Erm, the BBC is not part of the British Government. Besides, I think one has to consider the spirit of the law here, and the BBC had only benevolent intentions.
I'm not the BBCs biggest fan, I consider them Labour-biased. Nevertheless, I'd say this is an unequivocally good production. For crying out loud, they're educating the UK about the risks of unpatched/unprotected internet use, potentially dramatically reducing spam and DDOS risks, and Slashdot complains about the legality!
Erm, did you RTFA? The botnet was previously existing, the BBC spammed two accounts they'd set up, and DDOS'd a site they'd set up. I'd be shocked if they didn't tell the hosts what they were going to do. As a final step, they notified all members of the botnet that they'd been hacked by changing their desktop background. I think it would be difficult to claim damages as the BBC did not propagate the botnet and anyone in their clutches got off lightly.
IE8 is still in beta, like FF3.5 and Chrome 2.0. By comparing the latest build of IE vs. old builds of Chrome and FF they're comparing apples* and pears.
Or it could be because Google text ads are light, non-intrusive, and are unlikely to be carrying a spyware payload, so there's no real reason to block them, unless you have some fundamental objection to adverts, in which case I have a quote for you:
Business without advertising is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark. You know what you're doing, but nobody else does.
She does have the power to withhold consent, but traditionally it is not used. Similarly she dissolves Parliament every four years or so, that's how we have elections. But traditionally she doesn't except at the request of a Prime Minister or Governor-General.
The problem is that in the UK, tradition can take on the status of constitutional law (e.g. MPs are traditionally free to leak secret documents to the public, but not legally, traditionally the monarchy doesn't interfere with politics, but occasionally it does.)
Dare I mention the first-past-the-post system? Here one only actually has a vote if you live in a Tory-Labour marginal. The Lib-Dems will never get enough votes to form even the coalition that might introduce real democracy.
That won't stop me voting Lib-Dem. I think Clegg/Cable are the guys I want running the country now. I just know it'll never happen.
There's always going to be people who can't afford something. In the past, sellers, as part of the free market, have had the freedom to set their own price to maximise profits and the commercial viability of their product. Not any more, thanks to piracy!
In a free market, a company has a lot of competitors and its prices are set by its costs, not its profits. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider how free various markets are (compare US and UK telecoms, e.g.)
Now, consumers can decide what they think is fair for the seller to have, regardless of the seller's wishes, needs, or financial health. While we're at it, we might as well make it legal (or at least morally A-OK) to run out of a retail joint with a physical object, leaving only the manufacturing costs behind.
"Profit" is a cost of manufacture; as Adam Smith so astutely pointed out, what we call 'profit' should rightly be called 'cost of capital', as it is normally either returned to shareholders who stumped up the capital, re-invested in staying competitive or some combination of the two. If companies didn't 'profit' they'd have no way to pay for capital and hence no company.
Paying the manufacturing cost is not simple; do you pay for the raw materials, the raw materials+cost of capital of machinery, raw materials+cost of labour, raw materials+cost of capital+cost of labour+cost of distribution? When you account for all the costs you have paid the market price.
I'm basically agreeing with you, but refining your argument.
Yes, you can say it's not real evidence, but some right-wing governments, or any government that wasn't reliant on support from client regions, or any government that wasn't more interested in saving its own testes than doing what was right for the country* would have allowed the bank to collapse.
*You never know, it might happen. I can only think of one example at the moment, and that was Maggie's first term.
The English Conservative Party has a well-documented history of liberal tendencies going back at least as far as the Great War. There were even quite a few Tories who thought David Lloyd-George had the right idea, and said so publicly. Sir Winston Churchill illustrates the point well. First he was a Liberal, then a Toryprime minister.
Incidentally, this point is why there's a distinction between Socialism, Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy (in order of left-to-right and increasing sanity), the last being what most people in the West now think of when they think of socialism.
In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily "right wing", with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today's Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.
That's some good reading there Lou.
I'd say that socialism is inherently more authoritarian than right-wing economics, not least because socialism in its extreme forms removes an individuals economic liberties as well as the political ones.
Politicians are corrupt. There is value(read: profit) in artificial scarcity. By reducing the consumer's expectations you can get them to pay more for the same service. Profit is good for the economy(in theory).
Yes, yes, yes, NO! Profit from artificial scarcity causes a deadweight loss, and is bad for any other industry as well as consumers and therefore the government.
I don't know why my government is doing this, as it sounds like the exact opposite of the changes Britain normally proposes, but I don't understand any of the UK government policies. I would say roll on the general election, but I'm not convinced that Cameron's Tory's will be much better.
I heard a really good story about this, though it may be apocryphal.
Back in the day, Ordinance Survey maps used to be blanked out with fields or other inconspicuous things on top of military installations. Apparently the Soviet ambassador and his entourage were found walking around next to an army base. Their excuse when challenged was "Well, we wanted to have a picnic in the countryside, so we looked at the map and found this big open space..."
Besides, I think we have to face the truth here. Gaming to the exclusion of exercise is unhealthy, this campaign has a reasonable point. Denying this makes Slashdotters look like oil executives denying global warming by straw-manning the opposition.
"Oh, so the advert campaign is saying that if you play games you'll certainly die right away! How stupid!" +5 Insightful.
The point of the campaign is that a sedentary lifestyle is harmful to your health, which is true! The self-deluded rage expressed in the summary is moronic.
*I wish it didn't have to be the Daily Mail, but they had the best example.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, the BBC is not part of the British Government. Besides, I think one has to consider the spirit of the law here, and the BBC had only benevolent intentions.
I'm not the BBCs biggest fan, I consider them Labour-biased. Nevertheless, I'd say this is an unequivocally good production. For crying out loud, they're educating the UK about the risks of unpatched/unprotected internet use, potentially dramatically reducing spam and DDOS risks, and Slashdot complains about the legality!
Erm, did you RTFA? The botnet was previously existing, the BBC spammed two accounts they'd set up, and DDOS'd a site they'd set up. I'd be shocked if they didn't tell the hosts what they were going to do. As a final step, they notified all members of the botnet that they'd been hacked by changing their desktop background. I think it would be difficult to claim damages as the BBC did not propagate the botnet and anyone in their clutches got off lightly.
IE8 is still in beta, like FF3.5 and Chrome 2.0. By comparing the latest build of IE vs. old builds of Chrome and FF they're comparing apples* and pears.
*No jokes about Safari.
Or it could be because Google text ads are light, non-intrusive, and are unlikely to be carrying a spyware payload, so there's no real reason to block them, unless you have some fundamental objection to adverts, in which case I have a quote for you:
Business without advertising is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark. You know what you're doing, but nobody else does.
So if we extrapolate this trend, nuclear fusion power is only 30 years away!
We have taxes that punish people for conducting transactions, being productive citizens and family tragedy. We also reward people for being idle.
Hey ho, it seems to broadly work.
Please show me where taxes on the citizens hurt the economy.
This is the second time I've posted this link today.
Why should tax payers support people who can't afford to pay there property tax?
Circular reasoning.
She does have the power to withhold consent, but traditionally it is not used. Similarly she dissolves Parliament every four years or so, that's how we have elections. But traditionally she doesn't except at the request of a Prime Minister or Governor-General.
The problem is that in the UK, tradition can take on the status of constitutional law (e.g. MPs are traditionally free to leak secret documents to the public, but not legally, traditionally the monarchy doesn't interfere with politics, but occasionally it does.)
She's not. It would constitute interference in politics, something that is forbidden in the unwritten section of UK constitutional law.
I wonder about that. How is an anarchist system left-wing? It strikes me that freedom from external institutions is more of a right-wing thing.
Dare I mention the first-past-the-post system? Here one only actually has a vote if you live in a Tory-Labour marginal. The Lib-Dems will never get enough votes to form even the coalition that might introduce real democracy.
That won't stop me voting Lib-Dem. I think Clegg/Cable are the guys I want running the country now. I just know it'll never happen.
There's always going to be people who can't afford something. In the past, sellers, as part of the free market, have had the freedom to set their own price to maximise profits and the commercial viability of their product. Not any more, thanks to piracy!
In a free market, a company has a lot of competitors and its prices are set by its costs, not its profits. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider how free various markets are (compare US and UK telecoms, e.g.)
Now, consumers can decide what they think is fair for the seller to have, regardless of the seller's wishes, needs, or financial health. While we're at it, we might as well make it legal (or at least morally A-OK) to run out of a retail joint with a physical object, leaving only the manufacturing costs behind.
"Profit" is a cost of manufacture; as Adam Smith so astutely pointed out, what we call 'profit' should rightly be called 'cost of capital', as it is normally either returned to shareholders who stumped up the capital, re-invested in staying competitive or some combination of the two. If companies didn't 'profit' they'd have no way to pay for capital and hence no company.
Paying the manufacturing cost is not simple; do you pay for the raw materials, the raw materials+cost of capital of machinery, raw materials+cost of labour, raw materials+cost of capital+cost of labour+cost of distribution? When you account for all the costs you have paid the market price.
I'm basically agreeing with you, but refining your argument.
The only paid app I use is TubeDeluxe, because it is ridiculously useful. I can see its use declining rapidly outside London though. /astroturf
I prefer:
"He who thinks his system is foolproof has greatly underestimated the ingenuity of fools."
Here you go.
Yes, you can say it's not real evidence, but some right-wing governments, or any government that wasn't reliant on support from client regions, or any government that wasn't more interested in saving its own testes than doing what was right for the country* would have allowed the bank to collapse.
*You never know, it might happen. I can only think of one example at the moment, and that was Maggie's first term.
The English Conservative Party has a well-documented history of liberal tendencies going back at least as far as the Great War. There were even quite a few Tories who thought David Lloyd-George had the right idea, and said so publicly. Sir Winston Churchill illustrates the point well. First he was a Liberal, then a Tory prime minister.
The Tories, like Labour, are a fairly big tent.
Incidentally, this point is why there's a distinction between Socialism, Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy (in order of left-to-right and increasing sanity), the last being what most people in the West now think of when they think of socialism.
From link:
In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily "right wing", with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today's Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.
That's some good reading there Lou.
I'd say that socialism is inherently more authoritarian than right-wing economics, not least because socialism in its extreme forms removes an individuals economic liberties as well as the political ones.
Politicians are corrupt. There is value(read: profit) in artificial scarcity. By reducing the consumer's expectations you can get them to pay more for the same service. Profit is good for the economy(in theory).
Yes, yes, yes, NO! Profit from artificial scarcity causes a deadweight loss, and is bad for any other industry as well as consumers and therefore the government.
I don't know why my government is doing this, as it sounds like the exact opposite of the changes Britain normally proposes, but I don't understand any of the UK government policies. I would say roll on the general election, but I'm not convinced that Cameron's Tory's will be much better.
I heard a really good story about this, though it may be apocryphal.
Back in the day, Ordinance Survey maps used to be blanked out with fields or other inconspicuous things on top of military installations. Apparently the Soviet ambassador and his entourage were found walking around next to an army base. Their excuse when challenged was "Well, we wanted to have a picnic in the countryside, so we looked at the map and found this big open space..."
Why? Sounds like a great idea!
It would also make listening to KISS and singing along as Gene pretty much impossible.
Yes, but there are disadvantages to the technology too.
The other problem is for teenagers. Of course they loiter around threateningly, there's nothing for them to do in the average UK town centre now.
The problem is that they didn't do this. They just jump straight to the scare tactic of saying you will die if you play video games.
No they didn't. This campaign has been running since the new year, and they started with telling you how to modify your lifestyle in a positive way. They used no scare tactics, favouring a utopian vision. I'm guessing this resort to standard NHS tactics* means it didn't work.
Besides, I think we have to face the truth here. Gaming to the exclusion of exercise is unhealthy, this campaign has a reasonable point. Denying this makes Slashdotters look like oil executives denying global warming by straw-manning the opposition.
"Oh, so the advert campaign is saying that if you play games you'll certainly die right away! How stupid!" +5 Insightful.
The point of the campaign is that a sedentary lifestyle is harmful to your health, which is true! The self-deluded rage expressed in the summary is moronic.
*I wish it didn't have to be the Daily Mail, but they had the best example.