One problem with leaving the UK is that assaults on civil liberties are happening in other Western democracies too. So instead of leaving the country, you should fight back.
One way to do this is to join the Pirate Party UK, which is focussed on defending your civil liberties from governments and corporations that want to destroy them. We're for freedom of speech (and therefore against people having their net access cut off), against ID cards, against software patents, and against the government snooping on your email and phone calls.
One objection is that campaigning doesn't achieve results. This is untrue: Pirate Party achieved 7% in the recent Swedish election, and since the Internet and issues involved are worldwide, there's no reason PPUK can't achieve similar results. In fact, we should be able to achieve an even higher vote share because:
Every year, more people use the Internet, and they use it to do more stuff. There are an estimated 7 million fileshares in the UK today; in two years time there may be 8 million, or 10 million, or 15 million. That's more people who care about the issues we care about and the big parties ignore.
Our support is concentrated among mainly younger voters who use the Internet as part of their native culture. Every year, another load of 18 year olds get to vote, and many will vote for us, if the Swedish example is anything to go by.
the entertainment industry and the government aren't going to stop trying to take away our liberties. Every time they do, we'll get more coverage and support.
Swedish PP support is skewed towards male voters. But women use the Internet just as much as men, and have as much reason to care about their liberties. Once we've cracked the problem of getting women to vote for us in equal numbers, our vote share could almost double.
I refuse to use KDE4, and still use KDE3 on my main Ubuntu box.
KDE4 is a bloated silly bunch of nonsense. If the KDE4 developers designed cars, they'd flip the positions of the accelerator and brake pedals on each model to be "innovative".
If like me you think this is absurd, let me suggest you join the Pirate Party in your country. We recently got 7.1% of the vote in Sweden, and it's likely that soon we'll be achieving this and more throughout the developed world.
If research embarrasses some politicians, it should be leaked, because it suggests that reality is not in accordance with those politicians' beliefs, and that therefore those politicians may make wrong decisions.
If research embarrasses all the politicians in Congress, it's even more important that it be leaked.
If the tax REALLY meant that we were free to download whatever we wanted, and the RIAA / MPAA extortion tax had already been paid, we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).
Unfortunately that's not what the government intend. This proposal is to set up a new agency that will pursue filesharers on behalf of the RIAA/MPAA MAFIAA. Why this agency needs £20 from everyone in the entire country is beyond me.
If the UK does have a broadband tax, a better idea would be for it to fund creative works such as music/film/books/software/etc and where each taxpayer decides what sort of works their tax goes to fund. I've written this proposal up in more detail:
One possible solution would involve the creation of a series of Content Compensation Funds. A CCF would be a special type of legal entity that would be authorised to spend the money raised by a broadband tax. I envisage that legislation would be needed to create the legal basis for CCFs.
A CCF might be an existing entity repurposed to the task, such as the big four music companies, performance rights organisations, and TV companies such the BBC or ITV. Maybe the Free Software Foundation could act as a CCF to fund software. Perhaps an authors' society could fund money towards authors. It may be that new organisations are created to be CCFs. I envisage that there might be between 20 and 100 CCFs.
A CCF would be authorised to spend its budget funding content creators either for works that've already been created (the "funding post creation" model) or commissioning new works to be created (the "funding pre creation" model).
The clever bit is how the broadband tax would be distributed among CCFs. Everyone with broadband would be required to pay a monthly broadband tax. This might be a fixed amount for everyone (e.g. £5 a month) or it might vary according to the size of the broadband bill or the speed of connection. But either way, each taxpayer would decide which CCF or CCFs their payment goes to.
So Alice who likes music might channel 100% of her payment to a music-based CCF. Bob, who likes TV programmes and computer games, may channel 50% of his payment to an audiovisual CCF and 50% to a games software CCF. And Carol, who likes reading SF, may channel her payment to a science fiction CCF that commissions new science fiction works (which may be books, films, etc).
It's often said, particularly in the USA, that the newspaper industry is dying. That may be true of newpapers printed on dead trees, but there's still an important role in organisations that gather news. One can imagine newspaper CCFs (perhaps based on existing newspapers) that perform this role. They'll be web based, and their output won't be restricted to text and still pictures.
Because there will be lots of money in the system (if 15 million broadband subscribers each pay £5 a month, that's £900 million a year) there is the potential for fraud and waste. The "payer decides" system minimises that: if a CCF gets a reputation for being corrupt or for wasting most of its income, its income stream will quickly dry up. (Payers will be able to easily change the allocation of their payment every month via an Internet-based system). In this way CCFs will be responsive to market forces.
There would need to be other safeguards against people trying to game the system. For example a CCF might offer to give a taxpayer a reward of £2.50 for every £5 channeled their way. Any such inducement would have to be illegal. More broadly, a detailed record of a CCF's accounts should be public and on the web (because essentially all large transactions are done electronically, this could be done without extra administrative cost, because it would be built into the accounts software the CCF uses).
Wow, this is so clever. It never would have occurred to me that someone with a boy's name might be male, and deserving of a male avatar, while someone with a girl's name might be female and get a female avatar.
This is clearly a breakthrough in technology and IBM fully deserve their patent. It's also a slap in the face to those critics who say USPTO's standards are slipping. Go IBM! Go USPTO!
The enemy? For fucks sake, we're citizens of the same god damn country.
I'm not a citizen of the USA, so I think I have an outsider's perspective on this. To me it looks like there are two Americas. At the risk of a gross over-simplification...
One is the America of Obama, Democrats, people who think torture is wrong, Internet startups, Free Software advocates, scientists, people who believe in reality.
The other is the America of Bush, Republicans, people who think torture is OK, megachurches, fundamentalist preachers, creationists, and people who believe in irrationalist mumbo-jumbo.
I regard the first group as fellow members of Western Civilisation in the tradition of the Enlightenment; the second group, if not enemies, then certainly not ideological allies.
We're pretending to be sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:
Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). If you are using Linux, we think you are a nerdy loser and we don't give a fuck about your vote. This does not prevent us from running our website using Linux, nor will it prevent us from trying to associate ourselves with Internet startups, which typically use Linux and other Open Source software.
Re:It's summer, and Slashdot is trolling
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A not unreasonable cooperative attempt by private companies to cut piracy with no government intervention whatsoever is an "attack on civil liberties."
Nonsense. The UK government's plan is that the MAFIAA (in the guise of the BPI -- British Phonographic Industry) will get to institute a "3 strikes and you're out" system whereby if they say they've caught someone illegally filesharing 3 times, they will force their ISP to disconnect that person.
This is an infringement of civil liberties, because:
1. it's all to be done on the BPI's say-so. There will be no trial, no court case, so presumption of innocence. Note that even the government admits in their consultation document that the MAFIAA gets it wrong in 30% of their accusations.
2. it presumes collective guilt -- a principle alien to British justice; if one person in a household is making illegal downloads, then everyone in that household is punished.
3. it's grossly disproportionate. If someone commits a ctime while on a pavement -- for example beinbg drunk and disorderly, or causing a fight, or whatever -- they are not banned from using any pavement for the rest of their life.
It should be useful out of the box, so it should come with tools such as an office suite and a web browser by default, so for these we could use Open Office (which uses the standard ODF file format natively), and Firefox, which seems to be emerging as the best-of-breed browser. For a GUI against we could use a best-of-breed solution such as KDE.
But what about underneath the hood? We want rock solid stability and resistance to viruses, so let's replace the existing kernel with the Linux one. For our disk filing system we could use ext3.
Many computers are used as servers these days, so we'd want to include the industry-standard LAMP stack out of the box. Also, many sys admins like the standard Unix comand line tools, so we'll include them.
Many customers want to run legacy applications, so we'll need an emulator for them. It might be better, for marketing reasons, to pretend it isn't an emulator. We could even make the name a trendy recursive acronym, for example something like "WINE Is Not an Emulator".
Finally, the Windows name is getting a bit old and hackneyed. Let's change it to something modern sounding, like "Kubuntu".
I'd recommend you start your project with one of Wikipedia's database dumps
That's what I've done
Your homepage can even consist of links to good articles deleted from Wikipedia which were recreated in Includipedia.
That's a very good idea. Fancy working on includipedia?
You can watch Wikipedia's AFD boards and contact the users defending their articles, suggesting that they recreate them on Includipedia and link to Includipedia in the footnotes of relevant articles from Wikipedia.
I intend to!
If you play it right, you might possibly even give Wikipedia deletionists something to recommend to those people disillusioned with their favorite articles getting deleted.
Includipedia (my inclusionist fork of Wikipedia) will contain all (or nearly all -- some actually deserve deletion) deleted Wikipedia articles. This will be implemented by a semi-automated process that goes through Articles For Deletion daily.
This article highlights exactly the problem that has prompted me to create Includipedia, an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia. Includipedia will endeavour to have articles on:
every film
every TV programme episode
every book
every catalogued species
every minor band
every small-circulation magazine
every restaurant, fish-and-chip shop or takeaway
every pub or bar
every business
every open source software project
every club, church, place of worship, or other voluntary association
Ask them what language they code in for fun.
If they say they don't program in their spare time, they aren't a good programmer.
If they say something recherche like Prolog, Erlang, Self or OCaml, they're a good programmer, and possibly also arrogant or trying to impress.
If they say Python, Ruby, Lisp or Smalltalk, they're a good programmer.
If they say C++, Perl, C# or PHP, they may be a good programmer, but have wierd tastes.
If they say anything by Microsoft with the exception of C#, at all costs do not hire them or they will bankrupt your company.
If they say SQL, BASIC, Enterprise Java Beans, or mention UML, be very scared.
Gene Simmons has blasted 'college' kids and claims that they have destroyed the music industry
Well if unauthorised copying has already destroyed the music industry, then we might has well carry on doing it, since it can't do any more harm to that industry, right?
The allegations against Alisher Usmanov have been repeated by Tom Wise MEP in the European Parliament, so anyone can quote his words without fear of prosecution. Here's what Wise said:
Allegedly a gangster and racketeer, [Usmanov] served a six year jail sentence in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, his eventual pardon coming at the behest of Usbek mafia chief and heroin overlord Gafur Rachimov, described as Usmanov's mentor.
Usmanov bought the newspaper Kommersant; 3 months later the journalist Ivan Safranov, a critic of the Putin regime who just weeks earlier had been vigorously interrogated by the FSB -- as the KGB is now called -- mysteriously fell to his death from his apartment window, still clutching a recently purchased [unclear]. According to Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, it was Usmanov who ordered the cutting-off of supplies to Georgia earlier this year.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with leaving the UK is that assaults on civil liberties are happening in other Western democracies too. So instead of leaving the country, you should fight back.
One way to do this is to join the Pirate Party UK, which is focussed on defending your civil liberties from governments and corporations that want to destroy them. We're for freedom of speech (and therefore against people having their net access cut off), against ID cards, against software patents, and against the government snooping on your email and phone calls.
One objection is that campaigning doesn't achieve results. This is untrue: Pirate Party achieved 7% in the recent Swedish election, and since the Internet and issues involved are worldwide, there's no reason PPUK can't achieve similar results. In fact, we should be able to achieve an even higher vote share because:
I refuse to use KDE4, and still use KDE3 on my main Ubuntu box.
KDE4 is a bloated silly bunch of nonsense. If the KDE4 developers designed cars, they'd flip the positions of the accelerator and brake pedals on each model to be "innovative".
If like me you think this is absurd, let me suggest you join the Pirate Party in your country. We recently got 7.1% of the vote in Sweden, and it's likely that soon we'll be achieving this and more throughout the developed world.
In the UK, join Pirate Party UK; elsewhere look at Pirate Party International to find your national Pirate Party.
We should bring Neanderthals back to life to see how good they taste... anyone got any recipes?
If research embarrasses some politicians, it should be leaked, because it suggests that reality is not in accordance with those politicians' beliefs, and that therefore those politicians may make wrong decisions.
If research embarrasses all the politicians in Congress, it's even more important that it be leaked.
Meanwhile, Britain hopes to achieve 2 Mb/s across the country by 2012, only 500 times slower than South Korea. Go Britain!
Unfortunately that's not what the government intend. This proposal is to set up a new agency that will pursue filesharers on behalf of the RIAA/MPAA MAFIAA. Why this agency needs £20 from everyone in the entire country is beyond me.
If the UK does have a broadband tax, a better idea would be for it to fund creative works such as music/film/books/software/etc and where each taxpayer decides what sort of works their tax goes to fund. I've written this proposal up in more detail:
One possible solution would involve the creation of a series of Content Compensation Funds. A CCF would be a special type of legal entity that would be authorised to spend the money raised by a broadband tax. I envisage that legislation would be needed to create the legal basis for CCFs.
A CCF might be an existing entity repurposed to the task, such as the big four music companies, performance rights organisations, and TV companies such the BBC or ITV. Maybe the Free Software Foundation could act as a CCF to fund software. Perhaps an authors' society could fund money towards authors. It may be that new organisations are created to be CCFs. I envisage that there might be between 20 and 100 CCFs.
A CCF would be authorised to spend its budget funding content creators either for works that've already been created (the "funding post creation" model) or commissioning new works to be created (the "funding pre creation" model).
The clever bit is how the broadband tax would be distributed among CCFs. Everyone with broadband would be required to pay a monthly broadband tax. This might be a fixed amount for everyone (e.g. £5 a month) or it might vary according to the size of the broadband bill or the speed of connection. But either way, each taxpayer would decide which CCF or CCFs their payment goes to.
So Alice who likes music might channel 100% of her payment to a music-based CCF. Bob, who likes TV programmes and computer games, may channel 50% of his payment to an audiovisual CCF and 50% to a games software CCF. And Carol, who likes reading SF, may channel her payment to a science fiction CCF that commissions new science fiction works (which may be books, films, etc).
It's often said, particularly in the USA, that the newspaper industry is dying. That may be true of newpapers printed on dead trees, but there's still an important role in organisations that gather news. One can imagine newspaper CCFs (perhaps based on existing newspapers) that perform this role. They'll be web based, and their output won't be restricted to text and still pictures.
Because there will be lots of money in the system (if 15 million broadband subscribers each pay £5 a month, that's £900 million a year) there is the potential for fraud and waste. The "payer decides" system minimises that: if a CCF gets a reputation for being corrupt or for wasting most of its income, its income stream will quickly dry up. (Payers will be able to easily change the allocation of their payment every month via an Internet-based system). In this way CCFs will be responsive to market forces.
There would need to be other safeguards against people trying to game the system. For example a CCF might offer to give a taxpayer a reward of £2.50 for every £5 channeled their way. Any such inducement would have to be illegal. More broadly, a detailed record of a CCF's accounts should be public and on the web (because essentially all large transactions are done electronically, this could be done without extra administrative cost, because it would be built into the accounts software the CCF uses).
Pissing off religious nutters would in itself be a reason to re-create Neanderthals.
Wow, this is so clever. It never would have occurred to me that someone with a boy's name might be male, and deserving of a male avatar, while someone with a girl's name might be female and get a female avatar.
This is clearly a breakthrough in technology and IBM fully deserve their patent. It's also a slap in the face to those critics who say USPTO's standards are slipping. Go IBM! Go USPTO!
Of course I think it, I wouldn't have written it otherwise.
I'm not a citizen of the USA, so I think I have an outsider's perspective on this. To me it looks like there are two Americas. At the risk of a gross over-simplification...
One is the America of Obama, Democrats, people who think torture is wrong, Internet startups, Free Software advocates, scientists, people who believe in reality.
The other is the America of Bush, Republicans, people who think torture is OK, megachurches, fundamentalist preachers, creationists, and people who believe in irrationalist mumbo-jumbo.
I regard the first group as fellow members of Western Civilisation in the tradition of the Enlightenment; the second group, if not enemies, then certainly not ideological allies.
Nonsense. The UK government's plan is that the MAFIAA (in the guise of the BPI -- British Phonographic Industry) will get to institute a "3 strikes and you're out" system whereby if they say they've caught someone illegally filesharing 3 times, they will force their ISP to disconnect that person.
This is an infringement of civil liberties, because:
1. it's all to be done on the BPI's say-so. There will be no trial, no court case, so presumption of innocence. Note that even the government admits in their consultation document that the MAFIAA gets it wrong in 30% of their accusations.
2. it presumes collective guilt -- a principle alien to British justice; if one person in a household is making illegal downloads, then everyone in that household is punished.
3. it's grossly disproportionate. If someone commits a ctime while on a pavement -- for example beinbg drunk and disorderly, or causing a fight, or whatever -- they are not banned from using any pavement for the rest of their life.
It should be useful out of the box, so it should come with tools such as an office suite and a web browser by default, so for these we could use Open Office (which uses the standard ODF file format natively), and Firefox, which seems to be emerging as the best-of-breed browser. For a GUI against we could use a best-of-breed solution such as KDE.
But what about underneath the hood? We want rock solid stability and resistance to viruses, so let's replace the existing kernel with the Linux one. For our disk filing system we could use ext3.
Many computers are used as servers these days, so we'd want to include the industry-standard LAMP stack out of the box. Also, many sys admins like the standard Unix comand line tools, so we'll include them.
Many customers want to run legacy applications, so we'll need an emulator for them. It might be better, for marketing reasons, to pretend it isn't an emulator. We could even make the name a trendy recursive acronym, for example something like "WINE Is Not an Emulator".
Finally, the Windows name is getting a bit old and hackneyed. Let's change it to something modern sounding, like "Kubuntu".
Perhaps that law should be renamed "No Child Allowed To Progress Faster Than The Slowest" :-)
Creating accounts isn't possible yet, which the wiki is still being set up.
That's what I've done
That's a very good idea. Fancy working on includipedia?
I intend to!
That's a good point too.
I think Britannica are still in a huff, trying to pretend that Wikipedia doesn't exist, and that it hasn't made them irrelevant.
Includipedia (my inclusionist fork of Wikipedia) will contain all (or nearly all -- some actually deserve deletion) deleted Wikipedia articles. This will be implemented by a semi-automated process that goes through Articles For Deletion daily.
- every film
- every TV programme episode
- every book
- every catalogued species
- every minor band
- every small-circulation magazine
- every restaurant, fish-and-chip shop or takeaway
- every pub or bar
- every business
- every open source software project
- every club, church, place of worship, or other voluntary association
etcMe too, which is why I've started includipedia, an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.
My thoughts exactly
I guess the museum just wasn't intelligently designed.
Ask them what language they code in for fun. If they say they don't program in their spare time, they aren't a good programmer. If they say something recherche like Prolog, Erlang, Self or OCaml, they're a good programmer, and possibly also arrogant or trying to impress. If they say Python, Ruby, Lisp or Smalltalk, they're a good programmer. If they say C++, Perl, C# or PHP, they may be a good programmer, but have wierd tastes. If they say anything by Microsoft with the exception of C#, at all costs do not hire them or they will bankrupt your company. If they say SQL, BASIC, Enterprise Java Beans, or mention UML, be very scared.
Well if unauthorised copying has already destroyed the music industry, then we might has well carry on doing it, since it can't do any more harm to that industry, right?