My point was that in a religion based legal/political system the logic of the religion is an integral part of the system (and I include the US and UK in this, even though I'm an atheist I still live in a country where the monarch is "defender of the faith" and we habitually swear on a bible in court). Whether this is a good thing or not is another issue.
Islamic art is fascinating, because depictions of humans and nature are discouraged to a greater or lesser degree, from "no pictures of the Prophet Mohammed, PBUH" to "no pictures of anything living", much of it is geometric and mathematical. There are some pretty cool demonstrations of various types of symmetry, some attempts at Penrose-style tiling and lots of other pieces of science/art which were produced when most of Europe was still either living in a mud hut or debating whether or not the mud-hut-dwellers were actually human or just a lesser degree of animal. Frankly, if I was going to be forced to pick a religion then Islam would win over Christianity simply because it has historically encouraged scientific thought instead of trying to suppress it.
They're not dictating laws to companies in other countries. They're not saying Twitter can't operate as they do, just that they're not prepared to assist them once the data hits the Pakistan border. This is equivalent to any western country blocking access to data (copyright infringement, child pornography, $randomEvil), even though it may be considered legal in the country they're hosted in.
There are two main issues here. The first is the rights of a country to limit internet access in line with their own laws. This could be holocaust denial in Germany, incitement to murder in the UK or copyright infringement in the US, the religion aspect has nothing to do with it (and given that no-images-of-the-prophet-Mohammed is a central tennant of Islam intended to prevent idol worship it's perfectly understandable).
The second issue is whether it's worth trying to block the offending sites when it's unlikely to be effective and there are pre-existing legal mechanisms. If I was to call for the murder of all members of $ethnicMinority then that's illegal in the UK, so should the UK government's response be to block Slashdot or to prosecute me? I'd argue that the latter is far more effective in every way, whilst protecting the freedoms of other Slashdot users.
Should I do the same but breaking the rules of another country (eg holocause denial is legal in the UK but not Germany) then it's down to the pre-existing extradition channels.
See above - you don't have the book in front of you when you're searching for it, and publishers websites etc don't have barcodes for the most part, just the ISBN. Keypad is quicker than copy/paste.
I can drive safely while texting. The process goes like this:
1: Pick up phone.
2: Try to find "text" button while keeping my eyes on the road and fully concentrating on possible hazards.
3: Realise that's impossible.
4: Pull over.
5: Text.
Web pages about books don't usually have a barcode and then have to manually enter the ISBN into the stock system - and before you ask, typing on a keypad is faster than highlight -> CTRL-C -> CTRL-V.
Indeed - I worked in a bookshop where we were constantly entering ISBN numbers, a 13 digit string. It's an absolute nightmare to do on the top row, but you can learn to very quickly touch-type on a keypad in minutes. For normal typing yes you've got a point, but for anything involving continual entry of numeric data a keypad is so much faster and accurate it's unbelievable.
The "no pseudonyms" issue is the one thing that stops me using it.
The simple solution is to delete your G+ account, this will have no effect whatsoever on your other Google services, and you're free to keep your account pseudonymous on every Google service other than G+. Just be careful which buttons you click as you delete G+, there's a "delete everything related to my account" option in there somewhere, but it's all made pretty obvious.
So you believe that finding serious wrongdoing is a required outcome for any police stop? Way to ensure the police either miss the important stuff or feel pressured into "finding" something...
I'd rather have more unnecessary disclosure than less required disclosure, something Slashdot has always suffered. Fair play to the submitter as far as I'm concerned.
After a freedom of information request Leicester City Council recently admitted that they are "unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council's emergency plan".
The point is that the law is going to recognise that making a reasonable statement based on proper scientific data is demonstrably true, and as such cannot be libel. The internationally recognised process of peer review will be considered the arbiter of "proper scientific data" (my phrase). It leaves the door open for cases involving poorly collected data, I'm imagining something like one cosmetics company suing another because they do they suggest their product is better than the plaintiff's based on a biased sample of 300.
Bloggers, journalists and the like will have some protection if they're quoting peer reviewed data/comments in context because if the original isn't libellous then they can't be guilty of repeating it.
Facebook isn't a community, it's an advert serving system. You could quite legitimately say "Facebook users are a community", but Facebook itself is simply a system for delivering adverts to eyeballs. As for "your" content, as soon as you post it you grant Facebook non-exclusive rights to use it in any way they see fit. I suppose you could try invoicing them...
That's like saying people should be paid by the government for filling in their tax returns. The "users" aren't Facebook's customers, the advertisers are. The entire point is targetted advertising, the more information people post the more the adverts can be targetted and the more advertisers will pay. Facebook is an advertising platform, nothing more, the "social" aspect is just the hook to get the eyeballs to connect to the adverts.
That's why we have written laws about what is and isn't allowed, and police officers carry radios which they can use to clarify the law in an unusual situation.
I would certainly include "stopping a car that has a relatively high level of radioactivity" in "things police should be allowed to do". This wasn't a random unjustified stop. If you want a car analogy, it's like a police officer stopping a car because the boot (trunk) is on fire and the driver hasn't noticed, it's not a stop with a view to prosecution for any wrong-doing, it's a stop for safety reasons.
A low level dirty bomb made from medical grade material would be very effective indeed. All you have to do is spread some radioactive material in a very busy public spot (sports stadium, political building etc) and then call it in. The resulting media and political panic will cause far more "terror" than the situation warrants, and the threat of lawyers in the future will make the cleanup ridiculously protracted and expensive. "Terrorists" don't create the terror these days, politicians and the media do. If the actual threat was in any way related to the fuss made then we'd make a much bigger deal over road safety and a cure for cancer.
And the guy in question not having any problem with it! "Apatow was more curious than annoyed by the incident."
So the conversation probably went:
"Good afternoon sir, I've stopped you because your car seems to be radioactive"
"Yes, I've just had a medical procedure involving a radioactive isotope, here's a letter from the doctor."
"Thank you sir, sorry for the inconvenience."
"That's quite alright, those detectors are very sensitive aren't they?"
"Yes sir, have a nice day."
So in other words, "policeman does the job he is paid to do and nobody cares except people responding in an alarmist manner on some website or other".
You know, on Slashdot they would have covered this from an entirely different angle, looking at the technology required to pick up relatively low radiation levels from cars. Oh....hang on...
Who's going to do the minimum wage jobs when they don't have to? We already have this problem in the UK where it's more profitable to be unemployed than earn minimum wage, if it wasn't for immigrant workers you wouldn't be able to get a meal or a clean hotel room in some cities.
Agreed, but we're not going to see icons disappear because they're now considered a "vital branding element" by the graphic designers who think they're programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that in a religion based legal/political system the logic of the religion is an integral part of the system (and I include the US and UK in this, even though I'm an atheist I still live in a country where the monarch is "defender of the faith" and we habitually swear on a bible in court). Whether this is a good thing or not is another issue.
Islamic art is fascinating, because depictions of humans and nature are discouraged to a greater or lesser degree, from "no pictures of the Prophet Mohammed, PBUH" to "no pictures of anything living", much of it is geometric and mathematical. There are some pretty cool demonstrations of various types of symmetry, some attempts at Penrose-style tiling and lots of other pieces of science/art which were produced when most of Europe was still either living in a mud hut or debating whether or not the mud-hut-dwellers were actually human or just a lesser degree of animal. Frankly, if I was going to be forced to pick a religion then Islam would win over Christianity simply because it has historically encouraged scientific thought instead of trying to suppress it.
They're not dictating laws to companies in other countries. They're not saying Twitter can't operate as they do, just that they're not prepared to assist them once the data hits the Pakistan border. This is equivalent to any western country blocking access to data (copyright infringement, child pornography, $randomEvil), even though it may be considered legal in the country they're hosted in.
There are two main issues here. The first is the rights of a country to limit internet access in line with their own laws. This could be holocaust denial in Germany, incitement to murder in the UK or copyright infringement in the US, the religion aspect has nothing to do with it (and given that no-images-of-the-prophet-Mohammed is a central tennant of Islam intended to prevent idol worship it's perfectly understandable).
The second issue is whether it's worth trying to block the offending sites when it's unlikely to be effective and there are pre-existing legal mechanisms. If I was to call for the murder of all members of $ethnicMinority then that's illegal in the UK, so should the UK government's response be to block Slashdot or to prosecute me? I'd argue that the latter is far more effective in every way, whilst protecting the freedoms of other Slashdot users.
Should I do the same but breaking the rules of another country (eg holocause denial is legal in the UK but not Germany) then it's down to the pre-existing extradition channels.
In Scotland, yes. A couple who share a bed every night for a year and a day are common-law husband and wife. So it's not and entirely dumb question.
See above - you don't have the book in front of you when you're searching for it, and publishers websites etc don't have barcodes for the most part, just the ISBN. Keypad is quicker than copy/paste.
I can drive safely while texting. The process goes like this:
1: Pick up phone.
2: Try to find "text" button while keeping my eyes on the road and fully concentrating on possible hazards.
3: Realise that's impossible.
4: Pull over.
5: Text.
Web pages about books don't usually have a barcode and then have to manually enter the ISBN into the stock system - and before you ask, typing on a keypad is faster than highlight -> CTRL-C -> CTRL-V.
Indeed - I worked in a bookshop where we were constantly entering ISBN numbers, a 13 digit string. It's an absolute nightmare to do on the top row, but you can learn to very quickly touch-type on a keypad in minutes. For normal typing yes you've got a point, but for anything involving continual entry of numeric data a keypad is so much faster and accurate it's unbelievable.
The "no pseudonyms" issue is the one thing that stops me using it.
The simple solution is to delete your G+ account, this will have no effect whatsoever on your other Google services, and you're free to keep your account pseudonymous on every Google service other than G+. Just be careful which buttons you click as you delete G+, there's a "delete everything related to my account" option in there somewhere, but it's all made pretty obvious.
The asterisk is part of the name, rather than being a footnote.
I certainly had a wild imagination when the bus I was on was stopped by the police because of smoke coming from the rear storage hold.
So you believe that finding serious wrongdoing is a required outcome for any police stop? Way to ensure the police either miss the important stuff or feel pressured into "finding" something...
I'd rather have more unnecessary disclosure than less required disclosure, something Slashdot has always suffered. Fair play to the submitter as far as I'm concerned.
After a freedom of information request Leicester City Council recently admitted that they are "unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council's emergency plan".
The point is that the law is going to recognise that making a reasonable statement based on proper scientific data is demonstrably true, and as such cannot be libel. The internationally recognised process of peer review will be considered the arbiter of "proper scientific data" (my phrase). It leaves the door open for cases involving poorly collected data, I'm imagining something like one cosmetics company suing another because they do they suggest their product is better than the plaintiff's based on a biased sample of 300.
Bloggers, journalists and the like will have some protection if they're quoting peer reviewed data/comments in context because if the original isn't libellous then they can't be guilty of repeating it.
Facebook isn't a community, it's an advert serving system. You could quite legitimately say "Facebook users are a community", but Facebook itself is simply a system for delivering adverts to eyeballs. As for "your" content, as soon as you post it you grant Facebook non-exclusive rights to use it in any way they see fit. I suppose you could try invoicing them...
That's like saying people should be paid by the government for filling in their tax returns. The "users" aren't Facebook's customers, the advertisers are. The entire point is targetted advertising, the more information people post the more the adverts can be targetted and the more advertisers will pay. Facebook is an advertising platform, nothing more, the "social" aspect is just the hook to get the eyeballs to connect to the adverts.
That's why we have written laws about what is and isn't allowed, and police officers carry radios which they can use to clarify the law in an unusual situation.
The first traffic lights in the world were on Downing St. They were gas powered and later exploded, killing a police officer.
You don't need to be stronger, it's all about technique.
I would certainly include "stopping a car that has a relatively high level of radioactivity" in "things police should be allowed to do". This wasn't a random unjustified stop. If you want a car analogy, it's like a police officer stopping a car because the boot (trunk) is on fire and the driver hasn't noticed, it's not a stop with a view to prosecution for any wrong-doing, it's a stop for safety reasons.
A low level dirty bomb made from medical grade material would be very effective indeed. All you have to do is spread some radioactive material in a very busy public spot (sports stadium, political building etc) and then call it in. The resulting media and political panic will cause far more "terror" than the situation warrants, and the threat of lawyers in the future will make the cleanup ridiculously protracted and expensive. "Terrorists" don't create the terror these days, politicians and the media do. If the actual threat was in any way related to the fuss made then we'd make a much bigger deal over road safety and a cure for cancer.
And the guy in question not having any problem with it! "Apatow was more curious than annoyed by the incident."
So the conversation probably went:
"Good afternoon sir, I've stopped you because your car seems to be radioactive"
"Yes, I've just had a medical procedure involving a radioactive isotope, here's a letter from the doctor."
"Thank you sir, sorry for the inconvenience."
"That's quite alright, those detectors are very sensitive aren't they?"
"Yes sir, have a nice day."
So in other words, "policeman does the job he is paid to do and nobody cares except people responding in an alarmist manner on some website or other".
You know, on Slashdot they would have covered this from an entirely different angle, looking at the technology required to pick up relatively low radiation levels from cars. Oh....hang on...
Who's going to do the minimum wage jobs when they don't have to? We already have this problem in the UK where it's more profitable to be unemployed than earn minimum wage, if it wasn't for immigrant workers you wouldn't be able to get a meal or a clean hotel room in some cities.
Agreed, but we're not going to see icons disappear because they're now considered a "vital branding element" by the graphic designers who think they're programmers.