Slashdot Mirror

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/4003063.stm

Here in the UK at least, a PTA is a Parent Teacher Association.

I suppose a link to the BBC article, and its many comments, is too much to ask?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13874818

I'm not convinced that even the BBC could be trusted tracking my every move while this app is installed.

BBC? BBC declines to take any responsibility for the application or data collection, pointing the finger to Epitiro. And on the epitiro site, I couldn't find any more specific info. In my opinion, the best way for epitiro credibility would be to release the app in open source - (but I guess it won't happen).

Excepts, so that you can't say you weren't warned:

2. You acknowledge that whilst this is a BBC Survey, the App belongs to a third party which is not in anyway connected to the BBC. The BBC does not endorse the App in anyway whatsoever.
...
4. We do not warrant that the functions contained in the App will be error-free, that defects will be corrected by Epitiro as the provider of the App or that any software within the App will be free of bugs and viruses.
...
7. We understand from Epitiro that they will not publish any personal information or collate any personal information from your use of the App. However, the underlying data will remain the property of Epitiro who may create their own map/site afterwards.

Way to go boys, I'm proud of ya (seriously!)

But I sincerely hope you covered your tracks, and covered 'em well, because the guy who blew the lid off this whole thing was found dead in his apartment today in "unexplained but not suspicious" circumstances (seriously, WTF?)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14194623

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1P6KUyOhBc

And why they never buy the Sun:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4258455.stm

Basically the Sun isn't even fit to line a birdcage.

--
BMO

All you need to do is wear a welding mask as your Pastafarian religous headwear.

It works in Austria. G'day mate.

Not quite.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14135523

From TFA: "Later a police spokesman explained that the licence was issued because Mr Alm's face was fully visible in the photo."

They are bankrupting Hollywood

The UK has long lost it White Russian and ~ww2/cold war mass draft like testing generation to find needed languages.
So the GCHQ will reach out to schools with "ambassadors" to make maths, crypto ect. seem fun and help with languages of long term national interest like Russian and Arabic.
GCHQ staff teach 'future spies' in schools (March 2011) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12675368
A challenge just builds on a basic need for finding the next generation of gifted young people. Getting them young also allows better filtering and testing for a future "Katharine Gun".
GCHQ translator cleared over leak http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3485072.stm

The UK has long lost it White Russian and ~ww2/cold war mass draft like testing generation to find needed languages.
So the GCHQ will reach out to schools with "ambassadors" to make maths, crypto ect. seem fun and help with languages of long term national interest like Russian and Arabic.
GCHQ staff teach 'future spies' in schools (March 2011) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12675368
A challenge just builds on a basic need for finding the next generation of gifted young people. Getting them young also allows better filtering and testing for a future "Katharine Gun".
GCHQ translator cleared over leak http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3485072.stm

I don't think the picture you're painting of a typical Somali pirate has anything to do with reality...

According to the article, they are more like thugs with lots of cash and material items, not unlike what you would see in the US, rather than a bunch of starving people trying to feed their families.

Apologies, offtopic too. Wholeheartedly agree- with one caveat. I love the NHS and have had almost uniformly excellent treatment, thankfully have never experienced much like this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010mrzt which was a real eye-opener. This is when our fear of the right-wing free-market (usually fully justified) allows astonishingly poor practices to arise. The purveyors of ideological fear-mongering are part of the reason this is allowed to fly under the radar.

Microsoft is very good at this. It is a formula that has worked for them since the early 80s.

Really? I am struggling to think of an example of this from Microsoft. Of the leaks that they have had, I can't think of an instance when they have been caught out doing it deliberately (as opposed to bloggers just speculating this). Microsoft are much more likely to blatantly put out a press release to announce something long before it is ready to be released, in the hope that this will kill off the competition.

The next time you see something leak about that new Rick Roll of an OS they plan to call "Windows 8" look closely, it is no accident, it is pure marketing.

Why would they need to leak information about Windows 8 when they are actively previewing it?

> Until you get into the kinds of shows that Netflix, Amazon, and PSN just can't provide, such as Monday Night Football or The Rachel Maddow Show. Or have they picked up news and sports lately?

I don't watch sports, neither does my wife, so I don't really know where to point you for sports. I think there's an option for that somewhere though, maybe even on PSN or Amazon. I just don't know.

As for news: why would you watch news on television? I stay current on news by reading news web sites. There are a few US sites I use regularly, plus Google News for "trending news", and BBC for a "foreign" perspective.

Torture has been outlawed in Israel since 1999, and any evidence gathered through torture would be inadmissable, since it would be considered gathered illegally.

According to reliable reports, Israeli torture continues.

'tis not just her anymore - ouch:

oh my

Oh.. but it has been repeated recently...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8571929.stm

This is from 2010.

Except monkeys aren't legal persons, and therefore can't hold copyright, enter into a contract. I would say that the copyright belongs then to the closest human in the causal chain, i.e. the person who gave them the camera.

It's similar to claiming that your cat agreed to an EULA when you set everything up and wait for it to tread on the mouse. Hooey. The animal is merely a servant of the human master.

Tying it nicely together: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13286470

And suddenly this story from 2002 finally makes sense:

US activists demand lawyers for chimps

It's not just at the NoTW that fingers are now being pointed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14112097

(mentions both the Sunday Times and the Sun)

They won't. At the moment they're all USA companies, after all: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14043293

The Torness reactor was shut down on June 28th because jellyfish clogged the seawater inlet filters.

I was going to mention that until I noticed you already had, and while searching the BBC site for a story link, I also saw that an Israeli nuclear plant was threatened by jellyfish less than a week ago.

Either this sort of thing is very common, there's something happening that makes it common just now (aside from the fact it's summer, else we'd be hearing about it every year), or it's pure coincidence.

The Torness reactor was shut down on June 28th because jellyfish clogged the seawater inlet filters.

I was going to mention that until I noticed you already had, and while searching the BBC site for a story link, I also saw that an Israeli nuclear plant was threatened by jellyfish less than a week ago.

Either this sort of thing is very common, there's something happening that makes it common just now (aside from the fact it's summer, else we'd be hearing about it every year), or it's pure coincidence.

Nevertheless, oil also has to be transported, and some think that the trans-Afghan pipeline was one of the mayor reasons for the invasion. timeline A specific piece of interest is that a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, Niaz Naik, claimed to have known by mid.-July 2001 that there was a plan to attack Afghanistan before winter 2001.

Further evidence – it's systematic. They did it to Torness nuclear plant in Scotland recently too http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-13971005

A timely post given the headlines from the UK today. Britain's high-tech surveillance society is now in a royal mess, shall we say, with the Prime Minister, the police, and the press as major players. The corruption has just been shown to reach into law enforcement in a widespread way.

to see that at least they are actually detecting and disciplining breaches, since I was already assuming the worst.

If they were to have the right security and ethical culture, it's not implausible that they have a high detection rate when running a full access log, hopefully cross-referenced to some sort of case allocation log, in which case 900 out of ~242k is less than 0.4% of staff in a 3 year period. On the other hand it is possible the 900 is only from audit sampling, in which case since the sample size is unknown the actual rate can only be anything higher than that.

Incidentally this is bigger news due to it's related nature with the News of the World investigation. Since the recent Slashdot story the "news" paper has been shut down and today there has been arrests of both the editor and a sub-editor at the time on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption allegations. The investigation and the story seems to be turning it's attention to allegations of bribes paid to the police for information, having hit what surely is as deep as the depravity goes on the phone hacking (I've said this a few times before and been proven wrong) by discovering targets included the phones of families of victims of the 7/7 London bombing, soldiers killed in Iraq/Afghanistan and murdered children.

Hugh Grant 'exposed' the hacking. Well, in his world he did.

I'm mostly surprised that they more or less got away with tapping into nearly every one's voice-mail but only now did it become a fatal problem.

Amusing, but I suspect that's not the right one. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-14001576 references "The Gourmet Cafe", which is at "9, the shambles", http://coord.info/map?ll=53.928121,-1.386126&z=20 - nearly half a km away. I suspect the real GC has been completely removed, not just "needs maintenance" :-/

Update: News of the World to close amid hacking scandal. full statement here.

Update: News of the World to close amid hacking scandal. full statement here.

This is offtopic but do I believe that we're in this war to support the rebels? It can't possibly be for something we want. It has happened once, it will happen again.

Spamming is an economic problem, and until we employ economic solutions, spamming will never truly be defeated.

Yet here in the real world, spam has been defeated. Spam doesn't include the crap mailing list you signed up to a few years ago and can't be bothered to unsubscribe.

But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.

The problem is that when people demand "equality", they also mean more rights than others. Whether we're talking the right to a job for public sector workers (ie. the right not to be fired, even if they sleep on the job every day) or the "right" to force women to hide their face, demanded by "certain religions" (let's please stop pretending that doing so is somehow a freely made choice. That's like claiming people voluntarily take out insurance with Al Capone). All of these "equality" demands boil down to the one thing : forcing others to see you as their betters, preferably for reasons that have nothing to do with the real world.

Unions, leaders and members, see themselves as better than the real world because they follow the intellectual stream of the 70's and 80's. They see themselves as obviously smarter and more capable than everyone else. But they are rank amateurs compared to the religious groups, especially that one we all know I'm talking about from the middle eastern shithole, have even less accomplishments to vouch for their self-invented superiority. Well unless you see genocide as proving your superiority, because while these guys participated in the holocaust that is not at all the only blood on their hands. Genocide is, of course, how muslims "prove" their "superiority" since the day islam started (literally the day, read history).

And for a really, really disheartening tale of what muslims did to prove their superiority, look up, just for kicks, just how many black slaves were abducted by muslims to serve in arab countries (the number makes American colonial history look like a drop of water against an ocean). Then visit one of the arab countries, and notice : not a single one survived. Then read up a bit more on history, and look up how they died*.

* for those to lazy to read the article : despite the article's intense focus on excusing the islamic imposition of slavery on half the globe, how it has nothing to do with islam and so on, the article continues to say that it is accepted islamic canon that allah ordered the profet to capture children, sell them as slaves, rape them and even kill them after raping them, CHILDREN, for fun. But don't worry, such things have "nothing to do with islam". I wonder if they would say the same about the holocaust and nazi's/hitler (but I did manage to look up a few BBC transcripts from 1940-41 and yes, they *did* do the same with the holocaust, that the treatment of jews/cripples/... had nothing to do with "our friend" Hitler and their "championing of the poor")

Really? A bomb... that's a danger to people on the street... yet small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand? Is shrapnel really considered a terrorist threat nowadays?

They're called "Hand Grenades" for a reason, you know. It's because they can fit in the palm of one's hand. And they have a long history of being a danger to people.

Or did he think its antimatter explosion would eradicate the entire city block?

No, but he probably thought that a modern anti-personnel grenade was capable of throwing fragments over two hundred meters away. That makes for an area about _five_ city blocks long that could get quite uncomfortable for passers-by, with a "what's left of you will wish you were dead" zone about a third of a city block across at the centre. The real thing is nothing at all like Counter-Strike.

But, you know what? You're right. I'm just being silly. After all, nobody ever sets off bombs in England, so I'm sure there's no reason for anyone to worry about anything. Ever.

Right, and it's much easier to do so when you control a huge percentage of the mobile space. Again, my post was wondering if Apple would be able to resist that temptation.

Well, in the past they did not accept into their store apps that offered alternative to they own products and services.

In the early days of its App Store, Apple rejected two Google applications - Voice and Latitude.

The company said that, in the case of Voice, it replicated one of the iPhone's core functions - something which broke the App Store's terms of use.

Apple's rules were later relaxed, following an investigation by the US Federal Communications Commission.

Source http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14027466

A News Corp subsidiary that happens to be a tabloid (which as we all know don't count as real journalism) hired a private investigator to complete his own investigation on the murder of a girl. The private investigator, acting as a lone agent, "hacked in" (Is it hacking when you guess the passcode? 1-2-3-4?) to her voicemail and used a message on it to add to his investigation.

Firstly- they used information gathered from the phone hacking (and which can only have been gathered from phone hacking) as the basis for a front page story. The editors and journalists involved have exactly as much responsibility for the methods used as the PI.

Secondly, this is just one more leaf in a very mucky story. Among stories of hacking celebrities, senior politicians, the royal family, 7/7 terrorism victims, and a raft of other murder victims, other highlights include bribing the police and monitoring and intimidating a police officer investigating a PI with News International connections. And yes, hacking is still hacking even if brute forcing the password only takes 2 attempts...

(Incidentally, watch the interview with the NI executive in the second link. I don't know what the poor man did to deserve being given that job, but it's one of the funniest things I've seen in weeks. The poor chap doesn't stand a chance when the party line is so intrinsically stupid and illogical.)

This is not the only criminal offence, just the worst (so far)

No-one in the Greek government is demanding tax cuts, they are looking at decreasing spending, Greece's problem has come from widespread tax avoidance by the general population mixed with massive overspending by the government. The problem got as bad as it did because the Greek governments have successively lied about their budgets. The Greek protests are about the massive cuts mixed with a large scale sell off of nationally owned assets.

As for constant the Conservatives are heading a coalition government in the UK, a quick Google shows no planned tax cuts by the government and they only party in the UK asking for one is Labour .

No-one in the Greek government is demanding tax cuts, they are looking at decreasing spending, Greece's problem has come from widespread tax avoidance by the general population mixed with massive overspending by the government. The problem got as bad as it did because the Greek governments have successively lied about their budgets. The Greek protests are about the massive cuts mixed with a large scale sell off of nationally owned assets.

As for constant the Conservatives are heading a coalition government in the UK, a quick Google shows no planned tax cuts by the government and they only party in the UK asking for one is Labour .

No-one in the Greek government is demanding tax cuts, they are looking at decreasing spending, Greece's problem has come from widespread tax avoidance by the general population mixed with massive overspending by the government. The problem got as bad as it did because the Greek governments have successively lied about their budgets. The Greek protests are about the massive cuts mixed with a large scale sell off of nationally owned assets.

As for constant the Conservatives are heading a coalition government in the UK, a quick Google shows no planned tax cuts by the government and they only party in the UK asking for one is Labour .

No-one in the Greek government is demanding tax cuts, they are looking at decreasing spending, Greece's problem has come from widespread tax avoidance by the general population mixed with massive overspending by the government. The problem got as bad as it did because the Greek governments have successively lied about their budgets. The Greek protests are about the massive cuts mixed with a large scale sell off of nationally owned assets.

As for constant the Conservatives are heading a coalition government in the UK, a quick Google shows no planned tax cuts by the government and they only party in the UK asking for one is Labour .

> Google was a big corporation determined to increase its revenue by all possible means

Actually, no. Give credit where it's due: Google have shown themselves to be better than that.

It really is sad to see US and UK companies playing this territorial-creep card ... oh well, maybe when their citizens start getting called for extradition to other countries they'll either explicitly acknowledge the double standard, or live with it and start making their citizens subject to laws from random places.

What do you mean "maybe"? It's already happening now.

I don't agree or disagree with the post but I do think that the abundance of automatic drive cars are to blame. Cruise control is a bad idea too.

Of course, automatic drive cars are pretty much a necessity in countries where people generally travel long distances to work. In the UK travelling more than 30 minutes to work is unacceptable for most. A car journey is short enough that having a manual gearbox is not a problem. I would guess that manual shift is more suitable to the narrow roads with corners, hills and the like.

I whole heartedly agree. As Mr. Miyagi (The Karate Kid) said, "No such thing as bad student, only bad teacher."

A similar incident happened with myself. The teacher wanted me to write in cursive. I didn't want to. Then after a few tests she said my h looked like a k. There was only like a month and a half and me and Chasity both had a star for every week for getting a 100% on the weekly spelling test. I knew she wasn't going to miss a word going forward, so I didn't even try. I never did reclaim the same interest in anything related to English with the same gusto. There were several times I was not encouraged in school. But this article helps me see an answer to this problem.

NASA has reneged on its deal with the ESA in a move that cripples international space ventures, damages Mars exploration and inflicts severe damage on non-American engineering companies. This is blatant nationalism over and above science OR industry. This is NOT acceptable and given that this isn't the least bit unusual (NASA's failure to have a shuttle replacement reneges on ISS contractual obligations, for example), it would not surprise me if other nations stop cooperating with NASA at all. Why bother, if NASA is never going to come through on the deal?

Yes, this would be somewhat cynical - all national organizations are going to put those they call "their own" first, above any actual merit or any legal obligation to which they are tied. It's cronyism on a national scale rather than a familial one. Nonetheless, incidence by other nations have tended to not be as... ...expensive as NASA's.

It's also a bit unreasonable, given that NASA is pwned by corrupt politicians buying voters rather than being devolved and semi-autonomous, to actually give more of a damn about the science than it is about the views of those politicians who can kill NASA utterly any year they like by simply eliminating it as a budget item and transferring all GFE to the military. As I've said before, a BBC-like charter system (guaranteed income for X years no matter what in exchange for providing Y services with zero government interference on how those services are provided, with all ownership being by the organization and not the government and all profit thus derived being independent of the charter's fixed income) would be the superior system for NASA. It HAS to eliminate politics, not just in part but in whole, if it is to survive, let alone have even an iota of respect from anyone.

We have a story of an AC about a single instance modded informative. We have an incident involving a pair of serial killers (raped and killed 12 people remember) being shot with a hunting rifle, yet the closest stories google can find are a snopes false granny story and a real robbery incident with a handgun (described by the NRA, who should know, as "among the more dramatic"), so somehow the story of shooting two serial killers doesn't fit in. Now, there are lots of people reading Slashdot, and it's possible that this is a true story, but there is no way it should be modded up without at least an account name to back it up. The advice given is extremely dangerous. If people stop helping each other then the "bad people will win".

Now, to the original AC, and assuming that this was a true story; Please think again about how you say what you say. Your sister may have made a misjudgement, but you have to come to terms with that and realise that what she did was the right thing and most of what happened to her was bad luck. There are ways she could have been more careful; but in the end everybody has to get involved, we have to take some risk and 99.9% of the time it works out fine. If we don't do that then horrible things happen:

• There have been experiments done where thousands of people will not help lost children and even those that do are terrified of the consequences.
• There are many stories like this one where a two year old girl died because a bricklayer was afraid to help.
• Random strangers get ignored on the street
• simple stories about jump starting cars will cease to exist (and I thank all those people who have helped me with mine)

It's not enough to just say "call the cops". There aren't enough cops to investigate every possible strange situation, they won't be able to come reliably if they to. Call the cops means that most of the time people will do nothing. Worse, we end up with a passive society of afraid people who can't act on their own and expect "the authorities" to do everything for them. And even worse, with media hysteria stories like this, we get a culture where those that intervene are considered abnormal or even begin to believe they will get into trouble. You say:

The world has changed. If you are nice, you will be taken advantage of by those who aren't.

Yes; according to the US Department of Justice, the world has changed; it's much safer than it used to be.

The rate of reported rape among women decreased by 10% from 1990 to 1995 (80 per 100,000 compared to 72 per 100,000) (Greenfeld, 1997). In 1995, 97,460 forcible rapes were reported to the police nationwide, representing the lowest number of reported rapes since 1989.

Instead, we have to teach people a bit of a different lesson. Be extremely careful about interactions which are initiated by the other side. Make a visible call to a friend; give the license plate and description of the car that you are going to help. Single women don't help groups of men on their own without first making a call. Single men (who are actually most subject to violence) are careful too. Use judgement. But in the end, most of the time you just have to take some risk in life.

"In the UK you cannot buy a dog in any shop. You must go directly to a breeder. This requires research and investigation."

This isn't true, there are shops in the UK that legally allow you to simply purchase dogs. It's a disgusting practice, and it exists.

The Kennel Club in particular is a fine example of who not to use, because not only have their breeders been some of the worst responsible for genetic disorders through inbreeding, they even tried to whitewash an investigation into it with the party line "We do our best to ensure blah blah blah":

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7569064.stm

But again the real question is why go to a breeder at all? They'll have the same breeds in rescue centres, and your view that rescued dogs are only for experienced owners is completely false. Unlike with most breeders rescue centres have canine behaviour specialists, they often have the dog's background (i.e. if the dog was handed in because the owner died, or went into debt) and many other details about it- you can find a dog much more fitting for your experience and lifestyle than you ever could guarantee buying a puppy from a breeder. The Dogs Trust for example makes you fill in a form before you're even allowed to look at the dogs available for rehoming, and they will help match a dog to you.

You cannot ever guarantee a new puppy will have not develop behavioural problems but you can be pretty certain say, a year or two old rescue dog with a history that has no behavioural problems will stay that way, so your assertion that rescue dogs are more problematic couldn't be more in contrast with reality. Unless you specifically adopt a problem rescue dog on the understanding that you can look after it, rescue dogs are much easier for new and inexperienced owners.

Again, there is absolutely no beneficial reason to go to a breeder for an animal like a dog or a cat.

Find someone who is competent at reading comprehension and show them the bit I quoted. They'll tell you that GP's words clearly imply that for something to be in balance it must not change, i.e. balance = static, dynamic = not balance. Read. The. Words.

My acrobat is a counter-example. So are the foxes and rabbits, so I don't know why you're disagreeing with me or what your point is, other than waving your dick. Do trolls have them?

It's exactly analogous to him saying "Whales are not fish; they have lungs and so they're mammals" and me bringing up lungfish or reptiles. And then you making snide remarks and claiming "ha ha, fucktard, reptiles don't live in the sea!" - even though some do.

Not that nature doesn't appear to balance out but there is no balancing mechanism in place.

I never said there was. Perhaps my choice of example caused you to assume that I believed in some kind of purposeful actor. Well, I neither meant nor said anything of the sort; it was merely an example of something that moves and yet remains in balance. Balanced != static, remember? In fact, I almost chose prey/predators or commodity prices (arguably the same thing) and for some bizarre reason chose not to.

However there is a selection bias in which systems get studied, in the same way that there's a lot of history about the British and Roman empires and considerably less about, say, the Belgian and Seleucid ones.

It is VERY possible for the foxes to eat all the rabbits. No magic rebalancing act. Nature has plenty of example in all the extinct species.

Another strawman. Where did I mention anything like magic? However did I, or did I not, mention unstable systems and how, by their very nature, they disappear? If all the foxes had died out before we came along then they wouldn't be there for us to study, would they? That, not-so-smartass, was the point.

You might find these other BBC programmes educational and informative.