Bad for whom?

You should watch some films shot in Eastern Europe eg. the Decalogue series. Shot with a handful of people with no fancy pyrotechnics and expensive sets and written, edited and directed by probably the most accomplished film director of all time, Krzysztof Kieslowski. Without him there would be no Decalogue. So film, like music often belongs to the artist who wrote and/or directed it. There are other great directors who shot films on small budgets with a few actors and who created masterpieces greater than the multi-million Dollar garbage Hollywood churns out. Ingmar Bergman is another great director who shot some of his films on small budgets. This does not exclude bigger budget films either - take Kurosawa. Without Bergman, Kieslowski, Kurosawa etc many ground breaking films would have never been made.

Then there are anime directors like Makoto Shinkai who directed and produced an entire anime feature film by himself. There are many shorter animated films which were produced by small studios with a handful of people.

A good film is usually the vision of one individual. There are very few such great directors and without them we'd not have these unique gems. On the other hand Spielberg and Cameron produce assembly line entertainment pieces for the lowest common denominator and these dime a dozen films would have been made without them irrespective of the director employed, eg Titanic would have been a sentimental soap opera no matter what and even if there had never been a Titanic, someone else would have made a big budget romantic tragedy.

However, you can get productive work done on a Mac/PC but not on an iPad. The iPad is great for reading newspapers, books, watching videos, listening to music (not at the same time yet) but you're limited to end user functionality.

A television set is also easy to use, you have an ON button, buttons to change channels and buttons to change volume. Easy! But can you actually work on it? Some people will say yes, you can watch news bulletins on it for example and see what the stock price is doing but you can't really use the device (iPad or TV) to produce anything significant. You can watch a video on the iPad, nice! However, you can't EDIT it.

Secondly, your video file has to be the exact format and profile of the H.264 codec to be playable on the iPad. So you can't really watch other videos, eg AVCHD or XDCAM that you shot on your camcorder without first transcoding.

What Apple has done is re-invent the portable telly (as The Register pointed out) with an obviously easy interface and added some other features (newspapers, web browsing, iTunes music, etc) and you have a nice end user consumer product - primarily aimed to be used for consumption of mostly Apple content. The PC/Mac on the other hand is a different ballgame. It's everything the iPad is with a less finger-friendly interface and more - you can actually WORK on it and not just monkey around and watch iTunes video clips or read newspapers. Apple has made a nice appliance device for content consumption but not content creation, a nice toy.

The trick for Tablet PC makers, I think, would be to have an iPad like interface on a device which can do the work of a PC and not a multi-modal portable television.

Or the European Commission could tell Google to get out of the EU. If they disobey, their assets are seized. Google will lose a ton of advertising as customers in the EU are no longer able to view their ads. Granted other businesses in Europe will lose out too and governments will lose tax revenue too.

In Cracow, Poland major roads have overhead displays showing the speed you should be going at to make it to the next intersection while it's green.

The Soviets used far fewer and less knowledgeable Nazis and they abandoned them much sooner than the USA. To suggest that the Russian space program was a German affair is incorrect. By the time they sent the first man into space they didn't use any significant German scientists.

They will however confuse those who are not BD-related professionals or aficionados.

To qualify "non-Jewish women and children" - everyone knows that the Germans killed over 6 million Jewish civilians but few people realise how many non Jewish civilians they killed. Just pointing that out.

Total nonsense. The Germans were most cruel to people in the East whom they considered subhuman. I lost relatives to German army. If you also consider the numbers of Russian casualties and the numbers of SS as well as the numbers of troops killed by Stalin's own thugs, you have to logically concur that the Wehrmacht was guilty of many war crimes and actively executed civilans as well as POWs on top of providing logistical support for the SS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht#War_crimes

Of course the Germans were more civil towards those they didn't consider sub-human eg French, Americans, British, Dutch etc and life was comparatively easier there with prisoner exchanges, five star facilities and whatnot. There were also instances of the Wehrmacht participating in massacres of civilians in Italy, France and Holland but not on the level as in the General Government (Poland), Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe. The notion that only the SS were the main killers is preposterous and sick to the extreme.

It's amazing how we now demonise the Japanese but consider ONLY the Nazi SS to be nasty with gentlemanly armies and sailors fighting along - yet if you read the Wiki article on brothels, mass rapes, tortures, executions of non-Jewish women and children by Werhmacht soldiers (non-Gestapo/non-SS personnel) you realise how uncivilised Europeans really are. I had the honour of losing family to Wehrmacht in WW2 myself - civilians and POW.

As a doctor, if I did that, I'd be fired and probably have my license taken away. Why should the police, who have the power of life or death over Joe Public not have to be held up to the same strict standards? Fire those cops, I say.

Birds once flew because of god's will. I don't think the general belief was that these birds flew because God supported them in some way but that they flew because He made them that way. The mechanisms behind God's work were never explained beyond a few simplistic analogies. Religion never tried to explain the reasons behind how something is possible but more behind WHY it occurs. That's why this article, evolution, non-carbon based life etc - all of these ideas are not against the idea of God. As was, many simple people - and people were simple in ancient times as we are simple - as our descendants will say - ascribed many unexplained things to elements borrowed from religious dogma, a type of superstition if you will. That still does not prove God away one bit.

Secondly, as someone who lived under Soviet imposed Communism, I don't for a moment think that getting rid of religion will give us some improved society. IMHO I think it will be a lot worse.

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And why should China obey that declaration. Doesn't the UK need China more than China needs the UK? Is the UK going to invade China? China can do what it wants in Hong Kong and they will do it if they think it's necessary.

Can someone tell me who would stop China from doing what it wants to Hong Kong - after all it was all Chinese territory originally before the British came. Of course nothing and no-one can stop them. Is the UK going to start a nuclear war over Hong Kong?

Intolerance was the norm. However, if you looked at it objectively you'd find that the Catholic Church was probably more tolerant of transgressions than secular monarchs and merchants. Read up Sublimus Dei for example where the Pope forbids the enslavement of native Americans (and other undiscovered people) and taking of their property. Did it stop the SECULAR monarchs of Spain and Portugal from doing that? Did it stop the SECULAR slave merchants?

Then again torture and harsh punishment were acceptable in that age. Feudalism was the order of the day and most Europeans were slaves (serfs) themselves. It was a different world and while the Church had abuses, one has to put those in perspective of what was the acceptable and expected standard in those days.