Hmm. I'm not going to pretend I've read all of that site, nor do I particularly want to --- however I will make one point, do you realise that criticism of israel is not the same as anti-semitism? Israel is a state (and one that I find pretty distasteful), whilst the jews are a people (and I know plenty of extremely nice jews thanks).
Actually, since you used the view of one swede as evidence that "europe hasn't changed much", I rather suspect you don't.
I don't understand what you mean - it is virtually impossible to park a car in central london without paying. Unless you live in central london, it costs far more than £5 a day to park there. The key point about this system though is it only charges people if they go into london during certain hours... it's free off-peak, so I can drive in to meet people in the evening.
The original poster made it sound much more orwellian though - as far as I'm concerned, that sounds fair enough. They're not tracking everyone, but if a car is flagged... elsewhere in that article he says that 1 in 10 cars in london isn't registered, and isn't insured. I guess this system will get them off the roads at least, which has to be a very good thing.
Re:Of course, a parking space tax within the area
on
2003 Big Brother Awards
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· Score: 2, Informative
Which London already has of course. You need to buy parking permits for most councils in london, and there are extremely large fines (normally £80) if you park in a space without one, or without paying about £2 per hour. That didn't stop congestion, and the money (about £140 million a year if I recall) raised went to individual councils rather than being spent on public transport.
When did he EVER say they were going to use facial recognition?
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
This is kind-of a troll, but I've lived with IRA bombs in london for a large portion of my life... As you correctly say "terrorism must be funded, accomodated, encouraged, and allowed by people [...]" does this mean that the "War on Terror" extends to the US citizens who funded the IRA? Remember that most of the sponsorship for the IRA came from america.... I'd really like to see the sick fucks who contributed money to the murder of innocent british citizens charged and locked up. (Oh, and the same goes for any protestant sympathisers, and any guilty members of the british armed forces)
The Former British Foreign Secretary's resignation
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is largely for the benefit of non-Brits, and in particular Americans. Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Secretary resigned on Tuesday saying that he could not support the war. The speech is relevant because some (including me) initially assumed that there must be something awful that they couldn't reveal, some imminent danger from Saddam that made continuing with 12 years of containment futile, that we wouldn't be going to war for the shaky, rapidly -changing reasons given to us.
Robin Cook saw this secret intel, was not convinced, and his resignation speech is (for me) an extremely eloquent explanation of why this war is *NOT* justified, and why it has done severe and possibly irreparable damage to western relations.
The speech is here:here but I've cut and pasted it below:
This is the first time for 20 years that I have addressed the House from the back benches.
I must confess that I had forgotten how much better the view is from here.
None of those 20 years were more enjoyable or more rewarding than the past two, in which I have had the immense privilege of serving this House as Leader of the House, which were made all the more enjoyable, Mr Speaker, by the opportunity of working closely with you.
It was frequently the necessity for me as Leader of the House to talk my way out of accusations that a statement had been preceded by a press interview.
On this occasion I can say with complete confidence that no press interview has been given before this statement.
I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.
The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour party in my lifetime.
I hope that he will continue to be the leader of our party, and I hope that he will continue to be successful. I have no sympathy with, and I will give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace him.
I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.
I do not think that anybody could have done better than the foreign secretary in working to get support for a second resolution within the Security Council.
But the very intensity of those attempts underlines how important it was to succeed.
Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.
France has been at the receiving end of bucket loads of commentary in recent days.
It is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution.
We delude ourselves if we think that the degree of international hostility is all the result of President Chirac.
The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.
To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse.
Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible.
History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.
The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower.
Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules.
Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: the European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate.
Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired.
Well there's a comment piece on the bbc website here which says "He is taking action against the will of the UN, the British public, his party and a large swathe of global opinion" and "Mr Blair's leadership has never been so uncertain as it now is."
It's not really a question of objectivity - the polls have consistently shown that the british are against the war, and we have had the biggest public protest ever, as well as the biggest Commons rebellion ever. I am actually against the war, but what I'm more against is misinformation about the level of support Blair has. Britain has never before gone to war with less support, and that should alarm people.
Except that he's more popular in France than ever, so why has he got to go again? You'd have a better case saying that Blair has got to go, given that he is going against the majority opinion of the british people...
but here in the UK the government may support America, but the majority of the UK population are against the war, as I believe is the case with Spain. Personally, I'd like to see someone tot up the various polls across Europe to try and give some idea of the general level of support across the continent.
The Guardian isn't a london rag, it's a national paper.
Responding to your other comments, Blair is in a lot of trouble. Two prominent members of his cabinet have resigned, and he is serious trouble with the polls. Bearing in mind that the anti-war march in london was the biggest protest in the (long) history of the UK, and that the vote last night was the biggest rebellion in living memory, the only reason Blair is still secure is that the main opposition party support the war too.
To do substantially better, we will have to jettison the current straight-jacket of separate C/C++ applications and move to entirely new software architectures. And then, the distinction between "configurability" and "programming", between "user" and "programmer" will pretty much disappear. And we'll all have flying cars, and wear tight-fitting shiny clothes, and....;-)
Er. I don't think that "incrementing each of the letters in VMS gives WNT. It is something similar to IBM and HAL" can be called an urban myth. More like true? Correct? Accurate? Factual? Of course, whether this is a coincidence or not is another matter, and might be the basis of an urban myth.;-)
I never said they were full of slaves, and it rather depends if they resisted arrest or not! But yes, you're of course right and in general that's what happened.
Incidentally I've just thought of another defence for the British Empire (NOT my usual habit!)... it could be argued that the British Empire was extremely instrumental in the fall of the slave trade. Britain not only banned slave trading internally, but the royal navy sought and sunk slavers of other nations. Now of course this was monumental arrogance, but I challenge someone to say that it was an evil act.
(of course the British were originally keen slavers themselves, but they changed)
The British Empire was one of the more benign empires. It commited some horrible, horrible atrocities (the Boer war is a good place to start) and yet it also built schools, railways and generally did much to improve the lot of its subjects. I think saying it was "one of the most evil institutions in human history" is one of "the most ridiculous comments in slashdot history";-)
The simple problem is that for the last 30+ years the UK has put large amounts of money into policing Northern Ireland and playing at being a world power (despite being poorer than Germany, France or Italy which don't play those games any more)
Do you have any figures to back this up? As far as I know the UK is the world's fourth (sometimes dropping behind france to be fifth) largest economy, which by any sane measure would seem to suggest that it's a "world power." You also don't mention that the two new aircraft carriers are to replace three that are about to become obsolete.
Incidentally, I'm not keen on excessive CCTV, and I'm not fond of Britain's militaristic bent.
Oops... We did it again:) So you can play your favourite brand-new quicktime movie trailers with mplayer! Oops... you cannot yet... at least the code is working, and was uploaded to CVS, but it needs some hacking to get it work... (not so bad, you need some DLLs from QT5 player and sdk, and libwine from wine-20020310 and some config.h editing) - okay, we'll work on getting this more user-friendly...:) so be patient, it'll be available in next (pre)release for sure!
... yes but he was hardly himself was he? If someone gave you drugs that made you temporarily psychotic it doesn't mean you're a capricious person. And Superman behaving like that was supposed to be shocking, because it's not how he normally behaves - cue weird kent fighting "evil" superman sequences.... The REAL superman fighting back.
Superman is boringly predictable person. He saves people and never does anything wrong, which is why I find batman more interesting. Frankly Kent would be better if he *was* a bit capricious!
But Lex Luthor is just an ordinary human like you or I. Superman has all the advantages, but Lex still almost wins. Lex Luthor is a modern-day Prometheus, and Superman is a capricious god.
Oh dear. I don't really give a monkeys who'd win, but the paragraph above is painful to read!
Lex Luthor is "the greatest criminal mind of our ages (TM)" - I hardly see what that has to do with Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus to give to mankind. Lex would charge money each time someone lit a match!
Next I suggest you go here for a definition of capricious. How is Superman "impulsive and unpredictable?" Boring would be fair, a bit naive perhaps... but capricious? Still, superficially it sounded clever eh?
Maybe. I hadn't thought of it in those terms. Honestly though, most KDE "apps" are (imho anyway) worse than the Gtk (or whatever) alternatives that exist. They're improving incredibly fast, and I put up with their shortcomings because of the excellent integration. A user who doesn't see the integration probably won't be that inspired.
I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I just wanted to make the point that the KDE people have some reason to be upset, and it's not about keeping "noobs" out, or getting upset at the bluecurve theme.
This is probably the most painful thread I've ever read on Slashdot, and the above typifies it. Virtually noone seems to have bothered to understand why Bero and others are upset about this, preferring rather to make wild supositions like the above.
If KDE coders wanted to exclude "noobs" they wouldn't have a usability mailing list.
If KDE was upset about Redhat "theming" KDE there wouldn't be so much activity on www.kde-look.org.
I use KDE because it's fast, stable and well-integrated. (I like Gnome too, but imo KDE is better linked together) By replacing native KDE apps with Gtk etc. replacements, that speed has gone (multiple libraries need to be loaded), and the integration is seriously compromised.
The key point that upsets KDE people is that most "noobs" won't understand this - they'll try "KDE" under Redhat and probably not be that impressed. They aren't going to change the file-manager/browser/mail combination back to KDE defaults because they won't realise they should! Redhat 8.0 is extremely bad publicity for KDE.
Please try and understand what people are upset about before posting.
(Moderators : how on earth is that parent insightful? And +5?!!!)
Of course it's bloody evolution! That's what the article is talking about!
It's newsworthy because - to quote Faraneh Vargha-Khadem from the Washington Post story - "... it's not too far a leap to be making to say that civilizations gradually emerged from this type of ability."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, since you used the view of one swede as evidence that "europe hasn't changed much", I rather suspect you don't.
I don't understand what you mean - it is virtually impossible to park a car in central london without paying. Unless you live in central london, it costs far more than £5 a day to park there. The key point about this system though is it only charges people if they go into london during certain hours... it's free off-peak, so I can drive in to meet people in the evening.
The original poster made it sound much more orwellian though - as far as I'm concerned, that sounds fair enough. They're not tracking everyone, but if a car is flagged ... elsewhere in that article he says that 1 in 10 cars in london isn't registered, and isn't insured. I guess this system will get them off the roads at least, which has to be a very good thing.
Which London already has of course. You need to buy parking permits for most councils in london, and there are extremely large fines (normally £80) if you park in a space without one, or without paying about £2 per hour. That didn't stop congestion, and the money (about £140 million a year if I recall) raised went to individual councils rather than being spent on public transport.
When did he EVER say they were going to use facial recognition?
This is kind-of a troll, but I've lived with IRA bombs in london for a large portion of my life ...
As you correctly say "terrorism must be funded, accomodated, encouraged, and allowed by people [...]" does this mean that the "War on Terror" extends to the US citizens who funded the IRA? Remember that most of the sponsorship for the IRA came from america.... I'd really like to see the sick fucks who contributed money to the murder of innocent british citizens charged and locked up. (Oh, and the same goes for any protestant sympathisers, and any guilty members of the british armed forces)
Robin Cook saw this secret intel, was not convinced, and his resignation speech is (for me) an extremely eloquent explanation of why this war is *NOT* justified, and why it has done severe and possibly irreparable damage to western relations.
The speech is here:here but I've cut and pasted it below:
It's not really a question of objectivity - the polls have consistently shown that the british are against the war, and we have had the biggest public protest ever, as well as the biggest Commons rebellion ever. I am actually against the war, but what I'm more against is misinformation about the level of support Blair has. Britain has never before gone to war with less support, and that should alarm people.
Except that he's more popular in France than ever, so why has he got to go again? You'd have a better case saying that Blair has got to go, given that he is going against the majority opinion of the british people ...
but here in the UK the government may support America, but the majority of the UK population are against the war, as I believe is the case with Spain. Personally, I'd like to see someone tot up the various polls across Europe to try and give some idea of the general level of support across the continent.
Responding to your other comments, Blair is in a lot of trouble. Two prominent members of his cabinet have resigned, and he is serious trouble with the polls. Bearing in mind that the anti-war march in london was the biggest protest in the (long) history of the UK, and that the vote last night was the biggest rebellion in living memory, the only reason Blair is still secure is that the main opposition party support the war too.
To do substantially better, we will have to jettison the current straight-jacket of separate C/C++ applications and move to entirely new software architectures. And then, the distinction between "configurability" and "programming", between "user" and "programmer" will pretty much disappear.
And we'll all have flying cars, and wear tight-fitting shiny clothes, and
Er. I don't think that "incrementing each of the letters in VMS gives WNT. It is something similar to IBM and HAL" can be called an urban myth. ;-)
More like true? Correct? Accurate? Factual? Of course, whether this is a coincidence or not is another matter, and might be the basis of an urban myth.
I never said they were full of slaves, and it rather depends if they resisted arrest or not! But yes, you're of course right and in general that's what happened.
Fair enough.
... it could be argued that the British Empire was extremely instrumental in the fall of the slave trade. Britain not only banned slave trading internally, but the royal navy sought and sunk slavers of other nations. Now of course this was monumental arrogance, but I challenge someone to say that it was an evil act.
Incidentally I've just thought of another defence for the British Empire (NOT my usual habit!)
(of course the British were originally keen slavers themselves, but they changed)
The British Empire was one of the more benign empires. It commited some horrible, horrible atrocities (the Boer war is a good place to start) and yet it also built schools, railways and generally did much to improve the lot of its subjects. I think saying it was "one of the most evil institutions in human history" is one of "the most ridiculous comments in slashdot history" ;-)
Do you have any figures to back this up? As far as I know the UK is the world's fourth (sometimes dropping behind france to be fifth) largest economy, which by any sane measure would seem to suggest that it's a "world power." You also don't mention that the two new aircraft carriers are to replace three that are about to become obsolete.
Incidentally, I'm not keen on excessive CCTV, and I'm not fond of Britain's militaristic bent.
Superman is boringly predictable person. He saves people and never does anything wrong, which is why I find batman more interesting. Frankly Kent would be better if he *was* a bit capricious!
Oh dear. I don't really give a monkeys who'd win, but the paragraph above is painful to read!
Lex Luthor is "the greatest criminal mind of our ages (TM)" - I hardly see what that has to do with
Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus to give to mankind. Lex would charge money each time someone lit a match!
Next I suggest you go here for a definition of capricious. How is Superman "impulsive and unpredictable?" Boring would be fair, a bit naive perhaps
Ed
I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I just wanted to make the point that the KDE people have some reason to be upset, and it's not about keeping "noobs" out, or getting upset at the bluecurve theme.
I use KDE because it's fast, stable and well-integrated. (I like Gnome too, but imo KDE is better linked together) By replacing native KDE apps with Gtk etc. replacements, that speed has gone (multiple libraries need to be loaded), and the integration is seriously compromised.
The key point that upsets KDE people is that most "noobs" won't understand this - they'll try "KDE" under Redhat and probably not be that impressed. They aren't going to change the file-manager/browser/mail combination back to KDE defaults because they won't realise they should! Redhat 8.0 is extremely bad publicity for KDE.
Please try and understand what people are upset about before posting.
That amused me - LEP (at CERN) could't run in the winter heating months as it would suck too much power from
Of course it's bloody evolution! That's what the article is talking about!
It's newsworthy because - to quote Faraneh Vargha-Khadem from the Washington Post story - "... it's not too far a leap to be making to say that civilizations gradually emerged from this type of ability."