Isn't that what societies DID do before there were laws?
Someone going out with the girl you want? Someone has more land/shiny things than you? Someone has an attitude/skin-color/opinion you don't like, or is a threat to you? Are you in a position of power? Execute them!
The powerful still exploit their power in immoral ways. Laws reduce this. They make it harder, they make it more transparent. They don't eliminate it.
It looks like this is being improved. As your AC respondent points out, you can demand a solicitor (=lawyer) if you're detained in a police station. A bill in parliament says this:
Right of person detained under Schedule 7 to have someone informed and to consult a solicitor
5 (1) 40Schedule 8 to the Terrorism Act 2000 is amended as follows.
(2) In paragraph 6, for “police station”, in each place, there is substituted
“place”.
(3) In paragraph 7(1) the words “at a police station” are omitted.
I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear it widens powers in other areas, too ('Power to make and retain copies'). (You probably also won't be surprised that I haven't read and understood the whole thing, but other parts of it give the impression of doing both, too).
Yes indeed. And it's always worth remembering that companies are made up of people, that people watch, hear about, gossip about and judge others even when they're not subordinates, that people move around (and up) in industries, and that people talk to people.
Dump a problem on your jerk of a boss and he'll bad-mouth you to everyone else. Dump a load of unfinished work on your colleagues by giving no notice and they'll bad-mouth you, too. Apply to a company that employs someone who used to work for your former employer and you can bet that a message asking 'do you know him? what is this guy like?' is going to reach him. He might never have met you, but he might have heard about you from someone who's heard about you from your boss.
That isn't actually a reason, though. It just says 'some other people a long time ago also thought they shouldn't'. It just asks the question 'why should the US constitution say that?'. There are three deeper reasons which spring to mind. One is that having someone watch you is just creepy, it reduces people's well-being itself. The second is that governments sometimes go all Nazi-y/Stalin-y/burn-all-the-Catholics-y. The third is that governments are made up of individuals who, from the president to the lowliest policeman, can abuse it for personal reasons. For most 'real' people this might mean a dodgy policeman intruding on your life because your son has started dating his daughter, or you've done something he doesn't like, or you're the wrong colour, or anything else. That, I think, is the one most people forget. People dismiss the idea of THEIR country going Nazi because it doesn't happen very often, but it's a lot more plausible to imagine the petty official next door abusing their power - or the permit-granter who doesn't like something about you.
This push is not about that. It is to apply a filter to content that the government can not control. The filter is here the goal. And any means is just to get popular opinion to support it.
I don't think that's likely. I think it's much more likely to be about making a political statement. It's about Conservatives saying to the population's conservative voters 'we are the sort of party which doesn't like porn either, we are the sort of party who worries about the effect of our degenerate society on your children, and we are a party who can score a victory over pornographers and others who are not like you'. A lot of government policy - from mortgage assistance and immigration to benefits policy - puts symbolism over doing anything practically useful.
Unless you believe that someone would record child abuse on classified official documents.
Actually, this is what did happen in the US. The church kept records of known child abusing priests, and did not report them to the police. The priests were simply moved to new locations, instead. This is why victims were later able to sue the church diocese, instead of just the priest. The church was guilty of hiding the crimes of the priests.
Hmm, are you sure it requires that? I thought it was fairly widespread common law thing that employers could be sued for things their employees did whilst doing their job, even if there was nothing the employer could have known or done about it. (Which is something it can occasionally be rather important to know, especially if you're an employer). Of course, hiding it might make the church guilty of a crime, too.
Presumably lawyers have lots of fun making up puns on vicarious liability, too. Except that vicar and vicarious really do seem to have the same root.
It doesn't involve users to be code masters, it just involves them engaging their brain a bit. I frequently get bug reports along the lines of "something broke last week, came up with some error (I don't remember what), but I rebooted it and its fine for now; please fix it so it doesn't happen again". You don't have to be a "code master" to figure out that reporting a bug and not actually tell me _what_ broke, what the error was or let me log into a system that is currently exhibiting the problem so I can look myself is not going to be condusive to me fixing things.
I think users don't always realize that a fault is not just obvious by inspecting your software. They don't realize you have identify possible places in hundreds of thousands of lines of code, that you need to step through what happened or that you need to be able to repeat it in order to gather more information and know when you've fixed. Without any experience of code or debugging, reasoning about what is and isn't important just isn't something the user will have done. Worse, it's easy for users to think you're putting up bureaucratic barriers to escape extra work - which creating long mandatory forms with lots of required information will only make worse - or that you don't trust them.
It's the enormous gulf of understanding about the other sides experience of a bug report that's the problem, not stupidity (though there's plenty of that around, too).
I suspect a lot of that, especially when users flat out lie, comes from users feeling they'll get a better and higher priority response if they start by trying as hard as possible to make it sound like a problem you're responsible for rather than they are. I guess it just feels more legitimate to call and say 'your server isn't working' instead of 'I've broken my computer, please fix it for me again'.
No, it would be something that might actually have some relevance to the European Convention on Human Rights which the court has the power to decide the law would breach. This DOES include a freedom of association and to free expression. For some reason, no-one thought it worth including a right to be able to pay your taxes, it being one of the less popular rights.
I think a rather better argument would be that the Internet is now so important for communication, for political activity, for social involvement and so on that denying people access to it is to deny rights of free association. Not to mention that it's a vast vast overreaction.
Probably true. The thing about people with huge amounts of money is that they seem to like gaining more money as if it were some sort of competitive sport. That's just one reason they have so much in the first place. It's also why I found it so amusing when UK media reports a while ago suggested 'naming and shaming' highly paid CEOs by publishing a list, as if it would do anything other than cause number 47 to demand a pay rise 'because I'm a top ten sort of boss, not a top 50 sort of boss'.
It's not hard to imagine someone like that entering politics as yet another competitive sport.
An ideal physical outcome (as produced by an ideal but non-existent alternative to our markets, etc.) wouldn't leave resources idle before using them for something. People would go immediately in to training or education, or to some other job which their skills can meet. In any case, there's no shortage of stuff where there are plenty of skilled people who can do it, or which almost anyone can do, or learn to do in much less time than many people have been unemployed. There are lots of unemployed construction workers. Are there really no homes, schools, hospitals or offices which could be improved so as to make someone's life better? No infrastructure which needs replacing, repairing or which could be usefully built? Even the unskilled can do or learn to do plenty of things which people would love to have done for them - everything from planting municipal flower beds to cooking their food. But the economy isn't able to make these things happen, not because it's not a physical possibility, but because the system isn't an ideal one and makes incorrect decisions. And that's my point: mass unemployment is the result of the economy making poor decisions now, not a physically inevitable result of poor decisions in the past.
In a recession like the recent one (or any economic conditions with high unemployment) we have a bunch of things worth doing and a bunch of people who could do them but are not. This is a problem in which the economy's control system (by which I mean the markets, currencies, contracts, regulations an all the other social mechanisms which case the economy to produce this physical outcome rather than that physical outcome) doesn't make the best decisions. The chain of causation may go back further, but it doesn't cease to be a problem just because it was caused by something else.
It is a consequence of a problem, here, that whatever society is doing is simply out of whack with reality to the point that when the illusion falls apart and society attempts to return to a more reasonable approach, it results in considerable economic harm in the form of a recession.
Indeed it can be. Take Spain, for example. The Spanish consumed more than they produced for years, and the only reason all the Euros didn't drain out of Spain and thus make this impossible was because they were borrowing from abroad (to finance mortgages, in Spain's case there was almost no government debt involved). The crunch came, and foreigners stopped sending goods to Spain in exchange for promises of goods going the other way in the future (ie, debt). The response of the Spanish economy has been to reduce output and leave 25% of potential employees doing nothing. This response IS a problem. A much better response would be to produce more and start sending a lot of it abroad, in settlement of debts (or at least produce stuff for themselves). The actual response is not just a physically inevitable outcome of earlier poor decisions, it's problematic in itself. It's a wrong decision for the mechanism to make.
The difficulty is that recessions are natural corrections of problems, not the actual problems themselves.
Producing less and leaving resources idle is not an effective means to correct previous excessive borrowing. It may be a failure mode commonly triggered by previous bad decision making, but it's still a failure to make the correct decisions.
With China pushing people out of rural areas and into ever larger cities [nytimes.com], it will be very interesting over the next few years to see how all of those people will earn a living.
There's no shortage of things worth doing in the world, and especially not in a middle income country with a huge population still in poverty. It's a shorter-term problem, though - economies can't jump from one state to another, nor can people jump in to jobs needing different skills. And in a country like China, the state can always use those people to build a new high speed railway in the wrong place or a new ghost city nobody lives in. They could even do something shocking, like use them to make their food supply safe or clean their environment. A recession like that in the west is a pure economic problem - a problem in the control system, not the physical reality - and the Chinese government is a lot more able to meddle in it.
He didn't actually say it doesn't matter, just that Foxconn won't worry. Of course, being a purely mental concept, Foxconn doesn't have the neurons to worry, but its management might feel uncomfortable depending on their level of psychopathy. Not that that stops anyone. But Chinese politicians will worry if it threatens to cause mass unemployment, because they're already worried that poorer economic conditions will lead to unrest and dissatisfaction with the whole one-party thing. And when the Chinese government is worrying, they have a tendency to pass it on.
In any case, no country is actually obliged to require a visa or passport. The US cancelling his passport isn't an instruction to Russia not to let him in (and I'm sure Russia would absolutely love to ignore a US instruction anyway). After all, Russian border control is no business of the US. It's not like he needs a passport to prove who he is or where he's from anyway.
I'm sure the local intelligence services would be interested in speaking to him, but I think it's much more likely governments will consider what they always consider first with any sort of newsworthy foreign policy: domestic politics. There are places where pissing off the US and standing up to US government power will go down very well with the voters, especially in places where it fits with the governing party's narrative.
It does come with problems, though. Consider what happens if Google's car research pushes out publicly funded (and published) research and ties the field up in IP claims and secrecy. Aside from hindering research, this builds a potential future monopoly for something very important - not to mention the risks of Google tracking the journeys made and stuffing cars full of advertising.
Very definitely a problem. The UK has some secret evidence in court proceedings (for control orders, I think this was), and AIUI, a problem which comes up is that the defence is left guessing what they have to rebut. The defence lawyers have to ask the defendent (hmm, I'm not sure if he's technically a defendent) to guess what secret evidence might have been presented so that they can, say, present some evidence that he was at a certain place at a certain time in the hope that it invalidates some of the claims. Sounds rather farcical.
Also 'owning' a car becomes less interesting for many.
Which also makes me think it could eventually have quite an effect on residential landscapes. Look at a typical street in the UK, for example (and I imagine many other places, too) and you'll see either a road full of houses with front gardens converted to driveways, or a roadside packed with parked cars, or both. Many driveways could turn back in to gardens (and garages in to rooms). For those so inclined, it could even be possible to imagine groups of houses which don't have a road right outside them, which could bring either higher density or a better environment and less noise (not hard to guess which in the UK, though:( ).
Americans are the largest group of English speakers on the planet.
No, they aren't. But just because they aren't doesn't mean they aren't going to maintain a spoken language with a distinct identity (albeit still with plenty of variety within it), and part of that maintenance will come from avoidance of things which grate in the US but don't in, say, India or Nigeria.
You can hold onto whatever piddly rules you want,
Indeed we shall, as indeed will American-English speakers and speakers with particular US regional accents. It's why UK English isn't the same as US English.
but we are the majority of the spoken language. Sorry you lost the war sweet cheeks.
UK and US English are quite similar. AIUI, some linguists expect English to split in to Western, Indian and African variants, and I can't help thinking someone Americans will find it quite hard to take if Indian consumers start making fun of US products and call centre operators full of comical English 'mistakes' and weird/cute dialect words like 'million'.
And IMHO 'I also' would be more correct than 'I have also' in the context. just sayin'.:)
Not in UK English. Americans seem unusually allergic to the perfect tense. I find that 'I already ate' always grates, because it should be 'I have already eaten' (because it's a state of being, a state of having eaten). For some reason, 'I have learned...' seems better than 'I learned...' but 'I learnt' doesn't seem as bad.
I think The Economist may have got it right: The US sees espionage against the state as just part of the game, but espionage against its private civilian businesses as illegitimate, whereas the Chinese government doesn't recognize the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that what societies DID do before there were laws?
Someone going out with the girl you want? Someone has more land/shiny things than you? Someone has an attitude/skin-color/opinion you don't like, or is a threat to you? Are you in a position of power? Execute them!
The powerful still exploit their power in immoral ways. Laws reduce this. They make it harder, they make it more transparent. They don't eliminate it.
which, I presume, extends it to ports.
There is actually a bill part-way through parliament which shortens the detention period to six hours: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2013-2014/0093/cbill_2013-20140093_en_16.htm#sch7
I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear it widens powers in other areas, too ('Power to make and retain copies'). (You probably also won't be surprised that I haven't read and understood the whole thing, but other parts of it give the impression of doing both, too).
Yes indeed. And it's always worth remembering that companies are made up of people, that people watch, hear about, gossip about and judge others even when they're not subordinates, that people move around (and up) in industries, and that people talk to people.
Dump a problem on your jerk of a boss and he'll bad-mouth you to everyone else. Dump a load of unfinished work on your colleagues by giving no notice and they'll bad-mouth you, too. Apply to a company that employs someone who used to work for your former employer and you can bet that a message asking 'do you know him? what is this guy like?' is going to reach him. He might never have met you, but he might have heard about you from someone who's heard about you from your boss.
That isn't actually a reason, though. It just says 'some other people a long time ago also thought they shouldn't'. It just asks the question 'why should the US constitution say that?'. There are three deeper reasons which spring to mind. One is that having someone watch you is just creepy, it reduces people's well-being itself. The second is that governments sometimes go all Nazi-y/Stalin-y/burn-all-the-Catholics-y. The third is that governments are made up of individuals who, from the president to the lowliest policeman, can abuse it for personal reasons. For most 'real' people this might mean a dodgy policeman intruding on your life because your son has started dating his daughter, or you've done something he doesn't like, or you're the wrong colour, or anything else. That, I think, is the one most people forget. People dismiss the idea of THEIR country going Nazi because it doesn't happen very often, but it's a lot more plausible to imagine the petty official next door abusing their power - or the permit-granter who doesn't like something about you.
This push is not about that. It is to apply a filter to content that the government can not control. The filter is here the goal. And any means is just to get popular opinion to support it.
I don't think that's likely. I think it's much more likely to be about making a political statement. It's about Conservatives saying to the population's conservative voters 'we are the sort of party which doesn't like porn either, we are the sort of party who worries about the effect of our degenerate society on your children, and we are a party who can score a victory over pornographers and others who are not like you'. A lot of government policy - from mortgage assistance and immigration to benefits policy - puts symbolism over doing anything practically useful.
Unless you believe that someone would record child abuse on classified official documents.
Actually, this is what did happen in the US. The church kept records of known child abusing priests, and did not report them to the police. The priests were simply moved to new locations, instead. This is why victims were later able to sue the church diocese, instead of just the priest. The church was guilty of hiding the crimes of the priests.
Hmm, are you sure it requires that? I thought it was fairly widespread common law thing that employers could be sued for things their employees did whilst doing their job, even if there was nothing the employer could have known or done about it. (Which is something it can occasionally be rather important to know, especially if you're an employer). Of course, hiding it might make the church guilty of a crime, too.
Presumably lawyers have lots of fun making up puns on vicarious liability, too. Except that vicar and vicarious really do seem to have the same root.
It doesn't involve users to be code masters, it just involves them engaging their brain a bit. I frequently get bug reports along the lines of "something broke last week, came up with some error (I don't remember what), but I rebooted it and its fine for now; please fix it so it doesn't happen again". You don't have to be a "code master" to figure out that reporting a bug and not actually tell me _what_ broke, what the error was or let me log into a system that is currently exhibiting the problem so I can look myself is not going to be condusive to me fixing things.
I think users don't always realize that a fault is not just obvious by inspecting your software. They don't realize you have identify possible places in hundreds of thousands of lines of code, that you need to step through what happened or that you need to be able to repeat it in order to gather more information and know when you've fixed. Without any experience of code or debugging, reasoning about what is and isn't important just isn't something the user will have done. Worse, it's easy for users to think you're putting up bureaucratic barriers to escape extra work - which creating long mandatory forms with lots of required information will only make worse - or that you don't trust them.
It's the enormous gulf of understanding about the other sides experience of a bug report that's the problem, not stupidity (though there's plenty of that around, too).
I suspect a lot of that, especially when users flat out lie, comes from users feeling they'll get a better and higher priority response if they start by trying as hard as possible to make it sound like a problem you're responsible for rather than they are. I guess it just feels more legitimate to call and say 'your server isn't working' instead of 'I've broken my computer, please fix it for me again'.
No, it would be something that might actually have some relevance to the European Convention on Human Rights which the court has the power to decide the law would breach. This DOES include a freedom of association and to free expression. For some reason, no-one thought it worth including a right to be able to pay your taxes, it being one of the less popular rights.
I think a rather better argument would be that the Internet is now so important for communication, for political activity, for social involvement and so on that denying people access to it is to deny rights of free association. Not to mention that it's a vast vast overreaction.
Probably true. The thing about people with huge amounts of money is that they seem to like gaining more money as if it were some sort of competitive sport. That's just one reason they have so much in the first place. It's also why I found it so amusing when UK media reports a while ago suggested 'naming and shaming' highly paid CEOs by publishing a list, as if it would do anything other than cause number 47 to demand a pay rise 'because I'm a top ten sort of boss, not a top 50 sort of boss'.
It's not hard to imagine someone like that entering politics as yet another competitive sport.
An ideal physical outcome (as produced by an ideal but non-existent alternative to our markets, etc.) wouldn't leave resources idle before using them for something. People would go immediately in to training or education, or to some other job which their skills can meet. In any case, there's no shortage of stuff where there are plenty of skilled people who can do it, or which almost anyone can do, or learn to do in much less time than many people have been unemployed. There are lots of unemployed construction workers. Are there really no homes, schools, hospitals or offices which could be improved so as to make someone's life better? No infrastructure which needs replacing, repairing or which could be usefully built? Even the unskilled can do or learn to do plenty of things which people would love to have done for them - everything from planting municipal flower beds to cooking their food. But the economy isn't able to make these things happen, not because it's not a physical possibility, but because the system isn't an ideal one and makes incorrect decisions. And that's my point: mass unemployment is the result of the economy making poor decisions now, not a physically inevitable result of poor decisions in the past.
I disagree. A recession is not a problem.
In a recession like the recent one (or any economic conditions with high unemployment) we have a bunch of things worth doing and a bunch of people who could do them but are not. This is a problem in which the economy's control system (by which I mean the markets, currencies, contracts, regulations an all the other social mechanisms which case the economy to produce this physical outcome rather than that physical outcome) doesn't make the best decisions. The chain of causation may go back further, but it doesn't cease to be a problem just because it was caused by something else.
It is a consequence of a problem, here, that whatever society is doing is simply out of whack with reality to the point that when the illusion falls apart and society attempts to return to a more reasonable approach, it results in considerable economic harm in the form of a recession.
Indeed it can be. Take Spain, for example. The Spanish consumed more than they produced for years, and the only reason all the Euros didn't drain out of Spain and thus make this impossible was because they were borrowing from abroad (to finance mortgages, in Spain's case there was almost no government debt involved). The crunch came, and foreigners stopped sending goods to Spain in exchange for promises of goods going the other way in the future (ie, debt). The response of the Spanish economy has been to reduce output and leave 25% of potential employees doing nothing. This response IS a problem. A much better response would be to produce more and start sending a lot of it abroad, in settlement of debts (or at least produce stuff for themselves). The actual response is not just a physically inevitable outcome of earlier poor decisions, it's problematic in itself. It's a wrong decision for the mechanism to make.
The difficulty is that recessions are natural corrections of problems, not the actual problems themselves.
Producing less and leaving resources idle is not an effective means to correct previous excessive borrowing. It may be a failure mode commonly triggered by previous bad decision making, but it's still a failure to make the correct decisions.
With China pushing people out of rural areas and into ever larger cities [nytimes.com], it will be very interesting over the next few years to see how all of those people will earn a living.
There's no shortage of things worth doing in the world, and especially not in a middle income country with a huge population still in poverty. It's a shorter-term problem, though - economies can't jump from one state to another, nor can people jump in to jobs needing different skills. And in a country like China, the state can always use those people to build a new high speed railway in the wrong place or a new ghost city nobody lives in. They could even do something shocking, like use them to make their food supply safe or clean their environment. A recession like that in the west is a pure economic problem - a problem in the control system, not the physical reality - and the Chinese government is a lot more able to meddle in it.
He didn't actually say it doesn't matter, just that Foxconn won't worry. Of course, being a purely mental concept, Foxconn doesn't have the neurons to worry, but its management might feel uncomfortable depending on their level of psychopathy. Not that that stops anyone. But Chinese politicians will worry if it threatens to cause mass unemployment, because they're already worried that poorer economic conditions will lead to unrest and dissatisfaction with the whole one-party thing. And when the Chinese government is worrying, they have a tendency to pass it on.
In any case, no country is actually obliged to require a visa or passport. The US cancelling his passport isn't an instruction to Russia not to let him in (and I'm sure Russia would absolutely love to ignore a US instruction anyway). After all, Russian border control is no business of the US. It's not like he needs a passport to prove who he is or where he's from anyway.
I'm sure the local intelligence services would be interested in speaking to him, but I think it's much more likely governments will consider what they always consider first with any sort of newsworthy foreign policy: domestic politics. There are places where pissing off the US and standing up to US government power will go down very well with the voters, especially in places where it fits with the governing party's narrative.
It does come with problems, though. Consider what happens if Google's car research pushes out publicly funded (and published) research and ties the field up in IP claims and secrecy. Aside from hindering research, this builds a potential future monopoly for something very important - not to mention the risks of Google tracking the journeys made and stuffing cars full of advertising.
Very definitely a problem. The UK has some secret evidence in court proceedings (for control orders, I think this was), and AIUI, a problem which comes up is that the defence is left guessing what they have to rebut. The defence lawyers have to ask the defendent (hmm, I'm not sure if he's technically a defendent) to guess what secret evidence might have been presented so that they can, say, present some evidence that he was at a certain place at a certain time in the hope that it invalidates some of the claims. Sounds rather farcical.
Also 'owning' a car becomes less interesting for many.
Which also makes me think it could eventually have quite an effect on residential landscapes. Look at a typical street in the UK, for example (and I imagine many other places, too) and you'll see either a road full of houses with front gardens converted to driveways, or a roadside packed with parked cars, or both. Many driveways could turn back in to gardens (and garages in to rooms). For those so inclined, it could even be possible to imagine groups of houses which don't have a road right outside them, which could bring either higher density or a better environment and less noise (not hard to guess which in the UK, though :( ).
It isn't really relevant here, but I'd think that issuing two exclusive licences to different people would probably count.
Americans are the largest group of English speakers on the planet.
No, they aren't. But just because they aren't doesn't mean they aren't going to maintain a spoken language with a distinct identity (albeit still with plenty of variety within it), and part of that maintenance will come from avoidance of things which grate in the US but don't in, say, India or Nigeria.
You can hold onto whatever piddly rules you want,
Indeed we shall, as indeed will American-English speakers and speakers with particular US regional accents. It's why UK English isn't the same as US English.
but we are the majority of the spoken language. Sorry you lost the war sweet cheeks.
UK and US English are quite similar. AIUI, some linguists expect English to split in to Western, Indian and African variants, and I can't help thinking someone Americans will find it quite hard to take if Indian consumers start making fun of US products and call centre operators full of comical English 'mistakes' and weird/cute dialect words like 'million'.
learnt is, IIRC, an Anglicism.
Yes.
And IMHO 'I also' would be more correct than 'I have also' in the context. just sayin'. :)
Not in UK English. Americans seem unusually allergic to the perfect tense. I find that 'I already ate' always grates, because it should be 'I have already eaten' (because it's a state of being, a state of having eaten). For some reason, 'I have learned ...' seems better than 'I learned ...' but 'I learnt' doesn't seem as bad.
I think The Economist may have got it right: The US sees espionage against the state as just part of the game, but espionage against its private civilian businesses as illegitimate, whereas the Chinese government doesn't recognize the difference.