And that rock you are holding is doing a great job of keeping tigers away.
Seriously, the people who committed the 9/11 attacks are dead; they blew themselves to shit along with 3000+ innocent people. You can't "kick their asses"; their asses are scattered all over Manhattan, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
You can't maintain the pretence that getting rid of Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 - it's simply laughable. And the so-called war-on-terror in Afghanistan has only served to piss off the majority of the Afghan public, and given the Taliban more fodder for their propaganda machine.
I'll tell you what's kept the US safe from terrorist attacks like 9/11 for the last 9.5 years: An attack like that could never work again. Before 9/11 if someone tried to hijack your plane, you co-operated - The hijackers would generally want to negotiate and in the vast majority of cases everyone went home in one piece. 9/11 changed the rules. If someone tries to hijack a plane now, the passengers are going to "kick their ass" - there's nothing to lose.
Finally, you claim the US is "not willing to risk and lose [the] country just to avoid kicking their asses". If you look at the number of bad laws that have been passed as a result (e.g. the PATRIOT act), you'd see that you've already lost the country. I thought the US was supposed to be the "land of the free and the home of the brave". By implementing such draconian legislation, you've become a land of fear and oppression. The rest of the western world thinks you already let the terrorists win./p
Sure, we should have just sat back and done nothing about being attacked, having 2 buildings knocked down, and losing approx 3K citizens and others to a direct attack on our country. Can't think of a better way to encourage another one.
[I]t feels like the actors have no careers any more (especially Craig Charles, who is now badly dubbing Japanese game shows for cable channels) and just want to milk sucess 30 years ago.
Craig Charles has been on the UK soap Coronation Street since 2005. Given it's one of the most popular shows on UK TV, I'd say his career has significantly improved since the days of Red Dwarf.
All HTC Android phones are Google branded (not just the N1).
My HTC Desire has no Google branding. Some Google apps were pre-installed (Gmail, Maps etc.), but outside of those apps the Google name/logo is nowhere to be seen
I just got an HTC Desire free on a 24 month £20/month T-Mobile contract (300 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet subject to 1GB/month FUP). TCO over two years is £480.
Closest match with an iPhone would be a 24 month £30/month (300 minutes, unlimited texts, 1GB/month of internet). The 16GB iPhone 4 would cost £169 up front - TCO £889.
When I saw the new iPhone at WWDC, I really wanted one, but £409 is an awful lot to pay for a marginally better screen and a front facing camera.
So if you refuse to pay for the creation of that music you enjoy, how much longer do you think there's going to be music to listen to?
The fact that you consider the enjoyment of music to be valueless is simply sad. You are what's wrong with the world today.
I find it interesting that you assume that because I don't confuse theft with copyright infringement I must "refuse to pay for the creation of music that [I] enjoy". Not that it has any relevance to this argument, but I acquire my music legally, either from my not-all-that-vast collection of CDs, or through my premium Spotify account for which I pay a monthly fee.
I refute your argument here as a non sequitur as well as an ad hominem. Merely believing in a distinction between theft and copyright infringement (a belief that is backed up, in UK law at least, by the existence of separate Acts to deal with the two) is not evidence of a wilfulness to commit copyright infringement.
If I were one to stoop to ad hominem attacks, I would suggest that your failed attempt to create an equivalency between copyright infringement and theft makes you sound either ignorant, or like a tool of the music industry. In either case it would seem to me that you more strongly represent "what's wrong with the world today" than I.
Furthermore, the fact that you think artists are somehow obligated to give you that enjoyment for free is sickening.
I fail to see any portion of my previous post that claims copyright should not be respected and that artists should not be appropriately recompensed. Your second (failed) attempt to put words in my mouth only deepens my suspicions that you are making this argument for an ulterior motive.
You are in fact depriving them of just reward for the years of hard work it took to create that art, as well as re-reimbursement for the money they spent to create the recording.
Attempting to disguise your theft with semantics only makes you appear less intelligent.
Add in your third ad hominem attack in as many posts and I fear it is you who may "appear less intelligent". Please, learn how to refute an argument rather than spouting what amounts to a lot of irrelevant, emotive rubbish. You will sound less like a music industry shill and people might even respect you for it.
You are wrong. I could give you several reasons why, but the simplest dismissal is to refer to legislation. I'm going to quote UK law as that's where I happen to reside, but similar definitions apply in other jurisdictions.
From The Theft Act (1968):
A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it
So I hope this clears things up for you:
How to determine if you have stolen something.
Do you now have something that you didn't have a minute ago?
Does it belong to someone else?
Did you acquire it dishonestly?
By taking it are you intending to permanently deprive the owner?
If you answered "yes" to all four questions then you have stolen something that you were not permitted to take.
Let's check you were paying attention. Which of the following is theft?
a) You leave the front door to your house open whilst performing some task in the back yard. I sneak into your house, find your collection of audio CDs and remove them from the premises. I intend to sell the CDs to a second-hand music shop to fund my drug habit.
b) You leave the front door to your house open whilst performing some task in the back yard. I sneak into your house, find your collection of audio CDs and rip them all to the hard drive of my laptop. I intend to listen to the music, saving me from spending money purchasing CDs, and thereby allowing me to fund my drug habit.
That's not entirely fair, as resources can generally be reused for one year to the next
That is true - for example my year sevens are currently being taught a scheme of work that was developed three years ago. That doesn't mean it hasn't been touched since, though - Our work on cyber-bullying had to be updated over the summer break to cover the rise in social networking sites - three years ago your average (UK?) 11 year old didn't have a facebook page, but they do now.
sure still have to mark the tests but if you already have your marking scheme written out/on tape it is much faster the next year. It would be like a sysadmin counting all the times he runs a script they wrote as separate work, you know when you write the script the first time that it's a larger investment of time, but it pays off soon enough.
Again, I think this is down to the differences between the UK / Rest of World teaching systems. My average class will get three, maybe four tests a year and marking them is pretty straightforward. The part that takes up the time (and is difficult/impossible to automate) is marking portfolio work. Even something as simple as deciding whether a pupil's PowerPoint presentation is a level 4 or a level 5 requires you to refer to multiple, nebulous criteria (no yes/no mark scheme, I'm afraid) and make a judgement.
OFSTED (the UK Schools inspection agency)
FUCK THEM, I get that a system needs to be in place but it tends to punish the experienced teachers who teach, while letting incompetent motherfuckers get by because they spent more time developing a perfect lesson plan that they stick to even if it's useless.
While I agree with the sentiment, OFSTED would also mark the school down for having teachers that are excellent at covering their backs with paper-work but can't actually teach. Their role has a whole-school focus, so they can't "punish" individual teachers anyway.
Teachers aren't paid to make lesson plans: they don't draft or write them in the classroom while they're teaching.
In the UK, at least, teachers are paid to make lesson plans. I teach ICT in a Secondary School (11-18), and have a 25 hour weekly teaching timetable of which I am guaranteed by law at least 2.5 hours of non-contact time for Planning, Preperation and Assessment. My school is generous, and I actually get 4 hours of PPA time - that's 4 hours to plan, resource and then mark 21 lessons, or if you'd prefer a little over 11 minutes per lesson. Most teachers put in a couple of hours a day before/after school (some even work through lunch) but nonetheless, most teachers do an awful lot of their preparation work outside of school hours.
Lesson plans aren't required to do the job of teaching. Although some type of basic outline might be required, it's distinct from the detailed lesson plans teachers develop.
That might be the case in the US, but in my experience a detailed lesson plan is pretty much essential. A teacher may not have written the plan themselves (and in most departments, one teacher creates a Scheme of Work for a unit and then shares it with the others), but teaching a lesson without a plan is a definite no-no. OFSTED (the UK Schools inspection agency) would absolutely crucify a school if they observed lessons being taught without proper planning in place.
Some schools do buy in schemes of work developed by outside agencies. They can be pretty expensive, though. At my last job we used resources produced by Leafline called the Digit Strategy - the lessons were pretty dire (they wouldn't have been my first choice), but at least the paper-work was done for you!
I have a related, but slightly off-topic question - does anyone know of any decent FOSS alternative for the video production side of the Adobe suite? I'd dearly love to throw my XP partition away, but I can't find anything Free that'll match the combination of Premiere Pro (for video editing) and Encore (for DVD Authoring). In particular, none of the big hitters on the Linux video-editing front seem to offer support for multi-camera editing.
Meh, I suppose I could always save up for a Mac Pro and a copy of Final Cut Pro. Anyone wanna buy a kidney?
Am I the only one here who doesn't see any bias in the term "passive smoking"? It might be because that's what virtually everyone calls it in the UK ("second hand smoke" sounds like a barbarous Americanism;), but surely if one who lights a cigarette and deliberately inhales the resultant smoke can be considered to be "actively" smoking, then one who inhales tobacco smoke only because they are in a smoky environment could be thought of as "passively" smoking.
To my ears "Second Hand" smoke sound like the weasel words; a person who acquires something second hand does so by choice, I don't think (for example) Roy Castle chose his fate.
Why would running XP be a pre-requisite? If I'm reading Amazon's terms and conditions correctly, you only need to purchase a qualifying version of Vista (full or upgrade) to be eligible for a free (full) copy of Windows 7. It doesn't state anywhere that you have to install the version of Vista that you purchase...
Wouldn't that mean that without owning any prior Microsoft OS you could purchase Vista Home Premium Upgrade for £60, avoid breaking the EULA by not installing it, and then install your shiny, legitimate copy of Windows 7 Home Premium in October?
A convoluted way of saving a fiver, but I'm more likely to miss £5 than Microsoft is...
You can get a Polaroid back for medium/large format cameras that allows you to load an unexposed Polaroid in place of the usual film negative. If you use a Polaroid with the same film speed, you can keep the aperture and shutter lengths unchanged and see a pretty good preview of how the final image will be exposed.
If you re-recorded it, Pete Waterman would have to cram his *performance* royalties up his ass. Unfortunately, making a cover version does not remove his entitlement to *mechanical* royalties.
Either way under the current rules the guy gets money for work he did over 20 years ago. I wish my wages worked like that!
Craig Charles got the part of Lister after Grant/Naylor ran the pilot past him to see if he thought casting Danny John Jules in the role of Cat would turn the role into a racist stereotype. He didn't think so then - I wonder if he does now?
Not in the UK. Over here the housing market is in such poor shape that a number of companies that make For Sale signs are facing financial difficulties.
I teach ICT in the UK, and the US system of assigning grades seems completely alien to me. Would anyone familiar with the US system care to explain for us non-USians?
In particular, who actually decides the curriculum in US school classes? I am under the (probably mistaken) impression that it is up to individual School Boards. Who sets the standards of the tests/assignments and where the grade boundaries are? Is that down to individual teachers, or is there some coordination across schools/districts? Are all grades other than F 'passing grades'? How much room do teachers have for taking into account the personal circumstances of each child?
Over here in the UK, the government (in the form of the Department for Children, Skills and Families - how Orwellian does that sound?!) sets the curriculum that is taught in all subjects (although teachers are of course responsible for interpreting the curriculum and constructing their own Scheme of Work). Attainment levels for pupils aged 5-14 are also set by the government, and teachers are expected to continually assess pupils' progress against those standards and assign a numeric level for each pupil at regular intervals. In some subjects (English, Maths and Science) , tests that are set and assessed by the government are sat by all pupils aged 11 and 14.
In 14-19 education, pupils follow courses set by one of a number of exam boards (although exam boards have to follow guidelines set by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to ensure some degree of consistency between different courses). Although some coursework is normally assessed by teachers, the exam board typically asks for a random sample of pupils work to ensure teachers are marking to the correct standard. Again at the ages of 16 and 18, most pupils will sit a number of examinations that are set and assessed by the exam board.
If I understand how things work in the US correctly, our education system appears pretty inflexible in comparison, and offers less opportunity for teachers to use their discretion when assessing a pupil's progress. It would seem however, that the UK system does allow results from different schools/parts of the country to be more easily compared.
But perhaps I'm misunderstanding exactly how things work over the pond!
For some reason the South Park website reckons I can't watch it because I'm in England.
Which I'm not. I live in Wales (Cymru Am Byth!)
When will the Merkins learn that United Kingdom != England? As geographical mistakes go it's on a par with calling the entire Netherlands "Holland", or the USA "New England".
Brian May did not build his own amplifiers I agree. It was Queen bassist, John Deacon that built Brian's amplifier for him.
I'm being facetious, of course. When playing live, Brian likes a stack of (9!)Vox AC30s, but the complex, multi-tracked guitar orchestrations that typify his studio sound are all down to the (transistor based) "Deacy" Amp.
Slashdot Mirror
And that rock you are holding is doing a great job of keeping tigers away.
Seriously, the people who committed the 9/11 attacks are dead; they blew themselves to shit along with 3000+ innocent people. You can't "kick their asses"; their asses are scattered all over Manhattan, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
You can't maintain the pretence that getting rid of Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 - it's simply laughable. And the so-called war-on-terror in Afghanistan has only served to piss off the majority of the Afghan public, and given the Taliban more fodder for their propaganda machine.
I'll tell you what's kept the US safe from terrorist attacks like 9/11 for the last 9.5 years: An attack like that could never work again. Before 9/11 if someone tried to hijack your plane, you co-operated - The hijackers would generally want to negotiate and in the vast majority of cases everyone went home in one piece. 9/11 changed the rules. If someone tries to hijack a plane now, the passengers are going to "kick their ass" - there's nothing to lose.
Finally, you claim the US is "not willing to risk and lose [the] country just to avoid kicking their asses". If you look at the number of bad laws that have been passed as a result (e.g. the PATRIOT act), you'd see that you've already lost the country. I thought the US was supposed to be the "land of the free and the home of the brave". By implementing such draconian legislation, you've become a land of fear and oppression. The rest of the western world thinks you already let the terrorists win./p
Sure, we should have just sat back and done nothing about being attacked, having 2 buildings knocked down, and losing approx 3K citizens and others to a direct attack on our country. Can't think of a better way to encourage another one.
It worked for Gandhi...
[I]t feels like the actors have no careers any more (especially Craig Charles, who is now badly dubbing Japanese game shows for cable channels) and just want to milk sucess 30 years ago.
Craig Charles has been on the UK soap Coronation Street since 2005. Given it's one of the most popular shows on UK TV, I'd say his career has significantly improved since the days of Red Dwarf.
Even the inventor of TV was disgusted by what TV became very quickly.
[Citation Needed]
John Logie Baird died in 1946, when broadcast TV was in its infancy. I very much doubt he was disgusted by what became of his invention.
All HTC Android phones are Google branded (not just the N1).
My HTC Desire has no Google branding. Some Google apps were pre-installed (Gmail, Maps etc.), but outside of those apps the Google name/logo is nowhere to be seen
Not in the UK.
I just got an HTC Desire free on a 24 month £20/month T-Mobile contract (300 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet subject to 1GB/month FUP). TCO over two years is £480.
Closest match with an iPhone would be a 24 month £30/month (300 minutes, unlimited texts, 1GB/month of internet). The 16GB iPhone 4 would cost £169 up front - TCO £889.
When I saw the new iPhone at WWDC, I really wanted one, but £409 is an awful lot to pay for a marginally better screen and a front facing camera.
I find it interesting that you assume that because I don't confuse theft with copyright infringement I must "refuse to pay for the creation of music that [I] enjoy". Not that it has any relevance to this argument, but I acquire my music legally, either from my not-all-that-vast collection of CDs, or through my premium Spotify account for which I pay a monthly fee.
I refute your argument here as a non sequitur as well as an ad hominem. Merely believing in a distinction between theft and copyright infringement (a belief that is backed up, in UK law at least, by the existence of separate Acts to deal with the two) is not evidence of a wilfulness to commit copyright infringement.
If I were one to stoop to ad hominem attacks, I would suggest that your failed attempt to create an equivalency between copyright infringement and theft makes you sound either ignorant, or like a tool of the music industry. In either case it would seem to me that you more strongly represent "what's wrong with the world today" than I.
I fail to see any portion of my previous post that claims copyright should not be respected and that artists should not be appropriately recompensed. Your second (failed) attempt to put words in my mouth only deepens my suspicions that you are making this argument for an ulterior motive.
Add in your third ad hominem attack in as many posts and I fear it is you who may "appear less intelligent". Please, learn how to refute an argument rather than spouting what amounts to a lot of irrelevant, emotive rubbish. You will sound less like a music industry shill and people might even respect you for it.
You are wrong. I could give you several reasons why, but the simplest dismissal is to refer to legislation. I'm going to quote UK law as that's where I happen to reside, but similar definitions apply in other jurisdictions.
From The Theft Act (1968):
So I hope this clears things up for you:
How to determine if you have stolen something.
If you answered "yes" to all four questions then you have stolen something that you were not permitted to take.
Let's check you were paying attention. Which of the following is theft?
a) You leave the front door to your house open whilst performing some task in the back yard. I sneak into your house, find your collection of audio CDs and remove them from the premises. I intend to sell the CDs to a second-hand music shop to fund my drug habit.
b) You leave the front door to your house open whilst performing some task in the back yard. I sneak into your house, find your collection of audio CDs and rip them all to the hard drive of my laptop. I intend to listen to the music, saving me from spending money purchasing CDs, and thereby allowing me to fund my drug habit.
Hint: It's not B.
That's not entirely fair, as resources can generally be reused for one year to the next
That is true - for example my year sevens are currently being taught a scheme of work that was developed three years ago. That doesn't mean it hasn't been touched since, though - Our work on cyber-bullying had to be updated over the summer break to cover the rise in social networking sites - three years ago your average (UK?) 11 year old didn't have a facebook page, but they do now.
sure still have to mark the tests but if you already have your marking scheme written out/on tape it is much faster the next year. It would be like a sysadmin counting all the times he runs a script they wrote as separate work, you know when you write the script the first time that it's a larger investment of time, but it pays off soon enough.
Again, I think this is down to the differences between the UK / Rest of World teaching systems. My average class will get three, maybe four tests a year and marking them is pretty straightforward. The part that takes up the time (and is difficult/impossible to automate) is marking portfolio work. Even something as simple as deciding whether a pupil's PowerPoint presentation is a level 4 or a level 5 requires you to refer to multiple, nebulous criteria (no yes/no mark scheme, I'm afraid) and make a judgement.
OFSTED (the UK Schools inspection agency)
FUCK THEM, I get that a system needs to be in place but it tends to punish the experienced teachers who teach, while letting incompetent motherfuckers get by because they spent more time developing a perfect lesson plan that they stick to even if it's useless.
While I agree with the sentiment, OFSTED would also mark the school down for having teachers that are excellent at covering their backs with paper-work but can't actually teach. Their role has a whole-school focus, so they can't "punish" individual teachers anyway.
Teachers aren't paid to make lesson plans: they don't draft or write them in the classroom while they're teaching.
In the UK, at least, teachers are paid to make lesson plans. I teach ICT in a Secondary School (11-18), and have a 25 hour weekly teaching timetable of which I am guaranteed by law at least 2.5 hours of non-contact time for Planning, Preperation and Assessment. My school is generous, and I actually get 4 hours of PPA time - that's 4 hours to plan, resource and then mark 21 lessons, or if you'd prefer a little over 11 minutes per lesson. Most teachers put in a couple of hours a day before/after school (some even work through lunch) but nonetheless, most teachers do an awful lot of their preparation work outside of school hours.
Lesson plans aren't required to do the job of teaching. Although some type of basic outline might be required, it's distinct from the detailed lesson plans teachers develop.
That might be the case in the US, but in my experience a detailed lesson plan is pretty much essential. A teacher may not have written the plan themselves (and in most departments, one teacher creates a Scheme of Work for a unit and then shares it with the others), but teaching a lesson without a plan is a definite no-no. OFSTED (the UK Schools inspection agency) would absolutely crucify a school if they observed lessons being taught without proper planning in place.
Some schools do buy in schemes of work developed by outside agencies. They can be pretty expensive, though. At my last job we used resources produced by Leafline called the Digit Strategy - the lessons were pretty dire (they wouldn't have been my first choice), but at least the paper-work was done for you!
I think the poster is referring to Dynamic Range Compression.
I have a related, but slightly off-topic question - does anyone know of any decent FOSS alternative for the video production side of the Adobe suite? I'd dearly love to throw my XP partition away, but I can't find anything Free that'll match the combination of Premiere Pro (for video editing) and Encore (for DVD Authoring). In particular, none of the big hitters on the Linux video-editing front seem to offer support for multi-camera editing.
Meh, I suppose I could always save up for a Mac Pro and a copy of Final Cut Pro. Anyone wanna buy a kidney?
Am I the only one here who doesn't see any bias in the term "passive smoking"? It might be because that's what virtually everyone calls it in the UK ("second hand smoke" sounds like a barbarous Americanism ;), but surely if one who lights a cigarette and deliberately inhales the resultant smoke can be considered to be "actively" smoking, then one who inhales tobacco smoke only because they are in a smoky environment could be thought of as "passively" smoking.
To my ears "Second Hand" smoke sound like the weasel words; a person who acquires something second hand does so by choice, I don't think (for example) Roy Castle chose his fate.
Why would running XP be a pre-requisite? If I'm reading Amazon's terms and conditions correctly, you only need to purchase a qualifying version of Vista (full or upgrade) to be eligible for a free (full) copy of Windows 7. It doesn't state anywhere that you have to install the version of Vista that you purchase...
Wouldn't that mean that without owning any prior Microsoft OS you could purchase Vista Home Premium Upgrade for £60, avoid breaking the EULA by not installing it, and then install your shiny, legitimate copy of Windows 7 Home Premium in October?
A convoluted way of saving a fiver, but I'm more likely to miss £5 than Microsoft is...
You can get a Polaroid back for medium/large format cameras that allows you to load an unexposed Polaroid in place of the usual film negative. If you use a Polaroid with the same film speed, you can keep the aperture and shutter lengths unchanged and see a pretty good preview of how the final image will be exposed.
If you re-recorded it, Pete Waterman would have to cram his *performance* royalties up his ass. Unfortunately, making a cover version does not remove his entitlement to *mechanical* royalties.
Either way under the current rules the guy gets money for work he did over 20 years ago. I wish my wages worked like that!
Craig Charles got the part of Lister after Grant/Naylor ran the pilot past him to see if he thought casting Danny John Jules in the role of Cat would turn the role into a racist stereotype. He didn't think so then - I wonder if he does now?
Not in the UK. Over here the housing market is in such poor shape that a number of companies that make For Sale signs are facing financial difficulties.
No Slashdot comment, no matter how helpful, is worth spending £8.98 on a total stranger.
On the other hand, No Slashdot comment, no matter how useless, deserves the poster being bought a Will Young album...
I teach ICT in the UK, and the US system of assigning grades seems completely alien to me. Would anyone familiar with the US system care to explain for us non-USians?
In particular, who actually decides the curriculum in US school classes? I am under the (probably mistaken) impression that it is up to individual School Boards. Who sets the standards of the tests/assignments and where the grade boundaries are? Is that down to individual teachers, or is there some coordination across schools/districts? Are all grades other than F 'passing grades'? How much room do teachers have for taking into account the personal circumstances of each child?
Over here in the UK, the government (in the form of the Department for Children, Skills and Families - how Orwellian does that sound?!) sets the curriculum that is taught in all subjects (although teachers are of course responsible for interpreting the curriculum and constructing their own Scheme of Work). Attainment levels for pupils aged 5-14 are also set by the government, and teachers are expected to continually assess pupils' progress against those standards and assign a numeric level for each pupil at regular intervals. In some subjects (English, Maths and Science) , tests that are set and assessed by the government are sat by all pupils aged 11 and 14.
In 14-19 education, pupils follow courses set by one of a number of exam boards (although exam boards have to follow guidelines set by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to ensure some degree of consistency between different courses). Although some coursework is normally assessed by teachers, the exam board typically asks for a random sample of pupils work to ensure teachers are marking to the correct standard. Again at the ages of 16 and 18, most pupils will sit a number of examinations that are set and assessed by the exam board. If I understand how things work in the US correctly, our education system appears pretty inflexible in comparison, and offers less opportunity for teachers to use their discretion when assessing a pupil's progress. It would seem however, that the UK system does allow results from different schools/parts of the country to be more easily compared. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding exactly how things work over the pond!
If you like supporting indie developers that don't piss you off with DRM, it might be worthwhile looking at Multiwinia!
</spam>
Except a big pile of cash. Which you can spend on the next-great-thing-that-actually-meets-your-needs when it turns up.
For some reason the South Park website reckons I can't watch it because I'm in England.
Which I'm not. I live in Wales (Cymru Am Byth!)
When will the Merkins learn that United Kingdom != England? As geographical mistakes go it's on a par with calling the entire Netherlands "Holland", or the USA "New England".
Those "Metaphors" are all similes.
</pedant>
I agree. It was Queen bassist, John Deacon that built Brian's amplifier for him.
I'm being facetious, of course. When playing live, Brian likes a stack of (9!)Vox AC30s, but the complex, multi-tracked guitar orchestrations that typify his studio sound are all down to the (transistor based) "Deacy" Amp.