Errm, haven't got the UK figures at hand, but as I recall the fairly large increase in gun murders in Austrailia acutally meant an increase of 2 murders out of about 15. When you've got a sample size that small your statistics are meaningless - a single shootout between biker gangs could easily seem like a mass epidemic of shootings solely from looking at percentages.
It's a well known fact that in places where gun ownership is mandatory, there is less crime. You pale faced BSE infected inbred gits might not be able to get that through your thick skulls but leave the rest of the world out of it.
Of course, and the six times as high murder rate in the US proves your point I'm sure. And go, on pull out the Swiss example, please. Just because they all own guns (hint: they don't) doesn't mean they're not controlled.
And while we're on the topic, it seems like you can't even criticize your own government without fearing retribution. So piss off, you tosser.
Strawman. He was an employee of the EU at the time, hardly just a private citizen. Besides which, the EU is not Britain, despite what some people seem to think.
Nice troll though. Made two classic mistakes from the list of erroneous arguments linked to in the troll HOWTO.
Well that's easy. There's more tech work available in California than in the UK. Well, there has been anyway, and due to the shortages of workers willing to spend 90 hours a week slaving away for little money H1-Bs are popular there.
Amount of work available is hardly the sole criterion for quality of life though, which is what he seems to be saying. Well, he's less reasonable than that, but still...:)
When you've only got five black people in the entire country, yes, racism is low.
Did you know that by 2010 whites will comprise less than 50% of the population in Leicester? And by 2050 whites will comprise less than half the population in London, which is around the 10 million mark?
So that's hardly "five black people" is it? The white population in Britain is falling due to declining birth rates, whereas those of other cultures are rising.
Have all those cameras reduced the number of IRA bombings at all? Whose brains are you mopping off the floor?
Did having an armed populace stop the Unabomber from planting numerous bombs? No. In fact, none of the bomb attacks America has had have been stopped by people with guns have they?
How on Earth are people with guns supposed to stop someone quietly walking into a building and leaving a bag containing a bomb? Do guns make you psychic? Give you X-ray vision? Well?
Lay off the gun propagranda. If you were really interested in making a case for gun ownership you wouldn't spout off like a moron.
In any case, all these things are relative - London is more racially segregated than california.
How do you know this? I'd like to see something other than bald assertion please. Having lived in London almost all of my life, I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. Sure there is racism, but hardly to the level of "segregation". And London has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the world.
Again, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it offers more choices - to start a company, to immigrants looking for a new life, and for getting better bandwidth.
So how does all of the recent stories and news about the poor treatment of H1-Bs come into all of this? And looking at the eligibility requirements for the UK and the US, they appear much the same except for the requirement of an American trivia test for American citizenship. Not sure about relative ease of getting into the country in the first place though.
It's all relative, and the UK doesn't even come close to california. And it shows.
How? You've offered nothing apart from your opinion. Have you ever been to the UK? Lived here for a period of time? I've never been to California I'll admit, so I'm not passing judgement, which you seem to have done.
Then again, judging from your earlier post you aren't incredibly informed about the UK. So it's not really suprising.
You think they don't consider this? They are mounted so that they don't look into your house, and if they do you can call your local council and get them altered so that they don't.
This is an issue my European friends just can't grok... that we understand the cost of our freedoms and accept it (well, some of us do). Unfortunately, more and more of us just see the statistics and would rather live under an iron fist if it meant their kids were safer....
I hear this again and again, and I still don't get it. Don't take this as flamebait, but just how is the US freer than anywhere else? And I'm not talking about what the Constitution says, I'm talking about what actually happens in America?
In a country with no-knock searches, Carnivore, mandatory minimum sentances and widespread censorship where is this freedom? And bare in mind that what may be true for you does not hold for the average American.
Without touching on the miserably boring history of the English, lets see how we are different today.
Boring of course, as in having a lot of it. As opposed to America.
ISPs and newspapers routinely bend over for big business in the UK, its 10 times worse than over here.
ISPs certainly do, but newspapers aren't so likely to buckle, especially the larger broadsheets.
Guns. The citizenry dont defend themselves. The crown watches over its subjects. Guns are for the hunting of waterfowl on one's estate and the military. End of story.
For a start we're citizens, not subjects. Nice try there though. And as for guns, feel free to keep them and your murder rate.
Privacy. The crown is watching over you and will decide what is good for you. Give us your passwords and don't talk back peasant! Witness the RIP act and numerous other things more recently passed or in the process of passing. Forced handing over of private keys, etc etc etc.
True to an extent, but all Governments enjoy passing draconian legislation that they know will get struck down in the courts - for example several of the attempts made in USia for online decency laws. A lot of RIP is likely to fall foul of the Human Rights Act.
Cars. The brits have an insane traffic and speed system that is designed to a)inconvenience car owners and b) generate revenue with speed cameras. This is part "Green" legislation, part greed, part stupidity.
How is it insane? Because... *gasp*... we drive on the other side of the road???! Anyway, USia is quite happily installing as many speed cameras as possible, we're just ahead of the game.
I could go on for years about all the things that are differnet about the UK, but I havent been there in a while and I think ive made my point anyway.
I think you have made your point quite clearly.
Whether it was the point you were intending to make is something different though. Maybe you should try and find out about things before spouting off like a fool.
This is a common mistake made by people, but it's simply not true. We are in fact British citizens, and seeing as no legislation at all relating to nationality existed before the British Nationality & Status of Aliens Act of 1914, the term "subject" is simply a holdover from when the monarchy wielded real power.
Examples please. James Bulger ? Filmed on video being led away for murder, but it didn't stop it.
No it didn't, but in cases like that it wouldn't would it? I doubt those kids had any real comprehension of the ubiquitous nature of CCTV, as opposed to adults who are aware of the fact that they are likely to be filmed committing crimes, and so are deterred. And the CCTV footage was of great help in catching the killers.
The current case, where a number of (apparently) famous footballers severely beat and kicked one man, yet the witnesses in court are all eye-witnesses, not camera opearators.
Wrong. Actually there was CCTV footage of the players and their targets until just before the incident, and of the players moving away afterwards. Sure the actual incident may not have been caught, but the fact that the defendents were caught on film helps to validate eye witness accounts.
Sure we have a hell of a lot of cameras over here, but just making the film easier to view isn't going to further "erode" the rights of UK citizens. As the article says, CCTV cameras are already everywhere in the UK, and you can't walk through a major urban metropolis without being caught every 50 yards or so.
This is a good thing, because it has worked in keeping levels of crime in our cities down, and making them safer for people to walk late at night. CCTV footage has led to convictions for many people committing acts of violence, and I, and many other UK citizens feel safer for having them around.
Considering that the police already have access to all of the footage, it's hardly going to change much for them to be able to access it on the move. Rather, it will enable them to respond more quickly to criminal acts, and hopefully mean they can be stopped quicker. By piping them through a computer, face and car number plate recognition technology can be used to further aid identification of criminals and their vehicles.
The police need every bit of help they can get in their fight against crime. This development is something that can help, whilst at the same time causing no further decrease in our freedom or privacy.
You almost make this sound like it's a good thing.
How so? Did you read a different post?
There's a distinct difference between parental controls, which seems to be what you're talking about, and content control, which is things like CSS, SDMI and the recent hard disk protection mechanisms. I'd agree that voluntary parental control mechanisms are a good thing, whilst the other is distinctly a bad thing.
The P3 will certainly be more than just a games console. They've said before that their aim is to replace specialised units like DVD players and hi-fi systems with a central unit which does all of these jobs - the Playstation 2 makes a start at this, but by the time the P3 is rolled out people will be used to the idea of a central controlling device.
And let's face it - the P3 is likely to sell well solely on it's strength as a games machine and Sony's marketing muscle.
Of course there is a lot of risk with this - a central controlling device means that it's far easier to incorporate more effective content control mechanisms - you only need to include them with one device rather than every device in the house. And people are likely to choose convenience over freedom as they so often do.
Unfortunately it's only rarely that people reject convenience, and Sony will undoubtedly have another huge hit with the P3. If they can manage to produce any of course:)
While I'm the first to agree this is cool, and shows off the strides that have been made in electric car systems, it's hardly more than a showcase for top systems rather than the real systems that are required for everyday use, which are still somewhat lacking when it comes to things like efficiency.
What we really need is for electric cars to overtake petrol based cars in terms of miles/gallon - without this there is absolutely no chance of them ever taking off as anything other than a curiosity for people with money and an environmental conscience. And given that the giant fuel companies are hardly likely to welcome such developments, it may take significant benefits to allow people to make the change.
Still, it's good to see that the state of the art is progressing so quickly - these developments will eventually filter down to affordable systems and bring electric cars onto the streets for normal people sooner.
Conferences are a hell of a lot closer to books than software is. After all these conferences are about the things that O'Reilly write books about - programming, new technologies and so on. Their expertise in these areas certainly transfers to organising these events, and they've already got access to people who know a great deal about these subjects:)
A lot of organisations are pushing foward with more and more fancy multimedia features for the web, despite the fact that eyeball tracking experiments show that people tend to ignore even static images in favour of plain text.
Do you think that we need any of this new technology, and will it ever become the standard format for the web?
It's about time that a lot of companies in and around the open source/free software community started to realise that at the end of the day they are there to make money rather than generate kudos. There's no reason for small companies to suddenly start expanding in directions totally unrelated to their core product - it just spreads them thinly and weakens them financially.
O'Reilly are first and foremost a book company, and they're a damn good one. This is where their efforts should lie, and it looks as though they've realised that. Although it may have been a profitable venture, it's still a distraction for a small company looking to get bigger.
Just look at VA for the perfect example of this. They're a hardware company that specialises in preinstalled Linux solutions. But rather than stick with doing this, building up a client base and slowly consolidating and expanding they've gone on a veritable orgy of purchases which seem to make very little sense in terms of their bottom line. And now they're in trouble... suprise, suprise.
Companies need to stick with what they're good at until they're stable enough to expand. As nice as having kudos may be, you can't use them to buy food for the kids.
A country can't just expand its borders and retroactively claim anything that now appears within them. Because Sealand claimed sovreignity before the expansion, if they are a country then their territory isn't part of Britain at all.
Okay, this seems to me like a pretty damn pointless application, the sort of thing that programmers churn out just to practice their programming skills rather than produce anything truly useful.
Think about it - you can already get most of the essential Linux tools over at Cygwin if you're after better command line tools. Otherwise, what does Linux have to offer? Most Linux software is perpetual alphaware or just a rehash of other projects (witness the truly scary number of CD front-ends out there). These programs already have free native Windows equivalents out there, and the Windows ones have often been in development longer (the big Linux bandwagon wasn't all that long ago) and can take advantage of Windows features.
And out of the few open sourced packages that are approaching professional quality, many of them are already available on Windows, like Apache. Sure there's the GIMP, but Windows users using Photoshop aren't going to want to change, and PaintShop Pro is pretty much the package of choice for low-end use.
I just don't see that there's any real use for this.
Nonsense. Any simple web of trust algorithm could take care of this. Yes, it will take more computer hardware and software sophistication, but we have Moore's law to guarantee that that will happen. The key problem here is that Google bases rankings from all sites the same, instead of using a "web of trust" method of weighting rankings.
Funny thing about that image - it's impossible to tell just from looking at it what we see out of, what we smell out of, etc.!:-) Aliens who see this might think we see out of our nipples and eat through our navels, and that our heads are our sexual reproductive organs. Makes ya wonder...
You could configure George Schlossnagle's mod_log_spread to multicast apache log entries to a third party audit host. That would be realtime, very hard to fake, and transparent to your config.
You could configure George Schlossnagle's mod_log_spread to multicast apache log entries to a third party audit host. That would be realtime, very hard to fake, and transparent to your config.
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Errm, haven't got the UK figures at hand, but as I recall the fairly large increase in gun murders in Austrailia acutally meant an increase of 2 murders out of about 15. When you've got a sample size that small your statistics are meaningless - a single shootout between biker gangs could easily seem like a mass epidemic of shootings solely from looking at percentages.
Nice try, but not good enough.
It's a well known fact that in places where gun ownership is mandatory, there is less crime. You pale faced BSE infected inbred gits might not be able to get that through your thick skulls but leave the rest of the world out of it.
Of course, and the six times as high murder rate in the US proves your point I'm sure. And go, on pull out the Swiss example, please. Just because they all own guns (hint: they don't) doesn't mean they're not controlled.
And while we're on the topic, it seems like you can't even criticize your own government without fearing retribution. So piss off, you tosser.
Strawman. He was an employee of the EU at the time, hardly just a private citizen. Besides which, the EU is not Britain, despite what some people seem to think.
Nice troll though. Made two classic mistakes from the list of erroneous arguments linked to in the troll HOWTO.
Well that's easy. There's more tech work available in California than in the UK. Well, there has been anyway, and due to the shortages of workers willing to spend 90 hours a week slaving away for little money H1-Bs are popular there.
Amount of work available is hardly the sole criterion for quality of life though, which is what he seems to be saying. Well, he's less reasonable than that, but still... :)
When you've only got five black people in the entire country, yes, racism is low.
Did you know that by 2010 whites will comprise less than 50% of the population in Leicester? And by 2050 whites will comprise less than half the population in London, which is around the 10 million mark?
So that's hardly "five black people" is it? The white population in Britain is falling due to declining birth rates, whereas those of other cultures are rising.
Have all those cameras reduced the number of IRA bombings at all? Whose brains are you mopping off the floor?
Did having an armed populace stop the Unabomber from planting numerous bombs? No. In fact, none of the bomb attacks America has had have been stopped by people with guns have they?
How on Earth are people with guns supposed to stop someone quietly walking into a building and leaving a bag containing a bomb? Do guns make you psychic? Give you X-ray vision? Well?
Lay off the gun propagranda. If you were really interested in making a case for gun ownership you wouldn't spout off like a moron.
In any case, all these things are relative - London is more racially segregated than california.
How do you know this? I'd like to see something other than bald assertion please. Having lived in London almost all of my life, I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. Sure there is racism, but hardly to the level of "segregation". And London has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the world.
Again, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it offers more choices - to start a company, to immigrants looking for a new life, and for getting better bandwidth.
So how does all of the recent stories and news about the poor treatment of H1-Bs come into all of this? And looking at the eligibility requirements for the UK and the US, they appear much the same except for the requirement of an American trivia test for American citizenship. Not sure about relative ease of getting into the country in the first place though.
It's all relative, and the UK doesn't even come close to california. And it shows.
How? You've offered nothing apart from your opinion. Have you ever been to the UK? Lived here for a period of time? I've never been to California I'll admit, so I'm not passing judgement, which you seem to have done.
Then again, judging from your earlier post you aren't incredibly informed about the UK. So it's not really suprising.
You think they don't consider this? They are mounted so that they don't look into your house, and if they do you can call your local council and get them altered so that they don't.
This is an issue my European friends just can't grok... that we understand the cost of our freedoms and accept it (well, some of us do). Unfortunately, more and more of us just see the statistics and would rather live under an iron fist if it meant their kids were safer....
I hear this again and again, and I still don't get it. Don't take this as flamebait, but just how is the US freer than anywhere else? And I'm not talking about what the Constitution says, I'm talking about what actually happens in America?
In a country with no-knock searches, Carnivore, mandatory minimum sentances and widespread censorship where is this freedom? And bare in mind that what may be true for you does not hold for the average American.
Without touching on the miserably boring history of the English, lets see how we are different today.
Boring of course, as in having a lot of it. As opposed to America.
ISPs and newspapers routinely bend over for big business in the UK, its 10 times worse than over here.
ISPs certainly do, but newspapers aren't so likely to buckle, especially the larger broadsheets.
Guns. The citizenry dont defend themselves. The crown watches over its subjects. Guns are for the hunting of waterfowl on one's estate and the military. End of story.
For a start we're citizens, not subjects. Nice try there though. And as for guns, feel free to keep them and your murder rate.
Privacy. The crown is watching over you and will decide what is good for you. Give us your passwords and don't talk back peasant! Witness the RIP act and numerous other things more recently passed or in the process of passing. Forced handing over of private keys, etc etc etc.
True to an extent, but all Governments enjoy passing draconian legislation that they know will get struck down in the courts - for example several of the attempts made in USia for online decency laws. A lot of RIP is likely to fall foul of the Human Rights Act.
Cars. The brits have an insane traffic and speed system that is designed to a)inconvenience car owners and b) generate revenue with speed cameras. This is part "Green" legislation, part greed, part stupidity.
How is it insane? Because... *gasp*... we drive on the other side of the road???! Anyway, USia is quite happily installing as many speed cameras as possible, we're just ahead of the game.
I could go on for years about all the things that are differnet about the UK, but I havent been there in a while and I think ive made my point anyway.
I think you have made your point quite clearly.
Whether it was the point you were intending to make is something different though. Maybe you should try and find out about things before spouting off like a fool.
This is a common mistake made by people, but it's simply not true. We are in fact British citizens, and seeing as no legislation at all relating to nationality existed before the British Nationality & Status of Aliens Act of 1914, the term "subject" is simply a holdover from when the monarchy wielded real power.
Examples please. James Bulger ? Filmed on video being led away for murder, but it didn't stop it.
No it didn't, but in cases like that it wouldn't would it? I doubt those kids had any real comprehension of the ubiquitous nature of CCTV, as opposed to adults who are aware of the fact that they are likely to be filmed committing crimes, and so are deterred. And the CCTV footage was of great help in catching the killers.
The current case, where a number of (apparently) famous footballers severely beat and kicked one man, yet the witnesses in court are all eye-witnesses, not camera opearators.
Wrong. Actually there was CCTV footage of the players and their targets until just before the incident, and of the players moving away afterwards. Sure the actual incident may not have been caught, but the fact that the defendents were caught on film helps to validate eye witness accounts.
Sure we have a hell of a lot of cameras over here, but just making the film easier to view isn't going to further "erode" the rights of UK citizens. As the article says, CCTV cameras are already everywhere in the UK, and you can't walk through a major urban metropolis without being caught every 50 yards or so.
This is a good thing, because it has worked in keeping levels of crime in our cities down, and making them safer for people to walk late at night. CCTV footage has led to convictions for many people committing acts of violence, and I, and many other UK citizens feel safer for having them around.
Considering that the police already have access to all of the footage, it's hardly going to change much for them to be able to access it on the move. Rather, it will enable them to respond more quickly to criminal acts, and hopefully mean they can be stopped quicker. By piping them through a computer, face and car number plate recognition technology can be used to further aid identification of criminals and their vehicles.
The police need every bit of help they can get in their fight against crime. This development is something that can help, whilst at the same time causing no further decrease in our freedom or privacy.
You almost make this sound like it's a good thing.
How so? Did you read a different post?
There's a distinct difference between parental controls, which seems to be what you're talking about, and content control, which is things like CSS, SDMI and the recent hard disk protection mechanisms. I'd agree that voluntary parental control mechanisms are a good thing, whilst the other is distinctly a bad thing.
You seem somewhat confused I'm afraid :)
The P3 will certainly be more than just a games console. They've said before that their aim is to replace specialised units like DVD players and hi-fi systems with a central unit which does all of these jobs - the Playstation 2 makes a start at this, but by the time the P3 is rolled out people will be used to the idea of a central controlling device.
And let's face it - the P3 is likely to sell well solely on it's strength as a games machine and Sony's marketing muscle.
Of course there is a lot of risk with this - a central controlling device means that it's far easier to incorporate more effective content control mechanisms - you only need to include them with one device rather than every device in the house. And people are likely to choose convenience over freedom as they so often do.
Unfortunately it's only rarely that people reject convenience, and Sony will undoubtedly have another huge hit with the P3. If they can manage to produce any of course :)
While I'm the first to agree this is cool, and shows off the strides that have been made in electric car systems, it's hardly more than a showcase for top systems rather than the real systems that are required for everyday use, which are still somewhat lacking when it comes to things like efficiency.
What we really need is for electric cars to overtake petrol based cars in terms of miles/gallon - without this there is absolutely no chance of them ever taking off as anything other than a curiosity for people with money and an environmental conscience. And given that the giant fuel companies are hardly likely to welcome such developments, it may take significant benefits to allow people to make the change.
Still, it's good to see that the state of the art is progressing so quickly - these developments will eventually filter down to affordable systems and bring electric cars onto the streets for normal people sooner.
Conferences are a hell of a lot closer to books than software is. After all these conferences are about the things that O'Reilly write books about - programming, new technologies and so on. Their expertise in these areas certainly transfers to organising these events, and they've already got access to people who know a great deal about these subjects :)
I mean, starfish are just damn cool animals - you can cut their limbs off and they grow news ones! I'd like to see you try that!
A lot of organisations are pushing foward with more and more fancy multimedia features for the web, despite the fact that eyeball tracking experiments show that people tend to ignore even static images in favour of plain text.
Do you think that we need any of this new technology, and will it ever become the standard format for the web?
It's about time that a lot of companies in and around the open source/free software community started to realise that at the end of the day they are there to make money rather than generate kudos. There's no reason for small companies to suddenly start expanding in directions totally unrelated to their core product - it just spreads them thinly and weakens them financially.
O'Reilly are first and foremost a book company, and they're a damn good one. This is where their efforts should lie, and it looks as though they've realised that. Although it may have been a profitable venture, it's still a distraction for a small company looking to get bigger.
Just look at VA for the perfect example of this. They're a hardware company that specialises in preinstalled Linux solutions. But rather than stick with doing this, building up a client base and slowly consolidating and expanding they've gone on a veritable orgy of purchases which seem to make very little sense in terms of their bottom line. And now they're in trouble... suprise, suprise.
Companies need to stick with what they're good at until they're stable enough to expand. As nice as having kudos may be, you can't use them to buy food for the kids.
A country can't just expand its borders and retroactively claim anything that now appears within them. Because Sealand claimed sovreignity before the expansion, if they are a country then their territory isn't part of Britain at all.
Okay, this seems to me like a pretty damn pointless application, the sort of thing that programmers churn out just to practice their programming skills rather than produce anything truly useful.
Think about it - you can already get most of the essential Linux tools over at Cygwin if you're after better command line tools. Otherwise, what does Linux have to offer? Most Linux software is perpetual alphaware or just a rehash of other projects (witness the truly scary number of CD front-ends out there). These programs already have free native Windows equivalents out there, and the Windows ones have often been in development longer (the big Linux bandwagon wasn't all that long ago) and can take advantage of Windows features.
And out of the few open sourced packages that are approaching professional quality, many of them are already available on Windows, like Apache. Sure there's the GIMP, but Windows users using Photoshop aren't going to want to change, and PaintShop Pro is pretty much the package of choice for low-end use.
I just don't see that there's any real use for this.
Nonsense. Any simple web of trust algorithm could take care of this. Yes, it will take more computer hardware and software sophistication, but we have Moore's law to guarantee that that will happen. The key problem here is that Google bases rankings from all sites the same, instead of using a "web of trust" method of weighting rankings.
Funny thing about that image - it's impossible to tell just from looking at it what we see out of, what we smell out of, etc.! :-) Aliens who see this might think we see out of our nipples and eat through our navels, and that our heads are our sexual reproductive organs. Makes ya wonder...
You could configure George Schlossnagle's mod_log_spread to multicast apache log entries to a third party audit host. That would be realtime, very hard to fake, and transparent to your config.
You could configure George Schlossnagle's mod_log_spread to multicast apache log entries to a third party audit host. That would be realtime, very hard to fake, and transparent to your config.