Uhhh, Tarantino's best films are more about the dialog than the violence.

I disagree. If there were some form of ocean property rights (oh noes, capitalism!), BP would be paying money out the ass for years now due to all of the property damage they caused. That risk *should* make something like this more unlikely if only because it would be more costly (and corporations are greedy) for a company to deal with than some piddly fine by the government. They probably would have had the leak plugged by now. I doubt their punishment is increasing by the day at this point. It would be if every barrel of oil leaked eventually caused property damage.

No, no, no. You have it wrong. Its Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

I can't speak for the original poster, but I've never had an aptitude test. I've never actually heard of people doing that outside of TV show plots.

He was probably referring to this, although, its not really relevant anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_Germany#Citizenship_issues "Under previous German law, children born to foreigners in Germany were not entitled to German citizenship (jus sanguinis): a large population of permanently resident non-citizens developed, with the consequence over time that even the third generation born in Germany remained foreigners. As late as 2004, 36 per cent of Turkish citizens living in Germany did not have German nationality despite being born there.[3] In 2000, legislation was passed which conferred German citizenship on the German-born children of foreigners"

From Wikipedia: "Capitalism is an economic system in which wealth, and the means of producing wealth, are privately owned and controlled rather than commonly, publicly, or state-owned and controlled. Through capitalism, the land, labor, and capital are owned, operated, and traded by private individuals or corporations, and investments, distribution, income, production, pricing and supply of goods, commodities and services are determined by voluntary private decision in a market economy. A distinguishing feature of capitalism is that each person owns his or her own labor and therefore is allowed to sell the use of it to employers. In a "capitalist state", private rights and property relations are protected by the rule of law of a limited regulatory framework." Note that people in China don't seem to fully own their own labor(they are forced to work overtime and are forced to stay in the factory if they break the rules), nor are their rights protected by a "limited regulatory framework."

As I already posted a little ways up, capitalism requires a mechanism to try to ensure that the rights of the individual are not infringed. This is a necessary component. If you do not have this mechanism, you do not have capitalism. The best mechanism we have come up with is democracy. Is is possible for some other form government to protect the rights of individual? Sure, but history has shown that no other system will do it as reliably. I guess I could amend my comment to say that its unlikely that you have a capitalist system if you do not have democracy and the protection of rights. However, I think my point still stands.

Using the dumbed down definition, you are correct. Using a serious definition, capitalism includes a mechanism that protects the rights of the individual. So far, the best mechanism we have come up with is a government that consists of people elected by the people living in the country in question. That government is also generally prohibited from infringing upon the rights of the people living in the country in question, as well as being tasked with protecting the rights of its citizens from being infringed by others.

Forgot this part: On top of that, the educated in China that aren't really part of the government are unwilling to risk their wealth to help the poor. That's the clever part of what the Chinese government has done. After Tienanmen Square, they changed things enough to allow the educated (who might have the power/knowledge to do something) to live lives comparable to what we have in the west. This makes it somewhat difficult for them to say "hey, lets risk our wealth to help poor people."

That's true. However, the reason that those companies are able to do those things is because of the fact that the Chinese people don't have the necessary power to stop them. They don't have the right to freedom of speech and they don't have the ability to replace elected politicians with others. You can't call your system "capitalism" if you don't have those things. Just because an independent company is involved, doesn't mean its capitalism. That being said, this doesn't justify anything those companies (or we) do. Basically, the problem is that the Chinese government doesn't care about its own people, multi-national companies don't care about the Chinese people, and we (for the most part) don't care about the Chinese people.

Well, the people on the planet now (including us) did not create the problem. The problem was created a long time ago when it was decided to build our infrastructure based on the use of fossil fuels as the main energy source. At the moment, the idea is to determine what the best course of action is. To me, it seems like the best way to handle the situation is to get as much low hanging fruit as possible (change light bulbs, etc, etc) in the short term. Things like this reduce energy usage and also don't really add an economic cost. In the long term, switching to nuclear power would probably be the best way to go. At some point, fossil fuels will be expensive enough that alternative energy sources will be competitive without any help. The trade-off of this approach is that it does not solve the problem of global warming. We would have to deal with the costs of it later.

Even if we were to go back to pre-industrial revolution levels of CO2 emissions tomorrow, it wouldn't stop the warming that would occur because of previous activities. At this point(really, probably as of 30 years ago, at least), it seems like significant warming is inevitable. Does it make more sense to screw our economy up now, or to come up with something else? Even if we don't find an answer, we are better off letting our civilization collapse in 50 years rather than now. Because to stop global warming we would have to stop human caused CO2 emissions entirely AND we would have to come up with a way to reverse the warming that's already going to happen. We don't have a way of doing that in a short amount of time that won't also bankrupt every country on the planet.

Also (I understand WHY they could consider this an anti-trust issue) but at what point does something become core functionality of an OS? Internet accessibility is vital to personal computing, so it seems reasonable for them to bundle something that helps make the vast majority of that content reachable.

How is the average computer illiterate going to download a browser if Microsoft is not allowed to bundle one? Buy a disc?

Correct, and the manner in which the different frequencies interact with matter is what makes them different. To say that they are the same isn't strictly true.