I also run a cracked copy of XP Pro. In fact, on quite a few machines. All my copies of XP are legitimately purchased. I just don't want to go through all the activation rubbish every couple of months when I change hardware in the machines they're installed on, and after a few times, having to call up Microsoft UK to explain that yes, this is the 12th time I've activated it, and no, it is only on one machine, but that the hardware in said machine keeps changing.
I do exactly the same thing with games: buy them, then download the no-cd crack. Why? So I don't have to shove the disc into a drive, often in another room, before I'm able to play the thing.
Companies shouldn't assume that everyone who's using dodgy/generated keys didn't legitimately purchase their software...
you'll need a VoIP provider for a very long time because a large percentage of the world will still be on the circuit switched POTS network
This is one of the things I really love about VoIP, especially for folks who make lots of international calls: you can have multiple VoIP providers and link 'em all together via something like Asterisk for least-cost routing. I want to call someone in the US, I use a VoIP - PSTN gateway located as close as possible to where they live. Likewise, I want to call someone in the UK, I use a different PSTN gateway.
Total cost: an old machine to run Asterisk and a couple of VoIP to analogue phone adapters. The percentage of folks in the UK with cellphones is so high, the cellphone calling prices are usually as good, if not better than BT's landline prices, *and* the cellphones provide 999/112 emergency access, so doing away with the POTS landline isn't a big deal.
The parent makes a good point. In the UK the Data Protection Act governs fairly tightly exactly what information could be released by an ISP and exactly to which authorities. To the best of my knowledge, the BPI is not specified under that Act.
You'd think the 5 major countries that use the most oil could form a bargaining voice powerful enough to counter OPEC in this same way....speaking of dangerous challenges.
Completely off-topic, but do you really want to counter OPEC to massively increase production bringing oil prices down to stupidly low prices? Think about it carefully, whilst oil is as expensive as it is now, it makes more environmentally acceptable forms of energy seem much more cost effective by comparison. Surely that's a Good Thing (TM).
CNN casts them as cartoon heroes, the Beeb makes them cartoon villains, and you choose one or the other to represent fair and accurate?
I'm sure the truth is usually somewhere between the two.;-) I don't always agree with the BBC position on many things, but they do usually try to find a representative from each "side" to comment.
In the Palestine/Israeli issue, you'd normally expect to get commentary from a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy, possibly a spokesperson for the Palestinian authority, and possibly comment from an aid agency working in the area (if applicable). I would argue that makes it distinctly less "biased" than CNN, and certainly less than Fox.
Quick question for you: does Fox's opinion normally closely reflect your own?
I'm not sure what the deal with advertising is. Yes, a lot of it is stupid. I'd rather have stupid people fund my TV than set up a whole warrant and criminaal structure around TV, in which homes are invaded to prosecute $160 "crimes".
It's not just about the TV though. Advertisers will fund the parts of the industry where they think they're going to recoup the most benefit (can't blame them for that). So they'll want to advertise on TV and local radio, but they wouldn't want to advertise on other services which aren't going to net them any sales.
You have to remember that the BBC isn't *just* TV/radio/web. One of the most important parts of the BBC is the World Service. It's a radio news service available on short wave pretty much all over the world. It's especially important to people in countries where obtaining unbiased and uncensored news programming is nothing short of impossible, and where even free access to the net is difficult. It's much more difficult for a restrictive government to censor radio signals broadcast from the other side of the world, and short wave radios are so cheap to manufacture that they're available to even some of the poorest people.
I listen to both Fox and BBC daily, and can testify that while Fox may lean right, they always put both sides on to give their arguements. The BBC feels it only needs to give you one perspective, theirs
I'm not sure what gives you that impression, to be perfectly honest. When watching nearly any event with politcal ramifications the BBC are always very good about giving both sides a chance to put forward a representative. When there are events in the Palestine/Israeli conflict, there is nearly always a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy on hand to give their reaction/opinion, likewise a spokesperson from the Palestinian authority, aid agencies, etc. etc.. I think the BBC offers some of the most unbiased reporting I've ever seen, and, yes, I travel to the US regularly, and regularly watch US news broadcasts. Every time I stay in the US I wish the hotel would broadcast BBC World as well/instead of CNN.
Of course there is, although I suspect you and I would disagree on what constitutes "liberal" - your description of CNN as center-right is positively bizarre.
One of the things I always notice when I travel to the US is how different news reporting is on CNN as compared to the BBC. Now, I wouldn't call the BBC a left-wing organization at all, and it's certainly one of the most unbiased news networks I've seen.
It's particularly apparent when you look at coverage of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict - the simple changing of a couple of words in a headline can make a massive difference. A particular example I remember in September 2002 when Israeli troops occupied one town, the CNN headline made the Israeli troops sound like heroic liberators ("troops advancing under fire", and so on), whereas the BBC headline made them sound more like an invading army.
And apart from accessing it online, there are hardly *any* hotels at all in Washington, Orlando or Norfolk (3 places I go fairly regularly) that have BBC World available to guests.
So why don't Cerulean offer to licence the protocol from them for money?
Trillian is free and not ad-encumbered, so Cerulean probably don't have much money to throw around. I know they sell Trillian Pro, but I doubt the split of Pro/Non-Pro users is very high. (Anyone got stats on this?)
IANAL, but I did do a course in contract law a few years ago. As I remember from the lectures on insurance contracts, "Act of God" doesn't mean things like meteors, storm damage, etc. at all. It's usually described as "unexplained natural phenomena", at least as far as insurance contracts go on this side of the pond.
Unusual though a meteor coming through the roof is, I'm not sure it counts as "unexplained".
Forcing users to send mail through their ISP's SMTP server forces a single point of logging & authentication, what's the problem with that?
The problem is when the ISP's SMTP server doesn't behave in the manner you want it to: it's slow, often unreliable, won't accept large attachments, blocks certain file extensions as attachments, and so on. Oh, and it doesn't support SSL/TLS. This isn't just my ISP, nearly every ISP I've used in the last 5 years has had similar limitations. The unfortunate fact seems to be that ISPs provide connections. They're really not very good at providing other services like reliable email servers, webhosts, usenet servers and so on.
Personally I'd be much more comfortable paying the ISP a touch less, not having access to all the "extra" services (50mb webspace, 20 POP3 accounts, usenet, etc.) and get the services I actually need from a professional hosting company. Group a few people together on a user-mode Linux VPS and it only works out at a couple of pounds per person per month.
There's also the whole privacy issue - I don't necessarily want a large corporate entity (my ISP) having access to all the email I sent, when I send it, to whom I send it, etc. etc.. If this article were about anything apart from the unpleasant reality that is junk email, most of the comments here would be bemoaning the invasion of privacy.
is this a case of giving up some freedom (port 25) for some sanity?
My ISP already does this. What I'd encourage (see my earlier post for a fuller explanation) would be a captive portal ISPs could use for customers' machines which are victims of viruses. All it needs to be is a page telling people to sort the mess out, providing a few useful links to online virus scanning sites and so on. The message is more about informing the unsuspecting customer than it is about draconian blocking, etc.
There was a very similar discussion to this on another forum I frequent (though related specifically to Phishing, which seems to be a more worrying tendency at the moment, especially for those of us who have to provide support to the computer illiterate).
Anyway the discussion drifted towards whether ISPs should be more proactive in blocking customers who are open relays (usually through viruses). Unfortunately this leads certain ISPs to decide to run a blanket block on port 25, which is a real pain in the ass for those of us who *want* to run our own mailservers, and I'm sure many of us here do.
So, why don't ISPs take a more proactive role in "helping" their customers to realise they've been hacked - I'd suggest a captive portal for hacked machines, kinda like some organizations have for Wi-Fi. i.e. you type any web address and the browser will always show the captive portal page. If ISPs were to use this for hacked/virally infected customers there could be a nice little button at the bottom to say "I've fixed it". Then their net access would be automatically re-opened.
Of course, there are few issues to work out, such as you'd probably need to allow access to a couple of online virus scanners and virus fix tools rather than block net access entirely, but it could work. The idea isn't so much about the blocking, but more a case of informing the unsuspecting victim that they are infected and they need to do something about it pronto.
i.e. The samples are played in a random order and one is unaware of which one is which. Ideally I suppose one should also not be aware of which formats are included in the test as sometimes (particularly doing low-bitrate tests) one might be able to listen out for particular nuances in the way the compression affects the sample.
e.g. Vorbis preserves the frequency range more truly than AAC (in my opinion), yet AAC is possibly "cleverer" in allocating bitrate to the parts of the sample where loss of detail would be more noticable, even if it uses a highpass cutoff to do so. The encoders have probably improved considerably since I last did any serious listening tests though... over a year ago.
Tom Petty will probably hit a ceiling at 8.5, but Mudvayne will overwhelm even the highest compression settings
I pride myself on being culturally retarded and have absolutely no idea who either of them is I'm afraid.:)
Still one of the finest sound cards ever made in my opinion.
Not sure about being able to reliably differentiate up to -q 10 though - I can only manager it up to about -q 6. Not saying I don't believe you - just amazed if you can differentiate up to that level. Have you ABX'd it?
I don't understand this at all. If you argue that burning and ripping produces and almost identical copy, then why not just let people remove the protection from the original and skip the hassle of a burn/rip cycle?
Not to mention the environmental impact of people burning CD-Rs purely for the purpose of ripping them.
(Yes, I know you could use CD-RWs, but in my experience they're nowhere near as reliable as CD-Rs. No idea why - maybe my drive just doesn't like the things.)
60Hz does have the advantage that transformers and motors can be made slightly smaller and lighter.
But 110V transformers and motors tend to run somewhat hotter than their 220V cousins. I think it's fair to 220V is less likely to lead to fire than 110V (reduced current).
You win some, you lose some I guess. Fortunately quite a lot of computer equipment these days will work on one or the other with an appropriate flick of a power supply switch.
It does seem when discussing Outlook alternatives some people seem to "forget" that Outlook isn't just a mail client. Some of the group working functionality (online calendar publishing, integration with cellphones, etc.) are extremely useful. At the moment I dual boot Windows and Debian. I need to use Windows for 2 things: Outlook and games.
I'd love to ditch the Windows partition altogether if it weren't for those 2 issues. Games one can live with rebooting into Windows to play for a few hours, but Outlook is one of those things that tends to be open all the time in my experience, so I don't spend anywhere near as much time using Linux as I'd really like to. And the only viable alternative I can think of is to fork out for VMware (Linux) and run Windows as a virtual machine within Linux.
Outlook itself is a different matter, for one thing it's not free so you would need to compare it with other commercial offerings to be fair.
Much of this discussion has been comparing the rest of MS Office with OpenOffice, so I don't think it's unfair to try and find a non-commercial Outlook replacement. I'm open to suggestions.:)
Before the Madrid attack, the voters were set to overwhelmingly re-elect Aznar, along with his foreign policy.
Unfortunately Aznar made what could only be called a terrible misjudgement by initially blaming the Madrid bombings on ETA. As I understand things over there (and perhaps the Spanish amongst you will correct me if I'm wrong) there are some pretty deep cultural differences in different parts of Spain, and Aznar's willingness to blame the incident on ETA without any evidence to back the statement up rather offended a significant chunk of the electorate.
(now Spain is governed by a much more oppressive [socialist] government).
What is it with Americans and socialist governments? Many Americans I meet (and the majority I would consider good friends) seem to equate "socialist government" with "USSR-style communism", which simply isn't the case.
Many countries have had extremely successful socialist governments over the last 60 years. Socialist governements in the European sense stand for things like reducing the gap between richest and poorest, providing a decent welfare state, etc. Hell, one of them created one of our most famous institutions - the National Health Service. We might bitch and moan about it from time to time, but I think I speak for the majority of my countrymen in saying we're bloody glad it's here.
Maybe we've just decided that there is an alternative to the policy of Corporate Greed which defines US-style politics, under the guise of the "free market".
I've seen this claim before. Typically, the person will go on and whine about how the US media is controlled by the Jews and has a pro-Jewish bias. [snip]
Did I say any of that? Not at all. Please don't put words into my mouth.
Whether the US media is biased I will leave to those of you in the US to judge for yourselves. All I can say is this: When you hear a particular Middle Eastern report on CNN/Fox/[insert choice of US network here], please take it upon yourself to read a few alternative news sources. I'd suggest the BBC, ITN, Sky News. But I'm from the UK and probably biased as well. So how about a Canadian news source?
Hell, perhaps give Al Jazeera a try. Sure, it's probably biased too, but somewhere between your existing news network and a few others you might find a grain of truth.;)
For 30 years US foreign policy never considered the IRA in Northern Ireland a terrorist movement, despite no shortage of "terrorist" acts. As much as it pains me to say it, try to remember one group's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
Just shows the difference between Americans and Spanish. We get attacked and we fight back. The Spanish put their tails between their legs are run home.
Not meant personally, but I guess that's the kind of attitude one gets from watching too much CNN or Fox News and nothing from the other side of the political fence. My experience of US news reporting suggests it's often incredibly biased, especially on Middle Eastern affairs.
My understanding after talking to a number of Spanish friends after the election was that the opposition who defeated Aznar's government had been against the war in Iraq since well before Spain had even gotten involved.
Students learn to repeat the program's motto: 'If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it.'
I don't know if a similar thing exists in US law, but certainly under UK law the anti-smoking lobby made use of a little-known clause about 20 years ago which essentially meant that for every minute the tobacco companies were advertising on TV, the anti-smoking groups were entitled to equal TV time at little or no cost. Contrary to popular opinion, it was that which eventually persuaded the tobacco companies to give up on TV advertising - it was causing them more trouble than it was worth. (I would dig out some urls on this, but my ADSL is down and I'm on a modem at the moment)
Couldn't someone like the FSF or Creative Commons use a similar law (if it exists over that side of the pond) to do something similar with this?
Fortunately most of my friends seem to understand the whole "naming of computers" thing. We can be sitting in the pub talking about our respective machines and most of us know the names (and purpose) of the others' machines. I pity anyone who tries to listen to our conversations.
Computers:
ariadne, artemis, cronus, rhea, hestia, leto, zeus
Need to find names for the two cellphones now that they qualify as network devices...
I think it'd be extremely difficult to achieve consistent taxation across VoIP connections, simply because without a hell of a lot of packet sniffing how do you tell that the traffic is VoIP at all.
On the other hand, taxing it at the VoIP - PSTN gateway end (bear in mind most current and short-term-future VoIP use will ultimately need to break out onto a PSTN network eventually) would probably be easier to implemnet consistently.
That's because they don't get BBC2 in America, and you'd need RealPlayer to watch it on the internet.
I'm inclined to agree with you. The only shows I've watched with any degree of regularity over hte last couple of years are Grand Designs (C4) and Newsnight (BBC2).
I've made a determined effort recently to persuade American friends of mine to read/watch BBC News (either through their existing cable/satellite packages - some offer BBC World, or on the web) as opposed to the US news networks, and those who've tried it seem to find it truly amazing how different the same news is reported in different parts of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I also run a cracked copy of XP Pro. In fact, on quite a few machines. All my copies of XP are legitimately purchased. I just don't want to go through all the activation rubbish every couple of months when I change hardware in the machines they're installed on, and after a few times, having to call up Microsoft UK to explain that yes, this is the 12th time I've activated it, and no, it is only on one machine, but that the hardware in said machine keeps changing.
I do exactly the same thing with games: buy them, then download the no-cd crack. Why? So I don't have to shove the disc into a drive, often in another room, before I'm able to play the thing.
Companies shouldn't assume that everyone who's using dodgy/generated keys didn't legitimately purchase their software...
This is one of the things I really love about VoIP, especially for folks who make lots of international calls: you can have multiple VoIP providers and link 'em all together via something like Asterisk for least-cost routing. I want to call someone in the US, I use a VoIP - PSTN gateway located as close as possible to where they live. Likewise, I want to call someone in the UK, I use a different PSTN gateway.
Total cost: an old machine to run Asterisk and a couple of VoIP to analogue phone adapters. The percentage of folks in the UK with cellphones is so high, the cellphone calling prices are usually as good, if not better than BT's landline prices, *and* the cellphones provide 999/112 emergency access, so doing away with the POTS landline isn't a big deal.
The parent makes a good point. In the UK the Data Protection Act governs fairly tightly exactly what information could be released by an ISP and exactly to which authorities. To the best of my knowledge, the BPI is not specified under that Act.
Completely off-topic, but do you really want to counter OPEC to massively increase production bringing oil prices down to stupidly low prices? Think about it carefully, whilst oil is as expensive as it is now, it makes more environmentally acceptable forms of energy seem much more cost effective by comparison. Surely that's a Good Thing (TM).
I'm sure the truth is usually somewhere between the two. ;-) I don't always agree with the BBC position on many things, but they do usually try to find a representative from each "side" to comment.
In the Palestine/Israeli issue, you'd normally expect to get commentary from a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy, possibly a spokesperson for the Palestinian authority, and possibly comment from an aid agency working in the area (if applicable). I would argue that makes it distinctly less "biased" than CNN, and certainly less than Fox.
Quick question for you: does Fox's opinion normally closely reflect your own?
I'm not sure what the deal with advertising is. Yes, a lot of it is stupid. I'd rather have stupid people fund my TV than set up a whole warrant and criminaal structure around TV, in which homes are invaded to prosecute $160 "crimes".
It's not just about the TV though. Advertisers will fund the parts of the industry where they think they're going to recoup the most benefit (can't blame them for that). So they'll want to advertise on TV and local radio, but they wouldn't want to advertise on other services which aren't going to net them any sales.
You have to remember that the BBC isn't *just* TV/radio/web. One of the most important parts of the BBC is the World Service. It's a radio news service available on short wave pretty much all over the world. It's especially important to people in countries where obtaining unbiased and uncensored news programming is nothing short of impossible, and where even free access to the net is difficult. It's much more difficult for a restrictive government to censor radio signals broadcast from the other side of the world, and short wave radios are so cheap to manufacture that they're available to even some of the poorest people.
I listen to both Fox and BBC daily, and can testify that while Fox may lean right, they always put both sides on to give their arguements. The BBC feels it only needs to give you one perspective, theirs
I'm not sure what gives you that impression, to be perfectly honest. When watching nearly any event with politcal ramifications the BBC are always very good about giving both sides a chance to put forward a representative. When there are events in the Palestine/Israeli conflict, there is nearly always a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy on hand to give their reaction/opinion, likewise a spokesperson from the Palestinian authority, aid agencies, etc. etc.. I think the BBC offers some of the most unbiased reporting I've ever seen, and, yes, I travel to the US regularly, and regularly watch US news broadcasts. Every time I stay in the US I wish the hotel would broadcast BBC World as well/instead of CNN.
One of the things I always notice when I travel to the US is how different news reporting is on CNN as compared to the BBC. Now, I wouldn't call the BBC a left-wing organization at all, and it's certainly one of the most unbiased news networks I've seen.
It's particularly apparent when you look at coverage of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict - the simple changing of a couple of words in a headline can make a massive difference. A particular example I remember in September 2002 when Israeli troops occupied one town, the CNN headline made the Israeli troops sound like heroic liberators ("troops advancing under fire", and so on), whereas the BBC headline made them sound more like an invading army.
And apart from accessing it online, there are hardly *any* hotels at all in Washington, Orlando or Norfolk (3 places I go fairly regularly) that have BBC World available to guests.
Trillian is free and not ad-encumbered, so Cerulean probably don't have much money to throw around. I know they sell Trillian Pro, but I doubt the split of Pro/Non-Pro users is very high. (Anyone got stats on this?)
Unusual though a meteor coming through the roof is, I'm not sure it counts as "unexplained".
The problem is when the ISP's SMTP server doesn't behave in the manner you want it to: it's slow, often unreliable, won't accept large attachments, blocks certain file extensions as attachments, and so on. Oh, and it doesn't support SSL/TLS. This isn't just my ISP, nearly every ISP I've used in the last 5 years has had similar limitations. The unfortunate fact seems to be that ISPs provide connections. They're really not very good at providing other services like reliable email servers, webhosts, usenet servers and so on.
Personally I'd be much more comfortable paying the ISP a touch less, not having access to all the "extra" services (50mb webspace, 20 POP3 accounts, usenet, etc.) and get the services I actually need from a professional hosting company. Group a few people together on a user-mode Linux VPS and it only works out at a couple of pounds per person per month.
There's also the whole privacy issue - I don't necessarily want a large corporate entity (my ISP) having access to all the email I sent, when I send it, to whom I send it, etc. etc.. If this article were about anything apart from the unpleasant reality that is junk email, most of the comments here would be bemoaning the invasion of privacy.
is this a case of giving up some freedom (port 25) for some sanity?
My ISP already does this. What I'd encourage (see my earlier post for a fuller explanation) would be a captive portal ISPs could use for customers' machines which are victims of viruses. All it needs to be is a page telling people to sort the mess out, providing a few useful links to online virus scanning sites and so on. The message is more about informing the unsuspecting customer than it is about draconian blocking, etc.
Anyway the discussion drifted towards whether ISPs should be more proactive in blocking customers who are open relays (usually through viruses). Unfortunately this leads certain ISPs to decide to run a blanket block on port 25, which is a real pain in the ass for those of us who *want* to run our own mailservers, and I'm sure many of us here do.
So, why don't ISPs take a more proactive role in "helping" their customers to realise they've been hacked - I'd suggest a captive portal for hacked machines, kinda like some organizations have for Wi-Fi. i.e. you type any web address and the browser will always show the captive portal page. If ISPs were to use this for hacked/virally infected customers there could be a nice little button at the bottom to say "I've fixed it". Then their net access would be automatically re-opened.
Of course, there are few issues to work out, such as you'd probably need to allow access to a couple of online virus scanners and virus fix tools rather than block net access entirely, but it could work. The idea isn't so much about the blocking, but more a case of informing the unsuspecting victim that they are infected and they need to do something about it pronto.
i.e. The samples are played in a random order and one is unaware of which one is which. Ideally I suppose one should also not be aware of which formats are included in the test as sometimes (particularly doing low-bitrate tests) one might be able to listen out for particular nuances in the way the compression affects the sample.
e.g. Vorbis preserves the frequency range more truly than AAC (in my opinion), yet AAC is possibly "cleverer" in allocating bitrate to the parts of the sample where loss of detail would be more noticable, even if it uses a highpass cutoff to do so. The encoders have probably improved considerably since I last did any serious listening tests though... over a year ago.
Tom Petty will probably hit a ceiling at 8.5, but Mudvayne will overwhelm even the highest compression settings
I pride myself on being culturally retarded and have absolutely no idea who either of them is I'm afraid. :)
Still one of the finest sound cards ever made in my opinion.
Not sure about being able to reliably differentiate up to -q 10 though - I can only manager it up to about -q 6. Not saying I don't believe you - just amazed if you can differentiate up to that level. Have you ABX'd it?
Not to mention the environmental impact of people burning CD-Rs purely for the purpose of ripping them.
(Yes, I know you could use CD-RWs, but in my experience they're nowhere near as reliable as CD-Rs. No idea why - maybe my drive just doesn't like the things.)
But 110V transformers and motors tend to run somewhat hotter than their 220V cousins. I think it's fair to 220V is less likely to lead to fire than 110V (reduced current).
You win some, you lose some I guess. Fortunately quite a lot of computer equipment these days will work on one or the other with an appropriate flick of a power supply switch.
I'd love to ditch the Windows partition altogether if it weren't for those 2 issues. Games one can live with rebooting into Windows to play for a few hours, but Outlook is one of those things that tends to be open all the time in my experience, so I don't spend anywhere near as much time using Linux as I'd really like to. And the only viable alternative I can think of is to fork out for VMware (Linux) and run Windows as a virtual machine within Linux.
Outlook itself is a different matter, for one thing it's not free so you would need to compare it with other commercial offerings to be fair.
Much of this discussion has been comparing the rest of MS Office with OpenOffice, so I don't think it's unfair to try and find a non-commercial Outlook replacement. I'm open to suggestions. :)
Unfortunately Aznar made what could only be called a terrible misjudgement by initially blaming the Madrid bombings on ETA. As I understand things over there (and perhaps the Spanish amongst you will correct me if I'm wrong) there are some pretty deep cultural differences in different parts of Spain, and Aznar's willingness to blame the incident on ETA without any evidence to back the statement up rather offended a significant chunk of the electorate.
(now Spain is governed by a much more oppressive [socialist] government).
What is it with Americans and socialist governments? Many Americans I meet (and the majority I would consider good friends) seem to equate "socialist government" with "USSR-style communism", which simply isn't the case.
Many countries have had extremely successful socialist governments over the last 60 years. Socialist governements in the European sense stand for things like reducing the gap between richest and poorest, providing a decent welfare state, etc. Hell, one of them created one of our most famous institutions - the National Health Service. We might bitch and moan about it from time to time, but I think I speak for the majority of my countrymen in saying we're bloody glad it's here.
Maybe we've just decided that there is an alternative to the policy of Corporate Greed which defines US-style politics, under the guise of the "free market".
Did I say any of that? Not at all. Please don't put words into my mouth.
Whether the US media is biased I will leave to those of you in the US to judge for yourselves. All I can say is this: When you hear a particular Middle Eastern report on CNN/Fox/[insert choice of US network here], please take it upon yourself to read a few alternative news sources. I'd suggest the BBC, ITN, Sky News. But I'm from the UK and probably biased as well. So how about a Canadian news source?
Hell, perhaps give Al Jazeera a try. Sure, it's probably biased too, but somewhere between your existing news network and a few others you might find a grain of truth. ;)
For 30 years US foreign policy never considered the IRA in Northern Ireland a terrorist movement, despite no shortage of "terrorist" acts. As much as it pains me to say it, try to remember one group's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
Not meant personally, but I guess that's the kind of attitude one gets from watching too much CNN or Fox News and nothing from the other side of the political fence. My experience of US news reporting suggests it's often incredibly biased, especially on Middle Eastern affairs.
My understanding after talking to a number of Spanish friends after the election was that the opposition who defeated Aznar's government had been against the war in Iraq since well before Spain had even gotten involved.
I don't know if a similar thing exists in US law, but certainly under UK law the anti-smoking lobby made use of a little-known clause about 20 years ago which essentially meant that for every minute the tobacco companies were advertising on TV, the anti-smoking groups were entitled to equal TV time at little or no cost. Contrary to popular opinion, it was that which eventually persuaded the tobacco companies to give up on TV advertising - it was causing them more trouble than it was worth. (I would dig out some urls on this, but my ADSL is down and I'm on a modem at the moment)
Couldn't someone like the FSF or Creative Commons use a similar law (if it exists over that side of the pond) to do something similar with this?
Fortunately most of my friends seem to understand the whole "naming of computers" thing. We can be sitting in the pub talking about our respective machines and most of us know the names (and purpose) of the others' machines. I pity anyone who tries to listen to our conversations. Computers: ariadne, artemis, cronus, rhea, hestia, leto, zeus Need to find names for the two cellphones now that they qualify as network devices...
Deus Ex AIs?
On the other hand, taxing it at the VoIP - PSTN gateway end (bear in mind most current and short-term-future VoIP use will ultimately need to break out onto a PSTN network eventually) would probably be easier to implemnet consistently.
I'm inclined to agree with you. The only shows I've watched with any degree of regularity over hte last couple of years are Grand Designs (C4) and Newsnight (BBC2). I've made a determined effort recently to persuade American friends of mine to read/watch BBC News (either through their existing cable/satellite packages - some offer BBC World, or on the web) as opposed to the US news networks, and those who've tried it seem to find it truly amazing how different the same news is reported in different parts of the world.