18 is the legal age in the UK for photos and videos of full-on sexual activity. Nude photos of any age are not illegal unless they are of a sexual nature - if they were, then every parent who snaps a photo of their kid in the paddling pool would be facing jail.
Two of the faces were of local girls -- a 10-year-old and 12-year-old, the station reported. The third face appears to be Miley Cyrus, 16
16 is legal for sex in most jurisdictions of the world. 10 is illegal for most. The more interesting question is, were the photos just nudes, or did they show sexual activity? Nude photos of teenagers not engaging in sexual activity (e.g. this) are usually not illegal in Western society.
The point you are missing is that the application is not independent of the operating system. If the operating system does not support, or supports poorly, such features as real time processes, >1 CPU core threading with appropriate parallel locks on IO buffers and channels, O(n) process and thread scheduling, redundant failover, and a thousand other small features, then implementing applications that are high performance, real time, and mission critical, is massively more complex, or even impossible.
What actually runs on the CPU is application+OS user space libraries+kernel+kernel drivers. The performance of the sum total is as dependent on the performance and capabilities of other every bit of the stack as it is on the application itself.
Law enforcement requires a valid warrant to access that information.
No they don't. They are supposed to need a warrant to listen to actual calls, but meta-information, like subscriber info, and who calls you and who you call, don't need a warrant. At least, that was the latest that I heard from a court ruling...
ClubCards are per-person. There are 60 million people. So even if we assume that every single one of those 15 million cards are actives (& they aren't: mine isn't), that's only 9% of the population.
Tesco say that 15 million ClubCards are active, out of a total of over 25 million that have been issued. There are about 35 million adults in the U.K. That means that 42% of British adults have a ClubCard. Obviously there is some small error possible (a person may somehow have more than one active card, etc.), but the figure won't be far off.
How is it trolling to point out that the British intelligence services can almost certainly cross-reference these disparate databases already? Please explain.
Sure, do all you can to help clean up the environment and to minimize or eliminate pollution. I am all for cleaner, greener, etc. I am not for more tax burdens on top of the already increased tax burdens I and many many others are now facing in this country.
One of the best ways to reduce pollution is to tax it. Reducing pollution costs money. The purpose of a corporation is to generate profit for shareholders. Given the choice, no corporation would reduce pollution instead of returning a higher dividend. So, for pollution to be reduced, government has to be involved somehow. There are two possible ways:
A blanket ban on technologies. Government says what you can and can't use in your business.
A tax that charges the externality cost back to the original product and lets the market produce the most efficient solution
I recommend that everyone who is interested in this topic should read The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford, particularly chapter "Crosstown Traffic" subsection "Battling pollution on the cheap". The gist of it is that sulphur dioxide emissions were successfully reduced by taxation to the point where the tax is negligible. Initially, the corporations involved in power generation claimed that it would be impossible to do, that each ton of reduction in emissions would cost thousands of dollars. And yet, within 3 years of an auction based taxation being introduced, the cost per ton had fallen to $70.
Isn't this exactly what we all want? A market based solution to the problem, rather than overbearing government regulation?
No-one has proved any use for those either, and it all seems a little excessive.
There are many criminals who have travelled on false passports. Hypothetically, linking authentication to biometric data will stop most of this - you will no longer be able to travel on the passport of another, and the old "apply for a passport of a dead person" scam will probably disappear. According to investigative journalists, the current price of a valid UK passport in a fake name with your photo on it is about £20k. Anything that makes it more difficult to procure these passports will have the result of increasing the end price. Linking passports to an individual with more personal data than a photo will likely have that effect. The photograph is already a kind of biometric information, but the problem with photographs is the matching is rather fuzzy - Hussein Osman, one of the 7/7 London bombers, escaped Britain using his brother's passport.
If you accept that people should have to authenticate their identities to enter or leave the country, and accept that this identification needs to have some kind of information linking it to the actual person holding the card or papers, then the question just becomes "how much biometric data is necessary?" The first form of biometric data, the photo, has proved itself flawed and people who match photos are easy to fool. It isn't surprising that people want a form of authentication that is more secure.
Do you really think that MI5/6 don't already have the ability to do automated cross-referenced queries from those disparate databases using a single software interface? There are loads of pieces of data that could be munged into a primary key (National Insurance number, surname+DOB etc.). Even without that, they could query on name, address, date of birth, etc. and pull all of the info out in an automated fashion very quickly.
If Google can search the entire internet and give me search results in a fraction of a second, then I am not ready to believe that the British intelligence services would be so incompetent that they couldn't link several disparate databases to enable automated searches of members of the British public.
As far as I know, there are no privacy laws that protect the data held in databases from being shared between different government departments. The government is exempt from most of the Data Protection Act.
I doubt this is a bureaucratic issue either - getting some databases cross referenced is technically easy, and I would be surprised if the capability didn't already exist. I would be very, very, surprised if MI5/6 couldn't cross reference DVLA, passport, mobile phone, and police records, which means that, technically speaking, anyone else with appropriate permissions could too.
The Prevention of Money-Laundering Act, 2002, already requires photographic I.D. to be presented when you engage in certain financial dealings. The only valid photographic I.D. I've managed to use is a drivers license or passport, both of which are already government issued. Opening a bank account requires showing such I.D. I think I might've had to show my drivers license when I got a mobile photo as well. And drivers license obviously requires photo I.D. because it's printed on the card and held in the DVLA database.
Given that I already have had to show I.D. for all of the things that you mention, what difference would it make if I had used a single I.D. card instead?
Passports are not optional if you want to travel
They are only not optional if you want to fly or leave the United Kingdom. You can travel within the U.K. without a passport.
What information is held in the National Identity Register database that the government doesn't already have access to via bank records, tax records, drivers license and DVLA database, mobile phone subscriber and call logs, passport, etc.? If the government already has access to all of this information in its various databases, then what difference does it make if it gets centralised into a single database?
The vast majority of British people care about privacy from their neighbours, but don't care about privacy from the government or corporations. There are 15 million actively used Tesco Clubcards in the U.K., and only 24 million households. The Tesco receipt database stores every single purchase made linked along with the Clubcard holders info. 25% of money spent in the U.K. is spent at Tesco, so this is not an insubstantial amount of data.
I see no evidence that the British people, as a whole, care about privacy from the government.
my driving license has *never* been requested or required for anything
Maybe not requested directly from you, but all of that license information, including home address and the photo, is stored in the DVLA database. You have no idea who has access to it, or what they have done with it.
I don't have *anything* else with my photo on, at all.
Perhaps you don't, but most adults will also have a passport.
Additionally, credit/debits cards are *not* as big over here as over countries and a lot of people only "trust" cash.
Not true. "Behind the U.S., the U.K. is the next largest market with 59 million credit cards, according to the Lafferty Group, a research firm in London." (source)
How do you get your cash if you don't have a debit card? Every employer I've ever worked for has insisted on paying me through monthly bank transfer or standing order. Banks have inconvenient opening hours and are, well, inconvenient. Every single person I know uses ATMs. and you can't use an ATM without a debit card.
A lot of the resistance to I.D. cards in the U.K. has been "OMG the government will have my infos!". But unless you're paid cash in hand, have no mobile phone, no drivers license, no passport, no bank account, no NHS records, and aren't registered for council tax or to vote, then the government already have most, or all, of the info that would be stored on the I.D. card. The only addition is the biometrics.
Here's a post linking to some other posts discussing some problems with the Phoronix benchmarking methodology. The same issues seem to be pointed out every time they get a benchmark article published on Slashdot.
Of course, "white power" is a very different thing, too - it's really a belief that white race (not nation; the division is biological, not social) is inherently superior to all other races, and should dominate them all. So you're really just attacking a straw man there.
There is a very thin line between "white power" and "native born" nationalism. Most of the European far-right nationalist parties have moved away from blatant racism and now talk about a homeland for "the native people of this country" brought about by "voluntary" repatriation. However, scratch beneath the surface and the people are the same..
First of all, who spoke about "ethnic groups"? Nation is not the same thing as an ethnic group, even though the boundaries are usually close. A big difference, however, is that you can change your nationality, but not your ethnicity.
Of course ethnicity is a part of it - when people speak of Israel being a "Jewish state", they aren't talking about a state for the multi-cultural residents of Israel - they are talking about either a state for people who are ethnically Jewish, or who are followers of Judaism, or both.
Also, most nations in the world are nation-states, and most of those are in fact single-ethnicity nations.
I question whether most states have a population consisting of one single-ethnicity. Most of the previously white nations have seen some degree of immigration and are now multi-cultural. The Wikipedia article on multiculturalism demonstrates that most of the Western and Eastern world is multi-cultural. The U.S. is not a single-ethnic nation, it has multiple ethnic and cultural resident groups, and there are no special immigration laws for particular ethnic groups. Neither is the U.K. The laws in both do not favour a particular ethnic group - in fact the opposite - there are laws in both to ensure that ethnic groups are treated equally in the eyes of the government and law. A white person has no more right to residency in the U.K. than a black person, and a follower of Christianity has no more right to reside than a follower of Islam. I am not as familiar with German law, but I suspect it is the same since the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
I don't see what's extremist about Zionism either. It's really just healthy nationalism - the belief that Jews must have a state of their own. How is this extremist in and of itself (I don't claim that there aren't any specific extremist Zionist strains)
To paraphrase, "I don't see what's extremist about White Power either. It's really just healthy nationalism - the belief that White People must have a state of their own. How is this extremist in and of itself (I don't claim that there aren't any specific extremist White Power strains)"
A nation for a single ethnic group is not a great idea in this day and age. It's unsurprising that other ethnic groups resent the idea.
The development of stealth technology is one of those secretive fields that has an instant fascination. I quite enjoyed reading Ben Rich's autobiography. Also Hitler's plan to atom bomb New York and The Real Heroes of Telemark were both quite interesting, casting two sides of the same global battle from very different perspectives. German scientists were some of the best in the world (not that they are so bad today..). Sometimes I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.
As Wikipedia says, native code runs under Android fine. The Chrome web browser runs on Android. Chrome is not written in Java.
What you might mean is that you can't run native code on some specific mobile phone type device without hacks, and that you can't upload native code to the App Store. That much is true. In the first case, some manufacturers like to lock down their devices - the iphone is also pretty much locked down. In the second, Google want platform independence. But Android itself can clearly run native code - most of the software that it ships with is written in C. And you can distribute and install whatever Java code you want on any Android device, which is better than Apple's "you only load what we want you to load on a phone" rules.
I was at a conference in 2002 where the chairman of ARM, Sir Robin Saxby, gave a keynote talk on ARM. In the Q&A session afterwards one of the attendees asked what Mr. Saxby thought of Linux - he replied that it was a toy operating system that would never amount to anything, and that open source was a useless strategy for developing software and he didn't see any place for it in the business world. The hall erupted with various PhD students and postgrads raising their hands, and after three people all said basically the same thing - that they use Linux and think open source is great - the chair had to say no more Linux questions. But after hearing what the guy at the top had to say, it would never surprise me to hear that ARM might be hostile to Linux and open source, even when it's running on their own chipsets.
Don't you mean they own the last mile? Given that it's uneconomical to have loads of different companies constantly digging up the roads to wire up their own customers, then you have to choose either 1) the state lets a single company do it and regulates (what the UK has now) or 2) a state owned company does it (what the UK used to have). The interesting thing here is that in both cases the company was BT. A third possibility might be that the last mile infrastructure is communally owned but building and maintenance is put out to tender to private companies.
More accurately, these people are not considered terrorists by the government of the United States. They probably are considered terrorists by the government of China. If the Chinese government refused to return some individuals considered terrorists by the U.S., there would be all kinds of criticism of China for "supporting terrorism" in the popular U.S. media. Now the tables are turned...
It's a funny old world - Muslim separatists fighting the military backed dictatorship government of China are good guys and not to be handed over to the Chinese government, which is one of the U.S.'s biggest trading partners. Meanwhile, Muslim separatists fighting the military backed dictatorships of several countries in the Middle East, which happen to supply the U.S. with oil, are chartered private CIA jets to be flown back ASAP for torture and possible summary execution. At the same time, the U.S. Vice President visits a country which the U.S. and U.K. bombed and invaded with land forces in order to force a separatist state only a decade ago, and small Muslim children greet him waving the stars and stripes and chanting "USA USA!!". What an interesting world we live in.
"A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal.
Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away.
Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma. "
"DNA research carried out at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School and University College in London has shown that many Jews and Arabs are closely related."
"The terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, played an important part in bringing about peace in Northern Ireland, a leading negotiator in the peace process said."
Obviously there were other factors at play, but that doesn't mean the 9/11 factor wasn't significant in any way.
The problem is the race to the bottom scenario - there are already countries in the stable developed world with 0% tax rates. Sometimes this is done by taxing non-resident earnings differently to that of residents - but this has the unfortunate effect of providing an economic incentive to become non-resident. I think it may also be considered a harmful tax practice by the OECD. 0% islands like Cayman Islands, Jersey, etc. have large financial centers, and low government spending (no national defence for one thing). This model will not scale - it isn't possible for every country in the world to have a thriving financial services and banking industry, and it isn't possible for nations to rely on the military of neighbours for self-defense.
The Swiss model would be a fair one to copy, but Swiss citizens do pay taxes, which in % terms may be less than some other countries, but since they are much higher paid on average, the amount of tax taken in absolute terms may be higher.
Being a tax haven would have a negative impact on other areas. Being put on the OECD blacklist negatively impacts real business. Also, other nations are likely to retaliate by raising levies on trade with the tax haven, and by refusing any bilateral tax deals. And they will make it illegal for their own citizens to evade taxes by not declaring income in your country - this is already the case for most countries, but "banking secrecy" enables offshore tax evasion to still be done in certain jurisdictions. Given the financial fallout of 2008, and the fact that many of the hedge funds operated out of these jurisdictions, it is likely that we will see the law moving to increase regulation in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
18 is the legal age in the UK for photos and videos of full-on sexual activity. Nude photos of any age are not illegal unless they are of a sexual nature - if they were, then every parent who snaps a photo of their kid in the paddling pool would be facing jail.
16 is legal for sex in most jurisdictions of the world. 10 is illegal for most. The more interesting question is, were the photos just nudes, or did they show sexual activity? Nude photos of teenagers not engaging in sexual activity (e.g. this) are usually not illegal in Western society.
The point you are missing is that the application is not independent of the operating system. If the operating system does not support, or supports poorly, such features as real time processes, >1 CPU core threading with appropriate parallel locks on IO buffers and channels, O(n) process and thread scheduling, redundant failover, and a thousand other small features, then implementing applications that are high performance, real time, and mission critical, is massively more complex, or even impossible.
What actually runs on the CPU is application+OS user space libraries+kernel+kernel drivers. The performance of the sum total is as dependent on the performance and capabilities of other every bit of the stack as it is on the application itself.
No they don't. They are supposed to need a warrant to listen to actual calls, but meta-information, like subscriber info, and who calls you and who you call, don't need a warrant. At least, that was the latest that I heard from a court ruling...
Tesco say that 15 million ClubCards are active, out of a total of over 25 million that have been issued. There are about 35 million adults in the U.K. That means that 42% of British adults have a ClubCard. Obviously there is some small error possible (a person may somehow have more than one active card, etc.), but the figure won't be far off.
How is it trolling to point out that the British intelligence services can almost certainly cross-reference these disparate databases already? Please explain.
One of the best ways to reduce pollution is to tax it. Reducing pollution costs money. The purpose of a corporation is to generate profit for shareholders. Given the choice, no corporation would reduce pollution instead of returning a higher dividend. So, for pollution to be reduced, government has to be involved somehow. There are two possible ways:
I recommend that everyone who is interested in this topic should read The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford, particularly chapter "Crosstown Traffic" subsection "Battling pollution on the cheap". The gist of it is that sulphur dioxide emissions were successfully reduced by taxation to the point where the tax is negligible. Initially, the corporations involved in power generation claimed that it would be impossible to do, that each ton of reduction in emissions would cost thousands of dollars. And yet, within 3 years of an auction based taxation being introduced, the cost per ton had fallen to $70.
Isn't this exactly what we all want? A market based solution to the problem, rather than overbearing government regulation?
There are many criminals who have travelled on false passports. Hypothetically, linking authentication to biometric data will stop most of this - you will no longer be able to travel on the passport of another, and the old "apply for a passport of a dead person" scam will probably disappear. According to investigative journalists, the current price of a valid UK passport in a fake name with your photo on it is about £20k. Anything that makes it more difficult to procure these passports will have the result of increasing the end price. Linking passports to an individual with more personal data than a photo will likely have that effect. The photograph is already a kind of biometric information, but the problem with photographs is the matching is rather fuzzy - Hussein Osman, one of the 7/7 London bombers, escaped Britain using his brother's passport.
If you accept that people should have to authenticate their identities to enter or leave the country, and accept that this identification needs to have some kind of information linking it to the actual person holding the card or papers, then the question just becomes "how much biometric data is necessary?" The first form of biometric data, the photo, has proved itself flawed and people who match photos are easy to fool. It isn't surprising that people want a form of authentication that is more secure.
Do you really think that MI5/6 don't already have the ability to do automated cross-referenced queries from those disparate databases using a single software interface? There are loads of pieces of data that could be munged into a primary key (National Insurance number, surname+DOB etc.). Even without that, they could query on name, address, date of birth, etc. and pull all of the info out in an automated fashion very quickly.
If Google can search the entire internet and give me search results in a fraction of a second, then I am not ready to believe that the British intelligence services would be so incompetent that they couldn't link several disparate databases to enable automated searches of members of the British public.
As far as I know, there are no privacy laws that protect the data held in databases from being shared between different government departments. The government is exempt from most of the Data Protection Act.
I doubt this is a bureaucratic issue either - getting some databases cross referenced is technically easy, and I would be surprised if the capability didn't already exist. I would be very, very, surprised if MI5/6 couldn't cross reference DVLA, passport, mobile phone, and police records, which means that, technically speaking, anyone else with appropriate permissions could too.
The Prevention of Money-Laundering Act, 2002, already requires photographic I.D. to be presented when you engage in certain financial dealings. The only valid photographic I.D. I've managed to use is a drivers license or passport, both of which are already government issued. Opening a bank account requires showing such I.D. I think I might've had to show my drivers license when I got a mobile photo as well. And drivers license obviously requires photo I.D. because it's printed on the card and held in the DVLA database.
Given that I already have had to show I.D. for all of the things that you mention, what difference would it make if I had used a single I.D. card instead?
They are only not optional if you want to fly or leave the United Kingdom. You can travel within the U.K. without a passport.
What information is held in the National Identity Register database that the government doesn't already have access to via bank records, tax records, drivers license and DVLA database, mobile phone subscriber and call logs, passport, etc.? If the government already has access to all of this information in its various databases, then what difference does it make if it gets centralised into a single database?
The vast majority of British people care about privacy from their neighbours, but don't care about privacy from the government or corporations. There are 15 million actively used Tesco Clubcards in the U.K., and only 24 million households. The Tesco receipt database stores every single purchase made linked along with the Clubcard holders info. 25% of money spent in the U.K. is spent at Tesco, so this is not an insubstantial amount of data.
I see no evidence that the British people, as a whole, care about privacy from the government.
Maybe not requested directly from you, but all of that license information, including home address and the photo, is stored in the DVLA database. You have no idea who has access to it, or what they have done with it.
Perhaps you don't, but most adults will also have a passport.
Not true. "Behind the U.S., the U.K. is the next largest market with 59 million credit cards, according to the Lafferty Group, a research firm in London." (source)
How do you get your cash if you don't have a debit card? Every employer I've ever worked for has insisted on paying me through monthly bank transfer or standing order. Banks have inconvenient opening hours and are, well, inconvenient. Every single person I know uses ATMs. and you can't use an ATM without a debit card.
A lot of the resistance to I.D. cards in the U.K. has been "OMG the government will have my infos!". But unless you're paid cash in hand, have no mobile phone, no drivers license, no passport, no bank account, no NHS records, and aren't registered for council tax or to vote, then the government already have most, or all, of the info that would be stored on the I.D. card. The only addition is the biometrics.
Here's a post linking to some other posts discussing some problems with the Phoronix benchmarking methodology. The same issues seem to be pointed out every time they get a benchmark article published on Slashdot.
There is a very thin line between "white power" and "native born" nationalism. Most of the European far-right nationalist parties have moved away from blatant racism and now talk about a homeland for "the native people of this country" brought about by "voluntary" repatriation. However, scratch beneath the surface and the people are the same..
Of course ethnicity is a part of it - when people speak of Israel being a "Jewish state", they aren't talking about a state for the multi-cultural residents of Israel - they are talking about either a state for people who are ethnically Jewish, or who are followers of Judaism, or both.
I question whether most states have a population consisting of one single-ethnicity. Most of the previously white nations have seen some degree of immigration and are now multi-cultural. The Wikipedia article on multiculturalism demonstrates that most of the Western and Eastern world is multi-cultural. The U.S. is not a single-ethnic nation, it has multiple ethnic and cultural resident groups, and there are no special immigration laws for particular ethnic groups. Neither is the U.K. The laws in both do not favour a particular ethnic group - in fact the opposite - there are laws in both to ensure that ethnic groups are treated equally in the eyes of the government and law. A white person has no more right to residency in the U.K. than a black person, and a follower of Christianity has no more right to reside than a follower of Islam. I am not as familiar with German law, but I suspect it is the same since the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
To paraphrase, "I don't see what's extremist about White Power either. It's really just healthy nationalism - the belief that White People must have a state of their own. How is this extremist in and of itself (I don't claim that there aren't any specific extremist White Power strains)"
A nation for a single ethnic group is not a great idea in this day and age. It's unsurprising that other ethnic groups resent the idea.
The development of stealth technology is one of those secretive fields that has an instant fascination. I quite enjoyed reading Ben Rich's autobiography. Also Hitler's plan to atom bomb New York and The Real Heroes of Telemark were both quite interesting, casting two sides of the same global battle from very different perspectives. German scientists were some of the best in the world (not that they are so bad today..). Sometimes I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.
As Wikipedia says, native code runs under Android fine. The Chrome web browser runs on Android. Chrome is not written in Java.
What you might mean is that you can't run native code on some specific mobile phone type device without hacks, and that you can't upload native code to the App Store. That much is true. In the first case, some manufacturers like to lock down their devices - the iphone is also pretty much locked down. In the second, Google want platform independence. But Android itself can clearly run native code - most of the software that it ships with is written in C. And you can distribute and install whatever Java code you want on any Android device, which is better than Apple's "you only load what we want you to load on a phone" rules.
I was at a conference in 2002 where the chairman of ARM, Sir Robin Saxby, gave a keynote talk on ARM. In the Q&A session afterwards one of the attendees asked what Mr. Saxby thought of Linux - he replied that it was a toy operating system that would never amount to anything, and that open source was a useless strategy for developing software and he didn't see any place for it in the business world. The hall erupted with various PhD students and postgrads raising their hands, and after three people all said basically the same thing - that they use Linux and think open source is great - the chair had to say no more Linux questions. But after hearing what the guy at the top had to say, it would never surprise me to hear that ARM might be hostile to Linux and open source, even when it's running on their own chipsets.
Don't you mean they own the last mile? Given that it's uneconomical to have loads of different companies constantly digging up the roads to wire up their own customers, then you have to choose either 1) the state lets a single company do it and regulates (what the UK has now) or 2) a state owned company does it (what the UK used to have). The interesting thing here is that in both cases the company was BT. A third possibility might be that the last mile infrastructure is communally owned but building and maintenance is put out to tender to private companies.
More accurately, these people are not considered terrorists by the government of the United States. They probably are considered terrorists by the government of China. If the Chinese government refused to return some individuals considered terrorists by the U.S., there would be all kinds of criticism of China for "supporting terrorism" in the popular U.S. media. Now the tables are turned...
It's a funny old world - Muslim separatists fighting the military backed dictatorship government of China are good guys and not to be handed over to the Chinese government, which is one of the U.S.'s biggest trading partners. Meanwhile, Muslim separatists fighting the military backed dictatorships of several countries in the Middle East, which happen to supply the U.S. with oil, are chartered private CIA jets to be flown back ASAP for torture and possible summary execution. At the same time, the U.S. Vice President visits a country which the U.S. and U.K. bombed and invaded with land forces in order to force a separatist state only a decade ago, and small Muslim children greet him waving the stars and stripes and chanting "USA USA!!". What an interesting world we live in.
There's not even a reason to get rid of X here - the Android widget toolkit (Skia) already has an X-backend port.
"A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal. Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away. Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma. "
Actually, Jews are more similar genetically to Arabs than white Europeans, and real research beats a Google Image search:
Dr. Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem said she had found considerable similarity between Jews and Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, as if the Y chromosomes of both groups had been drawn from a common population that began to expand 7,800 years ago.
"DNA research carried out at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School and University College in London has shown that many Jews and Arabs are closely related."
Jews Are The Genetic Brothers Of Palestinians, Syrians, And Lebanese
Jerusalem Post - Experts find genetic Jewish-Arab link "The researchers found that the Arabs are more closely related to Jews than they are to the Welsh"
etc etc...
9/11 attacks helped to secure peace in Northern Ireland:
"The terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, played an important part in bringing about peace in Northern Ireland, a leading negotiator in the peace process said."
Obviously there were other factors at play, but that doesn't mean the 9/11 factor wasn't significant in any way.
The problem is the race to the bottom scenario - there are already countries in the stable developed world with 0% tax rates. Sometimes this is done by taxing non-resident earnings differently to that of residents - but this has the unfortunate effect of providing an economic incentive to become non-resident. I think it may also be considered a harmful tax practice by the OECD. 0% islands like Cayman Islands, Jersey, etc. have large financial centers, and low government spending (no national defence for one thing). This model will not scale - it isn't possible for every country in the world to have a thriving financial services and banking industry, and it isn't possible for nations to rely on the military of neighbours for self-defense.
The Swiss model would be a fair one to copy, but Swiss citizens do pay taxes, which in % terms may be less than some other countries, but since they are much higher paid on average, the amount of tax taken in absolute terms may be higher.
Being a tax haven would have a negative impact on other areas. Being put on the OECD blacklist negatively impacts real business. Also, other nations are likely to retaliate by raising levies on trade with the tax haven, and by refusing any bilateral tax deals. And they will make it illegal for their own citizens to evade taxes by not declaring income in your country - this is already the case for most countries, but "banking secrecy" enables offshore tax evasion to still be done in certain jurisdictions. Given the financial fallout of 2008, and the fact that many of the hedge funds operated out of these jurisdictions, it is likely that we will see the law moving to increase regulation in this area.