I'll give Angelina Jolie credit for doing a reasonable british accent
Actually I'd give her credit for doing a reasonable charicature of a British accent. As usual the British character in a Hollywood movie has developed that British accent which doesn't exist in Britain.
The problem is that Britain has many quite different accents. They can can change dramatically within 20 miles (my native Warwickshire has no accent even remotely like that of Birmingham, a mere 20 miles away). Time and time again Hollywood ends up with a slightly upper class accent that is far too neutral. If it can't be placed it doesn't exist. When you go to see films like this in Britain it is quite easy to hear the giggling in the cinema - and no they aren't giggling at any jokes.
Hollywood has a long tradition of frankly appalling British accents, from Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins" through Keanu Reeves in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (quite possibly the worst example in living memory) to modern example like this and Renée Zellweger in "Bridget Jones' Diary". They are dramatically over the top, competely unplaceable or just plain laughable (back to Mr Reeves again there!).
I'm sorry, but people from the US have an idea of what the British accent is. Unfortunatley that accent is usually quite far off the mark. It is very rare indeed that an actor from the US pulls it off - and IMHO this is another case of just not managing it.
But do they really hold a candle to Full House or Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs that have followed? No.
I'm sorry I have to disagree there. Monty Python managed to gain appeal throughout many different cultures, not just in their native homeland. I would hazard a guess that "Pee Wee" and "Full House" have not managed to gather anywhere near the same level of international appeal. Take this as an example, I am a child of the 70s and 80s (born in 1974). I have only heard of Pee Wee because of what happened in that cinema - I haven't seen a single one of his shows - and I had to look up "Full House" on IMDB to find out what it was.
Can you imagine anyone having to do that for Monty Python? Monty Python was innovative and it still has international appeal, long after lesser shows have been forgotten.
My doctor is known as Doctor Miller, yet he can often be referred to as Dr Miller. He doesn't get uptight about it. He just accepts that "Dr" is a common abbreviation of the word "Doctor". This extends to Doctor Who. It is a commonly accepted abbreviation. Get over it.
I eventually managed to download it from a mirror somebody had put up at Linköping University (thanks if you're reading!) which meant a steady 60k/s on my ADSL from SUNET to Telia. This still took hours (and it was several hours until I found this mirror). I eventually finished downloading at around 5:30am after receiving the key at about 9:00pm the previous evening. So I eventually got it installed and...
It was bloody awful.
I had heard so much about this "EverQuest-killer" that I had go really exciting during the eight and a half hours or so attempting to download it. I don't think I have ever had so much disappointment from a computer game. The MMORPG idea of attacking an NPC just does not work with guns. Pressing "q" and then waiting to shoot at a squirrel just seems wrong. We are so-used to the concept of guns, we have all used them in FPS style games that any way which doesn't involve pointing at an NPC and pressing the mousebutton to shoot just feels totally wrong.
I tried it. Thanks but not thanks, back to EverQuest for me.
Man, where are you shopping? In Stockholm a new release used to be 189 SEK and is now 199 SEK. That's 20 USD!
And yes, I have stopped buying CDs. I can't say I use Napster that much, I just go a lot more on recommendations from friends, whereas I used to buy stuff I hadn't heard much about. Sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad. Now I just don't risk it. I am just far more selective.
As someone else said, most of us don't have to buy CDs. It is a luxury, just it is becomming more and more of a luxury now.
The footage I saw showed a man lying down hardly moving, except for the occasional attempts to stand up. During all of this a beating was raining down on him. When you are having the sh*t kicked out of you, self-preservation kicks in. It is human instinct. Any attempt to "resist" arrest by that point was as a direct result of the "arresting" methods.
There has to be a cut-off point. Rodney King may have resisted arrest, but by the time the police had finished with him he was long past the point where he was resisting to a point that they could not cuff him. The fact is they overdid it, badly. IMHO (and somehow I think the opinion of the law as well) if they are resisting then the police can use forceful tactics UNTIL they can arrest him, not play with him like a cat plays with a mouse until they get bored.
We have had this discussion several times now on Slashdot and every time people start complaining about censorship and banning.
As far as I can see this is not banning. It is not censorship either. The games are still available but now if you are underage your Parents have to do the buying for you, forcing them into making a decision about what they want you to be able to do. You may or may not agree with this (personally I do), but either way the games are still available. To be banned or censored they have to be unavailable to the general populous. In this situation that is not so.
IMHO this is not a censorship issue. It is not a free speech issue either. It is about whether you want the Government to decide how you bring up your kids.
There is an argument that these rules will effectively ban things as companies will no longer bother to produce the "adult" games. If so this is still not banning (although it is "effective banning") or censorship (at least it is not Governmental censorship), it is a commercial discussion. Like how giving a film an NC17 rating is the kiss of death (as most cinemas won't show it and hence they get reedited to get an R rating) it is purely the nature of the US and its attitudes towards adult themes.
To be honest, coming from the Midlands in England I feel that the bombing of Dresden was justified. Five years before Dresden the Germans started bombing Coventry. The first raid was approximately 5/7 of the destructive power of the Dresden bombing (500 tons versus 700 tons). Dresden lasted two days (February 13th and 14th 1945) whilst the bombing of Coventry started on November 14th 1940 and continued until August 1942. By the end there had been 41 bombing raids and almost 4500 homes destroyed.
Yes. Almost 4500 homes destroyed. Civilian targets. Between five and three years before Dresden.
I grew up with a concrete wasteland, thrown together quickly in the 50s and 60s in an attempt to rebuild the city. Perhaps that is what most Americans don't understand. When you know that things are how they are because someone flattened an entire city, you don't really see why you shouldn't do it back. That is the way war is. You attack someone then you are going to get attacked back.
Actually that was a crap answer from me. Here's a better one:
In the UK it is standard for your holidays to be paid. Thus when I had 25 days holiday every one of those days was paid in full.
Now, in Sweden they also give you full pay for your holidays, but they alse have something else I don't quite understand - maybe a Swede could explain it for us. What it basically comes down to is that you get paid more for your holidays. It isn't that much more (I think on my current wage it is approximately equivalent to 23 USD extra a day) and you seem to get it in a lump sump at some point of the year (I think it was in June), but you do get paid extra and it isn't included in the amount quoted to you as being your monthly salary. Very strange. Surprised the hell out of me when I saw it for the first time.
Even MORE paid vacation. Hell, around here people only start a new job with 3 weeks a year!
Whoah! Is 3 weeks a lot where you come from? The standard 5 weeks I got in the UK and the 6 weeks I get in Sweden must seem pretty damn obscene to you.
In Sweden during July things pretty much close down. Everyone goes away for a month. You know what? We come back fresher and eager to do work. You have time to take a 2 week holiday somewhere nice, but also spend a couple of weeks "recovering" from an active holiday, doing the gardening and basically enjoying the summer.
Minor point, Sweden is a member of the EU (which is nice, as it made getting my Resident's Permit a mere formality). They are not a member of the single European currency, maybe you were getting confused with that.
The EU accord basically makes it illegal for me to sell somebody else a mailing list I may have built.
No it doesn't. It means that if a country wants to do things like this which would violate our privacy laws if it was done in the EU, then we can decide not to let data flow to that country.
To make it illegal in your country we would somehow have to change the laws in your country.
Iran, Guatemala, Zaire, Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Greece, Chile, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghansitan, Panama, Iraq, Haiti and Yugoslavia all in the second half of Twentieth Century.
"but have been asked repeatedly to come across the big pond to help Europe defend itself against invasion (think WW 1 and WW 2)"
Blah, blah, blah, usual excuses for turning up late for a war which included one of the biggest acts of genocide in the past few hundred years. Ignores the fact that aid was given to Britain in return for using British bases in the West Indies to defend themselves against Japan. Ignores the fact that of the first four countries to declare war on Germany (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France) only one of them actually did get invaded. Heard it all before, it is getting boring and tiresome.
Please remember that Hollywood isn't exactly the number one choice for historical accuracy. Perhaps you aught to look elsewhere.
Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.
I am sure France, Australia and New Zealand will take exception to this. Those three countries, along with Britain, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Incidentally, two days later the US declared neutrality and wouldn't join the war for over 2 years.
One of the main reasons for this is the historical tradition in Britain to rule over peoples and waves, since the days of William the Conqueror.
But wasn't William the Conqueror French? Hence the name "The Conqueror" - he conquered England. Surely a better were argument would be that, as one of the most invaded countries of Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia.... the only ones we really stopped were the Spanish), Britain decided enough was enough, she was no longer going to take this anymore and decided to do some invading for herself?
I believe that "Micro Olympics" for the BBC B and Acorn Electron, published by the same people who published Micro User and Electron User, was the first game in the UK to offer in game adverts.
Um... we have an offense called being "drunk and disorderly" for which you can get locked up overnight to sober up.
The weird thing is we seem to prefer people to go home at night and sleep it off. Locking people up for having a bit too much to drink is a bit too police state for us.
With regards to the police uniform. One of the design specifications was for it to look as unmilitaristic as possible. That's one of the things I find weird about my new place of residence (Sweden) - the police all look like soldiers, even down to the combat pants.
In Britain they don't try to get law and order by scaring the shit out of the citizens. Maybe it doesn't work quite as well, but at least no-one looks concerned and is disturbed wjen an armed person looking like a member of the military walks into a cafe. This my main argument against privately owned guns. Gun owners say "we have a right to defend myself". I say "I have a right as a non-gun owner and law-abider not to be scared shitless constantly by all the people carrying guns".
This always cracks me up. Every city in every country I have been to (Europe and North America)has had many "English style" pubs selling "authentic" pub food. When will people realise that this is our cuisine and you are all lapping it up without realising? Most of these "authentic" pubs (the one in CNN centre cracks me up, you have to wait to be seated as you enter)are so up market they are simply restaurants under a different name.
There are other reasons why the cameras are useful. For example, I remember watching a TV show about them and seeing footage of two kids (about 5 years old) in Leamington Spa after running away from home. Because of the cameras the police were able to find them and take them home.
Before anyone says it, I don't think you can see a policeman walking the beat would have been as successful. One sign of a policeman and the children wouldn have gone down an alley to hide.
We do have cable TV here with cable internet. It not longer is (and hasn't been for ages) like "National Lampoon's European Vacation" ("there are only three channels and no MTV"). DSL is making its way through Europe (I am currently on my rather pleasant ADSL connection in suburban Stockholm).
Reading this made me actually quite glad that Europe had state run telco monopolies for so long. It seems to me that in the US development in the infrastructure stopped somewhere in the mid 70s. Why should the telcos spend more money updating their infrastructure when they are already making loads of money? The telcos were making money, they were happy. In Europe, where the telco was (and in some countries maybe still is) a state run SERVICE, its duty being to supply the citizens with a quality telecommunications service, not just too make money and keep stock prices high.
From what I can tell, when people talk about the US having a more advanced land-based telecommunications infrastructure, what they really mean is "we get free local calls and can choose between x numbers of providers for long distance". Is that really any better when, as many people here have testified, the telcos are just trying to milk you for as much money as possible?
I don't see how this breaks the "innocent until proven guilty" concept. You are not being assumed to be guilty when you pay the tax. No-one ever said "you are guilty, you must pay". What it says is that someone is breaking the law, but we are all going to help pay for it.
Think of it like this. I pay taxes. The National Health service is funded by taxes. Illegal drug users are treated by the National Health service. Thus I pay for the treatment of criminals. It is not calling me a criminal, I just end up paying for some of it.
We have a word for this, it is called pedantic. It was damn obvious what the guy meant. The UK has the world's second largest music industry (behind the US).
Slashdot Mirror
I'll give Angelina Jolie credit for doing a reasonable british accent
Actually I'd give her credit for doing a reasonable charicature of a British accent. As usual the British character in a Hollywood movie has developed that British accent which doesn't exist in Britain.
The problem is that Britain has many quite different accents. They can can change dramatically within 20 miles (my native Warwickshire has no accent even remotely like that of Birmingham, a mere 20 miles away). Time and time again Hollywood ends up with a slightly upper class accent that is far too neutral. If it can't be placed it doesn't exist. When you go to see films like this in Britain it is quite easy to hear the giggling in the cinema - and no they aren't giggling at any jokes.
Hollywood has a long tradition of frankly appalling British accents, from Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins" through Keanu Reeves in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (quite possibly the worst example in living memory) to modern example like this and Renée Zellweger in "Bridget Jones' Diary". They are dramatically over the top, competely unplaceable or just plain laughable (back to Mr Reeves again there!).
I'm sorry, but people from the US have an idea of what the British accent is. Unfortunatley that accent is usually quite far off the mark. It is very rare indeed that an actor from the US pulls it off - and IMHO this is another case of just not managing it.
But do they really hold a candle to Full House or Pee Wee's Great Adventure or any of the other brilliant programs that have followed? No.
I'm sorry I have to disagree there. Monty Python managed to gain appeal throughout many different cultures, not just in their native homeland. I would hazard a guess that "Pee Wee" and "Full House" have not managed to gather anywhere near the same level of international appeal. Take this as an example, I am a child of the 70s and 80s (born in 1974). I have only heard of Pee Wee because of what happened in that cinema - I haven't seen a single one of his shows - and I had to look up "Full House" on IMDB to find out what it was.
Can you imagine anyone having to do that for Monty Python? Monty Python was innovative and it still has international appeal, long after lesser shows have been forgotten.
Sir, you are pedantic.
My doctor is known as Doctor Miller, yet he can often be referred to as Dr Miller. He doesn't get uptight about it. He just accepts that "Dr" is a common abbreviation of the word "Doctor". This extends to Doctor Who. It is a commonly accepted abbreviation. Get over it.
I eventually managed to download it from a mirror somebody had put up at Linköping University (thanks if you're reading!) which meant a steady 60k/s on my ADSL from SUNET to Telia. This still took hours (and it was several hours until I found this mirror). I eventually finished downloading at around 5:30am after receiving the key at about 9:00pm the previous evening. So I eventually got it installed and ...
It was bloody awful.
I had heard so much about this "EverQuest-killer" that I had go really exciting during the eight and a half hours or so attempting to download it. I don't think I have ever had so much disappointment from a computer game. The MMORPG idea of attacking an NPC just does not work with guns. Pressing "q" and then waiting to shoot at a squirrel just seems wrong. We are so-used to the concept of guns, we have all used them in FPS style games that any way which doesn't involve pointing at an NPC and pressing the mousebutton to shoot just feels totally wrong.
I tried it. Thanks but not thanks, back to EverQuest for me.
Man, where are you shopping? In Stockholm a new release used to be 189 SEK and is now 199 SEK. That's 20 USD!
And yes, I have stopped buying CDs. I can't say I use Napster that much, I just go a lot more on recommendations from friends, whereas I used to buy stuff I hadn't heard much about. Sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad. Now I just don't risk it. I am just far more selective.
As someone else said, most of us don't have to buy CDs. It is a luxury, just it is becomming more and more of a luxury now.
Umm .....
The footage I saw showed a man lying down hardly moving, except for the occasional attempts to stand up. During all of this a beating was raining down on him. When you are having the sh*t kicked out of you, self-preservation kicks in. It is human instinct. Any attempt to "resist" arrest by that point was as a direct result of the "arresting" methods.
There has to be a cut-off point. Rodney King may have resisted arrest, but by the time the police had finished with him he was long past the point where he was resisting to a point that they could not cuff him. The fact is they overdid it, badly. IMHO (and somehow I think the opinion of the law as well) if they are resisting then the police can use forceful tactics UNTIL they can arrest him, not play with him like a cat plays with a mouse until they get bored.
We have had this discussion several times now on Slashdot and every time people start complaining about censorship and banning.
As far as I can see this is not banning. It is not censorship either. The games are still available but now if you are underage your Parents have to do the buying for you, forcing them into making a decision about what they want you to be able to do. You may or may not agree with this (personally I do), but either way the games are still available. To be banned or censored they have to be unavailable to the general populous. In this situation that is not so.
IMHO this is not a censorship issue. It is not a free speech issue either. It is about whether you want the Government to decide how you bring up your kids.
There is an argument that these rules will effectively ban things as companies will no longer bother to produce the "adult" games. If so this is still not banning (although it is "effective banning") or censorship (at least it is not Governmental censorship), it is a commercial discussion. Like how giving a film an NC17 rating is the kiss of death (as most cinemas won't show it and hence they get reedited to get an R rating) it is purely the nature of the US and its attitudes towards adult themes.
To be honest, coming from the Midlands in England I feel that the bombing of Dresden was justified. Five years before Dresden the Germans started bombing Coventry. The first raid was approximately 5/7 of the destructive power of the Dresden bombing (500 tons versus 700 tons). Dresden lasted two days (February 13th and 14th 1945) whilst the bombing of Coventry started on November 14th 1940 and continued until August 1942. By the end there had been 41 bombing raids and almost 4500 homes destroyed.
Yes. Almost 4500 homes destroyed. Civilian targets. Between five and three years before Dresden.
I grew up with a concrete wasteland, thrown together quickly in the 50s and 60s in an attempt to rebuild the city. Perhaps that is what most Americans don't understand. When you know that things are how they are because someone flattened an entire city, you don't really see why you shouldn't do it back. That is the way war is. You attack someone then you are going to get attacked back.
You have an interesting idea of "Standard of living". Is it purely based on how many things you can buy?
Actually that was a crap answer from me. Here's a better one:
In the UK it is standard for your holidays to be paid. Thus when I had 25 days holiday every one of those days was paid in full.
Now, in Sweden they also give you full pay for your holidays, but they alse have something else I don't quite understand - maybe a Swede could explain it for us. What it basically comes down to is that you get paid more for your holidays. It isn't that much more (I think on my current wage it is approximately equivalent to 23 USD extra a day) and you seem to get it in a lump sump at some point of the year (I think it was in June), but you do get paid extra and it isn't included in the amount quoted to you as being your monthly salary. Very strange. Surprised the hell out of me when I saw it for the first time.
Yes, full pay.
The core policy was on page 83 of a book on it?
Man, that's a badly designed book.
Even MORE paid vacation. Hell, around here people only start a new job with 3 weeks a year!
Whoah! Is 3 weeks a lot where you come from? The standard 5 weeks I got in the UK and the 6 weeks I get in Sweden must seem pretty damn obscene to you.
In Sweden during July things pretty much close down. Everyone goes away for a month. You know what? We come back fresher and eager to do work. You have time to take a 2 week holiday somewhere nice, but also spend a couple of weeks "recovering" from an active holiday, doing the gardening and basically enjoying the summer.
Minor point, Sweden is a member of the EU (which is nice, as it made getting my Resident's Permit a mere formality). They are not a member of the single European currency, maybe you were getting confused with that.
The EU accord basically makes it illegal for me to sell somebody else a mailing list I may have built.
No it doesn't. It means that if a country wants to do things like this which would violate our privacy laws if it was done in the EU, then we can decide not to let data flow to that country.
To make it illegal in your country we would somehow have to change the laws in your country.
"We have historically kept to ourselves"
Iran, Guatemala, Zaire, Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Greece, Chile, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghansitan, Panama, Iraq, Haiti and Yugoslavia all in the second half of Twentieth Century.
"but have been asked repeatedly to come across the big pond to help Europe defend itself against invasion (think WW 1 and WW 2)"
Blah, blah, blah, usual excuses for turning up late for a war which included one of the biggest acts of genocide in the past few hundred years. Ignores the fact that aid was given to Britain in return for using British bases in the West Indies to defend themselves against Japan. Ignores the fact that of the first four countries to declare war on Germany (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France) only one of them actually did get invaded. Heard it all before, it is getting boring and tiresome.
Please remember that Hollywood isn't exactly the number one choice for historical accuracy. Perhaps you aught to look elsewhere.
When I returned home to the UK (from Sweden) for Christmas 2000 I was shocked by the number of personal injury claims adverts there were on TV.
"Where there's blame there's a claim".
The UK is going the way of the US.
First a discliamer: I am British.
.... the only ones we really stopped were the Spanish), Britain decided enough was enough, she was no longer going to take this anymore and decided to do some invading for herself?
Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.
I am sure France, Australia and New Zealand will take exception to this. Those three countries, along with Britain, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Incidentally, two days later the US declared neutrality and wouldn't join the war for over 2 years.
One of the main reasons for this is the historical tradition in Britain to rule over peoples and waves, since the days of William the Conqueror.
But wasn't William the Conqueror French? Hence the name "The Conqueror" - he conquered England. Surely a better were argument would be that, as one of the most invaded countries of Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia
I believe that "Micro Olympics" for the BBC B and Acorn Electron, published by the same people who published Micro User and Electron User, was the first game in the UK to offer in game adverts.
Man, that was ages ago.
Um ... we have an offense called being "drunk and disorderly" for which you can get locked up overnight to sober up.
The weird thing is we seem to prefer people to go home at night and sleep it off. Locking people up for having a bit too much to drink is a bit too police state for us.
With regards to the police uniform. One of the design specifications was for it to look as unmilitaristic as possible. That's one of the things I find weird about my new place of residence (Sweden) - the police all look like soldiers, even down to the combat pants.
In Britain they don't try to get law and order by scaring the shit out of the citizens. Maybe it doesn't work quite as well, but at least no-one looks concerned and is disturbed wjen an armed person looking like a member of the military walks into a cafe. This my main argument against privately owned guns. Gun owners say "we have a right to defend myself". I say "I have a right as a non-gun owner and law-abider not to be scared shitless constantly by all the people carrying guns".
Native cuisine?
This always cracks me up. Every city in every country I have been to (Europe and North America)has had many "English style" pubs selling "authentic" pub food. When will people realise that this is our cuisine and you are all lapping it up without realising? Most of these "authentic" pubs (the one in CNN centre cracks me up, you have to wait to be seated as you enter)are so up market they are simply restaurants under a different name.
There are other reasons why the cameras are useful. For example, I remember watching a TV show about them and seeing footage of two kids (about 5 years old) in Leamington Spa after running away from home. Because of the cameras the police were able to find them and take them home.
Before anyone says it, I don't think you can see a policeman walking the beat would have been as successful. One sign of a policeman and the children wouldn have gone down an alley to hide.
Have you actually been to Europe?
We do have cable TV here with cable internet. It not longer is (and hasn't been for ages) like "National Lampoon's European Vacation" ("there are only three channels and no MTV"). DSL is making its way through Europe (I am currently on my rather pleasant ADSL connection in suburban Stockholm).
Reading this made me actually quite glad that Europe had state run telco monopolies for so long. It seems to me that in the US development in the infrastructure stopped somewhere in the mid 70s. Why should the telcos spend more money updating their infrastructure when they are already making loads of money? The telcos were making money, they were happy. In Europe, where the telco was (and in some countries maybe still is) a state run SERVICE, its duty being to supply the citizens with a quality telecommunications service, not just too make money and keep stock prices high.
From what I can tell, when people talk about the US having a more advanced land-based telecommunications infrastructure, what they really mean is "we get free local calls and can choose between x numbers of providers for long distance". Is that really any better when, as many people here have testified, the telcos are just trying to milk you for as much money as possible?
I don't see how this breaks the "innocent until proven guilty" concept. You are not being assumed to be guilty when you pay the tax. No-one ever said "you are guilty, you must pay". What it says is that someone is breaking the law, but we are all going to help pay for it.
Think of it like this. I pay taxes. The National Health service is funded by taxes. Illegal drug users are treated by the National Health service. Thus I pay for the treatment of criminals. It is not calling me a criminal, I just end up paying for some of it.
We have a word for this, it is called pedantic. It was damn obvious what the guy meant. The UK has the world's second largest music industry (behind the US).