"If your believe you have a right to take anything you need, regardless of your means to pay, i cant see how your not an anarchist or a communist."
Well you missed out the common thief option. Thievery has no political persuasion and stretches from poor people who steal to eat, to your Enron's and politicians who want control of someone else's oil.
The oft used trick in the UK for getting the population to swallow whatever crap the government wants to hurl their way, i.e.
1) Announce insanely over the top version of whatever it is you want to do
2) Sit back while the population freaks out for a while and make a token defence of it
3) Back off to the point you originally intended and watch the population sigh in relief your "capitulation" in the face of their protests.
Generally, if there's one thing to realise about New Labour it's that things don't leak from a source close to anyone in the government unless there's an agenda behind it.
Schools in my area get Windows XP for £30 and Office for £45 per seat. I'm currently setting every PC in the school to dual boot XP and Ubuntu as there are just too many apps that are Windows based that teachers would be lost (or at least very confused) without.
We saved a fortune on Windows 2003 server licences and using E-Groupware saved £5 per seat exchange licences for 800 people. All of our servers run Redhat academic licences (£35 per server + no CALs) and have almost zero maintenance save the odd reboot when a kernel security upgrade comes along which takes about 3 minutes after school closes. Hell, I can VPN in, update the thing and reboot from home with confidence in the fact that the server will not have been stuffed by the latest updates.
All this will be irrelevant soon though as the the UK government has plans for the education system system in the UK called Building Schools for the Future. Look it up on Google and then be prepared for a sinking feeling.
BSF involves replacing every school building in the country using PFI (Private Finance Initiative) money and services. PFI basically means the lowest bidder and BSF schools so far have been mainly judged to be of poor or mediocre standard. More interesting to Slashdot readers though is the fact that ICT services will be removed from the control of the schools where it currently rests and will be tendered out to private companies on a county wide basis in order to take advantage of the bulk buying power that huge companies can obtain. One of the the lead trial areas however has yet to release the specs that companies tendering for the work will have to meet. This makes it very difficult for any company attempting to bid to see what it is they are required to provide. Funnily enough the County Council in that area has its own Educational ICT provider which is a strictly Microsoft shop.
If you look at the situation regarding BSF it looks like the ICT section provides a huge bias in favour of large corporations, particularly those based in Redmond.
Of course the payload of this will be the standardisation of ICT across large areas with no room for originality or independant thought but then that sounds that New Britain to me.
BTW, Check out the BSF PDF file that has an illustration of the perfect school design. It bears a strong resemblance to a factory production line. Raw meat in at one end, and a long stream of identical tasteless nuggets out at the other.
Car theft is the fault of metal-workers. After all, if powered centre-punches weren't available due to metal workers using them to mark drilling spots on metal then car thieves wouldn't use them to break car windows.
Forget the fact that a powered centre punch is just an inanimate tool and that it's purely the malicious intent of car thieves that means they're used for illegal reasons, someone must be to blame. So let's lynch metal-workers for causing car theft!!
"remind him that more people speak american english than british english, then tell him to bugger off or something."
Hate to say this but go to the websites of the countries that were part of the 3/4 of the world that was coloured pink on the empire map and color is spelt colour and favorite is spelt favourite with the exception of the odd typo. Then again maybe being part of the biggest empire in world history leaves a bit of an imprint.
"Windows Server 2003 was recently compared against Linux and Unix variants in a survey by the Yankee Group, with Windows having a higher annual uptime than Linux.
Also...
Pope says Catholicism the best religion and Bin Laden says Bush is a bad, bad man
Absolutely spot on, Blair is the problem but I think the truly amazing thing about Tony is that whenever New Labour draws up a new law it's always poorly thought, motivated by a need for a popular headline for tomorrows papers and is so vague in definition that it'll either criminalise people who have no ill intent or allow real criminals to get off on technicalities. Seriously, given that 90% of the laws that the gov. comes out with are so full of holes and badly drafted, if you ever needed a lawyer would you put your life in Tony Blair's hands?
I think that one of Margaret Thatcher's strongest points was the fact that when her government made laws she spent a lot of time making sure it would achieve what she wanted and there would be no way around it.
Another problem with the current government is that although they're really keen to make Britain a technological leader, they don't seem to have a clue about technology and the limits of it's abilites/usefulness. As a result, you end up with poorly designed government IT systems that are over budget, hated by those that use them and out of date before the systems installed. Even more surprising is that it's always the same bunch of companys that have provided a string of emabarrasing failures that end up getting the next contract.
So, for the question "What is going on in the UK?!". Basically it's being run by people with no principles, ideas or attention to detail in order to keep the press and media from turning on them while they give themselves 100% payrises, keep their corporate friends happy and destroy anything to do with Britain that may offend even the most over-sensitive minority. To stop the pissed off masses rebelling all it takes is country wide CCTV, RFID ID cards, number plate recognising cameras and a culture where people feel isolated.
This'll no doubt be handled the same way demonstrations are handled.
If you wait until there's a demo in Trafalgar Square and try logging into the publicly available traffic cams you'll suddenly find they're all down for maintenance.
For a cynic, this is so the police can beat the crap out of people undisturbed by public eyes for the optimist it's to stop potential troublemakers using the cameras and mobile phones to co-ordinate disorder.
No doubt there'll be a 1/4 mile radius of camera maintenance every time the PM leaves No. 10.
The state is snooping too much and is acting in an oppressive and unconstitutional way. Rumsfeld, Bush, whoever must be held responsible. Someone must resign.
Future situation:
The state is snooping too much and is acting in an oppressive and unconstitutional way. The Civil-Liberties Officer isn't doing his job properly and he must resign.
Appointing people to posts where they appear to have free reign while their strings are pulled from the shadows puts a superb buffer zone between the public and those who really make the decisions. It worked for Tony Blair for years and it's only since he's decided that he's invincible and dropped his guard, claiming responsibility for good things that unexpectedly turned to shit, that he's become so distrusted.
"and compatible with non-Windows systems (excluding Samba, as that was reverse-engineered),"
From what I understand, the SMB protocol that samba works on has been around longer than Microsoft have been using it. It's another case of the embrace, extend and exclude method of "innovation" that landed MS in the courts in the first place.
Nope, what he should do is find people who have worked there way up from the bottom, become successful and have Britain as their primary home.
Dyson, Branson, Sugar, etc.. I may even find Stelios acceptable. He may have started out with a million of so from his old man but he has a sufficiently different angle.
-- Anonymous Coward. The name you post under when you have nothing really worth saying.
The UK parliament has been redundant for a long time.
Back in the days of Margaret Thatcher, huge parliamentary majorities were won on minority votes thanks to the first past the post, 3 party system. If I remember rightly, Mrs. T held a majority in excess of 300 MPs with only 40% of the electorate voting for her. Tony Blair commanded about 35% of the vote when less than 50% of the electorate turned out.
With a three figure majority and the back-benches filled with career minded sheep, the government can get pretty much anything they want through so the new law is just icing on the cake. What worries me more is the sort of people they hang with. According to the treasury web site, the following are being flown in by Gordon Brown, the next Prime Minister, to give advice on business in New Britain:
Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO, LVMH
Lord Browne, Group Chief Executive, BP
Dr Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO, GlaxoSmithKline
Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Sir Ka-shing Li, Chairman of the Board, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd
Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
Sir John Rose, CEO, Rolls Royce
Robert Rubin, Director and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Citigroup Inc
Lee Scott, President and CEO, Wal-Mart
Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group
Meg Whitman, President and CEO, eBay
James Wolfensohn, Special Envoy for Disengagement and Former President of the World Bank
Yep, that's right. In order to improve the business environment for entrepreneurs and encourage opportunity among the lower classes, Brown is freighting in a convicted monopolist and a horde of bankers and fat-cats some of which are heads of corporations that have been criticised for predatory and/or unfair practises. Hmmmm.. Can't wait 'til the advice starts flowing. "Well everyone, what's the best thing to encourage competition in business"? Patents for everything and tax cuts for the exceptionally rich? Sure thing, no problem now that I can push it through Parliament without a proper debate. Seat in the House of Lords? Two million to you guv but make it untraceable, know what I mean?
Apple has confirmed that it's taken the number one spot in the western European education market. Apple's education market share in western Europe is now 15.2 per cent, relegating Dell, with 14.7 per cent, to second place.
If Apple owns 15.2% of the EU market that leaves 84.8% that are running Windows minus the small percentage that are running Linux. It's all very well putting Apple in the number 1 PC vendor spot but the Windows share is Dell plus any number of other Intel/MS manufacturers plus schools that build their own and use site wide volume licences etc.
Without wishing to piss on the Apple parade, MS are still the number 1 OS in education. Believe me, I wish it were otherwise as I've spent some time putting Linux/Samba in place of a school's NT network and I soooooooo want to run Linux clients but there's just so much curriculum software for Windows that can't be replaced with what's available for Linux/MAC.
On the other hand, I don't see how MS can win this one. The validity of their licences in the EU only holds because EU law supports them. If MS take the piss it only needs shrink wrapped licences to be declared invalid and MS are bolloxed.
The EU could also change competition law and make the max daily fine 10 million or 10 billion. If MS threaten to pull out of Europe you can look at it two ways, 1 - a disaster that could hurt the European economy or 2 - an opportunity for the birth of a whole new European software industry. OK so start the flames but at the end of the day there are many people who have stomped out of their workplace convinced that the company that's treated them so badly will suffer only to find that after a short period of readjustment the company forgets they even existed.
In the event of MS exiting Europe you can expect to see many of today's Linux geeks being tomorrows training company millionaires. Roll it on, that's what I say.
I work in a UK secondary school (Ages 11-17) running 250+ machines for about 800 users. So far, we've replaced all the servers with new hardware and Red Hat Enterprise 4 at £35 a server.
First of all, we set up a test network and checked things out to make sure it'd do everything we needed. Funnily enough it does, but the client side really is a pain in the arse. OpenOffice is up to it without a doubt, Gimpshop is going to be trialled by the art department starting next week and we're trying other stuff on Wine to see what will run and what won't in order to determine whether it's worth carrying on or not.
The only other option we've really considered is to set up a Windows Terminal Server and use rdesktop to access apps that we really can't run any other way. That way we'll only need to maintain one Windows setup, the Linux boxes being a boxed set with the auto update enabled.
Ultimately though you'll find that the software providers are your biggest enemy like the examination organisation that provides you software that requires SQL server. The kids have to take exams. You therefore have to have the software and hence Windows.
Hopefully, if enough people hack their way into running Windows apps on Linux, the providers may realise that there is a market out there. Alternatively they may then see no point in developing Linux specific versions until Vista comes along and DRMs WINE out of the equation.
Long term it may be worth setting up a curriculum oriented community project but it really would have to be co-ordinated so you don't end up with an abundance of one kind of app and a famine of others.
"It would appear that if you want to get legislation past PM Blair - just add a terorist threat - or say your name is Bush (guess who with have the extradition agreement with with)."
And if your name's Gates, you can get every government I.T. project and dinner at No. 10.
"Once he was finished with the rest of Europe, do you really think Adolf would have stopped at the channel for the sake of civility? As for "population density" - Holland? Belgium?
I don't know as I wasn't there. There are however people whose job it is to sift through archives looking for information and I have read several times that the original comments were possibly true. Whether they are based on facts drawn from the archives or the ramblings of right wing historical revisionists is open to debate but in my original post I started with the statement that "there is a line of thought that suggests". To blindly accept any one interpretation of history without thinking "what would have happened if", particularly when you're dealing with a mind as twisted as Hitlers, is not a good thing. Also remember that the British establishment at that time including the aristocracy contained many Hitler worshippers and it seems possible that some kind of arrangement would have been made that prevented Britain from being forcibly invaded. OK so I cocked up in phrasing the last bit. It was population desity + class structure and the fact that the working classes hadn't turned on the rulers in a French revolution style that impressed Hitler.
Face it, the only viable option was to team up with the US and Russia and get rid of Hitler, Just thank God you had Churchill and not just Chamberlain; I do,"
Yep, I'm glad we had Churchill as well although I feel that Chaimberlain is unfairly maligned for his appeasment based as it was on a desire to avoid a repeat of the bloodshed that occured in WW1 rather than an act of cowardice. Also note that at the time of Chaimberlain's declaration of war on Germany teaming up with Russia and the US was not an option as Russia had a non-aggresion pact with Germany and America expected the RAF to last 3 weeks before the Germans invaded while the US population opposed entering "another European war".
Make no mistake, I'm not claiming Hitler was right, nor am I saying that I wish he'd won. Indeed my dad spent the war years in North Africa and the Med flying anti-shipping and ASR missions and I'm proud of the part he played in nailing the Third Reich but the original question was would the British people have been any worse off had Hitler won. That's open to personal interpretation as well but as a constant criticism of dictatorships during WW2 and the Cold War was the constant surveillance of its citizens through cameras, phone taps and informants and the use of a compliant media to reinforce the status quo I often, in my more paranoid moments, start to wonder. I mean really, I don't think Tony Blair is that interested in watching my every move but the hard part of setting up an opressive regime is getting the mechanisms for enforcing that opression place without anyone noticing or complaining about it. Should a British government come to power that does want to rule by force New Labour has installed everything they need to make it easy from day one.
There's nothing wrong with England beyond the fact that the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.
"You people invented modern democratic society and civil rights, and you've been happily flushing it down the drain, piece by piece, ever since the end of WWII."
I can't say that I've really felt that my civil rights have been flushed away during the 40 years I've lived in this country until the current Blair Brigade fired up their war on privacy. The annoying thing about New Labour is that they really don't give a shit what the people think or want. For instance, during the build up to the ID card idea the government called for feedback from the public. The web based survey overwhelmingly showed a no vote for the idea of ID cards. The government then discounted all the web based votes on the grounds that they were the result of an organised group of anti protesters and effectively binned the wishes of those who'd taken the time to fill out the form.
The British people don't kick up a fuss nowadays because 20 years of this shit has proven that no matter how loud the people shout, they will be ignored as the purpose of government has shifted from representing the people to managing them in order to maintain the economy.
(Would you really be any worse off at this point if the Nazis had won?)
I've often wondered this myself. There's a line of thought that suggests that Hitler would not have invaded Britain had the UK kept out of Germany's affairs. There even appears to be evidence that Hitler admired Britain because of it's empire and the fact that in a country with such a high population density, people were controlled enough to not turn on each other. If this had been the case, Britain would have been less likely to have lost it's empire, would not have been bankrupted and would probably have remained one of the worlds top powers.
On the other hand Hitler was a nutter who had no problem with murdering entire races on the basis that he didn't like them and on balance I can't help but think that it was a worthy trade off to get rid of him.
"Gun control, CCTV, now ID cards--every time I look at America's problems, I can always cheer myself up by remembering that whatever we're doing wrong, you're guaranteed to do something worse."
It's true. Given the sacrifices above that this country has made in the name of freedom it is fairly staggering that we've been battered into giving up so much so easily. Another problem is that the UK government is obsessed with technology but blessed with not a clue as to its limits. You can therefore guarantee that any scheme that MPs go for will be riddled with holes that render it useless. With the number of access points to the central database that the government are planning it seems unbelievable that any dedicated terrorist organisation would be incapable of either hacking it or getting a sympathiser on the inside. Once this occurs, fake ID's will be legitimised purely by the fact that they're confirmed by the database and the work of criminals and terrorists will be made easier.
"And what kind of politics have you got going now where the Conservatives are for civil liberties and Labour are the fascists? That's just bizarre."
New Labour is a Labour government in the same way that Stalin and Mao's were communist. You can call a dog turd a gold nugget but that doesn't stop it being a dog turd and New Labour is Labour in name only.
Can't string this out too long as I wish to dedicate some time to the software patent issue, letter writing etc.
Anyhow, point 1 is undeniable but given that for the last two thousand years beating the crap out of each other was the accepted method of settling disputes I don't see this behaviour as being any different from the tribal wars of Africa, South America, The far east and practically every other continent. What made Europe different was scale due to the high population density, cultural and religious alliances and the ease of attacking a country that shares the same continent.
I still think that lease-lend was a vital component among many vital components and although important in the overall victory, it was the sum of the contributions that won the war not a single contribution from any particular party.
I can't help that think that the Marshall plan to rebuild Germany after war was the single most valuable contribution to peace. This was a definite sign that lessons had been learnt and saved the defeated axis from developing the victim mentality that made it so easy for Hitler to lead them into another conflict. Once nukes came on the scene and the MAD concept took hold only a true madman would have started a full scale European war.
I suspect that Britain and the rest of Europe for that matter has reached a point where it doesn't want any more wars. Ultimately, all the last two millenia of fighting has produced is a whole lot of misery and death whereas trade has serverd us as a much better master. The Balkans conflict was triggered by Tito's death and 50 years worth of bottled up anger over who sided with who in WW2. Funnily enough though, the instigators were christian Serbia and the Bosnian Muslims took most of the flak in that one.
Yep, social welfare does make up the majority of the European budget but we've spent a thousand + years years wallowing in shit and poverty while a tiny percent of the population held all the wealth propped up by corrupt barons and a church that swam in wealth while it's congregations starved. The wealth imbalance shifted through the industrial revolution to the point where rich factory and land owners joined the aristocracy while the rest of us wallowed in shit and poverty. In the end, people just got sick of working their wallowing in shit and poverty and being paid peanuts with the added bonus of a job and income that could disappear overnight leaving them freezing on the street. While Margaret Thatcher demonised the unions I can't help but think that they and the labour movement did far more good in the long run than harm. Despite being the biggest drain on tax payers money, the NHS is still seen by the majority of the British public as sacred and while few would sanction scrounging from the state, I suspect the majority of European citizens would favour welfare for all over extreme wealth for the few any day.
Funnily enough though, we now seem to be going backwards into a world where corporate billionaire kings supported by baron politicans are concentrating the wealth in their own pockets while credit companies hold the peasents in indentured service, slaving to pay of the credit bills they run up to buy their third new TV in two years. Funny thing progress isn't it.
The UK still runs a pretty effective welfare system despite Thatcher's legacy although pensions are a problem. Given that IBM and other US corporations have had problems in that field I don't think that this can be seen as a purely European problem. Long term, Europe will no doubt have to follow the UK down a more American style economic line and there will be turmoil as there was in the UK during the 1980s but rivers of blood flowing through the streets is an unlikely scenario. If the successful recovery of the UK economy between 1970 and now was to be repeated across the EU the potential is there for a rapid surge in economic strength that would make the EU a force to be dealt with instead of the disparate bickering bunch of nations that it currently is. Inc
"Why is it that whenever anyone wants to defend muslims and impugn christians they have to go back several centuries? I'll let you ponder the significance of that."
Aside from the colonisation of Muslim countries in the 19th century? The support of a Saudi Regime that oppresses its own population? Wonder why "Cough"oil.... The use of their land as a fighting ground in wars that they had no interest in? The creation and funding of a regional super power that was built on land forcibly taken from Muslim countries when Britain formed Israel and I'm a born and bred christian Englishman and even I can see the reason why they're still fighting. You don't have to go back to the crusades to find reasons for Muslims to hate the West. We put in a lot of groundwork over the years to build up that much hatred and contempt and it's a miracle that there are actually so few of them that really want to attack us.
"As for what the US military failed to achieve... in vietnam our soldiers were shackled by a series of over-involved and too hesitant administrations."
In the case of Vietnam, this is undeniable. The decisive point in the Vietnam war was congresses' refusal to approve the OC commanding US forces' request for 150,000 extra troops after the Tet offensive. Counter to the commonly held view, Tet was a major defeat for the Viet-Min (Viet-Cong is a made up name from the Pentagon's press office invented to make them sound scarier - seems fair, King Min sounds like a comedy character) and they lost a significant percentage of their soldiers. Had Congress had the balls to follow through with the extra troops it's almost certain that the war would have been a great victory for the US.
However, this leads to questioning whether or not the US would have had the determination required to stay the course in Europe if the soviets had invaded. After all, the regional spat that was Vietnam was a war against communism and ultimately the US public lost the will to fight on once middle class white kids started getting drafted instead of the Ghetto bred cannon fodder that led the way into action.
Had a US/Soviet war kicked off there's no guarantee than Communist China and Russia wouldn't have buried the hatchet and there's a lot to be said for weight of numbers when you're population's a billion even of you do arrive on donkeys.
Anyway, my original point wasn't that US involvment wasn't an important factor but that there were many important factors some of equal importance, e.g. Radar, the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk. Station X and the decryption of German signals. U.S. Involvement shortened the war without a doubt but at the top of the list I would place the fact that Hitler was, at the end of the day, a fuck up merchant. I've had an earfull for saying this in the past along the lines of "He couldn't have conquered Europe if he was that bad" but most of the German victories happened as a result of Hitler saying "Lets invade and his generals going off and doing it. What Hitler was, was an effective orator and figurehead who could raise rabble at a Quaker meeting if he wanted. Germany's biggest defeats resulted from Hitler's direct involvement in the actions of the German armies i.e. telling Rommel to fight to the last instead of retreating and regrouping in North Africa, insisting that German troops "Fight to the death" instead of retreating from Stalingrad, etc..
Towards the end of the war, the British Special Operations Executive palnned an assassination attempt on Hitler's life named Operation Foxleigh. It boiled down to dropping a sniper into the Hitler's bavarian mountain retreat where he was known to walk, unescorted every morning. The decision was taken not to assassinate him because the Allies had decided that Hitler was more of a liability to the Germans alive than dead. Like all politicians who are happy to send their countries youth off to a premature death, Hitler was quite happy to take the salutes, cheers and all the credit in exchange for a bit of second rate mouthing off while those
I always see it in terms of Jesus and Mohammed sitting on a cloud discussing worldly events along the lines of:
J: Dad ALMIGHTY! All I did was go down there and tell then to love their enemy and exercise forgiveness and all they do is spend all there time using me and the old man to justify kicking the shit out of each other.
M: Yeah, I know what you mean. I mean, where did all this 75 virgins bollocks come from? Surely if your giving out rewards 75 hot chicks with an in-depth knowledge of the Karma Sutra would be far more appropriate.
J: Absolutely. I just get so so fed up with blokes in frocks spouting out that this is a just war 'cos my dad told 'em so. I mean get a grip mankind, God don't take sides particularly if you're armed and picking on the small guy and he certainly doesn't talk to politicians as they're demented enough as it is without voices popping into their heads every five minutes.
M: True. Wouldn't fancy going there again in a hurry nowadays though. If they found out who you were they'd probably have you nailed to something wihtin 5 seconds of exiting the womb to stop you screwing up their dodgy deals.
J: Yeahhhh..... It's a hard eternal life isn't it.
"Each other, for starters. You Europeans were a goddamn bloody bunch, with major wars going back every decade for as long as history has been recorded. This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe."
1: In 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland (Sept. 1st), America was working out how it was going to manage a relationship with a Nazi controlled Europe as it only expected Britain to hold out for 3 weeks after the "inevitable" defeat of the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Hitler's biggest mistake, if anything, was to turn and attack the Soviet Union (22nd June 1941) splitting his forces across another front on top of the Western and North African wars that were already in progress. If Britain had fallen in 1939, Europe would have been fucked anyway so the phrase "This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe" which negates the contributions of all the other allied powers is an insult to the millions of non-Americans who died in that war as well as being an expression of an obscene level of arrogance.
Your tone also suggest America's involvement was a totally selfless act despite the fact that America entered the war wholesale after it had been attacked by Japan and Germany had made a declaration of War against it. You also neglect to mention the arrangements from which America benefited, i.e. technology transfers including Radar, the jet engine, the cavity magnetron, Azdic, etc. and, post-war, faster than sound technology (developed by Miles Aircraft Corp and used by Bell to build the X-1, sideways looking terrain following all weather radar (developed for the BAC TSR 2 Nuclear strike aircraft - used in the cruise missile) and more that I can't be arsed to list. On top of this, America gained access to a global span of British territory for military use as part of Lease Lend as well being in a position to isolate itself from Communist Russia by transferring any fighting with the USSR away from Alaska which would be a bitch because no-one wants to fight a war at -40 in an environment where everything that moves leaves a trail that can be spotted from the air and into region that could form a handy missile launching platform close to the intended target.
"This made engaging the US a prerequisite to starting any European war, and defeating the US military was too high a bar for anyone to really consider trying."
Er, Nope.
The world's leaders understanding that there were enough thermonuclear warheads on both sides to blow the entire planet up stopped another war from starting.
"As a consequence, most of Europe has allowed its military to degrade into near-uselessness."
The ex-Axis forces were deliberately prevented from having an army large enough to cause any trouble while what was left of allied Europe had been so bombed to shit that it was bankrupt and couldn't have supported the kind of Army needed to fight a war. One country is notable as having actually come out of WW2 richer than when it went in primarily through selling arms to it's allies under the guise of Lease Lend opening up potential lines of argument as to whether it was an alliance or a business arrangement.
"Muslims are usually looking for wars"
What the fuck are you on? That is just the sort of statement made from a position of such supreme ignorance that it borders on being not worth answering.
Muslims and Christians have existing next door to each other for several thousand years. In fact, when the christian crusaders commissioned to fight a "holy" war in the middle east arrived, the cities they found under Muslim control contained mixed populations of Christian, Muslim and Jews and the laws enacted within the cities prevented anyone from attacking a holy building of any denomination. The rulers of the Muslim lands also endorsed the crusaders activities as a holy war and offered them food and shelter within the hous
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"If your believe you have a right to take anything you need, regardless of your means to pay, i cant see how your not an anarchist or a communist."
Well you missed out the common thief option. Thievery has no political persuasion and stretches from poor people who steal to eat, to your Enron's and politicians who want control of someone else's oil.
The oft used trick in the UK for getting the population to swallow whatever crap the government wants to hurl their way, i.e.
1) Announce insanely over the top version of whatever it is you want to do
2) Sit back while the population freaks out for a while and make a token defence of it
3) Back off to the point you originally intended and watch the population sigh in relief your "capitulation" in the face of their protests.
Generally, if there's one thing to realise about New Labour it's that things don't leak from a source close to anyone in the government unless there's an agenda behind it.
OK, here's how it works.
Schools in my area get Windows XP for £30 and Office for £45 per seat. I'm currently setting every PC in the school to dual boot XP and Ubuntu as there are just too many apps that are Windows based that teachers would be lost (or at least very confused) without.
We saved a fortune on Windows 2003 server licences and using E-Groupware saved £5 per seat exchange licences for 800 people. All of our servers run Redhat academic licences (£35 per server + no CALs) and have almost zero maintenance save the odd reboot when a kernel security upgrade comes along which takes about 3 minutes after school closes. Hell, I can VPN in, update the thing and reboot from home with confidence in the fact that the server will not have been stuffed by the latest updates.
All this will be irrelevant soon though as the the UK government has plans for the education system system in the UK called Building Schools for the Future. Look it up on Google and then be prepared for a sinking feeling.
BSF involves replacing every school building in the country using PFI (Private Finance Initiative) money and services. PFI basically means the lowest bidder and BSF schools so far have been mainly judged to be of poor or mediocre standard. More interesting to Slashdot readers though is the fact that ICT services will be removed from the control of the schools where it currently rests and will be tendered out to private companies on a county wide basis in order to take advantage of the bulk buying power that huge companies can obtain. One of the the lead trial areas however has yet to release the specs that companies tendering for the work will have to meet. This makes it very difficult for any company attempting to bid to see what it is they are required to provide. Funnily enough the County Council in that area has its own Educational ICT provider which is a strictly Microsoft shop.
If you look at the situation regarding BSF it looks like the ICT section provides a huge bias in favour of large corporations, particularly those based in Redmond.
Of course the payload of this will be the standardisation of ICT across large areas with no room for originality or independant thought but then that sounds that New Britain to me.
BTW, Check out the BSF PDF file that has an illustration of the perfect school design. It bears a strong resemblance to a factory production line. Raw meat in at one end, and a long stream of identical tasteless nuggets out at the other.
Car theft is the fault of metal-workers. After all, if powered centre-punches weren't available due to metal workers using them to mark drilling spots on metal then car thieves wouldn't use them to break car windows.
Forget the fact that a powered centre punch is just an inanimate tool and that it's purely the malicious intent of car thieves that means they're used for illegal reasons, someone must be to blame. So let's lynch metal-workers for causing car theft!!
"remind him that more people speak american english than british english, then tell him to bugger off or something."
Hate to say this but go to the websites of the countries that were part of the 3/4 of the world that was coloured pink on the empire map and color is spelt colour and favorite is spelt favourite with the exception of the odd typo. Then again maybe being part of the biggest empire in world history leaves a bit of an imprint.
"Windows Server 2003 was recently compared against Linux and Unix variants in a survey by the Yankee Group, with Windows having a higher annual uptime than Linux.
Also...
Pope says Catholicism the best religion and Bin Laden says Bush is a bad, bad man
Absolutely spot on, Blair is the problem but I think the truly amazing thing about Tony is that whenever New Labour draws up a new law it's always poorly thought, motivated by a need for a popular headline for tomorrows papers and is so vague in definition that it'll either criminalise people who have no ill intent or allow real criminals to get off on technicalities. Seriously, given that 90% of the laws that the gov. comes out with are so full of holes and badly drafted, if you ever needed a lawyer would you put your life in Tony Blair's hands?
I think that one of Margaret Thatcher's strongest points was the fact that when her government made laws she spent a lot of time making sure it would achieve what she wanted and there would be no way around it.
Another problem with the current government is that although they're really keen to make Britain a technological leader, they don't seem to have a clue about technology and the limits of it's abilites/usefulness. As a result, you end up with poorly designed government IT systems that are over budget, hated by those that use them and out of date before the systems installed. Even more surprising is that it's always the same bunch of companys that have provided a string of emabarrasing failures that end up getting the next contract.
So, for the question "What is going on in the UK?!". Basically it's being run by people with no principles, ideas or attention to detail in order to keep the press and media from turning on them while they give themselves 100% payrises, keep their corporate friends happy and destroy anything to do with Britain that may offend even the most over-sensitive minority. To stop the pissed off masses rebelling all it takes is country wide CCTV, RFID ID cards, number plate recognising cameras and a culture where people feel isolated.
This'll no doubt be handled the same way demonstrations are handled.
If you wait until there's a demo in Trafalgar Square and try logging into the publicly available traffic cams you'll suddenly find they're all down for maintenance.
For a cynic, this is so the police can beat the crap out of people undisturbed by public eyes for the optimist it's to stop potential troublemakers using the cameras and mobile phones to co-ordinate disorder.
No doubt there'll be a 1/4 mile radius of camera maintenance every time the PM leaves No. 10.
Current situation:
The state is snooping too much and is acting in an oppressive and unconstitutional way. Rumsfeld, Bush, whoever must be held responsible. Someone must resign.
Future situation:
The state is snooping too much and is acting in an oppressive and unconstitutional way.
The Civil-Liberties Officer isn't doing his job properly and he must resign.
Appointing people to posts where they appear to have free reign while their strings are pulled from the shadows puts a superb buffer zone between the public and those who really make the decisions. It worked for Tony Blair for years and it's only since he's decided that he's invincible and dropped his guard, claiming responsibility for good things that unexpectedly turned to shit, that he's become so distrusted.
"and compatible with non-Windows systems (excluding Samba, as that was reverse-engineered),"
From what I understand, the SMB protocol that samba works on has been around longer than Microsoft have been using it. It's another case of the embrace, extend and exclude method of "innovation" that landed MS in the courts in the first place.
A Cancer, eating away at open standards from the inside!!! A Cancer I tell ya!! They're like communists, No, Facists, No! MONKEY DANCERS!!!!!!!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and foam at the mouth and throw some furniture.
Nope, what he should do is find people who have worked there way up from the bottom, become successful and have Britain as their primary home.
Dyson, Branson, Sugar, etc.. I may even find Stelios acceptable. He may have started out with a million of so from his old man but he has a sufficiently different angle.
--
Anonymous Coward. The name you post under when you have nothing really worth saying.
The UK parliament has been redundant for a long time.
Back in the days of Margaret Thatcher, huge parliamentary majorities were won on minority votes thanks to the first past the post, 3 party system. If I remember rightly, Mrs. T held a majority in excess of 300 MPs with only 40% of the electorate voting for her. Tony Blair commanded about 35% of the vote when less than 50% of the electorate turned out.
With a three figure majority and the back-benches filled with career minded sheep, the government can get pretty much anything they want through so the new law is just icing on the cake. What worries me more is the sort of people they hang with. According to the treasury web site, the following are being flown in by Gordon Brown, the next Prime Minister, to give advice on business in New Britain:
Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO, LVMH
Lord Browne, Group Chief Executive, BP
Dr Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO, GlaxoSmithKline
Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Sir Ka-shing Li, Chairman of the Board, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd
Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
Sir John Rose, CEO, Rolls Royce
Robert Rubin, Director and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Citigroup Inc
Lee Scott, President and CEO, Wal-Mart
Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group
Meg Whitman, President and CEO, eBay
James Wolfensohn, Special Envoy for Disengagement and Former President of the World Bank
Yep, that's right. In order to improve the business environment for entrepreneurs and encourage opportunity among the lower classes, Brown is freighting in a convicted monopolist and a horde of bankers and fat-cats some of which are heads of corporations that have been criticised for predatory and/or unfair practises. Hmmmm.. Can't wait 'til the advice starts flowing. "Well everyone, what's the best thing to encourage competition in business"? Patents for everything and tax cuts for the exceptionally rich? Sure thing, no problem now that I can push it through Parliament without a proper debate. Seat in the House of Lords? Two million to you guv but make it untraceable, know what I mean?
Sick country man, a really sick country.
From Gartner:
Apple has confirmed that it's taken the number one spot in the western European education market.
Apple's education market share in western Europe is now 15.2 per cent, relegating Dell, with 14.7 per cent, to second place.
If Apple owns 15.2% of the EU market that leaves 84.8% that are running Windows minus the small percentage that are running Linux. It's all very well putting Apple in the number 1 PC vendor spot but the Windows share is Dell plus any number of other Intel/MS manufacturers plus schools that build their own and use site wide volume licences etc.
Without wishing to piss on the Apple parade, MS are still the number 1 OS in education. Believe me, I wish it were otherwise as I've spent some time putting Linux/Samba in place of a school's NT network and I soooooooo want to run Linux clients but there's just so much curriculum software for Windows that can't be replaced with what's available for Linux/MAC.
On the other hand, I don't see how MS can win this one. The validity of their licences in the EU only holds because EU law supports them. If MS take the piss it only needs shrink wrapped licences to be declared invalid and MS are bolloxed.
The EU could also change competition law and make the max daily fine 10 million or 10 billion. If MS threaten to pull out of Europe you can look at it two ways, 1 - a disaster that could hurt the European economy or 2 - an opportunity for the birth of a whole new European software industry. OK so start the flames but at the end of the day there are many people who have stomped out of their workplace convinced that the company that's treated them so badly will suffer only to find that after a short period of readjustment the company forgets they even existed.
In the event of MS exiting Europe you can expect to see many of today's Linux geeks being tomorrows training company millionaires. Roll it on, that's what I say.
Scientist: Mr President, data collected from our Earth observing satellites is proof that's mankind is the major contributor to Global Warming!
GWB (Picks up phone): Send in the budget adjusters please..... I have a little job them. MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA
I work in a UK secondary school (Ages 11-17) running 250+ machines for about 800 users. So far, we've replaced all the servers with new hardware and Red Hat Enterprise 4 at £35 a server.
First of all, we set up a test network and checked things out to make sure it'd do everything we needed. Funnily enough it does, but the client side really is a pain in the arse. OpenOffice is up to it without a doubt, Gimpshop is going to be trialled by the art department starting next week and we're trying other stuff on Wine to see what will run and what won't in order to determine whether it's worth carrying on or not.
The only other option we've really considered is to set up a Windows Terminal Server and use rdesktop to access apps that we really can't run any other way. That way we'll only need to maintain one Windows setup, the Linux boxes being a boxed set with the auto update enabled.
Ultimately though you'll find that the software providers are your biggest enemy like the examination organisation that provides you software that requires SQL server. The kids have to take exams. You therefore have to have the software and hence Windows.
Hopefully, if enough people hack their way into running Windows apps on Linux, the providers may realise that there is a market out there. Alternatively they may then see no point in developing Linux specific versions until Vista comes along and DRMs WINE out of the equation.
Long term it may be worth setting up a curriculum oriented community project but it really would have to be co-ordinated so you don't end up with an abundance of one kind of app and a famine of others.
Hard life innit?
"It would appear that if you want to get legislation past PM Blair - just add a terorist threat - or say your name is Bush (guess who with have the extradition agreement with with)."
And if your name's Gates, you can get every government I.T. project and dinner at No. 10.
"UK Government Wants a Backdoor Into Windows"
Makes a change, Tony Blair's been making his back door available to Bill Gates since he came to power.
"Once he was finished with the rest of Europe, do you really think Adolf would have stopped at the channel for the sake of civility? As for "population density" - Holland? Belgium?
I don't know as I wasn't there. There are however people whose job it is to sift through archives looking for information and I have read several times that the original comments were possibly true. Whether they are based on facts drawn from the archives or the ramblings of right wing historical revisionists is open to debate but in my original post I started with the statement that "there is a line of thought that suggests". To blindly accept any one interpretation of history without thinking "what would have happened if", particularly when you're dealing with a mind as twisted as Hitlers, is not a good thing. Also remember that the British establishment at that time including the aristocracy contained many Hitler worshippers and it seems possible that some kind of arrangement would have been made that prevented Britain from being forcibly invaded. OK so I cocked up in phrasing the last bit. It was population desity + class structure and the fact that the working classes hadn't turned on the rulers in a French revolution style that impressed Hitler.
Face it, the only viable option was to team up with the US and Russia and get rid of Hitler, Just thank God you had Churchill and not just Chamberlain; I do,"
Yep, I'm glad we had Churchill as well although I feel that Chaimberlain is unfairly maligned for his appeasment based as it was on a desire to avoid a repeat of the bloodshed that occured in WW1 rather than an act of cowardice. Also note that at the time of Chaimberlain's declaration of war on Germany teaming up with Russia and the US was not an option as Russia had a non-aggresion pact with Germany and America expected the RAF to last 3 weeks before the Germans invaded while the US population opposed entering "another European war".
Make no mistake, I'm not claiming Hitler was right, nor am I saying that I wish he'd won. Indeed my dad spent the war years in North Africa and the Med flying anti-shipping and ASR missions and I'm proud of the part he played in nailing the Third Reich but the original question was would the British people have been any worse off had Hitler won. That's open to personal interpretation as well but as a constant criticism of dictatorships during WW2 and the Cold War was the constant surveillance of its citizens through cameras, phone taps and informants and the use of a compliant media to reinforce the status quo I often, in my more paranoid moments, start to wonder. I mean really, I don't think Tony Blair is that interested in watching my every move but the hard part of setting up an opressive regime is getting the mechanisms for enforcing that opression place without anyone noticing or complaining about it. Should a British government come to power that does want to rule by force New Labour has installed everything they need to make it easy from day one.
"What the hell is wrong with England?!?"
There's nothing wrong with England beyond the fact that the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.
"You people invented modern democratic society and civil rights, and you've been happily flushing it down the drain, piece by piece, ever since the end of WWII."
I can't say that I've really felt that my civil rights have been flushed away during the 40 years I've lived in this country until the current Blair Brigade fired up their war on privacy. The annoying thing about New Labour is that they really don't give a shit what the people think or want. For instance, during the build up to the ID card idea the government called for feedback from the public. The web based survey overwhelmingly showed a no vote for the idea of ID cards. The government then discounted all the web based votes on the grounds that they were the result of an organised group of anti protesters and effectively binned the wishes of those who'd taken the time to fill out the form.
The British people don't kick up a fuss nowadays because 20 years of this shit has proven that no matter how loud the people shout, they will be ignored as the purpose of government has shifted from representing the people to managing them in order to maintain the economy.
(Would you really be any worse off at this point if the Nazis had won?)
I've often wondered this myself. There's a line of thought that suggests that Hitler would not have invaded Britain had the UK kept out of Germany's affairs. There even appears to be evidence that Hitler admired Britain because of it's empire and the fact that in a country with such a high population density, people were controlled enough to not turn on each other. If this had been the case, Britain would have been less likely to have lost it's empire, would not have been bankrupted and would probably have remained one of the worlds top powers.
On the other hand Hitler was a nutter who had no problem with murdering entire races on the basis that he didn't like them and on balance I can't help but think that it was a worthy trade off to get rid of him.
"Gun control, CCTV, now ID cards--every time I look at America's problems, I can always cheer myself up by remembering that whatever we're doing wrong, you're guaranteed to do something worse."
It's true. Given the sacrifices above that this country has made in the name of freedom it is fairly staggering that we've been battered into giving up so much so easily. Another problem is that the UK government is obsessed with technology but blessed with not a clue as to its limits. You can therefore guarantee that any scheme that MPs go for will be riddled with holes that render it useless. With the number of access points to the central database that the government are planning it seems unbelievable that any dedicated terrorist organisation would be incapable of either hacking it or getting a sympathiser on the inside. Once this occurs, fake ID's will be legitimised purely by the fact that they're confirmed by the database and the work of criminals and terrorists will be made easier.
"And what kind of politics have you got going now where the Conservatives are for civil liberties and Labour are the fascists? That's just bizarre."
New Labour is a Labour government in the same way that Stalin and Mao's were communist. You can call a dog turd a gold nugget but that doesn't stop it being a dog turd and New Labour is Labour in name only.
Can't string this out too long as I wish to dedicate some time to the software patent issue, letter writing etc.
Anyhow, point 1 is undeniable but given that for the last two thousand years beating the crap out of each other was the accepted method of settling disputes I don't see this behaviour as being any different from the tribal wars of Africa, South America, The far east and practically every other continent. What made Europe different was scale due to the high population density, cultural and religious alliances and the ease of attacking a country that shares the same continent.
I still think that lease-lend was a vital component among many vital components and although important in the overall victory, it was the sum of the contributions that won the war not a single contribution from any particular party.
I can't help that think that the Marshall plan to rebuild Germany after war was the single most valuable contribution to peace. This was a definite sign that lessons had been learnt and saved the defeated axis from developing the victim mentality that made it so easy for Hitler to lead them into another conflict. Once nukes came on the scene and the MAD concept took hold only a true madman would have started a full scale European war.
I suspect that Britain and the rest of Europe for that matter has reached a point where it doesn't want any more wars. Ultimately, all the last two millenia of fighting has produced is a whole lot of misery and death whereas trade has serverd us as a much better master. The Balkans conflict was triggered by Tito's death and 50 years worth of bottled up anger over who sided with who in WW2. Funnily enough though, the instigators were christian Serbia and the Bosnian Muslims took most of the flak in that one.
Yep, social welfare does make up the majority of the European budget but we've spent a thousand + years years wallowing in shit and poverty while a tiny percent of the population held all the wealth propped up by corrupt barons and a church that swam in wealth while it's congregations starved. The wealth imbalance shifted through the industrial revolution to the point where rich factory and land owners joined the aristocracy while the rest of us wallowed in shit and poverty. In the end, people just got sick of working their wallowing in shit and poverty and being paid peanuts with the added bonus of a job and income that could disappear overnight leaving them freezing on the street. While Margaret Thatcher demonised the unions I can't help but think that they and the labour movement did far more good in the long run than harm. Despite being the biggest drain on tax payers money, the NHS is still seen by the majority of the British public as sacred and while few would sanction scrounging from the state, I suspect the majority of European citizens would favour welfare for all over extreme wealth for the few any day.
Funnily enough though, we now seem to be going backwards into a world where corporate billionaire kings supported by baron politicans are concentrating the wealth in their own pockets while credit companies hold the peasents in indentured service, slaving to pay of the credit bills they run up to buy their third new TV in two years. Funny thing progress isn't it.
The UK still runs a pretty effective welfare system despite Thatcher's legacy although pensions are a problem. Given that IBM and other US corporations have had problems in that field I don't think that this can be seen as a purely European problem. Long term, Europe will no doubt have to follow the UK down a more American style economic line and there will be turmoil as there was in the UK during the 1980s but rivers of blood flowing through the streets is an unlikely scenario. If the successful recovery of the UK economy between 1970 and now was to be repeated across the EU the potential is there for a rapid surge in economic strength that would make the EU a force to be dealt with instead of the disparate bickering bunch of nations that it currently is. Inc
"Why is it that whenever anyone wants to defend muslims and impugn christians they have to go back several centuries? I'll let you ponder the significance of that."
Aside from the colonisation of Muslim countries in the 19th century? The support of a Saudi Regime that oppresses its own population? Wonder why "Cough"oil.... The use of their land as a fighting ground in wars that they had no interest in? The creation and funding of a regional super power that was built on land forcibly taken from Muslim countries when Britain formed Israel and I'm a born and bred christian Englishman and even I can see the reason why they're still fighting. You don't have to go back to the crusades to find reasons for Muslims to hate the West. We put in a lot of groundwork over the years to build up that much hatred and contempt and it's a miracle that there are actually so few of them that really want to attack us.
"As for what the US military failed to achieve... in vietnam our soldiers were shackled by a series of over-involved and too hesitant administrations."
In the case of Vietnam, this is undeniable. The decisive point in the Vietnam war was congresses' refusal to approve the OC commanding US forces' request for 150,000 extra troops after the Tet offensive. Counter to the commonly held view, Tet was a major defeat for the Viet-Min (Viet-Cong is a made up name from the Pentagon's press office invented to make them sound scarier - seems fair, King Min sounds like a comedy character) and they lost a significant percentage of their soldiers. Had Congress had the balls to follow through with the extra troops it's almost certain that the war would have been a great victory for the US.
However, this leads to questioning whether or not the US would have had the determination required to stay the course in Europe if the soviets had invaded. After all, the regional spat that was Vietnam was a war against communism and ultimately the US public lost the will to fight on once middle class white kids started getting drafted instead of the Ghetto bred cannon fodder that led the way into action.
Had a US/Soviet war kicked off there's no guarantee than Communist China and Russia wouldn't have buried the hatchet and there's a lot to be said for weight of numbers when you're population's a billion even of you do arrive on donkeys.
Anyway, my original point wasn't that US involvment wasn't an important factor but that there were many important factors some of equal importance, e.g. Radar, the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk. Station X and the decryption of German signals. U.S. Involvement shortened the war without a doubt but at the top of the list I would place the fact that Hitler was, at the end of the day, a fuck up merchant. I've had an earfull for saying this in the past along the lines of "He couldn't have conquered Europe if he was that bad" but most of the German victories happened as a result of Hitler saying "Lets invade and his generals going off and doing it. What Hitler was, was an effective orator and figurehead who could raise rabble at a Quaker meeting if he wanted. Germany's biggest defeats resulted from Hitler's direct involvement in the actions of the German armies i.e. telling Rommel to fight to the last instead of retreating and regrouping in North Africa, insisting that German troops "Fight to the death" instead of retreating from Stalingrad, etc..
Towards the end of the war, the British Special Operations Executive palnned an assassination attempt on Hitler's life named Operation Foxleigh. It boiled down to dropping a sniper into the Hitler's bavarian mountain retreat where he was known to walk, unescorted every morning. The decision was taken not to assassinate him because the Allies had decided that Hitler was more of a liability to the Germans alive than dead. Like all politicians who are happy to send their countries youth off to a premature death, Hitler was quite happy to take the salutes, cheers and all the credit in exchange for a bit of second rate mouthing off while those
I always see it in terms of Jesus and Mohammed sitting on a cloud discussing worldly events along the lines of:
J: Dad ALMIGHTY! All I did was go down there and tell then to love their enemy and exercise forgiveness and all they do is spend all there time using me and the old man to justify kicking the shit out of each other.
M: Yeah, I know what you mean. I mean, where did all this 75 virgins bollocks come from? Surely if your giving out rewards 75 hot chicks with an in-depth knowledge of the Karma Sutra would be far more appropriate.
J: Absolutely. I just get so so fed up with blokes in frocks spouting out that this is a just war 'cos my dad told 'em so. I mean get a grip mankind, God don't take sides particularly if you're armed and picking on the small guy and he certainly doesn't talk to politicians as they're demented enough as it is without voices popping into their heads every five minutes.
M: True. Wouldn't fancy going there again in a hurry nowadays though. If they found out who you were they'd probably have you nailed to something wihtin 5 seconds of exiting the womb to stop you screwing up their dodgy deals.
J: Yeahhhh..... It's a hard eternal life isn't it.
WTF?
"Each other, for starters. You Europeans were a goddamn bloody bunch, with major wars going back every decade for as long as history has been recorded. This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe."
1: In 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland (Sept. 1st), America was working out how it was going to manage a relationship with a Nazi controlled Europe as it only expected Britain to hold out for 3 weeks after the "inevitable" defeat of the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Hitler's biggest mistake, if anything, was to turn and attack the Soviet Union (22nd June 1941) splitting his forces across another front on top of the Western and North African wars that were already in progress. If Britain had fallen in 1939, Europe would have been fucked anyway so the phrase "This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe" which negates the contributions of all the other allied powers is an insult to the millions of non-Americans who died in that war as well as being an expression of an obscene level of arrogance.
Your tone also suggest America's involvement was a totally selfless act despite the fact that America entered the war wholesale after it had been attacked by Japan and Germany had made a declaration of War against it. You also neglect to mention the arrangements from which America benefited, i.e. technology transfers including Radar, the jet engine, the cavity magnetron, Azdic, etc. and, post-war, faster than sound technology (developed by Miles Aircraft Corp and used by Bell to build the X-1, sideways looking terrain following all weather radar (developed for the BAC TSR 2 Nuclear strike aircraft - used in the cruise missile) and more that I can't be arsed to list. On top of this, America gained access to a global span of British territory for military use as part of Lease Lend as well being in a position to isolate itself from Communist Russia by transferring any fighting with the USSR away from Alaska which would be a bitch because no-one wants to fight a war at -40 in an environment where everything that moves leaves a trail that can be spotted from the air and into region that could form a handy missile launching platform close to the intended target.
"This made engaging the US a prerequisite to starting any European war, and defeating the US military was too high a bar for anyone to really consider trying."
Er, Nope.
The world's leaders understanding that there were enough thermonuclear warheads on both sides to blow the entire planet up stopped another war from starting.
"As a consequence, most of Europe has allowed its military to degrade into near-uselessness."
The ex-Axis forces were deliberately prevented from having an army large enough to cause any trouble while what was left of allied Europe had been so bombed to shit that it was bankrupt and couldn't have supported the kind of Army needed to fight a war. One country is notable as having actually come out of WW2 richer than when it went in primarily through selling arms to it's allies under the guise of Lease Lend opening up potential lines of argument as to whether it was an alliance or a business arrangement.
"Muslims are usually looking for wars"
What the fuck are you on? That is just the sort of statement made from a position of such supreme ignorance that it borders on being not worth answering.
Muslims and Christians have existing next door to each other for several thousand years. In fact, when the christian crusaders commissioned to fight a "holy" war in the middle east arrived, the cities they found under Muslim control contained mixed populations of Christian, Muslim and Jews and the laws enacted within the cities prevented anyone from attacking a holy building of any denomination. The rulers of the Muslim lands also endorsed the crusaders activities as a holy war and offered them food and shelter within the hous
"If you print the linux kernel, it sounds like angels crying."
s'funny. sounds more like flying furniture to me