I admit that there are no easy solutions to the problem. But If Iraq really falls into civil war(What they have right now is akin to really really bad gang violence), it will be the largest humanitarian crisis in decades.
I find it disturbing that you are so self-centered that you are only considering America and whether it was "Bad on our part" in the face of hundreds of thousands of potential casualties.
Right, because Qatar and the UAE are theocracies. Your post is symptomatic of the oversimplifications Americans make about the Middle East.
The fighting between the Sunni and Shia has little to do with religion, most fighting has been on tribal lines, and tibes tend to have religious homogeneity. The real battle is over which tribes will control power post war Iraq. There might be religious rhetoric on both sides, but it is only used as a justification for there real goals(We do the same thing[albeit to a smaller degree], listen to one of George Bush's speeches).
In Iraqi Kurdistan, the population is split evenly between Sunni and Shia, yet there is very little ethnic conflict. Why is this? Because there is no power vacuum in Kurdistan, there is a strong established government with large paramilitary forces.
Controlling road usage with a petrol tax is like conducting surgery with a sludge hammer.
In order to manage traffic, prices would need to be algorithmically changed several times a day depending on how much road capacity exists in an area. Otherwise you will have large areas of road with excess capacity being held up by crowded bottlenecks.
I dont think you know what a commodity is, as your implication that quanity of sale has something to do with whether or not a product is a commodity is...puzzling.
The reason why Playstation games are not like apple products is simple: Porting a game from a PS3 to a Gamecube is highly nontrivial, requiring vast amounts of programming resources. Converting music from one format to another requires a freeware program.
"But Apple makes the iPod. What gives other companies the right to be on Apple's product? They never marketed it as an open platform, quite the contrary. It would be a problem if Apple did decide to run an "open" platform that involved other companies. But they didn't, so it's irrelevant."
No, whether or not Apple decided to run a open platform is "irrelevant". Here is the problem, Apple is using its dominance and success in one industry to give it a huge unfair advantage(and pricing power, if itunes wanted to raise prices tomorrow, it would be done) in another industry. Open any economics textbook, this is very very bad.
"Then I wouldn't buy a car from Shell. It would be their own problem if their business plan failed, or the consumer's if it succeeded. Why should the government outlaw it? It might be a problem if they were abusing public resources or exploiting other companies - but if it was limited to just Shell's own products, then what's the problem?"
The patents, and the huge amount of pricing power. The government should outlaw it because textbook economics shows that such actions are good for the economy.
Yes, but other DRM formats do not work on the ipod. This is because of Apple, as other players can easily handle the songs.
I am using the legal fiction that people do not load their ipods with illegally and quasi-legally obtained music, as the argument "Well if you break the law, there is no problem", doesn't work so well in court.
Apple is the reason a song bought on Itunes wont work anywhere else, that is entirely Apples doing. Apple purposely shuts competitors from their Ipod, recall what happened when Real cracked fairplay.
Music, unlike playstation games or panasonic parts, is a commodity. It is exactly the same whether it is bought from emusic or from itunes. Here is a better analogy:
Imagine if you bought a car from a hypothetical shell car company(Which controls over 70% of the market, giving it huge monopsony power), and it only ran on shell gasoline. Worse, imagine your car used an elaborate and inefficient sensor to confirm that you bought your gas from shell. Worse, if you wanted to buy another car, it would not have a steering wheel or a gear stick, because Shell had patents on those.
I don't see how Sony benefits from shutting Linux users out. As for Microsoft, that is anti-competitive behavior too, and I would like to see it prosecuted. But the EU is already pursuing a case with Microsoft, so Norway probably doesn't doesnt want to spend the money(Anti-trust suits can be very expensive).
Teachers break up fighting students because they have a legal responcibility to, as assault and battery is against the law. As for the running around and not attending class thing, if a student wants to skip class and run around in the halls, I think we should let him/her, and call the parents. If he keeps doing it, you kick him out of the school out of noise concerns.
Parents should teach children how to behave, peers have a lot of influence also, but its the parent's job to give the child a strong enough foundation to know what to accept from peers and what to reject.
Teachers on the other hand, have no moral authority at all, and knowing many of my fellow college students who became teachers, I would not trust them with rasing children.
I was bullied in elementary school(I read encyclopedias during any free time). I was made fun of, but this never really bothered me, children are rarely more original then "Stupid-But". What was far worse was when my (expensive) books were dumped in toilets.
You do not have the right not to be offended, and neither do children. In life, there are going to be many people who won't like you, and as such, you have to develop your own inner self independent from the opinions of others.
Now, if an adult hits an adult, he will be tried for assault. Similarly, if a bully attacks a kid or is found physically hurting him, taking his lunch money, etc. I think he should be expelled and sent to a military school, or better, his parents will have to pay the normal fine for assault (around a thousand USD) directly to the kid.
No it's not! Teaching children how to behave is propoganda, social norms change, and as such it is idiotic for the goverment to step in. Don't follow the tradition of the Hitler Youth.
Jews started pouring into Palestine in large numbers during the 20's(They peacefully bought land). During the 30's, Jewish and Muslim gang/militias attacked each other. World War II put this on pause. The British tried to keep Jews out of Israel, but Jews around the world were smuggled in.
The UN did make a partition plan after the Holocaust, but the area they called Israel was already populated by Jews, all of whom had arrived peacefully. The areas of Palestine that were Arab were given their own state. At this point, none of Israeli land was stolen, Arabs had sold it to them, or the cities had been built from desert.
The Arabs then attacked the Jewish state. The major powers imposed a arms embargo on both sides. But Israel managed to get around it by buying weapons from Bulgaria and Hungary, desperate for foreign exchange. Because of this, Israel won, and conquered far more than was originally allotted. At this point, they expelled people, and did many evil things.
After this, cold war politics got involved. But the assertion that Israel was created because of the holocaust is absurd. Israel did not start it, the Arabs did.
And by the way, all countries are only maintained by force of arms.
Yes, but it is a known fact that they have nuclear weapons. Pictures have been taken, technical details linked. In fact, Prime Minister Olmert said during a interview a couple weeks ago "Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as France, America, Russia and Israel?".
Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, and missiles capable of launching them toward Israel. So MAD already exists(I know Pakistan has good relations with Israel, it wouldn't matter.)
Syria's military is suited toward internal repression, and is not really capable of offensive actions. Their mountainous border with Israel would make them sitting ducks for areal bombing(Israel, with or without American help, has massive air superiority), dooming any offensive reaction. In 1973, Syria had tremendous support from the Soviet Union, and still lost against Israel, despite the fact that Israel was being simultaneously engaged in a surprise attack by Egypt. Now Syria's military is much weaker in comparison to Israels, and there is no possibility of support from Egypt.
Iran's support would not be worth much. Any ground force would have to pass Iraq's heavily Sunni desert province, opening them up to both areal bombardment from Israel and sporadic attacks from local Sunnis(Assuming the Americans have magically left Iraq). Their Navy is incapable of force projection beyond the Arabian sea. Its air force might be capable of defending its airspace, but even that is tenuous, any attempted air strikes toward Israel would be shot down. Their missile force would be able to cause somewhat large civilian casualties to the Israeli population, lowering morale. But if Israels existence is at stake, I doubt morale will be an issue. The missiles would be unable to destroy most fortified structures, and pose little threat to existential Israel.
In any war, Syria would be annihilated, with their infrastructure devastated. Israel showed restraint in Lebanon. If Lebanon was knocked back 20 years, Syria would be returned to the stone age. Israel and Iran are too far apart from each other to cause much damage, though Israel could probably severely damage Iran's oil facilities. The Arabs have tried to "Overwhelm" Israel, twice. Each time, it has served to counter there interests, I do not think they would ever be stupid enough to repeat it.
Think about this rationally, why would Iran want to destroy Israel? Israel is a tool for Arab countries to control their population. Without Israel, Arab dictators would have to face their double-digit unemployment and corrupt inefficient economy. The real reason Iran wants nuclear weapons is not to guard against Israel, but its neighbors. Every one of its neighbors have attacked it in the last century. If Iran ever does uptain nuclear weapons, it is far more likely that nukes would land in Riyadh than Tel-Aviv.
Great Idea! I like it, but republicans would bring up that immigrants cost the country more than $5000 in services. I would leave the cost to a independent commission, that determines the average cost of a immigrant every year. To cover the loan problem, the government can simply take the money out of your paycheck every month, in a couple years, they will get all the money.
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Compare that to Yugoslavia, where 8000 people were killed in hours.
I find it disturbing that you are so self-centered that you are only considering America and whether it was "Bad on our part" in the face of hundreds of thousands of potential casualties.
The fighting between the Sunni and Shia has little to do with religion, most fighting has been on tribal lines, and tibes tend to have religious homogeneity. The real battle is over which tribes will control power post war Iraq. There might be religious rhetoric on both sides, but it is only used as a justification for there real goals(We do the same thing[albeit to a smaller degree], listen to one of George Bush's speeches).
In Iraqi Kurdistan, the population is split evenly between Sunni and Shia, yet there is very little ethnic conflict. Why is this? Because there is no power vacuum in Kurdistan, there is a strong established government with large paramilitary forces.
The right to a 40 gigabyte ipod and a jetpack?
Lets see how "successful" it will be when the free money disappears.
In order to manage traffic, prices would need to be algorithmically changed several times a day depending on how much road capacity exists in an area. Otherwise you will have large areas of road with excess capacity being held up by crowded bottlenecks.
The EU fined them for hundreds of millions of dollars, if my memory serves correctly.
Interesting, here in Florida(and possibly the US), I could be arrested for criminal negligence if I did not at least try and call the police.
The riff-raff are the people using coyotes
The reason why Playstation games are not like apple products is simple: Porting a game from a PS3 to a Gamecube is highly nontrivial, requiring vast amounts of programming resources. Converting music from one format to another requires a freeware program.
"But Apple makes the iPod. What gives other companies the right to be on Apple's product? They never marketed it as an open platform, quite the contrary. It would be a problem if Apple did decide to run an "open" platform that involved other companies. But they didn't, so it's irrelevant."
No, whether or not Apple decided to run a open platform is "irrelevant". Here is the problem, Apple is using its dominance and success in one industry to give it a huge unfair advantage(and pricing power, if itunes wanted to raise prices tomorrow, it would be done) in another industry. Open any economics textbook, this is very very bad.
"Then I wouldn't buy a car from Shell. It would be their own problem if their business plan failed, or the consumer's if it succeeded. Why should the government outlaw it? It might be a problem if they were abusing public resources or exploiting other companies - but if it was limited to just Shell's own products, then what's the problem?"
The patents, and the huge amount of pricing power. The government should outlaw it because textbook economics shows that such actions are good for the economy.
I am using the legal fiction that people do not load their ipods with illegally and quasi-legally obtained music, as the argument "Well if you break the law, there is no problem", doesn't work so well in court.
Hmm, I agree with you, I am against DRM. But the idea that DRM is inherently illegal for anti-trust reasons is a bit of a stretch for me.
Music, unlike playstation games or panasonic parts, is a commodity. It is exactly the same whether it is bought from emusic or from itunes. Here is a better analogy:
Imagine if you bought a car from a hypothetical shell car company(Which controls over 70% of the market, giving it huge monopsony power), and it only ran on shell gasoline. Worse, imagine your car used an elaborate and inefficient sensor to confirm that you bought your gas from shell. Worse, if you wanted to buy another car, it would not have a steering wheel or a gear stick, because Shell had patents on those.
I don't see how Sony benefits from shutting Linux users out. As for Microsoft, that is anti-competitive behavior too, and I would like to see it prosecuted. But the EU is already pursuing a case with Microsoft, so Norway probably doesn't doesnt want to spend the money(Anti-trust suits can be very expensive).
If I buy a song from Sony or Microsoft, it wont work on the ipod. That is textbook anti-competitive behavior.
Parents should teach children how to behave, peers have a lot of influence also, but its the parent's job to give the child a strong enough foundation to know what to accept from peers and what to reject.
Teachers on the other hand, have no moral authority at all, and knowing many of my fellow college students who became teachers, I would not trust them with rasing children.
You do not have the right not to be offended, and neither do children. In life, there are going to be many people who won't like you, and as such, you have to develop your own inner self independent from the opinions of others.
Now, if an adult hits an adult, he will be tried for assault. Similarly, if a bully attacks a kid or is found physically hurting him, taking his lunch money, etc. I think he should be expelled and sent to a military school, or better, his parents will have to pay the normal fine for assault (around a thousand USD) directly to the kid.
No it's not! Teaching children how to behave is propoganda, social norms change, and as such it is idiotic for the goverment to step in. Don't follow the tradition of the Hitler Youth.
I want to actually see the market share reports, instead of relying on press releases.
The UN did make a partition plan after the Holocaust, but the area they called Israel was already populated by Jews, all of whom had arrived peacefully. The areas of Palestine that were Arab were given their own state. At this point, none of Israeli land was stolen, Arabs had sold it to them, or the cities had been built from desert.
The Arabs then attacked the Jewish state. The major powers imposed a arms embargo on both sides. But Israel managed to get around it by buying weapons from Bulgaria and Hungary, desperate for foreign exchange. Because of this, Israel won, and conquered far more than was originally allotted. At this point, they expelled people, and did many evil things.
After this, cold war politics got involved. But the assertion that Israel was created because of the holocaust is absurd. Israel did not start it, the Arabs did.
And by the way, all countries are only maintained by force of arms.
Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, and missiles capable of launching them toward Israel. So MAD already exists(I know Pakistan has good relations with Israel, it wouldn't matter.)
Syria's military is suited toward internal repression, and is not really capable of offensive actions. Their mountainous border with Israel would make them sitting ducks for areal bombing(Israel, with or without American help, has massive air superiority), dooming any offensive reaction. In 1973, Syria had tremendous support from the Soviet Union, and still lost against Israel, despite the fact that Israel was being simultaneously engaged in a surprise attack by Egypt. Now Syria's military is much weaker in comparison to Israels, and there is no possibility of support from Egypt.
Iran's support would not be worth much. Any ground force would have to pass Iraq's heavily Sunni desert province, opening them up to both areal bombardment from Israel and sporadic attacks from local Sunnis(Assuming the Americans have magically left Iraq). Their Navy is incapable of force projection beyond the Arabian sea. Its air force might be capable of defending its airspace, but even that is tenuous, any attempted air strikes toward Israel would be shot down. Their missile force would be able to cause somewhat large civilian casualties to the Israeli population, lowering morale. But if Israels existence is at stake, I doubt morale will be an issue. The missiles would be unable to destroy most fortified structures, and pose little threat to existential Israel.
In any war, Syria would be annihilated, with their infrastructure devastated. Israel showed restraint in Lebanon. If Lebanon was knocked back 20 years, Syria would be returned to the stone age. Israel and Iran are too far apart from each other to cause much damage, though Israel could probably severely damage Iran's oil facilities. The Arabs have tried to "Overwhelm" Israel, twice. Each time, it has served to counter there interests, I do not think they would ever be stupid enough to repeat it.
Think about this rationally, why would Iran want to destroy Israel? Israel is a tool for Arab countries to control their population. Without Israel, Arab dictators would have to face their double-digit unemployment and corrupt inefficient economy. The real reason Iran wants nuclear weapons is not to guard against Israel, but its neighbors. Every one of its neighbors have attacked it in the last century. If Iran ever does uptain nuclear weapons, it is far more likely that nukes would land in Riyadh than Tel-Aviv.
Afghanistan-During the time of the drafting, nobody but Pakistan recognized Afghanistan's government, so they were not invited.
Andorra-They are really really small, with no industry whatsoever, I don't see why they would join.
Angola - They have had a civil war to worry about for the last 30 years.
Bosnia and Herzegovina- They were still occupied by NATO during the drafting.
Brunei-They are a large oil exporter, no surprises here.
Central African Republic- Civil War
Chad - Civil War
Comoros - Really, Really, small.
São Tomé and Príncipe Sao- Really small islands off the coast of Africa.
Montenegro - Did not even exist until 7 months ago
Saint Kitts and Nevis - Really really small tourist based island economy.
San Marino- They are one fucking city! They are not even in the UN!
Côte d'Ivoire - Really bad civil war
Republic of the Congo- Civil War
Iraq - Sanctions would have conflicted with most of the Kyoto Protocol(The parts on carbon trading)
Serbia- Did not exist until 7 months ago
Somalia- Has not had a central government since 1991
East Timor Timor-Leste - They control about half of a tiny island, was part of Indonesia at the time of drafting.
Zimbabwe - has a evil dictator too busy destroying his citizen's homes to bother with it.
Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic Sahrawi Republic - They are claimed by Morocco, not recognized by... anyone.
Palestinian National Authority - Not a country, Not recognized by... anyone.
Republic of China(Taiwan) - Would not have been allowed to join even if they wanted to. Not diplomatically recognized by UN or the developed world.
Holy See - Granted Observer Status in the UN, about the same status as the Knights Hospitallers
Great Idea! I like it, but republicans would bring up that immigrants cost the country more than $5000 in services. I would leave the cost to a independent commission, that determines the average cost of a immigrant every year. To cover the loan problem, the government can simply take the money out of your paycheck every month, in a couple years, they will get all the money.
12 years ago, Russia was a democracy, I'm sure things haven't changed that much.
Besides, this theater was pretty tasteful and well done. I'm not a Star Trek fan, but it is still pretty cool.