Wales may have been a separate country in the past, but it doesn't seem that way today. In what way is Wales a country?
Of all the countries making up the United Kingdom, Wales is probably the one with the least justification for being treated as a separate entity. This seems to be a hang-over from the Roman invasion in AD 43. The Romans ruled what is now England and Wales as a single unit, with only parts of Scotland and nothing of Ireland under their control. Today's administrative structures still show these fault-lines.
Laws passed by the UK Parliament in London are normally effective in "England and Wales", whereas Scotland and Northern Ireland often have their own versions, sometimes dramatically different versions or none at all, covering the same legislative areas.
On the other hand, Wales is gradually moving back to a more independent status with the establishment of the Welsh Assembley, a sort of cutdown parliament which is less powerful than the Scottish one (which has tax-raising powers) but is able to modify legislation as it comes from London. I'm not Welsh so I'm not sure of the details but I do know that the Assembly is very new and there may be developments to come.
The question is, of course, what makes a country? Is it international recognition? The Welsh would, I think, say that in their case it is simply the fact that they themselves view Wales as a country but not as a separate country and that's good enough for them and indeed a step up from Northern Ireland who can't even decide which country it's part of (or not a part of, nor are the other countries it may or may not be part of entirely clear as to whether they want Northern Ireland regardless of what it wants).
Scotland's parliment is much more clearly defined and Scotland has only been part of the UK since 1603 so there are far more overtones of separateness than in Wales. Scotland, like Northern Ireland, does indeed mint its own money and technically speaking, English notes are not legal tender there, although in practice, they are accepted by everyone.
The UK has a complex history with its roots far back beyond the modern conception of nations and international law, and our attitudes are shaped by that fact; we have no problem with the concept that a nation can be made of different countries or that a King can be "James the First and Sixth" at the same time. Younger countries (eg, US, Germany, and Italy) that formed much more recently do tend to wonder what the hell we're talking about, though.
To put it a different way: the countries that make up the UK don't give a monkey's whether the rest of the world understands that or not; that's the world's problem, not ours.
For those that don't know, Wales is a county (like a state or province) in England.
For those that really don't know, this is wrong and probably meant as a joke.
Wales and England are both countries within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Going into a Welsh pub and saying that Wales is a county in England is a good way to be introduced to the National Health System. Imagine telling a Texan that Texas is a county in California...
i do have an original unopened box of 'microsoft windows environment 1.0' on the shelf
You're not missing anything. If anyone ever claims that MS got where it is through hard work and products people wanted, show them Windows v1 to 3. NOBODY would have bought that crap if it hadn't been pre-installed.
Intentionally putting stuff that "fills out the story" into only trailers?
It's still a step up from Peter Jackson's method of making a movie that's a sketchy outline of the DVD. "Here, Sam, where did you get that?" "Never you mind, Mr Frodo, just you make sure you buys the proper film when it comes out on disc, see?"
But so many other people like it so much, i thought it must have been good in some way.
The visualisation is stunning for the most part. The cinematography, sets, costume, and most of the casting is perfect (Boromir and Aragorn are the wrong way around with the charismatic actor playing the boor and the non-entity playing the leader; Liv Tyler was a waste of space). The direction of the first film was just plain old-fashioned lousy and the second suffered from a mangled script. I gave up at that point and didn't bother with the third.
Someday someone will do a great (or even good) film of Lord of the Rings but I suspect it won't be in my lifetime now that Peter "More Fight Scenes" Jackson has shat all over the project.
It was made for people with attention spans longer than that commonly exhibited by a gnat.
More like people with less desire for entertainment and interesting ideas than the average corpse. All the pace of a glacier and the insight of a Bush spokesperson. Gee, you mean we can't be sure that what we perceive is real? I didn't have that conversation when I was 16.
Dark Star covers all the "important" philosophical points that Solaris does but it does it with jokes and characters you might actually care about instead of tedious nobodies pretending they're deep because they say nothing.
Ghastly film. The remake was at least shorter, or maybe it just felt shorter, but was no better in any other way.
Lemme guess: you're an american...
Nope, just someone that wants a movie with five minutes worth of material to last five minutes.
Then there is the Ring trilogy, which although very succesful and good movies
Successful movies, yes. Good? Well, if you're the sort of person that thinks Battlefield Earth was a "brave try", then maybe. Terrible script, talentless direction. Fantastic set and costume design, though.
Missing Seven Samurai is a strange thing indeed, as is Annie Hall. It's hard to imagine someone who knows those directors' work and yet manages to leave off their two greatest works in favour off other, admittedly good, pieces.
I do have a friend who's a Kubrick fan and he says that Berry Lyndon is his favourite, but I've not seen it.
Pressed about security rackham had a startling confession: I think it's perfectly reasonable for a 20 year old platform to still be a constant battle for security and that computers should be dangerous for children to use. Gives them moral backbone or something. Also, selling lots of shitty tat means that it's magically transformed into non-shitty non-tat.
Something accurate. MSDN is totally unreliable. I remember losing almost two weeks of work trying to debug code that followed the documentation. It was only unleashing a disassembler on a Microsoft program that finally showed that the fault was in the docs, not the code. Of course, magically Microsoft's coders had known what the correct in-memory layout was.
There were other similar occasions but fortunately I'm capable of learning from my mistakes and haven't touched any of MS's shitty tools for five years now. Life is just grand!
I assume pretty well everyone reading/. is used to the fact that MS never come up with new stuff on their own but in this case it's different because they normally succeed in selling their third-rate copies of other people's ideas by out-marketing, or buying, the originator. I don't think they can do either with Google. It'll be interesting to see if they can and what they'll do if they can't.
I work with mapping software _A_LOT_ for my work and I can tell you that mappoint is just about the worst big box product out there,
I disagree. I found Mappoint to be surprisingly good but what I did find, and we had meetings with Microsoft about it, was that MS had NO idea how to market it or who they wanted to market it to. To the point that they offered us money if we could find people that wanted to buy it, and we weren't a sales company or anything, we were just producing reports for estate agents.
No country was invaded and the power forcibly transferred to the EU.
On the other hand, the electorate was repeatedly lied to about what the whole thing was about. The YES campaign (ie, the government) in the UK for joining the EU was very, very clear that there were to be no political or legal implications beyond those needed for trade. Of course this was bullshit and the cabinet papers from the time show that the government was aware that it was but that the truth would result in a NO vote.
Lying to a democracy to get the result you want is not as bad as invading them, but it's sure as hell not "voluntary".
Bottom line is that the EU is a gravey train for politicians who have a nice, mostly secret, clubhouse where they can meet the various people that want to bribe them far away from the eyes of their voters. And that's just the ones that bother having voters (hello, Mr Mandelson!).
Indeed, it is actually an exercise in moving money up the pyramid to the execs in the companies who are doing the trading. The other 99.9999% of people involved are screwed. And since most big companies don't pay tax, there's not even the little comfort that they're at least paying to maintain a road somewhere or something.
I've never met a 10year+ user of dope that didn't have memory trouble, or a 20year+ one that sisn't have severe social problems as well. It doesn't kill you but that doesn't mean it can't fuck up you. And it is very addictive at some point, from what I've seen.
Having said all that, I do believe that the state should provide buildings were any and all drugs are given free, to be used on the premises, to whoever wants them, a simple sobriety test being the requirement for leaving again. I'd imagine that you'd need a full time undertaker's shop, but even if you left the bodies out the front to rot you'd still get plenty of losers taking you up on it, and at least they'd be out of everyone else's way and not funding drug barons.
Can somebody please explain to me what sets blogging apart from Geocities "Meet my Dog, check my favorite links" pages.. multiplied by a million screaming ME TOO posts and cross links?
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Of all the countries making up the United Kingdom, Wales is probably the one with the least justification for being treated as a separate entity. This seems to be a hang-over from the Roman invasion in AD 43. The Romans ruled what is now England and Wales as a single unit, with only parts of Scotland and nothing of Ireland under their control. Today's administrative structures still show these fault-lines.
Laws passed by the UK Parliament in London are normally effective in "England and Wales", whereas Scotland and Northern Ireland often have their own versions, sometimes dramatically different versions or none at all, covering the same legislative areas.
On the other hand, Wales is gradually moving back to a more independent status with the establishment of the Welsh Assembley, a sort of cutdown parliament which is less powerful than the Scottish one (which has tax-raising powers) but is able to modify legislation as it comes from London. I'm not Welsh so I'm not sure of the details but I do know that the Assembly is very new and there may be developments to come.
The question is, of course, what makes a country? Is it international recognition? The Welsh would, I think, say that in their case it is simply the fact that they themselves view Wales as a country but not as a separate country and that's good enough for them and indeed a step up from Northern Ireland who can't even decide which country it's part of (or not a part of, nor are the other countries it may or may not be part of entirely clear as to whether they want Northern Ireland regardless of what it wants).
Scotland's parliment is much more clearly defined and Scotland has only been part of the UK since 1603 so there are far more overtones of separateness than in Wales. Scotland, like Northern Ireland, does indeed mint its own money and technically speaking, English notes are not legal tender there, although in practice, they are accepted by everyone.
The UK has a complex history with its roots far back beyond the modern conception of nations and international law, and our attitudes are shaped by that fact; we have no problem with the concept that a nation can be made of different countries or that a King can be "James the First and Sixth" at the same time. Younger countries (eg, US, Germany, and Italy) that formed much more recently do tend to wonder what the hell we're talking about, though.
To put it a different way: the countries that make up the UK don't give a monkey's whether the rest of the world understands that or not; that's the world's problem, not ours.
TWW
For those that really don't know, this is wrong and probably meant as a joke.
Wales and England are both countries within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Going into a Welsh pub and saying that Wales is a county in England is a good way to be introduced to the National Health System. Imagine telling a Texan that Texas is a county in California...
TWW
Imagine: there's some chance that someone could use this to reduce the reliability of data on Wikipedia! The horror, the horror...
TWW
You're not missing anything. If anyone ever claims that MS got where it is through hard work and products people wanted, show them Windows v1 to 3. NOBODY would have bought that crap if it hadn't been pre-installed.
TWW
TWW
It's still a step up from Peter Jackson's method of making a movie that's a sketchy outline of the DVD. "Here, Sam, where did you get that?" "Never you mind, Mr Frodo, just you make sure you buys the proper film when it comes out on disc, see?"
TWW
I think you overestimate the attraction of a week in the self-styled "land of the free".
TWW
The visualisation is stunning for the most part. The cinematography, sets, costume, and most of the casting is perfect (Boromir and Aragorn are the wrong way around with the charismatic actor playing the boor and the non-entity playing the leader; Liv Tyler was a waste of space). The direction of the first film was just plain old-fashioned lousy and the second suffered from a mangled script. I gave up at that point and didn't bother with the third.
Someday someone will do a great (or even good) film of Lord of the Rings but I suspect it won't be in my lifetime now that Peter "More Fight Scenes" Jackson has shat all over the project.
Oh well.
TWW
More like people with less desire for entertainment and interesting ideas than the average corpse. All the pace of a glacier and the insight of a Bush spokesperson. Gee, you mean we can't be sure that what we perceive is real? I didn't have that conversation when I was 16.
Dark Star covers all the "important" philosophical points that Solaris does but it does it with jokes and characters you might actually care about instead of tedious nobodies pretending they're deep because they say nothing.
Ghastly film. The remake was at least shorter, or maybe it just felt shorter, but was no better in any other way.
Lemme guess: you're an american...
Nope, just someone that wants a movie with five minutes worth of material to last five minutes.
TWW
If only it were that easy!
TWW
Successful movies, yes. Good? Well, if you're the sort of person that thinks Battlefield Earth was a "brave try", then maybe. Terrible script, talentless direction. Fantastic set and costume design, though.
Missing Seven Samurai is a strange thing indeed, as is Annie Hall. It's hard to imagine someone who knows those directors' work and yet manages to leave off their two greatest works in favour off other, admittedly good, pieces.
I do have a friend who's a Kubrick fan and he says that Berry Lyndon is his favourite, but I've not seen it.
Ah, critics. What do they know?
TWW
Possibly the worst movie ever made twice. Certainly the dullest.
TWW
TWW
Something accurate. MSDN is totally unreliable. I remember losing almost two weeks of work trying to debug code that followed the documentation. It was only unleashing a disassembler on a Microsoft program that finally showed that the fault was in the docs, not the code. Of course, magically Microsoft's coders had known what the correct in-memory layout was.
There were other similar occasions but fortunately I'm capable of learning from my mistakes and haven't touched any of MS's shitty tools for five years now. Life is just grand!
TWW
20 years of copying other people badly
20 years of lock in
20 years of crimal actions
20 years of lousy browsers
20 years of filling Bill's bank account in the forlorn hope that the next release will be better
15 years of being conned
5 years of Linux
5 years of getting my work done
5 years of freedom
Thanks, Bill. The door's the wooden thing in the wall.
TWW
The Garda'll be after you, killing yerself's illegal, you know.
TWW
NO IT DOESN'T! It uses a bog-standard PPC chip, not a Cell.
TWW
What image text?
TWW
I disagree. I found Mappoint to be surprisingly good but what I did find, and we had meetings with Microsoft about it, was that MS had NO idea how to market it or who they wanted to market it to. To the point that they offered us money if we could find people that wanted to buy it, and we weren't a sales company or anything, we were just producing reports for estate agents.
TWW
On the other hand, the electorate was repeatedly lied to about what the whole thing was about. The YES campaign (ie, the government) in the UK for joining the EU was very, very clear that there were to be no political or legal implications beyond those needed for trade. Of course this was bullshit and the cabinet papers from the time show that the government was aware that it was but that the truth would result in a NO vote.
Lying to a democracy to get the result you want is not as bad as invading them, but it's sure as hell not "voluntary".
Bottom line is that the EU is a gravey train for politicians who have a nice, mostly secret, clubhouse where they can meet the various people that want to bribe them far away from the eyes of their voters. And that's just the ones that bother having voters (hello, Mr Mandelson!).
TWW
Indeed, it is actually an exercise in moving money up the pyramid to the execs in the companies who are doing the trading. The other 99.9999% of people involved are screwed. And since most big companies don't pay tax, there's not even the little comfort that they're at least paying to maintain a road somewhere or something.
TWW
Having said all that, I do believe that the state should provide buildings were any and all drugs are given free, to be used on the premises, to whoever wants them, a simple sobriety test being the requirement for leaving again. I'd imagine that you'd need a full time undertaker's shop, but even if you left the bodies out the front to rot you'd still get plenty of losers taking you up on it, and at least they'd be out of everyone else's way and not funding drug barons.
TWW
Nothing.
TWW
Hey! He didn't say anything about having some money too!
TWW