They make a dozen cars a month yet make greater annual profits than at least 3 car makers with billion dollar turnovers.
Sure economies of scale is nice, but it's pretty pointless for companies like Mitsibishi if a company like Morgan can make a greater annual profit & return better dividends to their owners.
Of course it's not that simple, many large stockholders of large conglomerates make their private companies subcontractors of the conglomerates & get their returns that way while the conglomerate makes a 'on payer' loss for tax purposes, but you know what I mean - size is nothing if it doesn't equal profits.
A USB2 keyboard (with a lengthy cable) that has two 5" external drive caddies built in underneath it on either side & also a USB2 hub built in, that a USB mouse can plug into.
This way (with keyboard on/off enabled in the bias) one need not ever have axcess to the noisy PC tower & it can be hidden away behind noise insulating closed doors under the desk or in a cupboard next to it. You see then a DVD/CDRW burner could be installed in the keyboard under one side & a another optical drive or a PCI floppy drive (like those LS one's) inside HHD pullout caddie could be installed in the USB2 5" caddie in the keyboard under the opposite side.
It would be a neat arrangement as one would need only 2 cables running between the tower & the desk, the monitor cable & a USB cable
Still his point still stands - you know that the US has been invoved in a average of one war a year since it's foundation, most of which the US started.
Incidently the US has higher incarceration rates & executes more people per capita than China.
The differance in morgue usage rates before & after nationwide work out at way over 100,000. & it's not because the dead are staying in morgues longer, I'm talking about turnover rates. Some morgues in Bagdad had 8 times the turnover of dead in the 1st year of Bush's war, relative to the year up to the start of the war.
Their sole purpose was to strike fear into the hearts of the Japanese so they would cease their demands for a negotiated end to the war & would instead surrender unconditionally.
By your logic then that was terrorism too, even more so as the target of those 2 bombings were primarily civilian to a very high degree, like more than 90%.
The Geneva Convention specifically says a indentifying moniker is sufficient, it gives the example of a armband. In fact in regards Afghanistan, the Taliban's black turbans were deemed equilivent to a identifying armband in regards the GC's requirements.
Besides define 'uniform'. Nowhere in the Geneva Convention does it say belligerant nations must inform their enamies what their uniforms consist of. Meaning if hypothetically all of Usama's hi-Jackers that day just so happened to have dressed the same way, say they all wore blue Brooks Brothers blue suits with white shirts & black silk ties, then there's no reason why such outfits would not fall under 'uniform' in regards the GC. Afterall does the US warn every potential belligerant of every uniform change in it's armedforces? No. Meaning there's no requirement for Usama to warn the world how uniformally dressed his men are before they go off on their Kamikazi missions.
The civilians on the plane were simply collateral damage.
That's what collateral damage means. Collateral damage does not refer to civilians accidently or unitentionally killed in a military attack, it instead refers to civilians that were unavoidable victims of an attack on a military target which were considered a acceptable cost of carrying out the attack beforehand.
For example during WWII the Americans bombed some armenents factories in Germany where they knew slave labourers from occupied Europe were working. It was accepted that if such factories were targeted one simply had to accept the deaths of such slave labourers as "collateral damage". The fact is when targeting the Pentagon by hi-jacked plane kamikazi style, then any civilians on that plane would be collateral damage too.
Otherwise are you saying that the Israelis commmitted a terrorist act when they killed 15 civilians, including half a dozen kids, during the assasination of a Hamas leader & his body guard in Gaza (by dropping a 1 tonne bomb on a block of flats)?
Confirmed christians everywhere else (well other than that less than 1% recessive demegraphic) simply accept creationism at the way god did it. Just go ask any mainstream bishop in Europe if there's any conflict between their christian beliefs & evolution. Whether Roman catholic, Eastern-rite catholic, Russian Orthadox, Greek Orthadox, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Anglican/CoE/W/I, Presbytarian/CoS, etc, etc. odds on to a large bloody degree the response will be something like "no my child, why should there be? Our church sees nothing wrong with members accepting evolution, after who's to say the lord did't simply use evolution as his method to create diversity?"
Really the US is the only nation on the planet where a significant percentage of it's christian population see a conflict between evolution & their christian beliefs (well except for some tiny Pacific Islands where 7th Day Adventists, the mormans & Victorian era English congregational missionaries 'n similar made significant inroads)
Confirmed christians everywhere else (other than that less than 1% recessive demegraphic) simply accept creationism at the way god did it. Just go ask any mainstream bishop in Europe if there's any conflict between their christian beliefs & evolution. Whether Roman catholic, Eastern-rite catholic, Russian Orthadox, Greek Orthadox, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Anglican/CoE/W/I, Presbytarian/CoS, etc, etc. odds on to a large bloody degree the response will be something like "no my child, why should there be? Our church sees nothing wrong with members accepting evolution, after who's to say the lord did't simply use evolution as his method to create diversity?"
Fact is the US is the only nation on the planet where a significant percentage of it's christian population see a conflict between evolution & their christian beliefs (well except for some tiny Pacific Islands where 7th Day Adventists, the mormans & Victorian era English congregational missionaries 'n similar made significant inroads)
You are assuming a faraday cage works like co-ax shielding.
Yes signal leakage does come out of co-ax, but a faraday cage does definitly shield bi-directionally, they are 2 different things with different properties.
electronic assemblies tend to go dusty & have soldered joints that go 'dry' after a few years (5 year old computer monitors that have screens that go funny colours intimintently which are resolved by banging the side of the monitor useally have such problems)
Now can we imagine what effect the regular discharging of bullets in a smart gun would have in regards dry joints?
armed intrusions in the home are the least likely
on
Smart Guns are Coming
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· Score: 1
This fear of home invasions by armed intruders is a fantasy perpetuated by Hollywood & the media. Unless one's a drug dealer or a Asian businessman the odds of falling victim to a [b]armed invasion[/b] in the home are so little that they are even less than the odds of being the victim of a firearm incident in a pub or the street.
Firearm incidents in the home are useally accidents or as a result of a act of impulsion/compulsion by a spouse, friend, relative or aquaintence, or maybe a combination of both (someones drunk & or lost it in a domestic & threatens another in a house with a gun & it accidently discharges, such incident are common as in demographics of high social dysfunction & firearm ownership)
The vast majority of intrusions into homes when residents are at home are cases where a desperate scrote burglar mistakingly thought the house was empty. In such situations all one need do is turn on the bedside light or make some noise (if during daylight) & the scrote will be out the door & running down the street as far as his abused body can take him.
As a regular & not so regular IV drug user & part-time dealer of 20 years standing I know this as I have known more than a few desperate scrotes in my time that habitually broke into peoples homes, & not one would ever have elected to continue to burglarise a home once they realised someone was home, well unless there's something valuable they saw within easy grab range (when the light when off or when they heard the noise) that they can take before pissing off.
Everyone knows someone who came back from a Asian holiday with a Asian market pirate copy WinXP CD, then it gets copied many times over by the networks of mates, & this happens thousands of times a day in Oz as thousands return from their Asian Sex/pissup holidays everyday with a couple of dozen pirate CDs.
Every single person I know uses either the Win XP Corporate edition (either patched using those weekend PC market sourced XP patch CDs that run a executable that loads all MS's Q patches except for the ones that fuck XP CE or re-registed using the XP keyword generator for SP2 upgrading) or the Asian market XP SP2 (that comes pre configured with no need for hardware activitation). I'd have as a guess that Linux on the desktop would be a tad more popular if such free XP Pro options didn't exist.
1/ The bonuses are a part of the agreed apon work conditions sorted out before one assumed that position with that employer.
2/ The employer elected to give a bonus for whatever reason that's in excess of the agreed apon entitlements of the job.
I remember when a construction firm sold out at a real good price & the former owner gave every employee a million dollars each, now that's great, but such bonuses, whether based on performance or not, should not be compulsary unless they're a part of the employees agreed apon entitlements.
IMAO this bloke should not have got that bonus unless such incentive based rewards were apart of his agreed apon entitlements, unless the employer simply wanted to give him such a large bonus, which they plainly did not.
BTW can someone please explain how blue LEDs are so bloody useful? I assume they can't do anything a yellow, orange or green LED can? Actually blue LEDs are more of a pain, they're so bloody bright one useally ends up having to stick a couple of stick-it notes across the front of what ever box of magic tricks has one on the front.
Untill I stuck down a bit of paper with sticky tape on the one on my computer speakers, the only way I could sleep at night with the computer/speakers on was by drinking half a dozen oversized cans of generic Bourbon 'n coke premixes or buy having a shot of smack.
If the objective of hydrogen is to replace batteries as a stored energy source for electric cars, with the billions already invested in internal combustion engine technology over the last century, wouldn't it be cheaper simply to use the hydrogen to fuel internal combustion engine cars? I really don't see a hydrogen storage & inlet system being that much harder than those LPG conversions many petrol taxis & deisel buses have. Actually here in Oz LPG is a no cost option for Holdens (dealer fitted) & Falcons (factory fitted) because those cars are popular fleet cars (including cab fleets).
Remember the triple rotor Mazda wankel racer at Le Mans that was powered by hydrogen. Aparently hydrogen doesn't like hot inlets, the wankel resolves that problem because where the inlet enters the combustrian chamber isn't where the combustion actually occures (a property of the wankel configuration). But there's that BMW research vehicle with a 4 cycle straight-6, so that problem's not insurmountable.
& kiddies flicks like Star Wars?
on
Top 50 DVDs
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· Score: 1
Why people think such crap rates is beyond me, those flicks have scripts designed for kids......or adults with a mental age of 12. The list doesn't include popular chick flicks so why it includes popular kiddies flicks is beyond me.
Then there's SPR, critics & monday morning halfbacks love it for it's 'realism', but anyone in the know knows it's anything but - it has the surrendering German with a skinhead haircut to make him unsympathetic (a old Hollywood trick) when German soldiers in WWII rarely had their skulls sheared - if anything they had short back 'n sides with long stylised front hair (I had a old family friend who was in the British army, although he was a Vienese Jew, & he took heaps of photos during the war, & of all the surrendering German soldiers, circa 44 & 45, the most common hair style was a long wave of hair at the front & top brushed to the side so it hung over the shorn stuble arround the ears & behind). Also Mustangs were not used by the Americans for tank busting duties on the Western front (although they were used like that on the Med), in reality it would've been a Thunderbolt or even more likely a RAF Typhoon (the primary tank buster at Normandy), but we all know Speilburg couldn't have a British plane saving the day, or a American one that's grossly fat & ugly.
Another truely great 'must have' is the History of Cinema 12 DVD box set, which includes such gems as Buster Keaton's The General, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin & Fritz Lang's Metropolis amongst Lon Chaney's & DW Griffith's greats. Of course one mustn't fail to include the Complete Ealing Studio Comedies Box Set which includes such classic Ealing comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts & Coronets (in which Alec Guinness plays 8 parts) & The Lady Killers.
Really Ugo's top 50 DVD List reminds me of all those people who have never travelled abroad yet go arround proclaiming that their country is the best country in the world to live, because it seems to be put together by someone who experiance of cinema seems to be limited to the summer blockbusters & alsorans of the last decade or so, & that's about it.
Fact is in the telco market (which includes broadband) competition is inefficient & the more competition the more inefficient the delivery of services are.
Remember economies of scale are king in this game - relatively speaking a nationwide telco with a 1/3 of the market has virtually the same costs as a nationwide telco with 2/3 of the market, or even one with 90% of the market.
Now corporate monopolies demand over regulation which is why govt telco monopolies are the go - if prices go up too much polies get voted out; so there's really no need for all the consumer & anti-trust regulation that private monopolies demand.
So what we need are govt utility telco monopolies, like most places had (all of Europe, Oz, New Zealand, etc) until the Thatcherite consultants started meddling & persuaded all the world's govt telcos to be privatised to pay for election promises. Already today, just a decade or so later, most in the know recognise the period of govt telco privatisation as a historic mistake (as things go that's quite remarkable, afterall it took nearly 5 decades for many pundits to realise that the creation of Israel was a historical mistake, of cause we're exluding those who always recognised this).
Just look at how the fantastic economies of scale of having 100% of the market has aided Singapore Telecom in it's amazing job rolling out the latest 'n greatest in buzzwords network wise to every business & residence on the island, at the govt's behest. All of which would've been impossible to do at the price without having 100% of the market & without the advantage of govt legislation dealing with any problems that get in the way. A fine example of pragmatism over ideology. Remember pragmatism always wins out of ideology, even the ideology of the free market (the same pragmatism over the ideology of the free market gave us the national highway system in the US).
I remember watching a inventors thing on telly about a decade ago & they were demenstrating peel off paint.
Some girl was driving along in a ferrari & decided she didn't like the colour & pulled up got out & just peeled the paint off to reveal another colour underneath, she then said "eke I don't like that colour either" (well words to that effect) & started to paint the car a 3rd colour (using of all thing a roller, like one uses to paint the inside of houses) from a big plastic bucket of paint that was then magically next to the car.
The only ones against Chavez are the wealthy & those that are in the pocket of the US, oh & those they pay, like the oil workers that were paid to strike by their management, because the management wanted to keep the oil dosh going into their pockets rather than the govt's pocket, which owned the oil wells.
What's happening in Venezuala is no different to what happened in Iran in the early 50's, when the US overthrew the democratically elected leader, Dr Mossadegh & introduced 25 years of tyrany under the Shah & the CIA trained Savak.
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They make a dozen cars a month yet make greater annual profits than at least 3 car makers with billion dollar turnovers.
Sure economies of scale is nice, but it's pretty pointless for companies like Mitsibishi if a company like Morgan can make a greater annual profit & return better dividends to their owners.
Of course it's not that simple, many large stockholders of large conglomerates make their private companies subcontractors of the conglomerates & get their returns that way while the conglomerate makes a 'on payer' loss for tax purposes, but you know what I mean - size is nothing if it doesn't equal profits.
A USB2 keyboard (with a lengthy cable) that has two 5" external drive caddies built in underneath it on either side & also a USB2 hub built in, that a USB mouse can plug into.
This way (with keyboard on/off enabled in the bias) one need not ever have axcess to the noisy PC tower & it can be hidden away behind noise insulating closed doors under the desk or in a cupboard next to it. You see then a DVD/CDRW burner could be installed in the keyboard under one side & a another optical drive or a PCI floppy drive (like those LS one's) inside HHD pullout caddie could be installed in the USB2 5" caddie in the keyboard under the opposite side.
It would be a neat arrangement as one would need only 2 cables running between the tower & the desk, the monitor cable & a USB cable
The buttons, base booster & LCD displays all cease working over time.
Sony Professional make top gear but their consumer stuff is crap.
China attacked Vietnam about 20 years ago.
Still his point still stands - you know that the US has been invoved in a average of one war a year since it's foundation, most of which the US started.
Incidently the US has higher incarceration rates & executes more people per capita than China.
The differance in morgue usage rates before & after nationwide work out at way over 100,000. & it's not because the dead are staying in morgues longer, I'm talking about turnover rates. Some morgues in Bagdad had 8 times the turnover of dead in the 1st year of Bush's war, relative to the year up to the start of the war.
Their sole purpose was to strike fear into the hearts of the Japanese so they would cease their demands for a negotiated end to the war & would instead surrender unconditionally.
By your logic then that was terrorism too, even more so as the target of those 2 bombings were primarily civilian to a very high degree, like more than 90%.
The Geneva Convention specifically says a indentifying moniker is sufficient, it gives the example of a armband. In fact in regards Afghanistan, the Taliban's black turbans were deemed equilivent to a identifying armband in regards the GC's requirements.
Besides define 'uniform'. Nowhere in the Geneva Convention does it say belligerant nations must inform their enamies what their uniforms consist of. Meaning if hypothetically all of Usama's hi-Jackers that day just so happened to have dressed the same way, say they all wore blue Brooks Brothers blue suits with white shirts & black silk ties, then there's no reason why such outfits would not fall under 'uniform' in regards the GC. Afterall does the US warn every potential belligerant of every uniform change in it's armedforces? No. Meaning there's no requirement for Usama to warn the world how uniformally dressed his men are before they go off on their Kamikazi missions.
The civilians on the plane were simply collateral damage.
That's what collateral damage means. Collateral damage does not refer to civilians accidently or unitentionally killed in a military attack, it instead refers to civilians that were unavoidable victims of an attack on a military target which were considered a acceptable cost of carrying out the attack beforehand.
For example during WWII the Americans bombed some armenents factories in Germany where they knew slave labourers from occupied Europe were working. It was accepted that if such factories were targeted one simply had to accept the deaths of such slave labourers as "collateral damage". The fact is when targeting the Pentagon by hi-jacked plane kamikazi style, then any civilians on that plane would be collateral damage too.
The target was the Pentagon.
Otherwise are you saying that the Israelis commmitted a terrorist act when they killed 15 civilians, including half a dozen kids, during the assasination of a Hamas leader & his body guard in Gaza (by dropping a 1 tonne bomb on a block of flats)?
Then the nuking of hiroshima & Nagasaki was terrorism & the firebombing of Dresden & Tokyo was terrorism
& I've never been rejected entry into a country.
One just has to dress in a way that impresses such people & then say what they want to here.
Really if one is up to something dodgy, the best way to enter a country is a part of a large tour group
Confirmed christians everywhere else (well other than that less than 1% recessive demegraphic) simply accept creationism at the way god did it. Just go ask any mainstream bishop in Europe if there's any conflict between their christian beliefs & evolution. Whether Roman catholic, Eastern-rite catholic, Russian Orthadox, Greek Orthadox, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Anglican/CoE/W/I, Presbytarian/CoS, etc, etc. odds on to a large bloody degree the response will be something like "no my child, why should there be? Our church sees nothing wrong with members accepting evolution, after who's to say the lord did't simply use evolution as his method to create diversity?"
Really the US is the only nation on the planet where a significant percentage of it's christian population see a conflict between evolution & their christian beliefs (well except for some tiny Pacific Islands where 7th Day Adventists, the mormans & Victorian era English congregational missionaries 'n similar made significant inroads)
Confirmed christians everywhere else (other than that less than 1% recessive demegraphic) simply accept creationism at the way god did it. Just go ask any mainstream bishop in Europe if there's any conflict between their christian beliefs & evolution. Whether Roman catholic, Eastern-rite catholic, Russian Orthadox, Greek Orthadox, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Anglican/CoE/W/I, Presbytarian/CoS, etc, etc. odds on to a large bloody degree the response will be something like "no my child, why should there be? Our church sees nothing wrong with members accepting evolution, after who's to say the lord did't simply use evolution as his method to create diversity?"
Fact is the US is the only nation on the planet where a significant percentage of it's christian population see a conflict between evolution & their christian beliefs (well except for some tiny Pacific Islands where 7th Day Adventists, the mormans & Victorian era English congregational missionaries 'n similar made significant inroads)
You are assuming a faraday cage works like co-ax shielding.
Yes signal leakage does come out of co-ax, but a faraday cage does definitly shield bi-directionally, they are 2 different things with different properties.
electronic assemblies tend to go dusty & have soldered joints that go 'dry' after a few years (5 year old computer monitors that have screens that go funny colours intimintently which are resolved by banging the side of the monitor useally have such problems)
Now can we imagine what effect the regular discharging of bullets in a smart gun would have in regards dry joints?
This fear of home invasions by armed intruders is a fantasy perpetuated by Hollywood & the media. Unless one's a drug dealer or a Asian businessman the odds of falling victim to a [b]armed invasion[/b] in the home are so little that they are even less than the odds of being the victim of a firearm incident in a pub or the street.
Firearm incidents in the home are useally accidents or as a result of a act of impulsion/compulsion by a spouse, friend, relative or aquaintence, or maybe a combination of both (someones drunk & or lost it in a domestic & threatens another in a house with a gun & it accidently discharges, such incident are common as in demographics of high social dysfunction & firearm ownership)
The vast majority of intrusions into homes when residents are at home are cases where a desperate scrote burglar mistakingly thought the house was empty. In such situations all one need do is turn on the bedside light or make some noise (if during daylight) & the scrote will be out the door & running down the street as far as his abused body can take him.
As a regular & not so regular IV drug user & part-time dealer of 20 years standing I know this as I have known more than a few desperate scrotes in my time that habitually broke into peoples homes, & not one would ever have elected to continue to burglarise a home once they realised someone was home, well unless there's something valuable they saw within easy grab range (when the light when off or when they heard the noise) that they can take before pissing off.
Everyone knows someone who came back from a Asian holiday with a Asian market pirate copy WinXP CD, then it gets copied many times over by the networks of mates, & this happens thousands of times a day in Oz as thousands return from their Asian Sex/pissup holidays everyday with a couple of dozen pirate CDs.
Every single person I know uses either the Win XP Corporate edition (either patched using those weekend PC market sourced XP patch CDs that run a executable that loads all MS's Q patches except for the ones that fuck XP CE or re-registed using the XP keyword generator for SP2 upgrading) or the Asian market XP SP2 (that comes pre configured with no need for hardware activitation). I'd have as a guess that Linux on the desktop would be a tad more popular if such free XP Pro options didn't exist.
Unless:-
1/ The bonuses are a part of the agreed apon work conditions sorted out before one assumed that position with that employer.
2/ The employer elected to give a bonus for whatever reason that's in excess of the agreed apon entitlements of the job.
I remember when a construction firm sold out at a real good price & the former owner gave every employee a million dollars each, now that's great, but such bonuses, whether based on performance or not, should not be compulsary unless they're a part of the employees agreed apon entitlements.
IMAO this bloke should not have got that bonus unless such incentive based rewards were apart of his agreed apon entitlements, unless the employer simply wanted to give him such a large bonus, which they plainly did not.
BTW can someone please explain how blue LEDs are so bloody useful? I assume they can't do anything a yellow, orange or green LED can? Actually blue LEDs are more of a pain, they're so bloody bright one useally ends up having to stick a couple of stick-it notes across the front of what ever box of magic tricks has one on the front.
Untill I stuck down a bit of paper with sticky tape on the one on my computer speakers, the only way I could sleep at night with the computer/speakers on was by drinking half a dozen oversized cans of generic Bourbon 'n coke premixes or buy having a shot of smack.
If the objective of hydrogen is to replace batteries as a stored energy source for electric cars, with the billions already invested in internal combustion engine technology over the last century, wouldn't it be cheaper simply to use the hydrogen to fuel internal combustion engine cars? I really don't see a hydrogen storage & inlet system being that much harder than those LPG conversions many petrol taxis & deisel buses have. Actually here in Oz LPG is a no cost option for Holdens (dealer fitted) & Falcons (factory fitted) because those cars are popular fleet cars (including cab fleets).
Remember the triple rotor Mazda wankel racer at Le Mans that was powered by hydrogen. Aparently hydrogen doesn't like hot inlets, the wankel resolves that problem because where the inlet enters the combustrian chamber isn't where the combustion actually occures (a property of the wankel configuration). But there's that BMW research vehicle with a 4 cycle straight-6, so that problem's not insurmountable.
Why people think such crap rates is beyond me, those flicks have scripts designed for kids... ...or adults with a mental age of 12. The list doesn't include popular chick flicks so why it includes popular kiddies flicks is beyond me.
Then there's SPR, critics & monday morning halfbacks love it for it's 'realism', but anyone in the know knows it's anything but - it has the surrendering German with a skinhead haircut to make him unsympathetic (a old Hollywood trick) when German soldiers in WWII rarely had their skulls sheared - if anything they had short back 'n sides with long stylised front hair (I had a old family friend who was in the British army, although he was a Vienese Jew, & he took heaps of photos during the war, & of all the surrendering German soldiers, circa 44 & 45, the most common hair style was a long wave of hair at the front & top brushed to the side so it hung over the shorn stuble arround the ears & behind). Also Mustangs were not used by the Americans for tank busting duties on the Western front (although they were used like that on the Med), in reality it would've been a Thunderbolt or even more likely a RAF Typhoon (the primary tank buster at Normandy), but we all know Speilburg couldn't have a British plane saving the day, or a American one that's grossly fat & ugly.
& how such a list could have nothing by Akira Kurosawa, Krzysztof Kieslowski or fail to include one or both of Sergio Leones' Once Apon a Time masterpieces is beyond me. The relatively recent Paramount DVD Special Collectors Edition release of Once Apon a Time in the West has to be one of the truely great collectors DVDs of all time. It also failed to list the Citizen Kane Special Edition DVD, one of the great all time collectors DVDs for cinema lovers. Another great true cinema DVD collectable they failed to list was Martin Scorsese's tribute to Italian cinema DVD, a 4 hour tribute to the greatest of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Visconti & Antonioni, etc. The DVD was recently reviewed by the SBS Movie Show. Other truely great DVDs include Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue Box Set & Kieslowski's 3 Colours Trilogy.
Another truely great 'must have' is the History of Cinema 12 DVD box set, which includes such gems as Buster Keaton's The General, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin & Fritz Lang's Metropolis amongst Lon Chaney's & DW Griffith's greats. Of course one mustn't fail to include the Complete Ealing Studio Comedies Box Set which includes such classic Ealing comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts & Coronets (in which Alec Guinness plays 8 parts) & The Lady Killers.
Really Ugo's top 50 DVD List reminds me of all those people who have never travelled abroad yet go arround proclaiming that their country is the best country in the world to live, because it seems to be put together by someone who experiance of cinema seems to be limited to the summer blockbusters & alsorans of the last decade or so, & that's about it.
Fact is in the telco market (which includes broadband) competition is inefficient & the more competition the more inefficient the delivery of services are.
Remember economies of scale are king in this game - relatively speaking a nationwide telco with a 1/3 of the market has virtually the same costs as a nationwide telco with 2/3 of the market, or even one with 90% of the market.
Now corporate monopolies demand over regulation which is why govt telco monopolies are the go - if prices go up too much polies get voted out; so there's really no need for all the consumer & anti-trust regulation that private monopolies demand.
So what we need are govt utility telco monopolies, like most places had (all of Europe, Oz, New Zealand, etc) until the Thatcherite consultants started meddling & persuaded all the world's govt telcos to be privatised to pay for election promises. Already today, just a decade or so later, most in the know recognise the period of govt telco privatisation as a historic mistake (as things go that's quite remarkable, afterall it took nearly 5 decades for many pundits to realise that the creation of Israel was a historical mistake, of cause we're exluding those who always recognised this).
Just look at how the fantastic economies of scale of having 100% of the market has aided Singapore Telecom in it's amazing job rolling out the latest 'n greatest in buzzwords network wise to every business & residence on the island, at the govt's behest. All of which would've been impossible to do at the price without having 100% of the market & without the advantage of govt legislation dealing with any problems that get in the way. A fine example of pragmatism over ideology. Remember pragmatism always wins out of ideology, even the ideology of the free market (the same pragmatism over the ideology of the free market gave us the national highway system in the US).
I remember watching a inventors thing on telly about a decade ago & they were demenstrating peel off paint.
Some girl was driving along in a ferrari & decided she didn't like the colour & pulled up got out & just peeled the paint off to reveal another colour underneath, she then said "eke I don't like that colour either" (well words to that effect) & started to paint the car a 3rd colour (using of all thing a roller, like one uses to paint the inside of houses) from a big plastic bucket of paint that was then magically next to the car.
They're doing ok in that dept but you're right in regards everything else.
The standard reason people immigrate from so-called poor countries to so-called rich countries
The only ones against Chavez are the wealthy & those that are in the pocket of the US, oh & those they pay, like the oil workers that were paid to strike by their management, because the management wanted to keep the oil dosh going into their pockets rather than the govt's pocket, which owned the oil wells.
What's happening in Venezuala is no different to what happened in Iran in the early 50's, when the US overthrew the democratically elected leader, Dr Mossadegh & introduced 25 years of tyrany under the Shah & the CIA trained Savak.