Really? In the UK you can pick up a "Freeview" box (which receives free to air digital programming via an aerial) for about 40 quid. Now this works out to about 70 dollars; but usually consumer electronics are much cheaper in the US than the UK (often working on a 1 USD to 1 GBP ratio).
It's could be that the UK currently has a much larger market for these boxes and competition has driven down prices. However I'd be horrified if someone tried to charge me over 200 dollars for a relatively simple piece of electronics.
Well - a publicly traded company made a deal with another publicly traded company that will increase both their revenues! Also it allows the client company to produce faster, cheaper computers. What bastards eh?
it's the only institution with any power that even pretends to represent public interest
The problem is just that - it only pretends to represent public interest. As such it cannot be trusted to achieve anything that won't directly benefit it. You might get away with this kind of thing at more local levels of goverment, where there is at least some accountability. But to attempt this on a Federal level is just asking for money to be thrown down the drain (well, into the pockets of apparatchiks and corporate benefactors) for no public benefit.
the actual solution to the problem would be far too expensive for either main party to consider: make the maximum class size in secondary education 20
Expense has very little to do with it - funding per pupil at state schools is around 5500GBP per pupil per year. Many excellent private schools only charge slightly more than 6K a year, and they almost always have class sizes of under 20. The problem is the massive mis-managment of the state education sector. Huge sums are wasted on over-paid building contractors, excessive levels of administration, far too many tests, pointless studies on 'inclusion' or 'access' and constant revisions to an already over-complex curriculum.
If you tore the whole thing down and started again you could build an excellent education system that cost the same, or less, than the current one. But all the political parties want to do is tinker with a broken engine.
and use exam results and reports to ensure that everyone in each class is of similar ability
Couldn't agree more - but this will never happen under Labour. There are far too many of them fundamentally opposed to selection on any basis - look at their current efforts to remove the 11-plus in Northern Ireland. This goes back to my original post - they know that selection improves the educational performance of students, and so they quash it in the (PR friendly) name of 'inclusion' and 'fairness'.
The Tories are in favour of selection, it's what happened at their private schools after all, but would undoubtably find a way to screw up the implementation.
The education system in the UK is so screwed because neither party have any incentive to fix it. The Tories appeal to people who can either buy a house to get their children in to the very best state school, or can afford to sent them to a private school. As such they don't see any problem with the education system, it worked for their children, and so put no pressure on the party to raise standards. The Labour party appeals to those nearer the bottom end of the social spectrum (the self-hating Islington set aside), as opposed to well educated people who have the means to support themselves and are less likely to vote for a tax & spend party. The worst thing the Labour party could do (from its perspective) is to raise too many people from the bottom rungs of society and sent them onwards and upwards; as people who are no longer dependent on the state are not going to vote for the higher taxes that the party's state-expanding policies require. Hence the current government makes a great spectacle of "widening access to education", whilst simultaneously ensuring that the extra access does nothing to improve social mobility (thus protecting their voter base).
So in the UK you've got a choice between the party that doesn't care about the bulk of education system, and the party that has an incentive to maintaining low standards in said education system.
Sky doesn't broadcast in HD TV, they won't even be shipping set-top boxes that support it until Q4 2005. The torrents were nothing but bog-standard PAL (576 lines interlaced at 50 half-fields per second).
There's no way I'm going to wait until October to see this, and I suspect that the final few episodes will be heading the other way across the pond (if they break for three months in the US).
There is no excuse not to broadcast shows that already have a UK distributor in the UK at the same time as in the US. I'm quite happy to sit through adverts if something is worth watching; but I'm not going to wait months for a show that's available as a torrent.
Cuba does have a positive image - it's a lovely place to go on holiday: the people are friendly, the weather is sunny, the booze is cheap and there's hardly any Americans! Even the flights aren't too expensive these days, and you can make some of that back by selling all the cigars you imported to your friends.
This wondering miles off topic but I thought I'd point out that British forces used bayonets during the Falklands war of 1982. Also the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders killed 30 Shia militia men during a bayonet charge in Iraq last year (mentioned about half-way down this article), though this is obviously not standard practice.
Then don't put it in the bank! Thanks to the wonder of the interweb [tm] there is an entire world of investment funds at your finger tips. Even a few hours of research will turn up funds that have been growing at around 10% for the last few years.
If only there was some way of distributing software that allowed the end-user to build it for their machine; whatever the architecture may be. Clearly America must focus the minds of its finest Computer Scientists on solving this, apparently insurmountable, problem.
if they would appear to sell them out to corporate interests, they'd instantly lose lots of votes to smaller parties with similar politics
So that would explain why Sweden opted not to implement the EUCD! Oh, wait a minute, they've already published draft legislation and are on course to implement the law (which actually goes beyond the EUCD in terms of destroying the original intention of copyright) in 2005.
Most African nations have a quite staggering level of centralisation. Hence the problem they have with corruption. The only difference is that it costs a lot less to buy an African politician than a US Senator.
The fact that many people may use illegally copied music on their iPod is utterly irrelevant. My MP3 player is populated with songs ripped from my own CD collection - if I were to buy a new player this would still be the case. Why should I pay what amounts to a fine for a criminal act that I haven't committed?
Assumption of innocence is the founding principle of the legal system in all vaguely civilised countries. This tax (and other like it) are based on an assumption of guilt. For this reason alone they should appal anyone who has even the slightest respect for an individual's liberty.
... or drive accross the border to Germany, Belgium or France and buy one there, the Netherlands is not a big country. All this law will do is harm Dutch retailers.
But why has all this money go to the corporate major label?
Because they were the ones who paid the politicians to draft, advocate and pass the law. Don't make the mistake of thinking that only the US suffers from this problem. Any country with a large, highly centralised government (which is pretty much the entire Western World) is going to suffer from the same issue.
The only solutions are to reduce the power of the government, and/or to move these powers to more regional authorities (thus increasing the cost require to influence the entire nation).
When was last time you heard of a Jumbo jet successfully landing on water? Yeah, that is right: never!
Too bloody right, and it annoys me that we continue to put useless balloons under airplane seats but won't mandate for smoke hoods. An invention that costs no more than a life jacket but would actually save lives.
Russia already has a presence in commercial aviation, though they have been very late in introducing things like glass cockpits. Plus the dire state of their domestic airlines haven't helped advertise their aircraft.
China flies copies of old Russian designs and is attempting to buy in French fighters (but can't because of the EU's arms sale ban). The only domestic design of note is a tanker. Hardly the stuff background required to compete in the commerical aircraft market.
India and Brazil have airforces entirely composed of foriegn imports - mainly Russian and French. Their combined aircraft industries are behind that of Sweden. I don't expect to be flying on an Indian or Brazilian designed airliner to be in service during my life-time.
It took the combined efforts of some of the world's richest and most industrialised nations to produce compete with Boeing. Russia has the engineers but not the money. The others you mentioned aren't even on the radar.
They have privacy in their rooms - just not on the family's computer. I'm struggling to see the problem here - when I was growing up nobody I knew had a computer in their room. It was the family's computer and it stayed in a shared space. None of us considered this an invasion of our privacy it was just a fact of life.
In my experience people who pile their childrens' rooms with electrical goods are doing so as an alternative to actual parenting.
Poor people at a disadvantage to those with high disposable incomes! I can only hope that life doesn't imitate art or we could end up living in a world where the wealthy have access to the best homes, food, clothing, transport, education and health care! What a nightmarish vision!
Against all probability, and past performance of UK public sector IT projects, the IR web system is staggeringly good. It took me less than half and hour to do my taxes this year - including payment.
Perhaps the US should outsource its tax collection to the UK. After all we already provide a chunk of their armed forces, this is the next logical step.
They've always had that power. People have been committing acts of terrorism since time immemorial - be it in the name of patriotism, religion or personal gain. Let's not forget that even supposedly 'good' countries (i.e. the Western democracies) have killed millions through their sponsorship of terrorists, sorry "freedom fighters".
The only thing that's changed is that the US has joined pretty much every other non-neutral nation in being a target of such attacks. The security arrangements put in place since the WTC attacks would not have prevented them, and will not prevent future attacks. The US has to learn what the UK, France, Russia et al learnt long ago - if you piss off any group of people for long enough they will eventually hit back. It's the price you pay for being a global player.
The alternative is the route taken by countries like Switzerland and Sweden. They don't try to influence the actions of other nations and as such people don't try to blow-up their citizens.
Given the influence that the US has had over the world since the end of the Second World War the shocking thing wasn't that the WTC attack occurred, but that it didn't occur until 2001.
Re:IMHO DS is far better and the review is compari
on
PSP And DS Duke It Out
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Except that in the modern credit happy world 10 dollars a game and 100 dollars a console doesn't mean shit. I've got both machines - the PSP is better, period.
It is more powerful, has a bigger screen, has the capacity for larger games, has standard's compilant wireless and looks the business. The DS has the better battery life, and the touch screen is cool (the mini-games in Mario DS kick arse) but it's basically a gimic. A slightly better one that the Virtual Boy that sits atop my bookshelf, but a gimic none the less.
The battery life isn't really an issue for most people as Ridge Racer can last five hours on a single charge, and very few people with jobs get to play video games for more than five hours a day. I took a spare battery with me last time I flew and it lasted all nine hours with juice to spare. That was mostly gaming, but with a three hour stint of watching Neverwhere off a memory card.
I have a feeling that my DS is going to go the same way as my Gamecube. Dragged out to play the latest Mario Kart and Zelda, but otherwise gathering dust.
Slashdot Mirror
It's could be that the UK currently has a much larger market for these boxes and competition has driven down prices. However I'd be horrified if someone tried to charge me over 200 dollars for a relatively simple piece of electronics.
Well - a publicly traded company made a deal with another publicly traded company that will increase both their revenues! Also it allows the client company to produce faster, cheaper computers. What bastards eh?
Expense has very little to do with it - funding per pupil at state schools is around 5500GBP per pupil per year. Many excellent private schools only charge slightly more than 6K a year, and they almost always have class sizes of under 20. The problem is the massive mis-managment of the state education sector. Huge sums are wasted on over-paid building contractors, excessive levels of administration, far too many tests, pointless studies on 'inclusion' or 'access' and constant revisions to an already over-complex curriculum.
If you tore the whole thing down and started again you could build an excellent education system that cost the same, or less, than the current one. But all the political parties want to do is tinker with a broken engine.
Couldn't agree more - but this will never happen under Labour. There are far too many of them fundamentally opposed to selection on any basis - look at their current efforts to remove the 11-plus in Northern Ireland. This goes back to my original post - they know that selection improves the educational performance of students, and so they quash it in the (PR friendly) name of 'inclusion' and 'fairness'.
The Tories are in favour of selection, it's what happened at their private schools after all, but would undoubtably find a way to screw up the implementation.
So in the UK you've got a choice between the party that doesn't care about the bulk of education system, and the party that has an incentive to maintaining low standards in said education system.
Great isn't it!
Sky doesn't broadcast in HD TV, they won't even be shipping set-top boxes that support it until Q4 2005. The torrents were nothing but bog-standard PAL (576 lines interlaced at 50 half-fields per second).
There is no excuse not to broadcast shows that already have a UK distributor in the UK at the same time as in the US. I'm quite happy to sit through adverts if something is worth watching; but I'm not going to wait months for a show that's available as a torrent.
Wodge not a word? Encarta and everyone else who speaks proper English would disagree with that.
When did that happen? I was at Durham from '96-'99 and don't recall there being any limitations with regard to outgoing net access.
Cuba does have a positive image - it's a lovely place to go on holiday: the people are friendly, the weather is sunny, the booze is cheap and there's hardly any Americans! Even the flights aren't too expensive these days, and you can make some of that back by selling all the cigars you imported to your friends.
Not that I'm a fan of B5 or anything.
This wondering miles off topic but I thought I'd point out that British forces used bayonets during the Falklands war of 1982. Also the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders killed 30 Shia militia men during a bayonet charge in Iraq last year (mentioned about half-way down this article), though this is obviously not standard practice.
Then don't put it in the bank! Thanks to the wonder of the interweb [tm] there is an entire world of investment funds at your finger tips. Even a few hours of research will turn up funds that have been growing at around 10% for the last few years.
If only there was some way of distributing software that allowed the end-user to build it for their machine; whatever the architecture may be. Clearly America must focus the minds of its finest Computer Scientists on solving this, apparently insurmountable, problem.
The fact that many people may use illegally copied music on their iPod is utterly irrelevant. My MP3 player is populated with songs ripped from my own CD collection - if I were to buy a new player this would still be the case. Why should I pay what amounts to a fine for a criminal act that I haven't committed?
Assumption of innocence is the founding principle of the legal system in all vaguely civilised countries. This tax (and other like it) are based on an assumption of guilt. For this reason alone they should appal anyone who has even the slightest respect for an individual's liberty.
... or drive accross the border to Germany, Belgium or France and buy one there, the Netherlands is not a big country. All this law will do is harm Dutch retailers.
The only solutions are to reduce the power of the government, and/or to move these powers to more regional authorities (thus increasing the cost require to influence the entire nation).
Too bloody right, and it annoys me that we continue to put useless balloons under airplane seats but won't mandate for smoke hoods. An invention that costs no more than a life jacket but would actually save lives.
China flies copies of old Russian designs and is attempting to buy in French fighters (but can't because of the EU's arms sale ban). The only domestic design of note is a tanker. Hardly the stuff background required to compete in the commerical aircraft market.
India and Brazil have airforces entirely composed of foriegn imports - mainly Russian and French. Their combined aircraft industries are behind that of Sweden. I don't expect to be flying on an Indian or Brazilian designed airliner to be in service during my life-time.
It took the combined efforts of some of the world's richest and most industrialised nations to produce compete with Boeing. Russia has the engineers but not the money. The others you mentioned aren't even on the radar.
In my experience people who pile their childrens' rooms with electrical goods are doing so as an alternative to actual parenting.
Poor people at a disadvantage to those with high disposable incomes! I can only hope that life doesn't imitate art or we could end up living in a world where the wealthy have access to the best homes, food, clothing, transport, education and health care! What a nightmarish vision!
Perhaps the US should outsource its tax collection to the UK. After all we already provide a chunk of their armed forces, this is the next logical step.
The only thing that's changed is that the US has joined pretty much every other non-neutral nation in being a target of such attacks. The security arrangements put in place since the WTC attacks would not have prevented them, and will not prevent future attacks. The US has to learn what the UK, France, Russia et al learnt long ago - if you piss off any group of people for long enough they will eventually hit back. It's the price you pay for being a global player.
The alternative is the route taken by countries like Switzerland and Sweden. They don't try to influence the actions of other nations and as such people don't try to blow-up their citizens.
Given the influence that the US has had over the world since the end of the Second World War the shocking thing wasn't that the WTC attack occurred, but that it didn't occur until 2001.
It is more powerful, has a bigger screen, has the capacity for larger games, has standard's compilant wireless and looks the business. The DS has the better battery life, and the touch screen is cool (the mini-games in Mario DS kick arse) but it's basically a gimic. A slightly better one that the Virtual Boy that sits atop my bookshelf, but a gimic none the less.
The battery life isn't really an issue for most people as Ridge Racer can last five hours on a single charge, and very few people with jobs get to play video games for more than five hours a day. I took a spare battery with me last time I flew and it lasted all nine hours with juice to spare. That was mostly gaming, but with a three hour stint of watching Neverwhere off a memory card.
I have a feeling that my DS is going to go the same way as my Gamecube. Dragged out to play the latest Mario Kart and Zelda, but otherwise gathering dust.