The reason why it gun crime makes headline news in the UK is because, in the UK, gun crime is headline news. Gun deaths are far rarer in the UK than they are in the US, hence when they occur they are newsworthy. In America, unless some lunatic has killed a dozen people or someone famous then it's not going to make the news, is it?
An average 25 year-old guy getting shot and killed is big news in Britain because it's a rare occurence but it's not even a two column news article in America because it happens every day in every state. It's that simple.
I seriously doubt that you're English or ever have been. "Since the total gun ban took effect in England?" Since what total gun ban? Effective gun control has been part of British society for almost a century. The only change in recent history was after Dumblane, when the laws governing hand guns were tightened up, which mainly effected sportsmen and -women who took part in competition shooting, not the average individual.
"The real effects of banning personal protection"? Uh, well since private hand gun ownership never really existed in the UK just how has it been banned? And, if gun crime and violent crime in general is falling in the UK (as the official sources I cited in my linked post above show), just what "real effects" are you talking about?
You started out using some numbers to defend your position then you go on to explain how innacurate they are. What are you talking about?
No, I started out using some numbers and then went on to explain how inflated they are compared to similar US statistics because of the more liberal description of what constitutes a gun incident in the UK.
If you try to rob a jewellers and say you have a gun when you really just have a banana in your pocket then that would count as a gun-related crime in England and Wales, and hence would show up in the official figures. Similarly if you used a starting pistol, an inert replica firearm or even a toy gun.
Hence, the true number of genuine gun-related incidents in England and Wales that involve real actual guns (even including those cases where they weren't loaded) is far lower than the official figure of 10,250. That's not to say this figure is inaccurate, only that the basis upon which it is constructed is far broader than any equivalent definition in the US.
No, the question wasn't what to do about crime, that was never the issue. The issue was that the UK was being wrongly touted as a society that had strict gun control but rampant gun crime, in the original poster's words "a murder rate [that is] higher than [Washington] DC's and is STILL rising". This is patently a lie, as I and others have clearly illustrated.
If you wan't to prove that gun control doesn't work then provide me with one example of a society that has properly enforced gun control but rampant gun crime. While your at it provide me with some examples of the "plenty of places that had high crime rates, removed some gun controls, and saw crime rates go down" that you say exist.
13,000 gun deaths for the whole of the US. Compared to 80 gun deaths for the whole of England and Wales and 10,250 total incidents. I think you've proved my point for me.
75 to 80 percent drug-related leaves 20 to 25 percent non-drug-related. Which, by your figures, is an astounding 2,600 to 3,250. Compared to say, 16 to 20 (using the same non-drug-related estimates) for England and Wales.
Now, the US has 5 to 6 times the population of England and Wales. But over 160 times as many gun deaths that aren't related to drugs. Tell me again which is the safer society when it comes to gun deaths and gun crime in general?
Last year there were 80 gun-related deaths in the whole of the England and Wales (population ~53.5 million) and in the year before that there were 95. So for the last full year for which data is available, gun deaths in the UK fell by one sixth.
In those same years, just how many gun deaths were there in the US? Are you telling me that the gun murder rate in America is at all comparable? That it's around 450 such deaths a year total? Seriously? Yeah, right.
The total number of gun incidents in the UK, which includes all instances of a gun, real or imitation just being present (and not necessarily used), stood at 10,250 for the 12 month period to March 2003.
When you consider that figure of 10,250 includes occasions such as when some jokers tried to hold up a bank with their hands hidden in their pockets in the shape of a gun then you have an idea at how inflated that figure is above reality.
It should also be noted that the overwhelming majority of gun incidents and deaths are related to drug dealing. So, unless you're a major drug dealer, you're chances of getting shot and in the UK are almost zero. Can you say the same of the US?
So, with regards to gun crime you're completely inaccurate. Similarly with crime in general because the British definition of what constitutes a crime and what doesn't is far stricter than in the US and many other countries.
For example, if you and I started pushing each other around in the street, without a single punch being thrown, and a policeman was called to investigate, then that incident would most likely show up in official figures. Elsewhere, it most probably wouldn't register.
If you're really interested in the facts then do some research. Here's where I got my facts from (reporting of official government figures) and where you'll get a truer idea of the situation in the UK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3195908. stm.
Frankly, I doubt that you'll look at a damn thing. You'd much rather spout the kind of inaccurate rubbish that the NRA, etc sells about you being safer with guns than without them. Dream on. I don't know what I find more disturbing, that you can hold such a wildly off base opinion or that enough people agree with your flawed thinking to moderate you up to "+5 insightful".
Firstly, posting anonymously for any of the reasons you give, even being off-topic is silly. Posting at +1 as opposed to 0 isn't going to taint a 240+ comment story heavily.
Secondly, just what do I have to apologise for? For lying as you accuse me of doing? When did I lie? If anything, you should be apologising to me for making such an accusation. Somehow, I doubt you'll see it that way though.
Anyhow, on to your comments.
1. My countrymen are not fundamentally any better or worse than the people of Haiti, Sierra Leone, or The Republic of the Congo. I may be misreading you, but it almost seems like you're hinting that the people of the industrialized world are somehow superior to the people who live in these places. You want me to compare the US to other industrialized nations, so I shall...
Two points here. For starters, I never said that Americans were fundamentally any better or worse than the people of Haiti or anywhere else. In fact, I've gone on the record to make the very opposite point, that American lives are no more valuable than any others. To me, a life is a life, regardless of race, colour, creed or nationality.
Also, as Disraeli pointed out, and as you've managed to learn along the way, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. GDP per capita measurements such as the ones you give don't take into account variations in the cost of living, etc. But using per capita numbers to talk about how well the poor of one nation fare in comparison to the poor of another is fundamentally flawed. When I talked about GDP I was using it to differentiate between rich nations and poor ones, not the relative wealth of a subset of their citizens.
2. It is at this point that you move even beyond ad hominem attacks, and into the realm of fabrication. Never did I say or imply that the US government's actions shouldn't be questioned. Quite the opposite. I specifically stated that I was disappointed with the current administration. I said I considered some of the actions of the current administration to be unconstitutional, and expressed hope that the Supreme Court would agree with me. I pointed out other recent wrong-doings committed by the US government. I suggested that the US should improve its education system to help the young avoid poverty in the first place, and offer more ways for those who are already poor to escape that poverty. I also suggested that, rather than make our nation's poor dependent on the government, a better solution would be to teach them how to provide for themselves and to provide them with the opportunity and skills needed to do so. Your above statement, to the effect that I argued against questioning my government's actions, is an outright lie.
You originally posted this:
In short, yes, there are plenty of countries out there with lower poverty rates. There are countries out there where the poor have better access to health care. There are countries out there with just as much freedom as we have. Relatively speaking, though, few have any of these things, and it's a rare country indeed that has all of those things. I count myself lucky to live in a place where a person of good character and a strong work ethic can pretty well be assured of a happy, healthy life.
I count myself lucky that I won't wake up at 3am with a squad of soldiers smashing down my door and dragging me away for a week of torture and an execution because I criticized my government. If you live in one of them also, you should count yourself lucky as well.
To which I retorted this:
Your defence for doing this is that you "count myself lucky that [you] won't wake up at 3am with a squad of soldiers smashing down my door and dragging me away for a week of torture and an execution because [you] criticized my government."? So because the US government doesn't execute its people those people should never question its action
The British Library isn't a public lending library, it's an academic library. It houses one of the most extensive literary collections in the world and it would seem patently obvious to me why it is that you can't just walk in, fill in a form and just take out whatever you like.
Some of its treasures are so delicate that they can't be touched by human hands - is that the kind of item you think should be easily accessed on a whim?
Is getting hold of relevant material at your own university's libraries really that difficult? Or is obtaining a letter of approval from your faculty impossible? I have to doubt that the answer to both these questions is a "yes".
On a parting note, perhaps you should try comparing the British Library to its one true American counterpart, the Library of Congress. The LoC is a fantastic archive, but despite being publicly funded and supposedly open to the public, you can't access it unless you're actually part of the political machine, as Michael Moore once illustrated.
The archive will comprise selective "harvesting" from the 2.9 million sites that have "co.uk" suffixes.
If a site is using a.co.uk (or other.uk address, the TLD for the UK) then it's a reasonable assumption that it's content is both British in its origin and intended primarily for a British audience.
The potential for overlap with content covered by the DCMA seems negligible but even if there was such an overlap I fail to see how keeping a copy of a web page (and not the files that it may link to) would constitute a breech of the DCMA. Remember, the British Library is governed by British law so issues like copyright (over pictures, song lyrics, etc) aren't really issues at all.
Also remember that the British Library isn't concerned with every last printed word, only those that are believed to be of historically significance and/or academically valuable to future generations.
1. "I know we have a poverty problem here, and I believe that there should be help available to the poor."
2. "In short, yes, there are plenty of countries out there with lower poverty rates. There are countries out there where the poor have better access to health care. There are countries out there with just as much freedom as we have. Relatively speaking, though, few have any of these things, and it's a rare country indeed that has all of those things. I count myself lucky to live in a place where a person of good character and a strong work ethic can pretty well be assured of a happy, healthy life. I count myself lucky that I won't wake up at 3am with a squad of soldiers smashing down my door and dragging me away for a week of torture and an execution because I criticized my government. If you live in one of them also, you should count yourself lucky as well."
3. "The average United States citizen's real purchasing power as of 1991 was $22,204, the highest of any nation on earth. Germany came in 2nd at a mean real purchasing power (MRPP) of $19,500. Canada was 3rd with $19,178. Japan's MRPP was $19,107. Denmark's MRPP was $17,621. Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, and Finland rounded out the top 9 for 1991 in MRPP."
4. "Perhaps your comprehension was clouded by your apparent hatred of all things American. It's exactly that kind of myopic anti-US rhetoric that makes me sometimes wonder if the European reputation for tolerance of others might be just as groundless as the myth of American superiority."
First of all, let me start by saying what I've said countless times. I love the ideal of America, the principles on which it was founded. What I don't love is the current implementation, which has become a distortion of that vision. Having said that, there are few things about the US that I would change and many things that I would hope would stay the same.
In many ways, I'm an Americophile, someone with a love of all things truly American - freedom of expression, baseball, American football, hot dogs, and apple pie, tailgating and its beautiful geography to name a few. However, I'm not blinded by that love and I see and recognise its shortcomings, just like many Americans do. It's ironic that you label me anti-American, because that's the very label that those Americans get tarred with by people who'd rather not respect the freedom of expression of those who question the status quo.
Now, if you can't see that you can both love something and yet find room for improvement in it at the same time then perhaps you should stop reading my post right now. Unblinding, unquestioning love isn't truly American - how can it be when, by definition, it implies the surrender of those hard fought for freedoms? You're only truly free when you take your own course, whether that be with the herd or without it, rather than follow it blindly regardless of where the herd wants to take you.
America has shortcomings. It isn't ideal. As someone once said on The West Wing, "The seal [on the dollar bill] is meant to be unfinished because this country is meant to be unfinished. We are meant to keep doing better, we're meant to keep discussing and debating...". Now I realise that even mentioning TWW is enough to set off alarm bells in the minds of people that consider "liberal" to be a swear word, but I can think of no better quote to convey my position. And if you don't believe that the quotation is true, if you truly believe that America is perfect and has no room for further improvement then I have to question whether you're as myopic as you accuse me of being.
Now I've finished defending my right to say something (which, frankly, I find ironic seeing as one of the things we both love is freedom of expression), I'll repeat my original point, which is that comparing how well off America's poor are than Ethiopia's or Somalia's poor is ridiculous.
These are countries routinely hit by famine, where the land is so barren that they can't
Note that I didn't say that American poor were wealthy by the standards of the United Kingdom, or France, or Sweden - I said "many nations". Places like Ethiopia, Somalia, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Malawi, Haiti, and so forth. Places where you're likely to see Sally Struthers pitching another Save The Children fund-raising campaign.
So the standards by which you measure the social safety net available to the least fortunate Americans are those set by Ethiopia, Somalia, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Malawi and Haiti? Countries regularly hit by draughts, famines, other ecological disasters, civil wars and/or coup d'etats?
What are the GDPs of those nations? And what's the US's GDP? Rather than talk about countries that don't have a pot to piss in shouldn't you be talking about those that do?
Seriously, if you're going to compare systems then try and compare like with like - compare the US to Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. You're not a third/developing world nation, so don't compare yourself to one.
... and what should worry you too is his job description, full-time temp employee. Sounds like Microsoft was getting all the benefits of a full-time employee without having to worry about any of the associated costs. And if companies like Microsoft, with its $60 billion cash reserve can pull this kind of crap, what does that say about today's job market, labour laws and how skewed they are in favour of big business?
Heck, being a "temp" probably made firing him that much easier.
Should he have been fired for breaking confidentiality? I don't know, because I can't even see his side of the story (as his site is/.ed). But should he have been a "full-time temp employee"? No fucking way.
What do you mean by "too much classism in England"?
If by that you mean we have a royal family (which we share with Canada and a whole lot of other countries too, by the way), then you're right.
But I hardly see how that's relevant. In the UK, our head of state is the Queen, who in many ways has fewer rights than the average citizen (for one thing, she can't vote), and has only a minor consitutional role - she has no say in how the country is governed, in deciding the law, etc.
In fact, for all practical purposes, the Queen is just a glorified ambassador, which is all I want from my head of state. The real power lies with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, all elected officials.
There's arguably more of a class system in America than in Britain. In the US, if you're poor and need expensive medical treatment then you're probably shit out of luck. But in Britain, or almost anywhere else in Europe, you'll get it (perhaps not straight away, but you will get it).
Also, further education is more attainable in Britain than it is in the US. It might not be as free as it once was, but British students don't need six figure bank balances to get there degrees. If you're from a poor background but smart, where would you rather be? A country that wants to see your green before it lets you realise your potential or one that is happy to help you attain it?
Want to attain office? Well, better hope that daddy and his friends have deep pockets. The fathers of our last three Prime Ministers were a shopkeeper, a circus performer and a university lecturer. A humble start in life doesn't stop you from running the country over here but can you say the same in the US? Heck, if you don't have millions of dollars to your name you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of even running for Congress, let alone be elected!
There are other examples but I'll only bore you further. Suffice to say class (or, to give it it's proper name, wealth) is more of a barrier in the US as it is in UK or elsewhere.
Licenses can be granted and licenses can be taken away. It'll only take a few "hey, now I stick it to RIAA and copy any music I want"-type posts, such as the one that I responded to for RIAA to petition that LAMP and any other similar projects should be shut down.
MIT may have intellectual property lawyers but don't forget that RIAA and its friends do. And, if it comes down to a major fight, I always put my money on the organisation with the deeper pockets for a legal fight and the stronger resolve. Now, I think we know who has the deeper pockets for a legal fight but who do you think has the greater will for that fight?
Do you think it's MIT, which is primarily concerned with research and teaching, or RIAA, which is only concerned with protecting the rights of its members and preserving the status quo?
Realise that if this endeavour is used as a thinly-veiled mass piracy scheme (as the grandfather post suggested), then RIAA will come down on it like a ton of bricks.
The average FM radio station has to comply with the copyright terms set by RIAA and other copyright holders. If a radio station was set up specifically with the aim of promoting recordings, or if it didn't jump through the relevant legal hoops, then it would be shut down faster than you could say "Britney Spears".
Exactly. But it's a legal alternative to the traditional buy-a-CD-of-twelve-songs-even-though-you-might-onl y-like-two-of-them model. I wasn't suggesting that it was independent of RIAA, only that it was one of the many legal alternatives that challenges RIAA's status quo.
If in twelve months time, 10, 15 or even 20 percent (to use arbitrary figures off the top of my head) of the music being bought by 10-25 year-olds is through online buy-just-what-you-want stores, then that'll be a very big wake-up call to RIAA and the major labels.
In that scenario (which most probably happen eventually), the big boys will have to re-evaluate how they package, present and sell music on a wider scale. Right now, they probably look at iTunes as in interesting exercise, just as IBM once looked at PC clones in the same way. But sooner or later, just like IBM and those clones, RIAA et al will have to embrace a future that's not entirely of their making.
And the less involvement that RIAA has in the music industry of the future, the better for us all, regardless of where we live and/or our musical tastes.
Am I the only one who thinks that, at this very moment, a RIAA lawyer will be drafting notes that use your comment as the centrepiece for a legal motion to get this MIT project shut down?
The way to combat RIAA, etc isn't by shouting from the rooftops that you'll pirate/whatever you want to call it their music from now till doomsday. The way to combat them is by supporting non-RIAA artists, by supporting innovative legitimate music-buying options such as the Apple iTunes store, by buying second-hand CDs, etc.
Giving someone the very ammunition that they need to shoot you down is suicide. Perhaps when you graduate to the real world you'll learn that lesson.
Uhh, there's a big difference between "Windows could do this" and "Mandrake 9.2 does do this". The former is hypothetical, the latter (unfortunately) is not.
When dealing with a serious problem, being able to differentiate between what has and hasn't happened is generally regarded as beneficial. To my knowledge, installing Windows hasn't destroyed any CD-ROM drives, from LG or anyone else, whereas there's clear evidence that Mandrake's latest distribution is doing that.
What's your next trick? Defending drink drivers by pointing the finger at other motorists and shouting "hey, he's got a six pack of beers back at home!"?
I'd pay $20 a share for a stake. Uhh, I mean $22. No, wait, make that $24. Did I say $24? Darn, I meant $26. No, I take that back, what I really meant was...
Uh, 15 and 16 year-olds don't exactly get asked to do proofs, do they?
What they do get asked to do is solve quadratics, derivatives and integrals. And, if they're typical 15 and 16 year-olds, they'll take the simplest option available to them, which is punching in the numbers into a calculator rather than doing the (rather basic) work themselves.
That's fine and dandy for those kids that never do any mathematics again in later life, but for any kid contemplating any kind of science degree that's sheer madness. You can't do proofs if you don't know how to solve simple quadratics without using a calculator. And that's what I'm worried about, because there's almost an entire generation out there that can barely multiply 12 x 15 in their heads let alone solve x^2 -4x +4 = 0 without help.
My nephew, who's one of the top pupils in his school across the board and who gets straight As in maths, physics, chemistry and biology had real trouble multiplying -x by 2x when I tutored him a few weeks back. Coming up to 15, he displays less mathematical knowledge than anyone I went to school with when I was 12. And he's one of the top students. God knows how bad the rest of them are.
It's way past the stage that these pocket calculators are calculators in the classical sense - these beasts are practically PCs.
When I sat my first recognised exams in mathematics (way back in the late 80s), the HP calculator I had then was programmable, and it was child's play to write programmes that solved quadratic equations, etc. Other kids in my class had models that had graphical displays that would give visual representations of equations, calculate integrals, etc.
And while most of us then where honest, because we knew our subject material, the potential for cheating (using a calculator to come up with an answer instead of working it out with your brain) was enormous.
Fast forward to today. I bet a fair few of these calculators-on-steroids will get bought by students that have no idea how to solve the problems set for them but are quite happy to just plug in a few numbers and have the calculator pop out the answers for them.
That's great if you want generations of kids who can use a programme someone else has written for them, not so great if you hope to teach those kids more complex maths, physics, engineering, etc later on.
My nephew is about to start the same exams I took 15+ years ago. There are no restrictions or checks on what calculators can be taken into any exam. How ridiculous is that?
That $130 cost won't matter to those people whose systems the new version won't run on.
Seriously though - and I've lost track of the number of times I've said this - if you don't want the new features then you don't have to pay for them. And, if you don't pay for them, you're existing system doesn't become any less productive or user-friendly.
It really amazes me that people act as if their computing experience has somehow been crippled just because they don't have the very latest thing, even though their own machine hasn't regressed in anyway and is just as useful as it was the day before.
Watch how this story will generate countless posts that proclaim that Apple has somehow stabbed its users in the back by releasing a significant upgrade packed with both new and improved features and (shock, horror) daring to charge for it.
Newsflash people: software costs time and money to develop. So either pay up or shut up. Apple is a business, not a charity.
And to those of you who just fail to qualify for a free upgrade (if there is such a thing), please, get over it. Life is full of upsets, big and small. In the end, it's an upgrade you're missing out on, not a heart-bypass operation.
Anyone else think that upgrade envy is becoming way too common, on computing platforms and elsewhere in life?
Slashdot Mirror
As I illustrated elsewhere within this broader discussion, this is complete rubbish.
The reason why it gun crime makes headline news in the UK is because, in the UK, gun crime is headline news. Gun deaths are far rarer in the UK than they are in the US, hence when they occur they are newsworthy. In America, unless some lunatic has killed a dozen people or someone famous then it's not going to make the news, is it?
An average 25 year-old guy getting shot and killed is big news in Britain because it's a rare occurence but it's not even a two column news article in America because it happens every day in every state. It's that simple.
I seriously doubt that you're English or ever have been. "Since the total gun ban took effect in England?" Since what total gun ban? Effective gun control has been part of British society for almost a century. The only change in recent history was after Dumblane, when the laws governing hand guns were tightened up, which mainly effected sportsmen and -women who took part in competition shooting, not the average individual.
"The real effects of banning personal protection"? Uh, well since private hand gun ownership never really existed in the UK just how has it been banned? And, if gun crime and violent crime in general is falling in the UK (as the official sources I cited in my linked post above show), just what "real effects" are you talking about?
More complete and utter rubbish.
You started out using some numbers to defend your position then you go on to explain how innacurate they are. What are you talking about?
No, I started out using some numbers and then went on to explain how inflated they are compared to similar US statistics because of the more liberal description of what constitutes a gun incident in the UK.
If you try to rob a jewellers and say you have a gun when you really just have a banana in your pocket then that would count as a gun-related crime in England and Wales, and hence would show up in the official figures. Similarly if you used a starting pistol, an inert replica firearm or even a toy gun.
Hence, the true number of genuine gun-related incidents in England and Wales that involve real actual guns (even including those cases where they weren't loaded) is far lower than the official figure of 10,250. That's not to say this figure is inaccurate, only that the basis upon which it is constructed is far broader than any equivalent definition in the US.
Was that really so hard to understand?
No, the question wasn't what to do about crime, that was never the issue. The issue was that the UK was being wrongly touted as a society that had strict gun control but rampant gun crime, in the original poster's words "a murder rate [that is] higher than [Washington] DC's and is STILL rising". This is patently a lie, as I and others have clearly illustrated.
If you wan't to prove that gun control doesn't work then provide me with one example of a society that has properly enforced gun control but rampant gun crime. While your at it provide me with some examples of the "plenty of places that had high crime rates, removed some gun controls, and saw crime rates go down" that you say exist.
13,000 gun deaths for the whole of the US. Compared to 80 gun deaths for the whole of England and Wales and 10,250 total incidents. I think you've proved my point for me.
75 to 80 percent drug-related leaves 20 to 25 percent non-drug-related. Which, by your figures, is an astounding 2,600 to 3,250. Compared to say, 16 to 20 (using the same non-drug-related estimates) for England and Wales.
Now, the US has 5 to 6 times the population of England and Wales. But over 160 times as many gun deaths that aren't related to drugs. Tell me again which is the safer society when it comes to gun deaths and gun crime in general?
Last year there were 80 gun-related deaths in the whole of the England and Wales (population ~53.5 million) and in the year before that there were 95. So for the last full year for which data is available, gun deaths in the UK fell by one sixth.
. stm.
In those same years, just how many gun deaths were there in the US? Are you telling me that the gun murder rate in America is at all comparable? That it's around 450 such deaths a year total? Seriously? Yeah, right.
The total number of gun incidents in the UK, which includes all instances of a gun, real or imitation just being present (and not necessarily used), stood at 10,250 for the 12 month period to March 2003.
When you consider that figure of 10,250 includes occasions such as when some jokers tried to hold up a bank with their hands hidden in their pockets in the shape of a gun then you have an idea at how inflated that figure is above reality.
It should also be noted that the overwhelming majority of gun incidents and deaths are related to drug dealing. So, unless you're a major drug dealer, you're chances of getting shot and in the UK are almost zero. Can you say the same of the US?
So, with regards to gun crime you're completely inaccurate. Similarly with crime in general because the British definition of what constitutes a crime and what doesn't is far stricter than in the US and many other countries.
For example, if you and I started pushing each other around in the street, without a single punch being thrown, and a policeman was called to investigate, then that incident would most likely show up in official figures. Elsewhere, it most probably wouldn't register.
If you're really interested in the facts then do some research. Here's where I got my facts from (reporting of official government figures) and where you'll get a truer idea of the situation in the UK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3195908
Frankly, I doubt that you'll look at a damn thing. You'd much rather spout the kind of inaccurate rubbish that the NRA, etc sells about you being safer with guns than without them. Dream on. I don't know what I find more disturbing, that you can hold such a wildly off base opinion or that enough people agree with your flawed thinking to moderate you up to "+5 insightful".
Secondly, just what do I have to apologise for? For lying as you accuse me of doing? When did I lie? If anything, you should be apologising to me for making such an accusation. Somehow, I doubt you'll see it that way though.
Anyhow, on to your comments.
1. My countrymen are not fundamentally any better or worse than the people of Haiti, Sierra Leone, or The Republic of the Congo. I may be misreading you, but it almost seems like you're hinting that the people of the industrialized world are somehow superior to the people who live in these places. You want me to compare the US to other industrialized nations, so I shall...
Two points here. For starters, I never said that Americans were fundamentally any better or worse than the people of Haiti or anywhere else. In fact, I've gone on the record to make the very opposite point, that American lives are no more valuable than any others. To me, a life is a life, regardless of race, colour, creed or nationality.
Also, as Disraeli pointed out, and as you've managed to learn along the way, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. GDP per capita measurements such as the ones you give don't take into account variations in the cost of living, etc. But using per capita numbers to talk about how well the poor of one nation fare in comparison to the poor of another is fundamentally flawed. When I talked about GDP I was using it to differentiate between rich nations and poor ones, not the relative wealth of a subset of their citizens.
2. It is at this point that you move even beyond ad hominem attacks, and into the realm of fabrication. Never did I say or imply that the US government's actions shouldn't be questioned. Quite the opposite. I specifically stated that I was disappointed with the current administration. I said I considered some of the actions of the current administration to be unconstitutional, and expressed hope that the Supreme Court would agree with me. I pointed out other recent wrong-doings committed by the US government. I suggested that the US should improve its education system to help the young avoid poverty in the first place, and offer more ways for those who are already poor to escape that poverty. I also suggested that, rather than make our nation's poor dependent on the government, a better solution would be to teach them how to provide for themselves and to provide them with the opportunity and skills needed to do so. Your above statement, to the effect that I argued against questioning my government's actions, is an outright lie.
You originally posted this:
To which I retorted this:
The British Library isn't a public lending library, it's an academic library. It houses one of the most extensive literary collections in the world and it would seem patently obvious to me why it is that you can't just walk in, fill in a form and just take out whatever you like.
Some of its treasures are so delicate that they can't be touched by human hands - is that the kind of item you think should be easily accessed on a whim?
Is getting hold of relevant material at your own university's libraries really that difficult? Or is obtaining a letter of approval from your faculty impossible? I have to doubt that the answer to both these questions is a "yes".
On a parting note, perhaps you should try comparing the British Library to its one true American counterpart, the Library of Congress. The LoC is a fantastic archive, but despite being publicly funded and supposedly open to the public, you can't access it unless you're actually part of the political machine, as Michael Moore once illustrated.
The archive will comprise selective "harvesting" from the 2.9 million sites that have "co.uk" suffixes.
.co.uk (or other .uk address, the TLD for the UK) then it's a reasonable assumption that it's content is both British in its origin and intended primarily for a British audience.
If a site is using a
The potential for overlap with content covered by the DCMA seems negligible but even if there was such an overlap I fail to see how keeping a copy of a web page (and not the files that it may link to) would constitute a breech of the DCMA. Remember, the British Library is governed by British law so issues like copyright (over pictures, song lyrics, etc) aren't really issues at all.
Also remember that the British Library isn't concerned with every last printed word, only those that are believed to be of historically significance and/or academically valuable to future generations.
1. "I know we have a poverty problem here, and I believe that there should be help available to the poor."
2. "In short, yes, there are plenty of countries out there with lower poverty rates. There are countries out there where the poor have better access to health care. There are countries out there with just as much freedom as we have. Relatively speaking, though, few have any of these things, and it's a rare country indeed that has all of those things. I count myself lucky to live in a place where a person of good character and a strong work ethic can pretty well be assured of a happy, healthy life. I count myself lucky that I won't wake up at 3am with a squad of soldiers smashing down my door and dragging me away for a week of torture and an execution because I criticized my government. If you live in one of them also, you should count yourself lucky as well."
3. "The average United States citizen's real purchasing power as of 1991 was $22,204, the highest of any nation on earth. Germany came in 2nd at a mean real purchasing power (MRPP) of $19,500. Canada was 3rd with $19,178. Japan's MRPP was $19,107. Denmark's MRPP was $17,621. Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, and Finland rounded out the top 9 for 1991 in MRPP."
4. "Perhaps your comprehension was clouded by your apparent hatred of all things American. It's exactly that kind of myopic anti-US rhetoric that makes me sometimes wonder if the European reputation for tolerance of others might be just as groundless as the myth of American superiority."
First of all, let me start by saying what I've said countless times. I love the ideal of America, the principles on which it was founded. What I don't love is the current implementation, which has become a distortion of that vision. Having said that, there are few things about the US that I would change and many things that I would hope would stay the same.
In many ways, I'm an Americophile, someone with a love of all things truly American - freedom of expression, baseball, American football, hot dogs, and apple pie, tailgating and its beautiful geography to name a few. However, I'm not blinded by that love and I see and recognise its shortcomings, just like many Americans do. It's ironic that you label me anti-American, because that's the very label that those Americans get tarred with by people who'd rather not respect the freedom of expression of those who question the status quo.
Now, if you can't see that you can both love something and yet find room for improvement in it at the same time then perhaps you should stop reading my post right now. Unblinding, unquestioning love isn't truly American - how can it be when, by definition, it implies the surrender of those hard fought for freedoms? You're only truly free when you take your own course, whether that be with the herd or without it, rather than follow it blindly regardless of where the herd wants to take you.
America has shortcomings. It isn't ideal. As someone once said on The West Wing, "The seal [on the dollar bill] is meant to be unfinished because this country is meant to be unfinished. We are meant to keep doing better, we're meant to keep discussing and debating...". Now I realise that even mentioning TWW is enough to set off alarm bells in the minds of people that consider "liberal" to be a swear word, but I can think of no better quote to convey my position. And if you don't believe that the quotation is true, if you truly believe that America is perfect and has no room for further improvement then I have to question whether you're as myopic as you accuse me of being.
Now I've finished defending my right to say something (which, frankly, I find ironic seeing as one of the things we both love is freedom of expression), I'll repeat my original point, which is that comparing how well off America's poor are than Ethiopia's or Somalia's poor is ridiculous.
These are countries routinely hit by famine, where the land is so barren that they can't
Note that I didn't say that American poor were wealthy by the standards of the United Kingdom, or France, or Sweden - I said "many nations". Places like Ethiopia, Somalia, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Malawi, Haiti, and so forth. Places where you're likely to see Sally Struthers pitching another Save The Children fund-raising campaign.
So the standards by which you measure the social safety net available to the least fortunate Americans are those set by Ethiopia, Somalia, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Malawi and Haiti? Countries regularly hit by draughts, famines, other ecological disasters, civil wars and/or coup d'etats?
What are the GDPs of those nations? And what's the US's GDP? Rather than talk about countries that don't have a pot to piss in shouldn't you be talking about those that do?
Seriously, if you're going to compare systems then try and compare like with like - compare the US to Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. You're not a third/developing world nation, so don't compare yourself to one.
... and what should worry you too is his job description, full-time temp employee. Sounds like Microsoft was getting all the benefits of a full-time employee without having to worry about any of the associated costs. And if companies like Microsoft, with its $60 billion cash reserve can pull this kind of crap, what does that say about today's job market, labour laws and how skewed they are in favour of big business?
/.ed). But should he have been a "full-time temp employee"? No fucking way.
Heck, being a "temp" probably made firing him that much easier.
Should he have been fired for breaking confidentiality? I don't know, because I can't even see his side of the story (as his site is
What do you mean by "too much classism in England"?
If by that you mean we have a royal family (which we share with Canada and a whole lot of other countries too, by the way), then you're right.
But I hardly see how that's relevant. In the UK, our head of state is the Queen, who in many ways has fewer rights than the average citizen (for one thing, she can't vote), and has only a minor consitutional role - she has no say in how the country is governed, in deciding the law, etc.
In fact, for all practical purposes, the Queen is just a glorified ambassador, which is all I want from my head of state. The real power lies with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, all elected officials.
There's arguably more of a class system in America than in Britain. In the US, if you're poor and need expensive medical treatment then you're probably shit out of luck. But in Britain, or almost anywhere else in Europe, you'll get it (perhaps not straight away, but you will get it).
Also, further education is more attainable in Britain than it is in the US. It might not be as free as it once was, but British students don't need six figure bank balances to get there degrees. If you're from a poor background but smart, where would you rather be? A country that wants to see your green before it lets you realise your potential or one that is happy to help you attain it?
Want to attain office? Well, better hope that daddy and his friends have deep pockets. The fathers of our last three Prime Ministers were a shopkeeper, a circus performer and a university lecturer. A humble start in life doesn't stop you from running the country over here but can you say the same in the US? Heck, if you don't have millions of dollars to your name you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of even running for Congress, let alone be elected!
There are other examples but I'll only bore you further. Suffice to say class (or, to give it it's proper name, wealth) is more of a barrier in the US as it is in UK or elsewhere.
Licenses can be granted and licenses can be taken away. It'll only take a few "hey, now I stick it to RIAA and copy any music I want"-type posts, such as the one that I responded to for RIAA to petition that LAMP and any other similar projects should be shut down.
MIT may have intellectual property lawyers but don't forget that RIAA and its friends do. And, if it comes down to a major fight, I always put my money on the organisation with the deeper pockets for a legal fight and the stronger resolve. Now, I think we know who has the deeper pockets for a legal fight but who do you think has the greater will for that fight?
Do you think it's MIT, which is primarily concerned with research and teaching, or RIAA, which is only concerned with protecting the rights of its members and preserving the status quo?
Realise that if this endeavour is used as a thinly-veiled mass piracy scheme (as the grandfather post suggested), then RIAA will come down on it like a ton of bricks.
The average FM radio station has to comply with the copyright terms set by RIAA and other copyright holders. If a radio station was set up specifically with the aim of promoting recordings, or if it didn't jump through the relevant legal hoops, then it would be shut down faster than you could say "Britney Spears".
Exactly. But it's a legal alternative to the traditional buy-a-CD-of-twelve-songs-even-though-you-might-onl y-like-two-of-them model. I wasn't suggesting that it was independent of RIAA, only that it was one of the many legal alternatives that challenges RIAA's status quo.
If in twelve months time, 10, 15 or even 20 percent (to use arbitrary figures off the top of my head) of the music being bought by 10-25 year-olds is through online buy-just-what-you-want stores, then that'll be a very big wake-up call to RIAA and the major labels.
In that scenario (which most probably happen eventually), the big boys will have to re-evaluate how they package, present and sell music on a wider scale. Right now, they probably look at iTunes as in interesting exercise, just as IBM once looked at PC clones in the same way. But sooner or later, just like IBM and those clones, RIAA et al will have to embrace a future that's not entirely of their making.
And the less involvement that RIAA has in the music industry of the future, the better for us all, regardless of where we live and/or our musical tastes.
Am I the only one who thinks that, at this very moment, a RIAA lawyer will be drafting notes that use your comment as the centrepiece for a legal motion to get this MIT project shut down?
The way to combat RIAA, etc isn't by shouting from the rooftops that you'll pirate/whatever you want to call it their music from now till doomsday. The way to combat them is by supporting non-RIAA artists, by supporting innovative legitimate music-buying options such as the Apple iTunes store, by buying second-hand CDs, etc.
Giving someone the very ammunition that they need to shoot you down is suicide. Perhaps when you graduate to the real world you'll learn that lesson.
Pretty impressive technology, but the purpose is still a bit unclear.
The latter half of that sentence is also a good description of what an Slashdot editorial role is all about.
Uhh, there's a big difference between "Windows could do this" and "Mandrake 9.2 does do this". The former is hypothetical, the latter (unfortunately) is not.
When dealing with a serious problem, being able to differentiate between what has and hasn't happened is generally regarded as beneficial. To my knowledge, installing Windows hasn't destroyed any CD-ROM drives, from LG or anyone else, whereas there's clear evidence that Mandrake's latest distribution is doing that.
What's your next trick? Defending drink drivers by pointing the finger at other motorists and shouting "hey, he's got a six pack of beers back at home!"?
I'd pay $20 a share for a stake. Uhh, I mean $22. No, wait, make that $24. Did I say $24? Darn, I meant $26. No, I take that back, what I really meant was...
Which is hardly typical of the average 15 and 16 year-old kid, is it?
"Ledgislation is BAD"?
Hmmm. Looks like someone here could do with a few dictionary sales spams.
Uh, 15 and 16 year-olds don't exactly get asked to do proofs, do they?
What they do get asked to do is solve quadratics, derivatives and integrals. And, if they're typical 15 and 16 year-olds, they'll take the simplest option available to them, which is punching in the numbers into a calculator rather than doing the (rather basic) work themselves.
That's fine and dandy for those kids that never do any mathematics again in later life, but for any kid contemplating any kind of science degree that's sheer madness. You can't do proofs if you don't know how to solve simple quadratics without using a calculator. And that's what I'm worried about, because there's almost an entire generation out there that can barely multiply 12 x 15 in their heads let alone solve x^2 -4x +4 = 0 without help.
My nephew, who's one of the top pupils in his school across the board and who gets straight As in maths, physics, chemistry and biology had real trouble multiplying -x by 2x when I tutored him a few weeks back. Coming up to 15, he displays less mathematical knowledge than anyone I went to school with when I was 12. And he's one of the top students. God knows how bad the rest of them are.
It's way past the stage that these pocket calculators are calculators in the classical sense - these beasts are practically PCs.
When I sat my first recognised exams in mathematics (way back in the late 80s), the HP calculator I had then was programmable, and it was child's play to write programmes that solved quadratic equations, etc. Other kids in my class had models that had graphical displays that would give visual representations of equations, calculate integrals, etc.
And while most of us then where honest, because we knew our subject material, the potential for cheating (using a calculator to come up with an answer instead of working it out with your brain) was enormous.
Fast forward to today. I bet a fair few of these calculators-on-steroids will get bought by students that have no idea how to solve the problems set for them but are quite happy to just plug in a few numbers and have the calculator pop out the answers for them.
That's great if you want generations of kids who can use a programme someone else has written for them, not so great if you hope to teach those kids more complex maths, physics, engineering, etc later on.
My nephew is about to start the same exams I took 15+ years ago. There are no restrictions or checks on what calculators can be taken into any exam. How ridiculous is that?
That $130 cost won't matter to those people whose systems the new version won't run on.
Seriously though - and I've lost track of the number of times I've said this - if you don't want the new features then you don't have to pay for them. And, if you don't pay for them, you're existing system doesn't become any less productive or user-friendly.
It really amazes me that people act as if their computing experience has somehow been crippled just because they don't have the very latest thing, even though their own machine hasn't regressed in anyway and is just as useful as it was the day before.
Watch how this story will generate countless posts that proclaim that Apple has somehow stabbed its users in the back by releasing a significant upgrade packed with both new and improved features and (shock, horror) daring to charge for it.
Newsflash people: software costs time and money to develop. So either pay up or shut up. Apple is a business, not a charity.
And to those of you who just fail to qualify for a free upgrade (if there is such a thing), please, get over it. Life is full of upsets, big and small. In the end, it's an upgrade you're missing out on, not a heart-bypass operation.
Anyone else think that upgrade envy is becoming way too common, on computing platforms and elsewhere in life?
Slow day at work, huh Graham?