Wow. What an eloquent argument. And people say the art of debate is dead.
By the way, as a Texan, you should be pissed off at Dubya rather than proud of him - after all, it was your state taxes that helped make him rich, courtesy of all the money, tax breaks and other incentives thrown at the Texas Rangers ballclub. Selling his stake in the Rangers (a stake which he didn't pay a penny for, by the way) is how Dubya made his money. Heck, he even managed to make more money on that deal than his granddaddy did laundering Nazi cash.
Between 1992 and 2000, the US was the sole champion of crushing sanctions against Iraq. The US bombed Iraq several times in that period, including 1998.
Nice definition of "sole" you've got there, bud. If by "sole" you mean only one apart from Britain, etc then you're spot on.
This is the same Iraq that supposedly didn't have any WMDs.
Uh, it didn't have them then and it doesn't have them now. Or did the coalition suddenly find a massive stockpile of them in the last five minutes?
Clinton also shot cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Africa which missed more than they hit to deflect attention from the Monica Lewinski case.
Too true. But those measures weren't exactly opposed by Republicans at the time, were they?
Last time I checked Germany and France were running record deficits too. Are those Bush's fault too?
Great argument there, bud - "Hey, it's OK that the government is screwing our economy because Germany and France aren't in great shape either!". Nice thinking. By that rationale it's OK for the US to start chopping off the hands of thieves because it works fine in Saudi Arabia and to pass a law granting government officials permanent immunity from prosecution because Italy's done so. Yeah, right.
The US, Germany and France might be running record deficits but Britain isn't. So it is possible to practise sound financial management of an economy. It's just not being done in the US, France and Germany right now.
(Oh, and by the way, why not do some proper research? The reason why Germany is financially strapped is reunification - West Germany took on East Germany at the end of the Cold War and has basically been supporting, maintaining and rebuilding it ever since. Imagine the population of the US doubling overnight but the economy, budgets, etc staying the same and you'll have some idea about how hard a task Germany has faced over the last decade or so.)
You castigate the grandparent poster for referring to the Houston Astros rather than the Texas Rangers and come back at him with a jibe about Canada having "a baseball team (for now)", an obvious reference to the soon to be relocated (or contracted) Montreal Expos but, somehow, in your haste to prove your encyclopaedic knowledge of MLB you've forgotten the Toronto Blue Jays.
Last time I checked, Toronto was in Canada too. Heck, just to help you remember the US Marines Corps screwed up during the Blue Jays 1992 World Series contest with Atlanta by flying the Canadian flag upside down! D'oh!
God, you don't even know Toronto has a MLB team and that Toronto is in Canada and you're laughing at someone else because he confused the two teams in Texas. Just how dumb do you look now, buddy?
Q: Which of the states are most closely associated with the space industry?
A: Texas (Houston, home of NASA) and Florida (site of the Kennedy Space Centre).
Q: Which of the states are most closely associated with the Bush family?
A: Texas (where George W. was Governor) and Florida (where Jeb Bush is Governor).
Wow. What an amazing coincidence!
Now Texas is a republican stronghold and real Bush country. So sending a few billion dollars Texas's way is a great way of saying thank you to the folks back home.
On the other hand, Florida is up for grabs. Remember, when the Supreme Court stopped the recount process after the last Presidential election, Al Gore was slightly ahead, and looked like he would have won the Florida vote. Of course, it wouldn't have been so close if all thousands of black voters (90 percent of whom voted for Gore) hadn't been illegally stripped of their votes by wrongly being labelled convicted felons, if the butterfly ballots hadn't have been used (at Pat Buchanon admitted himself, those Jewish voters weren't voting for him), if those chads hadn't been such an issue and if the Republicans hadn't got away with having hundreds of overseas ballots that were clearly not properly filled in time and/or authenticated count in their favour.
Either way, even if you say that Bush was the legitimate winner (which, as I illustrated is a highly contentious point), you have to concede that the Florida voting process was far from perfect and that the state is a key battleground for next year's election.
So, given that Florida's where the war was won/lost(/stolen) last time around, it's doesn't hurt Bush 2004 if Florida's got a big reason to feel good about the current administration.
It's a bit like the illegal steel import tarriffs. The Bush administration knew that they were illegal, the knew that eventually they would be forced by the WTO to abolish them or face severe consequences, but they did their job. While the tarriffs were in place, US steel manufacturers got a nice boost, despite being inefficient compared to their global counterparts, and lots of people in the steel industry had a good reason to vote Republican rather than Democrat when they last went to the ballot box.
Yep, if you want something in business or politics there's nothing like an old-fashioned bribe to grease the wheels and open the doors.
OK, I did have a nice, long rebuttal of your post but it disappeared into the ether just as I was about to hit the "submit" button. So here's a light version.
1. 127 cameras, covering a city with a population of over 100,000 and to which many more commute to for work is not a camera on every street corner. It's perhaps a camera on every major road junction, a few dozen cameras in the main shopping precinct and around major public buildings.
2. Being spotted by 300 cameras a day in London is some feat. Care to point out who makes that claim and how that 300 is reached? Perhaps if you went into London by public transport, visited Oxford Street (which has a higher turnover than the Mall of America), went into every department store there and visited every floor within, and then went on sightseeing tour of major public buildings, you might get caught on camera (a few seconds at a time) a couple of hundred times.
Most of those would be in the stores though and i) the stores don't share their footage in real-time with anyone; and ii) they are only interested in shoplifters stealing from them, within the confines of their property. If you don't want to be filmed shopping, don't go into any store that has a CCTV camera. Duh.
3. I am not "*SO* clueless" as you suggest. I freely admit there are CCTV cameras around, and that if you use public transport, go into a department store, visit a public building or square then you're bound to be caught on camera. But what I strongly refute is the claim as if it were fact that there are CCTVs on every street corner and that they are somehow linked to form a national monitoring network. This isn't just ridiculous, it's a bare-faced lie.
(Oh, and when I said "If they were there, I would see them.", it was in reply to the claim that there were CCTVs on every street corner. Which there clearly aren't. Thanks for taking that quote completely out of context.)
4. The amount of money spent on CCTVs in the UK, and the amount of coverage acheived by them is laughably small, especially when compared to elsewhere. Perhaps you should check your own links? This is what the penultimate link you supplied had to say about CCTV usage in the US:
Closed Circuit TV - United States
The United States is also experiencing massive growth in the implementation and use of CCTV equipment. Military sources refer to closed circuit television as the' force multiplier'. An apt name when we consider the sheer impossibility of any jurisdiction affording the number of staff it would require to have a 'cop on every corner'.
CCTV a huge success in the U.S...
The success of CCTV in reducing crime in the US is apparent. According to an article in the New York Times - New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir directly attributes a 44% drop in crime statistics in one regional housing installation project to the closed circuit tv cameras. Huge reductions have also been reported in traffic violations (running red lights for example) and in the areas of vandalism, theft, assault and public mischief.
Commercial and and industrial clients spending big bucks on the CCTV industry...
The demand for closed circuit television equipment is reflected in the statistics available from the industry's suppliers. Businesses in the US spend approximately $100 billion dollars a year on the purchase of high-tech security equipment - over 50% of the total sales of closed circuit tv products are to industrial or commercial clients.
20% of all U.S homeowners have some kind of closed circuit tv equipment...
Worthy of note, however, is the estimated growth in the residential security market. Approximately 20% of all homes in the US have some type of closed circuit television monitoring and alarm equipment installed. An estimated 95% of home owners report that these CCTV security systems are an effective deterrent to intruders and make them feel safer. Statistics reflect that a home without a security
Gee, thanks. I knew someone would bring this up. Just how ethical was the US Lend Lease policy? Was it really the best way to help Britain and France? Should the Lend Lease be something that the US should actually be proud of?
Let's imagine your house is on fire and your next door neigbour says he'll help you save your house but before he does so, you'll have to agree to pay for the use of his hosepipe and water - just how would you feel? Wouldn't you feel happier if he just gave you the stuff, and helped himself?
Yes, Lend Lease helped Britain avoid invasion. But it wasn't as much help as the US actually getting involved itself. Remember, the Lend Lease programme started before Germany declared war on the US, so it's fair to say that if that declaration of war hadn't come Lend Lease would have been the full-scale of the US's involvement of the war in Europe.
Someone who rushes to your help at the first sign of trouble is a true friend. Someone who rushes to sell you something is an opportunist. Churchill always regarded Lend Lease as being analogous to the latter of these, and I have no reason to disagree with his belief.
1. The congestion charging cameras are at the boundaries of the congestion charging zone, not all over it. Most importantly, the cameras are focused on the roads, and are looking for license plate numbers, not at the pavement looking for individuals.
2. Of course some of the cameras installed in some locations have people monitoring them in real time - traffic monitoring cameras would be pretty useless if you didn't actually inform people that there's a three mile tailback ahead right away, and the same goes for security cameras in a shopping centre or those on a Tube platform.
But to suggest that there's a camera on every street corner and that they are all being monitored in real time by someone is ridiculous, which is what people have suggested here. Such an endeavour would take a disproportionately large number of resources, as it did in East Germany, which eventually collapsed partially because it could no longer maintain that level of surveillance.
3. 78 million pounds today is peanuts, as it was when that scheme was announced in 2001. Just how much do you think it costs to buy a camera, install and use it? A fair amount I'd guess. So a total budget of 78 million isn't going to buy you 78 million's worth of cameras. I'd be surprised if the amount of that budget that was actually spent on the cameras itself exceeded 25 percent.
4. Your Slashdot links are barely relevant. The first relates to Borders, the bookshop, and what a private company does with its in-store security cameras is hardly relevant in this discussion. The second links to a story that's no longer there and is just as full of people discussing the BBC license fee as much as they are discussing CCTV.
And the third is about how congestion charging cameras ultimately controlled by the Mayor of London weren't in use while a protest march took place so that maintenance could be performed on them (which seems to be sensible). So cameras used to spot car license plate numbers, controlled by a man who was against the war, were being repaired rather than used when an anti-war march took place. Gee, and that's a conspiracy nowadays? That those cameras weren't turned on? Wow.
1. If they were there, I would see them. (Where do you think they're hidden? Inside street lights behind frosted glass coverings?)
2. If they were there, someone would be being hired to monitor them. (Where are all these people that are supposedly watching us? Are they invisible, too?)
3. If they were there, we'd be able to see them in some budget breakdown somewhere. (Maintaining such a huge network costs money, as East Germany found out.)
4. If they were there, crime would be practically non-existant. (You'd just track criminals back to their homes.)
5. If they were there, then it would be a major talking point. (They're not, so it isn't.)
QED.
Seeing "tons of cameras" in shopping centres, train stations, at major road junctions and outside sensitive buildings, most of which will be owned by the private organisations they serve and totally isolated from any external network, isn't the same thing as a camera on every street corner, which is where this thread started.
And as I pointed out, I'd see a similar number of cameras elsewhere in the world, regardless of whether I was in New York, Paris or Tokyo. Or don't you think that CCTVs are deployed outside the UK?
Maybe you should watch some of the shows they run on TLC or DSC showing some footage of UK police monitored cameras. Yes, they do monitor just about all the roadways and I believe most pedestrian streets in cities are covered with steerable, zoomable, recording cameras with a human operator.
Usually they are going after some skateboarder or something stupid, and it is *not* quite big brother, but it is far from nothing to be worried about. Way to dismiss legitimate privacy concerns with this gem...
Rather than just blindly believing what I see on TV, I prefer the evidence of my own two eyes. I live in London. Currently, I live in a suburb, but I've also lived in the heart of town. There aren't cameras on every street corner. There aren't cameras linked by some all-seeing network run by some all-seeing network. So that blows your "I believe most pedestrian streets in cities are covered with steerable, zoomable, recording cameras with a human operator" opinion right out of the water doesn't it?
And if that's true for London, and for every other British city that I've been to, what does that say about the accuracy of a widesweeping claim that every street corner in Britain is covered by a CCTV camera watching us all?
Legitimate privacy concerns? Huh, well perhaps if there actually were CCTV cameras on every street corner, and if there actually were being constantly monitored and if there actually were some way someone could be tracked by them then perhaps you might have a point. But I fail to see what you have to worry about when all this is in the realm of fiction.
1. The US involvement in WWI was minimal. Just look at the history of that conflict - the US didn't show up until after the majority of the fighting had been done, and played only a token role in the few battles that took part on the western front after it joined the war.
2. The number of US troops in Europe during WWII only exceeded that of Britain in late 1944, well after D-Day and well after the war in Europe became a forgone conclusion.
Did the US "save" Europe from Nazism? Well, it helped but don't kid your self that Britain, Russia, Canada, etc couldn't have defeated Hitler eventually if the US had continued its isolationist policy. Lest you forget, the US didn't declare war on Germany, it was Germany that declared war on the US.
And, as another poster pointed out, the key turning point of WWII in Europe wasn't D-Day, it was Stalingrad. Before Stalingrad, Germany had never retreated. After Stalingrad, that's all it did, mainly due to the huge sacrifices made by the Russian Army and the Russian people.
3. Involvement in the former Yugoslavia wasn't restricted to the US. NATO and UN both operated in that conflict, and soldiers and peacekeepers from just about every major country in Europe played their part. And unlike the US, those European nations weren't afraid to commit troops on the ground.
Just because the only coverage you saw on CNN was of various missions performed by the USAF (alongside the RAF, etc) that doesn't negate the efforts of those other nations and their servicemen that were involved more directly.
Please, if you're going to talk about the US rushing to the aid of its European allies, etc then at least try to be accurate. The American servicemen who served in those conflicts would be the first to acknowledge that they didn't do so alone, and that they joined the fight once it was in full swing on every occasion, so it wouldn't kill you to do the same. Revisionist statements like the ones in your post only serve to drive a greater wedge between the US and its European allies.
Question: Why is it that many people in the UK are get so upset about the idea of national ID cards, when nobody seems to mind (or notice) other even more "big brother" things that go on in the UK, such as the national grid of video cameras on every street corner and road?
The above sentence is a work of pure fiction. That people still buy this crap is beyond belief. There is no national grid of video cameras at all - you just have to walk out your door to disprove this crackpot claim.
Yes, there are CCTV cameras in places like shopping centres, train stations, major road junctions and outside sensitive buildings but they are there to monitor customer flow, for passenger safety, to spot accidents and traffic jams, and to act as a deterrent against terrorists rather than monitor the population. And that's no different from any other country in the world, where shopping centres, train stations, major road junctions and sensitive buildings have CCTV cameras installed.
So, please, stop spreading such stupid FUD and stop moderating it as "insightful", when it's about as inaccurate as saying the Statue of Liberty is in Vietnam or that the White House is a department store.
And I thought I was pretty clear in my reply; 250,000 men, 0.5 percent of the population, is a pretty big military force for an island nation that is 100 percent committed to national defence only. Japan's constitution expressly rules out the idea of anything other than a defensive capability, which is why the issue of sending Japanese soldiers on UN peacekeeping missions is a no-no. For a nation that has no military commitment outside its own borders, and no land borders to patrol, 250,000 is a huge force to maintain.
Yes, in the early post-war years, the burden of defending Japan's fell upon the shoulders of the Allies, but it's been a long time since the US, Britain, etc were Japan's last line of defence. And, as I acknowledged before, Japan, just like every other nation on the planet, benefits from mutual defence treaties with its allies. But to suggest that, in the 21st century, that Japan is still reliant on the US or anyone else for defence is laughable.
The only possible scenario I can imagine under which Japan might be threatened would be overt Chinese aggression and invasion. And, as China is becoming more and more reliant on trade with the west, and such aggression would polarise world opinion against it, shut down foreign trade, etc, the chances of that happening are almost astronomical. North Korea doesn't have the resources to mount a credible threat, and Russia is clearly not the evil empire that Ronald Reagan once portrayed. Under such circumstances, the JDF is more than equipped for its role.
Mea culpa on the GDP/budget thing - I got it right the first time but, in my haste, got it wrong the second time.
As to the examples of the US and Russia (I think you'll find that the USSR no longer exists), the US is top of the military spending pile, with Russia being one of the others in the top five. Amazingly, the US manages to outspend the rest of the top five put together, which either says something about how overmanned the US's armed forces are (in comparison to the threats it faces), or how inefficiently that money is spent.
That the US still maintains its "two wars" military doctrine - being able to fight two conflicts of the scale of Vietnam simultaneously without compromising its defensive capability - says a lot about how much redundancy there is within its current military strength.
Yet despite this the current Bush administration is ramping up military spend, not decreasing it. Surely some of that money could be better spent elsewhere?
Six percent of the budget going to the military is not a particularly high figure. For example, the US spent about 3.2% of its entire GDP on the military in 1999, and the USSR spent around 15% of its GDP in the 1980s. North Korea spends an unbelievable 34% of its GDP on its military.
Uh, six percent of Japan's GDP is a heck of a lot of money, whereas 34 percent of North Korea's GDP is probably peanuts in comparison. After all, you're comparing one of the world's richest economies with one of its poorest. Put another way six percent of a lot is still a lot, whereas 34 percent of next to nothing is still next to nothing.
Don't forget that the only reason Japan could get away with this kind of behavior is because they have the big, bad US military standing behind them. If Japan had been standing alone for the past 57 years, a few hundred kilometers from China, North Korea, and the USSR, restricting their military's power would have been a serious career-limiting move for any politician.
Uh, Japan's military spending is the fifth highest in the world. They take national defence very seriously, and they do not rely solely on others to shield them. Perhaps that was the case in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but it hasn't been the case for some considerable time now.
Under the Allied occupation of Japan, which lasted until 1952, the National Police Reserve was established, in 1950. In 1954 the NPR became the Japanese Self Defence Force (JDF), with Ground, Maritime and Air branches. The JDF's mandate is defensive only, and its sole purpose is to preserve peace, public order and Japanese independence and safety. Even sending JDF forces overseas for peacekeeping missions is beyond the mandate set out in the Japanese constitution.
Over 6 percent of Japan's national budget is spent on defence and 250,000 personnel serve in its forces (out of a population of approximately 125 million).
Japan may buy most of its miltary hardware from overseas, from the US and other western powers, and it may have mutual defence treaties with the US and others, but that doesn't mean that it's dependent on any other country to maintain its own security any more.
Jeez, you could write up a script in five minutes that would search a story for company and product names (hint: look for capitalisation) and check to see what other related stories there have been recently. Flag those for the editor to briefly glimpse over before hitting the "approved" button and you've saved yourself 99 percent of dupes.
Perhaps we have a right to wipe humanity of the face of the planet, perhaps we don't. But I don't see how we have a right to wipe out all the countless other species and to poison the earth, sky and the seas.
To use a famous quote, this is a beautiful planet, it's a miracle and we're destroying it.
(Cue a dozen posts from people who think environmental awareness is for only for hippies high as a kite.)
There's a series of books that were out years ago that were packed full of spoilers for all three films. They even had most of the stuff that's in the special edition DVDs and some of the stuff that didn't even get filmed. Now that's a spoiler.
That Tolkien dude sure had some sweet movie biz contacts. Harry Knowles eat your heart out.
Hmmm. Expocity for Metacity. An tool that's "an efficient means of switching between applications" and that "will present you a complete overview of all open windows [letting] you select the window, you want to switch to, visually".
Slashdot Mirror
As a Texan, I say FUCK YOU.
Wow. What an eloquent argument. And people say the art of debate is dead.
By the way, as a Texan, you should be pissed off at Dubya rather than proud of him - after all, it was your state taxes that helped make him rich, courtesy of all the money, tax breaks and other incentives thrown at the Texas Rangers ballclub. Selling his stake in the Rangers (a stake which he didn't pay a penny for, by the way) is how Dubya made his money. Heck, he even managed to make more money on that deal than his granddaddy did laundering Nazi cash.
Q. What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?"
A. I just post a question to ask slashdot, and have all the geeks trying to avoid troubleshooting at their jobs do it for me.
Heck, most Ask Slashdotters don't even bother with the first two options.
Between 1992 and 2000, the US was the sole champion of crushing sanctions against Iraq. The US bombed Iraq several times in that period, including 1998.
Nice definition of "sole" you've got there, bud. If by "sole" you mean only one apart from Britain, etc then you're spot on.
This is the same Iraq that supposedly didn't have any WMDs.
Uh, it didn't have them then and it doesn't have them now. Or did the coalition suddenly find a massive stockpile of them in the last five minutes?
Clinton also shot cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Africa which missed more than they hit to deflect attention from the Monica Lewinski case.
Too true. But those measures weren't exactly opposed by Republicans at the time, were they?
Last time I checked Germany and France were running record deficits too. Are those Bush's fault too?
Great argument there, bud - "Hey, it's OK that the government is screwing our economy because Germany and France aren't in great shape either!". Nice thinking. By that rationale it's OK for the US to start chopping off the hands of thieves because it works fine in Saudi Arabia and to pass a law granting government officials permanent immunity from prosecution because Italy's done so. Yeah, right.
The US, Germany and France might be running record deficits but Britain isn't. So it is possible to practise sound financial management of an economy. It's just not being done in the US, France and Germany right now.
(Oh, and by the way, why not do some proper research? The reason why Germany is financially strapped is reunification - West Germany took on East Germany at the end of the Cold War and has basically been supporting, maintaining and rebuilding it ever since. Imagine the population of the US doubling overnight but the economy, budgets, etc staying the same and you'll have some idea about how hard a task Germany has faced over the last decade or so.)
Oh, the irony.
You castigate the grandparent poster for referring to the Houston Astros rather than the Texas Rangers and come back at him with a jibe about Canada having "a baseball team (for now)", an obvious reference to the soon to be relocated (or contracted) Montreal Expos but, somehow, in your haste to prove your encyclopaedic knowledge of MLB you've forgotten the Toronto Blue Jays.
Last time I checked, Toronto was in Canada too. Heck, just to help you remember the US Marines Corps screwed up during the Blue Jays 1992 World Series contest with Atlanta by flying the Canadian flag upside down! D'oh!
God, you don't even know Toronto has a MLB team and that Toronto is in Canada and you're laughing at someone else because he confused the two teams in Texas. Just how dumb do you look now, buddy?
Q: Which of the states are most closely associated with the space industry?
A: Texas (Houston, home of NASA) and Florida (site of the Kennedy Space Centre).
Q: Which of the states are most closely associated with the Bush family?
A: Texas (where George W. was Governor) and Florida (where Jeb Bush is Governor).
Wow. What an amazing coincidence!
Now Texas is a republican stronghold and real Bush country. So sending a few billion dollars Texas's way is a great way of saying thank you to the folks back home.
On the other hand, Florida is up for grabs. Remember, when the Supreme Court stopped the recount process after the last Presidential election, Al Gore was slightly ahead, and looked like he would have won the Florida vote. Of course, it wouldn't have been so close if all thousands of black voters (90 percent of whom voted for Gore) hadn't been illegally stripped of their votes by wrongly being labelled convicted felons, if the butterfly ballots hadn't have been used (at Pat Buchanon admitted himself, those Jewish voters weren't voting for him), if those chads hadn't been such an issue and if the Republicans hadn't got away with having hundreds of overseas ballots that were clearly not properly filled in time and/or authenticated count in their favour.
Either way, even if you say that Bush was the legitimate winner (which, as I illustrated is a highly contentious point), you have to concede that the Florida voting process was far from perfect and that the state is a key battleground for next year's election.
So, given that Florida's where the war was won/lost(/stolen) last time around, it's doesn't hurt Bush 2004 if Florida's got a big reason to feel good about the current administration.
It's a bit like the illegal steel import tarriffs. The Bush administration knew that they were illegal, the knew that eventually they would be forced by the WTO to abolish them or face severe consequences, but they did their job. While the tarriffs were in place, US steel manufacturers got a nice boost, despite being inefficient compared to their global counterparts, and lots of people in the steel industry had a good reason to vote Republican rather than Democrat when they last went to the ballot box.
Yep, if you want something in business or politics there's nothing like an old-fashioned bribe to grease the wheels and open the doors.
Linux user blows own trumpet...
1. 127 cameras, covering a city with a population of over 100,000 and to which many more commute to for work is not a camera on every street corner. It's perhaps a camera on every major road junction, a few dozen cameras in the main shopping precinct and around major public buildings.
2. Being spotted by 300 cameras a day in London is some feat. Care to point out who makes that claim and how that 300 is reached? Perhaps if you went into London by public transport, visited Oxford Street (which has a higher turnover than the Mall of America), went into every department store there and visited every floor within, and then went on sightseeing tour of major public buildings, you might get caught on camera (a few seconds at a time) a couple of hundred times.
Most of those would be in the stores though and i) the stores don't share their footage in real-time with anyone; and ii) they are only interested in shoplifters stealing from them, within the confines of their property. If you don't want to be filmed shopping, don't go into any store that has a CCTV camera. Duh.
3. I am not "*SO* clueless" as you suggest. I freely admit there are CCTV cameras around, and that if you use public transport, go into a department store, visit a public building or square then you're bound to be caught on camera. But what I strongly refute is the claim as if it were fact that there are CCTVs on every street corner and that they are somehow linked to form a national monitoring network. This isn't just ridiculous, it's a bare-faced lie.
(Oh, and when I said "If they were there, I would see them.", it was in reply to the claim that there were CCTVs on every street corner. Which there clearly aren't. Thanks for taking that quote completely out of context.)
4. The amount of money spent on CCTVs in the UK, and the amount of coverage acheived by them is laughably small, especially when compared to elsewhere. Perhaps you should check your own links? This is what the penultimate link you supplied had to say about CCTV usage in the US:
Two words - lend lease.
Gee, thanks. I knew someone would bring this up. Just how ethical was the US Lend Lease policy? Was it really the best way to help Britain and France? Should the Lend Lease be something that the US should actually be proud of?
Let's imagine your house is on fire and your next door neigbour says he'll help you save your house but before he does so, you'll have to agree to pay for the use of his hosepipe and water - just how would you feel? Wouldn't you feel happier if he just gave you the stuff, and helped himself?
Yes, Lend Lease helped Britain avoid invasion. But it wasn't as much help as the US actually getting involved itself. Remember, the Lend Lease programme started before Germany declared war on the US, so it's fair to say that if that declaration of war hadn't come Lend Lease would have been the full-scale of the US's involvement of the war in Europe.
Someone who rushes to your help at the first sign of trouble is a true friend. Someone who rushes to sell you something is an opportunist. Churchill always regarded Lend Lease as being analogous to the latter of these, and I have no reason to disagree with his belief.
1. The congestion charging cameras are at the boundaries of the congestion charging zone, not all over it. Most importantly, the cameras are focused on the roads, and are looking for license plate numbers, not at the pavement looking for individuals.
2. Of course some of the cameras installed in some locations have people monitoring them in real time - traffic monitoring cameras would be pretty useless if you didn't actually inform people that there's a three mile tailback ahead right away, and the same goes for security cameras in a shopping centre or those on a Tube platform.
But to suggest that there's a camera on every street corner and that they are all being monitored in real time by someone is ridiculous, which is what people have suggested here. Such an endeavour would take a disproportionately large number of resources, as it did in East Germany, which eventually collapsed partially because it could no longer maintain that level of surveillance.
3. 78 million pounds today is peanuts, as it was when that scheme was announced in 2001. Just how much do you think it costs to buy a camera, install and use it? A fair amount I'd guess. So a total budget of 78 million isn't going to buy you 78 million's worth of cameras. I'd be surprised if the amount of that budget that was actually spent on the cameras itself exceeded 25 percent.
4. Your Slashdot links are barely relevant. The first relates to Borders, the bookshop, and what a private company does with its in-store security cameras is hardly relevant in this discussion. The second links to a story that's no longer there and is just as full of people discussing the BBC license fee as much as they are discussing CCTV.
And the third is about how congestion charging cameras ultimately controlled by the Mayor of London weren't in use while a protest march took place so that maintenance could be performed on them (which seems to be sensible). So cameras used to spot car license plate numbers, controlled by a man who was against the war, were being repaired rather than used when an anti-war march took place. Gee, and that's a conspiracy nowadays? That those cameras weren't turned on? Wow.
1. If they were there, I would see them. (Where do you think they're hidden? Inside street lights behind frosted glass coverings?)
2. If they were there, someone would be being hired to monitor them. (Where are all these people that are supposedly watching us? Are they invisible, too?)
3. If they were there, we'd be able to see them in some budget breakdown somewhere. (Maintaining such a huge network costs money, as East Germany found out.)
4. If they were there, crime would be practically non-existant. (You'd just track criminals back to their homes.)
5. If they were there, then it would be a major talking point. (They're not, so it isn't.)
QED.
Seeing "tons of cameras" in shopping centres, train stations, at major road junctions and outside sensitive buildings, most of which will be owned by the private organisations they serve and totally isolated from any external network, isn't the same thing as a camera on every street corner, which is where this thread started.
And as I pointed out, I'd see a similar number of cameras elsewhere in the world, regardless of whether I was in New York, Paris or Tokyo. Or don't you think that CCTVs are deployed outside the UK?
Maybe you should watch some of the shows they run on TLC or DSC showing some footage of UK police monitored cameras. Yes, they do monitor just about all the roadways and I believe most pedestrian streets in cities are covered with steerable, zoomable, recording cameras with a human operator.
Usually they are going after some skateboarder or something stupid, and it is *not* quite big brother, but it is far from nothing to be worried about. Way to dismiss legitimate privacy concerns with this gem...
Rather than just blindly believing what I see on TV, I prefer the evidence of my own two eyes. I live in London. Currently, I live in a suburb, but I've also lived in the heart of town. There aren't cameras on every street corner. There aren't cameras linked by some all-seeing network run by some all-seeing network. So that blows your "I believe most pedestrian streets in cities are covered with steerable, zoomable, recording cameras with a human operator" opinion right out of the water doesn't it?
And if that's true for London, and for every other British city that I've been to, what does that say about the accuracy of a widesweeping claim that every street corner in Britain is covered by a CCTV camera watching us all?
Legitimate privacy concerns? Huh, well perhaps if there actually were CCTV cameras on every street corner, and if there actually were being constantly monitored and if there actually were some way someone could be tracked by them then perhaps you might have a point. But I fail to see what you have to worry about when all this is in the realm of fiction.
1. The US involvement in WWI was minimal. Just look at the history of that conflict - the US didn't show up until after the majority of the fighting had been done, and played only a token role in the few battles that took part on the western front after it joined the war.
2. The number of US troops in Europe during WWII only exceeded that of Britain in late 1944, well after D-Day and well after the war in Europe became a forgone conclusion.
Did the US "save" Europe from Nazism? Well, it helped but don't kid your self that Britain, Russia, Canada, etc couldn't have defeated Hitler eventually if the US had continued its isolationist policy. Lest you forget, the US didn't declare war on Germany, it was Germany that declared war on the US.
And, as another poster pointed out, the key turning point of WWII in Europe wasn't D-Day, it was Stalingrad. Before Stalingrad, Germany had never retreated. After Stalingrad, that's all it did, mainly due to the huge sacrifices made by the Russian Army and the Russian people.
3. Involvement in the former Yugoslavia wasn't restricted to the US. NATO and UN both operated in that conflict, and soldiers and peacekeepers from just about every major country in Europe played their part. And unlike the US, those European nations weren't afraid to commit troops on the ground.
Just because the only coverage you saw on CNN was of various missions performed by the USAF (alongside the RAF, etc) that doesn't negate the efforts of those other nations and their servicemen that were involved more directly.
Please, if you're going to talk about the US rushing to the aid of its European allies, etc then at least try to be accurate. The American servicemen who served in those conflicts would be the first to acknowledge that they didn't do so alone, and that they joined the fight once it was in full swing on every occasion, so it wouldn't kill you to do the same. Revisionist statements like the ones in your post only serve to drive a greater wedge between the US and its European allies.
Question: Why is it that many people in the UK are get so upset about the idea of national ID cards, when nobody seems to mind (or notice) other even more "big brother" things that go on in the UK, such as the national grid of video cameras on every street corner and road?
The above sentence is a work of pure fiction. That people still buy this crap is beyond belief. There is no national grid of video cameras at all - you just have to walk out your door to disprove this crackpot claim.
Yes, there are CCTV cameras in places like shopping centres, train stations, major road junctions and outside sensitive buildings but they are there to monitor customer flow, for passenger safety, to spot accidents and traffic jams, and to act as a deterrent against terrorists rather than monitor the population. And that's no different from any other country in the world, where shopping centres, train stations, major road junctions and sensitive buildings have CCTV cameras installed.
So, please, stop spreading such stupid FUD and stop moderating it as "insightful", when it's about as inaccurate as saying the Statue of Liberty is in Vietnam or that the White House is a department store.
And I thought I was pretty clear in my reply; 250,000 men, 0.5 percent of the population, is a pretty big military force for an island nation that is 100 percent committed to national defence only. Japan's constitution expressly rules out the idea of anything other than a defensive capability, which is why the issue of sending Japanese soldiers on UN peacekeeping missions is a no-no. For a nation that has no military commitment outside its own borders, and no land borders to patrol, 250,000 is a huge force to maintain.
Yes, in the early post-war years, the burden of defending Japan's fell upon the shoulders of the Allies, but it's been a long time since the US, Britain, etc were Japan's last line of defence. And, as I acknowledged before, Japan, just like every other nation on the planet, benefits from mutual defence treaties with its allies. But to suggest that, in the 21st century, that Japan is still reliant on the US or anyone else for defence is laughable.
The only possible scenario I can imagine under which Japan might be threatened would be overt Chinese aggression and invasion. And, as China is becoming more and more reliant on trade with the west, and such aggression would polarise world opinion against it, shut down foreign trade, etc, the chances of that happening are almost astronomical. North Korea doesn't have the resources to mount a credible threat, and Russia is clearly not the evil empire that Ronald Reagan once portrayed. Under such circumstances, the JDF is more than equipped for its role.
Mea culpa on the GDP/budget thing - I got it right the first time but, in my haste, got it wrong the second time.
As to the examples of the US and Russia (I think you'll find that the USSR no longer exists), the US is top of the military spending pile, with Russia being one of the others in the top five. Amazingly, the US manages to outspend the rest of the top five put together, which either says something about how overmanned the US's armed forces are (in comparison to the threats it faces), or how inefficiently that money is spent.
That the US still maintains its "two wars" military doctrine - being able to fight two conflicts of the scale of Vietnam simultaneously without compromising its defensive capability - says a lot about how much redundancy there is within its current military strength.
Yet despite this the current Bush administration is ramping up military spend, not decreasing it. Surely some of that money could be better spent elsewhere?
Six percent of the budget going to the military is not a particularly high figure. For example, the US spent about 3.2% of its entire GDP on the military in 1999, and the USSR spent around 15% of its GDP in the 1980s. North Korea spends an unbelievable 34% of its GDP on its military.
Uh, six percent of Japan's GDP is a heck of a lot of money, whereas 34 percent of North Korea's GDP is probably peanuts in comparison. After all, you're comparing one of the world's richest economies with one of its poorest. Put another way six percent of a lot is still a lot, whereas 34 percent of next to nothing is still next to nothing.
Don't forget that the only reason Japan could get away with this kind of behavior is because they have the big, bad US military standing behind them. If Japan had been standing alone for the past 57 years, a few hundred kilometers from China, North Korea, and the USSR, restricting their military's power would have been a serious career-limiting move for any politician.
Uh, Japan's military spending is the fifth highest in the world. They take national defence very seriously, and they do not rely solely on others to shield them. Perhaps that was the case in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but it hasn't been the case for some considerable time now.
Under the Allied occupation of Japan, which lasted until 1952, the National Police Reserve was established, in 1950. In 1954 the NPR became the Japanese Self Defence Force (JDF), with Ground, Maritime and Air branches. The JDF's mandate is defensive only, and its sole purpose is to preserve peace, public order and Japanese independence and safety. Even sending JDF forces overseas for peacekeeping missions is beyond the mandate set out in the Japanese constitution.
Over 6 percent of Japan's national budget is spent on defence and 250,000 personnel serve in its forces (out of a population of approximately 125 million).
Japan may buy most of its miltary hardware from overseas, from the US and other western powers, and it may have mutual defence treaties with the US and others, but that doesn't mean that it's dependent on any other country to maintain its own security any more.
After age 45, you have to upgrade to the sidecar model.
You'd think the editors could actually search their own archives for the word "Bombardier" or "Embrio", wouldn't you?
Is it really that hard to do?
Jeez, you could write up a script in five minutes that would search a story for company and product names (hint: look for capitalisation) and check to see what other related stories there have been recently. Flag those for the editor to briefly glimpse over before hitting the "approved" button and you've saved yourself 99 percent of dupes.
Again, is it really that hard to do?
Shouldn't that be "the waistline of the feline is porcine"?
...they don't date much.
Perhaps we have a right to wipe humanity of the face of the planet, perhaps we don't. But I don't see how we have a right to wipe out all the countless other species and to poison the earth, sky and the seas.
To use a famous quote, this is a beautiful planet, it's a miracle and we're destroying it.
(Cue a dozen posts from people who think environmental awareness is for only for hippies high as a kite.)
There's a series of books that were out years ago that were packed full of spoilers for all three films. They even had most of the stuff that's in the special edition DVDs and some of the stuff that didn't even get filmed. Now that's a spoiler.
That Tolkien dude sure had some sweet movie biz contacts. Harry Knowles eat your heart out.
Hmmm. Expocity for Metacity. An tool that's "an efficient means of switching between applications" and that "will present you a complete overview of all open windows [letting] you select the window, you want to switch to, visually".
Apple's Expose for the rest of us?