it's illegal in the sense an individual or an entity (such as a company) can sue you for it, but it is not criminal and the police cannot investigate you for it, cannot arrest you for it and cannot give evidence in their official capacity against you for it either.

even losing a case for it does not make you a criminal and you cannot go to prison for it (but you can if you get a fine and you do not pay it).

when people say it is not "illegal" this is obviously what they mean. of course they realise there are property rights arguments, and regardless of whether they agree with those rights or not, they realise there are civil laws protecting them.

what they are saying is that, despite deceitful assertions by people like the riaa, is not NOT comparable to robbing a bank, or stealing the cd from a shop, which IS criminal.

that would be very interesting...

too bad for all those people who settled out of court for thousands of dollars each... there may have been no case for them to answer in the first place, but they'll never know now...

i take my hat off to you sir, that was an awesome statement.

i think i wept a little as you so eloquently described the way i feel about "government" and politicians. not only in usa, anywhere in the world.

sounds great in principle, until you realise there are millions of soulless, blood-sucking scumbags (lawyers) in america, and for every one that you kill, two more will pop up to take his place.

it's not only the riaa that are greedy and wanting to suck every hard earned penny out of the general populace and enslave them all as little more than "renevue producers". most people want that also, as long as they are the ones on top, of even if they are the victim, but believe they have some vague chance to one day be one of those on top...

the fact that bush was heavily involved in the whole thing is a matter of public record which no-one even denies, so my implication was spot on.

even if bush did directly cause the whole enron thing (unlikely), that is still not EVERYTHING, that is one single thing. so his accusation is very obviously totally false.

i never blamed bush for all the problems of the world, i just did not blame it all on obama, as he has only been president for just over 6 months.

anyway, it is totally pointless talking about these things to people who just want to blame everything bush did wrong on the new guy. anyone speaking against bush or for obama in any way gets modded troll here, and anyone lying through their teeth and being a bush apologist gets modded +5 informative...

i wonder why so many here hate the new guy so much... although looking at the lies and demeanour of some of these posts, i would say it has a lot more to do with his skin being the "wrong" colour than anything else...

you obviously understood that what we call brackets in english are the same as what you call parentheses in your international version of our language.

i have met americans who call them brackets, so i guess it's not universal there, like it is here...

it's like when a friend of mine told me "we don't say route (pronounced "root") here, we say route (pronounced "rowt")", yet i have heard of americans pronouncing it "root" too many times to count, even in that song about route 66 (get your kicks on "root" 66).

that would also be fine for me. i get about 60 channels or something for free on DTV, they are pretty much all trash every minute they run, much like most of the BBC.

if i saved the tv license fee, i can use that money to buy around 50 dvd films per year.

i would much rather lose the few good bits of the bbc and have no huge compulsory fee than keep paying for trash only idiots enjoy. if i really want to remind myself why i rarely ever watch tv at all, i will still have dozens and dozens of free commercial channels to ignore.

in theory you are almost right.

a pc used to watch the bbc live online also counts, although non-live programming does not technically need a license.

however, in practice, this is all complete nonsense and you will likely be prosecuted and fined heavily just for owning any type of tv or computer, etc. if caught with it.

if you pay an amount of money to clean up mess you are making, but not if you do not make that mess, then it matters little what it is called, it is still a fine, not a tax. you could just as easily say all fines are just a tax for doing the wrong thing...

so, i allude to medical aid and even water taking a long time to get to hurricane katrina victims, something that is a matter of public record and a great shame for america, and now i am a history-revising partisan?

funny.

third world countries have done better with more limited resources and bush publicly admitted the situation was badly mishandled.

i would love to see you go and tell the people of new orleans that the government did a great job and gave them all the help and attention they needed and anyone who argues that point must be a history-revising partisan...

if access to news ever was restricted to pay sites owned by news corporations, i think it would greatly help people like you cover up the things your friends have done; practically no-one would be reading about it any more...

no, of course the judiciary is NOT part of the government in england. i do not know of anywhere in the world where the courts are not independent of the government, at least in theory...

the prosecution are the representatives of the government (her majesty's government vs. whomever on the charge of murder, the united states vs. whomever for tax evasion, etc, etc), so i really cannot see how they could pretend a system where both the prosecution and the judgement makers were both part of the government and only the defence was left independent... or maybe defence should be government controlled also?

the bbc are very specifically NOT part of the british government, nor are they funded or supported by the government and the government does not help them with fee collection in any way. the bbc world service and bbc arabic tv receives a government grant for funding, but that entitles them to zero influence of the rest of the bbc in theory and those grants are used only for those two services.

the government does not force it, the judiciary does...

you get extremely large fines imposed by the courts if you are caught with electronic entertainment equipment and no license...

the government has nothing to do with it.

1: open google
2: type "define: sarcasm" without the quotes
3: hit return
4: read

you think that kind of corruption is only in the usa?

how sweet...

name a country, you can be pretty sure there is massive corruption and widescale injustice...

name a politician, it's a safe bet that s/he is a liar and is/has and always will be swindling more money than s/he is entitled to while serving their own interests in the name of the public good...

if we ever have to evacuate this planet, we really do need to make sure all the politicians and lawyers get their own "special" ship... whose course is set straight for the heart of the sun...

would certainly give you a lot less stress and a lot more satisfaction...

not so sure about its indexing properties though...

to badly paraphrase... "no-one ever got fired for buying google."

the BBC is not paid for by the government.

the BBC is paid for by the british public through a "license" we are pretty much forced to buy.

sure, if you do NOT own or possess a television, VCR, dvd player, radio or computer, you don't have to pay for it... (including in your car)

do you know anyone without any form of electronic entertainment?

the one good thing about this system is that the british government has zero influence or control over the BBC (in theory) and the BBC is free the criticise the government or its policies in any way it wants.

the biggest problem though, is that most of the output of the BBC is complete crap, vying for the attentions of the lowest common denominator (stupidest) of dole scrounging (welfare) scumbags (jerks) from sink estates (the projects). american translations in brackets for those that need them there...

in other words, the license is very expensive and the bits of the BBC that are good do not actually cost much.

i am still waiting for the day they break up the bbc and i just pay for the parts i think are worth having...

there are official estimates of casualties, and the more reputable counters will only count casualties that are backed up by at least 2 news sources. it's fairly safe to assume these are conservative figures and the real, unknowable but true figure is much higher and it is a matter of public record that our western governments have done nothing but create a huge mess and human tragedy on a scale not seen since world war 2. on the plus side, oil is a few dollars cheaper...

firing hundreds of millions of dollars of missiles into a target is, quite literally, the same as money getting tossed into a black hole. besides that... giving large amounts of money to military contractors and pumping large amounts of money into the army as a way to fix the economy was tried before...

during the last great depression...

by the nazi party in germany...

wasn't this topic something about trying to keep the news only on the sites that pay for the reportage? let's get back to that...