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I recall that there was quite an upstir when Profumo was caught his pants down.

Article

Guess there is more than one here who might symphathize (.)(.).

CC.

"...bin Laden is the evil criminal mastermind behind an International Terrorist Network, al-Qaeda. It's highly organised, militarised terror cells reach into every country around the World.".

We've all heard this kind of rhetoric about the unseen global terrorist network. It is, for the most part, untrue. The current attitudes and strategies used in The War on Terror, are doomed to fail.

Read this article, get a clue stick, then go buy the book book

""Little that had previously been published helped. It was clear to me that profound misconceptions were widespread. Foremost among them was the idea that bin Laden led a cohesive and structured terrorist organisation called "al-Qaeda". Every piece of evidence I came across in my own work contradicted this notion of al-Qaeda as an "Evil Empire" with an omnipotent mastermind at its head. Such an idea was undoubtedly comforting - destroy the man and his henchmen and the problem goes away - but it was clearly deeply flawed. As a result the debate over the prosecution of the ongoing "war on terror" had been skewed""

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated"? - John Lydon.

Here is the Petagon Climate Report) which was leaked through The Observer.
An interview whith one of its athors (Doug Randall) is here.
The BBC has some reactions from scientists on it.

Acclaim had innovative marketing techniques

Its called Felles Systemet (The shared system), and it makes many processes in the education sector VERY much more efficient

Outsiders, especially those from the USA think that this is a potentially bad idea, because it is a threat to negative freedom, however these types of system, merely distribute information to people who have access to it already in a more efficient manner.

Ironically, because the system becomes so much more efficient, the total number of people with access to this "private" information decreases

There are further details out there for the Googling. Short version: J.R.R. Tolkien sold the film rights to Saul Zaentz (who is listed in the credits, and is the owner of Tolkien Enterprises) back in '69. Certain members of the family (namely Christopher) have been smarting about this pretty much ever since. This is why the family refused to "officially"** endorse the films: the estate didn't have creative control.

**Unofficially is a different story; Simon, Christopher's son, has been estranged from his father for years for saying that the estate should loosen up a little. Simon is also a fan of the films, and his son (whose name I've forgotten) has a bit part as one of the Riders of Rohan. Yes, I include Tolkien in my various geekdoms; books and movies. Why do you ask? ;)

Yeah, that's what they always say at the public inquiry. The truth is they would shoot anything that moves, even a three year old, because they are racist bastards blinded by hate. Americans take note: your tax dollars payed to have a 13 year old girl murdered in cold blood. The killer's maximum penalty is 3 years in prison. This is abominable and makes me ashamed to call myself an American. It will only end if we stop funding the Israeli terrorists.

Did you even read the information in the wikipedia, or just skip to the bottom?

Yes, I read the information. Did you?

If life was so good in Chile after Pinochett got to power, how come so many fled to other countrys?

The percentage of people who left Chile was very small. I hear people are leaving the U.S. because of Bush but I don't think we are living in a brutal totalitarian society.

And with the economypart ... that Chile didn't get any loans when Allende was at power, but got big loans with Pinochett, doesnt that explain a bit the economy boom?

You see, this is the advantage of actually reading the articles (try it, you'll like it!). On the page about Allende it says The government announced a moratorium on foreign debt payments and defaulted on debts held by international creditors and foreign governments. People who refuse to make even token payments on existing debts are unlikely to secure more credit.

As to the source of the Chilean economic boom, again try reading the portion of the article about that where it says:

Once in power, Pinochet immediately set about making market-oriented economic reforms. He declared that he wanted "to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs". To formulate his economic policy, Pinochet relied on the so-called Chicago Boys, who were economists trained at the University of Chicago and heavily influenced by the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman.

Pinochet launched an era of economic deregulation and privatization. To accomplish his objectives, he abolished the minimum wage, recinded trade union rights, privatized the pension system, state industries, and banks, and abolished taxes on wealth and profits. Supporters of these policies (most notably Milton Friedman himself) have dubbed them "The Miracle of Chile", due to the 35% increase in real per capita GDP from 1960 to 1980 (later, from 1980 to 2000, it increased by 94%, but Pinochet was no longer in power after 1990). Opponents dispute this "miracle" label, pointing out that the unemployment rate increased from 4.3% in 1973 to 22% in 1983, while real wages declined by 40%. However, Pinochet did manage to address at least part of these problems during his final years as President, since unemployment was down to 7.8% in 1990. The shortage problems during the final years of Allende's administration were also remedied.

The privatizations, cuts in public spending and anti-union policies generally had a negative impact on Chile's working class and a positive one on the country's more wealthy strata.

The former President Allende's economic policy had involved nationalizations of many key companies, notably U.S.-owned copper mines. This had been the primary reason for the external (mostly American) opposition to Allende's government. Much of the internal opposition to Allende's policies was from business sectors, and it has been alleged that the U.S. funded the lorry driver's strike ([1]), which was to a significant degree responsible for the chaotic situation before the coup.

Note that the link is to The Guardian which is not an unbiased source.

I'm not American , but I see America going the wrong way and cutting funding for the wrong things (ok, it's not a socialist state) ... Education, Healthcare, Emergency services are things which have intangible returns on investment.

I think you're confusing the issue--and perhaps you've been spending too much time reading the European Left press. Somewhere, somehow, you have the impression that "tax cuts" have affected education, healthcare, and emergency services. Let's run down the list:

• Emergency services John Kerry, in the waning days of his campaign, made as crass a political promise as Americans have heard in seventy years. He promised to "put another 100,000 firefighters on the job." Despite the fact that the rate at which fires happen has plummeted with the advent of things like the National Fire Code, National Electrical Code, etc. Simply put, municipalities are laying off firefighters and closing firehouses because there's nothing for them to do, not because they don't have federal funds. Firefighters are typically paid by municipalities, from funds collected by a tax on property insurance premiums, without any federal funding. (Most firefighters in the U.S. are actually volunteers.) There WAS a short-term federal program to fund additional police officers which did expire during W's first term. Letting federal funding expire isn't quite the same thing. (And if those municipalities needed the cops, they should be able to fund them locally. Four years of federal boodle is plenty.)
• Education Federal funding for education is heavily focused on three areas: college tuition assistance (mostly federally-guaranteed student loans); special education funding for the emotionally, physically, or mentally disabled; and preschool funding for disadvantaged and "at risk" children (primarily through a program named Head Start and other programs targeted at providing free breakfast and/or lunch to poor children). Special Ed and Head Start/free breakfast/free lunch are all "entitlement" programs--which means that anyone meeting the criteria for assistance will get it, regardless of the federal or state budget issues. In other words, those programs are immune to budget politics: you cannot "cut" the budget, because the budget is, essentially "as much as it takes." There's a sigificant point to this, which I'll touch on below.
• Health care Federal funding for health care in general has increased--but the total costs of health care are skyrocketing. Traditionally health care in the U.S. has been an employer-paid benefit--but the cost per family of a barely-humane insurance policy can be crushing to a small business (heading past $700 per month for a $5000/family deductible and 80% co-pay when I shut down my consulting firm). There are millions of Americans who do not have adequate health coverage today, and it is a significant problem. That does not, however, mean that a federally-funded single-payer system (the U.K.'s National Health, or the health systems of each Canadian province) is a good solution. Those systems (especially Canada's) exist because there are private pay systems to alleviate overcrowding and provide cutting-edge treatment. When 90% of the Canadian population lives with 100 miles of a U.S. hospital, it's easy to live with a state-run health system: you can always cross the border to get a second opinion, or to get a test done sooner. That's not to say that our system is perfect--far from it. I believe that there are dramatic inequities in how private insurance works--there is essentially a widespread practice of "collusion in restraint of trade" going on between doctors, hospitals, and a network of ostensibly not-for-profits insurors known as Blue Cross/Blue Shield. There is tremendous price-gouging going on in medical malpractice insurance. There are outrageous damage awards in lawsuits, fueled by the contingent-fee that rewards lawyers for bringing all

Guardian Unlimited: Mail out of order:"Boca Raton in Florida is...the spam capital of the world....There are really only 150 spammers doing 90% of all the spam we get in the US and Europe... at least 40 of them are in Boca Raton."

Also see ROKSO.

"Ghosts in the machine" by the Guardian TV correspondent of many years standing Mark Lawson here

There's a great article in the Guardian about how everyone used to watch the same TV shows at the same time.

The quality was better

Am I the only one who finds it ironic to read about Google's World Domination plans on Yahoo news ?

Yes.

a recent guardian weekly article states that it is not considered worth the estimated US$ 2 billion it would cost to put a man on the moon.

Stop the pacifist plague. Ask your representative to bring home US criminal heroes. Not let them being judged by non neutral international tribunals.

The Guardian - Marines defend soldier's killing of Iraqi

UN News Centre - Iraq: UN human rights chief concerned over plight of civilians in Falluja

Amnesty International - Iraq: Urgent action needed to prevent war crimes

Stop the pacifist plague. Ask your representative to bring home US criminal heroes.

The Guardian - Marines defend soldier's killing of Iraqi

UN News Centre - Iraq: UN human rights chief concerned over plight of civilians in Falluja

Amnesty International - Iraq: Urgent action needed to prevent war crimes

Support the Iraq genocide

Stop the pacifist plague. Ask your representative to bring home US criminal heroes.

The Guardian - Marines defend soldier's killing of Iraqi

UN News Centre - Iraq: UN human rights chief concerned over plight of civilians in Falluja

Amnesty International - Iraq: Urgent action needed to prevent war crimes

I think that is exactly what makes Pixar so remarkable. When it comes to the animation, their rendering is pretty much top of the line, and they have always been pioneers in computer graphics. They are the leaders.

But the key to their success as a studio has been the fact that despite how good they are with their technology, they place their story writers, directors and artists first. That is why they are in a way, the most succesful movie studio ever.

Guardian had a great feature on Pixar last week. Excellent read:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0 ,4120,1348748,00.html

Sadly, most of this sexy hi-tech we love so much is for killing people. "Payloads into space"? I think it will find other uses too, eg: "US to deploy hyper-missiles" http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,135096 4,00.html describes mach 10 missiles capable of destroying stuff anywhere on earth in two hours. Just what we need. Yay nasa!!!

Well? The reviewer for the Guardian found a number of errors in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Does that make that book useless also?

Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.

You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.

(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;

(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.

(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.

If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: "Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. ...

The US should have spent billions on spreading peace instead of war. Now with so much fresh blood on their hands it's going to be much harder.

That is a nice sentiment, but it is completely unrelated to the problem with Al Qaeda. The ultimate problem that they have with us is that we are not Muslims in an Islamic country under Sharia law. (Read Bin Laden's letter to America starting at Q2. Demand 1: Convert to Islam. Demand 2: (When fleshed out) Drop your Constitution, impose Islamic Sharia law, stop immoral acts, adultery, fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest under penalty of Islamic law (adultery: death, homosexuality:death, etc.)

Do you understand the implications of that? This isn't a case of: Sorry about blowing up your house, here is $20,000 and we call it even, or here is $50,000 for your village to get a new irrigation ditch. This is a case of us having to answer their demand of: Convert to Islam or die.

They hate us because we have been trying to control them and bombing them, and other fucked up shit for the better part of a century. It is really that simple. ....... Of course it is easier for people to unburdon themselves and just place the blame on bullshit like "they hate us for our freedom".

Apparently you've never read Bin Laden's letter to America. I suggest that you do. He states his demands that we must meet before he will stop trying to kill us pretty clearly starting at Q2. I'll give you the quick summary:

1. Become Muslim
2. Abolish the Constitution, separation of Church and State, and institute Sharia law. No more oppression, lies, immorality, adultry, debauchery, immoral acts of fornication, pornography, homosexuality, intoxicants (alcohol, drugs), gambling's, and trading with interest under pain of the appropriate punishment (adulty:death, homosexuality:death, etc.).

Now, I could go on, but just those two points should be enough to convince you that this war isn't going to end until we are Muslim, or they are captured, killed, or otherwise discouraged.

If we would have left the middle east alone and not tried to force them to recognize israel and wouldnt have supported israel then we wouldnt have been in this mess to begin with.

You seem to think that they have a problem with the recognition of Israel. That isn't so. Their problem is with its existence. Many Muslims and Arabs do not accept its existence. Killing all of the Jews to undo Israel isn't really an acceptable solution to make those Muslims and Arabs happy, is it? You are also mistaken if you believe that if the US wasn't involved in the area that there would be no conflict. Wahabism and extremism is spreading. It has a presence in America. It was only a question of time before we had to face the problem of Muslim extremists. It is better that we do it on our own terms to the greatest extent that we can.

Add to that the fact that we have supported dictators like the taliban and hussien and you can see why they have legit problems with us.

We've removed the Taliban and Saddam and are helping those countries more to democracy. The people who are most upset are the extremists that want to recreate the Muslim superstate combining church and state. They are the same bunch that demand of us: Islam or death!

Yes, it really is *THAT* simple. Leave them alone.

You're wrong. If you don't believe me, read Bin Laden's letter and consider the choice he offers you: Islam or death!

• Ukraine does have quality engineers, does have better economics and less corruption than other CIS countries, and has been a considerable supporter of US interests (e.g., they dropped one of the highest levels of troops into Iraq for support.

I don't see any difference to other CIS countries here. And "supporting US interests" is mainly a synonym for prostitution. Popular opinion in Ukraine is no more pro-US than in any other European country. Post-Soviet Ukrainean goverments have kissed Uncle Sam's *** at every opportunity -- and US rewarded them with economic sanctions.

This is for those who need yet another proof that a deal made with USA hardly ever increases the value of the paper it is printed on. I have no idea why time after time people try this strategy; the fact that 'white man [USA] speaks with a forked tongue' has been common knowledge for ages now.

• They are a society with European heritage, a large number of the population understands English, German, French, Italian, etc.)

• There aren't that many CIS countries that can say they are trying quite as hard to embrace the Westernized world by cooperation and with as little grandstanding as Ukraine is doing.

There is no 'Western world'. There is USA and Europe. And there is not so much common between them. For an insightful opinion for this topic, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1345790 ,00.html.

Unfortunately, my experience says that on this (and almost any other English language) board on the net any dissidece will immeadiately be rated as flamebait. So much for 'freedom of speech' in USA.

We are technically at war with North Korea, and have been for 50 years now. The North Koreans are a major source of ballistic missile proliferation as they continue to develop and export a range of sophisticated missiles to nations such as Iran and Yemen. They have tested components for a missile capable of reaching the United States. They either have, or are close to having nuclear weapons. The North Koreas bought 12 decommissioned Soviet submarines and have used them to advance their technology and may deploy weapons on them.

North Korea regularly threatens to attack the United States.

To get a sense of the nature of the North Korean government you can just look at how they treat: orphans, the US deserver who just returned after 40 years, the Japanese they kidnapped to teach their spies, and last, but not least, the victims of their gulag.

The North Koreans could teach lessons to the Iraqi Information Minister. They deny having dug the tunnels into South Korea, some of which are big enough to drive vehicles. (A handy thing if you were of a mind to invade the South, no?) They no doubt also deny their regular attempts to infiltrate groups of agents into South Korea.

The North Korean Army had million soldiers in it in 1992. The North Koreans have been willing to starve the population, significant numbers to death, in order to sustain the army.

North Korea is a designated member of the "Axis of Evil."

They seem like a bunch you might want to protect yourself against.

We are technically at war with North Korea, and have been for 50 years now. The North Koreans are a major source of ballistic missile proliferation as they continue to develop and export a range of sophisticated missiles to nations such as Iran and Yemen. They have tested components for a missile capable of reaching the United States. They either have, or are close to having nuclear weapons. The North Koreas bought 12 decommissioned Soviet submarines and have used them to advance their technology and may deploy weapons on them.

North Korea regularly threatens to attack the United States.

To get a sense of the nature of the North Korean government you can just look at how they treat: orphans, the US deserver who just returned after 40 years, the Japanese they kidnapped to teach their spies, and last, but not least, the victims of their gulag.

The North Koreans could teach lessons to the Iraqi Information Minister. They deny having dug the tunnels into South Korea, some of which are big enough to drive vehicles. (A handy thing if you were of a mind to invade the South, no?) They no doubt also deny their regular attempts to infiltrate groups of agents into South Korea.

The North Korean Army had million soldiers in it in 1992. The North Koreans have been willing to starve the population, significant numbers to death, in order to sustain the army.

North Korea is a designated member of the "Axis of Evil."

They seem like a bunch you might want to protect yourself against.

But just for good measure-

Fox watchers are, depending on the issue, between three and seven times more likely than public-network audiences to harbour factually incorrect beliefs

Much of the mainstream media coverage of the Firefox 1.0 release has been surprisingly good so far. For example, here's a pretty good article from the front page of The Guardian website introducing the politics of wider Firefox adoption to a mainstream audience. It's going to be harder and harder for Microsoft to counter this positive reporting.

The more you realize journalists are wrong. It doesn't matter what the subject is, the vast majority of journalists have no clue what they're talking about.

The term journalist is vague and over respected. Media writers rewrite press releases. When school children they discovered shuffling sentences from encyclopedia entries for easy grades and never grew out of the habit. Slashdot submissions reusing the lead paragraph of the linked article are a good example of the practice, the infamous science turfer an edge case.

There are two old jokes that may help understand the dynamic.

How do you know when a used car salesman is lying? His lips move. What is the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman? The used car salesman knows when he is lying.

Or Israel, which is to this day supported by US funding and weapons

For those that haven't read of him, Vannu was only recently released from an 18 year sentence as punishment for providing hard evidence to the west of an illegal middle east nuclear weapons progam. Though he has been a nominee for the Nobel Peace price every year from 1988 to 2004, he has not been allowed to speak with foreigners or reporters.

Where's the part where Bush did business with the Nazis? or Prescott helped Hitler rise to power?

SEATTLE -- National Guard Spec. Ryan Anderson, 27, was sentenced to life in prison after his conviction on charges he tried to aid al Qaeda by detailing ways to destroy U.S. weapons and kill soldiers to undercover agents, the Army said. Anderson, a convert to Islam, was convicted of passing on diagrams of tanks and their vulnerabilities to undercover agents posing as al Qaeda operatives.

# Terrorist cells across America have been broken up, in cities including Buffalo, Seattle, Tampa and Portland (Oregon);

# 368 individuals have been criminally charged in the United States in terrorism investigations;

# Already, 194 individuals have been convicted or have pled guilty in the United States, including shoe-bomber Richard Reid and "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh; and

# Over 515 individuals linked to the September 11th investigation have been removed from the United States.

Also there was leader in today's Guardian which also mentioned linux and OpenOffice.org.

ironically it's not a bug in firefox, but a bug in slashdot.

No, it's a bug in Firefox, and even if it wasn't, it wouldn't be ironic.

For an open source browser, this is having a fairly major impact on society at large. As a case in point, The Guardian (the UKs major left leaning / liberal newspaper) had a major editorial on the subject today, which can be read here (in today's print edition as well as online)

As a longtime corporate Linux user, I have to say that nothing has made this more possible than having a good OS browser such as Mozilla and Firefox, kudos to both.

But people seriously... Do you think that the US government ( especially the current go-it-alone administration ) puts much stock in treaties? I mean I am honestly asking here.

Remember Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Also http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/newnuclearwe aponsissuebrief.asp

Why is this even news?

Isn't that the equivalent for the National Enquirer here in the US?

A better read

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a book detailing interrogation techniques based on psychic warfare. There's another extract from the series. I can't find the first part, which gets heavily into the psychic stuff.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a book detailing interrogation techniques based on psychic warfare. There's another extract from the series. I can't find the first part, which gets heavily into the psychic stuff.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743 ,1343775,00.html

Chris Rock is 2005 Oscar host

The article link is here.

The road to Abu Ghraib

"In the wake of Vietnam, the US military were demoralised and prey to some fairly crazy ideas. They thought they could train 'super soldiers' with psychic powers. In this first extract from his revealing new book, Jon Ronson describes how their aspirations were perverted in the prisons of Iraq."

I should declare my own bais here. I think the USA is finished; the only question is how much damage it will cause the rest of the world in it's death throes in the next few decades.

Don't believe me? OK, just keep an eye on the US dollar vs Euro. The invisible hand is voting...

--

Underneath the blue skies
Beautiful empty dying dolls...

Nope, over there you only need a knife. What's next in the UK, banning sticks and any rock over 2 ounces?

The spraying is the initiative of the United States, which has been involved in Colombia's affairs ever since it stole the land for the Panama Canal from Colombia. Coca is grown in the north and the south, but the north is not sprayed - only the south. That is because the coca growers in the north are US-friendly and the coca growers in the south are in FARC controlled areas, a movement which among other things, wants the US out of Colombia's affairs. The south growing coca is a new phenomenom, for years FARC banned it, so all the coca grown and sent to the US in the 1970s was from the US friendly north. It only became a "problem" when the south began growing it. The US army colonel who supposedly was leading anti-drug efforts was actually involved in an operation to ship drugs to the United States.

Right now Phillip Morris is pushing the deadly tobacco drug on Chinese people. Can you imagine if China sent planes over to the US and began dropping herbicides on fields all over the US south? This is completely ridiculous, and whenever someone from south Colombia fights back against this, of course it's called "terrorism" and is used as justification for why this is necessary.

I don't think this whole thing is the US government being misguided, I think it is the US government being misleading, especially to the American people. Plenty of countries ship drugs to the US, if the product (such as marijuana) is not grown here already. But only Colombia gets this attention, only Colombia gets sent one billion a year to fight the FARC...uh, I mean, to fight coca farmers. Coca is the WMD's of Colombia - it is the excuse for doing what they *really* want to do.

Why is Colombia so important? Because Venezuela, Colombia (and from recent discoveries, Bolivia) have massive amounts of oil. The US powers-that-be want to control these natural resources. Arauca is one of the more oil-rich regions, and dozens of trade unionists in that region alone have been murdered this year. Hundreds of Colombian trade unionists are murdered every year, and the US sends one billion a year in military aid, crop destruction and so forth in order to add fuel to the fire. These policies are lobbied for by corporations like Occidental Petroleum, and I see only the most sinister motives behind their and the US's efforts in Colombia. Of course, the whole coca thing is a big WMD-like front for the real reasons, but if the US wanted to stop the global drug trade it should stop shipping tobacco to China. Hell, the US helped England invade China in order to push heroin on them over a century ago.

China is best understood as a society with deadly, ultra-modern weapons coupled with a barbaric, medieval mindset. It is an ogre in the 21st century.

By the way, you can listen to radio station that streams Fox News Radio for free to anyone on the Internet.

Here is one place for starters - okay, not just the private sector but also to overseas like the USA.

Incidentally, I have nothing for the utmost admiration for our doctors and nurses and they deserve better treatment in terms of pay and conditions because of the jobs they do. I would happily pay higher taxes if I knew that money was going directly into their pockets.

The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any].

I have a female colleague who is a middle-manager in the NHS and travels around the country a lot. She does so always using First Class train or air travel, can expenses rooms in the best hotels, gets a huge mileage allowance and very large salary.

At least in the private sector, it's a matter of choice to pay for it or not - but my friend getting the benefits she gets when your wife (and other healthcare staff) deserve bigger salaries is an absolute travesty in a public-funded institution.

My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.

This is irrelevant to my argument. I have no problem in anyone choosing to run Windows (assuming that's what she uses) but I do object to my government using my taxes to line Bill Gates' pockets when it is quite clear that high quality free alternatives are available.

The fact that she works hard into the night on paperwork justs earns my admiration even more incidentally.

The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.

Sorry, this doesn't work for me. Why is lining Gates' pockets on IT infrastructure doing something? Surely doing something would be paying workers more, investing in hospital cleanliness, putting more into disease research, etc?

While Iraq continues to be the focus of terrorist attacks, they are also enjoying refurbished schools, utilities, road systems, and a host of other benefits lacking under Hussein.

Most notably, an operating democratic government with scheduled elections and a leader who is not practicing genocide.

Afghanistan has already had its elections--something you don't see heavily publicized.

Liberal spin? That's just neocon talk for "absence of correct neoconservative spin". Or thoughtcrime, as it is sometimes called.

MPs blame lack of cash for failure of Beagle 2

The most recent report on the failure of Beagle II, done by the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee sighted many "amateurish" funding woes and a lack of cooperation between the USA and the UK government as the underlying cause of failure. Pillenger responded by saying that they couldn't get guarantees of funding mostly because those groups didn't have the money to give. But what does that say about the success of the next project if the funding for Beagle II was dependant on groups that couldn't afford to guarantee funding but said they'd try to find the money anyway...and then failed to do so, unless they go at the next mission with a different attitude?

NASA has backed off of its Faster-Better-Cheaper which left faster and cheaper intact, while somewhat disregarding better, in favor of Faster-Better-Fund_Projects_Appropriatly...which seems certainly to have done the trick for such projects as the Mars Exploration Rovers, which (I would agrue appropriatly) cost hundreds of millions of dollars to properly build and test for the challenges they were being asked to face.