Umm, no the US forces had little to do with Soviet success. All they did was provide a few clapped out tanks and aircraft. In comparative losses the Soviets took the brunt of the damage in both men and materiel. What the Americans did do was prevent the Russians from taking over all of Europe after the war. The Russians were going to win eventually no matter what.
I prefer comments to moderation.
Lumping Chirac in with Usama and Saddam is a bit rich. He is the democraticaly elected head of a constitutional government, the others are not.
In Britain we have been bashing the Frogs since before your country even existed, but we never stooped that low.
Do you honestly think that Chirac wouldn't have done exactly the same as America? France as a nation exists to thumb its nose at the international community.
There was no way that the USA could have "won" Vietnam, the US were just trying to prop up a southern government to block the northern communists. However the general population of Vietnam were not too pleased to have a war on their doorstep. If you see interviews with former VC members they regarded it as less a war between communism and capitalism, ideologies are for leaders not people. They saw it as a war between the Vietnamese and the Americans interfering in their country.
A Sarin Gas mortar shell is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is an illegal chemical weapon. It is not a strategic weapon, it is a tactical weapon. Weapon of mass destruction is a misleading term. It implies large scale carnage and physical destruction. Chemical weapons are weapons of indiscriminate, wanton, destruction, this is what they share with Nuclear weapons, which are the only true weapon of mass destruction.
A couple of left over nerve gas shells do not a weapons programme make. BTW, I think that the WMD claims were a mistake, there were a large number of really good justifiable reasons for the war, WMD were the weakest of them.
Except that the BBC does not have a monopoly on the media or the news in the UK. Appart from the Internet and various other radio news sources, each of the different terrestrial television services has their own news programming. These are provided by ITN which is a private news company.
Additionally the satelite and digital terrestrial channels also broadcast other rolling news channels.
Even the basic digital terrestrial has three different news channels, BBC News 24, Sky News and ITN.
Furthermore, in response to your comment about public funding of television being a "bad thing":
The BBC provides television for the people, its charter demands that it Educate, Inform and Entertain. The licence fee enables the BBC to take more risks with programming which commercial carriers might not carry due to the objections of advertisers, the security of funding provided by the licence fee enables the BBC to invest in long term projects, like the one in the article. I care more about the quality of the output than the source of the income.
The whole point about the BBC is that it recognises that Television and the Media are a public good, not just a commodity. So while the licence fee may pay for pop concerts I haven't seen, or soap operas i don't watch, it also provides quality factual programmes that I do want to watch, or other programmes which won't get made because the rest of the population don't like them and advertisers won't pay for them.
The BBC is state funded for the same reason that railways and public transport are either state funded or subsidised. Because not everything that is good will make a profit Providing regular train services may mean that some trains run empty, while a private company would cut the empty services, a state run company can afford to run them because some people use them and the state has to serve as many people as possible, not as many people as profitable.
1. They were set up to serve the public, it's in the BBC's charter which they have to follow.
2. How is the BBC "official government media" did you even pay attention to the Hutton Report, or was that all a sham?
3. How are commercial channels accountable to the public? Commercial channels are accountable to advertisers, at least with the BBC the money is coming from the public. Advertiser led television leads to the lowest common denominator. Look at ITV, Britain's main commercial operator, it's tv schedules are a monumental pile of shite. "I'm a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here!" and "Footballers Wives"
If ITV is a sterling example of what commercial TV offers then it's a good thing the BBC exists.
Actually probably the best pulsejet site on the net is Bruce Simpson's. Home to the no-welds pulsejet and various other designs. http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet
sorry to poke holes in your post
The BBC is funded by taxpayers (licence fee payers) money anyway.
So the taxpayers money is going where taxpayers money was going anyway?
The confusion here is that John Logie Baird invented television using spinning discs, while i think Philo Farnsworth was the first to use the cathode ray tube for this purpose.
On the jet fighter comment, the germans invented the first operational jet fighter. I think you mean the attempts to break the sound barrier. In which the British developed the tailplane in which the entire wing moved rather than just flaps. The British shared what they had learned with the US under the apprehension that they would share information. It was only after they had sent their research that the US team could not give any in return, "in the interest of national security" one of the most overused phrases of all time
The Parallels with nazi germany are strikingly obvious. George Lucas uses these parallels to suggest the evilness of the Empire. For example,
Hitler came to power when he was granted Emergency Powers after the burning of the reichstag. He re-armed germany which had a very limited army before. He circumvented the powers of the Reichstag (senate) Anybody else seeing a pattern?
I remember seeing some TV when I was in New York about two years ago, the biggest difference I noticed was that all the shows seemed to be interrupted by adverts almost every three minutes. For example 24 from Fox which is currently showing on BBC is meant to be an hour long, at least on Fox it is, but on the BBC it's only 45 minutes, this is due to all of the missing adverts.
Next time you watch TV see how many minutes of your show is taken up with Ads.
It's for this reason that the BBC is such a good thing
Nice idea but if you are right then how come that some of the most prosperous countries in europe and those with some of the highest standards of living in the world have world class public sector services.
There are a few main flaws in your argument, if everything is run so well by the private sector, how do you explain what happened in britain. In this example thre was previously a fairly good quality state railway service that was privatised during the 1980's by Margaret Thatcher, yet ever since then the whole railway network has gone down the pan, there have been a number of rail crashes, mostly due to the fact that the private company responsible for maintaining the railway had decided that it was too expensive to provide a safe railway network and decided to cut corners. The whole problem behind private companies running a public service is that a private company has, first and foremost, at its heart two prime objectives, make money and survive. because its main aim is to make money then it wont do things that are un-economical, even if they are in the public interest. For example what was one of the first thing that the new private companies running the various rail routes did? They cut back on their staff, and cut back on the number of trains they ran, the worst hit were the ones in the middle of the day which didn't have enough passengers to be "cost effective" too bad if you relied on those trains to get around. One of the problems with railtrack in particular is that they decided that they could put a price on a human life, beyond which they decided it wasn't worth paying for safety improvements
I probably wont change your mind, but this is how i feel, a private company which has its own profits or shareholders interests at heart can rarely if ever be acting in the interest of the general public.
This reminds me of an article i read in new scientist (i think) about this guy who developed concrete submarines.
The idea was that they would behave like aeroplanes, having wings, so instead of controling altitude with varying bouyancy as in a balloon or conventional submarine it would fly through the water like a heavier than air aircraft.
This would have lead to subs which could carry very heavy loads. The major problem was safety if there was an accident the sub couldnt rely just on its natural bouyancy to surface.
According to him the Germans in WWII and the russians afterwards put some serious research into it.
Re:Needed: affordable self-cleaning public toilets
on
Best High-Tech Toilet?
·
· Score: 1
I know in London and some other european cities new pop up urinals have been installed in some areas. This was because people were pissing on the walls of the buildings after the pubs shut.
Thats meant to be true but it hasnt stopped a large US corporation sueing a British cancer charity.
What happened was that the charity discovered these two genes that could be used in a test for some form of cancer.
It published its findings and its test. Then this company came along and patents the two genes on both sides of the atlantic.
Currently in america it is charging a hugely inflated price for the test, and they are now sueing the National Health Service, and the charity for supplying it in the UK at cost price.
The whole underlying argument here is whether the patenting of genes is legal. For example in order for something to be patented it has to be something new or an improvement on something that already exists, however if something is already in the public domain it cant be patented.
Seeing as many people around the world already have these genes, then surely they are already in the public domain?
we have several of the more expensive smart boards at school, big touch screen/projector ones. they are a godsend, i have a learning difficulty which makes copying from a board extremely slow. the smartboard alows the teacher to print off all the notes made in the lesson instead of ending up with a termsworth of unfinished notes.
Slashdot Mirror
Pah, That's nothing. According to Bill Bryson, he once got a letter delivered by the Royal Mail with the following address:
Bill Bryson
Writer
Yorkshire Dales
Umm, no the US forces had little to do with Soviet success. All they did was provide a few clapped out tanks and aircraft. In comparative losses the Soviets took the brunt of the damage in both men and materiel.
What the Americans did do was prevent the Russians from taking over all of Europe after the war.
The Russians were going to win eventually no matter what.
I prefer comments to moderation. Lumping Chirac in with Usama and Saddam is a bit rich. He is the democraticaly elected head of a constitutional government, the others are not. In Britain we have been bashing the Frogs since before your country even existed, but we never stooped that low. Do you honestly think that Chirac wouldn't have done exactly the same as America? France as a nation exists to thumb its nose at the international community. There was no way that the USA could have "won" Vietnam, the US were just trying to prop up a southern government to block the northern communists. However the general population of Vietnam were not too pleased to have a war on their doorstep. If you see interviews with former VC members they regarded it as less a war between communism and capitalism, ideologies are for leaders not people. They saw it as a war between the Vietnamese and the Americans interfering in their country.
A Sarin Gas mortar shell is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is an illegal chemical weapon. It is not a strategic weapon, it is a tactical weapon. Weapon of mass destruction is a misleading term. It implies large scale carnage and physical destruction. Chemical weapons are weapons of indiscriminate, wanton, destruction, this is what they share with Nuclear weapons, which are the only true weapon of mass destruction.
A couple of left over nerve gas shells do not a weapons programme make.
BTW, I think that the WMD claims were a mistake, there were a large number of really good justifiable reasons for the war, WMD were the weakest of them.
I swear that I have seen this posted to Slashdot before. Admittedly a slightly longer timescale than most dupes.
Except that the BBC does not have a monopoly on the media or the news in the UK. Appart from the Internet and various other radio news sources, each of the different terrestrial television services has their own news programming. These are provided by ITN which is a private news company.
Additionally the satelite and digital terrestrial channels also broadcast other rolling news channels.
Even the basic digital terrestrial has three different news channels, BBC News 24, Sky News and ITN.
Furthermore, in response to your comment about public funding of television being a "bad thing":
The BBC provides television for the people, its charter demands that it Educate, Inform and Entertain. The licence fee enables the BBC to take more risks with programming which commercial carriers might not carry due to the objections of advertisers, the security of funding provided by the licence fee enables the BBC to invest in long term projects, like the one in the article. I care more about the quality of the output than the source of the income.
The whole point about the BBC is that it recognises that Television and the Media are a public good, not just a commodity. So while the licence fee may pay for pop concerts I haven't seen, or soap operas i don't watch, it also provides quality factual programmes that I do want to watch, or other programmes which won't get made because the rest of the population don't like them and advertisers won't pay for them.
The BBC is state funded for the same reason that railways and public transport are either state funded or subsidised. Because not everything that is good will make a profit Providing regular train services may mean that some trains run empty, while a private company would cut the empty services, a state run company can afford to run them because some people use them and the state has to serve as many people as possible, not as many people as profitable.
Hold on a minute.
1. They were set up to serve the public, it's in the BBC's charter which they have to follow.
2. How is the BBC "official government media" did you even pay attention to the Hutton Report, or was that all a sham?
3. How are commercial channels accountable to the public? Commercial channels are accountable to advertisers, at least with the BBC the money is coming from the public. Advertiser led television leads to the lowest common denominator. Look at ITV, Britain's main commercial operator, it's tv schedules are a monumental pile of shite. "I'm a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here!" and "Footballers Wives"
If ITV is a sterling example of what commercial TV offers then it's a good thing the BBC exists.
Actually probably the best pulsejet site on the net is Bruce Simpson's. Home to the no-welds pulsejet and various other designs. http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet
Why, the people own it!
seriously though, the hutton business has shown that the BBC is not the British Government
I understand your point, but, in the Register article there was a link to the original source for the story.
2 43 987
http://www.newmediazero.com/lo-fi/story.asp?id=
In this article it says "A fully flexible, platform-neutral, super EPG is in development that will allow TV content to be recorded TiVo-style,"
That may be true, but if you look at the link in the Register story to new media age you would see that they intend to make it "platform neutral"
sorry but apple dont make the iTrip Griffin Technology do
sorry to poke holes in your post The BBC is funded by taxpayers (licence fee payers) money anyway. So the taxpayers money is going where taxpayers money was going anyway?
Where outside the US do you live? Because in Britain and most of Europe TiVO is on sale at most electrical shops.
The confusion here is that John Logie Baird invented television using spinning discs, while i think Philo Farnsworth was the first to use the cathode ray tube for this purpose.
On the jet fighter comment, the germans invented the first operational jet fighter. I think you mean the attempts to break the sound barrier. In which the British developed the tailplane in which the entire wing moved rather than just flaps. The British shared what they had learned with the US under the apprehension that they would share information. It was only after they had sent their research that the US team could not give any in return, "in the interest of national security" one of the most overused phrases of all time
The Parallels with nazi germany are strikingly obvious.
George Lucas uses these parallels to suggest the evilness of the Empire.
For example,
Hitler came to power when he was granted Emergency Powers after the burning of the reichstag.
He re-armed germany which had a very limited army before.
He circumvented the powers of the Reichstag (senate)
Anybody else seeing a pattern?
Actually there are far fewer adverts full stop.
I remember seeing some TV when I was in New York about two years ago, the biggest difference I noticed was that all the shows seemed to be interrupted by adverts almost every three minutes. For example 24 from Fox which is currently showing on BBC is meant to be an hour long, at least on Fox it is, but on the BBC it's only 45 minutes, this is due to all of the missing adverts.
Next time you watch TV see how many minutes of your show is taken up with Ads.
It's for this reason that the BBC is such a good thing
Nice idea but if you are right then how come that some of the most prosperous countries in europe and those with some of the highest standards of living in the world have world class public sector services.
There are a few main flaws in your argument, if everything is run so well by the private sector, how do you explain what happened in britain. In this example thre was previously a fairly good quality state railway service that was privatised during the 1980's by Margaret Thatcher, yet ever since then the whole railway network has gone down the pan, there have been a number of rail crashes, mostly due to the fact that the private company responsible for maintaining the railway had decided that it was too expensive to provide a safe railway network and decided to cut corners. The whole problem behind private companies running a public service is that a private company has, first and foremost, at its heart two prime objectives, make money and survive. because its main aim is to make money then it wont do things that are un-economical, even if they are in the public interest. For example what was one of the first thing that the new private companies running the various rail routes did? They cut back on their staff, and cut back on the number of trains they ran, the worst hit were the ones in the middle of the day which didn't have enough passengers to be "cost effective" too bad if you relied on those trains to get around.
One of the problems with railtrack in particular is that they decided that they could put a price on a human life, beyond which they decided it wasn't worth paying for safety improvements
I probably wont change your mind, but this is how i feel, a private company which has its own profits or shareholders interests at heart can rarely if ever be acting in the interest of the general public.
This reminds me of an article i read in new scientist (i think) about this guy who developed concrete submarines.
The idea was that they would behave like aeroplanes, having wings, so instead of controling altitude with varying bouyancy as in a balloon or conventional submarine it would fly through the water like a heavier than air aircraft.
This would have lead to subs which could carry very heavy loads. The major problem was safety if there was an accident the sub couldnt rely just on its natural bouyancy to surface.
According to him the Germans in WWII and the russians afterwards put some serious research into it.
I know in London and some other european cities new pop up urinals have been installed in some areas.
This was because people were pissing on the walls of the buildings after the pubs shut.
Thats meant to be true but it hasnt stopped a large US corporation sueing a British cancer charity.
What happened was that the charity discovered these two genes that could be used in a test for some form of cancer.
It published its findings and its test. Then this company came along and patents the two genes on both sides of the atlantic.
Currently in america it is charging a hugely inflated price for the test, and they are now sueing the National Health Service, and the charity for supplying it in the UK at cost price.
The whole underlying argument here is whether the patenting of genes is legal. For example in order for something to be patented it has to be something new or an improvement on something that already exists, however if something is already in the public domain it cant be patented.
Seeing as many people around the world already have these genes, then surely they are already in the public domain?
its zero degrees exactly. The prime meridian goes straight through the building.
we have several of the more expensive smart boards at school, big touch screen/projector ones. they are a godsend, i have a learning difficulty which makes copying from a board extremely slow. the smartboard alows the teacher to print off all the notes made in the lesson instead of ending up with a termsworth of unfinished notes.
its sad but true, its symptomatic of the unilateralism always being shown by the US, thats why many people have trouble warming to them.
Farscape is from Australia not the USA