except when the government is run by people they disagree with, elected by people they detest. You can't have your government schools and not expect the government to control the teaching as per majority desire, can you?
Here's the cycle of America:
1) Democrats gain power, expand government control over X, Y and Z. 2) Republicans gain power, use government control to fuck up X, Y and Z. 3) Goto (1)
I'm not very happy with our political system right now, either. It seems to be it used to be much better, with far less government, and less corporate influence on what there was.
We'll debate forever on health care, I'm afraid! I'm for it, of course, but not by the government and not by force. Not all things that are good to do are good for the government to do; I still have a bit of trouble with the idea of forced charity, especially when it's the government that does both the forcing and the implementation. I'd feel a little better about being forced to pay for my fellow American's health care if it weren't the government administering the health care. If you have any words of wisdom to make me feel better about being forced to pay the healthcare costs of people 3000 miles away from me, especially given the inefficient way they are probably going to spend my money, I'd honestly like to hear them. Lord knows it's going to happen when Hillary takes the White House in 2008, and I'd just like to feel better about the inevitable. To help you understand my frustration, imagine if you had to help pay for the French healthcare system. That's pretty much how I feel about the prospect of paying for some of New Mexico's healthcare. And believe me, under social medicine I would have to.
You totally have us on the nuclear weapons thing, at least in terms of our unfair domination of the policy landscape. But I don't think we should have points taken against us for using them. We didn't start WWII, and as much as I admire the Japanese and respect them, Hirohito screwed them, not us. Would YOU have preferred that our parents/grandparents have had to fight for every last inch of Japan? It's quite possible you and/or I wouldn't even be here were it not for US use of nukes. Granted, it seems selfish as heck to put civilian lives over soldiers', but remember that the vast majority of our soldiers in WWII were civilians before the Japanese and German governments decided to declare war on us. I wish it didn't have to happen, but I don't think we should be given demerits on the world stage for using nuclear weapons to end a war we didn't start.
Heck no, it's not dither. First of all, you can't make connections between concepts just because they share vocabulary words in common. That only works in the social sciences.
In this case, the noise added adds energy to the airflow. And it doesn't make the flight smoother, it just makes the airplane stall at a lower airspeed. Most importantly, however, it's a purely aerodynamic affect, having nothing to do with quantization.
However, I applaud you on getting modded up on what has to be one of the least informative or insightful posts I've ever seen. That, in an of itself, is certainly interesting and perhaps worth a different kind of mod. Unfortunately, there are no points given for fooling moderators.
Americans at the Naval Research Lab invented radar, though it wasn't very good. I wouldn't count that, but by your standards, Americans did indeed invent it. Though you are right that the Brits got it working first. I was wrong there.
I think you're really stretching with the nuclear power. I say nuclear power, and you mention the first time anybody did something remotely related. For that matter, why not just credit the greeks with postulating the atomic theory? The first nuclear power plant was in America. The first time a self-sustaining reaction was made was in America. Just getting fission doesn't count. You're really desperate to prove your point if you credit the Germans with nuclear power.
The French photography in 1826 was certainly not in color. Kodak was the first to figure out how to make color film. Apparently you don't understand the difference between an experiment and an invention. An invention is, by it's very nature, a commercializable notion. Something you can MAKE. Just dicking around with something and getting to work once doesn't account for much in the world, and you can probably find people all over the world who have independently mucked around with all manner of preliminary ideas. Such people are a dime a dozen. Hell, I can make an internal compbustion engine. It's an obvious idea. But mine won't perform very well, and it won't be manufacturable.
Above all, you've mostly just tried to convince me of the fact that the British are effete stooges who can't follow through on a goddam thing. (I don't really think that, but apparently you do if you think they invented half the stuff that they are now forced to get from other places.) The question is why, if so much was experimented with outside America, did it take Americans to actually make good on it? I don't think this has anythign to do with American intelligence (which is, after all, imported) but from our system of government, or what used to be our system of government. It's very hard to produce new things when you're crippled by big government and expensive social engineering. Of course, we're well on our way to figuring that out as we spend increasing portions of our GDP on the federal government while we send away all of our manufacturing ability. So there's really no point in bragging about our past; it just makes our present and future all the more stupid and depressing.
You can argue America's going down the shitter in terms of recent innovation, but you're out of your mind if you think Americans aren't responsible for more than their fair share of invention, commercialization aside. Ok, so here's my list. Do your best with this one...:-)
Integrated circuits Nuclear power Radar that actually works (heh heh) Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and chemical analysis Color photography Liquid crystal displays Assless leather chaps Lightbulbs Long distance telegraphy, telephone and THE INTERNET (thank you, Al!) Television (sorry!) AC power distribution grid Graphical user interfaces Vacuum cleaner Adhesive tape Airbags Air conditioning The artificial heart Information theory and data compression The first working airplane
It's not fair to dismiss the innovation to actually produce something in a commerically viable way. The idea for the automobile is pretty obvious, as is the idea of blowing something up to power a piston. In my opinion, the hard part is figuring out how to do that in a workable way that people can actually afford.
Anyway, if your point is that Americans think too provincially about inventions, you're right. Nothing in the world can be credited to anything other than the cumulative effort of people from all over the world and all over time. You take away the contributions of most any country, and the world's a vastly inferior place.
I agree that Pascal's Wager is bogus. I was joking about that part. However, I wasn't joking about the notion that being certain of no God is just as religious an idea as being sure there is a God. They are perfectly symmetric beliefs, and insofar as faith is concerned, are essentially the same. If there can be no proof of God, there can be no proof of Godlessness. I know that's not logically neccesary, but I believe given the way the world is, it is nonetheless true.
You just dismissed the deeply held beliefs of over half the world's population. Who's the troll, again? Being certain there is no God is just as "religious" a statement as to be certain there is one. Moreover, if you're going to operate on blind faith and not reason, why in whomever's name would you go with atheism? I can see saying "I have no idea regarding the existence of a creator" but to come down with a definite conclusion, and for that to be a hard bet against the home team? That's just crazy. Seventy-two virgins crazy. Ever hear of Pascal's Wager?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly WHAT would you be looking for? Do you somehow have the superhuman ability to see light between 1530 and 1570 nm?
RTFA. Less popular music will also be lowered in price. So, unless you listen to Britney, this might result in lower prices for music. Paying the same price for a new Wil Smith single that you pay for a track of some unknown orchestra playing public domain music is ludicrous. One is underpriced, the other is overpriced. It's about time they do this.
I really agree that the music shouldn't be uniformly priced. Music is not a commodity. The idea that all songs were the same price was ludicrous, and completely detached from reality. Different songs have different aquisition costs, and different popularity. Just like in real life, they should've been able to lower the cost of songs which weren't selling to try and capture at least a few sales. It was ridiculous that classical music and the latest overproduced pop music were the same price given the hugely different cost to produce each. If their prices were more appropriate, I'd actually consider buying music off of iTunes.
Mod down, my ass. Mod the fucker up, funny. These tech articles need a little more action, anyway.
I'm not saying that theory is wrong, but if it's true, I'm moving to Switzerland.
First, I'm sorry about the guy who modded you. I think they should do away with negative mods sometimes, because they are almost always ideologically based. Second, I would guess the reason for the plating wasn't financial but (1) the designers were too incompetent to put it in in the first place, (2) the DOD was too inefficient to start the process earlier when they realized they needed it and (3) once they made the decision to do so, it just fricking takes time to do shit like have plating built for hundreds of vehicles. My understanding is that right now the holdup is entirely in manufacturing.
I'm almost certain money had nothing to do with the delay in getting proper plating for the troops.
You're assuming that the government considers money to be a finite conserved quantity. That is not in evidence. Unlike the real world, the Pentagon does not need to subtract money from one project to get more money for another. All it needs to do is talk to some key commitee members in congress and mention a few key phrases, like: "blah blah blah laser blah blah built in your state blah blah" or "blah blah parents of troops from your state" or maybe even "blah blah blah satellite photos of your mistress in cancun."
The problem is, why should every person and their lawyers EACH get the $229 million. This was just the first of many lawsuits to come. Anyway, thanks for the article. I'll check it out.
Rebelling against the previous generations used to be about stuff like war or freedoms. You've chosen reading and libraries. Congratulations on having the worst chosen generational gap ever. So, what's the best book you've ever read on a PDA? Also, would you care to show me data that says people who read only in electronic form are a majority?
I kind of agree with you. What REALLY bugs me, though, is when people call themselves 'progressive'. Assuming your superiority in your very description of your politics is pretty obnoxious. Why not just call yourself politically totally-fucking-right?
CAMBRIDGE GUY: Well, you know, I'm a progressive, politically. Very progressive. I just wish the other people around here were as progressive as I.
ME: Dude. Totally. In fact, politically, I'm totally-fucking-right. I used to be progressive, but moved past that when I started showering and reading books. Now I'm really leaning toward totally-fucking-right politics. We are currently trying to get Massachusetts to relax its gun control laws.
CAMBRIDGE GUY: Not cool, dude. As a progressive, I really think the gun control laws should stay exactly the way they are.
Interesting points. You'd think the pharma industry would be self-policing, too, though. They have just as much to lose when it turns out their products are defective. I can't help but think that part of the basis for the Vioxx scandal is, ironically, our tort system. We've got such a ludicrous liability system that companies are afraid to do the right thing, because they'll get sued even if they act on good faith to address the problem. Their only chance is to cover it up and hope nobody finds out.
If Google were the government you'd have $2 deducted from your paycheck for each search, they'd deliver half the e-mail to the wrong address and would convince Amazon.co.uk to help them defeat Mac fundamentalism by invading Apple. If you tried to search for "Bin Laden" you'd get nothing except 4 billion pages about Terry Schiavo. All gay porn sites would automatically forward to www.patrobertson.com (unless the HTTP request comes from Karl Rove's IP).
I agree with you. Regulation is where I generally get stuck with a lot of libertarians. One could argue that FDA kills more people than it helps, and there's the fact that our general aviation industry is the safest in the world despite being, by far, the least regulated. Having said that, I must admit I really like FAA, especially when I get on an airplane. I don't know what the ideal level of government is, but I think we've overshot it by a mile.
I think a lot of libertarians are really just people who hate paying taxes. I think the good ones recognize government is a natural phenomenon that has its place, including in regulation of public spaces, like commerce.
I just can't help but notice that our country functioned surprisingly well back when the average person paid just 10% of their income to taxes (about 80 years ago) and now that we pay over 50%, I don't think we're getting 5 times the service. Liberals talk about anything prior to the New Deal as a dark age, but I just don't see it. We went from nothing to the biggest power on earth with the smallest government of any Western nation, and now that we've caught up to the rest of them in terms of heavy government, we're now starting to lose our competitive edge to places like China and India. I don't see that as a coincidence. I think there would be a revolt if we truly knew the cost of our government after factoring in their currency inflation and the sum total of fees and taxes at all levels.
George Bush is not really a conservative (he's just religious) and he was never for small government. Anyway, assuming you're talking about things like the misnamed PATRIOT act, such powers would be hard for the government to take were it not for a century of government expansion and loosening of civil liberties brought on by both parties. It's very easy for law enforcement to violate the privacy of Americans when Americans are all catalogued by their Social Security number in hundreds of government program databases. We wouldn't have the facilities to even do so were it not for the massive enforcement infrastructure required by our regulations and prohibitions. (For example, it was liberals who created the ATF, a famous violator of civil rights.) It's quite easy for a nanny state to turn into a big brother state, and so I find it frustratingly amusing when the left becomes shocked when the big government they helped setup suddenly turns on its own citizens. "My God! You were never supposed to use the social security database to track Americans like that! It was supposed to be a friendly citizen tracking scheme! And you're using the trust fund for WHAT?" Only a very naive person would think you could have a government that is so intimately involved in the daily lives of its citizens, and in control of so much of our wealth, and have it never turn ugly.
So, yeah, I blame both sides. The Republicans may have pulled the trigger, but the Democrats helped load the gun. Neither side operates on principle, only convenient opportunities to gain more power. Right now the Dems are just pissed they aren't the ones getting to choose which rights are violated, so they pose as champions of liberty. When the tables turn (and they will, after the phenomenal fuckup the second Bush term will be) it will be the Repubs who are whinging about Democrat's profligate spending, but only because they are frustrated they aren't choosing where to waste our money.
So, my guess is that we probably don't disagree at all. I think it's terribly duplicitous of Bush to even claim to be a conservative, when he's just a really shitty liberal with too much fundamentalism. My point is that both sides are completely full of shit at this point, and really only differ (to the little extent they truly differ) in the principles they chose to violate.
I don't see where libertarianism suggests government lets corporations run amok. In fact, if our government weren't so busy engaging in corporate welfare (conservative stupidity enabled by liberal government expansion, as in my original argument) we'd have more resources to devote to fighting corporate malfeasance. And if the federal government weren't such a centralized source of money and power, it wouldn't be such a target for corporate influence. A small government with minimal resources just isn't going to be worth the effort. But you give the government control over healthcare, for example, and now Merck suddenly gets interested in making donations. Anyway, I'm not sure I'd agree with most big "L" Libertarians, and I'm quite certain my post wasn't libertarian, so what's your deal? And what's my deal, for that matter, responding to an AC troll?!?
I'm not sure which part of my "strawman" argument you've got a problem with. It is an unwritten rule of fairness that after you dismiss somebody's argument with one of the standard refutations, you explain exactly HOW you think the refutation applies. Otherwise, you're not really arguing, just proving you took freshman philosophy in college. Was it my exaggeration to refer to controlling "everything"? Was it the word "control", itself? Do you feel liberals enjoy small government and local control? Anyway, be happy you got modded up simply for disagreeing with me without any substance behind your disagreement.
Funny how liberal statists want the central government to control everything, except when the government is run by people they disagree with, elected by people they detest. You can't have your government schools and not expect the government to control the teaching as per majority desire, can you?
Here's the cycle of America:
1) Democrats gain power, expand government control over X, Y and Z.
2) Republicans gain power, use government control to fuck up X, Y and Z.
3) Goto (1)
You don't hear the Red Cross going on in their quarterly report about "doing no evil" do you?
I'm not very happy with our political system right now, either. It seems to be it used to be much better, with far less government, and less corporate influence on what there was.
We'll debate forever on health care, I'm afraid! I'm for it, of course, but not by the government and not by force. Not all things that are good to do are good for the government to do; I still have a bit of trouble with the idea of forced charity, especially when it's the government that does both the forcing and the implementation. I'd feel a little better about being forced to pay for my fellow American's health care if it weren't the government administering the health care. If you have any words of wisdom to make me feel better about being forced to pay the healthcare costs of people 3000 miles away from me, especially given the inefficient way they are probably going to spend my money, I'd honestly like to hear them. Lord knows it's going to happen when Hillary takes the White House in 2008, and I'd just like to feel better about the inevitable. To help you understand my frustration, imagine if you had to help pay for the French healthcare system. That's pretty much how I feel about the prospect of paying for some of New Mexico's healthcare. And believe me, under social medicine I would have to.
You totally have us on the nuclear weapons thing, at least in terms of our unfair domination of the policy landscape. But I don't think we should have points taken against us for using them. We didn't start WWII, and as much as I admire the Japanese and respect them, Hirohito screwed them, not us. Would YOU have preferred that our parents/grandparents have had to fight for every last inch of Japan? It's quite possible you and/or I wouldn't even be here were it not for US use of nukes. Granted, it seems selfish as heck to put civilian lives over soldiers', but remember that the vast majority of our soldiers in WWII were civilians before the Japanese and German governments decided to declare war on us. I wish it didn't have to happen, but I don't think we should be given demerits on the world stage for using nuclear weapons to end a war we didn't start.
Heck no, it's not dither. First of all, you can't make connections between concepts just because they share vocabulary words in common. That only works in the social sciences.
In this case, the noise added adds energy to the airflow. And it doesn't make the flight smoother, it just makes the airplane stall at a lower airspeed. Most importantly, however, it's a purely aerodynamic affect, having nothing to do with quantization.
However, I applaud you on getting modded up on what has to be one of the least informative or insightful posts I've ever seen. That, in an of itself, is certainly interesting and perhaps worth a different kind of mod. Unfortunately, there are no points given for fooling moderators.
Americans at the Naval Research Lab invented radar, though it wasn't very good. I wouldn't count that, but by your standards, Americans did indeed invent it. Though you are right that the Brits got it working first. I was wrong there.
I think you're really stretching with the nuclear power. I say nuclear power, and you mention the first time anybody did something remotely related. For that matter, why not just credit the greeks with postulating the atomic theory? The first nuclear power plant was in America. The first time a self-sustaining reaction was made was in America. Just getting fission doesn't count. You're really desperate to prove your point if you credit the Germans with nuclear power.
The French photography in 1826 was certainly not in color. Kodak was the first to figure out how to make color film. Apparently you don't understand the difference between an experiment and an invention. An invention is, by it's very nature, a commercializable notion. Something you can MAKE. Just dicking around with something and getting to work once doesn't account for much in the world, and you can probably find people all over the world who have independently mucked around with all manner of preliminary ideas. Such people are a dime a dozen. Hell, I can make an internal compbustion engine. It's an obvious idea. But mine won't perform very well, and it won't be manufacturable.
Above all, you've mostly just tried to convince me of the fact that the British are effete stooges who can't follow through on a goddam thing. (I don't really think that, but apparently you do if you think they invented half the stuff that they are now forced to get from other places.) The question is why, if so much was experimented with outside America, did it take Americans to actually make good on it? I don't think this has anythign to do with American intelligence (which is, after all, imported) but from our system of government, or what used to be our system of government. It's very hard to produce new things when you're crippled by big government and expensive social engineering. Of course, we're well on our way to figuring that out as we spend increasing portions of our GDP on the federal government while we send away all of our manufacturing ability. So there's really no point in bragging about our past; it just makes our present and future all the more stupid and depressing.
Also, supersonic flight and digital audio.
You can argue America's going down the shitter in terms of recent innovation, but you're out of your mind if you think Americans aren't responsible for more than their fair share of invention, commercialization aside. Ok, so here's my list. Do your best with this one... :-)
Integrated circuits
Nuclear power
Radar that actually works (heh heh)
Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and chemical analysis
Color photography
Liquid crystal displays
Assless leather chaps
Lightbulbs
Long distance telegraphy, telephone and THE INTERNET (thank you, Al!)
Television (sorry!)
AC power distribution grid
Graphical user interfaces
Vacuum cleaner
Adhesive tape
Airbags
Air conditioning
The artificial heart
Information theory and data compression
The first working airplane
It's not fair to dismiss the innovation to actually produce something in a commerically viable way. The idea for the automobile is pretty obvious, as is the idea of blowing something up to power a piston. In my opinion, the hard part is figuring out how to do that in a workable way that people can actually afford.
Anyway, if your point is that Americans think too provincially about inventions, you're right. Nothing in the world can be credited to anything other than the cumulative effort of people from all over the world and all over time. You take away the contributions of most any country, and the world's a vastly inferior place.
I agree that Pascal's Wager is bogus. I was joking about that part. However, I wasn't joking about the notion that being certain of no God is just as religious an idea as being sure there is a God. They are perfectly symmetric beliefs, and insofar as faith is concerned, are essentially the same. If there can be no proof of God, there can be no proof of Godlessness. I know that's not logically neccesary, but I believe given the way the world is, it is nonetheless true.
You just dismissed the deeply held beliefs of over half the world's population. Who's the troll, again? Being certain there is no God is just as "religious" a statement as to be certain there is one. Moreover, if you're going to operate on blind faith and not reason, why in whomever's name would you go with atheism? I can see saying "I have no idea regarding the existence of a creator" but to come down with a definite conclusion, and for that to be a hard bet against the home team? That's just crazy. Seventy-two virgins crazy. Ever hear of Pascal's Wager?
This pretty much sums it up. There's really no point arguing.