ight now, you only have to pay for each TV/radio set..
Even this is false.
you have to pay once for having a TV if you have any number of TV sets in your household, however many persons you're living with in your household. As of April 2005, this includes Internet-capable PCs.
Only if you don't have a TV, you have to pay once for having a radio if you have any number of radios in your household. This includes car radios.
It's not that you pay more if you have more TV/radio set. Just if you have any means of watching TV, you pay the TV fee. If you have no means of watching TV, but you do have any means of listening to the radio, you pay the radio fee. If you have neither, you don't have to pay, just make a truthful statement to that effect. This is where the bother starts, because they have these garden gnomes patrolling the town, ringing your bell to see if there's a TV running so they can catch you lying on your statement, and under the Rundfunkgebührenstaatsvertrag law, they are allowed to ring you bell (but that's all they're allowed to do).
The GEZ seldom operates roving vans. Instead, they just knock at your door and require to see either their recipe, or they call the police to forcibly enter your home.
Here, you're reproducing a common German conspiracy theory. Please stop spreading this myth, it lacks any factual basis. The GEZ man is not allowed to enter your home and check. If you let him in, it's your fault. There are cases where the GEZ man threatened to call in the police, but as far as I know, they never actually did. After all, what is the police supposed to do? "Forcibly enter your home"? Is there any documented case where the police forcibly entered anyone's home without their permission on suspicion of not paying the GEZ fee? After all, you can sue even the GEZ man for "Hausfriedensbruch" (literally, breaking the peace of your home, i.e. trespassing) if he enters your home without your permission.
Under German law, the police is not allowed to enter your home without a warrant. A warrant has to be given by a judge upon evidence or strong suspicion of a crime. Note that by not paying the GEZ fee, under German law you are not committing a crime. German penal law distinguishes between crimes ("Straftaten") and minor offenses ("Ordnungswidrigkeiten"). Not paying the GEZ fee is a minor offense, and warrants aren't issued on a minor offense, let alone the mere suspicion of it. I don't remember even seeing a case where the police got called at all, let alone where they forcibly entered people's homes on a GEZ suspicion. There are cases where the GEZ man entered without being allowed, but then he was in break of law, and the victim could have sued him. (Note that in this particular situation [and only there], the evidence obtained by the GEZ man while under break of law is actually considered valid, even when he's sued, but if he's sued, he will not be employed by the GEZ again, as he's a convict in this case.)
If you kindly tell the GEZ man that you have neither a computer nor a TV set, what's he supposed to do? There are all these myths that they go through your garbage to see if you read TV journals, that they rent the flat opposite your own to spy on you and so on, but they usually lack any supportive evidence. According to 4, paragraph 5 of the Rundfunkgebührenstaatsvertrag (the "law" that regulates public broadcasting), they have an "Auskunftsrecht", but this does not pertain to searching your home, just to asking you for a truthful statement on whether you have a TV set. If you have one while stating that you don't, you obviously are in break of law. The GEZ is a bother, and some of their data is obtained by a questionable treatment of government data, but they are not a secret police of some sort, and if you don't believe this, you've never been out of that peaceful German shell where the GEZ man is the biggest of all troubles. They are allowed to go around and ask if you have a TV, and to look through your door and through your window from outside if you actually have one. This is all they're allowed to do, and even for this they need a special law in place.
If you have a TV, while you claim that you don't have any for the purpose of not paying, you are committing a minor offense, like it or not. If your TV or your PC is visible from the street or from the door when you open it to the GEZ man, you are admitting to this minor offense. I mean, under German law you are required to pay this fee if you have a TV, like it or not. This is all of the "big trouble" you're in. If you don't like it, join one of the various petitions, but in the meantime, you are still obliged to pay it, whether you watch ARD or not.
Here, in Spain, public TV and radio channels (three radio stations, two TV channels plus one satellite open channel, supported by taxes, and amounting a -1 Billon Eur deficit) are, by far, the worst available. Sponsor's aren't out of them, and most visible sponsor is always the governing party.
Well, this is a situation we don't have in Germany, so the fee system (as opposed to the Spanish combined tax/advertizing scheme) isn't maybe that bad. The quality of the TV program as a whole is debatable, but the quality of the news coverage is comparatively high; higher than that of any of the large private stations over here, anyway.
Yeah, that would be awful. I mean, on my cable TV, I have a choice of 250 channels, and another 150 that I can pay extra "on demand". On radio, I have a choice of approxaimtely 50-100 broadcast stations (depending on time of day), and another 100 on my satellite radio receiver.
Yes, its really just AWFUL here in the US.
If I read Slashdot, for example, I keep reading complaints every day mostly from Americans that the news coverage from their major stations is biased. This is not YOUR opinion, but it's definitely shared by many.
After all, number of options isn't really the only measure of quality applicable to the media. Another might be impartiality of news coverage coupled with relative prominence within the selection of stations.
German TV isn't really that great when it comes to entertainment, but the news coverage is usually pretty impartial, and it's definitely better by orders of magnitude than the news coverage from any of the German private stations. Even the most notorious "ARD and ZDF sucks" people I know do watch the Tagesschau.
If you just have a PC, odds are you won't watch TV on it, unless you bought a TV tuner to put into it. PC's without TV tuners won't be watching broadcast TV.
IIRC the only reason why all PCs are considered (as opposed to those with a TV tuner) was that live streams are becoming more and more popular.
I'm exactly the kind of user this is targeted at. I don't have a TV set, but I'm watching Internet news broadcasts. (However, my flatmate is already paying, so it doesn't affect me, either. We'll split his fee now, though.)
I can see considering it a TV for broadcast considerations if it has a TV tuner.
It was actually discussed in Germany to impose this fee only on PCs with a TV tuner. In the end, they didn't do it this way for the following reasons:
Even if it doesn't have a TV tuner, it's easy to hook up a satellite receiver or VCR to the computer via video-in. With digital VCRs becoming popular, it's even easier to do so via FireWire.
You can watch ARD and ZDF broadcasts over the Internet.
This way, the only people "unjustly" affected are the very small crowd of people who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, albeit one incapable of watching Internet broadcast streams. It would have been possible to impose the fee on VCRs and TV tuner cards instead. As far as I'm concerned, this would have been the best solution, but I don't have much of a say in the legislation over here. It was probably too complicated for the average Joe, and it doesn't account for the internet streams. Most people don't get affected by this anyway, as they have a TV already.
Copying broadcast material is legal already in Germany, as long as you clearly see it's from a broadcast (i.e. the station's logo in one of the corners). This led to an awkwardly complicated situation once where, basically, one guy was forbidden to sell a device that removes the logo from a broadcast, because that could have been used to make illegal copies of broadcast material. Not the best ruling, as far as I'm concerned.
This folks, is what happens when the government has too much power. And as an American, this really upsets me regardless of the fact I don't live in Germany.
Note that:
if the government does not interfere with broadcasting at all, you get a media environment like the US, with lots of channels competing for consumers' and sponsors' attention. The result? Ads targeted at kids, news coverage that imposes the sponsors' opinion upon everyone. Thanks a lot! As an American, this is what you should be upset about.
the German system is designed in this way specifically to give the government less power over broadcasting. If the government doesn't fund broadcasting themselves, they don't have a say in what's getting broadcast.
The whole point of the German system is to have a TV station that can afford to produce a high-quality program with balanced news coverage, without being influenced either by the state or by private sponsors.
Preemptive incrimination is one of my very favorite things.
This has nothing to do whatsoever with incrimination. It's not about digital rights or copyright at all.
In Germany, we have two state-owned TV stations, ARD (which is a conglomerate) and ZDF. These are funded partly by the state, partly (to a small extent) by advertising, and mostly by collecting a monthly fee of about EUR 18 from TV owners. This fee is paid per household, regardless of how many TVs you actually have. If you don't have a TV, you don't have to pay it. (There's a smaller fee paid on radios if you don't have a TV). The point of this regulation is that the stations should be largely independent from the advertisers' whim as well as from the state's. This is, actually, a very valid point, as far as I am concerned. I don't want an American situation over here where TV is controlled by some conservative media czars, and neither do I want an East German situation where the state controls all TV content. Don't forget that state-run broadcasting was an extremely powerful instrument in the hands of the state during the Third Reich, and we've been trying to avoid this from bad experience. Now I don't personally appreciate a lot of the content on ARD and ZDF, but still I think the basic system is OK in itself, as it's the lesser of three evils.
Some time ago, the stations found out that you can watch TV on your computer even if you don't have a TV set. That's why this fee is being introduced. It won't affect many people, as their household is most likely to have a TV already. The only people affected will be those who have a computer, but who don't have a TV. They aren't that many. I don't have a TV, for example, but my flatmate has one, and therefore I don't have to pay extra. (We'll split the fee, however.)
This is a completely different situation from that proposed a fee on computers because one could, technically, copy copyrighted media with it, same as the fee on CD-R media or blank tapes that are collected in some countries. In Germany, for example, you can get special "audio CD-Rs" where this fee is included and where, under present legislation, it is legal to copy copyrighted audio materials for non-commercial purposes. (Of course, apart from the "audio" label that makes them applicable for this fee, they are just normal CD-R media, usually fairly high-quality ones.) Some time ago there was a proposal that the PC should be classified as an instrument of media reproduction as well so that this kind of fee would be imposed on CD burners, for example, but this proposal didn't get through. The TV situation is entirely different.
And recent studies seem to indicate that the environmental impact from significant H2 leakage could be worse than CO2 emissions.
Care to elaborate and/or provide a link? H2 tends to go straight up into space, as Earth's gravity is too weak to hold it. No environmental impact, unless you count explosions. While water vapour (H2O) is a greenhouse gas, its lifetime in the atmosphere is orders of magnitude lower than that of CO2.
Maybe next year the tournament should be organized in some country which is more open to visits.
Maybe next year the tournament should be organized in some country which is more open to terrorists.
Fixed that for you.
Note the following, however:
Any serious terrorist will get into the US anyway; after all it's got a long, basically uncontrollable land border with Canada and another, slightly better controlled with Mexico. It's a bit like copy protection on CDs: it pisses of the legitimate users, while the bad guys just laugh and circumvent the system
Most of the 9/11 perpetrators would still get into the US under today's legislation
this way the US is alienating a lot of people whom they might actually want inside their borders, scientists, for example. I've got a German colleague who recently got a professorship at a US college... he's a specialist on Islamic Studies, focusing on Islam in Russia. He had serious trouble getting the paperwork done because of the visa and stamps from strange countries in his passport. Look at the percentage of US Nobel Prize winners born outside the US, for instance; would you rather have had them turned away at the border? Granted, CS players from Serbia aren't probably ranked very high on the agenda.
How about actually rebuilding the laptops? I've snagged dead laptops by the palletfull before and simply take them apart and replace cracked screens with working screens (need a number of the same model, easy to get from corperate auctions)
I second that. Years ago, a friend gave me a dead AcerNote Light 370CDX laptop with a broken screen. I repaired it using a spare screen from eBay that cost about $20, then I took it with me when I visited Iran for the first time - just for work, diary, Internet access with a PCMCIA modem card the occasional game of NetHack and so on.
I've carried my AcerNote on 14-hour train and 21-hour bus journeys up and down Iran, probably somewhere aroung 6000 miles in total, all the time stuffed at the bottom of my boardcase, in temperatures ranging from five to forty-five degrees (C) and with humidity ranging from desert to jungle. I wouldn't have dared to take a new laptop with me, but the old Pentium 133 was fine. Probably it survived all sorts of rough treatment, including being shoved around by Iranian customs officials, specifically because I could afford to lose it. Had I taken my work laptop down there, it would've been broken after three days, probably.
Same thing now: I've spent five months in Uzbekistan with an old IBM Thinkpad T20. It's light, comparatively rugged, specifically not brand new, and it does all it's supposed to do. And it survived working at temperatures from minus five to plus forty-five degrees as well as journeys on overland buses and the good old Soviet railway.
Moral: Always keep a couple of older laptops around, you never know when they'll come in handy;)
Err... seems to have stopped the euro-pricing that was about to happen, doesn't it? Pretty good for America that crude is only ever bought and sold in dollars.
Russia is starting to sell oil in Euro. It's a win-win situation: the EU gets to import oil in Euro, and Russia manages to secure more oil exports, conveniently pissing off the US in the process. Seeing that next to all major oil exporting countries have a poor human rights track record, it's probably not even worse to import from Russia than from Saudia Arabia or Nigeria.
There are several vendors over here in Germany that offer Thinkpads with Linux. It's an offer specifically targeted at students, you get comparatively large discounts. The devices are still too expensive, compared with US prices, though... (I hope one day we'll actually reap the benefits of the US trade balance;))
At present, however there's only an R51 model on sale... and even that is somewhat of a weird offer, it ships with XP preinstalled, and you get an install CD for a custom IBM version of SuSE 9.1 Professional that automatically configures itself into a Dual Boot configuration, preserving the hibernation files etc. and with Linux drivers preinstalled.
Lets not forget, that for some reason we can't find WMD, but we can find pesticides. Lots of them, all stored in **tada** ammunition bunkers. Now either the Iraqi army was extremly fastidious, and had really bad crabs, or something else was going on there. Another honesty check folks. The difference between weapons of mass destruction and pesticides is the intended target. [Emphasis yours.]
Hello, the artikle is about nukes. We're talking about a secret nuclear weapons program here. When was the last time an Oklahoma farmer nuked his crops?
And if possessing pesticides is considered equivalent to possessing WMDs, you can invade right about any country that you don't particularly fancy.
But how do u make a case to attack him, and not China? [...] Or Iran? [...] All these countries have regimes or a general populace which hates Americans.
Speaking from first-hand experience of Iran and work experience as a military country advisor and Farsi language trainer: Most Iranians in Iran like the American way of life and have nothing against Americans; at least among the ones I've spoken to in the country, mainly people under 30 of both sexes, but everybody else I know who has been down there and actually bothered talking to people as opposed to looking at the pretty monuments says the same. However, the Iranian people have been highly indoctrinated against America as such. As I've said in another thread, there's murals like this and this all over Tehran, and they're putting up new ones with pictures from Abu Ghuraib. The whole Iraq affair doesn't make the US more lovable.
The average Iranian likes America as the cradle of the American way of life and has no grudges against individual Americans. They do show, however, increasing distrust of America as a political entity. As I've said, if the US were to invade Iran to prevent the government from acquiring the A-bomb, the outcome depends on how quickly the US would be able to restore/provide peace, stability, prosperity and individual freedom so that the Iranian people would come to judge America by the former aspect rather than the latter. Seeing the US Iraq experience as well as the fact that Iran is a much more complicated country topographically, ethnically, linguistically and politically, I sincerely hope that the US don't botch this. But then, there's a reason why my country expects to be on a large-scale peacekeeping mission in Iran over the next ten years.
In over 50 years of deployment, we've only used nuclear weapons in one campaign and against an enemy that had initiated hostilities and had been at war with for 4 years. Not only that, we had them for over a decade before anybody else, including the Soviet Union, without excercising anything close to Pax Americana. (Emphasis mine.)
If you want to get your point across, it would certainly help if you got your facts straight:
First US atomic bomb detonation: 12 July 1945 (deliverable)
First Soviet atomic bomb detonation: 29 August 1949 (deliverable)
Or H-bombs instead:
First US hydrogen bomb detonation: 1 November 1952 (stationary)
First Soviet hydrogen bomb detonation: 12 August 1953 (deliverable, first use of fusion in thermonuclear device), 22 November 1955 (deliverable, first "real" H-bomb)
We will develope [sic] big fucking sticks and we will make sure you know we have them, but we never use those big fucking sticks unless you absolutely deserve it.
Of course. Tell that the guys who lived near the Nevada desert, they must be terrible wrongdoers indeed. (Then, on the other hand, every American who knows where Semipalatinsk is will comment on how evil the Soviets were to expose their own population to radiation at all.) You should probably try to get out of puberty and get a more balanced world view, where politics isn't explained in terms of "big fucking sticks". I can't help it, you remind me of the bone scene in 2001.
The embassy kidnappings in Tehran were done by a highly radicalized group of religious students active in the Islamic Revolution. Khomeini called the US embassy in Tehran a "US den of espionage" and ordered it kidnapped, and these students did it.
wrong. That's part of the public misconception.
The funny thing is that I've heard my version in Tehran from the guy who's running the souvenir shop on the corner of the former embassy grounds. Looks like history has been mangled up on both sides quite a bit;)
"Remember we'd all just kicked the fuck out of Germany, and France wasn't exactly in good shape after they'd been occupied for so long. The Soviets however had just raised a huge army, beaten the shit out of Germany"
Er, replace Germany with Iraq, and France with Israel and Soviets with Iran and you may understand.
And if you want to understand why the Arabs in the Middle East will not start loving the US all of a sudden, remember about all the oil in the ground there. Then replace occupied Iraq with Soviet East Germany, the US occupants with the Soviets, Israel as a background power with a nuclear, aggressive Poland and hitherto unoccupied Iran with the free world in the 1960s against a looming Soviet threat. What about the US building bases in Iraq now? Remember that this is just an experiment to give you a different view of the matter. It may or may not have a lot to do with the actual situation, but it's closer to the Arab street mindset than your version. I'm just talking about the distribution of roles here, not about personal preference for any of the sides, particularly the Iranian.
Of course this is just a game of thought and not a 100% precise analogy (most Arabs have no particular liking for Iran, for instance), it still gives you a vague impression of the other side's mindset. (Just to anticipate likely responses: your analogy has its limits, too. Israel is in a rather good state, except for the terrorism threat that, well, they've brought upon themselves to deal with somehow. And Iran isn't exactly on the scale of the Soviet Union as a global threat. And Iran has oil, too.
By the way, Rome, in all its time, was never a democracy. At one point it was a republic.
And so is America, as of now.
BTW you have to distinguish between democracy as a form of government (then it makes sense to say "America is not a democracy) and democracy as a way of choosing one's leaders. America is more or less a democratic country. It's a republic where the leaders are elected more or less democratically. Saying it's not a democracy then is a semantic game of definitions.
If Iranians like American people, then why did they take civilians hostage?
I don't know, maybe because not all Iranians like all Americans?
The embassy kidnappings in Tehran were done by a highly radicalized group of religious students active in the Islamic Revolution. Khomeini called the US embassy in Tehran a "US den of espionage" and ordered it kidnapped, and these students did it. Basically, they treated the embassy personnel like enemy soldiers because they considered more or less all of them to be spies and because they (as young, inexperienced and highly radical) had no respect for diplomatic immunity. The former embassy is now being used as barracks for the Revolutionary Guards, and on the embassy corner there is a souvenir shop selling replicas of US documents labeled "Top Secret" about the good relations between the US, Israel and the Shah's government.
Most Iranians like the American way of life and have nothing against Americans. However, they have been highly indoctrinated against America as such. Most of them have been watching TV what goes on in Iraq, too. There's murals like this (another view) and this all over Tehran, and recently, some new ones have appeared where they reproduced pictures from Abu Ghuraib.
To put it another way: the average Iranian in Iran, at least judging from whom I've spoken to, likes America as the cradle of the American way of life, as a place to get a good education etc., and has no grudges against individual Americans, yet shows profound distrust of America as a political superpower. If (and that's a big if) the US were to invade Iran to avoid the government acquiring the A-bomb, the outcome depends on how quickly the US would be able to restore/provide peace, stability, prosperity and individual freedom so that the Iranian people would come to judge America by the former aspect rather than the latter.
(Again: I've had first-hand experience of the country, and I'm saying this out of experience as a consultant and language trainer (Farsi and Dari) for the German army, who expect serious trouble in Iran within the next five or ten years; read: large-scale peacekeeping mission. Please, US, don't botch this, it would be a complete disaster.)
I agree with you, as far as China and North Korea are concerned.
But Iran?
What, do you think, is the US army supposed to do in case of a war in Iran?
The same thing the US military is supposed to do with China - be a credible deterrent and instrument of influence in that region.
The difference could not be greater. China is a world power, has A-bombs and is an important economic partner with whom the US is dealing more or less on eye level; China is the Soviet Union of the 21st century. Iran, on the other hand, is basically an regional upstart power in the process of going nuclear. "Being a credible deterrent and instrument of influence" in the case of Iran will have to lead to some kind of military action, because they are actively pursuing a counter-deterrent in the form of the A-bomb, which the US cannot afford Iran to have. Present US policy is encouraging Iran. The US is spouting rhetoric in the direction of the supposedly nuclear North Korea, while straightforwardly occupying Iraq. The strategic difference between Iraq and North Korea is oil and nukes. Iran has oil, so they'll have to acquire nukes as well.
With China, the strategic objective for the US military is deterrence and credibility. With Iran, it will have to be military action if they aren't to go nuclear. The US can rely on the "fleet in being" effect for some time, but at some point, they won't be prohibited from acquiring a weapon of counter-deterrence without some action on the US' behalf. At this point, the worst-case scenario is the one I outlined (supposing they don't have nukes by then), and a plan B is urgently required.
Iran, North Korea, China, all the future conflicts brewing in Africa... come on.
I agree with you, as far as China and North Korea are concerned.
But Iran?
What, do you think, is the US army supposed to do in case of a war in Iran? Iran is going nuclear at this very moment, they are within five years of the bomb; either the US allows it to happen or they don't. If they don't, the US will have to go in somehow, and that will probably mean overthrowing the government. Defeating the army will be a bit more difficult than Iraq's, but not impossible - and what then? The US will need a plan B for this case really quick, if they don't want Iran to fall apart and become another terrorists' paradise like Afghanistan - Iran is a country with very strong centrifugal forces in the provinces, and if the central government were to topple, the result would be a hell of instability. So that will have to mean occupying the country, simply because of lack of options - most Iranian organized exile groups who could form a proxy government are even more bizarre than the Iraqi émigrés and have no support whatsoever in the country. This includes the most theoretically legitimate of them, the former Shah's family; they don't call them the "zero kilometer kings" for nothing in Iran, and over all of the Islamic Republic's atrocities they haven't forgotten the Shah's torture chambers either. The country is larger, the terrain is much more difficult to control, and while most of the populace admires the American way of life, they have been indoctrinated quite a bit against America for the last twenty years. Most of them have been watching TV what's going on on in Iraq, too, and murals with (sometimes rather exaggerated) pictures from Abu Ghuraib have appeared all over Tehran over the last months. They are a proud people, and they will not fall in love with the idea of the US occupying them. Iran is not a piece of cake - not so much because of its army, but because of all the rest of it, the part that is not fought with subs, tanks and strategic bombers. I've had first-hand experience of the country, and I'm saying this out of experience as a consultant and language trainer (Farsi and Dari) for the German army, who expect serious trouble in Iran within the next five or ten years; read: large-scale peacekeeping mission. Please, US, don't botch this, it would be a complete disaster.
And Africa? All the future conflicts in Africa are of the Somalia/Iraq type, with easily defeated armies and a difficult peacekeeping job. The US has an extremely poor track record in these situations, especially if the US is serious about implementing peace or democracy. Of course, it's a tempting idea to just install stable, US-friendly dictatorships that keep the dirty jobs in-house. But the America I know and respect is the America that liberated my country from the Nazis and installed a prosperous democracy, not the one that installs puppet military dictatorships in the Third World (if it's even possible to separate the two Americas).
While there's still China and North Korea around to justify the "subs, planes, tanks, and satellites", it's still a necessity to account for the Iraq/Somalia/Iran/Africa guerilla-style type of conflict as well, where the real enemy is not the enemy's army but the anti-American resentments in the local population.
Winning the war is different from winning the peace, as they say a lot these days, which is what most of your criticism is based on. The US Army/Marine Corps did their job, win the armed conflict.
At present, it doesn't even look like the armed conflict is over, let alone won. It's just a different enemy now.
The overthrow of Saddam's army was indeed a remarkable US success; however whose job should winning the peace be, if not the army's? What peace, by the way? I wish they'd had all the language, communication and mediation training, then at least I hope things wouldn't be escalating the way they're doing.
After all, the monthly US casualty rate in Iraq is now higher than before "the war was won", and it's been increasing again since June.
If the Army's job was solely to defeat Saddam's troops, then they did an excellent job. Even if their job is to restore peace (as in "put an end to the fighting"), they haven't succeeded yet, and I guess it's:
partly because they were ill-trained to do this particular job,
partly because of hubris on the leaders' side who imagined the whole Iraq pacification thing to be a piece of cake, given the US' military superiority,
and partly because of the general confused US Middle East policy that, all in all, doesn't appear particularly credible to large numbers of Arabs and that has succeeded in fanaticizing large numbers of them even more.
Just because a weapon system is no applicable does not mean that it should be scrapped.
Where am I saying that, again?
All I'm saying is that in spite of the massive amount spent on the US military in general and military R&D in particular, the US army is still woefully unprepared to restore peace and order in Iraq, and at 40 to 80 daily attacks on US troops, it doesn't look like the war is being won.
Oh, and by the way, various types of satellites are used every day; so why are they included in your list?
Because I was quoting somebody else's posting.
Just because you (we) cannot necessarily see the real and potential threats, does not mean its existance is not real.
There's no denying that, of course. But on the other hand, there are some very real threats to US troops in Iraq now that were easy to predict, especially after the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and the US experience in Somalia. Nevertheless, it looks like the US army went into Iraq with severely inadequate for the real, obvious and commonly acknowledged task of pacifying the country - in spite of enormous military spending. After all, if lots of money is being spent on the military and the military can be expected to face this sort of situation sooner or later (after Somalia, this was increasingly obvious, and after Bush's election, it was even more so), it wouldn't have hurt to take this particular very real task of the US military into consideration as well, beside the "real and potential" other threats.
Slashdot Mirror
- you have to pay once for having a TV if you have any number of TV sets in your household, however many persons you're living with in your household. As of April 2005, this includes Internet-capable PCs.
- Only if you don't have a TV, you have to pay once for having a radio if you have any number of radios in your household. This includes car radios.
It's not that you pay more if you have more TV/radio set. Just if you have any means of watching TV, you pay the TV fee. If you have no means of watching TV, but you do have any means of listening to the radio, you pay the radio fee. If you have neither, you don't have to pay, just make a truthful statement to that effect. This is where the bother starts, because they have these garden gnomes patrolling the town, ringing your bell to see if there's a TV running so they can catch you lying on your statement, and under the Rundfunkgebührenstaatsvertrag law, they are allowed to ring you bell (but that's all they're allowed to do).Here, you're reproducing a common German conspiracy theory. Please stop spreading this myth, it lacks any factual basis. The GEZ man is not allowed to enter your home and check. If you let him in, it's your fault. There are cases where the GEZ man threatened to call in the police, but as far as I know, they never actually did. After all, what is the police supposed to do? "Forcibly enter your home"? Is there any documented case where the police forcibly entered anyone's home without their permission on suspicion of not paying the GEZ fee? After all, you can sue even the GEZ man for "Hausfriedensbruch" (literally, breaking the peace of your home, i.e. trespassing) if he enters your home without your permission.
Under German law, the police is not allowed to enter your home without a warrant. A warrant has to be given by a judge upon evidence or strong suspicion of a crime. Note that by not paying the GEZ fee, under German law you are not committing a crime. German penal law distinguishes between crimes ("Straftaten") and minor offenses ("Ordnungswidrigkeiten"). Not paying the GEZ fee is a minor offense, and warrants aren't issued on a minor offense, let alone the mere suspicion of it. I don't remember even seeing a case where the police got called at all, let alone where they forcibly entered people's homes on a GEZ suspicion. There are cases where the GEZ man entered without being allowed, but then he was in break of law, and the victim could have sued him. (Note that in this particular situation [and only there], the evidence obtained by the GEZ man while under break of law is actually considered valid, even when he's sued, but if he's sued, he will not be employed by the GEZ again, as he's a convict in this case.)
If you kindly tell the GEZ man that you have neither a computer nor a TV set, what's he supposed to do? There are all these myths that they go through your garbage to see if you read TV journals, that they rent the flat opposite your own to spy on you and so on, but they usually lack any supportive evidence. According to 4, paragraph 5 of the Rundfunkgebührenstaatsvertrag (the "law" that regulates public broadcasting), they have an "Auskunftsrecht", but this does not pertain to searching your home, just to asking you for a truthful statement on whether you have a TV set. If you have one while stating that you don't, you obviously are in break of law. The GEZ is a bother, and some of their data is obtained by a questionable treatment of government data, but they are not a secret police of some sort, and if you don't believe this, you've never been out of that peaceful German shell where the GEZ man is the biggest of all troubles. They are allowed to go around and ask if you have a TV, and to look through your door and through your window from outside if you actually have one. This is all they're allowed to do, and even for this they need a special law in place.
If you have a TV, while you claim that you don't have any for the purpose of not paying, you are committing a minor offense, like it or not. If your TV or your PC is visible from the street or from the door when you open it to the GEZ man, you are admitting to this minor offense. I mean, under German law you are required to pay this fee if you have a TV, like it or not. This is all of the "big trouble" you're in. If you don't like it, join one of the various petitions, but in the meantime, you are still obliged to pay it, whether you watch ARD or not.
If you're German
After all, number of options isn't really the only measure of quality applicable to the media. Another might be impartiality of news coverage coupled with relative prominence within the selection of stations.
German TV isn't really that great when it comes to entertainment, but the news coverage is usually pretty impartial, and it's definitely better by orders of magnitude than the news coverage from any of the German private stations. Even the most notorious "ARD and ZDF sucks" people I know do watch the Tagesschau.
IIRC the only reason why all PCs are considered (as opposed to those with a TV tuner) was that live streams are becoming more and more popular.
I'm exactly the kind of user this is targeted at. I don't have a TV set, but I'm watching Internet news broadcasts. (However, my flatmate is already paying, so it doesn't affect me, either. We'll split his fee now, though.)
- Even if it doesn't have a TV tuner, it's easy to hook up a satellite receiver or VCR to the computer via video-in. With digital VCRs becoming popular, it's even easier to do so via FireWire.
- You can watch ARD and ZDF broadcasts over the Internet.
This way, the only people "unjustly" affected are the very small crowd of people who don't watch TV at all, but who do have a computer, albeit one incapable of watching Internet broadcast streams. It would have been possible to impose the fee on VCRs and TV tuner cards instead. As far as I'm concerned, this would have been the best solution, but I don't have much of a say in the legislation over here. It was probably too complicated for the average Joe, and it doesn't account for the internet streams. Most people don't get affected by this anyway, as they have a TV already.Copying broadcast material is legal already in Germany, as long as you clearly see it's from a broadcast (i.e. the station's logo in one of the corners). This led to an awkwardly complicated situation once where, basically, one guy was forbidden to sell a device that removes the logo from a broadcast, because that could have been used to make illegal copies of broadcast material. Not the best ruling, as far as I'm concerned.
- if the government does not interfere with broadcasting at all, you get a media environment like the US, with lots of channels competing for consumers' and sponsors' attention. The result? Ads targeted at kids, news coverage that imposes the sponsors' opinion upon everyone. Thanks a lot! As an American, this is what you should be upset about.
- the German system is designed in this way specifically to give the government less power over broadcasting. If the government doesn't fund broadcasting themselves, they don't have a say in what's getting broadcast.
The whole point of the German system is to have a TV station that can afford to produce a high-quality program with balanced news coverage, without being influenced either by the state or by private sponsors.In Germany, we have two state-owned TV stations, ARD (which is a conglomerate) and ZDF. These are funded partly by the state, partly (to a small extent) by advertising, and mostly by collecting a monthly fee of about EUR 18 from TV owners. This fee is paid per household, regardless of how many TVs you actually have. If you don't have a TV, you don't have to pay it. (There's a smaller fee paid on radios if you don't have a TV). The point of this regulation is that the stations should be largely independent from the advertisers' whim as well as from the state's. This is, actually, a very valid point, as far as I am concerned. I don't want an American situation over here where TV is controlled by some conservative media czars, and neither do I want an East German situation where the state controls all TV content. Don't forget that state-run broadcasting was an extremely powerful instrument in the hands of the state during the Third Reich, and we've been trying to avoid this from bad experience. Now I don't personally appreciate a lot of the content on ARD and ZDF, but still I think the basic system is OK in itself, as it's the lesser of three evils.
Some time ago, the stations found out that you can watch TV on your computer even if you don't have a TV set. That's why this fee is being introduced. It won't affect many people, as their household is most likely to have a TV already. The only people affected will be those who have a computer, but who don't have a TV. They aren't that many. I don't have a TV, for example, but my flatmate has one, and therefore I don't have to pay extra. (We'll split the fee, however.)
This is a completely different situation from that proposed a fee on computers because one could, technically, copy copyrighted media with it, same as the fee on CD-R media or blank tapes that are collected in some countries. In Germany, for example, you can get special "audio CD-Rs" where this fee is included and where, under present legislation, it is legal to copy copyrighted audio materials for non-commercial purposes. (Of course, apart from the "audio" label that makes them applicable for this fee, they are just normal CD-R media, usually fairly high-quality ones.) Some time ago there was a proposal that the PC should be classified as an instrument of media reproduction as well so that this kind of fee would be imposed on CD burners, for example, but this proposal didn't get through. The TV situation is entirely different.
I've carried my AcerNote on 14-hour train and 21-hour bus journeys up and down Iran, probably somewhere aroung 6000 miles in total, all the time stuffed at the bottom of my boardcase, in temperatures ranging from five to forty-five degrees (C) and with humidity ranging from desert to jungle. I wouldn't have dared to take a new laptop with me, but the old Pentium 133 was fine. Probably it survived all sorts of rough treatment, including being shoved around by Iranian customs officials, specifically because I could afford to lose it. Had I taken my work laptop down there, it would've been broken after three days, probably.
Same thing now: I've spent five months in Uzbekistan with an old IBM Thinkpad T20. It's light, comparatively rugged, specifically not brand new, and it does all it's supposed to do. And it survived working at temperatures from minus five to plus forty-five degrees as well as journeys on overland buses and the good old Soviet railway.
Moral: Always keep a couple of older laptops around, you never know when they'll come in handy ;)
There are several vendors over here in Germany that offer Thinkpads with Linux. It's an offer specifically targeted at students, you get comparatively large discounts. The devices are still too expensive, compared with US prices, though... (I hope one day we'll actually reap the benefits of the US trade balance ;))
At present, however there's only an R51 model on sale... and even that is somewhat of a weird offer, it ships with XP preinstalled, and you get an install CD for a custom IBM version of SuSE 9.1 Professional that automatically configures itself into a Dual Boot configuration, preserving the hibernation files etc. and with Linux drivers preinstalled.
And if possessing pesticides is considered equivalent to possessing WMDs, you can invade right about any country that you don't particularly fancy.
The average Iranian likes America as the cradle of the American way of life and has no grudges against individual Americans. They do show, however, increasing distrust of America as a political entity. As I've said, if the US were to invade Iran to prevent the government from acquiring the A-bomb, the outcome depends on how quickly the US would be able to restore/provide peace, stability, prosperity and individual freedom so that the Iranian people would come to judge America by the former aspect rather than the latter. Seeing the US Iraq experience as well as the fact that Iran is a much more complicated country topographically, ethnically, linguistically and politically, I sincerely hope that the US don't botch this. But then, there's a reason why my country expects to be on a large-scale peacekeeping mission in Iran over the next ten years.
- First US atomic bomb detonation: 12 July 1945 (deliverable)
- First Soviet atomic bomb detonation: 29 August 1949 (deliverable)
Or H-bombs instead:- First US hydrogen bomb detonation: 1 November 1952 (stationary)
- First Soviet hydrogen bomb detonation: 12 August 1953 (deliverable, first use of fusion in thermonuclear device), 22 November 1955 (deliverable, first "real" H-bomb)
(Sources: Wikipedia; Soviet nuclear weapons program)Of course. Tell that the guys who lived near the Nevada desert, they must be terrible wrongdoers indeed. (Then, on the other hand, every American who knows where Semipalatinsk is will comment on how evil the Soviets were to expose their own population to radiation at all.) You should probably try to get out of puberty and get a more balanced world view, where politics isn't explained in terms of "big fucking sticks". I can't help it, you remind me of the bone scene in 2001.
Anyway, thanks for the clarification.
Of course this is just a game of thought and not a 100% precise analogy (most Arabs have no particular liking for Iran, for instance), it still gives you a vague impression of the other side's mindset. (Just to anticipate likely responses: your analogy has its limits, too. Israel is in a rather good state, except for the terrorism threat that, well, they've brought upon themselves to deal with somehow. And Iran isn't exactly on the scale of the Soviet Union as a global threat. And Iran has oil, too.
BTW you have to distinguish between democracy as a form of government (then it makes sense to say "America is not a democracy) and democracy as a way of choosing one's leaders. America is more or less a democratic country. It's a republic where the leaders are elected more or less democratically. Saying it's not a democracy then is a semantic game of definitions.
The embassy kidnappings in Tehran were done by a highly radicalized group of religious students active in the Islamic Revolution. Khomeini called the US embassy in Tehran a "US den of espionage" and ordered it kidnapped, and these students did it. Basically, they treated the embassy personnel like enemy soldiers because they considered more or less all of them to be spies and because they (as young, inexperienced and highly radical) had no respect for diplomatic immunity. The former embassy is now being used as barracks for the Revolutionary Guards, and on the embassy corner there is a souvenir shop selling replicas of US documents labeled "Top Secret" about the good relations between the US, Israel and the Shah's government.
Most Iranians like the American way of life and have nothing against Americans. However, they have been highly indoctrinated against America as such. Most of them have been watching TV what goes on in Iraq, too. There's murals like this (another view) and this all over Tehran, and recently, some new ones have appeared where they reproduced pictures from Abu Ghuraib.
To put it another way: the average Iranian in Iran, at least judging from whom I've spoken to, likes America as the cradle of the American way of life, as a place to get a good education etc., and has no grudges against individual Americans, yet shows profound distrust of America as a political superpower. If (and that's a big if) the US were to invade Iran to avoid the government acquiring the A-bomb, the outcome depends on how quickly the US would be able to restore/provide peace, stability, prosperity and individual freedom so that the Iranian people would come to judge America by the former aspect rather than the latter.
(Again: I've had first-hand experience of the country, and I'm saying this out of experience as a consultant and language trainer (Farsi and Dari) for the German army, who expect serious trouble in Iran within the next five or ten years; read: large-scale peacekeeping mission. Please, US, don't botch this, it would be a complete disaster.)
With China, the strategic objective for the US military is deterrence and credibility. With Iran, it will have to be military action if they aren't to go nuclear. The US can rely on the "fleet in being" effect for some time, but at some point, they won't be prohibited from acquiring a weapon of counter-deterrence without some action on the US' behalf. At this point, the worst-case scenario is the one I outlined (supposing they don't have nukes by then), and a plan B is urgently required.
But Iran?
What, do you think, is the US army supposed to do in case of a war in Iran? Iran is going nuclear at this very moment, they are within five years of the bomb; either the US allows it to happen or they don't. If they don't, the US will have to go in somehow, and that will probably mean overthrowing the government. Defeating the army will be a bit more difficult than Iraq's, but not impossible - and what then? The US will need a plan B for this case really quick, if they don't want Iran to fall apart and become another terrorists' paradise like Afghanistan - Iran is a country with very strong centrifugal forces in the provinces, and if the central government were to topple, the result would be a hell of instability. So that will have to mean occupying the country, simply because of lack of options - most Iranian organized exile groups who could form a proxy government are even more bizarre than the Iraqi émigrés and have no support whatsoever in the country. This includes the most theoretically legitimate of them, the former Shah's family; they don't call them the "zero kilometer kings" for nothing in Iran, and over all of the Islamic Republic's atrocities they haven't forgotten the Shah's torture chambers either. The country is larger, the terrain is much more difficult to control, and while most of the populace admires the American way of life, they have been indoctrinated quite a bit against America for the last twenty years. Most of them have been watching TV what's going on on in Iraq, too, and murals with (sometimes rather exaggerated) pictures from Abu Ghuraib have appeared all over Tehran over the last months. They are a proud people, and they will not fall in love with the idea of the US occupying them. Iran is not a piece of cake - not so much because of its army, but because of all the rest of it, the part that is not fought with subs, tanks and strategic bombers. I've had first-hand experience of the country, and I'm saying this out of experience as a consultant and language trainer (Farsi and Dari) for the German army, who expect serious trouble in Iran within the next five or ten years; read: large-scale peacekeeping mission. Please, US, don't botch this, it would be a complete disaster.
And Africa? All the future conflicts in Africa are of the Somalia/Iraq type, with easily defeated armies and a difficult peacekeeping job. The US has an extremely poor track record in these situations, especially if the US is serious about implementing peace or democracy. Of course, it's a tempting idea to just install stable, US-friendly dictatorships that keep the dirty jobs in-house. But the America I know and respect is the America that liberated my country from the Nazis and installed a prosperous democracy, not the one that installs puppet military dictatorships in the Third World (if it's even possible to separate the two Americas).
While there's still China and North Korea around to justify the "subs, planes, tanks, and satellites", it's still a necessity to account for the Iraq/Somalia/Iran/Africa guerilla-style type of conflict as well, where the real enemy is not the enemy's army but the anti-American resentments in the local population.
The overthrow of Saddam's army was indeed a remarkable US success; however whose job should winning the peace be, if not the army's? What peace, by the way? I wish they'd had all the language, communication and mediation training, then at least I hope things wouldn't be escalating the way they're doing.
After all, the monthly US casualty rate in Iraq is now higher than before "the war was won", and it's been increasing again since June.
If the Army's job was solely to defeat Saddam's troops, then they did an excellent job. Even if their job is to restore peace (as in "put an end to the fighting"), they haven't succeeded yet, and I guess it's:
All I'm saying is that in spite of the massive amount spent on the US military in general and military R&D in particular, the US army is still woefully unprepared to restore peace and order in Iraq, and at 40 to 80 daily attacks on US troops, it doesn't look like the war is being won.Because I was quoting somebody else's posting.There's no denying that, of course. But on the other hand, there are some very real threats to US troops in Iraq now that were easy to predict, especially after the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and the US experience in Somalia. Nevertheless, it looks like the US army went into Iraq with severely inadequate for the real, obvious and commonly acknowledged task of pacifying the country - in spite of enormous military spending. After all, if lots of money is being spent on the military and the military can be expected to face this sort of situation sooner or later (after Somalia, this was increasingly obvious, and after Bush's election, it was even more so), it wouldn't have hurt to take this particular very real task of the US military into consideration as well, beside the "real and potential" other threats.