You're working on the assumption that you only have rights that the government gives you... but that's a longer discussion.
Anyway, the UK is a signatory AFAIK to the European convention on Human Rights:
ARTICLE 10
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html
The UN declaration on human rights also applies worldwide:
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
That's the theory, of course; good luck trying to apply this in practice. Even if you can afford to go to the appropriate court, and are lucky enough to reach it, the government usually ignores it or rearranges things slightly to comply with the letter, and not the spirit, of the law.
E.g. the recent case which clearly stated that it's unlawful to hold the DNA of innocent people on the national database - that got a baker's dozen out of hundred of thousand removed.
Rule of law? That went out of fashion a while ago...around the time Tony came into office, or perhaps a wee bit earlier
> Keith Richards has to make a living while he's still animate.
If Keith Richards still has to work for a living it's only because he's spent more money on drugs and booze than most of us will earn in several lifetimes.
Fair game to him, it was his money, his nose, and his liver, but you'll excuse me if I don't weep in sympathy;)
If you go into a house looking for marijuana and you find people being tortured, do you have to go back to the station, get a warrant for looking into that, and then come back?
That's a hypothetical question. The cops would hardly raid Guantanamo for marijuana, would they now?
Vaccinations are important; I paid for my daughter to have the shots individually.
As a parent, you want to avoid anything bad happening to your child, however remote and unlikely. Given that no one has yet shown me any convincing reason why MMR is better than individual shots (cost doesn't count if the UK govt is willing to blow billions on NHS IT systems that were dead in the water before the first line of code was written, commit accounting fraud on a huge scale (PFI), throw money at "management consultancies",...).
We currently have the Labour party in power, the only people we can elect who stand any chance of winning are our Conservative party who traditionally are the more right wing of our two parties.
Traditionally , perhaps, New Labour handed their principles in at the door when they came to power.
Howard was a terribly oppressive Home Secretary, but all the Labour ones that followed have been progressively worse. Remember Barmy Blunkett?
I'm jealous of you folks in the US, at least you've got a new government in 2 months time. We're stuck with the same leadership over here for likely another 18 months or so. Given the current recession and the billions plowed into bailing out the UK banking system, I'm pissed off that such big budget projects such as this -
which are an egregious, malicious misuse of public funds -
Firstly, this doesn't mean that the police can come and demand your encryption keys at any time. This isn't the US, where the police can kick your door in at any time for any reason, just because they feel like having a look at your stuff and maybe relieving you of a few high-value items. If they're looking for an encryption key, it's pretty much going to be because they've already had a warrant to search your property. It really *is* no different to being forced to hand over the key to the basement dungeon where you keep your step-daughter - chances are that they already know what they're looking for and where to look for it.
You're really not paying attention: Under the RIP act, no warrant is involved. So yes, at least in theory, the police can ask you at any time, and you're not even allowed to seek legal advice on it. Worse, it's not just the police, it's also council busybodies etc etc etc.. Let's not bring Godwin into it...
Of course, if you don't feel like handing it over, you can always say you left it on a bus, or in a taxi, or you posted it somewhere and it was never seen again...
And then of course you'll go down for two years. In practice that means 1 year, probably minimum security open prison. Which is clearly such an effective deterrent that your money laundering, child-molesting terrorist will hand over the keys to all his incriminating data and go down for 15 to life [ or 7-20 years in practice, assuming they find space in the prison ].
Logic and New Labour never really went together very well.
Of course one of the key problems with the UK RIP Act is that it does away with court warrants. All it needs is the authority of a "senior police officer" or even someone in the (civil) local authority.
I.e. not only is there is no meaningful oversight, they've even done away with the facade of one.
So it will work only against really really stupid criminals, just like their Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Possibly because it was designed by really really stupid legislators.
Baker street doesn't have any government buildings. It does, however, have the (admittedly fictional) residence of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (now a museum of sorts).
Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
If only it were true that it only applies to British citizens, I wouldn't mind quite so much. It applies to anyone.
Yeah, because they are the ones who are more likely to out source work to a private company, right? Last time I checked, parties like Labour generally prefer that the government did it themselves, even if it costs more, and it's the opposition who are the ones who like to out source and privatise things.
You clearly haven't checked since about 1991. While technically it was the Conservatives that invented the expensive accounting scam called PFI, it was Labour who implemented it with full gusto, in a vain attempt to hide as much public borrowing as possible in the private sector in exchange for wasting even more taxpayers' money.
It was also Labour that really instituted the practice of throwing enormous amounts of cash at management consultancies; the fact that cabinet members rotate in and out of those consultancies is clearly unrelated.
the British Ministry of Defense has lost a hard drive with the personal details of 100,000 serving personnel
No. EDS lost a hard-drive, belonging to the MoD. Had to get that in before the "Government is intrinsically incompetent" posse got here. EDS, a privately owned and run subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard, subcontracting to the MoD, were responsible for the security of this drive, and they, not anyone at the MoD did the losing here.
The incompetence is in hiring EDS when they have proven time and time again that they're clueless to the point of being dangerous.
Well, there's financial calculations and financial calculations. I've been hanging around the finance industry for 1.8362 decades now, and still haven't seen a BCD in the wild.
That's because I work in the front office with derivatives, and all the calculations are done in doubles. BCD shines in the backoffice and in retail banking where people do worry about every penny of interest - at least in theory;)
> Anytime you have physical assets, you have value. granted you'll have some value, but there's no guarantee that it'll be anywhere near the value you acquired the asset for.
Viz. tulips in amsterdam, houses in detroit, etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
You're working on the assumption that you only have rights that the government gives you... but that's a longer discussion.
Anyway, the UK is a signatory AFAIK to the European convention on Human Rights:
ARTICLE 10
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html
The UN declaration on human rights also applies worldwide:
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
That's the theory, of course; good luck trying to apply this in practice. Even if you can afford to go to the appropriate court, and are lucky enough to reach it, the government usually ignores it or rearranges things slightly to comply with the letter, and not the spirit, of the law.
E.g. the recent case which clearly stated that it's unlawful to hold the DNA of innocent people on the national database - that got a baker's dozen out of hundred of thousand removed.
Rule of law? That went out of fashion a while ago...around the time Tony came into office, or perhaps a wee bit earlier
Excuse me, but don't they have free speech in the UK?
No.
Well, not really, and our NuLabour overlords are continually meddling with it...
Ah yes, the bible in the original English. I really prefer the Hebrew and Greek translations myself ;)
> Keith Richards has to make a living while he's still animate.
If Keith Richards still has to work for a living it's only because he's spent more money on drugs and booze than most of us will earn in several lifetimes.
Fair game to him, it was his money, his nose, and his liver, but you'll excuse me if I don't weep in sympathy ;)
If you go into a house looking for marijuana and you find people being tortured, do you have to go back to the station, get a warrant for looking into that, and then come back?
That's a hypothetical question. The cops would hardly raid Guantanamo for marijuana, would they now?
Vaccinations are important; I paid for my daughter to have the shots individually.
As a parent, you want to avoid anything bad happening to your child, however remote and unlikely. Given that no one has yet shown me any convincing reason why MMR is better than individual shots (cost doesn't count if the UK govt is willing to blow billions on NHS IT systems that were dead in the water before the first line of code was written, commit accounting fraud on a huge scale (PFI), throw money at "management consultancies",...).
For the amount of data leaks the UK government has had, it surprising that UK citizens allow any personal information to be captured digitally at all.
Information wants to be free!! :)
We currently have the Labour party in power, the only people we can elect who stand any chance of winning are our Conservative party who traditionally are the more right wing of our two parties.
Traditionally , perhaps, New Labour handed their principles in at the door when they came to power.
Howard was a terribly oppressive Home Secretary, but all the Labour ones that followed have been progressively worse. Remember Barmy Blunkett?
I'm jealous of you folks in the US, at least you've got a new government in 2 months time. We're stuck with the same leadership over here for likely another 18 months or so. Given the current recession and the billions plowed into bailing out the UK banking system, I'm pissed off that such big budget projects such as this -
which are an egregious, malicious misuse of public funds -
are still on the agenda.
There, I fixed that for you.
Closed societies are STILL vulnerable to terrorism.
Firstly, this doesn't mean that the police can come and demand your encryption keys at any time. This isn't the US, where the police can kick your door in at any time for any reason, just because they feel like having a look at your stuff and maybe relieving you of a few high-value items. If they're looking for an encryption key, it's pretty much going to be because they've already had a warrant to search your property. It really *is* no different to being forced to hand over the key to the basement dungeon where you keep your step-daughter - chances are that they already know what they're looking for and where to look for it.
You're really not paying attention: Under the RIP act, no warrant is involved. So yes, at least in theory, the police can ask you at any time, and you're not even allowed to seek legal advice on it. Worse, it's not just the police, it's also council busybodies etc etc etc.. Let's not bring Godwin into it...
Of course, if you don't feel like handing it over, you can always say you left it on a bus, or in a taxi, or you posted it somewhere and it was never seen again...
And then of course you'll go down for two years. In practice that means 1 year, probably minimum security open prison. Which is clearly such an effective deterrent that your money laundering, child-molesting terrorist will hand over the keys to all his incriminating data and go down for 15 to life [ or 7-20 years in practice, assuming they find space in the prison ].
Logic and New Labour never really went together very well.
Technically, the Human Rights Act enshrines into British law the European Convention on Human Rights, and not common law.
Arguably, its main purpose is to stop the embarassment of the British government being sue in Strasbourg, and losing.
> Disclaimer: I think Britain is royally fucked anyway.
Hard to disagree with that.
Of course one of the key problems with the UK RIP Act is that it does away with court warrants. All it needs is the authority of a "senior police officer" or even someone in the (civil) local authority.
I.e. not only is there is no meaningful oversight, they've even done away with the facade of one.
Four words: TOR, The Onion Router.
http://www.torproject.org/
So it will work only against really really stupid criminals, just like their Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Possibly because it was designed by really really stupid legislators.
Baker street doesn't have any government buildings. It does, however, have the (admittedly fictional) residence of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (now a museum of sorts).
And you don't want to mess with Mr Holmes.
Trouble is, you don't generally get famous and rich solving derivatives.
You can get rich and infamous selling them though.
Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
If only it were true that it only applies to British citizens, I wouldn't mind quite so much. It applies to anyone.
Fuck Labour.
Yeah, because they are the ones who are more likely to out source work to a private company, right? Last time I checked, parties like Labour generally prefer that the government did it themselves, even if it costs more, and it's the opposition who are the ones who like to out source and privatise things.
You clearly haven't checked since about 1991. While technically it was the Conservatives that invented the expensive accounting scam called PFI, it was Labour who implemented it with full gusto, in a vain attempt to hide as much public borrowing as possible in the private sector in exchange for wasting even more taxpayers' money.
It was also Labour that really instituted the practice of throwing enormous amounts of cash at management consultancies; the fact that cabinet members rotate in and out of those consultancies is clearly unrelated.
No. EDS lost a hard-drive, belonging to the MoD. Had to get that in before the "Government is intrinsically incompetent" posse got here. EDS, a privately owned and run subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard, subcontracting to the MoD, were responsible for the security of this drive, and they, not anyone at the MoD did the losing here.
The incompetence is in hiring EDS when they have proven time and time again that they're clueless to the point of being dangerous.
The point is she shouldn't have been tried in the first place.
I admire quadriplegics who paint with their mouth; that doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't use our hands.
Errr...R is a scripting language.
Not necessarily the easiest to grok, but quite powerful when you get your head around it.
Well, there's financial calculations and financial calculations. I've been hanging around the finance industry for 1.8362 decades now, and still haven't seen a BCD in the wild.
That's because I work in the front office with derivatives, and all the calculations are done in doubles. BCD shines in the backoffice and in retail banking where people do worry about every penny of interest - at least in theory ;)
> Anytime you have physical assets, you have value.
granted you'll have some value, but there's no guarantee that it'll be anywhere near the value you acquired the asset for.
Viz. tulips in amsterdam, houses in detroit, etc etc.
yes, but
1) physical proximity is only part of latency
2) high frequency, low latency trading is only a tiny part of the business,