Slashdot Mirror

AN ONLINE trader who cheated the taxman out of more than £300,000 in VAT receipts has been given a suspended prison sentence. For five years Daniel Waslin, 35, failed to register his business for VAT as he made more than £2.6 million from the sales of remote control golf trolleys and garden furniture imported from China. He evaded paying £323,000 in VAT. HM Revenue and Customs found out about his online auction sales through import checks and he was prosecuted for tax evasion.

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/new...

Whilst I'm sure examples of this exist, it goes the other way too. I used to live somewhere that F1 teams started testing on a disused air strip. It was used occasionally for some motor sport previously but was inaudible outside of its immediate environs. When F1 teams moved in, areas that had been peaceful for decades (since the site strip was last used in WW2) were suddenly subject to a lot of noise - villages and urban areas miles and miles away from the site. It's not just the immediate surroundings of a race track for just the duration of the events that suffer at the hands of noise pollution caused by motor racing. This is an article I quickly googled, but it was going on for years- http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/new...

Authors can't (generally speaking, I suppose some poets and spoken-word types could) go on tour and perform their craft for a live audience.

Sure they can. It's called "a reading".

"tough shit, start waiting tables and give up the writing thing if you're not popular?"

And that is different from the current business model how exactly? Sure, it ain't as bad as in music industry, but still...

Unless you are selling at least tens of thousands of each book - you're not going to be making a living from writing alone.
At 10% royalty a $20 hard copy owned by a publisher and a $2 self-published, self-marketed e-book make the same amount of money per book for the author.
Granted, minus the advance, promotion and various other services that the publisher would provide. Also, minus any copyright limitations.

If anything, authors need to demand a larger piece of a smaller cake for the e-versions of their books.
Most of the publisher's costs are non-existent for e-books, just as most of the risk. Author would probably be better off self-publishing through amazon.

300 per block, WTF? +5 Insightful, WTFF?

I live in a big city (160,000 people) in England. There are just 59 cameras monitored by the local police, and they are monitored by one person. I live just over a mile from the city centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.

For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are published.

I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.

My theory is that someone (who had a point to make or an axe to grind) counted all the CCTV cameras in a particular small area - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then took that number, multiplied it by the area of the country, and ignored the fact that 99%+ are nothing to do with government or police, to make whatever point they were trying to make. No doubt some imbecile published it (Daily Mail I wouldn't be surprised to hear) and made it out to be a fact and a huge problem, people repeated it and so it became an urban legend.

I'm curious, where is it that you get the impression the UK has vastly more CCTV than anywhere else, aside from reading it on Slashdot?

Amen, wish I had a mod point for you. 300 per block, WTF? +5 Insightful, WTFF?

I live in a city of 160,000 people in England, there are just 59 cameras monitored by the local government, and they are monitored by one person. I live 1.5 miles outside the centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.

For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are even published.

I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.

My theory is, someone counted all the CCTV cameras - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then used that vastly-bigger number to make whatever point they were trying to make, and it sounds like a big problem, people repeated it and so it became a false meme.

I suppose you're referring to this, which affected eleven schools in a single city, and like I posted elsewhere:

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show 11 schools in the city are using personal biometric data to identify pupils, but one said today they had suspended the practice, after a local politician voiced concerns.

A law passed by the government gave information on this to the public, and a politician acted on his constituents' behalves to stop it from continuing. Sure, it's a dumb move, but it's a dumb move that's out in the open and in the process of being corrected, and that is happening because in this case the political process is working properly.

So no, our government doesn't fingerprint children in schools, unless you count one city where it was tried and rejected by the public and politicians alike.

There are occasions when they are in peoples' homes, albeit not on a wide scale. One of the ways that local law enforcement are trying to cut burglaries in specific areas is by installing covert surveilance cameras to gather evidence. Here's a link: http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/search/display.var.9279 10.0.spying_on_the_burglar.php