The United States has many states which can have slightly different laws. Each state is made up of counties which often have separate police forces.
The United Kingdom has many kingdoms which can have slightly different laws. Each kingdom is made up of counties which often have separate police forces.
I fail to see what USians find so hard to grasp.
(Okay, so actually we have only two kingdoms plus one principality and one territory, and historically those are technically made up of smaller tribal kingdoms, but the basic modern formation of the United Kingdom really isn't so far removed from the United States. It all went wrong after King Ozric of Mercia, mark my words...)
"the average worker's wage is $15 a month" - No it isn't. Cuba does not use the dollar.
This is the usual bullshit propaganda from the kind of people that want you to believe that third-world workers on two dollars a day can't afford to eat. They arrive at this rubbish by pricing first-world food at first-world prices (herb ciabatta from a New York delicatessen at $4 a loaf, instead of flat bread baked by the family where the ingredients are grown by the local farmers and sold at market for less than quarter of a day's wages).
The developing world does not price its goods in dollars, nor do they shop at the deli counter. Get over it.
As a Brit, I was dissapointed that our Royal Air Force closed their UFO analysis division last week. I wittered in social media about how the RAF UFO division was an excellent team who investigated unidentified incursions into UK airspace, assessed them for threats, and passed on reports of possible enemy action to the rest of the UK military. The RAF UFO division was never about finding aliens, it was about assessing unidentified airborne threats.
I'm now beginning to think I should have been a lot more vocal, writing to my MP instead. What if that had been a missile launch over Scotland instead of Norway?
I'd tend to agree with this. Chinatown will give you some of the best Chinese restaurants that London has to offer, but that isn't saying very much.
The Japanese restaurants, however, which tend towards nearby areas, are pretty top-notch IMHO. Particularly the sushi.
All of this comes with the caveat "...for a country which has no Pacific coastline". Despite our imperial heritage, the UK simply doesn't have the East Asian communities in the numbers that, say, California has.
Also, the handbrake for horse carts is on the outside of the vehicle. By sitting on the right, your stronger arm (right arm) is the one which operates the handbrake. The driver needs to have the best view of the road, so he needs to be as central as possible. Hence drive on the left, driver on the right.
The Ironbridge Gorge Museums (plural, more than one, mostly within 15-30 mins walk of each other) are indeed well worth a trip if you are keen on steampunk, engineering or Victorian / Industrial Revolution history.
However Ironbridge itself is a bit of a bugger to get to. Train from Euston to Birmingham New Street, change for Telford Central, bus or expensive taxi from Telford Central. Total journey time 3 hours if you're lucky and all the connections fall in line.
Given that you should spend a whole day at Blists Hill open-air museum alone, which includes an entire Victorian town, two or three foundries, a canal system, a funfair, two mineshafts and a whole lot of other stuff, I strongly recommend booking a hotel there for at least one night. The Swan Hotel and the Tontine Hotel are both perfectly okay (but not spectacular) and will put you in the centre of Ironbridge, easy walk or very short taxi ride to most attractions. If you've got more cash and want something larger, posher and quieter, the Best Western Valley Hotel is further away from the museums but excellent quality.
The UK has a high population density which has some forseeable consequences. Hotel rooms will be small, especially in central London. Trains and busses will be crowded in rush hour - if you don't have to be travelling between 8-9:30am or 4:30-6:30pm, then don't.
If you want oriental food, then Chinatown (Soho), just off Leicester Square and a 3-minute walk from Picadilly Circus, does exactly what it says on the tin.
Set aside 20 quid to have proper Afternoon Tea, 3pm onwards at the Terrace Bar in Harrods department store. Ask the besuited concierges for this specific bar (there are many). Ignore anyone who says Harrods is touristy; you are a tourist, so enjoy it and soak up the atmosphere. Service at Harrods is far better than at Fortnum & Mason, even if the prices match.
Do you like engineering? Break up a tube journey by having a look around St Pancras railway station, a marvel of Victorian ironwork itself, and where the rather swish Eurostar train starts its 200mph journey to Paris. Still engineering based, visit the Thames Barrier, a moving metal marvel which stops London from flooding.
Take the Docklands Light Railway monorail (included in your underground tube train ticket) to East India station and gawp at Telehouse Docklands. Note how British police do not carry pistols. Oh no. If they're going to carry a gun, they carry an assault rifle.
Visit the Grenwich Observatory, home of the GMT zero line and note with amusement that, although us British have given up most of our Empire, we still tell the rest of the world when to wake up and when to go to bed.
Walk past Buckingham Palace but make sure you also walk past St James Palace, only two blocks away, which is much older and has far more history.
Really, really, make sure you take a compact umbrella.
Take your laptop. Make sure your hotel has WiFi. Use the WiFi without changing the settings and without fear; the US uses a couple of extra radio frequencies that the UK doesn't, but since all the access points / routers will be British, your laptop will only lock on to the British frequencies, so it isn't a real issue. You absolutely will not get hassle for this.
Forget internet kiosks. They're as crappy in the UK as they are everywhere else in the world. Even being quaintly retro-fitted into a traditional red phone box with an innovative stainless steel vandal-proof trackball doesn't detract from the universal crappiness of internet kiosks in general. If you absolutely must, use a proper Internet cafe, but even so you'll be better off with your own laptop and free WiFi at a normal cafe. Lots and lots of cafes offer free WiFi. You can also get pay-for WiFi at many pubs, and those which are part of the British Telecom BT Openzone network will allow you to carry over WiFi credit from pub to another pub.
Take only one British plug adaptor (you can buy them at the airport) but take a multi-way gang lead. That way you can plug multiple American electronic devices into one British socket. Hotels the world over have a shortage of sockets, this is no different in the UK, so make the most of one socket rather than buying converters for several.
Make sure your cell phone is compatible with GSM/3G/UTMS and that your cellular provider is aware that you are travelling to the UK.
The British Museum is pretty good, albiet small, and offers a lot which American museums don't. Bear in mind that the Rosetta Stone is not as large as you might imagine. The Science Museum covers pretty much the same things as other science museums in other capital cities around the world, it's good but not particularly different from what you have back in the US, unless you desperately, desperately want to see a working version of Babbage's 250-year-old mechanical computer. If you want a second museum day, consider the Victoria and Albert museum which has lots of steampunk and design things.
If you have only one day out of London, visit Bletchley Park, the WWII codebreaking base with lots of old computers. You can catch a train from Euston station, takes about 45 mins. If you have a second day out, visit Oxford, the quaint picturesque university city with Cotswold stone buildings and lots of really distinctive museums. You can catch a train from Paddington station, takes about an hour. Neither Bletchley nor Oxford train station are in the middle of where you want to be (it's difficult to plan infrastructure in towns built a thousand years ago), so expect some walking.
Absolutely do not hire a car. Firstly, the steering wheel and handbrake will be on the wrong side of the car, secondly it's expensive, thirdly the roads are significantly more crowded and more wiggly than you are used to, and fourthly we have lots and lots of roundabouts which are entirely different to four-way stops in ways which you can probably not even imagine.
Taxis are expensive. Use the plentiful and frequent underground (subway train) service, buy an all-day or all-week pass. This pass will also cover you for the busses.
Get the London Popout Map. This covers the main pedestrian areas, underground map and bus routes in a very compact form, slips easily into a small pocket and uses a very geeky, very neat origami folding method which means you can quickly and discretely open it in a confined space, without looking like a potential mugging victim.
Get an Underground Overground tube map. You can buy these from dispensers on the underground platforms. They show the actual physical route and actual physical distances the tube trains take; the traditional symbolic map doesn't demonstrate the real distances between stops. You
If you're using a cell phone in an urban area (ie. more than 2 cell towers nearby), GPS is irrelevent. A sufficiently authorised person (or sufficiently good hacker / social engineer) can locate you using cellphone signal triangulation, regardless of whether you have GPS or not.
Quite. Unless your job is in astro-navigation looking after one of 30-odd low Earth orbit satellites racing round the planet twice per day, there is absolutely zero chance that any GPS equipment you ever encounter will be a transmitter.
GPS receiver, yes. GSM transmitter, yes. UTMS transmitter, yes. CDMA transmitter, yes. Various other return path transmitters, yes.
GPS transmitter, no.
Thank god someone else noticed this too. My faith in humanity is restored; thank-you.
Am I the only person in the world who gets red-vision-throwing-stuff-Balmer-esque frustrated by the sheer number of nincompoops that believe that GPS has some kind of return path? Uninformed privacy nuts drive me up the bloody wall (as opposed to the informed ones, who I'm sure are jolly nice chaps all).
Alternatively, dig around in the second hand bookshops for Fighting Fantasy Role Playing Game. The rule system from the "choose your own adventure" d6-based novels, but adapted for multiplayer RPGs.
Unsurprisingly your straw man argument is not what I'm suggesting. Libel relies not only on proof of truth, but also proof of harm. A US citizen making a supportive comment about his national team, is unlikely to be considered harmful to the Honduran team.
Where we have got it wrong, though, is in the current English and Welsh burden of proof, for libel only, for the defendant to prove that what he wrote was correct. This is an unusual quirk specific to libel in English and Welsh law, and I'm pretty certain that in all other situations, the burden of proof is indeed upon the accuser.
There is currently widespread agreement amongst political parties in England and Wales, that this needs to be changed, such that the burden of proof should be on the accuser to disprove the defendant's claims.
Ie. you would be held at legal risk anytime you said anything that was 1) DISPROVABLE by scientific experiment or beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law && 2) harmful (where && is a logical "and", both 1 and 2 must happen).
Yes. Probably because it's a lot cheaper over here than it is over there; we have universal means-tested state-subsidised access to legal process (ie. poor people can take rich people to court and have their case considered fairly), you do not.
It's a cultural issue. You seem to be trying to dismiss the possibility that a non-US culture may have different values, based solely on your experience of US culture. That's a failure to even contemplate an alternative. To weigh up non-US cultures, you need to consider examples of non-US cultures.
Freedom is not a universal good. The freedom of the rich to exert power over the poor, for instance. The English belief in "fairness", rather than freedom, is very different, and both succeeds and fails in very different ways.
Slashdot's use of US-centric concepts such as "freedom of speech" simply do not correctly address English and Welsh legal issues. We don't have it, we have something else.
Whether our alternative is better or worse overall, I wouldn't attempt to assess. But it is better in some places, and writers of headlines for globally significant websites should consider global cross-cultural differences. Or at minimum, be reasonably informed about cultural differences within the Anglosphere alone.
My post addresses cultural differences, nothing more.
The point is, just because the US and England/Wales share one common language (in the case of Wales, only one of two), one should not assume they should share common values. As an Englishman who frequently visits the USA, I'm frequently astounded by how the USA thinks that its values are the only possible ones. In particular, there seems to be an unquestioning "cult of constitutional rights", where the US education system seems to re-enforce this monoculturalism and by inference dismiss the values of other societies. English and Welsh values centre on fairness (protection by logical proof), whereas US values centre on freedom (protection from oppression).
Freedom of speech is, contrary to the opinions of most people I meet in the USA, not valued universally outside the USA. Sometimes there are good cultural reasons - bitter historical experience - why a country may not value freedom of speech.
Horses for courses. England and Wales are not on the same course as the USA.
A lot of Englishmen and other scientists throughout Europe died fighting for our right to be factually correct in the face of populist misconceptions, and although we certainly got our own back, you'll hopefully excuse me for pointing out that, historically, the propagation of populist misconceptions is an anathema to the hard-fought English experience, and that despite our Anglosphere connections, we do not and will never share the US' young-nation naive blind trust in "the freedom to be wrong". It will bite you in the arse, one day, sooner or later.
Quite. The key word being "judge". I'd trust the judicial process to be more correct than whatever rises to the top of the popularity list of a social network.
The Slashdot headline "restore" is wrong. England and Wales have never had freedom of speech. It cannot be "restored", it was never there.
We English and Welshmen value correctness above freedom. Now I'll readily admit that sometimes - often, perhaps - megacorporates and in particular the law firm Carter Fuck try to abuse the system so that they also prevent inconvenient truths from slipping out.
But would I want to live in a country where people can spread lies about each other with no legal redress? No. The problems with freedom of speech go way beyond shouting "Fire!" in a crowded cinema. England and Wales have always regarded responsibilities above freedoms; in this case, the responsibility to get the facts right.
The US gets many things right, and a few things wrong. The USA's bonkers bible-belt religious fundamentalism, for instance, would never be tolerated in England and Wales, as most of it is demonstrably factually incorrect. England and Wales would never suffer from a Kansas-style education system which promoted creationism over science. So, whilst I respect your country's achievements, please don't try to sell me "freedom of speech" as a cure-all. It's no more a cure-all than the snake oil which I understand your forefathers were so keen on selling in the days of your Wild West.
Yup. My three-year old loves "the penguin game" (Tux Racer). Ideally, at 5:30am, as in "Daddy, wake up, it is morning day. Can I play the penguin game please?".
The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was: > oracle: all knowledge, all questions, answered all the time > (that might change the way we think of our education system!)
And in response, thus spake the Oracle: > The internet's had an Oracle since 1975. > > ZOT!!! You owe the Oracle six woodchucks and a trowel.
This is very easy to answer. Large-scale war - real or perceived - creates large-scale innovation. WWI, WWII and the Cold War were major periods of innovation. Major technological advanced were required to address mass civillian bombings and casualties numbering in the millions. Plus, there was the need to be seen to be superior to the enemy.
Nowadays, a civillian casualty rate in the low thousands dominates a decade of news. Eight years of fighting in a foreign land nets the UK just 200 military deaths. And there really isn't much technological wow-factor to flushing tramp-like beardy-weirdies out of caves.
Frankly I'm happy with the slow pace of innovation. It indicates a lack of discontent.
Slashdot Mirror
The United States has many states which can have slightly different laws. Each state is made up of counties which often have separate police forces.
The United Kingdom has many kingdoms which can have slightly different laws. Each kingdom is made up of counties which often have separate police forces.
I fail to see what USians find so hard to grasp.
(Okay, so actually we have only two kingdoms plus one principality and one territory, and historically those are technically made up of smaller tribal kingdoms, but the basic modern formation of the United Kingdom really isn't so far removed from the United States. It all went wrong after King Ozric of Mercia, mark my words...)
TFA: "Me: ... What if I want to commit a serious crime in the future?"
And he wonders why the police want to keep tabs on him?
USA has a lower population density, so for many USAians, physical distance from any perceived threat may be sufficiently greater than the signal.
It's definitely that, and absolutely not that Americans don't read the manual or that Europeans think their neighbours are all crooks. Definitely.
"the average worker's wage is $15 a month" - No it isn't. Cuba does not use the dollar.
This is the usual bullshit propaganda from the kind of people that want you to believe that third-world workers on two dollars a day can't afford to eat. They arrive at this rubbish by pricing first-world food at first-world prices (herb ciabatta from a New York delicatessen at $4 a loaf, instead of flat bread baked by the family where the ingredients are grown by the local farmers and sold at market for less than quarter of a day's wages).
The developing world does not price its goods in dollars, nor do they shop at the deli counter. Get over it.
As a Brit, I was dissapointed that our Royal Air Force closed their UFO analysis division last week. I wittered in social media about how the RAF UFO division was an excellent team who investigated unidentified incursions into UK airspace, assessed them for threats, and passed on reports of possible enemy action to the rest of the UK military. The RAF UFO division was never about finding aliens, it was about assessing unidentified airborne threats.
I'm now beginning to think I should have been a lot more vocal, writing to my MP instead. What if that had been a missile launch over Scotland instead of Norway?
To be fair, Britain is pretty well served for fresh fish. What with it being an island in the Atlantic, and all.
I'd tend to agree with this. Chinatown will give you some of the best Chinese restaurants that London has to offer, but that isn't saying very much.
The Japanese restaurants, however, which tend towards nearby areas, are pretty top-notch IMHO. Particularly the sushi.
All of this comes with the caveat "...for a country which has no Pacific coastline". Despite our imperial heritage, the UK simply doesn't have the East Asian communities in the numbers that, say, California has.
Also, the handbrake for horse carts is on the outside of the vehicle. By sitting on the right, your stronger arm (right arm) is the one which operates the handbrake. The driver needs to have the best view of the road, so he needs to be as central as possible. Hence drive on the left, driver on the right.
(I grew up just down the road from Ironbridge)
The Ironbridge Gorge Museums (plural, more than one, mostly within 15-30 mins walk of each other) are indeed well worth a trip if you are keen on steampunk, engineering or Victorian / Industrial Revolution history.
However Ironbridge itself is a bit of a bugger to get to. Train from Euston to Birmingham New Street, change for Telford Central, bus or expensive taxi from Telford Central. Total journey time 3 hours if you're lucky and all the connections fall in line.
Given that you should spend a whole day at Blists Hill open-air museum alone, which includes an entire Victorian town, two or three foundries, a canal system, a funfair, two mineshafts and a whole lot of other stuff, I strongly recommend booking a hotel there for at least one night. The Swan Hotel and the Tontine Hotel are both perfectly okay (but not spectacular) and will put you in the centre of Ironbridge, easy walk or very short taxi ride to most attractions. If you've got more cash and want something larger, posher and quieter, the Best Western Valley Hotel is further away from the museums but excellent quality.
And some other things...
The UK has a high population density which has some forseeable consequences. Hotel rooms will be small, especially in central London. Trains and busses will be crowded in rush hour - if you don't have to be travelling between 8-9:30am or 4:30-6:30pm, then don't.
If you want oriental food, then Chinatown (Soho), just off Leicester Square and a 3-minute walk from Picadilly Circus, does exactly what it says on the tin.
Set aside 20 quid to have proper Afternoon Tea, 3pm onwards at the Terrace Bar in Harrods department store. Ask the besuited concierges for this specific bar (there are many). Ignore anyone who says Harrods is touristy; you are a tourist, so enjoy it and soak up the atmosphere. Service at Harrods is far better than at Fortnum & Mason, even if the prices match.
Do you like engineering? Break up a tube journey by having a look around St Pancras railway station, a marvel of Victorian ironwork itself, and where the rather swish Eurostar train starts its 200mph journey to Paris. Still engineering based, visit the Thames Barrier, a moving metal marvel which stops London from flooding.
Take the Docklands Light Railway monorail (included in your underground tube train ticket) to East India station and gawp at Telehouse Docklands. Note how British police do not carry pistols. Oh no. If they're going to carry a gun, they carry an assault rifle.
Visit the Grenwich Observatory, home of the GMT zero line and note with amusement that, although us British have given up most of our Empire, we still tell the rest of the world when to wake up and when to go to bed.
Walk past Buckingham Palace but make sure you also walk past St James Palace, only two blocks away, which is much older and has far more history.
Really, really, make sure you take a compact umbrella.
Take your laptop. Make sure your hotel has WiFi. Use the WiFi without changing the settings and without fear; the US uses a couple of extra radio frequencies that the UK doesn't, but since all the access points / routers will be British, your laptop will only lock on to the British frequencies, so it isn't a real issue. You absolutely will not get hassle for this.
Forget internet kiosks. They're as crappy in the UK as they are everywhere else in the world. Even being quaintly retro-fitted into a traditional red phone box with an innovative stainless steel vandal-proof trackball doesn't detract from the universal crappiness of internet kiosks in general. If you absolutely must, use a proper Internet cafe, but even so you'll be better off with your own laptop and free WiFi at a normal cafe. Lots and lots of cafes offer free WiFi. You can also get pay-for WiFi at many pubs, and those which are part of the British Telecom BT Openzone network will allow you to carry over WiFi credit from pub to another pub.
Take only one British plug adaptor (you can buy them at the airport) but take a multi-way gang lead. That way you can plug multiple American electronic devices into one British socket. Hotels the world over have a shortage of sockets, this is no different in the UK, so make the most of one socket rather than buying converters for several.
Make sure your cell phone is compatible with GSM/3G/UTMS and that your cellular provider is aware that you are travelling to the UK.
The British Museum is pretty good, albiet small, and offers a lot which American museums don't. Bear in mind that the Rosetta Stone is not as large as you might imagine. The Science Museum covers pretty much the same things as other science museums in other capital cities around the world, it's good but not particularly different from what you have back in the US, unless you desperately, desperately want to see a working version of Babbage's 250-year-old mechanical computer. If you want a second museum day, consider the Victoria and Albert museum which has lots of steampunk and design things.
If you have only one day out of London, visit Bletchley Park, the WWII codebreaking base with lots of old computers. You can catch a train from Euston station, takes about 45 mins. If you have a second day out, visit Oxford, the quaint picturesque university city with Cotswold stone buildings and lots of really distinctive museums. You can catch a train from Paddington station, takes about an hour. Neither Bletchley nor Oxford train station are in the middle of where you want to be (it's difficult to plan infrastructure in towns built a thousand years ago), so expect some walking.
Absolutely do not hire a car. Firstly, the steering wheel and handbrake will be on the wrong side of the car, secondly it's expensive, thirdly the roads are significantly more crowded and more wiggly than you are used to, and fourthly we have lots and lots of roundabouts which are entirely different to four-way stops in ways which you can probably not even imagine.
Taxis are expensive. Use the plentiful and frequent underground (subway train) service, buy an all-day or all-week pass. This pass will also cover you for the busses.
Get the London Popout Map. This covers the main pedestrian areas, underground map and bus routes in a very compact form, slips easily into a small pocket and uses a very geeky, very neat origami folding method which means you can quickly and discretely open it in a confined space, without looking like a potential mugging victim.
Get an Underground Overground tube map. You can buy these from dispensers on the underground platforms. They show the actual physical route and actual physical distances the tube trains take; the traditional symbolic map doesn't demonstrate the real distances between stops. You
If you're using a cell phone in an urban area (ie. more than 2 cell towers nearby), GPS is irrelevent. A sufficiently authorised person (or sufficiently good hacker / social engineer) can locate you using cellphone signal triangulation, regardless of whether you have GPS or not.
GPS is not the boogeyman here.
Quite. Unless your job is in astro-navigation looking after one of 30-odd low Earth orbit satellites racing round the planet twice per day, there is absolutely zero chance that any GPS equipment you ever encounter will be a transmitter.
GPS receiver, yes. GSM transmitter, yes. UTMS transmitter, yes. CDMA transmitter, yes. Various other return path transmitters, yes.
GPS transmitter, no.
Thank god someone else noticed this too. My faith in humanity is restored; thank-you.
Then the privacy concern is "whatever they are using for the return path" (eg. GSM, CDMA, UTMS) and NOT GPS itself.
Am I the only person in the world who gets red-vision-throwing-stuff-Balmer-esque frustrated by the sheer number of nincompoops that believe that GPS has some kind of return path? Uninformed privacy nuts drive me up the bloody wall (as opposed to the informed ones, who I'm sure are jolly nice chaps all).
Fed up with complexity and commerce? Want brevity and simplicity?
http://microlite20.net/
Core rules fit on 8 sides of A6 paper.
Alternatively, dig around in the second hand bookshops for Fighting Fantasy Role Playing Game. The rule system from the "choose your own adventure" d6-based novels, but adapted for multiplayer RPGs.
Unsurprisingly your straw man argument is not what I'm suggesting. Libel relies not only on proof of truth, but also proof of harm. A US citizen making a supportive comment about his national team, is unlikely to be considered harmful to the Honduran team.
Where we have got it wrong, though, is in the current English and Welsh burden of proof, for libel only, for the defendant to prove that what he wrote was correct. This is an unusual quirk specific to libel in English and Welsh law, and I'm pretty certain that in all other situations, the burden of proof is indeed upon the accuser.
There is currently widespread agreement amongst political parties in England and Wales, that this needs to be changed, such that the burden of proof should be on the accuser to disprove the defendant's claims.
Ie. you would be held at legal risk anytime you said anything that was 1) DISPROVABLE by scientific experiment or beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law && 2) harmful (where && is a logical "and", both 1 and 2 must happen).
Do you trust the judicial process more
Yes. Probably because it's a lot cheaper over here than it is over there; we have universal means-tested state-subsidised access to legal process (ie. poor people can take rich people to court and have their case considered fairly), you do not.
It's a cultural issue. You seem to be trying to dismiss the possibility that a non-US culture may have different values, based solely on your experience of US culture. That's a failure to even contemplate an alternative. To weigh up non-US cultures, you need to consider examples of non-US cultures.
Freedom is not a universal good. The freedom of the rich to exert power over the poor, for instance. The English belief in "fairness", rather than freedom, is very different, and both succeeds and fails in very different ways.
Slashdot's use of US-centric concepts such as "freedom of speech" simply do not correctly address English and Welsh legal issues. We don't have it, we have something else.
Whether our alternative is better or worse overall, I wouldn't attempt to assess. But it is better in some places, and writers of headlines for globally significant websites should consider global cross-cultural differences. Or at minimum, be reasonably informed about cultural differences within the Anglosphere alone.
My post addresses cultural differences, nothing more.
The point is, just because the US and England/Wales share one common language (in the case of Wales, only one of two), one should not assume they should share common values. As an Englishman who frequently visits the USA, I'm frequently astounded by how the USA thinks that its values are the only possible ones. In particular, there seems to be an unquestioning "cult of constitutional rights", where the US education system seems to re-enforce this monoculturalism and by inference dismiss the values of other societies. English and Welsh values centre on fairness (protection by logical proof), whereas US values centre on freedom (protection from oppression).
Freedom of speech is, contrary to the opinions of most people I meet in the USA, not valued universally outside the USA. Sometimes there are good cultural reasons - bitter historical experience - why a country may not value freedom of speech.
Horses for courses. England and Wales are not on the same course as the USA.
Whose correctness? That which can be deduced by repeatable scientific experiment, or subject to the rigours of proof beyond doubt in a court of law.
Openness isn't usually a bad thing, but the propagation of falsehoods and unproven nonsense is most definitely a bad thing.
Us Englishmen kicked out the Pope more than four hundred years ago, partially I'll admit because our King fancied a new shag, but mostly because our scholars were fed up of the Catholic church insisting upon demonstrably false populist nonsense, such as the Earth being fixed in space or gravity accelerating heavy objects faster than lighter ones.
A lot of Englishmen and other scientists throughout Europe died fighting for our right to be factually correct in the face of populist misconceptions, and although we certainly got our own back, you'll hopefully excuse me for pointing out that, historically, the propagation of populist misconceptions is an anathema to the hard-fought English experience, and that despite our Anglosphere connections, we do not and will never share the US' young-nation naive blind trust in "the freedom to be wrong". It will bite you in the arse, one day, sooner or later.
Quite. The key word being "judge". I'd trust the judicial process to be more correct than whatever rises to the top of the popularity list of a social network.
The Slashdot headline "restore" is wrong. England and Wales have never had freedom of speech. It cannot be "restored", it was never there.
We English and Welshmen value correctness above freedom. Now I'll readily admit that sometimes - often, perhaps - megacorporates and in particular the law firm Carter Fuck try to abuse the system so that they also prevent inconvenient truths from slipping out.
But would I want to live in a country where people can spread lies about each other with no legal redress? No. The problems with freedom of speech go way beyond shouting "Fire!" in a crowded cinema. England and Wales have always regarded responsibilities above freedoms; in this case, the responsibility to get the facts right.
The US gets many things right, and a few things wrong. The USA's bonkers bible-belt religious fundamentalism, for instance, would never be tolerated in England and Wales, as most of it is demonstrably factually incorrect. England and Wales would never suffer from a Kansas-style education system which promoted creationism over science. So, whilst I respect your country's achievements, please don't try to sell me "freedom of speech" as a cure-all. It's no more a cure-all than the snake oil which I understand your forefathers were so keen on selling in the days of your Wild West.
Yup. My three-year old loves "the penguin game" (Tux Racer). Ideally, at 5:30am, as in "Daddy, wake up, it is morning day. Can I play the penguin game please?".
The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
> oracle: all knowledge, all questions, answered all the time
> (that might change the way we think of our education system!)
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
> The internet's had an Oracle since 1975.
>
> ZOT!!! You owe the Oracle six woodchucks and a trowel.
This is very easy to answer. Large-scale war - real or perceived - creates large-scale innovation. WWI, WWII and the Cold War were major periods of innovation. Major technological advanced were required to address mass civillian bombings and casualties numbering in the millions. Plus, there was the need to be seen to be superior to the enemy.
Nowadays, a civillian casualty rate in the low thousands dominates a decade of news. Eight years of fighting in a foreign land nets the UK just 200 military deaths. And there really isn't much technological wow-factor to flushing tramp-like beardy-weirdies out of caves.
Frankly I'm happy with the slow pace of innovation. It indicates a lack of discontent.