If you're taking any other approach, namely one that will force your client to remain attached to you I'd have to question your ethics, motive, and ability because what you're doing is creating a dependence on you that is borderline blackmail (if that's something you're doing).
Why is it that employees are supposed to work hard, be as professional as possible, take pride in their work, be ethical etc? All these virtuous practices are things that largely benefit the employer. It's effectively work ethic propaganda that has been drilled into the population.
In contrast employers work you as hard as possible for as little reward as possible (often including unpaid overtime which is effectively theft of your time) then dump you for a cheaper college graduate at the first opportunity. Employers do not adopt a strategy that benefits the employee as much as possible, they adopt a strategy that benefits them as much as possible. Why then shouldn't employees be just as ruthless, conniving and unethical as employers?
"Virtuous" work ethics have been drilled into successive populations over the aeons by those who directly benefit from them, i.e. the powerful. Don't fall for them.
How can the people support or oppose Chavez's policies if they don't even know what he's doing?
Well if they watched the privately owned media in Venezuela, they will certainly have no idea what he was doing. The hugely powerful privately owned media spent most of the time writing stories about how he is insane or a criminal. It was the private media that took an active part in the coup attempt against Chavez in 2002. There was plenty of incredibly critical coverage of Chavez in Venezuela, make no mistake about that.
At my old job I was once writing a while loop and decided to use "i" as the name of a counter variable I was incrementing. After a while I noticed that I had not declared the i and was perplexed as to why there was no compile error. Then to my horror I discovered that someone was using a global variable named "i".
The weird scope rules and lack of proper object/class support drive me up the wall when working on projects with ~40,000 lines of code.
HAXE has has classes, static typing and all the things you probably want. Then you can just transpile it into javascript (among other languages). There are other efforts along similar lines. Increasingly it seems, due to it's unsuitability for large projects, Javascript is being treated as a sort of assembly language you compile to as a last step.
certainly nowhere near as much as what their strangely negative reputation in the U.S. would lead you to believe
There was a lot of propaganda against Al Jazeera but it really was just nonsense. The US and Allies had grown used to their own media's kid-gloves reporting on their military adventures and were absolutely incensed that a news outlet would question their motives and/or pay too much attention to their victims. Al Jazeera has really been a breath of fresh air in the world of news media. They cover issues that are simply ignored by other outlets and have become one of my primary news sources.
Due to their wild inaccuracy, a lot of these rockets land in the middle of nowhere anyway. Would you really even know if a rocket was intercepted successfully or whether the Iron Dome missile just exploded nearby to one? Are there journalists monitoring every single Iron Dome launch and somehow accurately verifying a success/fail for each missile?
I'm not saying Iron Dome isn't successful, but given that targeting missiles is very difficult and we are relying on official IDF sources, there should be much more scepticism about the system's effectiveness.
Some people here may not be old enough to remember all the propaganda about the Patriot anti-Missile system's effectiveness during the first Gulf War. The media/public were fed total lies. Patriot turned out not to be very effective at all. Given that Israeli officials are currently the only information source for Iron Dome's amazing 90% success rate, surely we should be highly sceptical. Instead all I have seen in the media are endless uncritical articles about how amazing Iron Dome is.
All they need to do acknowledge that Israel is a legitimate nation. But you know, Hamas won't do that.
By continuously building settlements in the West Bank in violation of international law, Israel refuses to even recognise basic Palestinian land rights. Yet we expect Palestinians to recognise Israel?
I would like nothing better than for the Palestinians to have a normal economy
The Palestinians would like that too, but Israel will not allow it. This all goes far beyond firing rockets at each other. Israel really believes that all the Palestinian land should belong to them, which is why there are so many settlements in the West Bank (in violation of international law). Israel has always viewed the Palestinians as a demographic threat, which is why they never allowed Palestinian refugees to return.
One way to help ease the whole situation in Gaza would have been to allow in a peacekeeping force, but Israel will not allow it. Their excuse in the past has been that a peace-keeping force would "interfere with Israeli security measures". The truth is that a peacekeeping force would remove many of the excuses the Israeli government has for blockading Gaza and preventing it growing economically.
So yes, Hamas are terrorists, but Israel behaves no better and they have their own agenda.
The problem with this idea of PCs disappearing is that we will still need general purpose computers with large screens and input devices that are comfortable to use for many hours at a time. Are you going to develop a website on your mobile phone, or your games console? Even if you use a tablet, it would be like sitting at work all day staring at a 10 inch monitor. Tiny monitors are not good for productivity at all. Also, touch screens are not good for entering large amounts of text, a task which is quite common.
Perhaps though, you will be able to plug your tablet into a bigger screen on your desk, and also plug a nice keyboard into the tablet. Also a mouse would be nice. Then you realise that you are basically reconstructing a PC. Welcome to the post PC future that still actually needs PCs.
the Beeb decided that the overwheling evidence of climate change and global warming rendered dissenting views not only null, but dangerous
The BBC needs to be more accountable. They should only be exempt from FOI requests when it comes to protecting journalistic sources, nothing else. Also, they need to be more accountable when it comes to their articles. We should be able to comment on any article, not just the non-controversial ones.
However, the scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring and that we are contributing to it. So I would expect the BBC to go with the scientific consensus just as it does with other areas of science. I would not expect a BBC cosmology programme to devote 50% of its time to the steady-state theory just to counterbalance the big bang theory.
It really isn't independent. The government appoints the Board and the Board appoints the Director General. It's like saying you are not influenced by your department manager despite the fact that he appoints all the line managers. The BBC has really always been pro-establishment. The founder of the BBC, Lord Reith famously said "They know they (the government) can trust us not to be really impartial". That was during the General Stike, where the BBC made sure that strikers voices were not heard.
You're strawmanning the argument. Only the people on the far extreme want patents abolished.
Europe generally does not support software patents. So being in favour of abolishing software patents is hardly extreme. I think Stallman and the EFF have given up too quickly on this issue. The patent office will never do a proper job of rejecting ridiculous software patents so it seems unlikely that reforms will make much difference. Abolition is a sensible way forward. Copyright is all that is necessary for software because the code itself specifies the solution exactly.
Indeed. Fundamentally uncrackable provided the pad is truly random. The only chance is if they can find the pad in the archives, but I wouldn't pin my hopes on that.
The near field Witricity technology can transmit power over a meter or two. Even further with passive repeater antenna which can be disguised as picture frames, table-mats etc.
It's a much better technology than the simple induction pads that you put your mobile phone on and could be quite revolutionary. It seems they have recently released development kits too, so hopefully it won't be too long before its generally available.
We have bases in many countries because of treaties with them. They agree to have us there.
The problem is "They" so often refers to a dictator rather than the people. Particularly in the Middle East, the people of those countries do not want US bases on their soil, but they have no choice is the matter. Then of course there is the case of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Guantanamo Bay was granted to the US by a Godfather-style "offer they can't refuse" treaty with the Cuba while the country was occupied with US troops.
And for the last time, we did not get any of Iraq's oil so stop pushing that big lie
International Oil companies including Exxon Mobile,BP, Shell etc are all over Iraq's oil fields now. If Iraq was never invaded, that would not be the case. Strategic control of oil reserves in the Middle East has been part of US foreign policy since at least World War 2.
They were found guilty not primarily for failing to predict the earthquake, but for releasing a statement saying there was probably not going to be one.
If your job is to decide whether minor tremors indicate something bigger to come, you don't just keep quiet either way. You either publicly announce that you think a bigger quake is on the way, or that the tremors don't seem to be anything to worry about. In this case they did the later and other world experts agree with the decision they made.
In Switzerland the people can instigate referenda and overturn government decisions. It takes about 100,000 signatures to trigger a referendum on an issue.
Indeed. These companies are not creating JavaScript replacements because they just want it their way, there are real issues with using JavaScript for large developments. Why are we still waiting for basic features like optional static typing and classes to be added to JavaScript? Static typing is a very important feature. From it flows not just basic type checking, but also autocompletion (a major productivity booster), ease of re-factoring and useful code analysis (what functions use this particular type of object etc). There's now a whole list of languages that are aimed as direct replacements for javascript because of its failings, and transpilers to convert from various languages such as Java and haxe to JavaScript. All because JavaScript, for whatever reason, refuses to make any serious moves forward.
Sooner or later, if it continues to stand still, JavaScript will be replaced by one of these contenders. If we're unlucky, it will be replaced by several of them.
Seriously Google, give us some alternatives. Java is the absolute worst part of Android.
Indeed. I'm finding it's particularly bad for game development where you want to avoid continuously allocating objects on the heap. So if you need to continuously call some mathematical function from the game loop that uses a temporary vector as part of the calculation, this is an issue. How do you create this temporary vector? If we create a new one in the function, it will go on the heap, so we don't want to do that. You could have some module-level variable that the function uses, but that's rather messy. I ended up having to make an object caching system. When a function needs a vector, I pop one off the global vector cache, do the calculations, then push it back. This is messy and dangerous in its own way too though.
In C# you could just implement the vector as a struct, since structs go on the stack rather than the heap (and in C++ you can put what you like on the stack). C# stucts have value semantics too, which I think is an added bonus for something like a mathematical vector. Java is quite crippled in this respect. Another annoyance I immediately found with Java is that you can't pass parameters by reference. Why does Java have such a restriction? Even Visual Basic 6 could pass by reference. It's not that often that I want to pass a parameter by reference, but sometimes you really need to.
I also made the mistake of trying to use Generics in Java. I knew ahead of time that due to type erasure, there would be no performance improvement, but I didn't quite realise how crippled the Generics were. I first noticed this when trying to declare an array of a generic type. This does not work due to type erasure. Java Generics really is a train wreck.
It's a shame C# is so strongly tied to windows (and Microsoft) because it's one of the most advanced modern languages there is. Compared to Java, it really is a joy to use. It doesn't get in the way of what you want to do.
The soldier at the scene who picks up the child from the minivan (Ethan McCord) believes that the attack on the van was a war crime. They seemed all too quick to decide that people were carrying weapons and all too eager to shoot. I've heard many accounts where all civilians were considered as the enemy whether or not they were armed. e.g.
McCord told Van Auken: "He [Kauzlarich] goes, 'If someone in your line gets hit with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherf*cker on the street.'" McCord said that he had also witnessed the order carried out, saying: "I've seen it many times, where people are just walking down the street and an IED goes off and the troops open fire and kill them."
Only if no news outlet in the U.S. will publish it, because it makes nearly everyone look bad, where do you go?
Exactly. News organisations are not objective. The style of reporting and even whether a story is reported at all depends on who it damages. So if some Iranian police are beating protesters, an American newspaper can really go to town on the story, using emotive language etc. If some US police beat protesters in the same way the story (if printed at all) would have a much more neutral tone and probably would downplay any police violence.
Getting angry about issues which make an enemy look bad but downplaying or ignoring issues which make your own country look bad is standard practice. If a US newspaper routinely got just as angry about US police violence as it did about Iranian police violence, then it would be viewed as some crazy left wing pamphlet and widely ridiculed.
The best way to get your news is to shop around through. Look at the BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Russia Today etc. Between them all you can get a good picture of what is going on.
Ever since Lord Reith, the BBC has carefully guarded its independence.
"They know they (the government) can trust us not to be really impartial" - Lord Reith in his diary during the General Strike in 1926.
The BBC is in no sense independent. The board of governors is appointed directly by the government. Trying to argue that the BBC is independent is like trying to argue that the department manager has no influence over you because you only answer to the line manager (who is answerable to the department manager). There are plenty of examples of the BBC being highly partisan and serving the interests of government. Perhaps one of the most notable is the BBC's involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup. The BBC broadcast the "go" code for the operation.
Most of the time though, you don't need to have some government minister secretly complaining to the board. Like most news organisations, the BBC is well versed in self-censorship. Even the language used betrays the establishment mindset. You can see this most clearly when you contrast reporting on a domestic issue with reporting on a similar foreign issue. So for example, when police are hitting protesters with batons in the UK, the BBC will describe it as "police scuffled with protesters". In contrast, when police in Iran hit Iranian protesters in similar ways, the BBC describe it as "batons swinging wildly at unarmed protesters" etc.
Another example is the seige of Grozny where the BBC reporter was allowed to get fist-shakingly angry (because Russia is an enemy) and demanded to know what right the Russians had to order the citizens to leave.
How many of them were incinerated, crushed by falling masonry or shredded by shrapnel nobody yet knows.
Moscow excused itself the trouble of worrying about such details by equating those who stayed on with terrorists.
Why should they go? By what right was the Russian army forcing them from their homes? So Russia could destroy what it itself dismissed as a handful of terrorists?
In contrast it is interesting to see how the BBC dealt with the very similar situation of the seige of Fallujah. This time the army carrying out the siege was the US army, so the gloves go back on. Instead of a angry reporter cursing the US, we had articles like "Fixing the Problem of Fallujah".
They also show a genuine concern for civilians of Falluja.
The big question is whether the rebels will stay and fight, or if they will simply melt away, as guerrillas tend to do when faced with a large conventional force.
But for the highly-professional marines, Falluja is also a return to the simplicity of combat after the complexities of peacekeeping and an enemy that never shows itself.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're taking any other approach, namely one that will force your client to remain attached to you I'd have to question your ethics, motive, and ability because what you're doing is creating a dependence on you that is borderline blackmail (if that's something you're doing).
Why is it that employees are supposed to work hard, be as professional as possible, take pride in their work, be ethical etc? All these virtuous practices are things that largely benefit the employer. It's effectively work ethic propaganda that has been drilled into the population.
In contrast employers work you as hard as possible for as little reward as possible (often including unpaid overtime which is effectively theft of your time) then dump you for a cheaper college graduate at the first opportunity. Employers do not adopt a strategy that benefits the employee as much as possible, they adopt a strategy that benefits them as much as possible. Why then shouldn't employees be just as ruthless, conniving and unethical as employers?
"Virtuous" work ethics have been drilled into successive populations over the aeons by those who directly benefit from them, i.e. the powerful. Don't fall for them.
How can the people support or oppose Chavez's policies if they don't even know what he's doing?
Well if they watched the privately owned media in Venezuela, they will certainly have no idea what he was doing. The hugely powerful privately owned media spent most of the time writing stories about how he is insane or a criminal. It was the private media that took an active part in the coup attempt against Chavez in 2002. There was plenty of incredibly critical coverage of Chavez in Venezuela, make no mistake about that.
At my old job I was once writing a while loop and decided to use "i" as the name of a counter variable I was incrementing. After a while I noticed that I had not declared the i and was perplexed as to why there was no compile error. Then to my horror I discovered that someone was using a global variable named "i".
The weird scope rules and lack of proper object/class support drive me up the wall when working on projects with ~40,000 lines of code.
HAXE has has classes, static typing and all the things you probably want. Then you can just transpile it into javascript (among other languages). There are other efforts along similar lines. Increasingly it seems, due to it's unsuitability for large projects, Javascript is being treated as a sort of assembly language you compile to as a last step.
certainly nowhere near as much as what their strangely negative reputation in the U.S. would lead you to believe
There was a lot of propaganda against Al Jazeera but it really was just nonsense. The US and Allies had grown used to their own media's kid-gloves reporting on their military adventures and were absolutely incensed that a news outlet would question their motives and/or pay too much attention to their victims. Al Jazeera has really been a breath of fresh air in the world of news media. They cover issues that are simply ignored by other outlets and have become one of my primary news sources.
Due to their wild inaccuracy, a lot of these rockets land in the middle of nowhere anyway. Would you really even know if a rocket was intercepted successfully or whether the Iron Dome missile just exploded nearby to one? Are there journalists monitoring every single Iron Dome launch and somehow accurately verifying a success/fail for each missile?
I'm not saying Iron Dome isn't successful, but given that targeting missiles is very difficult and we are relying on official IDF sources, there should be much more scepticism about the system's effectiveness.
Some people here may not be old enough to remember all the propaganda about the Patriot anti-Missile system's effectiveness during the first Gulf War. The media/public were fed total lies. Patriot turned out not to be very effective at all. Given that Israeli officials are currently the only information source for Iron Dome's amazing 90% success rate, surely we should be highly sceptical. Instead all I have seen in the media are endless uncritical articles about how amazing Iron Dome is.
All they need to do acknowledge that Israel is a legitimate nation. But you know, Hamas won't do that.
By continuously building settlements in the West Bank in violation of international law, Israel refuses to even recognise basic Palestinian land rights. Yet we expect Palestinians to recognise Israel?
I would like nothing better than for the Palestinians to have a normal economy
The Palestinians would like that too, but Israel will not allow it. This all goes far beyond firing rockets at each other. Israel really believes that all the Palestinian land should belong to them, which is why there are so many settlements in the West Bank (in violation of international law). Israel has always viewed the Palestinians as a demographic threat, which is why they never allowed Palestinian refugees to return.
One way to help ease the whole situation in Gaza would have been to allow in a peacekeeping force, but Israel will not allow it. Their excuse in the past has been that a peace-keeping force would "interfere with Israeli security measures". The truth is that a peacekeeping force would remove many of the excuses the Israeli government has for blockading Gaza and preventing it growing economically.
So yes, Hamas are terrorists, but Israel behaves no better and they have their own agenda.
The problem with this idea of PCs disappearing is that we will still need general purpose computers with large screens and input devices that are comfortable to use for many hours at a time. Are you going to develop a website on your mobile phone, or your games console? Even if you use a tablet, it would be like sitting at work all day staring at a 10 inch monitor. Tiny monitors are not good for productivity at all. Also, touch screens are not good for entering large amounts of text, a task which is quite common.
Perhaps though, you will be able to plug your tablet into a bigger screen on your desk, and also plug a nice keyboard into the tablet. Also a mouse would be nice. Then you realise that you are basically reconstructing a PC. Welcome to the post PC future that still actually needs PCs.
the Beeb decided that the overwheling evidence of climate change and global warming rendered dissenting views not only null, but dangerous
The BBC needs to be more accountable. They should only be exempt from FOI requests when it comes to protecting journalistic sources, nothing else. Also, they need to be more accountable when it comes to their articles. We should be able to comment on any article, not just the non-controversial ones.
However, the scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring and that we are contributing to it. So I would expect the BBC to go with the scientific consensus just as it does with other areas of science. I would not expect a BBC cosmology programme to devote 50% of its time to the steady-state theory just to counterbalance the big bang theory.
It really isn't independent. The government appoints the Board and the Board appoints the Director General. It's like saying you are not influenced by your department manager despite the fact that he appoints all the line managers. The BBC has really always been pro-establishment. The founder of the BBC, Lord Reith famously said "They know they (the government) can trust us not to be really impartial". That was during the General Stike, where the BBC made sure that strikers voices were not heard.
You're strawmanning the argument. Only the people on the far extreme want patents abolished.
Europe generally does not support software patents. So being in favour of abolishing software patents is hardly extreme. I think Stallman and the EFF have given up too quickly on this issue. The patent office will never do a proper job of rejecting ridiculous software patents so it seems unlikely that reforms will make much difference. Abolition is a sensible way forward. Copyright is all that is necessary for software because the code itself specifies the solution exactly.
Indeed. Fundamentally uncrackable provided the pad is truly random. The only chance is if they can find the pad in the archives, but I wouldn't pin my hopes on that.
The near field Witricity technology can transmit power over a meter or two. Even further with passive repeater antenna which can be disguised as picture frames, table-mats etc.
It's a much better technology than the simple induction pads that you put your mobile phone on and could be quite revolutionary. It seems they have recently released development kits too, so hopefully it won't be too long before its generally available.
We have bases in many countries because of treaties with them. They agree to have us there.
The problem is "They" so often refers to a dictator rather than the people. Particularly in the Middle East, the people of those countries do not want US bases on their soil, but they have no choice is the matter. Then of course there is the case of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Guantanamo Bay was granted to the US by a Godfather-style "offer they can't refuse" treaty with the Cuba while the country was occupied with US troops.
And for the last time, we did not get any of Iraq's oil so stop pushing that big lie
International Oil companies including Exxon Mobile,BP, Shell etc are all over Iraq's oil fields now. If Iraq was never invaded, that would not be the case. Strategic control of oil reserves in the Middle East has been part of US foreign policy since at least World War 2.
They were found guilty not primarily for failing to predict the earthquake, but for releasing a statement saying there was probably not going to be one.
If your job is to decide whether minor tremors indicate something bigger to come, you don't just keep quiet either way. You either publicly announce that you think a bigger quake is on the way, or that the tremors don't seem to be anything to worry about. In this case they did the later and other world experts agree with the decision they made.
In Switzerland the people can instigate referenda and overturn government decisions. It takes about 100,000 signatures to trigger a referendum on an issue.
It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are unemployed.
"This is not a solution. It's a mess."
Indeed. These companies are not creating JavaScript replacements because they just want it their way, there are real issues with using JavaScript for large developments. Why are we still waiting for basic features like optional static typing and classes to be added to JavaScript? Static typing is a very important feature. From it flows not just basic type checking, but also autocompletion (a major productivity booster), ease of re-factoring and useful code analysis (what functions use this particular type of object etc). There's now a whole list of languages that are aimed as direct replacements for javascript because of its failings, and transpilers to convert from various languages such as Java and haxe to JavaScript. All because JavaScript, for whatever reason, refuses to make any serious moves forward.
Sooner or later, if it continues to stand still, JavaScript will be replaced by one of these contenders. If we're unlucky, it will be replaced by several of them.
Seriously Google, give us some alternatives. Java is the absolute worst part of Android.
Indeed. I'm finding it's particularly bad for game development where you want to avoid continuously allocating objects on the heap. So if you need to continuously call some mathematical function from the game loop that uses a temporary vector as part of the calculation, this is an issue. How do you create this temporary vector? If we create a new one in the function, it will go on the heap, so we don't want to do that. You could have some module-level variable that the function uses, but that's rather messy. I ended up having to make an object caching system. When a function needs a vector, I pop one off the global vector cache, do the calculations, then push it back. This is messy and dangerous in its own way too though.
In C# you could just implement the vector as a struct, since structs go on the stack rather than the heap (and in C++ you can put what you like on the stack). C# stucts have value semantics too, which I think is an added bonus for something like a mathematical vector. Java is quite crippled in this respect. Another annoyance I immediately found with Java is that you can't pass parameters by reference. Why does Java have such a restriction? Even Visual Basic 6 could pass by reference. It's not that often that I want to pass a parameter by reference, but sometimes you really need to.
I also made the mistake of trying to use Generics in Java. I knew ahead of time that due to type erasure, there would be no performance improvement, but I didn't quite realise how crippled the Generics were. I first noticed this when trying to declare an array of a generic type. This does not work due to type erasure. Java Generics really is a train wreck.
It's a shame C# is so strongly tied to windows (and Microsoft) because it's one of the most advanced modern languages there is. Compared to Java, it really is a joy to use. It doesn't get in the way of what you want to do.
the issue is that they misidentified the targets.
The soldier at the scene who picks up the child from the minivan (Ethan McCord) believes that the attack on the van was a war crime. They seemed all too quick to decide that people were carrying weapons and all too eager to shoot. I've heard many accounts where all civilians were considered as the enemy whether or not they were armed. e.g.
McCord told Van Auken: "He [Kauzlarich] goes, 'If someone in your line gets hit with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherf*cker on the street.'" McCord said that he had also witnessed the order carried out, saying: "I've seen it many times, where people are just walking down the street and an IED goes off and the troops open fire and kill them."
Only if no news outlet in the U.S. will publish it, because it makes nearly everyone look bad, where do you go?
Exactly. News organisations are not objective. The style of reporting and even whether a story is reported at all depends on who it damages. So if some Iranian police are beating protesters, an American newspaper can really go to town on the story, using emotive language etc. If some US police beat protesters in the same way the story (if printed at all) would have a much more neutral tone and probably would downplay any police violence.
Getting angry about issues which make an enemy look bad but downplaying or ignoring issues which make your own country look bad is standard practice. If a US newspaper routinely got just as angry about US police violence as it did about Iranian police violence, then it would be viewed as some crazy left wing pamphlet and widely ridiculed.
The best way to get your news is to shop around through. Look at the BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Russia Today etc. Between them all you can get a good picture of what is going on.
and even there Guantanamo was put there pursuant to (at the time) Cuba's consent.
More like an offer they couldn't refuse. It was one of the conditions of removing the occupying force.
Ever since Lord Reith, the BBC has carefully guarded its independence.
"They know they (the government) can trust us not to be really impartial" - Lord Reith in his diary during the General Strike in 1926.
The BBC is in no sense independent. The board of governors is appointed directly by the government. Trying to argue that the BBC is independent is like trying to argue that the department manager has no influence over you because you only answer to the line manager (who is answerable to the department manager). There are plenty of examples of the BBC being highly partisan and serving the interests of government. Perhaps one of the most notable is the BBC's involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup. The BBC broadcast the "go" code for the operation.
Most of the time though, you don't need to have some government minister secretly complaining to the board. Like most news organisations, the BBC is well versed in self-censorship. Even the language used betrays the establishment mindset. You can see this most clearly when you contrast reporting on a domestic issue with reporting on a similar foreign issue. So for example, when police are hitting protesters with batons in the UK, the BBC will describe it as "police scuffled with protesters". In contrast, when police in Iran hit Iranian protesters in similar ways, the BBC describe it as "batons swinging wildly at unarmed protesters" etc.
Another example is the seige of Grozny where the BBC reporter was allowed to get fist-shakingly angry (because Russia is an enemy) and demanded to know what right the Russians had to order the citizens to leave.
How many of them were incinerated, crushed by falling masonry or shredded by shrapnel nobody yet knows.
Moscow excused itself the trouble of worrying about such details by equating those who stayed on with terrorists.
Why should they go? By what right was the Russian army forcing them from their homes? So Russia could destroy what it itself dismissed as a handful of terrorists?
In contrast it is interesting to see how the BBC dealt with the very similar situation of the seige of Fallujah. This time the army carrying out the siege was the US army, so the gloves go back on. Instead of a angry reporter cursing the US, we had articles like "Fixing the Problem of Fallujah".
They also show a genuine concern for civilians of Falluja.
The big question is whether the rebels will stay and fight, or if they will simply melt away, as guerrillas tend to do when faced with a large conventional force.
But for the highly-professional marines, Falluja is also a return to the simplicity of combat after the complexities of peacekeeping and an enemy that never shows itself.
Notice the difference?