Poland had no allies in 1939. At least no allies in 'active' mode.
Poland had allies in 1939, but they were three years too late. By 1939 Poland was encircled (with Czechoslovakia chopped up and Nazi or Soviet puppet states being set up around it).
Just following the invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Supplies (limited) were dropped to the Poles by air & the Polish Air Force and government evacuated to London. What shocked Britain and France however was the simultaneous Soviet invasion - which meant ground support for Poland would have been insane. France and Britain were going into overdrive building up their defences: ok, this didn't work for France but if the Battle of Britain had been lost, America's intervention may never have occured, or might have failed.
Yes, without the backing of then isolationist America, the Entente Cordial betrayed Czechoslovakia. Poland they backed up.
Of course, if America had stepped in in 1939 (or 1937 or better still, financially, in the 1920s by meaningfully writing off war reparations) then it could have been a different story. But the real villans of the piece were the Soviets (after the Nazis, obviously). No wonder they let the Warsaw Uprising be crushed in 1944; independent politicians couldn't be tolerated in the Soviet sphere of influence...
Another reason may be that the third generation services from 3 (e.g. video clips of news and football/cricket/wimbeldon), while charged for, normally come with a headline and sometimes a short summarry delivered over WAP, gratis. So if all you want is the cricket score, you can get it for free every half hour or so.
Sure 3 has a comparatively small userbase, but they are the early adopters & likely to be using the various services much more per head than the huge installed bases of the big four.
So, for example, almost any software manufacturer
other than Microsoft could be deemed to be on
a 'shaky financial footing', and have to come up with the cash to cover their opponent's litigation
risk. Who do you think would be their opponent in
99.9% of the cases? (Hint: Starts with Micro and
ends with soft) How many companies would survive
long enough to even get to the trial?
Good point. The judge attempts to balance things out in "the interests of justice" and would therefore look at the strength of the claim before requiring a payment into court. Basically if the case is strong enough to not be struck out at summary judgment, but still pretty weak, the litigant will be forced to chip in (if short on funds). If the case is very strong, more likely to require a payment into court from a financially weak defendant.
While generally you guys get a lot of things right (constitutional protection, etc), one thing that maddens me about these "only in the USA" stories is the freedom you give to lawyers to run amok with cases and spend all their clients money, forcing the other side to spend even more.
Here in the UK (well England and Wales at least), as you may know, the loser in litigation generally has to pick up the winner's legal fees. Where the claim was, e.g. an abuse of process, the fees can be payable on a punitive ("indemnity") basis. If either side is on a shaky financial footing, they can be forced to pay money into court to cover their opponent's litigation risk.
Is anyone thinking of taking these sort of rules into the US system? Or would that not work with the constitution?
unfortunately when it came to Kerry all you criticised him with was a racial slur:
"Kerry has his skeletons...For some reason the press lets everyone think Kerry is a Kennedyesque Irish Catholic when his paternal grand parents were actually Austro/Hungarian and Jewish.His name would be John Kohn if they hadn't changed their name to Kerry when the immigrated to the U.S....these little things...may color his decision making on Isreal in particular"
This contains hints (probably subconscious) of old slurs:
1 Jews control the press
2 They are deceitful (not merely sensible in those times of rising tension against anyone with a germanic sounding name)
3 Jew=Zionist (pro Israel)
You can't have a system of proportional representation in a presidential election, it's a contradiction in terms!*#
What you can have is a run-off system where the second (and subsequent) preferences of 3rd party voters are added to the votes of the leading 2 until one candidate has 50% + 1 vote.
Proportional representation would also not work for the US senate (hell that's not even a fair plurality system, given the different size of states), but could work for any state chosing to adopt it for their house of reps elections.
*(Although in the US it would be possible for states to send a proportionately representative set of delegates to the convention, the election of delegates is a fiction anyway, people are really voting for their next president, who can by definition only be one person. This would prove interesting though - what if there had been a dozen or so Nader and Buchanan delegates at the convention last time round, deciding to switch their delegated votes to Gore or Bush...)
# OK, OK, it can be proportionally representative if everyone votes for the same person!
I think the really sad reason for this is the contiual underfunding of music and other non-core subjects since the introduction of the National Curriculum.
The Government is prepared to put the resources into funding "literacy hours" and "numeracy hours" (which by the way are normally 50 minute sessions) but is not willing to fund the arts, private organisations, with their own agendas, are expected to chip in.
While all children must obviously be literate and numerate, it is my opinion that they are more likely to do this if they are given a great variety of creative subjects which inspire them to care about learning for itself, and not just the next test.
Nelson Mandela
Mahatma Gandhi 35 of the US Founding Fathers
Cherie Booth QC (who still takes human rights cases against her husband's government, and wins, and incidentally earns 4x more than the PM)
Some of the above, and some more obscure ones, are listed here
However there's still a long way to go when google asks, in response to the search for "great lawyers", "Did you mean: great leaders?"!
Unfortunately, this does not seem to be part of the package on offer. From the Motorola website:
iTunes(TM) Alliance -- Motorola and Apple announced a strategic alliance to bring the
iTunes(TM) music player to Motorola's next-generation mobile handsets. Music lovers will be
able to transfer favorite songs from the iTunes(TM) jukebox on their Mac or PC, to Motorola's
next-generation 'always with you' mobile handsets, via a USB or Bluetooth connection.
The phone on offer appears to be not so much "iTMS in your pocket" as a decoder for Apple's DRM.
What would be interesting, if the alliance continues, is a phone with a connection to iTMS and a fast download speed, which could hold a limited number of songs, that could then be transferred (probably over USB) to an iPOD.
Here in the United States, I and many other people still don't have mobile phones. There are many reasons for the slow take up of phones here but spam is not going to help. Resons why spam phone calls are both annoying and successful here include:
1 We are charged for receiving calls!
2 Spammers need not pay - if they are calling local, only the receiver pays.
In the case of local to mobile calls this cross-subsidisation of the landline network by mobile phone customers is a distortion of the market not present in calling-party-pays systems.
Back ontopic, one reason that the spammers were probably caught here is that to mass-SMS in the UK a contract has to be entered into with the relevant mobile provider. Combining this with all digital exchanges for landlines and mobiles, and a tracing operation becomes considerably easier. The chief spammers may have been in Russia but they would have had to have had intermediaries in the UK to set up the contracts and it is presumably through this intermediary that the suspects were traced.
Although almost no one can agree precisely on just what child pornography is, since even the concept of "child" is highly amorphous. ("Honey, I'd really like to just take your picture, but that might be a crime, so why don't we just fuck. That's black letter legal.")
The article is talking about banning child pornography sites (those showing compromising pictures of children under 16), in Britain, where the age of consent is 16.
"For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P."
Maybe, but this also gives the government one more reason as to why P2P is evil and should be banned, don't you think?
While P2P is clearly not "evil" as of itself, it is easy to see how such a network providing and disseminating information on governments and politicians could easily be abused. Because the decentralised structure of the network makes it nigh-on impossible to remove interesting reads (true or false) from the network, it could easily find itself being used for any of the following purposes:
1 Dissemination of information that could endanger the lives of individuals. Note this is not just a terrorist threat. If, say, details of suspected but not convicted criminals for the more emotionally sensitive crimes were released, vigilantes could pop up. Also say details such as the planned movements and security patrols for politicians or others at risk such as Salman Rushdie.
2 Blackmail. Which is more likely to be quickly disseminated a (false) story or its retraction?
3 Fraud. By doctoring official looking documents in favour of one or another commercial interests. Unrealistic? Think Enron.
I would treat such a network with great suspicion and would prefer simply to improve searching capabilities of existing websites.
Compare like with like: IT salaries in the City of London (the commercial district which probably has 25% of the country's graduate-level jobs) exceed those in any market other than Wall Street, and the cost of living can be double that of a big US city.
However, the cost of living in the North of England is much, much lower, but yes, wages will be lower than in the US.
Cost of living comparisons with the UK are always skewed for three reasons:
1 - the cost of property in London is insane, but if you see it as an investment as well as a cost of living, it works out much better.
2 - we get a lot of stuff for "free" - not just the NHS but also a decent-ish social security system.
3 - The cost of labour - anything involving services are going to be expensive - from haircuts to eating out, but then you don't have to tip as much (or at all in many places!)
we pay blank CD-R levy but we cant get sued by MPAA/RIAA.
Perhaps because of what 2 of the "A"s in "MPAA/RIAA" stand for?
America - that continent that Canada is part of?
(No.)
Here are the minimum system requirements for Picasa:
Personal computer with 300MHz Pentium® processor and MMX® technology.
64 MB RAM (128MB recommended).
50 MB available hard disk space.
800 x 600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor.
Microsoft® Windows 98, Microsoft® Windows Me, Microsoft® Windows 2000, or Microsoft® Windows XP.
Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 (6.0 recommended). If at any time you
get an "unable to authenticate" error, you should upgrade to IE 6.0.
Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, 9.0b recommended).
Optional: 56K Internet connection speed (for access to any online services and picture sharing via Hello).
Works with JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PSD, AVI, MPG, ASF, and WMV files
No, it doesn't run on Linux, nor on Macs, nor my old 486sx running windows 3.1 that I still keep half my photos on (early digital camera adopter).
OK, I went to a fairly typical good English University so your experiences in the states may be different but...
Some college's and uni's send grades,
schedules and who knows what else
directly to students' email. Pretty
handy for a stalker right?
Perhaps - but I'm not sure what a stalker would do with a set of exam results - I mean medical results are obviously confidential but exams people generally tell all and sundry about (if you do well, to boast, if you do poorly, to complain about the questions being harder than the past papers). Besides a person's exam results, like their timetables, are generally available on the student noticeboards (and the departmental websites) so cracking their email doesn't make much difference. As for campus doctors, I would be very annoyed if I was sent anything more personal than perhaps a time for an appointment via email, but all doctors I've had are pretty sensible people and wouldn't send that sort of information through an unsecure medium (which, unfortunately, at university includes the post).
The public availablity of exam results is important for employers and students - because here in Britain most exam results are published (for some professional qualifications such as the law and accountancy they are put in the national papers!), there is far less risk that sutdents will lie about their grades to an employer, thereby protecting the honest employees.
You have to subscribe to get into the body of that article, but from the first fifty words the tone does not seem to reflect the "Windows dominates the desktop" story of itfacts.biz.
They are:
GNU Linux, the free computer operating system, has had far more success in winning converts in corporate data centers than on desktop personal computers. But as more user-friendly software makes its way onto the Linux desktop, the free operating system is starting to make progress in its David-vs.-Goliath competition against
Also interesting from the updated survey is the division of the separate rankings given to the United States for press freedom on American territory and in relation to Iraq.
A similar division is made in the updated table applying to Israel (1967 borders) and the Occupied Territories: in both cases the 'carving out' of these countries anti-journalist actions abroad has flattered their headline position.
1.1 Product Placement
A product or service must never be included in sound or vision in return for cash, services or any consideration in kind. This is product placement and it is expressly forbidden in BBC programmes. It is illegal to make any such arrangements in the UK or anywhere else within the European Union.
Slashdot Mirror
Poland had no allies in 1939. At least no allies in 'active' mode.
Poland had allies in 1939, but they were three years too late. By 1939 Poland was encircled (with Czechoslovakia chopped up and Nazi or Soviet puppet states being set up around it).
Just following the invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Supplies (limited) were dropped to the Poles by air & the Polish Air Force and government evacuated to London. What shocked Britain and France however was the simultaneous Soviet invasion - which meant ground support for Poland would have been insane. France and Britain were going into overdrive building up their defences: ok, this didn't work for France but if the Battle of Britain had been lost, America's intervention may never have occured, or might have failed.
Yes, without the backing of then isolationist America, the Entente Cordial betrayed Czechoslovakia. Poland they backed up.
Of course, if America had stepped in in 1939 (or 1937 or better still, financially, in the 1920s by meaningfully writing off war reparations) then it could have been a different story. But the real villans of the piece were the Soviets (after the Nazis, obviously). No wonder they let the Warsaw Uprising be crushed in 1944; independent politicians couldn't be tolerated in the Soviet sphere of influence...
OK I meant electoral college not "the convention"!
IANAA
(IAAB)
The only reason the usage has gone up...
Another reason may be that the third generation services from 3 (e.g. video clips of news and football/cricket/wimbeldon), while charged for, normally come with a headline and sometimes a short summarry delivered over WAP, gratis. So if all you want is the cricket score, you can get it for free every half hour or so.
Sure 3 has a comparatively small userbase, but they are the early adopters & likely to be using the various services much more per head than the huge installed bases of the big four.
So, for example, almost any software manufacturer other than Microsoft could be deemed to be on a 'shaky financial footing', and have to come up with the cash to cover their opponent's litigation risk. Who do you think would be their opponent in 99.9% of the cases? (Hint: Starts with Micro and ends with soft) How many companies would survive long enough to even get to the trial?
Good point. The judge attempts to balance things out in "the interests of justice" and would therefore look at the strength of the claim before requiring a payment into court. Basically if the case is strong enough to not be struck out at summary judgment, but still pretty weak, the litigant will be forced to chip in (if short on funds). If the case is very strong, more likely to require a payment into court from a financially weak defendant.
While generally you guys get a lot of things right (constitutional protection, etc), one thing that maddens me about these "only in the USA" stories is the freedom you give to lawyers to run amok with cases and spend all their clients money, forcing the other side to spend even more.
Here in the UK (well England and Wales at least), as you may know, the loser in litigation generally has to pick up the winner's legal fees. Where the claim was, e.g. an abuse of process, the fees can be payable on a punitive ("indemnity") basis. If either side is on a shaky financial footing, they can be forced to pay money into court to cover their opponent's litigation risk.
Is anyone thinking of taking these sort of rules into the US system? Or would that not work with the constitution?
unfortunately when it came to Kerry all you criticised him with was a racial slur: "Kerry has his skeletons ...For some reason the press lets everyone think Kerry is a Kennedyesque Irish Catholic when his paternal grand parents were actually Austro/Hungarian and Jewish.His name would be John Kohn if they hadn't changed their name to Kerry when the immigrated to the U.S....these little things...may color his decision making on Isreal in particular"
This contains hints (probably subconscious) of old slurs:
1 Jews control the press
2 They are deceitful (not merely sensible in those times of rising tension against anyone with a germanic sounding name)
3 Jew=Zionist (pro Israel)
You can't have a system of proportional representation in a presidential election, it's a contradiction in terms!*#
What you can have is a run-off system where the second (and subsequent) preferences of 3rd party voters are added to the votes of the leading 2 until one candidate has 50% + 1 vote.
Proportional representation would also not work for the US senate (hell that's not even a fair plurality system, given the different size of states), but could work for any state chosing to adopt it for their house of reps elections.
*(Although in the US it would be possible for states to send a proportionately representative set of delegates to the convention, the election of delegates is a fiction anyway, people are really voting for their next president, who can by definition only be one person. This would prove interesting though - what if there had been a dozen or so Nader and Buchanan delegates at the convention last time round, deciding to switch their delegated votes to Gore or Bush...)
# OK, OK, it can be proportionally representative if everyone votes for the same person!
I think the really sad reason for this is the contiual underfunding of music and other non-core subjects since the introduction of the National Curriculum.
The Government is prepared to put the resources into funding "literacy hours" and "numeracy hours" (which by the way are normally 50 minute sessions) but is not willing to fund the arts, private organisations, with their own agendas, are expected to chip in.
While all children must obviously be literate and numerate, it is my opinion that they are more likely to do this if they are given a great variety of creative subjects which inspire them to care about learning for itself, and not just the next test.
Only those of you with mod points!
I knew there was an advantage to being a newbie.
Nelson Mandela
Mahatma Gandhi
35 of the US Founding Fathers
Cherie Booth QC (who still takes human rights cases against her husband's government, and wins, and incidentally earns 4x more than the PM)
Some of the above, and some more obscure ones, are listed here
However there's still a long way to go when google asks, in response to the search for "great lawyers",
"Did you mean: great leaders?"!
where is this Central EU place?
You might think it is funny that the site requires Internet Explorer; I would say it's appropriate. Who gets caught by these scams anyway? IE users.
Unfortunately, this does not seem to be part of the package on offer. From the Motorola website:
iTunes(TM) Alliance -- Motorola and Apple announced a strategic alliance to bring the
iTunes(TM) music player to Motorola's next-generation mobile handsets. Music lovers will be
able to transfer favorite songs from the iTunes(TM) jukebox on their Mac or PC, to Motorola's
next-generation 'always with you' mobile handsets, via a USB or Bluetooth connection.
The phone on offer appears to be not so much "iTMS in your pocket" as a decoder for Apple's DRM.
What would be interesting, if the alliance continues, is a phone with a connection to iTMS and a fast download speed, which could hold a limited number of songs, that could then be transferred (probably over USB) to an iPOD.
Here in the United States, I and many other people still don't have mobile phones. There are many reasons for the slow take up of phones here but spam is not going to help. Resons why spam phone calls are both annoying and successful here include:
1 We are charged for receiving calls!
2 Spammers need not pay - if they are calling local, only the receiver pays.
In the case of local to mobile calls this cross-subsidisation of the landline network by mobile phone customers is a distortion of the market not present in calling-party-pays systems.
Back ontopic, one reason that the spammers were probably caught here is that to mass-SMS in the UK a contract has to be entered into with the relevant mobile provider. Combining this with all digital exchanges for landlines and mobiles, and a tracing operation becomes considerably easier. The chief spammers may have been in Russia but they would have had to have had intermediaries in the UK to set up the contracts and it is presumably through this intermediary that the suspects were traced.
The article is talking about banning child pornography sites (those showing compromising pictures of children under 16), in Britain, where the age of consent is 16.
1 Dissemination of information that could endanger the lives of individuals. Note this is not just a terrorist threat. If, say, details of suspected but not convicted criminals for the more emotionally sensitive crimes were released, vigilantes could pop up. Also say details such as the planned movements and security patrols for politicians or others at risk such as Salman Rushdie.
2 Blackmail. Which is more likely to be quickly disseminated a (false) story or its retraction?
3 Fraud. By doctoring official looking documents in favour of one or another commercial interests. Unrealistic? Think Enron.
I would treat such a network with great suspicion and would prefer simply to improve searching capabilities of existing websites.
Compare like with like: IT salaries in the City of London (the commercial district which probably has 25% of the country's graduate-level jobs) exceed those in any market other than Wall Street, and the cost of living can be double that of a big US city. However, the cost of living in the North of England is much, much lower, but yes, wages will be lower than in the US. Cost of living comparisons with the UK are always skewed for three reasons: 1 - the cost of property in London is insane, but if you see it as an investment as well as a cost of living, it works out much better. 2 - we get a lot of stuff for "free" - not just the NHS but also a decent-ish social security system. 3 - The cost of labour - anything involving services are going to be expensive - from haircuts to eating out, but then you don't have to tip as much (or at all in many places!)
we pay blank CD-R levy but we cant get sued by MPAA/RIAA. Perhaps because of what 2 of the "A"s in "MPAA/RIAA" stand for? America - that continent that Canada is part of?
(No.) Here are the minimum system requirements for Picasa: Personal computer with 300MHz Pentium® processor and MMX® technology. 64 MB RAM (128MB recommended). 50 MB available hard disk space. 800 x 600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor. Microsoft® Windows 98, Microsoft® Windows Me, Microsoft® Windows 2000, or Microsoft® Windows XP. Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 (6.0 recommended). If at any time you get an "unable to authenticate" error, you should upgrade to IE 6.0. Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, 9.0b recommended). Optional: 56K Internet connection speed (for access to any online services and picture sharing via Hello). Works with JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PSD, AVI, MPG, ASF, and WMV files No, it doesn't run on Linux, nor on Macs, nor my old 486sx running windows 3.1 that I still keep half my photos on (early digital camera adopter).
OK, I went to a fairly typical good English University so your experiences in the states may be different but...
Some college's and uni's send grades,
schedules and who knows what else
directly to students' email. Pretty
handy for a stalker right?
Perhaps - but I'm not sure what a stalker would do with a set of exam results - I mean medical results are obviously confidential but exams people generally tell all and sundry about (if you do well, to boast, if you do poorly, to complain about the questions being harder than the past papers). Besides a person's exam results, like their timetables, are generally available on the student noticeboards (and the departmental websites) so cracking their email doesn't make much difference. As for campus doctors, I would be very annoyed if I was sent anything more personal than perhaps a time for an appointment via email, but all doctors I've had are pretty sensible people and wouldn't send that sort of information through an unsecure medium (which, unfortunately, at university includes the post).
The public availablity of exam results is important for employers and students - because here in Britain most exam results are published (for some professional qualifications such as the law and accountancy they are put in the national papers!), there is far less risk that sutdents will lie about their grades to an employer, thereby protecting the honest employees.
just my 0.031 euros worth...
I hadn't heard of itfacts.biz so I followed the link to their page, which then provides an onward link to a New York Times article about the proliferation of Linux.
You have to subscribe to get into the body of that article, but from the first fifty words the tone does not seem to reflect the "Windows dominates the desktop" story of itfacts.biz.
They are:
GNU Linux, the free computer operating system, has had far more success in winning converts in corporate data centers than on desktop personal computers. But as more user-friendly software makes its way onto the Linux desktop, the free operating system is starting to make progress in its David-vs.-Goliath competition against
Also interesting from the updated survey is the division of the separate rankings given to the United States for press freedom on American territory and in relation to Iraq.
A similar division is made in the updated table applying to Israel (1967 borders) and the Occupied Territories: in both cases the 'carving out' of these countries anti-journalist actions abroad has flattered their headline position.
J'accuse!
1.1 Product Placement
A product or service must never be included in sound or vision in return for cash, services or any consideration in kind. This is product placement and it is expressly forbidden in BBC programmes. It is illegal to make any such arrangements in the UK or anywhere else within the European Union.