Ye gods, have you ever checked the BBC site for errors?
I had to write to them once; they'd put up an article about a bomb scare in Bath, but on their map, they'd accidentally indicated that Bath was somewhere north of Birmingham.
I use the railway daily; without it, I'd be totally stuffed, since I can't drive. And I will note here that the amount the UK government provides to its railways is laughably tiny compared to spending on the Continent. I have once used unemployment benefit, and it was fortunate that it existed, because otherwise I'd have been living under a bridge.
When I was a kid, I used the state education system. When I am old, I strongly expect to use old peoples' homes. If I have kids and then die horribly in a freak slipping-on-banana-peel accident, then I strongly expect that my children will find themselves in a children's home. At least, I hope they will, because otherwise the poor little buggers will be out on the streets begging, you get my point?
But I don't use the BBC. I survive just fine without it, and expect that state of affairs to persist indefinitely. TV is not education, it's not health, it's not contingency planning and it's not a basic human need; it's amusement. I'm aware that the ancient Romans used to refer to bread and circuses as the two things that the population desire, and I'm perfectly - indeed radiantly - happy for my taxes to go on the bread. That's the stuff that keeps you alive, well, educated and able to go out there and pursue happiness - but once we've got you to that point, the actual pursuit is your own problem.
I'm happy to cough up for libraries, but damn it, there's enough amusement in books. If people want to watch television, they can do it on their own wage packet.
They knew what they were doing when they decided not to fund the BBC from income tax. It meant that it was possible for the weird fringes of society to be either totally indifferent or become conscientious objectors, and that as quietly as possible.
That said, there is an interesting technical question in dealing with billing non-TV owners for watching online broadcast services. It is not, however, a question that necessarily needs to be answered by undoing one of the fairer elements of British law.
Do you mean the Stephen King serialisation of The Green Mile?
I think that failed for the reason that everybody was convinced that he'd be bringing out the paperback sometime soon, the books were pretty thin, and if you bought the whole series it would have cost at least as much as a hardback (three dollars per book, six books). When the paperback came out, of course, it cost about eight dollars and left everybody feeling a bit hard done by. People saw it as a pure marketing ploy; Stephen King could at that point have published his laundry list, and it would probably have sold its way into the bestseller tables.
The good side of trying this for video is that TV on video (DVD) is freaking expensive, and everybody is used to this fact. It's accepted as episodic, which solves one of King's problems: many readers found it difficult to focus on a story provided in monthly installments. The bad side is, as you mentioned, that people will want a sample, and that huge quantities of seed money are required for producing that sample...
On the one hand I agree entirely that one shouldn't just encourage girls for the sake of etc (although I might argue that the mainstream media have previously been known to act to encourage a given gender in these things *cough*). On the other hand, at the risk of falling foul of 'the plural of anecdote is not data', I've often heard from female friends of mine that they were interested in all those geeky topics like computers and physics and whatnot, but consider themselves to have grown out of it. Usually when I hear that it's expressed in tones of mild surprise that the same thing hasn't happened to me, as though it's a developmental flaw to be in one's twenties and still a physicist.
Thinking about the education we shared, I can see how that way of thinking can have come about. Speaking objectively, there is something of the obsessive in computing (or hi-fi, or photo, or cars) with which it is not easy to come to terms. Lots of squabbling over product codes, feature sets and relative merits. I can also see that a little positive encouragement during that time could have made a difference. So I wonder if this initiative is merely trying to encourage girls (rather than both sexes) as such, or just trying to help like-minded girls compensate for the tendancy to be put off by the apparent childishness of these things, to get past the public face of the hobby and see the substance of the career.
No, I haven't seen the miniseries. I have a strange and unusual TV watching schedule, unfortunately. As it's worth seeing, though, I'll see if the video club will locate a copy.
As for obviously waiting the full 33 minutes hoping, well, I don't know about you but comedy by repetition rather gets me down. After the first one or two times I'd be thinking about varying my act a bit. Having said that, though, I didn't catch how many times they had gone through that cycle; I just assumed it was a lot due to the one hundred and whatever it was hours without sleep, and the dialogue line about "Why thirty-three minutes?".
Basically the idea just seemed a little odd; jump. Wait 33 minutes. Whoops, Cylons. Darn, they found us. Jump. Wait 33 minutes. Whoops, Cylons. Darn, they found us. Jump. Wait 33 minutes. Whoops, Cylons. Darn, they found us. Jump... and so on. It's eminently possible that there's a related scene elsewhere where they try jumping five times in rapid succession and discover that the Cylons find them in 33 minutes anyway, thus proving the pointlessness of the strategy. I'm not dissing the series, just pointing out that all is not clear.
Hm. Having just watched the streaming episode of Battlestar Galactica, I think that baldly stating that everything in the series has a matter-of-fact explanation might be at least a slight exaggeration, because much of the plot doesn't seem to make total sense. For example, if that transport ship had nukes on it, wouldn't you be a touch bothered about blowing it up that near to the rest of the ships? Or are we talking very, very small nukes? What's with the Terminator-style humaniform thing, and why does nobody ever suggest taking a few minutes out to identify Cylon spies? Are they totally organic, in which case, how do the Cylons know they haven't created something that's going to turn right back at them? What's with the blonde hanging out in that dude's head? Why bother with all this blonde clone stuff at all, when they clearly won already? Why, and here's the question that's bugging me most, do the humans wait 33 minutes every time for the Cylons to come find them before jumping away? Surely you'd be better off leaving before they arrive?
Based on that episode, and I appreciate that I very probably am a closed-minded person with no capacity to appreciate good TV, the only obvious assumption to make is that this BG is basically a sort of 'Cube' rerun; you know, that Canadian doodad with the basic plot of 'postulate an experiment in which the inexplicable kills people in unusual ways for non-apparent reasons'. Now, that's not to say that I don't like it - I'd watch a couple more episodes at least - but frankly I think that describing BG as in the style of a documentary possibly hits the metaphorical nail on the head. Nobody has made any effort to explain anything, which accounts for the total lack of unconvincing explanations, but also means that there aren't any explanations available whatsoever for most of the questions above. Much of this is presumably for dramatic purposes, or possibly was answered in the pilot, and I am just fine with either of those, but I have a nasty feeling that some of it is just as much dramatic licence as Star Trek, sold in a way that appears to require no explanation. That episode displays FTL travel, sound in space, cloned humaniform robots and apparent telepathy/mind control; that's a decent set of sci-fi magic elements right there. In fact, the only major difference would appear to be a disinclination for technobabble and a commendable resolve to avoid permitting exposition about the story's universe to get in the way of the drama.
Ah, I wouldn't have stopped either except I had to move house internationally a few times; part of the price was the need to put all my more fragile hobbies away in my parents' attic.
Full agreement that neonazis are and look like nutcases. Having said that, Hitler was a short Austrian guy with a ridiculous moustache, undeniably dumb hairstyle, accent/way of speech that to present-day German ears sounds entirely laughable, and to top all that, a predilection for wearing woollen knee socks and shorts. And yet the little bugger got enough support to take over Germany. Maybe it was the name change; Schickelgruber? Ha.
Either way, large swathes of human society do seem to have a weakness for personalities that leave many of us going, "You what?": Shoko Asahara; Bin Laden (whose name, entirely incidentally, means 'am shop' in German); Le Pen; Tony Blair (ye gods); George W Bush (would you buy a used car from that man?); not to mention all those TV personalities, stars and ideals that always get the older generation saying, "I don't know what she sees in him".
So I'm not sure I entirely believe that people, when faced with what seems to my eyes to be clearly ridiculous buffoonery, will see it that way at all. It's not a matter of intelligence, though of course it'd be nice to believe that the better one's education, the more likely one is to see through these things (not in my experience the case at all. Oxbridge people can be amazingly gullible). In fact it beats me where peoples' capacity for taking almost anything seriously enough to want kill other people for it actually comes from, but there's a rather snobby statement you pretty often hear in French, usually with those little quotation marks people make with their fingers; "Nous n'avons pas les memes valeurs" - "we don't have the same values", which can be applied anywhere and is probably a reasonable basis for resigning oneself to a troubled acceptance of human nature.
Of course I don't have a right to assume people won't see through neonazism, but the German government probably feel that they had that right conferred by historical precedent.
See, I don't pay large restaurant bills in cash because I have a policy about not carrying around more than say twenty pounds in cash at any one time. This is because I have discovered from an inconvenient mugging that carrying large amounts of cash is inherently insecure.
I mention this to underline the point that carrying around large amounts of cash in any form, virtual, electronic or literal, is an inherently hazardous enterprise. The difference of course is that if one's Visa gets nicked, one can cancel it, whereas no similar solution exists for cash. Thus the origin of travellers' cheques and plastic.
A lot of companies now refuse to take a signature on UK cards. Which irritates the living daylights out of me, although on the plus side it has done great things for my credit card bill and incidental spending problem, because my credit card PIN is one thing I have never been able to remember. They shouldn't refuse the signature, by the way; according to the Chip and Pin website, You can continue to use non-chip and PIN cards in all outlets, and you will be asked to sign for goods, just as you always have done...If you have had a problem using your card, and perhaps not been permitted to sign, please let your card issuer know.
A good trick is to learn to type your PIN with one hand whilst actually holding your other hand over the keypad. One ought to do this at cash machines anyway, given the high incidence of suspect devices, card number skimming devices and so on; most of them depend on a camera of some kind to gain your PIN. Or so I am told.
My personal reason for loathing the system is the confusion it seems to cause to shop assistants at the till, each of whom seems to have a very different idea about which part of the transaction is the customer's job. If you slot the card into the machine yourself, one chance in two you'll get a frown from the till person as if to indicate that you're taking away his or her glory. If you extract the card from it yourself, you risk similar consequences. And yet if you don't, you risk being told that you ought to have been following the instructions on the card handset ('Remove Card'). Shopping interaction politics at its worst.
I see your point, but what if you weren't looking for a biography of Marx or a book about his ideas? What if you were more interested in third-person opinions or analysis, or the impact of Marxist ideas on art or architecture? In these cases, you'd be looking for books on quite different topics that happened to include sections that mentioned Marx.
That's a classic blogger response: just give me the paragraph. No context needed, no weighing up of the argument, just give me the bit that backs up my pre-conceived idea so I can spew it back out again somewhere else.
...you're assuming that finding the paragraph is the end-of-line as far as the researcher's procedure is concerned. How about returning the paragraph as the initial search result, using it to get an initial idea of whether it is likely to be of any use, and then reading the chapter or indeed the entire book? Not that it is always necessary to read the entire book; reference volumes are often designed to be dipped into a little at a time. There's no need to read the entire Feynman lectures just to get a grip on superconductivity.
This sounds to me like an entirely acceptable way of searching through a large number of volumes. True, if no relevant paragraphs are returned then it suggests bad search terms or the wrong books, but those who have a good idea of their subject matter will very likely find it helpful.
Well... in my youth I had quite a weakness for scale model planes, so I personally respect the drive to approach authenticity, although I admit that my interest was more the noisier stuff you see at airshows, like the Sukhoi SU-30 or the MiG-29 Fulcrum. Russian accent on PA system calmly announcing 'Cobra'... beautiful. Excuse my nostalgia. *cough*
With respect to the actual topic, though, the German legislation (and the French, the Italian and the Hungarian) was not designed to target modellers. This is, if you'll pardon the expression, collateral damage. It was probably designed to remove the Nazi 'brand' as far from the political and literal marketplace as possible (I say probably because, frankly, I wasn't there). The number of neo-nazi variants on the swastika at least suggest that the neo-nazis would be keeping the brand alive if it were possible, implying that it retains its symbolism and thus that there's some value in it for them. Which is a pretty good reason to keep them and it apart as far as possible, ratty little buggers that they are.
I'm happy to hear the general EU ban didn't go through. As the great Doctor Johnson probably didn't actually say, it would be like fitting wheels to a tomato - time consuming and completely unnecessary.
It has happened to me a number of times that I've been searching for information on a problem, like hot pixels on my digital camera or solutions to obsecure software problems, and come across the answer on someone's blog.
Frankly, I'm pretty happy that blogs exist, since the whole CMS thing lowers the threshold of Web publishing enough to allow people who can't be arsed with HTML to write stuff like that up. It takes a bored kind of person to bother designing a web page entirely around a five minute cure to a software problem, whereas a person with a blog will often just cut and paste a few lines. Untidy, ok, but sometimes handy.
Because the actual law in Germany is that the swastika is banned from any public display, amongst other things, exact law here (not banned as such - you can't get imprisoned for having a swastika hidden in an envelope under your bed).
In detail, the law is apparently that:
# There is a charge of up to three years in prison or a financial fee for:
1. publishing symbols of an organization hostile to the constitution, or using these symbols publicly in meetings or publications.
2. importing, exporting using, publishing, distributing or producing items with these symbols domestically or internationally.
# symbols are flags, buttons, uniforms, slogans and forms of greetings. Included are variations that are extremely similar to the original ones. # Excepted are the use of these symbols for public education, prevention of hostile actions against the constitution, the use in art, science, schooling, news reports, historical reports and the like.
If you are manufacturing/publishing something about swastikas that does not meet one of the exceptions, like for example a plastic model kit (that, let's face it, looks just as much or little like a Messerschmitt without the addition of a squiggle on the tailfin) then you could quite logically get it in the neck. I guess if you argued that you were doing it for educational reasons, you could get away with it - but if you were just doing it to brand the model Shock Value 'Nazi(TM)', which is a common use of the symbol (look at the German history section in Amazon.com) then the German government apparently reserves the right to disapprove.
I was in the Auto and Technik Museum Sinsheim the other day and picked up their telephone directory-sized catalogue of their more popular exhibits. If Nazi symbols are supposed to be removed from images, then the guys who wrote that book had better start making an escape plan, because practically every page dedicated to the older German air force planes has a nice black and white photo of the plane in question, plus swastika clearly visible on tail fin.
And if books about national socialism are supposed to be specially regulated and protected, then clearly nobody has told any of the tourist bookshops in Berlin, which are stuffed to the gills with stuff about Nazism. There's a massive audience for resources on the subject, and the various media have responded predictably by producing as much gunk as people will consume. Try finding a book about German history that isn't about this period; that will take a little searching.
If the grandparent poster is right that the government are trying to censor Nazi references, it's quite clear that they're not very good at it:)
How fortunate for BMW that Hitler's lot had excellent graphic designers, then.
However, you want maybe to consider the whole symbol thing a bit more deeply. I readily agree that it is 'silly' to confuse the symbol with the symbolised, but it occurs to me that this is exactly the way in which people do in fact act. Silly things like this regularly do happen.
Going to school in black jeans, black t-shirt and black trench coat will supposedly earn you a trip to the school psychologist in some places, for more or less the same reason. Appearance is image, some images are taboo. Grow a large bushy beard and learn to wind a turban and people will begin to make assumptions about you; shave your head and get a tattoo and the same thing will happen. Wear a burqua and see how attitudes change when you walk into the chip shop. Symbols are a powerful modifier: as far as the UK goes, wear a cross, people will assume you're Christian; wear an ankh, people will assume you're a Sandman fan (ok, they won't, but they would if they had a bit of culture); wear a red star/golden hammer and sickle, guess what; wear a swastika and people will think you're a nazi. These associations have been made. They're current.
Whilst I appreciate that outside the human context, geometrical shapes are not innately anything, I also suspect that the human context is about the only one that matters. Particularly in post-war Germany, feelings ran extremely high about these things. The Nazis were pretty good at propaganda. If you get a chance, go to Nuremburg and look at the stuff Hitler built there, of which a huge stadium/coliseum and an immensely long and empty parade ground remain. Imagine for a minute having been in the crowd at one of Hitler's rallys, demonstrating with more people than you have ever seen before in your life for the sake of your patriotism, your fellow citizens, your nation's glory. The power of that experience is the power of the swastika. I think perhaps it was hard for people to go 'propaganda cold turkey', to accept the truth about the Third Reich as it became obvious after the war, as more disgusting events, facts and details came to light. This process, I suspect it was felt, would not have benefitted from the continued use of a symbol that stood for glory, power, control, supremacy and the extinction of all other life forms.
So I'm not going to second guess that decision with fifty years' hindsight. As to whether it should be banned today, that's a good question. But it is unquestionable that the swastika is still used. In the German context, the relationship of the symbol to anti-semitism is not about to go away, nor its relationship to a particularly repellent variety of nationalism. Such is life; in that context, it has rather eclipsed the swastika's previous association with good luck. In the final analysis, the human beings within a given social context aren't looking at the landscape you mentioned; they're all reading the map. If it looks ridiculous to the rest of is, it's because our social contexts have a different map... and Robespierre once said "La liberté de l'un s'arrete ou commence celle de l'autre" - the individual liberty of one person ends where the liberty of others begins.
Apologies for sounding like a cultural relativist. It isn't my intention. I'd like it if society admitted rational treatment of issues like this, but I'm afraid that we may have to wait until we all evolve into superbrainy grey doodads before we can seriously expect that.
I dunno if they've entirely made the best choice of reading matter there. Depending on the version of the Bible they picked, they'll be producing unusually medieval results (second person singular, seest thou). Neither will the combination of Harry Potter and the Bible produce much vocabulary suitable for the modern Muggle world, although I admit that it would be a distinct relief to be certain that my choice of translation software is ready to handle tricky terms like 'troll snot'.
I wish they would open source this software. I can imagine spending many fascinated hours feeding it different authors' complete works and testing the results. Just think; if we fed it Francis Hodgson Burnett and then translated speech, all the characters would be ejaculating instead of merely exclaiming. Presumably if we fed it Jane Austen it would start quoting numbers in a distinctly German manner (four-and-twenty) and a definite hint of subject-verb inversion (said he).
Assuming there's enough source material for a given period, you could imagine adding a temporal element to the next generation of Babelfish. Destination language: English, 19th century socialite... but I think I'm probably overstepping the bounds of a pretty nonspecific press release here.
That sounds exactly like the sort of deal that a photo agency would want to work out with a school.
I say this as a survivor of the English school system - at one memorable uni I've worked with, just about everything has been polarised into single supplier situations. The graduation process is 0wned by one photo services group; the gown ordering process by some other group; the catering service group has grown from a convenient umbrella organisation into a strangely incompetent monstrosity of overpriced latté and food so bad that it drives conference delegates away entirely. The problem is, these companies are so firmly inserted in the Uni system that it's almost impossible to bypass them, even when your conference speakers are green around the gills and threatening to bring up their lunch.
I mention this merely to illustrate my point, which is that a) there's a lot of cash in photography, particularly if you can trap a captive audience, and b) there's a lot of cash in monopolising any given function of a large-ish organisation.
This being the case, I suspect that the schools have chosen to make kiddie pr0n an excuse partly due to pressure from the specialist photography groups, who spy a healthy profit. Really I'm surprised that the PTAs have fallen for an excuse this lousy, but there's no accounting for idiocy.
Had control of Europe gave it back. Had control of England or could have gave it back.
By 'Europe', what precisely do you mean? The sum total of the nations of the European continent? To review (it's so important to be clear about these things), those countries are:
Eastern Europe: Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, and Ukraine
Southern Europe: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Croatia, Cyprus, Gibraltar,Greece, Holy See, Italy, Macedonia, Malta, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia and Montenegro (former Yugoslavia), Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey
Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Switzerland
Unless you can point to the time when the US was in control of all the above, I guess your definition of Europe just doesn't coincide with geography. Possibly you meant western Europe, but the existence of (neutral) Switzerland rather rules this out. Or possibly you meant 'Old Europe', which translates into 'France and Germany'.
If this is what you meant, I'll just point out that in the final analysis, Germany was only partly under US control. Thus the splitting of the country into two, the Berlin Wall, East Germany, Checkpoint Charlie, Stasi and all the other features of living on the edge of the Iron Curtain that fortunately have now passed into nostalgia. And as for France, you'll notice that at liberation, de Gaulle rather took political control of the situation before anybody got around to establishing an Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories; the World Bank did hold the purse-strings for reconstruction, so I suppose that's control of a kind, but not really what you had in mind.
As for had control of England or could have gave it back, I think you're reaching quite a bit there. Probably better to tone down the claims to had partial control of various European countries, gave it back, or indeed not to rant about control at all, which would certainly improve matters.
And a couple more points: suggesting that Germany is unhappy that the cold war is over... well, you must be thinking of a different Germany. Imagine having to apply for permission papers to visit your relatives, who only live ten miles away. Imagine living on the front line. Germans don't have to imagine either; they know how it feels, thanks. Some Germans miss communism, but I haven't met a single one who misses the cold war.
As for steamrolling Russia, hah, you seem to have forgotten about the nuclear deterrent, or the scale of the Soviet Union, or both. Even without the nukes problem, plenty of nutcases have tried and failed in the task of invading Russia.
So in summary: history (and geography) is more complicated than you make it sound. It's also more complicated than 'the US caused all the evil in the world', so I can see your point about being sick of lets take a stab at the US to some how validate their argument tactics. But there's little point in 'taking a stab at Europe to some how validate' your defensiveness, either:)
Just for you (to celebrate your switch!), I'm going to give you the URL of a rant that a university lecturer of my acquaintance wrote a while ago about subversion, along with a quote or two.
Subversion is a version control system. Like CVS. It is designed as a successor to CVS, improving the functionality, speed, without losing the elegance and simplicity of CVS. Subversion has indeed the features that CVS is lacking, you can move files, and you can easily tag releases. It is also blindingly fast, and it has used the sample approach that CVS uses. So far so good.
The reason I am no longer touching it with a bargepole is the implementation. svn has been implemented using Berkeley databases. Presumably because they are fast and efficient. All releases o all files are stored in a single database. This is fine, efficient, and everything else, until your database gets corrupted. At that stage you are up to your chin in shit.
The database is easily corrupted.
The rest of the rant is here. I know he convinced me right back into CVS:( Probably it would have made more sense merely to be convinced into making timely backups... but hey.
what the hell is texture anyway, and did you ever pay attention to it in your life?
I admit that textures in jam aren't generally all that exciting - unless you count gooseberry jam, which will have you picking seeds out of your teeth for years in the future - but if you want a graphic demonstration of textures in food, try eating either tripe (lining of a cow's stomach) or tongue. Not the squished and re-formed into convenient shape variety, either; the original version. Either one will leave you with a graphical idea of the sheer stomach-lurching potential of texture in food, particularly tongue, which has a very memorable roughness, reminiscent of all sorts of images that have nothing whatsoever to do with dinner.
Having succeeded in grossing myself out, I'll quit now.
HotJava! I haven't seen that since, ooh, 1999. Didn't they give up on that around then? I seem to remember that my employers of the time had decided to support it (against all logic) on their embedded Java platform. When that went west, they ended up having to evaluate Linux vs. Windows CE, and this was back in the days that CE really was short for 'See? it still sucks'.
I recall Microsoft actually offered at that time to sell my employers a 'nightly OS refresh' system, which was managementspeak for rebooting the thing once a night so that the memory leaks never got beyond the faintly ridiculous. How fortunate that embedded Windows has since improved.
*sigh* Nostalgia - what fun. Back on topic, however, I think HotJava died around the days of Netscape 4.
The trouble is, the guys TV licencing send out do have a nasty habit of lying to the public about these things. Even if you quote the FAQ at them, they'll often say "The rules just changed", or whatever. Ask them for documentation, and they'll claim it hasn't been printed yet... it all depends whether the inspector you get is playing nice or not.
As they do have an interesting legal status, and are a bit trigger-happy when it comes to slapping fines on people, they're fairly scary people. Actually, very scary people. They can for example get a search warrant more or less arbitrarily to search one's house. They are one of the few cases in the UK where 'guilty until proven innocent' is the rule. Fair enough, perhaps, since most people without a TV licence are indeed guilty, but not really fair on that insignificant minority who aren't. Finally, of course, my experience is that they tend to hire people who are built like brick shithouses, on the principle that a little physical intimidation underscores the threat of being fined pretty effectively.
So it's kind of important to be clear about the law, because a large part of the UK TV licencing strategy actually does serve to intimidate people into getting a TV licence, whether they need it or not.
As a side note, most of Europe does have a different law on TV licencing; if you own hardware capable of receiving TV, you have to pay up. On the other hand, other aspects of the law also vary. For example, in Germany, TV licencing inspectors apparently have no legal authority to enter your house and therefore you can merely refuse to let them in. Or so I am informed...
TV licencing FAQ. Slightly rephrased, but essentially identical: If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes (for example, a VCR, set-top box, DVD recorder or PC with a broadcast card) - you need a TV Licence. You are required by law to have one.
This information is easily available. If you're going to claim that somebody's "talking bollocks", it doesn't hurt to check your facts first, especially on a matter of law. I realise that it's extremely unlikely that some idiot is stupid enough to actually believe this post and act on it, but spreading misinformation is not particularly productive.
Slashdot Mirror
Ye gods, have you ever checked the BBC site for errors?
I had to write to them once; they'd put up an article about a bomb scare in Bath, but on their map, they'd accidentally indicated that Bath was somewhere north of Birmingham.
Their proofreading is not what it once was.
Look, mate;
I use the railway daily; without it, I'd be totally stuffed, since I can't drive. And I will note here that the amount the UK government provides to its railways is laughably tiny compared to spending on the Continent. I have once used unemployment benefit, and it was fortunate that it existed, because otherwise I'd have been living under a bridge.
When I was a kid, I used the state education system. When I am old, I strongly expect to use old peoples' homes. If I have kids and then die horribly in a freak slipping-on-banana-peel accident, then I strongly expect that my children will find themselves in a children's home. At least, I hope they will, because otherwise the poor little buggers will be out on the streets begging, you get my point?
But I don't use the BBC. I survive just fine without it, and expect that state of affairs to persist indefinitely. TV is not education, it's not health, it's not contingency planning and it's not a basic human need; it's amusement. I'm aware that the ancient Romans used to refer to bread and circuses as the two things that the population desire, and I'm perfectly - indeed radiantly - happy for my taxes to go on the bread. That's the stuff that keeps you alive, well, educated and able to go out there and pursue happiness - but once we've got you to that point, the actual pursuit is your own problem.
I'm happy to cough up for libraries, but damn it, there's enough amusement in books. If people want to watch television, they can do it on their own wage packet.
They knew what they were doing when they decided not to fund the BBC from income tax. It meant that it was possible for the weird fringes of society to be either totally indifferent or become conscientious objectors, and that as quietly as possible.
That said, there is an interesting technical question in dealing with billing non-TV owners for watching online broadcast services. It is not, however, a question that necessarily needs to be answered by undoing one of the fairer elements of British law.
Do you mean the Stephen King serialisation of The Green Mile?
I think that failed for the reason that everybody was convinced that he'd be bringing out the paperback sometime soon, the books were pretty thin, and if you bought the whole series it would have cost at least as much as a hardback (three dollars per book, six books). When the paperback came out, of course, it cost about eight dollars and left everybody feeling a bit hard done by. People saw it as a pure marketing ploy; Stephen King could at that point have published his laundry list, and it would probably have sold its way into the bestseller tables.
The good side of trying this for video is that TV on video (DVD) is freaking expensive, and everybody is used to this fact. It's accepted as episodic, which solves one of King's problems: many readers found it difficult to focus on a story provided in monthly installments. The bad side is, as you mentioned, that people will want a sample, and that huge quantities of seed money are required for producing that sample...
On the one hand I agree entirely that one shouldn't just encourage girls for the sake of etc (although I might argue that the mainstream media have previously been known to act to encourage a given gender in these things *cough*). On the other hand, at the risk of falling foul of 'the plural of anecdote is not data', I've often heard from female friends of mine that they were interested in all those geeky topics like computers and physics and whatnot, but consider themselves to have grown out of it. Usually when I hear that it's expressed in tones of mild surprise that the same thing hasn't happened to me, as though it's a developmental flaw to be in one's twenties and still a physicist.
Thinking about the education we shared, I can see how that way of thinking can have come about. Speaking objectively, there is something of the obsessive in computing (or hi-fi, or photo, or cars) with which it is not easy to come to terms. Lots of squabbling over product codes, feature sets and relative merits. I can also see that a little positive encouragement during that time could have made a difference. So I wonder if this initiative is merely trying to encourage girls (rather than both sexes) as such, or just trying to help like-minded girls compensate for the tendancy to be put off by the apparent childishness of these things, to get past the public face of the hobby and see the substance of the career.
No, I haven't seen the miniseries. I have a strange and unusual TV watching schedule, unfortunately. As it's worth seeing, though, I'll see if the video club will locate a copy.
As for obviously waiting the full 33 minutes hoping, well, I don't know about you but comedy by repetition rather gets me down. After the first one or two times I'd be thinking about varying my act a bit. Having said that, though, I didn't catch how many times they had gone through that cycle; I just assumed it was a lot due to the one hundred and whatever it was hours without sleep, and the dialogue line about "Why thirty-three minutes?".
Basically the idea just seemed a little odd; jump. Wait 33 minutes. Whoops, Cylons. Darn, they found us. Jump. Wait 33 minutes. Whoops, Cylons. Darn, they found us. Jump. Wait 33 minutes. Whoops, Cylons. Darn, they found us. Jump... and so on. It's eminently possible that there's a related scene elsewhere where they try jumping five times in rapid succession and discover that the Cylons find them in 33 minutes anyway, thus proving the pointlessness of the strategy. I'm not dissing the series, just pointing out that all is not clear.
Hm. Having just watched the streaming episode of Battlestar Galactica, I think that baldly stating that everything in the series has a matter-of-fact explanation might be at least a slight exaggeration, because much of the plot doesn't seem to make total sense. For example, if that transport ship had nukes on it, wouldn't you be a touch bothered about blowing it up that near to the rest of the ships? Or are we talking very, very small nukes? What's with the Terminator-style humaniform thing, and why does nobody ever suggest taking a few minutes out to identify Cylon spies? Are they totally organic, in which case, how do the Cylons know they haven't created something that's going to turn right back at them? What's with the blonde hanging out in that dude's head? Why bother with all this blonde clone stuff at all, when they clearly won already? Why, and here's the question that's bugging me most, do the humans wait 33 minutes every time for the Cylons to come find them before jumping away? Surely you'd be better off leaving before they arrive?
Based on that episode, and I appreciate that I very probably am a closed-minded person with no capacity to appreciate good TV, the only obvious assumption to make is that this BG is basically a sort of 'Cube' rerun; you know, that Canadian doodad with the basic plot of 'postulate an experiment in which the inexplicable kills people in unusual ways for non-apparent reasons'. Now, that's not to say that I don't like it - I'd watch a couple more episodes at least - but frankly I think that describing BG as in the style of a documentary possibly hits the metaphorical nail on the head. Nobody has made any effort to explain anything, which accounts for the total lack of unconvincing explanations, but also means that there aren't any explanations available whatsoever for most of the questions above. Much of this is presumably for dramatic purposes, or possibly was answered in the pilot, and I am just fine with either of those, but I have a nasty feeling that some of it is just as much dramatic licence as Star Trek, sold in a way that appears to require no explanation. That episode displays FTL travel, sound in space, cloned humaniform robots and apparent telepathy/mind control; that's a decent set of sci-fi magic elements right there. In fact, the only major difference would appear to be a disinclination for technobabble and a commendable resolve to avoid permitting exposition about the story's universe to get in the way of the drama.
Ah, I wouldn't have stopped either except I had to move house internationally a few times; part of the price was the need to put all my more fragile hobbies away in my parents' attic.
Full agreement that neonazis are and look like nutcases. Having said that, Hitler was a short Austrian guy with a ridiculous moustache, undeniably dumb hairstyle, accent/way of speech that to present-day German ears sounds entirely laughable, and to top all that, a predilection for wearing woollen knee socks and shorts. And yet the little bugger got enough support to take over Germany. Maybe it was the name change; Schickelgruber? Ha.
Either way, large swathes of human society do seem to have a weakness for personalities that leave many of us going, "You what?": Shoko Asahara; Bin Laden (whose name, entirely incidentally, means 'am shop' in German); Le Pen; Tony Blair (ye gods); George W Bush (would you buy a used car from that man?); not to mention all those TV personalities, stars and ideals that always get the older generation saying, "I don't know what she sees in him".
So I'm not sure I entirely believe that people, when faced with what seems to my eyes to be clearly ridiculous buffoonery, will see it that way at all. It's not a matter of intelligence, though of course it'd be nice to believe that the better one's education, the more likely one is to see through these things (not in my experience the case at all. Oxbridge people can be amazingly gullible). In fact it beats me where peoples' capacity for taking almost anything seriously enough to want kill other people for it actually comes from, but there's a rather snobby statement you pretty often hear in French, usually with those little quotation marks people make with their fingers; "Nous n'avons pas les memes valeurs" - "we don't have the same values", which can be applied anywhere and is probably a reasonable basis for resigning oneself to a troubled acceptance of human nature.
Of course I don't have a right to assume people won't see through neonazism, but the German government probably feel that they had that right conferred by historical precedent.
Mmm.
See, I don't pay large restaurant bills in cash because I have a policy about not carrying around more than say twenty pounds in cash at any one time. This is because I have discovered from an inconvenient mugging that carrying large amounts of cash is inherently insecure.
I mention this to underline the point that carrying around large amounts of cash in any form, virtual, electronic or literal, is an inherently hazardous enterprise. The difference of course is that if one's Visa gets nicked, one can cancel it, whereas no similar solution exists for cash. Thus the origin of travellers' cheques and plastic.
A lot of companies now refuse to take a signature on UK cards. Which irritates the living daylights out of me, although on the plus side it has done great things for my credit card bill and incidental spending problem, because my credit card PIN is one thing I have never been able to remember. They shouldn't refuse the signature, by the way; according to the Chip and Pin website, You can continue to use non-chip and PIN cards in all outlets, and you will be asked to sign for goods, just as you always have done...If you have had a problem using your card, and perhaps not been permitted to sign, please let your card issuer know.
A good trick is to learn to type your PIN with one hand whilst actually holding your other hand over the keypad. One ought to do this at cash machines anyway, given the high incidence of suspect devices, card number skimming devices and so on; most of them depend on a camera of some kind to gain your PIN. Or so I am told.
My personal reason for loathing the system is the confusion it seems to cause to shop assistants at the till, each of whom seems to have a very different idea about which part of the transaction is the customer's job. If you slot the card into the machine yourself, one chance in two you'll get a frown from the till person as if to indicate that you're taking away his or her glory. If you extract the card from it yourself, you risk similar consequences. And yet if you don't, you risk being told that you ought to have been following the instructions on the card handset ('Remove Card'). Shopping interaction politics at its worst.
I see your point, but what if you weren't looking for a biography of Marx or a book about his ideas? What if you were more interested in third-person opinions or analysis, or the impact of Marxist ideas on art or architecture? In these cases, you'd be looking for books on quite different topics that happened to include sections that mentioned Marx.
This sounds to me like an entirely acceptable way of searching through a large number of volumes. True, if no relevant paragraphs are returned then it suggests bad search terms or the wrong books, but those who have a good idea of their subject matter will very likely find it helpful.
Well... in my youth I had quite a weakness for scale model planes, so I personally respect the drive to approach authenticity, although I admit that my interest was more the noisier stuff you see at airshows, like the Sukhoi SU-30 or the MiG-29 Fulcrum. Russian accent on PA system calmly announcing 'Cobra' ... beautiful. Excuse my nostalgia. *cough*
With respect to the actual topic, though, the German legislation (and the French, the Italian and the Hungarian) was not designed to target modellers. This is, if you'll pardon the expression, collateral damage. It was probably designed to remove the Nazi 'brand' as far from the political and literal marketplace as possible (I say probably because, frankly, I wasn't there). The number of neo-nazi variants on the swastika at least suggest that the neo-nazis would be keeping the brand alive if it were possible, implying that it retains its symbolism and thus that there's some value in it for them. Which is a pretty good reason to keep them and it apart as far as possible, ratty little buggers that they are.
I'm happy to hear the general EU ban didn't go through. As the great Doctor Johnson probably didn't actually say, it would be like fitting wheels to a tomato - time consuming and completely unnecessary.
It has happened to me a number of times that I've been searching for information on a problem, like hot pixels on my digital camera or solutions to obsecure software problems, and come across the answer on someone's blog.
Frankly, I'm pretty happy that blogs exist, since the whole CMS thing lowers the threshold of Web publishing enough to allow people who can't be arsed with HTML to write stuff like that up. It takes a bored kind of person to bother designing a web page entirely around a five minute cure to a software problem, whereas a person with a blog will often just cut and paste a few lines. Untidy, ok, but sometimes handy.
Because the actual law in Germany is that the swastika is banned from any public display, amongst other things, exact law here (not banned as such - you can't get imprisoned for having a swastika hidden in an envelope under your bed).
In detail, the law is apparently that:
# There is a charge of up to three years in prison or a financial fee for:
1. publishing symbols of an organization hostile to the constitution, or using these symbols publicly in meetings or publications.
2. importing, exporting using, publishing, distributing or producing items with these symbols domestically or internationally.
# symbols are flags, buttons, uniforms, slogans and forms of greetings. Included are variations that are extremely similar to the original ones.
# Excepted are the use of these symbols for public education, prevention of hostile actions against the constitution, the use in art, science, schooling, news reports, historical reports and the like.
If you are manufacturing/publishing something about swastikas that does not meet one of the exceptions, like for example a plastic model kit (that, let's face it, looks just as much or little like a Messerschmitt without the addition of a squiggle on the tailfin) then you could quite logically get it in the neck. I guess if you argued that you were doing it for educational reasons, you could get away with it - but if you were just doing it to brand the model Shock Value 'Nazi(TM)', which is a common use of the symbol (look at the German history section in Amazon.com) then the German government apparently reserves the right to disapprove.
I was in the Auto and Technik Museum Sinsheim the other day and picked up their telephone directory-sized catalogue of their more popular exhibits. If Nazi symbols are supposed to be removed from images, then the guys who wrote that book had better start making an escape plan, because practically every page dedicated to the older German air force planes has a nice black and white photo of the plane in question, plus swastika clearly visible on tail fin.
:)
And if books about national socialism are supposed to be specially regulated and protected, then clearly nobody has told any of the tourist bookshops in Berlin, which are stuffed to the gills with stuff about Nazism. There's a massive audience for resources on the subject, and the various media have responded predictably by producing as much gunk as people will consume. Try finding a book about German history that isn't about this period; that will take a little searching.
If the grandparent poster is right that the government are trying to censor Nazi references, it's quite clear that they're not very good at it
Ah, funny.
How fortunate for BMW that Hitler's lot had excellent graphic designers, then.
However, you want maybe to consider the whole symbol thing a bit more deeply. I readily agree that it is 'silly' to confuse the symbol with the symbolised, but it occurs to me that this is exactly the way in which people do in fact act. Silly things like this regularly do happen.
Going to school in black jeans, black t-shirt and black trench coat will supposedly earn you a trip to the school psychologist in some places, for more or less the same reason. Appearance is image, some images are taboo. Grow a large bushy beard and learn to wind a turban and people will begin to make assumptions about you; shave your head and get a tattoo and the same thing will happen. Wear a burqua and see how attitudes change when you walk into the chip shop. Symbols are a powerful modifier: as far as the UK goes, wear a cross, people will assume you're Christian; wear an ankh, people will assume you're a Sandman fan (ok, they won't, but they would if they had a bit of culture); wear a red star/golden hammer and sickle, guess what; wear a swastika and people will think you're a nazi. These associations have been made. They're current.
Whilst I appreciate that outside the human context, geometrical shapes are not innately anything, I also suspect that the human context is about the only one that matters. Particularly in post-war Germany, feelings ran extremely high about these things. The Nazis were pretty good at propaganda. If you get a chance, go to Nuremburg and look at the stuff Hitler built there, of which a huge stadium/coliseum and an immensely long and empty parade ground remain. Imagine for a minute having been in the crowd at one of Hitler's rallys, demonstrating with more people than you have ever seen before in your life for the sake of your patriotism, your fellow citizens, your nation's glory. The power of that experience is the power of the swastika. I think perhaps it was hard for people to go 'propaganda cold turkey', to accept the truth about the Third Reich as it became obvious after the war, as more disgusting events, facts and details came to light. This process, I suspect it was felt, would not have benefitted from the continued use of a symbol that stood for glory, power, control, supremacy and the extinction of all other life forms.
So I'm not going to second guess that decision with fifty years' hindsight. As to whether it should be banned today, that's a good question. But it is unquestionable that the swastika is still used. In the German context, the relationship of the symbol to anti-semitism is not about to go away, nor its relationship to a particularly repellent variety of nationalism. Such is life; in that context, it has rather eclipsed the swastika's previous association with good luck. In the final analysis, the human beings within a given social context aren't looking at the landscape you mentioned; they're all reading the map. If it looks ridiculous to the rest of is, it's because our social contexts have a different map... and Robespierre once said "La liberté de l'un s'arrete ou commence celle de l'autre" - the individual liberty of one person ends where the liberty of others begins.
Apologies for sounding like a cultural relativist. It isn't my intention. I'd like it if society admitted rational treatment of issues like this, but I'm afraid that we may have to wait until we all evolve into superbrainy grey doodads before we can seriously expect that.
Moving on, I thought this was an interesting resource on the German treatment of these issues: The Treatment of Hate Speech in German Constitutional Law (Part I).
I dunno if they've entirely made the best choice of reading matter there. Depending on the version of the Bible they picked, they'll be producing unusually medieval results (second person singular, seest thou). Neither will the combination of Harry Potter and the Bible produce much vocabulary suitable for the modern Muggle world, although I admit that it would be a distinct relief to be certain that my choice of translation software is ready to handle tricky terms like 'troll snot'.
I wish they would open source this software. I can imagine spending many fascinated hours feeding it different authors' complete works and testing the results. Just think; if we fed it Francis Hodgson Burnett and then translated speech, all the characters would be ejaculating instead of merely exclaiming. Presumably if we fed it Jane Austen it would start quoting numbers in a distinctly German manner (four-and-twenty) and a definite hint of subject-verb inversion (said he).
Assuming there's enough source material for a given period, you could imagine adding a temporal element to the next generation of Babelfish. Destination language: English, 19th century socialite... but I think I'm probably overstepping the bounds of a pretty nonspecific press release here.
That sounds exactly like the sort of deal that a photo agency would want to work out with a school.
I say this as a survivor of the English school system - at one memorable uni I've worked with, just about everything has been polarised into single supplier situations. The graduation process is 0wned by one photo services group; the gown ordering process by some other group; the catering service group has grown from a convenient umbrella organisation into a strangely incompetent monstrosity of overpriced latté and food so bad that it drives conference delegates away entirely. The problem is, these companies are so firmly inserted in the Uni system that it's almost impossible to bypass them, even when your conference speakers are green around the gills and threatening to bring up their lunch.
I mention this merely to illustrate my point, which is that a) there's a lot of cash in photography, particularly if you can trap a captive audience, and b) there's a lot of cash in monopolising any given function of a large-ish organisation.
This being the case, I suspect that the schools have chosen to make kiddie pr0n an excuse partly due to pressure from the specialist photography groups, who spy a healthy profit. Really I'm surprised that the PTAs have fallen for an excuse this lousy, but there's no accounting for idiocy.
Had control of Europe gave it back. Had control of England or could have gave it back.
:)
By 'Europe', what precisely do you mean? The sum total of the nations of the European continent? To review (it's so important to be clear about these things), those countries are:
Northern Europe: Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, UK
Eastern Europe: Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, and Ukraine
Southern Europe: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Croatia, Cyprus, Gibraltar,Greece, Holy See, Italy, Macedonia, Malta, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia and Montenegro (former Yugoslavia), Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey
Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Switzerland
Unless you can point to the time when the US was in control of all the above, I guess your definition of Europe just doesn't coincide with geography. Possibly you meant western Europe, but the existence of (neutral) Switzerland rather rules this out. Or possibly you meant 'Old Europe', which translates into 'France and Germany'.
If this is what you meant, I'll just point out that in the final analysis, Germany was only partly under US control. Thus the splitting of the country into two, the Berlin Wall, East Germany, Checkpoint Charlie, Stasi and all the other features of living on the edge of the Iron Curtain that fortunately have now passed into nostalgia. And as for France, you'll notice that at liberation, de Gaulle rather took political control of the situation before anybody got around to establishing an Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories; the World Bank did hold the purse-strings for reconstruction, so I suppose that's control of a kind, but not really what you had in mind.
As for had control of England or could have gave it back, I think you're reaching quite a bit there. Probably better to tone down the claims to had partial control of various European countries, gave it back, or indeed not to rant about control at all, which would certainly improve matters.
And a couple more points: suggesting that Germany is unhappy that the cold war is over... well, you must be thinking of a different Germany. Imagine having to apply for permission papers to visit your relatives, who only live ten miles away. Imagine living on the front line. Germans don't have to imagine either; they know how it feels, thanks. Some Germans miss communism, but I haven't met a single one who misses the cold war.
As for steamrolling Russia, hah, you seem to have forgotten about the nuclear deterrent, or the scale of the Soviet Union, or both. Even without the nukes problem, plenty of nutcases have tried and failed in the task of invading Russia.
So in summary: history (and geography) is more complicated than you make it sound. It's also more complicated than 'the US caused all the evil in the world', so I can see your point about being sick of lets take a stab at the US to some how validate their argument tactics. But there's little point in 'taking a stab at Europe to some how validate' your defensiveness, either
The rest of the rant is here. I know he convinced me right back into CVS
Probably it would have made more sense merely to be convinced into making timely backups... but hey.
what the hell is texture anyway, and did you ever pay attention to it in your life?
I admit that textures in jam aren't generally all that exciting - unless you count gooseberry jam, which will have you picking seeds out of your teeth for years in the future - but if you want a graphic demonstration of textures in food, try eating either tripe (lining of a cow's stomach) or tongue. Not the squished and re-formed into convenient shape variety, either; the original version. Either one will leave you with a graphical idea of the sheer stomach-lurching potential of texture in food, particularly tongue, which has a very memorable roughness, reminiscent of all sorts of images that have nothing whatsoever to do with dinner.
Having succeeded in grossing myself out, I'll quit now.
HotJava! I haven't seen that since, ooh, 1999. Didn't they give up on that around then? I seem to remember that my employers of the time had decided to support it (against all logic) on their embedded Java platform. When that went west, they ended up having to evaluate Linux vs. Windows CE, and this was back in the days that CE really was short for 'See? it still sucks'.
I recall Microsoft actually offered at that time to sell my employers a 'nightly OS refresh' system, which was managementspeak for rebooting the thing once a night so that the memory leaks never got beyond the faintly ridiculous. How fortunate that embedded Windows has since improved.
*sigh* Nostalgia - what fun. Back on topic, however, I think HotJava died around the days of Netscape 4.
The trouble is, the guys TV licencing send out do have a nasty habit of lying to the public about these things. Even if you quote the FAQ at them, they'll often say "The rules just changed", or whatever. Ask them for documentation, and they'll claim it hasn't been printed yet... it all depends whether the inspector you get is playing nice or not.
As they do have an interesting legal status, and are a bit trigger-happy when it comes to slapping fines on people, they're fairly scary people. Actually, very scary people. They can for example get a search warrant more or less arbitrarily to search one's house. They are one of the few cases in the UK where 'guilty until proven innocent' is the rule. Fair enough, perhaps, since most people without a TV licence are indeed guilty, but not really fair on that insignificant minority who aren't. Finally, of course, my experience is that they tend to hire people who are built like brick shithouses, on the principle that a little physical intimidation underscores the threat of being fined pretty effectively.
So it's kind of important to be clear about the law, because a large part of the UK TV licencing strategy actually does serve to intimidate people into getting a TV licence, whether they need it or not.
As a side note, most of Europe does have a different law on TV licencing; if you own hardware capable of receiving TV, you have to pay up. On the other hand, other aspects of the law also vary. For example, in Germany, TV licencing inspectors apparently have no legal authority to enter your house and therefore you can merely refuse to let them in. Or so I am informed...
Well you could try Google.
TV licencing press release. Scroll down.
TV licencing FAQ. Slightly rephrased, but essentially identical: If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes (for example, a VCR, set-top box, DVD recorder or PC with a broadcast card) - you need a TV Licence. You are required by law to have one.
This information is easily available. If you're going to claim that somebody's "talking bollocks", it doesn't hurt to check your facts first, especially on a matter of law. I realise that it's extremely unlikely that some idiot is stupid enough to actually believe this post and act on it, but spreading misinformation is not particularly productive.
*snort*
don't do that when I'm drinking coffee!