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No iPhone Apps, Please — We're British

Posted by samzenpus on from the none-for-us-thank-you dept.

GMGruman writes "The BBC has stirred up quite a row in Britain about a shocking use of taxpayer funds: creating iPhone apps to provide citizens services. As InfoWorld blogger Galen Gruman notes, it's apparently bad in Britain for the government to use modern technology during a recession, a mentality he likens as a shift from 'cool Britannia' to 'fool Britannia.'"

3 of 393 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Maybe something everybody can use? by Hamsterdan · · Score: 1, Troll

    Interface and OS.. Many reasons why I'm running Leopard on my AMD dual core. And I'm keeping my jailbroken iPhone. The interface just works...

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    I've got better things to do tonight than die.
  2. Re:Maybe something everybody can use? by Hamsterdan · · Score: 0, Troll

    Besides, it's BSD...

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    I've got better things to do tonight than die.
  3. Re:Supporting citizens vs supporting a platform by Tom · · Score: 0, Troll

    Not everyone has an iPhone, so an iPhone-only app is stupid.

    Errr, what?

    Who modded this up? Please go and give your license back. Any license. Actually, all of them.

    So, things that is only useful to a minority of people should not be done by the government, yes? Which means they should stop spending any money that helps the blind or disabled. Or the unemployed. Heck, I'm neither blind nor unemployed, so what the fuck is the government doing spending my money on this shit?

    Oh yes, I am picking extreme examples, but the point remains. Very few government actions are really intended for everyone, or even the majority.

    If this were about dumping the existing options and leaving only an iPhone app as your way to, say, get unemployment benefits, then yes by all means the outcry would be justified.

    But it isn't.

    So all the bullshit jealousy whining is just that.

    The rational look should be exactly what the government did: Check what the costs are, check what the benefits to how many people would be, then decide whether the costs are worth the benefit. If it costs £1000 to do something, and 100 people will each have a benefit of £50, then the government just saved its citizen £4000. As long as it is not always the same group of people that benefit, that's perfectly good.

    Because, you know, otherwise they could never get anything done, especially not with new technologies.

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    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org