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Please, name him correctly:

George the Unready (see pp. 20 et seq.) or George II (worst American leader since George III).

china=mate
muckers=mates
butchers=look
scoobie=clue
rabbit=talk
Not as obscure as you'd like to think; I can decode it, and I've never even been to the UK.

Mod parent up! This is basic physics folks; I would have hoped more people on Slashdot new this. Wind resistance is the single most limiting factor in land speed records.

To illustrate, this high-powered modern steam vehicle hit 225 km/h, or 140 mph. Bruce Bursford beat this by nearly 50% on a bicycle , setting the world record of 334.6 km/h or 207.9 mph. He biked on a treadmill, with no wind resistance.

That's fine, but you can understand how a lot of people might not think too highly of King James. When you read about his life and consider the implications of relying on a "translation" that was written at the direction of a man who believed that, as a king, he had divine capabilities, it's not exactly a huge mental leap to reach a place of significant distrust in the "translation's" accuracy.

Exactly when was it that my country decide to abdicate rationality in favor of wanton superstition, reprehensible pseudoscience, and gross ignorance?

Probably round about the time of the Pilgrim Fathers

From the link:

"The Protestant Reformation, which had begun in 1517, had reached England some twenty years later. As elsewhere in Europe, it spawned dissenting minorities who were rather more ascetic in the practice of their new faith than the Church of England which was Protestant in name, but was, effectively, Catholicism without the Pope. Of these, the plain-living Puritans who eschewed what they saw as the gaudy, papist show of the English church, were the most overt and became the most oppressed. In 1609, the Puritans found England so inimical that 35 of them left the country and settled at Leyden, in Holland. Holland was much more to their strict religious taste, but after ten years, the Puritans began to seek a better freedom than a patch in a foreign land.

The Puritans looked, therefore, to America"

it's actually attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister in the 1860s and 1870s ...

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Benjamin_Disr aeli

http://www.britannia.com/bios/disraeli.html

anti-Semetic in the proper sense of the work (being against Jews, Arabs, Ethiopians, etc)

How are Ethiopians Semites?

Anyway, in Germany the more appropriate word is "JewHate" (Judenhas). "anti-Semitism" was coined later as a euphemism. And although Britain probably exhibited JewHate to an extent, there are important distinctions. They looked at is as a "cultural" factor- once a Jew converted to Christianity, he was entirely redeemed (and could even go on to lead the government). Germany in the 1900s on came to be dominated by a "racial" judenhas, which was the belief that Jews were intrinsticlly, physically evil, and not merely followers of discredited old religions. (The rise of biological science, including Darwinism, contributed to the dominance of this idea)

Just to be clear, the medieval peculiarity you are referring to was the prohibition against Jews owning land.

No. The relatively short-lived landowning prohibition was a fairly minor factor in how the Jews became major financiers.

A few of the more important contributions:
1. Moneylending was a sin (usury) for Christians, but not Jews.
2. Jews were forbidden to work on Saturday, and working on Sunday would've invited Christian retaliation, so they could do less work overall in normally laborious fields.

But more important than any of those:
3. Jews were religiously required to be literate. They HAD to read the Torah. (Whereas Christian churches at various times discouraged non-clergy from reading the Bible). Jews often had a literacy rate 100 times higher than the surrounding Christian population. You can't be a banker, bookkeeper, or industrialist without the ability to handle paperwork.

What a coincidence. Louis Malle was definitely no less radical and left-leaning than Michael Moore. His movies were full of political or social satire, given in a lighthearted and pleasant manner, yet they were also insightful and generally true to the historical fact. How unlike Michael Moore, who is unable to do anything but cashing his alleged ideals. Sorry, I consider myself a leftwinger, I am all against Bush and the whole Iraq invasion, but I think I'm too old school for Michael Moore. When Karl Marx wanted to launch a revolutionary movement, he went to a library to study the facts. FACTS. Ef - ah - cee - tee - es. Something you won't find in a flashy mockumentary by Michael Moore.

Yeah, I know. Here goes my karma bonus. Well, I won't post it as an AC.

1. Normans were Danes (aka Vikings) who took over the northern coast of France. See this article
2. Much of England was under Viking control at one time, this was called the Danelaw

He was Hanoverian....

Geck, erhalten Sie ein Dell!

If you've never heard of the radio (which works pretty well actually, probably better than the shoes ever will!), or the new flashlight, here's a trivial description, or there are several news items around, such as this one.

You should be able to track one down if you're interested - look out for the iMac-alike version. If desparate maybe start with this UK stockist.

cheers

alex

The clearest threat to Free Software is disolving the term to such an extent that it is meaningless. This will result in no one working on the "open source" and companies deciding it was a bad approach. The chance we would have had to change the way in which we all work would have been lost forever. Better stick with a strong radical position like RMS's which at least is clear than to have a politically swayed realpolitik position which is more business friendly, but will only result in failure