Protection of life and freedom against arbitrary decisions in the UK date back to the Magna Carta (1215, with the version currently "on the books" in England dating to 1295), the Petition of Rights (1628), the Habeas Corpus Act of (1679), and the Bill of Rights and Claim of Rights (1689), which combined set out the foundation for ensuring fair trials and protections against punishment without trials etc. (and which are reflected in large part in current US law as well...). In the intervening centuries there has been a number of acts adding to these rights.
In addition, by passing the European Communities Act (1972), the UK parliament made EU law supreme to UK law in a number of areas, which means that the EU human rights legislation is binding, providing additional rights.
If anything, the complexity of UK constitutional law in the form of those (and many other) acts, principles and court judgements makes it harder for government to just change things, as the UK court are loathe to let parliament get away with that kind of thing unless they have made pretty damn sure to dot all their i's and that what they try to do is not inconsistent with other laws or principles (in which case they'd have to revoke or replace those as well to get their way with the courts).
Governments have tried "simply decreeing" more than once, and had the courts tell them they are simply wrong. Specificially, they've been told several times that what they've tried to do is in violation of EU law, and thanks to the European Communities Act, they can't override EU law.
After passing that act the situation has become quite complex, as there are some legal scholars that argue that this act actually limited parliamentary sovereignty, and that the UK parliament thus can't actually just revoke it, and revoking it would be the only way for the government to take away any rights guaranteed in the European Charter of Human Rights (revoking it would also mean leaving the EU).
If the courts agree with that assessment, then barring the EU itself revoking the charter the government would not have a legal way of modifying those rights in any way other than adding to them.
Now, there are many things lacking in the UK constitution, and I agree that having it in a clear, written form would make things easier (and at the very least make people more likely to be aware of what rights they actually have), but the situation is quite a lot better than what most people complaining about (lack of) rights in the UK think it is.
Meanwhile, in the UK, democracy was largely introduced by parliament itself. Ever since the Magna Carta, officials in the royal council that slowly turned into an elected parliament have been chipping away at the monarchy and expanding the electoral base, only briefly interrupted by the civil war and Cromwell.
It's a history were power has largely been handed downward as a result of demonstration and pressure rather than armed action, and where most of the armed action has been between regular armies
If YOU had read a history book you might have seen that there is a lot of diversity in how democracy has come about in various countries, as well as in how it has been defended when under threat, and that includes a lot of cases where armed ordinary citizens had minimal impact.
I bought at least a 10 day supply last time I needed anything (just a few weeks back). In fact, the only time I have ever been told I couldn't buy the quantity I wanted was when I on a whim tried buying two packs of paracetamol (acetaminophen for Americans) .
The "worst" case is that you go out of the pharmacy and back in 5 minutes later (or to another one) - if it's important to you and they are being difficult.
If you want to buy something that is potentially lethal or used to make drugs, then yes, there are restrictions (pseudoephedrine, for example, but that's mostly replaced by phenylephrine in most products anyway). Those restrictions might seem silly, but they are there because idiots do actually use those drugs to harm or kill themselves fairly regularly - paracetamol and alcohol being a "popular" combination (apparently spending days in massive pain while dying of acute liver failure is a fun way to go...)
Is it? Or are the newspapers just writing more about it?
Remember a few years ago when gun crime was the "big thing"? Despite the stats showing that only a vanishingly small fraction of violent crimes in the UK involved a gun at the time... It was an impression created almost exclusively by the media with the help of family and friends of victims that were trotted out as "evidence" of how Britain was facing a plague of gun crime.
I am not saying knife crime isn't a problem - it is certainly a bigger problem than gun crime has been in this country since before the hand gun ban -, but I haven't seen any stats, just reports from the same media that never retracted or apologized for their unsupported "We are all going to be shot to death, OMG!!!!" scare stories.
The UK has one of the best public health care systems in the world. Of course it has it's issues, but generally it fares very well. More importantly NHS patients generally rate the quality of the NHS very highly.
My wife and I have both been through various treatments, and it's always been quick, high quality, and efficient. There's been the odd minor hiccup, but that's all.
The biggest "problem" with the NHS is that some people expect it to be a luxury service. That is not the goal. The goal is to provide a good and cost effective health service for the entire population. If people wish, nothing stops them from paying for private care or taking out insurance to "top up" the care received on the NHS, such as going to a private hospital *if* there is a long waiting list for a particular NHS service..
Yes, you can expect to wait for non-emergency operations, and if that's an issue you can either pay for a specific operation privately or pay a little bit for private insurance.
That's what you have to expect with a publicly funded system: While I am perfectly happy to pay taxes towards universal health care, people are simply not willing to pay for the amount of excess capacity needed to avoid queues completely.
In fact, only about 10% of the population see that as worthwhile enough to pay even a couple of hundred pounds a year for comprehensive private insurance that lets them avoid the queues. That in itself is a pretty damn good testament that the capacity tradeoff for the NHS is just about right.
4. if drive wiped itself, charge suspect of violating RIPA by not handing over the genuine password, and get him thrown in jail regardless of the content of the drive.
A lot of the enterprise SSD's are RAM with battery backup and a smart controller that will dump the RAM to a disk before the battery runs out, though, not flash. I'm assuming the GP meant flash
Still, your point holds even for flash based SSD's.
Depending on the type of flash you can either clear or set individual bits (that's what the NAND and NOR names come from), but not the reverse - to "reset" the bits you have to erase an entire erase unit (block).
Any reasonable flash drive and all flash optimized filesystems or translation layers will take advantage of that and move data around when you change it to avoid having to do too many erases. This is needed for wear leveling anyway.
Flash specific filesystems may further (and some do) take advantage of this by updating block allocation maps / free lists etc. by clearing or setting bits in already partly written areas.
I've written flash drivers, and erasing a whole erase unit to write a single block was never an option unless the drive was near full, exactly because it kills performance. In fact, you'd often want to withhold a percentage of blocks from use to reduce the number of erases you want to do both for this reason and for improved wear leveling and increased lifespan (you can "retire" erase units when they get unreliable)
You're assuming they manage to stop both copies coming out of studio sources AND re-encoded copies created from video capture. There's so many ways of getting good enough copies that DRM just piss off regular consumers and "casual pirates" - there'll be enough copies around no matter what they do about DRM.
The discs do work with other players, including the PS3, although some have reported lengthy load times of up to 2 minutes. "
*shudder*. I get agitated when I have to wait to get through 10 second animations before my DVD menus show up. I'd break the player if I had to wait 2 minutes.
Copyright law trumps the license texts - they can't take away rights they don't have the right to take away under the law. If they could stop this with lawsuits they would - so far they're not been a single case where consumers have been prevented from doing what GP suggests, because the studios know they don't stand a chance in hell of enforcing terms that stop people from that kind of use.
DRM is trying to enforce terms that are not legally enforceable because they are unreasonable.
Well, for my part this means I'll hold of even longer before buying any BluRay discs. I refuse to start using it until I'm guaranteed that I can rip all the disks I get onto my fileserver so I can store the disks away. So congratulations to the movie studios on losing lots of sales from people like me. Given the low adoption of BluRay so far, they can't afford to push away people who are usually early adopters.
Tell me this: Does the US have fewer home breakins per capita than the UK (where hand guns are outlawed, and where violent deaths involving firearms are next to non-existent)? How many MORE homeowners die during home breakins in the US compared to the UK?
I very much doubt that the right to own a gun in your home deters many criminals. It will make them carry a gun to protect themselves against you, however, which they very rarely do in the UK and other places with a saner gun culture (note: that includes countries with as many guns as the US, but where the guns are not there primarily for home protection - i.e. Norway, where lots of people have guns, but by law they are kept locked down and inoperable when not in use)
Your argument is flawed. I might want to own a pile of plutonium. My ownership of plutonium placed around my property would surely seriously affect the rights of others. Absolute freedom is impossible. To maximize freedom you need some form of organized society (or absolute isolation) to mediate the tradeoffs of one persons freedoms over another. The closer we live and the more we interact, the more regulation is needed to successfully preserve the maximal amount of freedom for the maximum number of people.
Now, that does not mean that laws against gun ownership are necessarily required or even good. But it also means that rights of individuals goes both ways - there's the freedom of more than the gun owners to take into account when considering whether firearms regulations are good or bad.
In fact anything else would be a gross violation of money laundering laws in most countries, at least for international transfers above very low limits.
The biggest problem is trying to build a supernational government without actually going the full hog. The EU today is a little bit like the US when it was still a confederation of sovereign states, and there's the constant battle between the elected EU parliament and the appointed organs and individual member state governments.
The EU is going to remain a mess until support for a federal model gets strong enough. However, the populations in most member states are for the time being more likely to support the status quo which gives them less say, than to support a federal model with a stronger EU parliament.
Well, no, Bicentennial Man was not faithful to the story. In the story the central point is the question of what it means to be human. Andrew tries again and again to be accepted by changing more and more. Where do we draw the line?
In the movie much of that plot point is sidelined by Andrews love interest.
Overall I liked it - the "real" plot was still there, though it was "washed out" a bit by the love angle. But then again, love is a big part of being human too.
As for I, Robot, I thought it exactly GOT the point: Most of Asimov's robot stories are exactly about how the laws are subverted or have unintended consequences, as you point out yourself, and that includes stories in the I,Robot collection such as "Liar!" and several others.
RAID5 is not for performance but for reliability, and it's only "reaching its limits" for large capacity systems where the time to rebuild the RAID on drive failure is getting close to the point where the risk of a second drive failure during the rebuild is becoming an issue.
These drives are intended for high performance setups.
It's not RAID vs. these drives - nothing prevent you from using them in RAID setups, and most people using them in servers probably will.
You can buy systems that use DRAM with battery backup that's available as a "disk". Some use standard interfaces, some use PCI cards to get higher throughput. They all have one thing in common: They are far more expensive than SSD's. In fact, one company quoted me $250,000 for a 64GB unit.
There are cheaper ones, but I don't know of any that can compete with SSD's on price - if there had been more people would've been using them as harddisk replacements. As it is, the primary market for these units are extreme high end database setups where swapping in these units is cheaper than a clustering solution or re-engineering applications.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, by passing the European Communities Act (1972), the UK parliament made EU law supreme to UK law in a number of areas, which means that the EU human rights legislation is binding, providing additional rights.
If anything, the complexity of UK constitutional law in the form of those (and many other) acts, principles and court judgements makes it harder for government to just change things, as the UK court are loathe to let parliament get away with that kind of thing unless they have made pretty damn sure to dot all their i's and that what they try to do is not inconsistent with other laws or principles (in which case they'd have to revoke or replace those as well to get their way with the courts).
Governments have tried "simply decreeing" more than once, and had the courts tell them they are simply wrong. Specificially, they've been told several times that what they've tried to do is in violation of EU law, and thanks to the European Communities Act, they can't override EU law.
After passing that act the situation has become quite complex, as there are some legal scholars that argue that this act actually limited parliamentary sovereignty, and that the UK parliament thus can't actually just revoke it, and revoking it would be the only way for the government to take away any rights guaranteed in the European Charter of Human Rights (revoking it would also mean leaving the EU).
If the courts agree with that assessment, then barring the EU itself revoking the charter the government would not have a legal way of modifying those rights in any way other than adding to them.
Now, there are many things lacking in the UK constitution, and I agree that having it in a clear, written form would make things easier (and at the very least make people more likely to be aware of what rights they actually have), but the situation is quite a lot better than what most people complaining about (lack of) rights in the UK think it is.
It's a history were power has largely been handed downward as a result of demonstration and pressure rather than armed action, and where most of the armed action has been between regular armies
If YOU had read a history book you might have seen that there is a lot of diversity in how democracy has come about in various countries, as well as in how it has been defended when under threat, and that includes a lot of cases where armed ordinary citizens had minimal impact.
The "worst" case is that you go out of the pharmacy and back in 5 minutes later (or to another one) - if it's important to you and they are being difficult.
If you want to buy something that is potentially lethal or used to make drugs, then yes, there are restrictions (pseudoephedrine, for example, but that's mostly replaced by phenylephrine in most products anyway). Those restrictions might seem silly, but they are there because idiots do actually use those drugs to harm or kill themselves fairly regularly - paracetamol and alcohol being a "popular" combination (apparently spending days in massive pain while dying of acute liver failure is a fun way to go...)
There is this implement called a "fork". Maybe you have heard of it?
Is it? Or are the newspapers just writing more about it?
Remember a few years ago when gun crime was the "big thing"? Despite the stats showing that only a vanishingly small fraction of violent crimes in the UK involved a gun at the time... It was an impression created almost exclusively by the media with the help of family and friends of victims that were trotted out as "evidence" of how Britain was facing a plague of gun crime.
I am not saying knife crime isn't a problem - it is certainly a bigger problem than gun crime has been in this country since before the hand gun ban -, but I haven't seen any stats, just reports from the same media that never retracted or apologized for their unsupported "We are all going to be shot to death, OMG!!!!" scare stories.
My wife and I have both been through various treatments, and it's always been quick, high quality, and efficient. There's been the odd minor hiccup, but that's all.
The biggest "problem" with the NHS is that some people expect it to be a luxury service. That is not the goal. The goal is to provide a good and cost effective health service for the entire population. If people wish, nothing stops them from paying for private care or taking out insurance to "top up" the care received on the NHS, such as going to a private hospital *if* there is a long waiting list for a particular NHS service..
Yes, you can expect to wait for non-emergency operations, and if that's an issue you can either pay for a specific operation privately or pay a little bit for private insurance.
That's what you have to expect with a publicly funded system: While I am perfectly happy to pay taxes towards universal health care, people are simply not willing to pay for the amount of excess capacity needed to avoid queues completely.
In fact, only about 10% of the population see that as worthwhile enough to pay even a couple of hundred pounds a year for comprehensive private insurance that lets them avoid the queues. That in itself is a pretty damn good testament that the capacity tradeoff for the NHS is just about right.
4. if drive wiped itself, charge suspect of violating RIPA by not handing over the genuine password, and get him thrown in jail regardless of the content of the drive.
The employer can place whatever requirements for employment they like.
That's not true in ANY developed country.
Still, your point holds even for flash based SSD's.
That's totally chip/device specific. I've written drivers for flash drives with a totally flat address space.
Depending on the type of flash you can either clear or set individual bits (that's what the NAND and NOR names come from), but not the reverse - to "reset" the bits you have to erase an entire erase unit (block).
Any reasonable flash drive and all flash optimized filesystems or translation layers will take advantage of that and move data around when you change it to avoid having to do too many erases. This is needed for wear leveling anyway.
Flash specific filesystems may further (and some do) take advantage of this by updating block allocation maps / free lists etc. by clearing or setting bits in already partly written areas.
I've written flash drivers, and erasing a whole erase unit to write a single block was never an option unless the drive was near full, exactly because it kills performance. In fact, you'd often want to withhold a percentage of blocks from use to reduce the number of erases you want to do both for this reason and for improved wear leveling and increased lifespan (you can "retire" erase units when they get unreliable)
You're assuming they manage to stop both copies coming out of studio sources AND re-encoded copies created from video capture. There's so many ways of getting good enough copies that DRM just piss off regular consumers and "casual pirates" - there'll be enough copies around no matter what they do about DRM.
The discs do work with other players, including the PS3, although some have reported lengthy load times of up to 2 minutes. "
*shudder*. I get agitated when I have to wait to get through 10 second animations before my DVD menus show up. I'd break the player if I had to wait 2 minutes.
DRM is trying to enforce terms that are not legally enforceable because they are unreasonable.
Well, for my part this means I'll hold of even longer before buying any BluRay discs. I refuse to start using it until I'm guaranteed that I can rip all the disks I get onto my fileserver so I can store the disks away. So congratulations to the movie studios on losing lots of sales from people like me. Given the low adoption of BluRay so far, they can't afford to push away people who are usually early adopters.
I very much doubt that the right to own a gun in your home deters many criminals. It will make them carry a gun to protect themselves against you, however, which they very rarely do in the UK and other places with a saner gun culture (note: that includes countries with as many guns as the US, but where the guns are not there primarily for home protection - i.e. Norway, where lots of people have guns, but by law they are kept locked down and inoperable when not in use)
Now, that does not mean that laws against gun ownership are necessarily required or even good. But it also means that rights of individuals goes both ways - there's the freedom of more than the gun owners to take into account when considering whether firearms regulations are good or bad.
You might find yourself drinking profusely for weeks to forget all about it.
Or you wake up, find that all other men are extinct, think "Jackpot!" until you realize the women don't want men around and plan to make you have a sex change operation
In fact anything else would be a gross violation of money laundering laws in most countries, at least for international transfers above very low limits.
The EU is going to remain a mess until support for a federal model gets strong enough. However, the populations in most member states are for the time being more likely to support the status quo which gives them less say, than to support a federal model with a stronger EU parliament.
In the movie much of that plot point is sidelined by Andrews love interest.
Overall I liked it - the "real" plot was still there, though it was "washed out" a bit by the love angle. But then again, love is a big part of being human too.
As for I, Robot, I thought it exactly GOT the point: Most of Asimov's robot stories are exactly about how the laws are subverted or have unintended consequences, as you point out yourself, and that includes stories in the I,Robot collection such as "Liar!" and several others.
These drives are intended for high performance setups.
It's not RAID vs. these drives - nothing prevent you from using them in RAID setups, and most people using them in servers probably will.
There are cheaper ones, but I don't know of any that can compete with SSD's on price - if there had been more people would've been using them as harddisk replacements. As it is, the primary market for these units are extreme high end database setups where swapping in these units is cheaper than a clustering solution or re-engineering applications.
Ohhh.. I want Linux in my browser :)