More seriously, it is about time Sony found some original acronyms. We had enough trouble distinguishing PS2 (the Sony games console) from PS/2 (IBM's Personal System Two, a late 80's next-generation PC design, from which the well-known mouse and keyboard socket standards originated). Now the same bunch of elderly spods is going to have the same trouble with PSP, and this time there's no stroke/slash to assist.
(I wish I still had my Model 80 IBM PS/2 complete with its "Danger! Heavy! Two men required to lift!" sticker).
there is nothing like books when it comes to learning
But what if the reason for reducing libraries, isn't to shift towards e-learning, but instead pressure from book SHOPS?
If I were an amoral university principal - or even a moral principal at an underfunded university - I'd take nice fat cheques from the bookshops and reduce the libraries.
A good on-campus bookshop and a laptop sales/repair outlet could really clean up in a university with insufficient library facilities.
Surely an American name would be more like "Sitting Bull" or somesuch?
You speak with forked tongue, sir. Jeff is a British name, short for either (German) Geoffrey or (British variant) Jefford. Geoffrey was originally a German tribal word for "peace". My grandfather, major of Kidderminster, Worcestershire UK, was called Jefford, although I can't imagine anyone calling him Jeff.
Most non-Anglophone/non-Scandinavian cultures can't even pronounce the "J" sound used with "Jeff". For instance, the European household cleaning liquid "Jif" had to be rebranded "Cif" so that other nationals could pronounce it. I sincerely doubt that the native American languages had the "J" consonant, it is fairly exclusive to Britain, Germany and Scandinavia.
the officer that decides whether or not to write the ticket
There is no officer. It is a fully automated process, at least here in the UK. Indeed, in the UK, the cameras are not even owned nor operated by the police; they're usually owned and operated by the local council (local government).
Camera -> Network -> Central Computer -> Printer -> Postbag
Once the camera is in place and switched on, the only human involved is the postman.
someone chose where to put the camera
The placement of UK speed cameras is also almost entirely automatic; 4 fatal accidents within 2 years IIRC. There are strict guidelines controlling where the council is allowed to place cameras. So there is very little fine control of anything, it's just a big snowballing system which has very little human input nowadays.
What is this "logging on" of which you speak? I have never "logged on" to Google. Is this for g-mail or some other service?
Yes, exactly right. IIRC it originally began as a legacy log-on when Google acquired DejaNews; my Google login is exactly the same as my old DejaNews login, and works with all Google services which allow login, such as Google Maps and Google Local which can remember where I live.
The amusing counter-anecdote about this is, of course, that my email address and personal profile which was carried forward from DejaNews ceased to be accurate about ten years ago. In fact its funnier than that; my sign-on email address is a "nospam" adulterated address of a subdomain under an ISP I stopped using way back when.
Which makes me wonder exactly how much evil anyone could get up to with Google's data, which is, after all, completely unverified. It's about as useful as that survey which asked people their passwords in exchange for a bar of chocolate. "Yeah, sure, my password is, erm, iwantsomefreechocolate. Yeah, honestly, that's my password. Honest, guv'nor."
I mean, really, does anyone actually tell the whole truth on these sign-up forms?
Take my free IT industry magazine subscriptions. I know they're only going to send it if I say I'm the finance director of a large company. So that's what I say. Now imagine how confused any evil data miner is going to be when they sell my name to a bunch of fraudsters thinking that I sign the cheques. Or, indeed, imagine how said evil data miner is going to be kneecapped by said fraudster's burly pals.
Agreed - a speed camera also doesn't record context, whereas a security camera usually does. A speed camera doesn't care whether you're speeding on an empty cross-country trunk road at 3am with no other traffic nor pedestrians, or speeding on a residential road outside a school at going-home time. Whereas a bank camera can be used to distinguish a gun-toting balaclava-wearing bandit from an absent-minded granny who put too many zeroes on the end of her cash withdrawal slip.
In the UK we have the "Crown Prosecution Service" (CPS) which throws out cases which it considers to be "not in the public interest" (for instance, charging the aforementioned granny with attempted fraud), but sadly (AFAIK) the CPS is not used for automated speeding tickets. On the other hand, the CPS also ensures that cases which are in the public interest do go to court regardless of the requests of the victim; for instance, the CPS can insist that a domestic violence case goes to court even if the abused spouse later wishes not to proceed.
It's "The Times", dagnammit. Like "The Post Office" and "Birmingham". They are the original, definitive articles.
It's not "The British Times", "The London Times", "The British Post Office", "The UK Post Office", "Birmingham England" or "Birmingham UK".
The other Johnny-come-lately Times newspapers are prefixed by a description, for instance "The New York Times", "The US Post Office" or "Birmingham Alabama". The original stands alone.
Whilst I'm having an Aspergers nitpick that'll be modded down, can I also put out a plea to stop people from saying such nonsense as "A spokesman, Tuesday". Unless the spokesman was actually named "Mr. Tuesday" or somesuch, it's "A spokesman on Tuesday" or even "On Tuesday, a spokesman".
Gah.
(Actually the report was from The Sunday Times, which in theory is seperate from The Times, but in practice is homogenous.)
Okaaaay. So that's number two on the "things Brits find completely incomprehensible about Americans" (Number one is executions. Utterly alien concept to my generation, I'm afraid.)
Although I do admit that our use of the words "barrister" and "solicitor" are far inferior to your much more understandable "lawyer".
Or you can pay a lawyer for the privilege and he'll do the exact same thing, except you'll be out more money than the fine was worth (incentives work both ways).
That can't be right. Surely if you win the court case, you can recoup the lawyer's / solicitor's fees from the loosing party? Otherwise anyone with lots of money, could take anyone with not much money to court, and the poor person would be forced to accept whatever the rich person said just to reduce the bill.
I just don't get why people need air conditioners. And I especially don't get why people think that they can be environmentally friendly by redesigning one. The environmentally friendly solution is not to need one.
Just move further towards the pole.
Here in England we just don't need them. It never gets that hot. We don't get significant droughts or forest fires or earthquakes or whatever. The few heat and water problems we have are entirely down to overcrowding in London; again, my solution is: don't live there.
I just don't understand what was in the mind of some colonist when he went to, say, Utah and thought to himself "Yeah, this is a good place to live" when it quite blatantly the weather is going to try to kill you for four months of the year. I visited Texas in summer once; everyone spent the whole time moving between air conditioned houses to air conditioned cars to air conditions offices and air conditioned shops. They might as well have lived underground.
How on earth did we end up living in such daft places?
Lunokhod Soviet moon robots?
on
Google Moon Debuts
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
One of the things that has been forgotten here, is that the BBC has in its constitution, the requirement that it does not stifle the free market.
There is nothing in UK law [1] that prohibits the BBC nor anyone from releasing noncopyrighted music.
However, UK law isn't what's at question here. What's at question is whether the BBC broke its own rules.
The BBC is funded almost entirely by a tax on television ownership, and overall control belongs to an unelected body appointed by the government. Part of the BBC's responsibilities are to foster the broadcasting market in the UK, a small country that would otherwise be drowned in foriegn imports. This means balancing making more programmes to encourage the market in areas where it is deficient (for instance, classical drama), making quality programmes in areas where competition might otherwise drown the market with low-quality products (for instance, soap operas), and making no programmes in areas where the market already produces diverse quality (for instance, AOR).
[1] Actually there are hardly any UK laws, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have different legal systems. Usually English and Welsh law is identical. Scottish and Northern Irish law frequently differs.
It is (partially) funded by the License Fee which is collected by government and passed on, but it is most definitely NOT run by the government.
That's true, but it is also true to say that "It is almost entirely funded by mandatory taxation on television ownership and the editorial line is enforced by a government-appointed quango."
One of the things that us Brits find odd is that a lot of countries have a hierarchical approach to power grids, whereby there are a small number of upstream power sources which supply a specific number of downstream locations.
It seems that every time I visit the USA there are local power cuts on the news (although to be fair I did visit Boston during the great blizzard in January, and New York during last week's heatwave).
In the UK we have a more "networked" version of the grid where power can flow from pretty much any source to pretty much any location, rather than just upstream/downstream. Although it is possible for all lines into a location to fail, this is rare. Most UK power problems are caused by safety systems cutting in and isolating areas of suspected fault, rather than supply problems.
Of course our island is only 700 miles long which makes planning a grid a heck of a lot easier.
We're currently having a debate about re-introducing nuclear power, since we moved to gas instead of coal and oil. Recently we started importing a lot of gas from Eastern countries which we're worried aren't very stable.
It is theft of the funds. Obviously, someone who gets a copy of whatever IP without paying is permanently depriving the creator of the money they might have earned, and that is theft.
That's not theft either. People who "might" not buy something isn't theft.
Otherwise you could say that anyone who gives away second-hand clothes is stealing from clothes shops.
Theft is a very specific, very clearly defined crime; intention to permanently deprive the owner of a physical object. Breach of contract or failure to earn money is not theft.
Stealing coins or banknotes is theft. Moving money between accounts without authorisation is fraud, not theft. Doing something in contravention of an informed consentual licence is breach of contract, not theft.
Breach of copyright is illegal in itself. There is no need, no logic and no honesty in trying to claim that it is something that it isn't.
Potentially preventing a company from earning money is completely irrelevent.
Honesty is important, it is as important as right and wrong. Pretending that breach of copyright is analogous to theft is dishonest.
I'd say "Breach of Copyright" or "Breach of Contract" which is exactly what it is and nothing else.
You're absolutely correct that right and wrong is important. So why muddy the waters? Why confuse people? Why look like you're trying to mislead people? Why not just say "Breach of Copyright is wrong"?
Honesty is right. Dishonesty is wrong. Saying that breach of copyright equals theft is dishonest.
The reason people don't see breaching copyright as theft, is because it isn't theft.
In order for something to be theft, there has to be an "intention to permanently deprive". You have to take something away from someone. That's the legal definition.
If you copy something, the original is still perfectly usable. Nobody is deprived of the original for a moment.
The copyright "industry's" attempts to equate breach of copyright with theft has fallen upon deaf ears because people aren't that stupid; they know the analogy is stupid from the start.
Bodies which name themselves using the phrase "copyright theft" are open to public ridicule, because everyone knows that breach of copyright absolutely not the same nor even similar to theft.
If you revert to a version prior to Office 2000, you can have them right now. Never really understood why they did away with them in the first place.
It seems that GUI fashions are as circular as clothing fashions. It'll be inverse video next.
What's really baking my noodle is that I like tabbed usage for word processing, but for the life of me I can't figure out why I'd want tabbed web browsing - for some admittedly non-rational reason, I'm quite happy using multiple new windows with my web browser, but using multiple new windows with my word processor annoys me no end.
>>their engineers will only come out between 9am-5pm Mon-Fri.
>Technically not true. They have early-shift and late-shift engineers, and the former can work pretty early in the morning. But you have to find your way through the incredible, Byzantine, almost unreal tangle of red tape
...or...
When you arrange the engineer's visit, insist that the operator puts "CUSTOMER WILL SUPPLY BACON SANDWICH" on the call details.
I have used this trick twice now. First call of the morning (08:30) every time. One of the guys actually drove a 30 mile round trip back to HQ to pick up a spare part and come back to me, after being fed a bacon sandwich and promised more.
Seriously, you have to be aware than BT engineers get allocated a whole heap of calls for the day, then they get to choose which ones to do in which order. The ones they leave until later will probably get postponed as they run late.
Therefore you need to make your call the attractive one which the engineer picks first.
All BT engineers like bacon sandwiches. There are NO vegitarian BT engineers. You need calories and protein to climb telephone poles.
Next, the most important question when the engineer arrives is "Tea or coffee, milk and sugar?". Once you have your engineer, you want to keep him on your side. Your anger with the bureacracy of BT means nothing to him, if you get feisty he can just pretend he doesn't have the part and will have to come back tomorrow (ie. you get marked as troublesome and always get picked last each day).
Capitalism works fine provided there are competitors. Unfortunately, Earth is finite so eventually it is possible for monopolies, ologopolies or cartels to emerge.
Western European "socialism" is barely recognisable as the Socialism familiar in East Asia or Russia. A lot of governments which brand themselves as socialists - such as Scandinavia or France - are actually just regulated capitalist economies.
What these countries do is to either enforce competition, or to enforce the effects that competition would provide if it existed.
To support your argument, MultiMap and GetMapping's aerial photo of GCHQ is at least five years old - it shows the "cross" building which has now been demolished. The new "donut" which has been built and in use for several years (clearly visible from the road and heavily publicised with photographs by GCHQ themselves in a major local recruitment campaign) is not on the aerial photo at all.
The amusing thing is, that if you zoom out to 1:25000 scale and hover over the image, you can see the donut superimposed from the regular road map! So it doesn't strike me as secrecy, so much as just plain out-of-date.
Actually, Channel 4, a commercial channel, does get additional funds from UK taxpayers. It's a pretty small amount and (in theory) it doesn't come from the licence fee (IIRC).
Slashdot Mirror
Surely Paint Shop Pro is beyond v2 by now?
More seriously, it is about time Sony found some original acronyms. We had enough trouble distinguishing PS2 (the Sony games console) from PS/2 (IBM's Personal System Two, a late 80's next-generation PC design, from which the well-known mouse and keyboard socket standards originated). Now the same bunch of elderly spods is going to have the same trouble with PSP, and this time there's no stroke/slash to assist.
(I wish I still had my Model 80 IBM PS/2 complete with its "Danger! Heavy! Two men required to lift!" sticker).
there is nothing like books when it comes to learning
But what if the reason for reducing libraries, isn't to shift towards e-learning, but instead pressure from book SHOPS?
If I were an amoral university principal - or even a moral principal at an underfunded university - I'd take nice fat cheques from the bookshops and reduce the libraries.
A good on-campus bookshop and a laptop sales/repair outlet could really clean up in a university with insufficient library facilities.
Surely an American name would be more like "Sitting Bull" or somesuch?
You speak with forked tongue, sir. Jeff is a British name, short for either (German) Geoffrey or (British variant) Jefford. Geoffrey was originally a German tribal word for "peace". My grandfather, major of Kidderminster, Worcestershire UK, was called Jefford, although I can't imagine anyone calling him Jeff.
Most non-Anglophone/non-Scandinavian cultures can't even pronounce the "J" sound used with "Jeff". For instance, the European household cleaning liquid "Jif" had to be rebranded "Cif" so that other nationals could pronounce it. I sincerely doubt that the native American languages had the "J" consonant, it is fairly exclusive to Britain, Germany and Scandinavia.
the officer that decides whether or not to write the ticket
There is no officer. It is a fully automated process, at least here in the UK. Indeed, in the UK, the cameras are not even owned nor operated by the police; they're usually owned and operated by the local council (local government).
Camera -> Network -> Central Computer -> Printer -> Postbag
Once the camera is in place and switched on, the only human involved is the postman.
someone chose where to put the camera
The placement of UK speed cameras is also almost entirely automatic; 4 fatal accidents within 2 years IIRC. There are strict guidelines controlling where the council is allowed to place cameras. So there is very little fine control of anything, it's just a big snowballing system which has very little human input nowadays.
Yes, exactly right. IIRC it originally began as a legacy log-on when Google acquired DejaNews; my Google login is exactly the same as my old DejaNews login, and works with all Google services which allow login, such as Google Maps and Google Local which can remember where I live.
The amusing counter-anecdote about this is, of course, that my email address and personal profile which was carried forward from DejaNews ceased to be accurate about ten years ago. In fact its funnier than that; my sign-on email address is a "nospam" adulterated address of a subdomain under an ISP I stopped using way back when.
Which makes me wonder exactly how much evil anyone could get up to with Google's data, which is, after all, completely unverified. It's about as useful as that survey which asked people their passwords in exchange for a bar of chocolate. "Yeah, sure, my password is, erm, iwantsomefreechocolate. Yeah, honestly, that's my password. Honest, guv'nor."
I mean, really, does anyone actually tell the whole truth on these sign-up forms?
Take my free IT industry magazine subscriptions. I know they're only going to send it if I say I'm the finance director of a large company. So that's what I say. Now imagine how confused any evil data miner is going to be when they sell my name to a bunch of fraudsters thinking that I sign the cheques. Or, indeed, imagine how said evil data miner is going to be kneecapped by said fraudster's burly pals.
In the UK we have the "Crown Prosecution Service" (CPS) which throws out cases which it considers to be "not in the public interest" (for instance, charging the aforementioned granny with attempted fraud), but sadly (AFAIK) the CPS is not used for automated speeding tickets. On the other hand, the CPS also ensures that cases which are in the public interest do go to court regardless of the requests of the victim; for instance, the CPS can insist that a domestic violence case goes to court even if the abused spouse later wishes not to proceed.
Well, of course! Presumably, the Shuttle comes from the same American school of engineering that sold helicopters that can't fly in cloud, to the British Ministry of Defence.
TFA: the British Times
It's "The Times", dagnammit. Like "The Post Office" and "Birmingham". They are the original, definitive articles.
It's not "The British Times", "The London Times", "The British Post Office", "The UK Post Office", "Birmingham England" or "Birmingham UK".
The other Johnny-come-lately Times newspapers are prefixed by a description, for instance "The New York Times", "The US Post Office" or "Birmingham Alabama". The original stands alone.
Whilst I'm having an Aspergers nitpick that'll be modded down, can I also put out a plea to stop people from saying such nonsense as "A spokesman, Tuesday". Unless the spokesman was actually named "Mr. Tuesday" or somesuch, it's "A spokesman on Tuesday" or even "On Tuesday, a spokesman".
Gah.
(Actually the report was from The Sunday Times, which in theory is seperate from The Times, but in practice is homogenous.)
Okaaaay. So that's number two on the "things Brits find completely incomprehensible about Americans" (Number one is executions. Utterly alien concept to my generation, I'm afraid.)
Although I do admit that our use of the words "barrister" and "solicitor" are far inferior to your much more understandable "lawyer".
That can't be right. Surely if you win the court case, you can recoup the lawyer's / solicitor's fees from the loosing party? Otherwise anyone with lots of money, could take anyone with not much money to court, and the poor person would be forced to accept whatever the rich person said just to reduce the bill.
Or is that just England?
They tested a system to find out whether people were experiencing intolerable heat in New Mexico?
Surely in New Mexico, all you have to do is just stand in the sun?
I just don't get why people need air conditioners. And I especially don't get why people think that they can be environmentally friendly by redesigning one. The environmentally friendly solution is not to need one.
Just move further towards the pole.
Here in England we just don't need them. It never gets that hot. We don't get significant droughts or forest fires or earthquakes or whatever. The few heat and water problems we have are entirely down to overcrowding in London; again, my solution is: don't live there.
I just don't understand what was in the mind of some colonist when he went to, say, Utah and thought to himself "Yeah, this is a good place to live" when it quite blatantly the weather is going to try to kill you for four months of the year. I visited Texas in summer once; everyone spent the whole time moving between air conditioned houses to air conditioned cars to air conditions offices and air conditioned shops. They might as well have lived underground.
How on earth did we end up living in such daft places?
I note that Google have conveniently forgotten to place the Soviet (Russian) Lunokhod moon robots on the map (at Sea of Rains and Le Monnier, Mare Serenitatis).
One of the things that has been forgotten here, is that the BBC has in its constitution, the requirement that it does not stifle the free market.
There is nothing in UK law [1] that prohibits the BBC nor anyone from releasing noncopyrighted music.
However, UK law isn't what's at question here. What's at question is whether the BBC broke its own rules.
The BBC is funded almost entirely by a tax on television ownership, and overall control belongs to an unelected body appointed by the government. Part of the BBC's responsibilities are to foster the broadcasting market in the UK, a small country that would otherwise be drowned in foriegn imports. This means balancing making more programmes to encourage the market in areas where it is deficient (for instance, classical drama), making quality programmes in areas where competition might otherwise drown the market with low-quality products (for instance, soap operas), and making no programmes in areas where the market already produces diverse quality (for instance, AOR).
[1] Actually there are hardly any UK laws, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have different legal systems. Usually English and Welsh law is identical. Scottish and Northern Irish law frequently differs.
That's true, but it is also true to say that "It is almost entirely funded by mandatory taxation on television ownership and the editorial line is enforced by a government-appointed quango."
One of the things that us Brits find odd is that a lot of countries have a hierarchical approach to power grids, whereby there are a small number of upstream power sources which supply a specific number of downstream locations.
It seems that every time I visit the USA there are local power cuts on the news (although to be fair I did visit Boston during the great blizzard in January, and New York during last week's heatwave).
In the UK we have a more "networked" version of the grid where power can flow from pretty much any source to pretty much any location, rather than just upstream/downstream. Although it is possible for all lines into a location to fail, this is rare. Most UK power problems are caused by safety systems cutting in and isolating areas of suspected fault, rather than supply problems.
Of course our island is only 700 miles long which makes planning a grid a heck of a lot easier.
We're currently having a debate about re-introducing nuclear power, since we moved to gas instead of coal and oil. Recently we started importing a lot of gas from Eastern countries which we're worried aren't very stable.
That's not theft either. People who "might" not buy something isn't theft.
Otherwise you could say that anyone who gives away second-hand clothes is stealing from clothes shops.
Theft is a very specific, very clearly defined crime; intention to permanently deprive the owner of a physical object. Breach of contract or failure to earn money is not theft.
Stealing coins or banknotes is theft. Moving money between accounts without authorisation is fraud, not theft. Doing something in contravention of an informed consentual licence is breach of contract, not theft.
Breach of copyright is illegal in itself. There is no need, no logic and no honesty in trying to claim that it is something that it isn't.
Potentially preventing a company from earning money is completely irrelevent.
Honesty is important, it is as important as right and wrong. Pretending that breach of copyright is analogous to theft is dishonest.
I'd say "Breach of Copyright" or "Breach of Contract" which is exactly what it is and nothing else.
You're absolutely correct that right and wrong is important. So why muddy the waters? Why confuse people? Why look like you're trying to mislead people? Why not just say "Breach of Copyright is wrong"?
Honesty is right. Dishonesty is wrong. Saying that breach of copyright equals theft is dishonest.
In order for something to be theft, there has to be an "intention to permanently deprive". You have to take something away from someone. That's the legal definition.
If you copy something, the original is still perfectly usable. Nobody is deprived of the original for a moment.
The copyright "industry's" attempts to equate breach of copyright with theft has fallen upon deaf ears because people aren't that stupid; they know the analogy is stupid from the start.
Bodies which name themselves using the phrase "copyright theft" are open to public ridicule, because everyone knows that breach of copyright absolutely not the same nor even similar to theft.
There seems to be something about the New Zealand psyche that just doesn't understand the concept of separate routing and protection of cables.
If you revert to a version prior to Office 2000, you can have them right now. Never really understood why they did away with them in the first place.
It seems that GUI fashions are as circular as clothing fashions. It'll be inverse video next.
What's really baking my noodle is that I like tabbed usage for word processing, but for the life of me I can't figure out why I'd want tabbed web browsing - for some admittedly non-rational reason, I'm quite happy using multiple new windows with my web browser, but using multiple new windows with my word processor annoys me no end.
>Technically not true. They have early-shift and late-shift engineers, and the former can work pretty early in the morning. But you have to find your way through the incredible, Byzantine, almost unreal tangle of red tape
When you arrange the engineer's visit, insist that the operator puts "CUSTOMER WILL SUPPLY BACON SANDWICH" on the call details.
I have used this trick twice now. First call of the morning (08:30) every time. One of the guys actually drove a 30 mile round trip back to HQ to pick up a spare part and come back to me, after being fed a bacon sandwich and promised more.
Seriously, you have to be aware than BT engineers get allocated a whole heap of calls for the day, then they get to choose which ones to do in which order. The ones they leave until later will probably get postponed as they run late.
Therefore you need to make your call the attractive one which the engineer picks first.
All BT engineers like bacon sandwiches. There are NO vegitarian BT engineers. You need calories and protein to climb telephone poles.
Next, the most important question when the engineer arrives is "Tea or coffee, milk and sugar?". Once you have your engineer, you want to keep him on your side. Your anger with the bureacracy of BT means nothing to him, if you get feisty he can just pretend he doesn't have the part and will have to come back tomorrow (ie. you get marked as troublesome and always get picked last each day).
You're confusing capitalism with competition.
Capitalism works fine provided there are competitors. Unfortunately, Earth is finite so eventually it is possible for monopolies, ologopolies or cartels to emerge.
Western European "socialism" is barely recognisable as the Socialism familiar in East Asia or Russia. A lot of governments which brand themselves as socialists - such as Scandinavia or France - are actually just regulated capitalist economies.
What these countries do is to either enforce competition, or to enforce the effects that competition would provide if it existed.
The amusing thing is, that if you zoom out to 1:25000 scale and hover over the image, you can see the donut superimposed from the regular road map! So it doesn't strike me as secrecy, so much as just plain out-of-date.
Actually, Channel 4, a commercial channel, does get additional funds from UK taxpayers. It's a pretty small amount and (in theory) it doesn't come from the licence fee (IIRC).
I don't think Channel 5 does, though.