I don't think many people in this country (or elsewhere) would agree with your description of the UK as a "socialist republic":
a) It's not a Republic. There is a Queen.
b) It's not socialist. It's has a free-market based economy and a government that when pushed will only describe itself as "centrist" (don't be fooled by the name).
It IS illegal in the UK for the police to do this. At least, in theory it is. However, ever since the IRA started blowing things up in the 70's (thank you Irish-Americans of New York) there has been a yearly "renewal" of a bill of anti-terror legislation. Every year, and particularly in the last 4, it has been getting stronger and stronger. The upshot of this is that the police merely need to whisper the word "terrorist" and everything is nice and legal.
Even shooting someone in the head 7 times because "he looked a bit foreign".
Hey, with Greenland chucking out fresh water at the rate it is now and SUV production in overdrive, we don't need no stinkin' rock: catastrophic climate change here we come!
Seriously, it's a perfect kick start, ocean current changes will probably only affect small, but highly populated bits of the 1st world; the bits that are most likely to drive innovation quicktime.
You need more roads now?! Hopefully as fuel prices go up, there will be less cars on the road; at least that's the rationale in europe where gas prices are already way over $4 a gallon, most of which is tax.
It appears to be a fallacy though cos there are more cars than ever, proving that the world won't end when the US pays the same price for gas as the rest of the world.
However, in europe it did lead to normal production cars that get 60-70mpg (ie Citroens), without any hybrid bullshit.
I agree with you almost 100%, however I take issue with your statement that Islamic cultures do not discriminate between civilian and military targets. I do not claim to be an expert in arab culture, but these people are as intelligent as anyone else in the world; the difference between a bunch a language students on a bus and the field headquarters of the 9th armoured division is apparent to anyone.
The two examples you use of revolutionaries not attacking civilian targets have one very crucial difference to the contemporary "terrorist" organisations; they were fighting a war on their own land: the civilians were their brothers, mothers and cousins. The modern attacks have been carried out on foreign (to the perpetrators) soil. They are at "war" with these countries, so everyone is a valid target.
An equally valid (and equally flawed) WWII analogy is the allied fire bombings of Hamburg and Dresden. These were raids on almost purely civilian targets, carried out after the war was effectively already won, and intended to terrify Germany into submission. "Bomber" Harris did not differentiate between civilian and military targets (though the many crews who refused to drop their bombs did), and there was certainly nothing honourable about it.
Basically, an army on foreign soil makes little distinction between civilian and military targets. Only when they're fighting close to home do they stop and think about who's actually being killed.
If it happens, we've been there before. About two centuries ago...
Yeah, it's happened more recently than that too, at least in the UK.
1914: 80% of the agricultural workers leave their farms and go to die in a ditch in france.
1918: half of them come back expecting to pick up where the left off and guess what? Their jobs are not there anymore; they have been mechanised out of work.
Someone had still had to grow food while they were away, so they invented better tractors and farm machinery.
Society did *not* manage to absorb that surplus of labour, and it eventually contributed to the great depression.
That IE for Mac really, really did suck. 4.x did anyway. It just didn't render stuff right, it was buggy, crashy, and just shit. I've not built webpages seriously since 5.x came out but I see similar things written about it.
Fuel tax does annoy people, we pay more for petrol than just about anywhere else and a huge chunk of that is tax.
That's not really true any more. Fuel tax rates across Western Europe are very similar. France is noticably lower, which is why we notice it, but the rest of them are about the same (eu mandated) level, and scandinavia is noticeably higher (were my observations on a recent road trip to from the uk to stockholm).
US federal Income tax:
Rate: 25%
Income Band: $29,051 - $70,350
UK income tax:
Rate: 22% + (1-3% for National Insurance)
Income Band: £2,091 - £32,400 ($4k - 60k)
You were saying?
The UK has one of the lowest income tax rates in the developed world. It makes me laugh (and cry) when I hear people complaining about the "high" rate of tax in the UK.
Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
That comes out of of the 1-3% mentioned above. What does your government do with that 1-3%? Invade countries? Build space weapons systems? Subsidise cotton farmers? I think I'd rather have my free health service, ta.
Cameras everywhere
Not sure what you mean by that.
A sensationalistic press that makes Fox look bi-partisan.
Umm... not really. Having read both US and UK papers, I've seen nothing in the US to compare to the Guardian or the Independent. People take as much notice of the Sun and Mirror as they do of the National Inquirer.
Out of control, bureaucratic utilities
BT is the last one, but yes.
Television licenses along with warrant-less searches of homes suspected of running an unlicensed television.
TV licenses pay for the largest (ad free) news site on the web, plus a whole bunch of programs that wouldn't get made otherwise (The Office, HHGTTG, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen, etc). Warrantless searches is bollocks. The TV License people have no more right to enter my house than you do, or the police do, for that matter.
Speed traps everywhere, set to excessively low limits and with giant fines.
Speed traps yes, they are a fucking pain in the arse, but not in their self a reason not to live here. "Excessivly low speed limits" is a bit rich coming from a yank. What's the interstate limit? 55mph? jebus!
Cameras monitoring every meaningful inch of public space.
I guess that's a repeat of No. 2 above. Don't know where you got that from. Don't believe everything you read on slashdot.
wtf does libertarian mean in the US?! I can't believe you put up with the possibility of being shot by the police after being stopped for traffic incidents; a transparently corrupt political system; unrestricted development on a beautiful countryside; blatant society-wide racism; a massively powerful religious right-wing movement; advertising on every inch of spare space;
Now THAT is taking up the arse.
BTW, you wouldn't have been able to live here even if you wanted to, yanks can't get permanent residence without marriage, academia or intelligence.
Not quite right. The WMO members are only obligated to share certain information (ie 500mb and MSL pressure) and they only have to share it with other WMO members, not with the public, and not neccesarily over the internet.
The US gubment (god bless them) has decided that the NWS should share all its data over the internet. Hurray! European weather agencies are feeling the squeeze however and need to make any money they can. The UK met office, for example, keeps strictly to the letter of the law in what it distributes and does not do it over the internet (the NWS does redistribute their data however).
This bill is extremely vague (and hopefully will be shot down immediately) and doesn't specifiy whether it includes grib data or not. Is suspect not, as unless Accuweather have recently invested in one of the worlds most powerful computers without anyone noticing, they rely on this model output for THEIR products, as does every other private weather company out there.
BTW I can sell you one of those grib->xml feeds if you want;)
I can see all you mericans hate the way things are going with copyrights, patents, licensing etc, and in fact the rest of the World hates it too, because you become the lowest common denominator.
However, y'all never tire of telling us how you live in the greatest democracy on earth, so, why do you all vote republicrat? or not vote at all?
Exercise your rights; petition your representatives, Vote Green, or Vote Perot for all I care, but stop voting these facists into power. Please?
My university (Kent) ran a very similar system before privatisation. Though it was more about making money for the uni than about convienience for the students.
Yes the private British Rail system came up with standards. Unforunately they were different standards to the rest of the world! That's why the Eurostar had to have it's own track laid at great expense all the way across Kent.
"First rule of government maintenance of infrastructure: jobs for the boys,"
Check out the directors of some of those privatised rail companies. You might recognise some names in there.
"and fuck long term maintenance of infrastructure
Who built that university/school that you're sitting in? And when did it start falling down? After the janatorial staff was outsourced perhaps?
telling the GPO you want a telephone and not getting it for 2 months again because there is a waiting list
eh?? How old are you? There hasn't been waiting lists for phones in this country for.. well.. ever. I think you are confusing soviet russia with the UK. Which is an odd thing to do.
Actually it was the 60s when huge swathes of the system was pared off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe). The system they had inherited from the private companies was making an enormous loss and they closed down what they saw as the non-profitable parts of the business. Sound familiar?
The public did not create the railway system. Brunel, Stephenson and Co did, making themselves, the Empire and many, many Victorians very, very wealthy in the process. Railways in the 1850s were like dot coms in the nineties (and followed the same path 10 years later). It was only nationalised in 1948.
There is no "free market". That's the point. It's subsidised by the government, like all the privatised industries and all those PFI schemes. Even outside this arguement, everything is either taxed or subsidised. As soon as one of those things happen, you no longer have a free market.
The point of private ownership is to make the owners profit. The trouble with private ownership of a system like the railways is that to not all parts make a profit. This means that following their rational economic methods you end up with a system that only serves major population centres and stops working after 20 years (as companies don't think that far ahead). Genius.
You may also like to note that I wasn't advocating re-nationalising the system or putting it under state control at all. What it actually needs is to be run by a non-profit making company led by people who know something about railways and who aren't responsible to politicians in anyway whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
a) It's not a Republic. There is a Queen.
b) It's not socialist. It's has a free-market based economy and a government that when pushed will only describe itself as "centrist" (don't be fooled by the name).
and how many people will be shot before they realise it's not preventing terrorism?
Even shooting someone in the head 7 times because "he looked a bit foreign".
BitTorrent also relies on numbers. One or two leechers isn't going to break the system; 70% of clients being leechers is.
Asking VCs the specifics of what they want to invest in is pointless; they don't know. What they do (or should) know is a good idea when they see it.
Seriously, it's a perfect kick start, ocean current changes will probably only affect small, but highly populated bits of the 1st world; the bits that are most likely to drive innovation quicktime.
It appears to be a fallacy though cos there are more cars than ever, proving that the world won't end when the US pays the same price for gas as the rest of the world.
However, in europe it did lead to normal production cars that get 60-70mpg (ie Citroens), without any hybrid bullshit.
The two examples you use of revolutionaries not attacking civilian targets have one very crucial difference to the contemporary "terrorist" organisations; they were fighting a war on their own land: the civilians were their brothers, mothers and cousins. The modern attacks have been carried out on foreign (to the perpetrators) soil. They are at "war" with these countries, so everyone is a valid target.
An equally valid (and equally flawed) WWII analogy is the allied fire bombings of Hamburg and Dresden. These were raids on almost purely civilian targets, carried out after the war was effectively already won, and intended to terrify Germany into submission. "Bomber" Harris did not differentiate between civilian and military targets (though the many crews who refused to drop their bombs did), and there was certainly nothing honourable about it.
Basically, an army on foreign soil makes little distinction between civilian and military targets. Only when they're fighting close to home do they stop and think about who's actually being killed.
How many sock puppets does Steve Jobs have on here I wonder...
Yeah, it's happened more recently than that too, at least in the UK.
1914: 80% of the agricultural workers leave their farms and go to die in a ditch in france.
1918: half of them come back expecting to pick up where the left off and guess what? Their jobs are not there anymore; they have been mechanised out of work.
Someone had still had to grow food while they were away, so they invented better tractors and farm machinery.
Society did *not* manage to absorb that surplus of labour, and it eventually contributed to the great depression.
Cos if not, I (and I think I speak for the majority here), don't want to know.
and also why IE on the Mac didn't suck.
Wha...??
That IE for Mac really, really did suck.
4.x did anyway. It just didn't render stuff right, it was buggy, crashy, and just shit. I've not built webpages seriously since 5.x came out but I see similar things written about it.
well done that man...
That's not really true any more. Fuel tax rates across Western Europe are very similar. France is noticably lower, which is why we notice it, but the rest of them are about the same (eu mandated) level, and scandinavia is noticeably higher (were my observations on a recent road trip to from the uk to stockholm).
US federal Income tax:
Rate: 25%
Income Band: $29,051 - $70,350
UK income tax:
You were saying? The UK has one of the lowest income tax rates in the developed world. It makes me laugh (and cry) when I hear people complaining about the "high" rate of tax in the UK.Rate: 22% + (1-3% for National Insurance)
Income Band: £2,091 - £32,400 ($4k - 60k)
Sources:i ncome_tax_rates/index/life/tax/income_tax_rates.ht m
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/itax/2004taxrates.asp
http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/n6w/index/life/tax/
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rates/nic.htm
Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
That comes out of of the 1-3% mentioned above. What does your government do with that 1-3%? Invade countries? Build space weapons systems? Subsidise cotton farmers? I think I'd rather have my free health service, ta.
Cameras everywhere
Not sure what you mean by that.
A sensationalistic press that makes Fox look bi-partisan.
Umm... not really. Having read both US and UK papers, I've seen nothing in the US to compare to the Guardian or the Independent. People take as much notice of the Sun and Mirror as they do of the National Inquirer.
Out of control, bureaucratic utilities
BT is the last one, but yes.
Television licenses along with warrant-less searches of homes suspected of running an unlicensed television.
TV licenses pay for the largest (ad free) news site on the web, plus a whole bunch of programs that wouldn't get made otherwise (The Office, HHGTTG, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen, etc). Warrantless searches is bollocks. The TV License people have no more right to enter my house than you do, or the police do, for that matter.
Speed traps everywhere, set to excessively low limits and with giant fines.
Speed traps yes, they are a fucking pain in the arse, but not in their self a reason not to live here. "Excessivly low speed limits" is a bit rich coming from a yank. What's the interstate limit? 55mph? jebus!
Cameras monitoring every meaningful inch of public space.
I guess that's a repeat of No. 2 above. Don't know where you got that from. Don't believe everything you read on slashdot.
wtf does libertarian mean in the US?! I can't believe you put up with the possibility of being shot by the police after being stopped for traffic incidents; a transparently corrupt political system; unrestricted development on a beautiful countryside; blatant society-wide racism; a massively powerful religious right-wing movement; advertising on every inch of spare space;
Now THAT is taking up the arse.
BTW, you wouldn't have been able to live here even if you wanted to, yanks can't get permanent residence without marriage, academia or intelligence.The WMO members are only obligated to share certain information (ie 500mb and MSL pressure) and they only have to share it with other WMO members, not with the public, and not neccesarily over the internet.
The US gubment (god bless them) has decided that the NWS should share all its data over the internet. Hurray! European weather agencies are feeling the squeeze however and need to make any money they can. The UK met office, for example, keeps strictly to the letter of the law in what it distributes and does not do it over the internet (the NWS does redistribute their data however).
This bill is extremely vague (and hopefully will be shot down immediately) and doesn't specifiy whether it includes grib data or not. Is suspect not, as unless Accuweather have recently invested in one of the worlds most powerful computers without anyone noticing, they rely on this model output for THEIR products, as does every other private weather company out there.
BTW I can sell you one of those grib->xml feeds if you want ;)
That's why most countries have Environmental Protection rules.
try dividing that by 4..
$10 for the first person to find Area 51!
Yes, a car program that didn't make it to air on Channel 5 is really going to be worth watching...
However, y'all never tire of telling us how you live in the greatest democracy on earth, so, why do you all vote republicrat? or not vote at all?
Exercise your rights; petition your representatives, Vote Green, or Vote Perot for all I care, but stop voting these facists into power. Please?
Genius. I wish I could do that. I.'m damn sure I could run a better system
My university (Kent) ran a very similar system before privatisation. Though it was more about making money for the uni than about convienience for the students.
Yes the private British Rail system came up with standards. Unforunately they were different standards to the rest of the world! That's why the Eurostar had to have it's own track laid at great expense all the way across Kent.
"First rule of government maintenance of infrastructure: jobs for the boys,"
Check out the directors of some of those privatised rail companies. You might recognise some names in there.
"and fuck long term maintenance of infrastructure
Who built that university/school that you're sitting in? And when did it start falling down? After the janatorial staff was outsourced perhaps?
telling the GPO you want a telephone and not getting it for 2 months again because there is a waiting list
eh?? How old are you? There hasn't been waiting lists for phones in this country for.. well.. ever. I think you are confusing soviet russia with the UK. Which is an odd thing to do.
Actually it was the 60s when huge swathes of the system was pared off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe). The system they had inherited from the private companies was making an enormous loss and they closed down what they saw as the non-profitable parts of the business. Sound familiar?
The public did not create the railway system. Brunel, Stephenson and Co did, making themselves, the Empire and many, many Victorians very, very wealthy in the process. Railways in the 1850s were like dot coms in the nineties (and followed the same path 10 years later). It was only nationalised in 1948.
There is no "free market". That's the point. It's subsidised by the government, like all the privatised industries and all those PFI schemes. Even outside this arguement, everything is either taxed or subsidised. As soon as one of those things happen, you no longer have a free market.
The point of private ownership is to make the owners profit. The trouble with private ownership of a system like the railways is that to not all parts make a profit. This means that following their rational economic methods you end up with a system that only serves major population centres and stops working after 20 years (as companies don't think that far ahead). Genius.
You may also like to note that I wasn't advocating re-nationalising the system or putting it under state control at all. What it actually needs is to be run by a non-profit making company led by people who know something about railways and who aren't responsible to politicians in anyway whatsoever.