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Running Great Britain? There's an App For That!
judgecorp writes "Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron will get a personalised iPad app to help him run the country. The 'government dashboard' will include health waiting list figures, crime statistics, economic statistics and a real-time news feed. Cameron is a committed Apple user — but British members of Parliament have only been allowed iPads in the House of Commons since March 2011."
Angry Birds will be running the country.
as "Ruining Great Britain"?
Stop making apps for the sake of making an app. If the solution doesn't require any specific equipment on the device, just write make it a website.
"Cabinet Office developers are currently building the customised iPad app so the Prime Minister can remain abreast of government business . . . is expected to be ready by March."
I'd love to work for the government contractor that got that contract. As if the MPs expenses scandal wasn't bad enough, now we're bankrolling the Prime Minister's iTunes account.
"The app will essentially act as a government dashboard, providing the Prime Minister with all the latest information from across Whitehall – including the latest NHS waiting-list figures, crime statistics, unemployment numbers, and a wide variety of other data – at a glance."
I just hope that we, the taxpayers who are paying for this development work, will get a version of the app that we can use ourselves. It's fine if they scrub out the sensitive internal government data that it's (hopefully) tracking, but a sanitised version appropriate for public consumption would still be quite useful. I'd be interested to know things like crime and unemployment statistics, which can then be used to judge how well the Conservative government is actually doing.
Presumably you also criticized GWB, who literally took 3 times as many vacation days as Obama, right?
Dev accounts can load apps directly onto factory standard iOS devices - it'd be a bitch to chase down bugs otherwise!
Just put him to playing Civilization or the like, and tell him he's running the country.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
While your country is in a rescission, your people are in the streets protesting, and having to budget for a simple can of beans what does the government do?
Buy the most expensive, most shiny status symbol toy cause they cant be bothered to check their fucking email at their desk.
Someone else has already mentioned dev accounts, but it's also possible to run an enterprise app store. Perhaps not worth it for just one iPad but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the way they go since it will be seen as the proper approach.
I have no idea why the summary says MPs are only allowed iPads in the House of Commons. Members are allowed to use smartphones or tablet computers, there are no brand restrictions placed upon them.
Politicians are hypocritical! Shock horror.
I'm in Scotland and we've got the Nationals in 'power' at the moment (we get Education, Health, Income Tax, Law and some others, but money and legislation on Power, Defence, Foreign Policy etc. comes from Westminster). There will be an Independence referendum in the next year or so and I'm still undecided myself which way I'll vote. There are pros and cons for each side. The biggest Pro would be finally kicking the Tories out of Scotland.
Sure, they got that bit of the Borders, but there's about 10 people living there and half of them are English. Ofcourse, then we're left with Labour as our most right-wing party of note, since our National Party are about as left as the Liberals.
The biggest Con would be keeping our economy working. Especially with the way Europe is at the moment (and no amount of increased trade with Norway will counter that).
What I'm scared of is that I don't know enough to make an informed choice. And that people in general have lost faith in politics in a broad sense because they feel they don't know enough, and don't CARE enough to find out. They just trust that each party is pretty much the same as the other ones and just vote for the person that shouts the loudest at them.
Here in Scotland we have Holyrood, who defer to Westminster for certain issues, who defer to the EU on top of that. I know here we have three systems to worry about, and three Elections to vote in. We vote in MSPs, MPs and MEPs. Each parliament is so monolithic and entwined in their own red tape that the general population don't know what each one of them *really* does, and who controls what and are so fatigued by it that voter turnout for the last Scottish Election was 50%. Half the people in Scotland didn't turn up to vote.
It's 2am here. I'm rambling. Hopefully some of it made sense :P
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Waiting lists are inevitable in a system where demand slightly outstrips supply and so are valuable metrics on how the system in operating. That's not to say emergency treatment is restricted, but you will probably have to wait a while to get your bunions treated. It seems to me a sign of a mature and caring democracy where this metric *is* the primary concern of a society. Oh... and no one believes it is "free". It is only "free" at the point of delivery, we know we pay a lot for it and that's why we need to make sure we're receiving value for the money. This is why the metric is important.