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The level of welfare spending in the UK at the moment is such that you could just give every man, woman and child in the country GBP 3000 (USD 5400 approx) every year, no questions asked. That works out as very nearly the current average household income!

GBP 3,000 is much smaller than the average income in the UK, which was GBP 23,607 in 2002, somewhat above the GBP 3,000 you quote. (This is an average, but given that the minimum wage is at least GBP 3.80 per hour (GBP 4.50 for those over 21), and assuming one works a 38 hour week 48 weeks of the year, this equates to a minimum income of GBP 6,931).

The difference between the money that goes into the welfare budget and comes out suggests that this is not a good use of money!

Surely, that depends whether you are unemployed, sick, disabled, mentally ill or living in poor accommodation, doesn't it? I presume you are none of the above. However, if a mentally ill person were to attack you in the street, you'd consider a welfare system quite desirable. If you were mugged or burgled, you might wonder if it would have been a good idea for the state to provide a safety net for that person before they turned to crime.

It would even be preferable to the current system if the entire government department responsible was simply abolished, all its bureaucrats fired, and the money paid directly to each citizen by the treasury.

Since the treasury doesn't actually own that money, surely it would be simpler not to tax citizens at all?

You know, you're probably living in the wrong country. There are places in the world without all this wasteful welfare baloney. We call them 'Third World Countries' -- perhaps you've seen them on the news -- their citizens tend to be a strange colour? Do you think that there might be even the slightest chance that there is a direct economic link between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support provided to the citizens of that country? It doesn't all boil down to this, but it's a significant contributory factor.

Cell phones use licensed spectrum, controlled by companies.

Spectrum is controlled and licensed by government agencies, in the the US, the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau of the FCC, Canada, Industry Canada, and the UK, the Radiocommunications Agency of the Department of Trade and Industry.

The licensing comes from a tradition of making spectrum organized to prevent interference.

Anyone who tries to use WiFi in a densely populated area, especially over a large area (e.g. linking various sites in the same city) can tell you, intereference can be a problem within the license-free (aka license-exempt) frequency ranges .

Sorry, there is no private funding of Beagle 2. It has been paid for as a consortium by the Department of Trade and Industry, ESA, the Wellcome Trust and PPARC. The involvement of Damien Hirst and Blur has been on a volunteer basis - both for their contributions and for the publicity they can give the project.

Best wishes,
Mike.

You might want to look into the 2002 EU teleworking agreement.
This page has a reasonable description (skip down to the bit about the main points) although some of the links seem to be broken.

The agreement is voluntary but lots of large companies do follow this. My own experience was that companies often prefer to have you work *part time* in the office rather than full time at home, to avoid the onus of a health and safety inspection of your house (I can't remember if this one is required under UK law, we have some regs which differ from the EU agreement). There are definite tax implications in the UK when you work from home, and you should allocate a room or an area in your house as your 'home office'. (the issue was, IIRC, that if the company provide you with furniture and/or equipment - as is often the case because of their health and safety duty of care - then this can be taxed as an additional benifit, unless you use it *exclusively* for work)

If you belong to a professional organization or union they will almost certainly be able to provide you with better advice than anyone /. . If you are self-assessed for tax you definitely want to contact the DTI/Revenue or your accountant to make sure you're not going to get screwed for extra tax.

You should also read this note on working outside of the UK.

Disclaimer: IANAL, but I did serve as a union official 3 years or so ago, and dealt with a couple of teleworking cases.

-Baz

thanks Google. The world makes sense again.

The DTI regs on redundancy and the regs on breach of contracts.
And, as an added bonus, the definition of various types of dismissal.
Enjoy!

The DTI regs on redundancy and the regs on breach of contracts.
And, as an added bonus, the definition of various types of dismissal.
Enjoy!

The DTI regs on redundancy and the regs on breach of contracts.
And, as an added bonus, the definition of various types of dismissal.
Enjoy!

There is an European Union directive which comes into effect after the 30th October which gives these 'guidelines' legal backing. A company advertising via email must be able to provide 'documented proof' of the consent of the sender to receive the email (although the acceptable forms of proofhave not yet been decided). While the act of buying a product from a company may be sufficient proof, any subsequent advertising should only be for similar products to the one(s) originally purchased. You can find out more info on this at the DTI web site

The UK will pay a high price in than high electric costs when it uglifies it's landscapes with windmills and it's shores with tideal generators.

Much of the proposed wind energy will come from large offshore sites in terratorial water, (Rockall is not only useful for cod fishing;-) which will be only barely visable from the shore. The UK (and ireland) are well endowed with wind an wave energy and consiquenlty are in an almost unique possition to be able to take good adavantage of the excess power while the technology is still young and inefficient. As this Government Consultation [pdf] points out.

Wave power schemes are idealy suited for incorperation with the offshore wind, as the infrastructure is there, and they would also provide some protection for the turbines in such a harsh environment.

As for tidal generators, such as the Severn barrage, the visual impact of the scheme would be minimal when compared to a bridge (which these projects usually incorporate). Though they have some environmental issues they are easily comparable to those of hydro schemes e.g..

Besides I would much rather look out on a wind farm than a gas platform or coal power plant, knowing that I was breathing clean fresh air.

In Europe we have regulations to prevent this - stipulation on maximum working week etc. However, in the way the regulations were implemented in the UK, it's standard practice for everyone to sign a contract that allows overtime working with no fixed maximum.

Of course, whether such a contractual clause has any legal validity at all is a different matter; see the DTI information on working time regulations.

The thing that always amazes me is that incompetent managers continue to equate longer hours with higher productivity. The UK has the longest hours and lowest statutory minimum holiday entitlement of any EU member state, yet it also has almost the lowest productivity by any major benchmark.

The population of the US seems prepared to put up with any amount of abuse from the big corporate employers and such, and when someone from elsewhere with three times the annual holiday allowance suggests that demanding a reasonable limit on their working hours is entirely appropriate, I've seen US citizens here on /. rant at them about how they don't know how good they've got it. They just don't realise how abusive their employers are compared to the rest of the western world... <sigh>

By the way, I work in the UK, and I'm paid a salary rather than an hourly rate (and no over-time). My contract specifies a minimum 37.5 hour week, and I work pretty close to that. The company makes a genuine effort to treat its employees well, so most of us are prepared to cut them some slack when deadlines come up, but ultimately it's a two-way business relationship, and there are always limits to what would be acceptable by either side.

In contrast, at the last place I worked, the management was so worried about their financial state that they actually started asking people to defer taking their holiday entitlement, because we couldn't bill the clients for days when people were on leave and cash flow was that bad. Needless to say, everyone started taking their holiday immediately to make sure they got it at all, and many of the good people started looking for alternative employment around that point. Go figure...

Even if the false description was a genuine error, customers would still be entitled to a refund.

Sure - I'll put an entry to a homepage in my /. details by the weekend, just need to get my ISP to create the domain name.

Well, yes, stuff must behave as advertised, definitely - isn't that common practice these days? Otherwise those Medicine Roadshow guys would still be around... Here's a summary of the UK Trades Descriptions Act anyway - an easy read, surprisingly.

Pirate radio stations! You must have them in the US, I used to DJ on a pirate radio station in the UK.

They're pretty easy to set up if you know a bit about transmitters. We used to have a few microwave links between us and the transmitter as well just incase the DTI found the transmitter while we were on air. This would give us time to get our records and decks out of there before they could catch us!

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A couple of other places you may want to complain to, the UK government's 'e-minister' and the 'e-envoy'. They also have an 'e-forum'

for some people to order data or keys to be given up.

Now, whilst I'm not a lawyer, here's my thoughts on reading the bill.

Part 1 sets up a register of 'approved providers of cryptographic support services'.

Interestingly, you don't need to be providing any service in the UK, to apply for approval. (Para 2.1 b ).

Part 2 allows the use of a digital signature, as a legal indicator if identity.

Para 7.2 basically says that if it looks like the signature is ment to be attatched, then it is. Given that you can use either a chunck of random data, or a procedure applied to the signature, (Para 7.3), and it must be certified as per para 7.1, it looks to me like you could, if you can packet sniff and spoof, read a message, then send a second message, claiming to be a signature of the sender, to the recipient. The reciptent would then be able to certify that signature, and, ta-da, you can sign that person up to what you want, with legal force. Fair? I have seen no point in the bill that states that the sender must certify his signature.

Part 3 is ther meaty bit - this is the part that allows your data / keys to be taken.

There are a number of mechanisms for getting authorisation to do such - two by my counting, as detailed in Schedule 1.

1 - Secretary of State, or a Judge, JP, Sheriff[0] etc issues a warrent.

2 - With written permission, but no actual warrent from same as above, or something along those lines[1].

These methods have various sub conditions, depending if they have your data, or if they think you are about to get encrypted data (which is enough for them to get a warrent to force you to decrypt it).

There's a particularly worrying batch of legalese in schedlue 1, that suggests that they don't always need a warrent, and can act on the say so of a senior polic officer, customs and excise commisioner, or, worryingly, a senior member of the military. The latter bit worries me a lot.

Hopefully my reading of it is wrong, anyone want to confirm?

[0] A Sheriff is a local magistrate, not a law enforecment offical (in Scotland)

[1] A particulary contorted batach of legalese in Schedule 1.2 - 1.4
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Refusing to decrypt the data when you're able to is certainly a failure to allow a legal search, but that's not the real problem with this law.

As it stands, you're required to produce the key and thrown in jail if you don't - regardless of whether you even posess the key in the first place. The only thing that counts is the police opinion on whether you posess the key, with the defendant required to prove their innocence, contrary to UK law elsewhere where prosecution are required to prove guilt. Speaking personally, I've got something like 1,000 floppy disks and several Spectrum data cassettes. The idea of having to prove that none of them held a key is a little worrying.

On top of that, my memory is that it's now an offence to tell anyone that you're being prosecuted under this law. Truly terrifying.

Anyway, two good URLs here:

• The bill. Whether the act contains any significant amendments, I don't know but none have been reported so make your own mind up...
• Secondly, some background information

Greg

There are several interesting clauses in it, to my eyes, to be found at http://www.dti.gov.uk/cii/el ec/ecbill_part_III.htm onwards.
In particular, I notice sections 10 (2) where (a) and (b) might give grounds for defence / opting-out, but "require" towards the end stamps on our freedom & privacy.
(3) (b) seems to allow for any means the requirer sees fit - I wonder what happens if they choose PGP-signed mail?

(11)(2) and (3) appear to leave a loop-hole; if you're required to release information believed to be held under a key system, might you only have to release "useful information" ('in an intelligible form'), not necessarily the *actual* information you've encrypted.

Big deal? Why've I gone to the trouble of looking all this up?
Because while it will only apply if the police demand it, which will probably only happen if they suspect you of something, the problem is that if we don't *exert* the basic human right to *privacy*, then someone will trample all over it later and you'll wake up powerless to fix things.

Here's the BBC article on the bill. It also provides a link to a copy of the actual draft bill.

You can read it for yourself: http://www.dti.gov.uk/cii/elec/elec_co m.html
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