Er... not really, maybe that's your experiences in the US but here in the UK the accepted wisdom is that the government can run some things in beneficial ways that private enterprises never would. Granted, running ISPs is not one of those things - you would probably find an actual government run ISP to be slow and outdated, unless it's competing with corporate ISPs (even then it's doubtful) or is simply in the form of some tax break for ISPs if they improve their services.
Some things which are more or less impossible purely through private enterprise or systems which worked better in the UK when they were socialised:
Socialised healthcare (private companies make more money through charging on a case-by-case basis, they have no authority to levy a national tax, the overheads would be gargantuan which would be unacceptable, corner-cutting would be rife)
Decent railways (here in the UK the railways were privatised - they were being run appallingly by the government and are now being run appallingly in a very slightly different way by corporations: being more expensive, more crowded and costing more to run (largely subsidised, as the railways are not profitable for the companies) but being slightly safer (a big deal!) - the government was probably marginally preferable.). Theoretically, a government run train operator
Roads (roads are almost universally run by the government in pretty much all countries - if they weren't, how would money be made for them? Tolls up the wazoo.)
Emergency services (would you want to pay every time the fire service or the police came to your house when you dialed the emergency services? A corporation running them would need money from somewhere.)
There're more but suffice to say that government run things can work better than corporate run things if they're run well and in the right sector. If not, they don't (see: British Gas, British Telecom etc. etc. when they were government-owned).
I assume you're talking about OiNK? That's the only private site I can think of where it's remotely difficult to maintain a ratio - even there, getting the 0.5 which is the maximum ratio you need to maintain your account isn't that hard.
Getting the 1.05 for Power User+ status is.
Of course, I could be mistaken about what site you mean, but I've yet to join any torrent site apart from OiNK where it's hard to seed. And to be honest, OiNK is by far the best music torrent site I've seen - between it, DC++ and Soulseek you can find practically all the music that's ever been on the internet. The only downsides are that it's very difficult to keep an ideal ratio and that they, for some reason, have around seven categories of electronic music, yet don't have a prog rock category or any metal subgenre categories....
Regardless, it is very much worth using private trackers, OiNK is very much the exception regarding the difficulty seeding (and there you just have to tread carefully) and the content, speed and security on private trackers is unparalleled. Provided it's a good tracker, of course! There're some duff ones.
No offence, but I'm glad you're not in charge of the media in this country. I've noticed time and time again that BBC and Channel 4 content (i.e. the public-service channels) are of a consistently higher standard than the programming on ITV (which has gone downhill very much in the last few years) and Channel 5 (which was never good to begin with). I also think it's telling that even if you include all of the satellite channels available in the UK, the ones which consistently deliver the highest-quality programming are BBC 3 and BBC 4.
State monopolies are not invariably inferior to programming from media companies. Assuming you're from the UK (which I presume you are, because you know that the BBC isn't part of the state, which, tbh, most non-UK people assume it is) you surely remember the directory enquiries scandal? We had cheap reliable directory enquiries with an easy to remember number - now we have a thousand and one directory enquiries lines and all of the well known lines are much more expensive than what they replaced.
Another example, the train system, granted, it was fairly bad before it was denationalised but now ten years later on, the forward march of progress under the private companies has lead to... it being fairly bad. It has improved in some ways, but has degraded elsewhere to match it. This is more to do with poor management in the changeover than anything else - the track operators in particular have been set up so that they still are monopolies in their area. Compare this to the SNCF in France where the trains are nationalised but run competently.
Basically, what I'm saying is, denationalising utilities and breaking up state protected monopolies are not always a good thing - there are plenty of cases where they have been - but if there's nothing wrong with the service to begin with, don't even think about it. Television and beer are about the only two areas where Britain can be said to have something close to the best in the world - let's not degrade the quality of one of them! Let's put results over rhetoric here. Also, wouldn't your view point imply that the NHS should be dismantled, seeing as if you call the BBC a monopoly (which it isn't, now that I think about it) the NHS would definitely fall under that banner?
Ever occured to you that people don't want to pay to try the movie before hand, so Blockbuster and Netflix are out. What if they want obscure movies that aren't rented there? What if they only watch a movie a month? Then $20 a month is ludicrous. I think that Blockbuster may well be in trouble in the years ahead, with cheap DVD prices for 90% of titles, imo.
Trailers don't tell you anything about how good a movie is, some good movies have had awful trailers and vice versa. Reviews don't tell you anything either, because quite frankly, reviewers are snobbish and full of crap most of the time - how much you can trust a movie critic depends on what kind of movie it is (the more artsy the film the more you can trust reviewers' opinions) and even when you CAN trust a critic, it has to be cumulative (i.e. from RottenTomatoes) rather than from a single review.
And this is from movie critics, who are probably the best kind of critic - music critics' opinions are utterly worthless because music is so subjective and their job depends on predicting the next best thing (so they have a bent toward the mainstream normally, unless they're a specialist reviewer) - although if they're not actually paid for it the quality can be better because some of that stuff doesn't apply. Game critics are generally okay, but there are a lot of game critics who are just company mouthpieces, the whole scale of 1-10 is never used (anything below 7 is usually dire) and the quality of the writing is usually poor. Literary critics are usually just pretentious as hell and have no concept of a book that's fun but superficial, again, cumulatively, you can get a good idea of how good certain types of books are.
Those solutions are fairly poor, cumulative reviews are acceptable but not foolproof, for example, Catcher in the Rye is a book with general critical appeal which is truly dire, imo. Obtaining music, film etc. and "trying before you buy" is perfectly acceptable. It's quite regular that I buy a product I initially pirated for film and games (a recent example is my buying Pan's Labyrinth and some more of the director's stuff after watching a downloaded version), less common for music because a CD is still inexplicably more expensive than a DVD, but I still do it there occasionally.
CLIFFNOTES: Downloading to try before you buy is not only fine, but a good idea, it leads to less disapointment and it means that the industry is that much more meritocratic.
You hypocrite! You say that my post is unsubstantiated, which, granted it is, and then you go and make an unsubstantiated post yourself (you provided an example of something legal in the EU which is illegal in the US, which, if I had argued that everything illegal in the US is illegal in the EU would have been a good retort. Unfortunately, I didn't say that.). You say it's factually incorrect, but provide no evidence to suggest otherwise and you call it a slam (even though it is clearly not intended as that) and in the same breath say "what does it say about you that [you] choose to post...".
It is a general trend, I do not provide citations because: a) I know nothing about the details of cars and provided with a list of safety standards I would be unable to compare. b) I would have thought it pretty obvious, really:
I base this off three reasons: i) The society and economic style is different, all of the EU are capitalist, but nowhere near as capitalist as the USA is, this means that the governments and/or EU are much less hesistant to impose restrictions on business in general. ii) With food additives, European countries are a lot more restrictive on what is allowed to be added to food - I can't find facts and figures, but many kids' breakfast cereals which are available in the USA are illegal in the UK (Froot Loops and Lucky Charms come to mind) because some additives integral to making the cereals are illegal here. Again, this doesn't mean anything in and of itself but is indicative of a trend for European nations to have much more regulated business than America. iii) Again with food, there are other regulations that exist in Europe which don't in America, for example regional protection - if you want to sell, say, wine, you couldn't call it champagne unless it came from the region of Champagne. Similarly, if you wanted to sell something as feta, it had to be produced in the appropriate area of Greece, if you want to sell something as Newcastle Brown Ale, it has to come from Newcastle etc. Another trend, not 100% on-topic, but it shows my point. iv) There are restrictions on things such as fuel efficiency in cars which are much stricter than those in America. It would follow that safety and emissions standards are probably also stricter. v) The EU has set a target to halve the road accident rate (currently at a similar level to America) by 2010, I'd doubt that meeting this target doesn't involve tightening of safety regulations somehow.
This wasn't a slam, merely pointing out that American standards are generally looser than those in Europe, which, no matter how much you say it's false, is true.
Is the UK entry level model street legal in the US? Does it meet US emissions and safety requirements? (For that matter, what constitues a 'UK entry level model', as no model is designated as such on the UK BMW website that I can find.) More than likely, America tends to have more lax laws in things like safety standards. There're all sorts of chemicals that are illegal to put in food in the EU that are perfectly legit in America, for example.
It doesn't really work because it fails to take into account whether all of that land is producing pollution. In the USA where there're vast plains of... basically nothing, most of that land won't be doing the polluting, but it'll be restricted to more populated areas. In the EU, a much higher proportion of land is populated and therefore producing pollution. Because of this, this really tells us more about whether the area is industrialised and the population density.
This measurement will always suggest, if you read it to compare pollution in different areas, that the USA is always less of a polluter than the rest, just on the basis that it's big and comparatively sparsely populated and that the EU is always the worst because it's comparatively small (operative word: comparatively) and generally, with a few exceptions (e.g. the Scottish Highlands) pretty densely populated.
So, no, that measurement, if anything, MASKS the real issues. Some alternatives to this could be: just measuring pollution as is (after all the amount of CO2 released is what is important, NOT per capita etc.) - the downside to this is that it discriminates against larger countries, pollution per capita (problem is that it discriminates against countries with large populations), pollution per occupied square mile (discriminates against microstates (e.g. Singapore would do fairly bad on this test) and somewhat misses the point anyway) or, alternatively some index taking into account net pollution, the amount of industry, the amount of vehicles and the amount of homes with electricity and/or gas. I think that either the first one (net pollution) or the last one (the index) works best.
Most of this is 100% true, but just to be pendantic, the right to bear arms was enshrined in law in Saxon and mediaeval times, I believe, but as it became less necessary and more archaic it pretty much vanished.
Oh, come on! Firstly, a good deal of that data came from the Soviet archives, specifically the figures on how many people had died in the camps (which is surely more likely to be biased the other way), so, no, most of it hasn't been produced by Western official agencies. The rest are by independent historians, who, oddly enough, have no direct relationship with the kind of official agencies you're implying (I'm assuming you mean MI6, CIA type agencies). Two, I didn't translate from the Russian due to a couple of teensy problems, firstly my not having the source text in Russian and the second the fact that I can't speak Russian or read the Cyrillic alphabet (I can read the Greek one, though). Though I pose this to you - on your information on Cyprus, did you translate all of the official documentation from Greek and Turkish yourself? If you didn't it may have been interfered with by Turkish official agencies and are therefore suspect. *rolls eyes*
History may favour the winners, but given that not every single one of the UK/US's enemies have been accused of killing that many people through history, I'm more inclined to believe it actually happened, seeing as the USSR was seen as a mortal threat, just like all of the other mortal threats that have existed in history. Also, don't you think that there'd be no records of atrocities commited on the side of Americans/Britons if official agencies had filtered history? I mean, people aren't exactly shouting on the rooftops about these things, but they're not exactly secret either.
I am aware of Cyprus' recent history. The thing is that Turks only made up 18% of the population at that time, although that's a significant minority, it's not really a minority large enough for power sharing (in that context) to be viable, and under the system the Turks had disproportionate influence as well. This system also blocked off the idea of a seperate Turkish Cypriot state and reunification with Greece, and as almost all Turks wanted the former and most Greeks wanted the latter. The only thing they agreed over was that these restrictions were placed there by a a foreign power and were therefore not valid, and fighting promptly broke out in order to achieve their aims. Well, in a few years anyway.
As it had happened the Turkish Cypriots had been abusing safeguards put there to prevent total Greek rule as a matter of course and the Greek majority was very much unhappy with this, as they were basically vetoing them. Amendments were suggested by the President, which fixed most of the issues which made the system unworkable at the time but also removed the safeguards that the Turks were using. Understandably this didn't go down well and this served as a catalyst to civil war, as the Turks shortly after insurrected to form a seperate state, the Greeks didn't appreciate this and counterattacked and what was lead to what was basically a small scale civil war. Consistutional amendments by a neutral mediator were proposed but Turkey refused to agree to these. At this time NATO peacekeeping troops entered Cyprus (including British troops).
There was a coup against Makarios, yes, but that was performed by the Greek military junta and was put down by the Greek Cypriots, so you can't really blame them. Then Turkey invaded, but it's not as black and white as you make it seem as to the legality of their actions - "The guarantor powers (the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Greece) promised not to seek annexation or partition of Cyprus, and to assist their communities on Cyprus in the event of major clashes between the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. It was the attempted July 1974 Greek-backed coup d'etat that made Turkey intervene militarily, arguing that the Treaty of Guarantee made their intervention fully legal. Some Critics counter that only the first stage of the intervention - the initial landings - is covered by the treaty. The second stage of the intervention - the occupation of 37% of the island - however, was condemned by UN Security Council resolutions." on the Tr
Stalin was a Georgian who ended up running the USSR, of which the central and most powerful nation was Russia. It's irrelevant where he came from, it's like a Jew being upset at Germans for Hitler, even though Hitler was Austrian. Both of them came from countries inside the sphere of influence of the country they eventually lead, and both of them are remebered for leading that country rather than where they came from.
Marxism came from Germany and the Germans weren't keen on having communism back in the day of the DDR. National socialism came from Austria and most Austrians aren't keen on fascism. Just because a school of thought comes from a country doesn't mean that they should like it, just because an event in a country through a massively long, indirect and impossible to predict series of events ended up impacting negatively on that country doesn't mean that the countrymen shouldn't feel bitter about it.
You're thinking about it too logically here, you're not taking into account the fact that people are emotional beings. These kinds of fueds last longer than the lifetimes of the people involved, how many old people do you know who dislike the Japanese even though the Japanese people born since WWII have nothing to do with it? How many Irish people still have an instrinsic distrust of the British (those wounds are still very fresh)? Now. Given that Estonia became independent in 1991, and many people will remember the days of the USSR's occupation, and the older people will remember Stalin... do you honestly not expect them to be irritated at what they feel to be the presence of an imperial agressor?
I don't get my views on gulags from the media, I look them up. "The total deaths shown by the declassified archives in the GULAG from 1931 to 1953 amount to about 1 million in "corrective labor camps." Another archival document contains the number of roughly 1.6 million deaths in both "corrective labor camps" and "corrective labor colonies" during the years 1930-1956 (figures for colonies are included from 1935 onwards). These figures include deaths of political and common prisoners, but they do not include executions of camp inmates that occurred during various waves of terror. " - there, specifically in forced labour camps, which is what I was referring to with gulags, 1 million dead in 20 years. So, no, they were not exactly nice there. And the moving ethnic groups is hardly an ethically sound thing to do, is it? Yes, it may be better for supporting the country, but it broke up anyway, and there are plenty of morally dubious things which can be done for the good of a country. As Godwin's Law has already been fulfilled, I shall mention the actions of a certain ruler of Germany in 1933-1945 who revitalised the economy, rebuilt a ruined country, raised national pride and made people proud to be German who did a few morally dubious things in his time, to say the least.
I'm not sure what you mean by subnation, so it's somewhat hard to argue against what you're saying on that front (do you mean like wars of independence?), but... well... although I hardly find myself approving of many of the US's and the UK's actions, I don't think that you can objectively place anything these two countries have done, including Dresden, including massacres in India, including Hiroshima, including Vietnam, including Suez. Let's just have a rundown of what Stalin did: gulags (which we've already discussed), came into a position of power by way of robbing banks for funds, masterminded the invasion of his own country, assassinated his main political opponents, had mass imprisoning of intellectuals in countries he invaded, caused mass famines in the Ukraine through his policy of collectivisation, executed scientists with dissenting views, razed most religious buildings and killed the monks, censored science and the arts, attempted to destroy the Ukrainian people and culture, held great purges of opponents, sent millions of pretty much every ethnic group ex
Officially if you're a Latino in the United States you are a US Citizen, however, how far you get in the world is fairly limited if you only know Spanish, unless you stick exclusively to areas with large Latino minorities. If you want to be succesful in the USA you need to know English, same applies in Estonia with Estonian, only it's codified. And guess what, most of the other countries in that area have this too, Latvia certainly does.
The EU admits countries on strict criteria, one of which is that every single member state agrees to allow this country within the union, for instance, one of the stumbling blocks for Turkey's joining the EU is Cyprus threatening to veto any moves made because of the whole North Cyprus issue. You'd've thought that if this had counted as what you are claiming it is that one of the countries would have vetoed these countries joining, wouldn't you? There are people within the EU very enthusiastic about Russia, such as Italy's current PM (though on balance relations are not good), so I'm sure that that would have happened.
Where did you live in Europe? Did you forget that Europe's a continent with many different countries and that attitudes are vastly different from area to area even within countries? Unless you've lived in over half of the EU's countries for a signficant amount of time, you're not qualified to make a judgement. Besides which, my experience, which is no more or less valid than yours, says the opposite. In the modern day, in all of the European countries I've been to (granted, scant few) there's been a lot of casual racism, in that stereotypes are used an awful lot usually in a jocular way and racist jokes are fairly commonly told, but very little serious racism (though there's more of this towards Pakistanis and Muslims because of the media...). What I've found with Americans based off their internet presence compared with those of Europeans is that they seem more inclined to serious racism, as in actually believing the stereotypes and hating people because of nationality etc. I haven't actually lived in America, but given that attitudes are different in different parts of the USA....
Estonia's an indepdent country because it's an independent country. Czechoslovakia, East Prussia and Yugoslavia were independent countries because they were independent countries. And if lines on a map and governmental structures don't make a country, what does? By your logic (I'm assuming that you're basing this off ethnicity as it seems implied in your post, so sorry if this turns out straw-mannish if that's not what you mean) South Korea isn't an independent country but, say, Tibet is. The fact is that Estonia's an independent country and if it were part of a greater anything it would not be part of a greater Russia. It is not Russian ethnically, never has been. And who suggested breaking up countries into areas where different languages are spoken? So, some questions. Does Estonia have a government, does it have institutions, is it marked out with a black line on a globe? If all of these are true, it's a real country.
What's your basis for claiming Estonia wants to go back to its fascist past? If you've been under the yoke of one country, an invader, no matter what it is, seems like a liberator.
I would say that that'd be very odd given that they're a constituent country in the United Kingdom and not an indepedent state and their government isn't really devolved enough to make that kind of decision and that there's no language called Scottish (there's Gaelic (which is very much a minority language) and Scots (which is basically little more than a dialect of English with more Norse words) but most Scots speak English). At least choose a comparible example, the history is completely different beyond everything else I pointed out. Act of Union? i.e. we didn't conquer the Scots and send them to gulags.
Of course Europe has a murky past, that's why the EU was set up. I mean, officially it was a mining community, but Churchill and other leader
Britpop is a specific genre, formed as a reaction against grunge music and American musical dominance in the early 1990s (grunge being, of course, a very American thing). It lasted roughly 1994-1999, although some indie bands are to some extent reviving it at present, and you know what, you can tell immediately what britpop is compared to other British pop music just by listening to it. British pop music could be said to be what you think britpop is, but britpop is most definitely a specific genre, covering a specific style of music over a specific period and does NOT mean "pop music of the region, of the time". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britpop)
The others you listed are much closer to what you said they were, aside from A-pop which is a term I've never seen used by anyone, ever. Presumably it means American pop, and I think that as I live in Britain rather than America, I would have heard that term if anyone used it. JPop is a specific genre again, but as it covers a large chunk of all of Japan's music since the 70s, and there'd only been around 20 years of pop music before then, I think it's a close enough approximation. Europop is also a specific genre, but what it is depends on what time period you're talking about and where you're from.
Quite frankly, I don't really think I should have to spend this long justifying my correcting a tiny, inconsequential mistake.
Good man! I am rather a fan of b3ta, so even though I'm not a board frequenter (the massively outdated board is one of the few things that really irritates me about it).
Well, yes, I'll grant you that 2chan has a greater magnitude, that's why I said they're not more than a subculture. I was just saying that although 2chan may have broken through to the public awareness more than other boards, it's not the only one to have done so.
And to be fair, Slashdot does cater for a specific crowd, I mean, yes, it's massive, and for 2chan to have more traffic is pretty bloody impressive, but it's, at the end of the day, a small segment of many large populations against a large segment of one small one. I mean, it's mostly those interested in science, geeky things, and watching radical libertarians argue who visit/.
I think you're placing a bit too much emphasis on b3ta's following of current affairs, but, yes, I think that the art-orientated aspect of it is probably what gives it any time in the sun in the British press. I'm aware that I've been arguing for the sake of arguing, so sorry, mate:)
Their having written a book and occasionally appearing in the media is not that unusual. Here in the UK there is a site called b3ta, which hasn't really caught on that much in America, because it's very UK-centric. I wouldn't say that they're more than a subculture, but they've released a book (full of user-made content) and, though I've never seen them on TV, you do get them occasionally in the newspaper.
It depends how you define something as "working". When you're focusing ONLY on crimes committed by people using firearms, sure, banning guns "works". When you focus on the overall amount of VIOLENT crime, gun control has the opposite effect. These statistics that gun control advocates always cite are misleading for multiple reasons.
Yes, because pro-gun people NEVER cite misleading stats, ever, do they? Like the "Oh, X banned guns and their gun crime rose after they did that" or "X has gun control and has lower gun crime rates than Y, but what they don't say is that in 1900 when neither had gun control, X still had lower gun crime rates!".
And actually, rates of murders overall follow the same pattern. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap- crime-murders-per-capita). The exception is Switzerland but as everyone is given a gun by the government it's safe to assume that murder rate and murder with firearms rate are more or less the same there.
United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
Canada: 0.0149063 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.0140633 per 1,000 people
Switzerland: 0.00921351 per 1,000 people
"Gun deaths" include suicides, accidents, cases of self defense, "gang warfare" and police shootings.
"Murders with firearms" however, which we are talking about, would not definitely not count suicide and almost certainly wouldn't count accidents or self-defence either. I believe that those would both fall under manslaughter. Gang warfare and police shootings, yes, but I don't see why this alters the point at all. Certainly all of the other countries I've listed would have gang warfare and police shootings from time to time. Britain certainly does.
Furthermore, looking only at "gun crime" completely ignores the well documented deterrent effect of lawful firearms ownership! How many stabbings, bludgeonings, rapes and home invasions are you willing to tolerate in order to prevent one firearms-related death?
The murder rate follows the same pattern, as I have established.
Burglaries - (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_bur_percap- crime-burglaries-per-capita) - seems to disprove my point? Wrong. Switzerland has the highest guns per capita in the world, everyone does national service and they're allowed to keep their guns at home after they do it, and most people do. Despite this, it has a higher rate of burglary than the USA, where gun ownership is (odd as it sounds) less. This would imply that how many people have guns has shit all to do with burglary rates and that this "deterent effect" only works when that gun is pointed at you at the time.
Now, rape. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap- crime-rapes-per-capita). Canada has by far the highest rate, the USA is second, UK is third, Switzerland is last. No correlation, clearly. Robberies (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rob_percap- crime-robberies-per-capita), UK highest, USA second highest, Canada and Switzerland far behind third and fourth respectively. Total crimes (no seperate stats for violent crimes, I'm afraid - http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_perc ap-crime-total-crimes-per-capita) - UK, very slightly behind is the USA, Canada behind the USA by the same amount the USA is behind the UK, Switzerland fourth. Assault (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_ass_percap- crime-assaults-per-capita) - USA first, UK and Canada slightly behind, no info on Switzerland. Car theft (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_car_the_per cap-crime-car-thefts-per-capita) - UK, Canada, USA, Switzerland.
So, what we've learned here is that gun control effects the murder with firearms rates and the murder rates, but has little impact on other crime either way. We've also learned that if you dislike crime,
0.0279271 per 1,000 people for the USA - very little gun control
0.00534117 per 1,000 people - gun ownership is compulsory and everyone has extensive firearms training through national service.
0.00502972 per 1,000 people for Canada - some degree of gun control
0.00102579 per 1,000 people for the UK - the nearest thing to total gun prohibition you get in any developed country.
These three nations are very comparable, and I think that the trend tells us something, don't you? Namely that gun control and prohibition DOES work. However, an acceptable alternative is national service and extensive education on the subject. I don't think either will appeal to the Libertarian crowd.
Alcohol... well... in a western country, yes, it's unviable to do so, but it works fine in Arabic countries where it's not really in the culture.
And as for prohibiting bad speech... it depends what the bad speech is. America is about the only country which defends pretty much all speech, many other developed countries have laws against hate speech. I don't see these countries descending into an Orwellian dystopia just yet. Do you? So, you're overreacting here. This is a worry because it's subjective, but it's far from what you make it out to be, it's just a well-meaning law that's not really precise enough.
I'm guessing that you're an American libertarian, correct?... well, in future, before making these blanket statements, please look at examples from outside the borders of the US. It shows that many of the ideas you find so abhorrent can, do and are working. I'm expecting not to get any markings up for this, because this has arrived late and will piss off all of the/. libertarians that hang around here, but, really... don't carry ideas to extremes with no thought for how the world actually works.
And that "however" is exactly why IP rights ot pharmeceuticals should not be restricted. Generally I'm anti-big business and anti-IP (you know what I mean) but by virtue of how the pharmeceutical industry works, they are an exception. They are vital and they need lots of money going in, as this money goes towards developing cures for diseases.
I learned to program without a networked machine. Why can't they?
They can but it's ludicrous to expect them to. I've been coding in PHP lately (yes, I know, newb language) and I would have gone absolutely insane had I not been able to access php.net, so many commands which I've needed have only been on that site and not in any of the books available to the school. This, of course, on top of the fact that there's no reason to force kids learning to program to flip through 200 page books rather than letting them use Google, even if the info is there.
I don't know why this is getting an informative rating, there are plenty of P2P protocols without hashing. Apparently BitTorrent allows it (which I wasn't aware of) and the DC network definitely does, but one that does not is the Soulseek network.
Unfortunately, the SoulSeek network is probably the best one by a long way for finding obscure music, but the program and protocol show their age.
So... one notable network without hashes. Personally, I think that a program that was somewhere between DC++ and Soulseek would be the best P2P program ever. (on the Soulseek network, with wishlists, without requirements to be in rooms and without arbitary limits you have to stick to to be in rooms but with hashing, without user ban lists, without this stupid attitude that some SoulSeek users take that sharing music is a privelege rather than a right when they're just sitting there on a P2P network, with autosearch and autoslots... preferably the DC++ GUI too)
Back on topic. This would be a real improvement, as most files of the same song vary only by bitrate and tags and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to dl fragments.
Given that the Big Bang was heavily contested for the larger part of the 20th century and that most scientists initially thought it was a crackpot theory... to have convinced the vast majority of the scientific community, I think it's safe to say that it's not a wild guess. Just because we don't know what happened before it. Believe me, there's shedloads of evidence for it.
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang - look under observational evidence. Ergo, not wild guess. For the history of it - http://www.amazon.com/Big-Bang-Origin-Universe-P-S/dp/0007162219/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0498900-8622244?ie =UTF8&s=books&qid=1175189801&sr=8-1
Evolution... er... there've been quite a few intermediate forms found. How the hell can you explain fossils of, say, homo erectus without evolution and geology being involved? Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetacean s and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_hors e because I'm presuming you wouldn't trust talkorigins as a source. Anyone who says that there are no intermediates either hasn't researched it too deeply or insists on finding additional intermediates between intermediates forever and ever, so that they can continue to deny that they exist.
Mutations that add DNA complexity? Define complexity. Meanwhile, look up polyploidy, frameshifts and retroviruses. Because of your vague wording, I have no idea if these actually fit the bill for what you're looking for, but these are three things off the top of my head which show what I THINK you're denying exists.
If you're too lazy to look them up: Polyploidy - copying chromosomes basically. Down's Syndrome is a form of it and it's a major cause for speciation in plants.
Frameshifts - causes genetic disease. When an extra base is added or a base is removed from the DNA, which, by virtue of how DNA transcription works (codons of three bases, coding for one amino acid) completely alters all of the code past that point of the code. This is significant because it involves an additional base being added (additional complexity, ne?) and it's pretty undeniable that this happens.
Retroviruses - viruses that can add DNA to the DNA of the host. Again, not really deniable, additional complexity.
Given that Franklin lived and died before Darwin I'm not too surprised that he was a creationist. Seeing as there wasn't really an alternative at the time and the existence of God was, at the time, a given, see? Also, inventor does not necessarily mean scientist and vice versa. Although Franklin was undoubtedly both, it needs to be said. And of course there are Christians who create things. We're not talking about Christians and never were, we're talking about creationists. Unless you're telling me that every single Christian is a creationist. And a creationist does not necessarily reject the rest of science which does not conflict with the Bible, BUT, creationism as a whole is very unscientific, placing no value on science. There are some creationists who are still scientists, but the proportion (not amount, although that's also true) of creationists who are scientists is MUCH, MUCH smaller than the amount of non-creationists who are scientists.
And what the hell are you talking about? No proof but verbal repetition? http://web.ukonline.co.uk/a.buckley/dino.htm - this page isn't the best for describing it, but there're certainly some things in there which I've checked up elsewhere and have found to be true. I'd say that it counts as evidence, rather than some mysterious verbal folklor
I'm not going to comment on most of this post, as a couple of posters have summed up the response. Namely that "global cooling" was a huge topic in the media, but never held much weight in the scientific community and that the following facts are beyond dispute: i) The Earth is warming. ii) Carbon dioxide reflects infra-red light back to Earth, effectively trapping heat. iii) We pump out a LOT of carbon dioxide. Regardless of how big an impact you think Man has on this effect, cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions isn't a bad idea regardless, as it's not really defensible to suggest that we are in no way contributing anything to the problem.
Yes, there is scaremongering, but big deal, when the media gets hold of ANY topic, there is scaremongering. It doesn't make that topic any more, or any less, valid than it was before.
The part of your post which I wanted to pick at though, is this: The reason global warming has no credibility. Global warming is controversial (as opposed to having no credibility, as you suggested) in the USA, and pretty much only the USA. It is a topic, like evolution or abortion, which is a thorny issue in America, but which the rest of the developed world has more or less already accepted and got on with their lives. The USA is very isolated in being sceptical of it. Europe certainly isn't, there are EU intiatives for each nation within the union to have a certain percentage of its electricity supplied by renewable sources within the next decade (I can't recall the specific year) and recent polls in the UK showed that 85% of people believed both in global warming and that Man is mostly to blame for it.
There are several reasons why this is the case, one being that America, put bluntly, is a very VERY conservative country on the whole, compared to the rest of the developed world. Left-wing politicians in America that may seem radical there, really aren't by our standards (though, to veer off topic, I have to raise an eyebrow in confusion at how they're doing affirmative action over there, surely doing it by race is the worst possible method imaginable and doing it by income would be a lot fairer?), right-wing politicans that may not seem radical in America (and this is just politicans, we're not counting crazy talk show hosts) seem absolutely shocking. New ideas coming from the left gain traction in the rest of the developed world a lot quicker than in America because of this.
The second reason is simply that the effects are more obvious here, birds that are normally migratory are staying in the UK all year round, animals that hibernate are... well... not hibernating, we have a flock of wild parakeets living in London, a banana plant produced ripe fruit in Cambridge last year, the climate is changing sufficiently that running a vinyard in Britain is actually now viable, various species of animals which used to be common in the south are now found only in the north etc.
The third reason is that, put bluntly, we'd be in a lot more trouble if water levels did rise than you would be. More measures have to be taken to prevent London from flooding every year (put bluntly, it's not positioned with rising water levels in mind and half the city would be destroyed if water levels rose even a relatively small amount) and... well... Holland. Need I say more? Essentially, what I'm saying is, the USA =/= the world, global warming is more or less accepted in most developed countries.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Not all working class people are yobs or chavs, not even all working class people of the appropriate age to be yobs or chavs are yobs or chavs. This seems to be what you're implying.
And there is actually a great deal of social equality and social climbing in Britain. Social equality because of our less insanely capitalist society (compared to America). As for social climbing... well... look at Margaret Thatcher. Woman, daughter of a green grocer, ended up being PM and dominating the political scene for over a decade.
The class divisions are there in every country, we just happen to be one of the countries that recognises that they exist and that people who are poor may be poor because of their background rather than their being lazy. Seriously, in America, wouldn't you say that there're divisions between an average person who lives in the Bronx and the average person who live in Manhattan? These divisions exist everywhere, we just chose to not bury our heads in the sand about them. And these divisions can be bridged and do get bridged.
The "English middle class"? According to you, the working class is full of yobs, the middle class is insufferable, so are the only people you like the aristocracy then? Besides which, which section of the middle class do you mean, we do divide them up further.
You don't understand the need for cameras. Put bluntly, they're not a bad thing at all, even if they're not really watched, having them in the streets is a good idea, and it works far better than allowing the average man a bloody gun for self-defence, which is a recipe for disaster if ever I've seen one.
And I organised a train ride last weekend, the train was crowded but it went to where I wanted it to go. British trains are not fantastic, but I fail to see what they have to do with anything. And what are you talking about getting served in a shop? You get your stuff and you go to the counter, you pay, and you leave. If you've had trouble in a shop then that's the shop that's dodgy, not the entire country.
I get the impression that you're just a rabid anglophobe who may have been here for two weeks tops, because you just seem to have no idea about how the country actually runs. It's not an efficient country, no, it's not a perfect country. However, no country is perfect, very few countries are efficient and those that are usually have massive downsides. Which countries are good and which are shit are purely subjective, I could never live in America, for instance, for a whole plethora of reasons, but I'm not pretending that my opinion on the country is fact. And I'm not sure that I'd trust the opinion of anyone who is unaware that class divisions exist in every single country and is unaware that these classes are not things that you are locked into for the rest of your life.
The American attitude to gun scares me really - you have something like twenty-five times the muder with firearms rate (per capita) as the UK and still insist that there's no positive effect on gun bans. You honestly can't figure out why guns and cars are different (hot tip: guns are for the express intent of causing bodily harm and ultimately, save for range shooting, which really doesn't require anyone owning their own guns, every function of them is for this - in contrast, a car is primarily for transport and the bodily harm is a sideeffect) and why the idea of banning guns is much less ridiculous than that of banning cars.
I think that if you find a socialist undertone to that, you're looking too hard for something that's not actually there.
Besides which, what is wrong with socialism? America, in particular, needs to move more towards socialism, IMO, there's a balance between capitalism and socialism to be struck, and America's way too far towards the capitalism side. Also, note that I use the phrase socalist rather than communist (there is a difference) and capitalist rather than libertarian. Once you get to the point where you can call your society communist or libertarian accurately, your society is more or less screwed.
But of course, because/. is populated by libertarians who view anything to do with portraying socialism in a positive light as a horrific sin and who haven't thought over their political philosophy of choice to see the evident flaws (seriously, there are TONS in libertarianism, let's start with "lack of anti-monopoly laws" and I'll let you do the thinking from there) this post will either get ignored or marked down viciously by teenagers who honestly think that switching to some extreme form of government will actually fix anything.
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Er ... not really, maybe that's your experiences in the US but here in the UK the accepted wisdom is that the government can run some things in beneficial ways that private enterprises never would. Granted, running ISPs is not one of those things - you would probably find an actual government run ISP to be slow and outdated, unless it's competing with corporate ISPs (even then it's doubtful) or is simply in the form of some tax break for ISPs if they improve their services.
Some things which are more or less impossible purely through private enterprise or systems which worked better in the UK when they were socialised:
Socialised healthcare (private companies make more money through charging on a case-by-case basis, they have no authority to levy a national tax, the overheads would be gargantuan which would be unacceptable, corner-cutting would be rife)
Decent railways (here in the UK the railways were privatised - they were being run appallingly by the government and are now being run appallingly in a very slightly different way by corporations: being more expensive, more crowded and costing more to run (largely subsidised, as the railways are not profitable for the companies) but being slightly safer (a big deal!) - the government was probably marginally preferable.). Theoretically, a government run train operator
Roads (roads are almost universally run by the government in pretty much all countries - if they weren't, how would money be made for them? Tolls up the wazoo.)
Emergency services (would you want to pay every time the fire service or the police came to your house when you dialed the emergency services? A corporation running them would need money from somewhere.)
There're more but suffice to say that government run things can work better than corporate run things if they're run well and in the right sector. If not, they don't (see: British Gas, British Telecom etc. etc. when they were government-owned).
I assume you're talking about OiNK? That's the only private site I can think of where it's remotely difficult to maintain a ratio - even there, getting the 0.5 which is the maximum ratio you need to maintain your account isn't that hard.
Getting the 1.05 for Power User+ status is.
Of course, I could be mistaken about what site you mean, but I've yet to join any torrent site apart from OiNK where it's hard to seed. And to be honest, OiNK is by far the best music torrent site I've seen - between it, DC++ and Soulseek you can find practically all the music that's ever been on the internet. The only downsides are that it's very difficult to keep an ideal ratio and that they, for some reason, have around seven categories of electronic music, yet don't have a prog rock category or any metal subgenre categories....
Regardless, it is very much worth using private trackers, OiNK is very much the exception regarding the difficulty seeding (and there you just have to tread carefully) and the content, speed and security on private trackers is unparalleled. Provided it's a good tracker, of course! There're some duff ones.
No offence, but I'm glad you're not in charge of the media in this country. I've noticed time and time again that BBC and Channel 4 content (i.e. the public-service channels) are of a consistently higher standard than the programming on ITV (which has gone downhill very much in the last few years) and Channel 5 (which was never good to begin with). I also think it's telling that even if you include all of the satellite channels available in the UK, the ones which consistently deliver the highest-quality programming are BBC 3 and BBC 4.
... it being fairly bad. It has improved in some ways, but has degraded elsewhere to match it. This is more to do with poor management in the changeover than anything else - the track operators in particular have been set up so that they still are monopolies in their area. Compare this to the SNCF in France where the trains are nationalised but run competently.
State monopolies are not invariably inferior to programming from media companies. Assuming you're from the UK (which I presume you are, because you know that the BBC isn't part of the state, which, tbh, most non-UK people assume it is) you surely remember the directory enquiries scandal? We had cheap reliable directory enquiries with an easy to remember number - now we have a thousand and one directory enquiries lines and all of the well known lines are much more expensive than what they replaced.
Another example, the train system, granted, it was fairly bad before it was denationalised but now ten years later on, the forward march of progress under the private companies has lead to
Basically, what I'm saying is, denationalising utilities and breaking up state protected monopolies are not always a good thing - there are plenty of cases where they have been - but if there's nothing wrong with the service to begin with, don't even think about it. Television and beer are about the only two areas where Britain can be said to have something close to the best in the world - let's not degrade the quality of one of them! Let's put results over rhetoric here. Also, wouldn't your view point imply that the NHS should be dismantled, seeing as if you call the BBC a monopoly (which it isn't, now that I think about it) the NHS would definitely fall under that banner?
Ever occured to you that people don't want to pay to try the movie before hand, so Blockbuster and Netflix are out. What if they want obscure movies that aren't rented there? What if they only watch a movie a month? Then $20 a month is ludicrous. I think that Blockbuster may well be in trouble in the years ahead, with cheap DVD prices for 90% of titles, imo.
Trailers don't tell you anything about how good a movie is, some good movies have had awful trailers and vice versa. Reviews don't tell you anything either, because quite frankly, reviewers are snobbish and full of crap most of the time - how much you can trust a movie critic depends on what kind of movie it is (the more artsy the film the more you can trust reviewers' opinions) and even when you CAN trust a critic, it has to be cumulative (i.e. from RottenTomatoes) rather than from a single review.
And this is from movie critics, who are probably the best kind of critic - music critics' opinions are utterly worthless because music is so subjective and their job depends on predicting the next best thing (so they have a bent toward the mainstream normally, unless they're a specialist reviewer) - although if they're not actually paid for it the quality can be better because some of that stuff doesn't apply. Game critics are generally okay, but there are a lot of game critics who are just company mouthpieces, the whole scale of 1-10 is never used (anything below 7 is usually dire) and the quality of the writing is usually poor. Literary critics are usually just pretentious as hell and have no concept of a book that's fun but superficial, again, cumulatively, you can get a good idea of how good certain types of books are.
Those solutions are fairly poor, cumulative reviews are acceptable but not foolproof, for example, Catcher in the Rye is a book with general critical appeal which is truly dire, imo. Obtaining music, film etc. and "trying before you buy" is perfectly acceptable. It's quite regular that I buy a product I initially pirated for film and games (a recent example is my buying Pan's Labyrinth and some more of the director's stuff after watching a downloaded version), less common for music because a CD is still inexplicably more expensive than a DVD, but I still do it there occasionally.
CLIFFNOTES: Downloading to try before you buy is not only fine, but a good idea, it leads to less disapointment and it means that the industry is that much more meritocratic.
You hypocrite! You say that my post is unsubstantiated, which, granted it is, and then you go and make an unsubstantiated post yourself (you provided an example of something legal in the EU which is illegal in the US, which, if I had argued that everything illegal in the US is illegal in the EU would have been a good retort. Unfortunately, I didn't say that.). You say it's factually incorrect, but provide no evidence to suggest otherwise and you call it a slam (even though it is clearly not intended as that) and in the same breath say "what does it say about you that [you] choose to post...".
It is a general trend, I do not provide citations because: a) I know nothing about the details of cars and provided with a list of safety standards I would be unable to compare. b) I would have thought it pretty obvious, really:
I base this off three reasons: i) The society and economic style is different, all of the EU are capitalist, but nowhere near as capitalist as the USA is, this means that the governments and/or EU are much less hesistant to impose restrictions on business in general. ii) With food additives, European countries are a lot more restrictive on what is allowed to be added to food - I can't find facts and figures, but many kids' breakfast cereals which are available in the USA are illegal in the UK (Froot Loops and Lucky Charms come to mind) because some additives integral to making the cereals are illegal here. Again, this doesn't mean anything in and of itself but is indicative of a trend for European nations to have much more regulated business than America. iii) Again with food, there are other regulations that exist in Europe which don't in America, for example regional protection - if you want to sell, say, wine, you couldn't call it champagne unless it came from the region of Champagne. Similarly, if you wanted to sell something as feta, it had to be produced in the appropriate area of Greece, if you want to sell something as Newcastle Brown Ale, it has to come from Newcastle etc. Another trend, not 100% on-topic, but it shows my point. iv) There are restrictions on things such as fuel efficiency in cars which are much stricter than those in America. It would follow that safety and emissions standards are probably also stricter. v) The EU has set a target to halve the road accident rate (currently at a similar level to America) by 2010, I'd doubt that meeting this target doesn't involve tightening of safety regulations somehow.
This wasn't a slam, merely pointing out that American standards are generally looser than those in Europe, which, no matter how much you say it's false, is true.
It doesn't really work because it fails to take into account whether all of that land is producing pollution. In the USA where there're vast plains of ... basically nothing, most of that land won't be doing the polluting, but it'll be restricted to more populated areas. In the EU, a much higher proportion of land is populated and therefore producing pollution. Because of this, this really tells us more about whether the area is industrialised and the population density.
This measurement will always suggest, if you read it to compare pollution in different areas, that the USA is always less of a polluter than the rest, just on the basis that it's big and comparatively sparsely populated and that the EU is always the worst because it's comparatively small (operative word: comparatively) and generally, with a few exceptions (e.g. the Scottish Highlands) pretty densely populated.
So, no, that measurement, if anything, MASKS the real issues. Some alternatives to this could be: just measuring pollution as is (after all the amount of CO2 released is what is important, NOT per capita etc.) - the downside to this is that it discriminates against larger countries, pollution per capita (problem is that it discriminates against countries with large populations), pollution per occupied square mile (discriminates against microstates (e.g. Singapore would do fairly bad on this test) and somewhat misses the point anyway) or, alternatively some index taking into account net pollution, the amount of industry, the amount of vehicles and the amount of homes with electricity and/or gas. I think that either the first one (net pollution) or the last one (the index) works best.
Most of this is 100% true, but just to be pendantic, the right to bear arms was enshrined in law in Saxon and mediaeval times, I believe, but as it became less necessary and more archaic it pretty much vanished.
Oh, come on! Firstly, a good deal of that data came from the Soviet archives, specifically the figures on how many people had died in the camps (which is surely more likely to be biased the other way), so, no, most of it hasn't been produced by Western official agencies. The rest are by independent historians, who, oddly enough, have no direct relationship with the kind of official agencies you're implying (I'm assuming you mean MI6, CIA type agencies). Two, I didn't translate from the Russian due to a couple of teensy problems, firstly my not having the source text in Russian and the second the fact that I can't speak Russian or read the Cyrillic alphabet (I can read the Greek one, though). Though I pose this to you - on your information on Cyprus, did you translate all of the official documentation from Greek and Turkish yourself? If you didn't it may have been interfered with by Turkish official agencies and are therefore suspect. *rolls eyes*
History may favour the winners, but given that not every single one of the UK/US's enemies have been accused of killing that many people through history, I'm more inclined to believe it actually happened, seeing as the USSR was seen as a mortal threat, just like all of the other mortal threats that have existed in history. Also, don't you think that there'd be no records of atrocities commited on the side of Americans/Britons if official agencies had filtered history? I mean, people aren't exactly shouting on the rooftops about these things, but they're not exactly secret either.
I am aware of Cyprus' recent history. The thing is that Turks only made up 18% of the population at that time, although that's a significant minority, it's not really a minority large enough for power sharing (in that context) to be viable, and under the system the Turks had disproportionate influence as well. This system also blocked off the idea of a seperate Turkish Cypriot state and reunification with Greece, and as almost all Turks wanted the former and most Greeks wanted the latter. The only thing they agreed over was that these restrictions were placed there by a a foreign power and were therefore not valid, and fighting promptly broke out in order to achieve their aims. Well, in a few years anyway.
As it had happened the Turkish Cypriots had been abusing safeguards put there to prevent total Greek rule as a matter of course and the Greek majority was very much unhappy with this, as they were basically vetoing them. Amendments were suggested by the President, which fixed most of the issues which made the system unworkable at the time but also removed the safeguards that the Turks were using. Understandably this didn't go down well and this served as a catalyst to civil war, as the Turks shortly after insurrected to form a seperate state, the Greeks didn't appreciate this and counterattacked and what was lead to what was basically a small scale civil war. Consistutional amendments by a neutral mediator were proposed but Turkey refused to agree to these. At this time NATO peacekeeping troops entered Cyprus (including British troops).
There was a coup against Makarios, yes, but that was performed by the Greek military junta and was put down by the Greek Cypriots, so you can't really blame them. Then Turkey invaded, but it's not as black and white as you make it seem as to the legality of their actions - "The guarantor powers (the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Greece) promised not to seek annexation or partition of Cyprus, and to assist their communities on Cyprus in the event of major clashes between the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. It was the attempted July 1974 Greek-backed coup d'etat that made Turkey intervene militarily, arguing that the Treaty of Guarantee made their intervention fully legal. Some Critics counter that only the first stage of the intervention - the initial landings - is covered by the treaty. The second stage of the intervention - the occupation of 37% of the island - however, was condemned by UN Security Council resolutions." on the Tr
Stalin was a Georgian who ended up running the USSR, of which the central and most powerful nation was Russia. It's irrelevant where he came from, it's like a Jew being upset at Germans for Hitler, even though Hitler was Austrian. Both of them came from countries inside the sphere of influence of the country they eventually lead, and both of them are remebered for leading that country rather than where they came from.
... do you honestly not expect them to be irritated at what they feel to be the presence of an imperial agressor?
... well ... although I hardly find myself approving of many of the US's and the UK's actions, I don't think that you can objectively place anything these two countries have done, including Dresden, including massacres in India, including Hiroshima, including Vietnam, including Suez. Let's just have a rundown of what Stalin did: gulags (which we've already discussed), came into a position of power by way of robbing banks for funds, masterminded the invasion of his own country, assassinated his main political opponents, had mass imprisoning of intellectuals in countries he invaded, caused mass famines in the Ukraine through his policy of collectivisation, executed scientists with dissenting views, razed most religious buildings and killed the monks, censored science and the arts, attempted to destroy the Ukrainian people and culture, held great purges of opponents, sent millions of pretty much every ethnic group ex
Marxism came from Germany and the Germans weren't keen on having communism back in the day of the DDR. National socialism came from Austria and most Austrians aren't keen on fascism. Just because a school of thought comes from a country doesn't mean that they should like it, just because an event in a country through a massively long, indirect and impossible to predict series of events ended up impacting negatively on that country doesn't mean that the countrymen shouldn't feel bitter about it.
You're thinking about it too logically here, you're not taking into account the fact that people are emotional beings. These kinds of fueds last longer than the lifetimes of the people involved, how many old people do you know who dislike the Japanese even though the Japanese people born since WWII have nothing to do with it? How many Irish people still have an instrinsic distrust of the British (those wounds are still very fresh)? Now. Given that Estonia became independent in 1991, and many people will remember the days of the USSR's occupation, and the older people will remember Stalin
I don't get my views on gulags from the media, I look them up. "The total deaths shown by the declassified archives in the GULAG from 1931 to 1953 amount to about 1 million in "corrective labor camps." Another archival document contains the number of roughly 1.6 million deaths in both "corrective labor camps" and "corrective labor colonies" during the years 1930-1956 (figures for colonies are included from 1935 onwards). These figures include deaths of political and common prisoners, but they do not include executions of camp inmates that occurred during various waves of terror. " - there, specifically in forced labour camps, which is what I was referring to with gulags, 1 million dead in 20 years. So, no, they were not exactly nice there. And the moving ethnic groups is hardly an ethically sound thing to do, is it? Yes, it may be better for supporting the country, but it broke up anyway, and there are plenty of morally dubious things which can be done for the good of a country. As Godwin's Law has already been fulfilled, I shall mention the actions of a certain ruler of Germany in 1933-1945 who revitalised the economy, rebuilt a ruined country, raised national pride and made people proud to be German who did a few morally dubious things in his time, to say the least.
I'm not sure what you mean by subnation, so it's somewhat hard to argue against what you're saying on that front (do you mean like wars of independence?), but
Officially if you're a Latino in the United States you are a US Citizen, however, how far you get in the world is fairly limited if you only know Spanish, unless you stick exclusively to areas with large Latino minorities. If you want to be succesful in the USA you need to know English, same applies in Estonia with Estonian, only it's codified. And guess what, most of the other countries in that area have this too, Latvia certainly does.
The EU admits countries on strict criteria, one of which is that every single member state agrees to allow this country within the union, for instance, one of the stumbling blocks for Turkey's joining the EU is Cyprus threatening to veto any moves made because of the whole North Cyprus issue. You'd've thought that if this had counted as what you are claiming it is that one of the countries would have vetoed these countries joining, wouldn't you? There are people within the EU very enthusiastic about Russia, such as Italy's current PM (though on balance relations are not good), so I'm sure that that would have happened.
Where did you live in Europe? Did you forget that Europe's a continent with many different countries and that attitudes are vastly different from area to area even within countries? Unless you've lived in over half of the EU's countries for a signficant amount of time, you're not qualified to make a judgement. Besides which, my experience, which is no more or less valid than yours, says the opposite. In the modern day, in all of the European countries I've been to (granted, scant few) there's been a lot of casual racism, in that stereotypes are used an awful lot usually in a jocular way and racist jokes are fairly commonly told, but very little serious racism (though there's more of this towards Pakistanis and Muslims because of the media...). What I've found with Americans based off their internet presence compared with those of Europeans is that they seem more inclined to serious racism, as in actually believing the stereotypes and hating people because of nationality etc. I haven't actually lived in America, but given that attitudes are different in different parts of the USA....
Estonia's an indepdent country because it's an independent country. Czechoslovakia, East Prussia and Yugoslavia were independent countries because they were independent countries. And if lines on a map and governmental structures don't make a country, what does? By your logic (I'm assuming that you're basing this off ethnicity as it seems implied in your post, so sorry if this turns out straw-mannish if that's not what you mean) South Korea isn't an independent country but, say, Tibet is. The fact is that Estonia's an independent country and if it were part of a greater anything it would not be part of a greater Russia. It is not Russian ethnically, never has been. And who suggested breaking up countries into areas where different languages are spoken? So, some questions. Does Estonia have a government, does it have institutions, is it marked out with a black line on a globe? If all of these are true, it's a real country.
What's your basis for claiming Estonia wants to go back to its fascist past? If you've been under the yoke of one country, an invader, no matter what it is, seems like a liberator.
I would say that that'd be very odd given that they're a constituent country in the United Kingdom and not an indepedent state and their government isn't really devolved enough to make that kind of decision and that there's no language called Scottish (there's Gaelic (which is very much a minority language) and Scots (which is basically little more than a dialect of English with more Norse words) but most Scots speak English). At least choose a comparible example, the history is completely different beyond everything else I pointed out. Act of Union? i.e. we didn't conquer the Scots and send them to gulags.
Of course Europe has a murky past, that's why the EU was set up. I mean, officially it was a mining community, but Churchill and other leader
No.
Britpop is a specific genre, formed as a reaction against grunge music and American musical dominance in the early 1990s (grunge being, of course, a very American thing). It lasted roughly 1994-1999, although some indie bands are to some extent reviving it at present, and you know what, you can tell immediately what britpop is compared to other British pop music just by listening to it. British pop music could be said to be what you think britpop is, but britpop is most definitely a specific genre, covering a specific style of music over a specific period and does NOT mean "pop music of the region, of the time". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britpop)
The others you listed are much closer to what you said they were, aside from A-pop which is a term I've never seen used by anyone, ever. Presumably it means American pop, and I think that as I live in Britain rather than America, I would have heard that term if anyone used it. JPop is a specific genre again, but as it covers a large chunk of all of Japan's music since the 70s, and there'd only been around 20 years of pop music before then, I think it's a close enough approximation. Europop is also a specific genre, but what it is depends on what time period you're talking about and where you're from.
Quite frankly, I don't really think I should have to spend this long justifying my correcting a tiny, inconsequential mistake.
Technically, both Radiohead and the Beatles started before britpop did. (it started around 1994)
Good man! I am rather a fan of b3ta, so even though I'm not a board frequenter (the massively outdated board is one of the few things that really irritates me about it).
/.
:)
Well, yes, I'll grant you that 2chan has a greater magnitude, that's why I said they're not more than a subculture. I was just saying that although 2chan may have broken through to the public awareness more than other boards, it's not the only one to have done so.
And to be fair, Slashdot does cater for a specific crowd, I mean, yes, it's massive, and for 2chan to have more traffic is pretty bloody impressive, but it's, at the end of the day, a small segment of many large populations against a large segment of one small one. I mean, it's mostly those interested in science, geeky things, and watching radical libertarians argue who visit
I think you're placing a bit too much emphasis on b3ta's following of current affairs, but, yes, I think that the art-orientated aspect of it is probably what gives it any time in the sun in the British press. I'm aware that I've been arguing for the sake of arguing, so sorry, mate
Their having written a book and occasionally appearing in the media is not that unusual. Here in the UK there is a site called b3ta, which hasn't really caught on that much in America, because it's very UK-centric. I wouldn't say that they're more than a subculture, but they've released a book (full of user-made content) and, though I've never seen them on TV, you do get them occasionally in the newspaper.
3 / (scans of times when b3ta appeared in the press)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B3ta http://www.flickr.com/photos/robmanuel/sets/54014
It depends how you define something as "working". When you're focusing ONLY on crimes committed by people using firearms, sure, banning guns "works". When you focus on the overall amount of VIOLENT crime, gun control has the opposite effect. These statistics that gun control advocates always cite are misleading for multiple reasons.
Yes, because pro-gun people NEVER cite misleading stats, ever, do they? Like the "Oh, X banned guns and their gun crime rose after they did that" or "X has gun control and has lower gun crime rates than Y, but what they don't say is that in 1900 when neither had gun control, X still had lower gun crime rates!".
And actually, rates of murders overall follow the same pattern. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap- crime-murders-per-capita). The exception is Switzerland but as everyone is given a gun by the government it's safe to assume that murder rate and murder with firearms rate are more or less the same there.
United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
Canada: 0.0149063 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.0140633 per 1,000 people
Switzerland: 0.00921351 per 1,000 people
"Gun deaths" include suicides, accidents, cases of self defense, "gang warfare" and police shootings.
"Murders with firearms" however, which we are talking about, would not definitely not count suicide and almost certainly wouldn't count accidents or self-defence either. I believe that those would both fall under manslaughter. Gang warfare and police shootings, yes, but I don't see why this alters the point at all. Certainly all of the other countries I've listed would have gang warfare and police shootings from time to time. Britain certainly does.
Furthermore, looking only at "gun crime" completely ignores the well documented deterrent effect of lawful firearms ownership! How many stabbings, bludgeonings, rapes and home invasions are you willing to tolerate in order to prevent one firearms-related death?
The murder rate follows the same pattern, as I have established.
Burglaries - (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_bur_percap- crime-burglaries-per-capita) - seems to disprove my point? Wrong. Switzerland has the highest guns per capita in the world, everyone does national service and they're allowed to keep their guns at home after they do it, and most people do. Despite this, it has a higher rate of burglary than the USA, where gun ownership is (odd as it sounds) less. This would imply that how many people have guns has shit all to do with burglary rates and that this "deterent effect" only works when that gun is pointed at you at the time.
Now, rape. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap- crime-rapes-per-capita). Canada has by far the highest rate, the USA is second, UK is third, Switzerland is last. No correlation, clearly. Robberies (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rob_percap- crime-robberies-per-capita), UK highest, USA second highest, Canada and Switzerland far behind third and fourth respectively. Total crimes (no seperate stats for violent crimes, I'm afraid - http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_perc ap-crime-total-crimes-per-capita) - UK, very slightly behind is the USA, Canada behind the USA by the same amount the USA is behind the UK, Switzerland fourth. Assault (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_ass_percap- crime-assaults-per-capita) - USA first, UK and Canada slightly behind, no info on Switzerland. Car theft (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_car_the_per cap-crime-car-thefts-per-capita) - UK, Canada, USA, Switzerland.
So, what we've learned here is that gun control effects the murder with firearms rates and the murder rates, but has little impact on other crime either way. We've also learned that if you dislike crime,
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_ percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita
... well ... in a western country, yes, it's unviable to do so, but it works fine in Arabic countries where it's not really in the culture.
... it depends what the bad speech is. America is about the only country which defends pretty much all speech, many other developed countries have laws against hate speech. I don't see these countries descending into an Orwellian dystopia just yet. Do you? So, you're overreacting here. This is a worry because it's subjective, but it's far from what you make it out to be, it's just a well-meaning law that's not really precise enough.
... well, in future, before making these blanket statements, please look at examples from outside the borders of the US. It shows that many of the ideas you find so abhorrent can, do and are working. I'm expecting not to get any markings up for this, because this has arrived late and will piss off all of the /. libertarians that hang around here, but, really ... don't carry ideas to extremes with no thought for how the world actually works.
0.0279271 per 1,000 people for the USA - very little gun control
0.00534117 per 1,000 people - gun ownership is compulsory and everyone has extensive firearms training through national service.
0.00502972 per 1,000 people for Canada - some degree of gun control
0.00102579 per 1,000 people for the UK - the nearest thing to total gun prohibition you get in any developed country.
These three nations are very comparable, and I think that the trend tells us something, don't you? Namely that gun control and prohibition DOES work. However, an acceptable alternative is national service and extensive education on the subject. I don't think either will appeal to the Libertarian crowd.
Alcohol
And as for prohibiting bad speech
I'm guessing that you're an American libertarian, correct?
And that "however" is exactly why IP rights ot pharmeceuticals should not be restricted. Generally I'm anti-big business and anti-IP (you know what I mean) but by virtue of how the pharmeceutical industry works, they are an exception. They are vital and they need lots of money going in, as this money goes towards developing cures for diseases.
I learned to program without a networked machine. Why can't they?
They can but it's ludicrous to expect them to. I've been coding in PHP lately (yes, I know, newb language) and I would have gone absolutely insane had I not been able to access php.net, so many commands which I've needed have only been on that site and not in any of the books available to the school. This, of course, on top of the fact that there's no reason to force kids learning to program to flip through 200 page books rather than letting them use Google, even if the info is there.
I don't know why this is getting an informative rating, there are plenty of P2P protocols without hashing. Apparently BitTorrent allows it (which I wasn't aware of) and the DC network definitely does, but one that does not is the Soulseek network.
... one notable network without hashes. Personally, I think that a program that was somewhere between DC++ and Soulseek would be the best P2P program ever. (on the Soulseek network, with wishlists, without requirements to be in rooms and without arbitary limits you have to stick to to be in rooms but with hashing, without user ban lists, without this stupid attitude that some SoulSeek users take that sharing music is a privelege rather than a right when they're just sitting there on a P2P network, with autosearch and autoslots ... preferably the DC++ GUI too)
Unfortunately, the SoulSeek network is probably the best one by a long way for finding obscure music, but the program and protocol show their age.
So
Back on topic. This would be a real improvement, as most files of the same song vary only by bitrate and tags and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to dl fragments.
Given that the Big Bang was heavily contested for the larger part of the 20th century and that most scientists initially thought it was a crackpot theory ... to have convinced the vast majority of the scientific community, I think it's safe to say that it's not a wild guess. Just because we don't know what happened before it. Believe me, there's shedloads of evidence for it.
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang - look under observational evidence. Ergo, not wild guess. For the history of it - http://www.amazon.com/Big-Bang-Origin-Universe-P-S /dp/0007162219/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0498900-8622244?ie =UTF8&s=books&qid=1175189801&sr=8-1
Evolution ... er ... there've been quite a few intermediate forms found. How the hell can you explain fossils of, say, homo erectus without evolution and geology being involved? Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetacean s and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_hors e because I'm presuming you wouldn't trust talkorigins as a source. Anyone who says that there are no intermediates either hasn't researched it too deeply or insists on finding additional intermediates between intermediates forever and ever, so that they can continue to deny that they exist.
Mutations that add DNA complexity? Define complexity. Meanwhile, look up polyploidy, frameshifts and retroviruses. Because of your vague wording, I have no idea if these actually fit the bill for what you're looking for, but these are three things off the top of my head which show what I THINK you're denying exists.
If you're too lazy to look them up: Polyploidy - copying chromosomes basically. Down's Syndrome is a form of it and it's a major cause for speciation in plants.
Frameshifts - causes genetic disease. When an extra base is added or a base is removed from the DNA, which, by virtue of how DNA transcription works (codons of three bases, coding for one amino acid) completely alters all of the code past that point of the code. This is significant because it involves an additional base being added (additional complexity, ne?) and it's pretty undeniable that this happens.
Retroviruses - viruses that can add DNA to the DNA of the host. Again, not really deniable, additional complexity.
Given that Franklin lived and died before Darwin I'm not too surprised that he was a creationist. Seeing as there wasn't really an alternative at the time and the existence of God was, at the time, a given, see? Also, inventor does not necessarily mean scientist and vice versa. Although Franklin was undoubtedly both, it needs to be said. And of course there are Christians who create things. We're not talking about Christians and never were, we're talking about creationists. Unless you're telling me that every single Christian is a creationist. And a creationist does not necessarily reject the rest of science which does not conflict with the Bible, BUT, creationism as a whole is very unscientific, placing no value on science. There are some creationists who are still scientists, but the proportion (not amount, although that's also true) of creationists who are scientists is MUCH, MUCH smaller than the amount of non-creationists who are scientists.
And what the hell are you talking about? No proof but verbal repetition? http://web.ukonline.co.uk/a.buckley/dino.htm - this page isn't the best for describing it, but there're certainly some things in there which I've checked up elsewhere and have found to be true. I'd say that it counts as evidence, rather than some mysterious verbal folklor
I'm not going to comment on most of this post, as a couple of posters have summed up the response. Namely that "global cooling" was a huge topic in the media, but never held much weight in the scientific community and that the following facts are beyond dispute: i) The Earth is warming. ii) Carbon dioxide reflects infra-red light back to Earth, effectively trapping heat. iii) We pump out a LOT of carbon dioxide. Regardless of how big an impact you think Man has on this effect, cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions isn't a bad idea regardless, as it's not really defensible to suggest that we are in no way contributing anything to the problem.
... well ... not hibernating, we have a flock of wild parakeets living in London, a banana plant produced ripe fruit in Cambridge last year, the climate is changing sufficiently that running a vinyard in Britain is actually now viable, various species of animals which used to be common in the south are now found only in the north etc.
... well ... Holland. Need I say more? Essentially, what I'm saying is, the USA =/= the world, global warming is more or less accepted in most developed countries.
Yes, there is scaremongering, but big deal, when the media gets hold of ANY topic, there is scaremongering. It doesn't make that topic any more, or any less, valid than it was before.
The part of your post which I wanted to pick at though, is this: The reason global warming has no credibility. Global warming is controversial (as opposed to having no credibility, as you suggested) in the USA, and pretty much only the USA. It is a topic, like evolution or abortion, which is a thorny issue in America, but which the rest of the developed world has more or less already accepted and got on with their lives. The USA is very isolated in being sceptical of it. Europe certainly isn't, there are EU intiatives for each nation within the union to have a certain percentage of its electricity supplied by renewable sources within the next decade (I can't recall the specific year) and recent polls in the UK showed that 85% of people believed both in global warming and that Man is mostly to blame for it.
There are several reasons why this is the case, one being that America, put bluntly, is a very VERY conservative country on the whole, compared to the rest of the developed world. Left-wing politicians in America that may seem radical there, really aren't by our standards (though, to veer off topic, I have to raise an eyebrow in confusion at how they're doing affirmative action over there, surely doing it by race is the worst possible method imaginable and doing it by income would be a lot fairer?), right-wing politicans that may not seem radical in America (and this is just politicans, we're not counting crazy talk show hosts) seem absolutely shocking. New ideas coming from the left gain traction in the rest of the developed world a lot quicker than in America because of this.
The second reason is simply that the effects are more obvious here, birds that are normally migratory are staying in the UK all year round, animals that hibernate are
The third reason is that, put bluntly, we'd be in a lot more trouble if water levels did rise than you would be. More measures have to be taken to prevent London from flooding every year (put bluntly, it's not positioned with rising water levels in mind and half the city would be destroyed if water levels rose even a relatively small amount) and
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Not all working class people are yobs or chavs, not even all working class people of the appropriate age to be yobs or chavs are yobs or chavs. This seems to be what you're implying.
... well ... look at Margaret Thatcher. Woman, daughter of a green grocer, ended up being PM and dominating the political scene for over a decade.
And there is actually a great deal of social equality and social climbing in Britain. Social equality because of our less insanely capitalist society (compared to America). As for social climbing
The class divisions are there in every country, we just happen to be one of the countries that recognises that they exist and that people who are poor may be poor because of their background rather than their being lazy. Seriously, in America, wouldn't you say that there're divisions between an average person who lives in the Bronx and the average person who live in Manhattan? These divisions exist everywhere, we just chose to not bury our heads in the sand about them. And these divisions can be bridged and do get bridged.
The "English middle class"? According to you, the working class is full of yobs, the middle class is insufferable, so are the only people you like the aristocracy then? Besides which, which section of the middle class do you mean, we do divide them up further.
You don't understand the need for cameras. Put bluntly, they're not a bad thing at all, even if they're not really watched, having them in the streets is a good idea, and it works far better than allowing the average man a bloody gun for self-defence, which is a recipe for disaster if ever I've seen one.
And I organised a train ride last weekend, the train was crowded but it went to where I wanted it to go. British trains are not fantastic, but I fail to see what they have to do with anything. And what are you talking about getting served in a shop? You get your stuff and you go to the counter, you pay, and you leave. If you've had trouble in a shop then that's the shop that's dodgy, not the entire country.
I get the impression that you're just a rabid anglophobe who may have been here for two weeks tops, because you just seem to have no idea about how the country actually runs. It's not an efficient country, no, it's not a perfect country. However, no country is perfect, very few countries are efficient and those that are usually have massive downsides. Which countries are good and which are shit are purely subjective, I could never live in America, for instance, for a whole plethora of reasons, but I'm not pretending that my opinion on the country is fact. And I'm not sure that I'd trust the opinion of anyone who is unaware that class divisions exist in every single country and is unaware that these classes are not things that you are locked into for the rest of your life.
The American attitude to gun scares me really - you have something like twenty-five times the muder with firearms rate (per capita) as the UK and still insist that there's no positive effect on gun bans. You honestly can't figure out why guns and cars are different (hot tip: guns are for the express intent of causing bodily harm and ultimately, save for range shooting, which really doesn't require anyone owning their own guns, every function of them is for this - in contrast, a car is primarily for transport and the bodily harm is a sideeffect) and why the idea of banning guns is much less ridiculous than that of banning cars.
I think that if you find a socialist undertone to that, you're looking too hard for something that's not actually there.
/. is populated by libertarians who view anything to do with portraying socialism in a positive light as a horrific sin and who haven't thought over their political philosophy of choice to see the evident flaws (seriously, there are TONS in libertarianism, let's start with "lack of anti-monopoly laws" and I'll let you do the thinking from there) this post will either get ignored or marked down viciously by teenagers who honestly think that switching to some extreme form of government will actually fix anything.
Besides which, what is wrong with socialism? America, in particular, needs to move more towards socialism, IMO, there's a balance between capitalism and socialism to be struck, and America's way too far towards the capitalism side. Also, note that I use the phrase socalist rather than communist (there is a difference) and capitalist rather than libertarian. Once you get to the point where you can call your society communist or libertarian accurately, your society is more or less screwed.
But of course, because