You forgot the part where every type that you want to use with your generic code must then implement an arbitrary number of interfaces like the one you mentioned, and be changed to add an extra interface every time a new generalisation in other code requires it. This is poor even compared to C++ templates, never mind the much more powerful type systems that various recent languages and languages with a lot of research interest are using now.
It's like the much older Java problem with implementing observers for things like GUI events: taken to its logical conclusion, relying on interfaces to do everything and providing only single inheritance of implementation means either you need an interface for every public method (or set of completely inter-dependent methods), or you need to implement a whole bunch of unnecessary no-op methods for parts of an interface you don't care about just to get the other parts. Either way introduces an almost comical amount of bloat, not to mention the accompanying maintenance hazards, and Java is rightly criticised for this.
The article you are responding to clearly states that 1 in 40 people who engage in these activities are not any more dangerous while doing it.
Based on 5 outliers in a sample of only 200, in a study whose methodology has not yet been published but possibly observing only voice calls using hands-free systems, and ignoring the complete lack of previous support for this theory from a diverse body of evidence gathered over quite a few years now into both road safety and cognitive theory.
I think I'll wait until the jury is back before I start jumping to any conclusions on this one.
No, of course not. I live in the real world, and here we have shades other than black and white. Remarkably, trained lawyers and experienced judges are even capable of perceiving them.
Oh, right, you need to break said laws to show that they are being abused.
Well, no, usually you don't. Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some people in this discussion, there really are checks and balances within even our current flawed systems of government. This is why we have opposition political parties, whose representatives sit on committees with access to privileged information. This is why the leaders of the administration are typically required to report back whatever elected national assembly represents the people, and to answer questions posed by representatives. This system has proved to be quite effective over the years.
Where it has not been, civil disobedience and freedom of the press have been sufficient to expose things on plenty of occasions. But there are understandings and established patterns of acceptable there that, while not necessarily codified in law, represent a reasonable balance of power that neither side tends to abuse: the broadsheets do tend to check their sources and don't tend to break big stories about state secrets unless they have a solid evidentiary basis and public interest justification for making their claims/revelations, and the authorities don't tend to prosecute reporters/editors even if technically they broke the law in the course of investigative journalism with honourable intentions. If respect for this balance did erode, then I expect the necessary protections and restrictions would become codified in law very quickly.
Wikileaks, in contrast, has not demonstrated the same kind of editorial responsibility, and frankly the kind of immature attitude they do demonstrate at times concerns me.
Oh, I completely agree about national security rules being a mess. That is why I have been carefully qualifying my position in this discussion: I am only talking about the need to protect information where there is a genuine, legitimate need for secrecy to protect national security, not just where the information concerned was politically inconvenient and someone was leaned on to make it go away.
As far as I'm concerned, the "correct" solution to this problem is better oversight within governments. I have argued before — and I notice others in this discussion have suggested similar things — that we should have an independent supervisory body with directly elected leadership, which has no powers against private citizens, but which has unlimited access to any area of the government it wants to see, statutory powers to reveal any information it deems to be in the public interest, and the authority (including a "police force") to physically remove from power any government worker who breaks the rules and throw them in the dock before a judge and jury.
We already have (to give examples from here in the UK) the National Audit Office looking at government spending and Office of the Information Commissioner looking at freedom of information generally, but these have limited areas of authority and tend to be under-funded for their mandates. There should be something much bigger and more powerful, and anyone working at a senior level of government should be scared sh**less at the possibility of crossing them.
People keep making this black-and-white distinction, as if any case going the wrong way implies that all cases will go wrong in the same way.
A few things being classified for longer than necessary will not bring about the demise of liberty any more than a few things leaking that shouldn't will result in the death of the entire army.
We need a greater sense of perspective in this debate.
You known, the government is elected by that same bunch of amateurs with political axes to grind.
No, because governments are elected by the population as a whole, and Wikileaks is... well, I don't know who they are, but their actions tell me a lot about what kind of people they are.
You seem to be advocating a government that's intrinsically better than the people it rules over.
Better? No. Better informed? I hope so. No one person has the time and resources to know everything about everything. If the system works, we choose a government whose principles and beliefs correspond as closely as possible to our collective views, so the people within that government can dedicate their time to fully understanding specific areas of importance and making informed decisions in those areas in line with our expectations and on our behalf.
Remind me how well that's working out so far again?
Well, in my country, our Prime Minister was basically forced out of office as a direct result of taking us into a war we should never have supported, about 1/3 of our Members of Parliament have just seen their careers ended following scandals about abuse of authority, we are slowly but surely kicking out the unelected second chamber of our legislature, we have recently completed the separation of our legislature and judiciary for the first time in our history, controversial "security" measures like ID cards, the DNA database and full body scanners at airports are facing mounting public and political opposition by the day, we just outed details that our and the US governments wanted to keep secret about sanctioning the torture abroad of one of our residents, and right now it looks as though our two largest political parties are going to be victims of their own arrogance and negative campaigning at an election within the next few weeks, leaving neither of them with the absolute majority needed to legislate unilaterally and forcing them to actively work with smaller parties that have disproportionately low representation in Parliament for the first time in a generation.
Sure, we have plenty of problems that should be fixed: our electoral system is horribly unrepresentative, we have way too many organisations wielding legislative powers or spending taxpayers' money without the accountability that should go with it, and so on. Even so, I'm more optimistic about fixing the problems in our governments through legal, democratic means than some people, and I think I have good reason to be. After all, we didn't need Wikileaks to achieve any of the above successes, including exposing the biggest political cover-up in a generation or complicity in torture by our and our allies' security services.
I usually don't bother replying to posts like this, but since you seem to hold your opinion genuinely as well...
I am not from the US. Your US-centric arguments are wasted on me.
No-one said anything about waterboarding, and even if they had, the CIA haven't waterboarded anyone to death. That's an impressive two straw men in a single field.
Of course the checks and balances are insufficient. But if we care about that, we should be forcing our governments to do something about it. Vigilantism rarely solves serious problems in the long run, and Wikileaks is just e-vigilantism.
I had already given one example where information shared by Wikileaks was inappropriate, and I did so long before you posted. Others have contributed further examples elsewhere in the thread.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for governments to keep certain types of information secret for relevant periods of time other than those you mentioned: military logistics, civil emergency procedures, witness protection...
Realistically, all political parties call for unequal treatment of one form or another.
And the problem here is that it's not just a right for the public to know, which might or might not be justified depending on the circumstances. What we have here is a prohibition on people with a certain political view doing certain jobs, even if they scrupulously keep their private views away from their work. That is not a healthy precedent, regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of the views in question. Indeed, it is political freedom of speech that is the strongest argument for any law protecting freedom of expression.
There's a contradiction between your case and mine. If my axiom is true, and the information is genuinely protected for national security reasons (and I am making no claim if that is not the case) then your axiom is false, and so are the conclusions that follow from it: the information is not genuinely covered by freedom of information laws, and security staff may legally withhold it.
To what extent, for the sake of national security, should individual rights and freedoms be restricted and can the restriction of civil rights for the sake of national security be justified?
The difficult cases are always the ones that involve balancing conflicting priorities: one person's freedom of expression vs. another's right to privacy, one person's freedom of movement and association vs. locking up violent offenders to protect others, and so on.
All you can ever do is look at the specifics of each case and try to judge the fairest outcome on the merits. That is what we have things like courts, due process, independent judges, and juries of peers for. Wikileaks is not a court.
They do if they are publishing classified information, private information about individuals, etc. I'm not sure any jurisdiction in the world actually has absolute freedom of speech coded in law — even in the US, there have been Supreme Court cases balancing the First Amendment against other concerns with legal weight — and there are explicit exemptions in the basic constitutional or human rights legislation almost everywhere covering things like genuine national security interests.
3. When?
A common example is publishing the membership list of the BNP. It is particularly ironic since by outing those people, Wikileaks actually removed some protection and consequently damaged the freedom of expression of a minority political group that has been subject to dubious restrictions by mainstream politicians.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I don't like the BNP's politics at all. I just don't like censoring them rather than beating them with rational argument any better.)
And remember if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide.
That's a silly argument when governments try to use it to justify privacy invasions, and it's an equally silly argument to make against a government, some of whose members/staff will necessarily have access to information that should not be immediately available to the general public.
There is certainly a potential problem with classifying things inappropriately, but my opposition to Wikileaks is based on three principles that are not affected by such problems:
If Wikileaks is useful, we already have a fundamental problem of insufficient checks and balances in our government (see my sig).
Supporting an organisation that actively tries to place itself above the law is not the solution to those problems. We should fix bad laws for the good of everyone, not merely try to circumvent them.
Wikileaks in particular has exhibited a lack of good judgement about what is really in the public interest in the past, so they get little sympathy from me on any sort of civil disobedience/public interest whistleblower argument.
There are national security laws for a reason. If Wikileaks is going to publish sensitive information that is genuinely covered by those laws — and while I haven't seen the details, if this really is military video footage it might well be — then of course the security services are going to take steps, the same way they would with anyone else. Why anyone using/working on Wikileaks thinks they are above the law, I have never understood.
You forgot weapons of mass destruction: the US remains the only nation in the world ever to have dropped a nuclear weapon on a civilian-populated area.
I do wonder how much further the US can push its luck before the rest of the world just starts telling them to shove it, though. As I have noted before, they are no longer the world's "superpower" by any meaningful standard, though plenty of people in the US government don't seem to have realised that yet. These repeated attempts to promote US business interests abroad might carry some weight in the US where they recently officially legalised buying the government, but it's not really in anyone else's interests. For the rest of the world, sucking up to a major foreign government is only worth it if the rewards are commensurate, and no-one really believes that about the US any more, and there is a lot of political competition today in many states with traditionally close ties to the US making it harder to do things quietly behind closed doors than it used to be (see: SWIFT, ACTA).
Speaking as an outsider, and one from the UK where we have both the NHS (socialised healthcare) and a lot of private practice on top...
I just don't understand the attitude in the parent post. I am generally in favour of small government and low taxation, and I am generally against a primarily socialist system, but there are certain services that really do benefit everyone. No-one goes through their entire lives in perfect health, no-one can predict whether they will be the unfortunate one to get $SERIOUS_CONDITION, and just about everyone would want to be treated if they were the unlucky one.
In the 21st century, it seems barbaric to me that you can have a system where tens of millions of citizens aren't protected in the event of conditions that we can easily treat, and where the health service doesn't routinely practice universal preventative medicine. And it seems it's not just those who can't be bothered to work who lose out: there is a woman from the US who has been on some of our TV channels over here, came across as perfectly decent and worked a real job, but couldn't get proper healthcare cover from insurers because of "pre-existing conditions" (I think they were allergies and some old broken bone from an accident years ago, neither of which significantly increases her chances of getting unrelated conditions). What is this, the Middle Ages?
Faced with evidence like this, I can't accept the opposition argument that this law just helps freeloaders. It sounds like there are plenty of people who play the game under the current system and only take out "insurance" when they are becoming sick, and it seems to me that they are far worse than the woman we saw on TV.
Finally, the anti-socialist argument that people will sit back and bleed the system dry seems a bit hollow to me in this case. As I said, I am all for a system that promotes and rewards hard work over layabouts, but it's not as if you think "I know, I'll screw the healthcare system out of some money" and the next day you deliberately get cancer. No-one wants to get sick.
Are there flaws in our socialised healthcare system over here? Sure, you get better care and a wider variety of treatment options in a private hospital where you're paying a lot of money for the privilege. And IMHO, the socialised system that we all support should pay for much more routine/preventative/advisory care, since in the long term that keeps everyone healthier and avoids paying a greater amount to treat more serious but avoidable conditions later.
But at least over here, if you get hit by a car and left with life-threatening injuries, they treat you first and ask questions later.
HMRC issues roughly 10 million tax returns each year. The total population of the UK is roughly 60 million (of whom approximately half are employed).
Second, the rest of my post isn't "wrong" -- and you couldn't possibly know anything about it, anyway.
Well, let's see, shall we?
Unless people are self-employed, they don't file a tax return.
Wrong.
Your employer takes the taxes, and you don't get them back, no matter what.
Wrong.
You do the equivalent...with your employer, and they adjust the withholding accordingly.
Wrong.
Please stop giving financial advice when you don't even know the basics of the subject. Someone might trust that you did, and then make a very expensive mistake because of it.
That may all be true (though a lot of it is hyperbole).
The interesting question is, since you can't stop the march of technology and there are genuine advantages to be had, wouldn't it be better to start thinking about similarly advanced ways of safeguarding privacy in an age of databases and global communications?
Both the theory and the physical hardware exist to do things like properly encrypting all digital communications. We know how to store data such that only those with proper authority can access it. We know how to separate systems so that even if the front-end looks common and uses common credentials for the individual, any particular government worker can only see certain parts of the data, and any access to it is logged.
We have also learned ways to reduce the dangers of abuse by those with privileged access to a system, for example by logging all access, mandating independent oversight, and criminalising abuses of access with a deterrent level of penalty.
Finally, the more I debate the dangers of modern technology with others, the more I become convinced that the one thing we really need is for any automated systems to have a timely and effective method of correcting mistakes. It is not acceptable to have, say, a tax system based on a database that can cost you money for months at a time because of some small human error that was never plausible, because mistakes are inevitable and we'll never avoid them all. However, such a system might still be an improvement on what we have today, given better checks at the point of entry to reduce the number of silly mistakes combined with a robust system where anyone can query something incorrect that got through and have a real, sufficiently senior person check out the situation and put it right quickly.
To be sure, these measures aren't going to be perfect, but the current system isn't perfect either, and organisations like banks and security services have been using such techniques for years so we have at least a fighting chance of developing workable safeguards and any social changes necessary to understand that mistakes will happen and shouldn't be held against the innocent victim.
Or we could just stick our fingers in our ears, blow a few raspberries, and hope that continuing with no real isolation of sensitive data, hopelessly outdated security precautions, unencrypted communications and so on won't be abused sooner or later.
I see you're not very familiar with the British tax system.
Actually, you are clearly not familiar with the British tax system. There are many reasons you may be required to file a tax return, and even if you aren't, you can file one voluntarily (and it may be in your interests to do so).
The rest of your post is so completely wrong that there is no point going through it.
I find this odd, because I already use several government IT systems at least annually, e.g.,
filing my personal tax return,
filing various official paperwork required for my company,
renewing my car tax, and
renewing my electoral registration.
Without exception, these systems have been efficiently designed, professionally presented, and vastly easier to use than the corresponding paper/telephone/whatever versions. If all they did was bring other systems into line with this so I never had to fill out another paper form from the Post Office and then mail it back, I would be quite happy.
Moreover, I have personally been hassled for a few months due to a mistake by a real person (probably a minimum wage data entry clerk) who mistyped data relating to me and caused The System to confuse me with someone else. So while I certainly share concerns about allowing wider access to any personal data than anyone in government or in the public has at the moment, there is definitely an upside to a system that isn't as subject to human error in that respect.
Of course, government IT has seen colossal screw-ups as well, usually when they try to "improve" systems in the process, rather than simply automating the collection of data they already have anyway that goes to people who already see it anyway. Thus we get things like the universal NHS mess, ever more invasions of privacy via new databases tracking more stuff and accessible by more people, and so on.
I'm just saying that it really doesn't have to be that way. Some government IT systems do what IT should do: make tedious but (arguably) necessary processes more accessible to the average citizen, less error-prone to use, less subject to human error by third parties, and less of a burden to work with. They just need to stop trying to sneak other stuff in on top of that.
Unfortunately, since the guy down the road cracked the cheap, insecure system they gave you within about two minutes and used your broadband to download content illegally, your connection is now being revoked and you can't access any government system any more. Thanks for playing, and congratulations on now being unable to meet your statutory tax obligations due to legal restrictions on Internet access.
It is quite remarkable that no-one in government seems to have noticed the obvious conflict between the draconian, Big-Media-backed provisions in the Digital Economy Bill and the push to get more essential government services on-line.
It's a fundamental flaw in the architecture, which allows (at a minimum) any web page to trivially lock up the entire browser, causing the loss of whatever is being done in the other tabs.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the part where every type that you want to use with your generic code must then implement an arbitrary number of interfaces like the one you mentioned, and be changed to add an extra interface every time a new generalisation in other code requires it. This is poor even compared to C++ templates, never mind the much more powerful type systems that various recent languages and languages with a lot of research interest are using now.
It's like the much older Java problem with implementing observers for things like GUI events: taken to its logical conclusion, relying on interfaces to do everything and providing only single inheritance of implementation means either you need an interface for every public method (or set of completely inter-dependent methods), or you need to implement a whole bunch of unnecessary no-op methods for parts of an interface you don't care about just to get the other parts. Either way introduces an almost comical amount of bloat, not to mention the accompanying maintenance hazards, and Java is rightly criticised for this.
The article you are responding to clearly states that 1 in 40 people who engage in these activities are not any more dangerous while doing it.
Based on 5 outliers in a sample of only 200, in a study whose methodology has not yet been published but possibly observing only voice calls using hands-free systems, and ignoring the complete lack of previous support for this theory from a diverse body of evidence gathered over quite a few years now into both road safety and cognitive theory.
I think I'll wait until the jury is back before I start jumping to any conclusions on this one.
No, of course not. I live in the real world, and here we have shades other than black and white. Remarkably, trained lawyers and experienced judges are even capable of perceiving them.
You don't have to copy an entire work to infringe copyright, and your entire argument is predicated on the assumption that you do.
Oh, right, you need to break said laws to show that they are being abused.
Well, no, usually you don't. Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some people in this discussion, there really are checks and balances within even our current flawed systems of government. This is why we have opposition political parties, whose representatives sit on committees with access to privileged information. This is why the leaders of the administration are typically required to report back whatever elected national assembly represents the people, and to answer questions posed by representatives. This system has proved to be quite effective over the years.
Where it has not been, civil disobedience and freedom of the press have been sufficient to expose things on plenty of occasions. But there are understandings and established patterns of acceptable there that, while not necessarily codified in law, represent a reasonable balance of power that neither side tends to abuse: the broadsheets do tend to check their sources and don't tend to break big stories about state secrets unless they have a solid evidentiary basis and public interest justification for making their claims/revelations, and the authorities don't tend to prosecute reporters/editors even if technically they broke the law in the course of investigative journalism with honourable intentions. If respect for this balance did erode, then I expect the necessary protections and restrictions would become codified in law very quickly.
Wikileaks, in contrast, has not demonstrated the same kind of editorial responsibility, and frankly the kind of immature attitude they do demonstrate at times concerns me.
Oh, I completely agree about national security rules being a mess. That is why I have been carefully qualifying my position in this discussion: I am only talking about the need to protect information where there is a genuine, legitimate need for secrecy to protect national security, not just where the information concerned was politically inconvenient and someone was leaned on to make it go away.
As far as I'm concerned, the "correct" solution to this problem is better oversight within governments. I have argued before — and I notice others in this discussion have suggested similar things — that we should have an independent supervisory body with directly elected leadership, which has no powers against private citizens, but which has unlimited access to any area of the government it wants to see, statutory powers to reveal any information it deems to be in the public interest, and the authority (including a "police force") to physically remove from power any government worker who breaks the rules and throw them in the dock before a judge and jury.
We already have (to give examples from here in the UK) the National Audit Office looking at government spending and Office of the Information Commissioner looking at freedom of information generally, but these have limited areas of authority and tend to be under-funded for their mandates. There should be something much bigger and more powerful, and anyone working at a senior level of government should be scared sh**less at the possibility of crossing them.
People keep making this black-and-white distinction, as if any case going the wrong way implies that all cases will go wrong in the same way.
A few things being classified for longer than necessary will not bring about the demise of liberty any more than a few things leaking that shouldn't will result in the death of the entire army.
We need a greater sense of perspective in this debate.
You known, the government is elected by that same bunch of amateurs with political axes to grind.
No, because governments are elected by the population as a whole, and Wikileaks is... well, I don't know who they are, but their actions tell me a lot about what kind of people they are.
You seem to be advocating a government that's intrinsically better than the people it rules over.
Better? No. Better informed? I hope so. No one person has the time and resources to know everything about everything. If the system works, we choose a government whose principles and beliefs correspond as closely as possible to our collective views, so the people within that government can dedicate their time to fully understanding specific areas of importance and making informed decisions in those areas in line with our expectations and on our behalf.
Remind me how well that's working out so far again?
Well, in my country, our Prime Minister was basically forced out of office as a direct result of taking us into a war we should never have supported, about 1/3 of our Members of Parliament have just seen their careers ended following scandals about abuse of authority, we are slowly but surely kicking out the unelected second chamber of our legislature, we have recently completed the separation of our legislature and judiciary for the first time in our history, controversial "security" measures like ID cards, the DNA database and full body scanners at airports are facing mounting public and political opposition by the day, we just outed details that our and the US governments wanted to keep secret about sanctioning the torture abroad of one of our residents, and right now it looks as though our two largest political parties are going to be victims of their own arrogance and negative campaigning at an election within the next few weeks, leaving neither of them with the absolute majority needed to legislate unilaterally and forcing them to actively work with smaller parties that have disproportionately low representation in Parliament for the first time in a generation.
Sure, we have plenty of problems that should be fixed: our electoral system is horribly unrepresentative, we have way too many organisations wielding legislative powers or spending taxpayers' money without the accountability that should go with it, and so on. Even so, I'm more optimistic about fixing the problems in our governments through legal, democratic means than some people, and I think I have good reason to be. After all, we didn't need Wikileaks to achieve any of the above successes, including exposing the biggest political cover-up in a generation or complicity in torture by our and our allies' security services.
I usually don't bother replying to posts like this, but since you seem to hold your opinion genuinely as well...
I am not from the US. Your US-centric arguments are wasted on me.
No-one said anything about waterboarding, and even if they had, the CIA haven't waterboarded anyone to death. That's an impressive two straw men in a single field.
Of course the checks and balances are insufficient. But if we care about that, we should be forcing our governments to do something about it. Vigilantism rarely solves serious problems in the long run, and Wikileaks is just e-vigilantism.
I had already given one example where information shared by Wikileaks was inappropriate, and I did so long before you posted. Others have contributed further examples elsewhere in the thread.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for governments to keep certain types of information secret for relevant periods of time other than those you mentioned: military logistics, civil emergency procedures, witness protection...
Realistically, all political parties call for unequal treatment of one form or another.
And the problem here is that it's not just a right for the public to know, which might or might not be justified depending on the circumstances. What we have here is a prohibition on people with a certain political view doing certain jobs, even if they scrupulously keep their private views away from their work. That is not a healthy precedent, regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of the views in question. Indeed, it is political freedom of speech that is the strongest argument for any law protecting freedom of expression.
There's a contradiction between your case and mine. If my axiom is true, and the information is genuinely protected for national security reasons (and I am making no claim if that is not the case) then your axiom is false, and so are the conclusions that follow from it: the information is not genuinely covered by freedom of information laws, and security staff may legally withhold it.
To what extent, for the sake of national security, should individual rights and freedoms be restricted and can the restriction of civil rights for the sake of national security be justified?
The difficult cases are always the ones that involve balancing conflicting priorities: one person's freedom of expression vs. another's right to privacy, one person's freedom of movement and association vs. locking up violent offenders to protect others, and so on.
All you can ever do is look at the specifics of each case and try to judge the fairest outcome on the merits. That is what we have things like courts, due process, independent judges, and juries of peers for. Wikileaks is not a court.
2. Wikileaks does not place itself above the law
They do if they are publishing classified information, private information about individuals, etc. I'm not sure any jurisdiction in the world actually has absolute freedom of speech coded in law — even in the US, there have been Supreme Court cases balancing the First Amendment against other concerns with legal weight — and there are explicit exemptions in the basic constitutional or human rights legislation almost everywhere covering things like genuine national security interests.
3. When?
A common example is publishing the membership list of the BNP. It is particularly ironic since by outing those people, Wikileaks actually removed some protection and consequently damaged the freedom of expression of a minority political group that has been subject to dubious restrictions by mainstream politicians.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I don't like the BNP's politics at all. I just don't like censoring them rather than beating them with rational argument any better.)
And remember if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide.
That's a silly argument when governments try to use it to justify privacy invasions, and it's an equally silly argument to make against a government, some of whose members/staff will necessarily have access to information that should not be immediately available to the general public.
There is certainly a potential problem with classifying things inappropriately, but my opposition to Wikileaks is based on three principles that are not affected by such problems:
There are national security laws for a reason. If Wikileaks is going to publish sensitive information that is genuinely covered by those laws — and while I haven't seen the details, if this really is military video footage it might well be — then of course the security services are going to take steps, the same way they would with anyone else. Why anyone using/working on Wikileaks thinks they are above the law, I have never understood.
You forgot weapons of mass destruction: the US remains the only nation in the world ever to have dropped a nuclear weapon on a civilian-populated area.
I do wonder how much further the US can push its luck before the rest of the world just starts telling them to shove it, though. As I have noted before, they are no longer the world's "superpower" by any meaningful standard, though plenty of people in the US government don't seem to have realised that yet. These repeated attempts to promote US business interests abroad might carry some weight in the US where they recently officially legalised buying the government, but it's not really in anyone else's interests. For the rest of the world, sucking up to a major foreign government is only worth it if the rewards are commensurate, and no-one really believes that about the US any more, and there is a lot of political competition today in many states with traditionally close ties to the US making it harder to do things quietly behind closed doors than it used to be (see: SWIFT, ACTA).
Speaking as an outsider, and one from the UK where we have both the NHS (socialised healthcare) and a lot of private practice on top...
I just don't understand the attitude in the parent post. I am generally in favour of small government and low taxation, and I am generally against a primarily socialist system, but there are certain services that really do benefit everyone. No-one goes through their entire lives in perfect health, no-one can predict whether they will be the unfortunate one to get $SERIOUS_CONDITION, and just about everyone would want to be treated if they were the unlucky one.
In the 21st century, it seems barbaric to me that you can have a system where tens of millions of citizens aren't protected in the event of conditions that we can easily treat, and where the health service doesn't routinely practice universal preventative medicine. And it seems it's not just those who can't be bothered to work who lose out: there is a woman from the US who has been on some of our TV channels over here, came across as perfectly decent and worked a real job, but couldn't get proper healthcare cover from insurers because of "pre-existing conditions" (I think they were allergies and some old broken bone from an accident years ago, neither of which significantly increases her chances of getting unrelated conditions). What is this, the Middle Ages?
Faced with evidence like this, I can't accept the opposition argument that this law just helps freeloaders. It sounds like there are plenty of people who play the game under the current system and only take out "insurance" when they are becoming sick, and it seems to me that they are far worse than the woman we saw on TV.
Finally, the anti-socialist argument that people will sit back and bleed the system dry seems a bit hollow to me in this case. As I said, I am all for a system that promotes and rewards hard work over layabouts, but it's not as if you think "I know, I'll screw the healthcare system out of some money" and the next day you deliberately get cancer. No-one wants to get sick.
Are there flaws in our socialised healthcare system over here? Sure, you get better care and a wider variety of treatment options in a private hospital where you're paying a lot of money for the privilege. And IMHO, the socialised system that we all support should pay for much more routine/preventative/advisory care, since in the long term that keeps everyone healthier and avoids paying a greater amount to treat more serious but avoidable conditions later.
But at least over here, if you get hit by a car and left with life-threatening injuries, they treat you first and ask questions later.
I've seen it estimated that only 10% do
HMRC issues roughly 10 million tax returns each year. The total population of the UK is roughly 60 million (of whom approximately half are employed).
Second, the rest of my post isn't "wrong" -- and you couldn't possibly know anything about it, anyway.
Well, let's see, shall we?
Unless people are self-employed, they don't file a tax return.
Wrong.
Your employer takes the taxes, and you don't get them back, no matter what.
Wrong.
You do the equivalent...with your employer, and they adjust the withholding accordingly.
Wrong.
Please stop giving financial advice when you don't even know the basics of the subject. Someone might trust that you did, and then make a very expensive mistake because of it.
That may all be true (though a lot of it is hyperbole).
The interesting question is, since you can't stop the march of technology and there are genuine advantages to be had, wouldn't it be better to start thinking about similarly advanced ways of safeguarding privacy in an age of databases and global communications?
Both the theory and the physical hardware exist to do things like properly encrypting all digital communications. We know how to store data such that only those with proper authority can access it. We know how to separate systems so that even if the front-end looks common and uses common credentials for the individual, any particular government worker can only see certain parts of the data, and any access to it is logged.
We have also learned ways to reduce the dangers of abuse by those with privileged access to a system, for example by logging all access, mandating independent oversight, and criminalising abuses of access with a deterrent level of penalty.
Finally, the more I debate the dangers of modern technology with others, the more I become convinced that the one thing we really need is for any automated systems to have a timely and effective method of correcting mistakes. It is not acceptable to have, say, a tax system based on a database that can cost you money for months at a time because of some small human error that was never plausible, because mistakes are inevitable and we'll never avoid them all. However, such a system might still be an improvement on what we have today, given better checks at the point of entry to reduce the number of silly mistakes combined with a robust system where anyone can query something incorrect that got through and have a real, sufficiently senior person check out the situation and put it right quickly.
To be sure, these measures aren't going to be perfect, but the current system isn't perfect either, and organisations like banks and security services have been using such techniques for years so we have at least a fighting chance of developing workable safeguards and any social changes necessary to understand that mistakes will happen and shouldn't be held against the innocent victim.
Or we could just stick our fingers in our ears, blow a few raspberries, and hope that continuing with no real isolation of sensitive data, hopelessly outdated security precautions, unencrypted communications and so on won't be abused sooner or later.
I see you're not very familiar with the British tax system.
Actually, you are clearly not familiar with the British tax system. There are many reasons you may be required to file a tax return, and even if you aren't, you can file one voluntarily (and it may be in your interests to do so).
The rest of your post is so completely wrong that there is no point going through it.
I find this odd, because I already use several government IT systems at least annually, e.g.,
Without exception, these systems have been efficiently designed, professionally presented, and vastly easier to use than the corresponding paper/telephone/whatever versions. If all they did was bring other systems into line with this so I never had to fill out another paper form from the Post Office and then mail it back, I would be quite happy.
Moreover, I have personally been hassled for a few months due to a mistake by a real person (probably a minimum wage data entry clerk) who mistyped data relating to me and caused The System to confuse me with someone else. So while I certainly share concerns about allowing wider access to any personal data than anyone in government or in the public has at the moment, there is definitely an upside to a system that isn't as subject to human error in that respect.
Of course, government IT has seen colossal screw-ups as well, usually when they try to "improve" systems in the process, rather than simply automating the collection of data they already have anyway that goes to people who already see it anyway. Thus we get things like the universal NHS mess, ever more invasions of privacy via new databases tracking more stuff and accessible by more people, and so on.
I'm just saying that it really doesn't have to be that way. Some government IT systems do what IT should do: make tedious but (arguably) necessary processes more accessible to the average citizen, less error-prone to use, less subject to human error by third parties, and less of a burden to work with. They just need to stop trying to sneak other stuff in on top of that.
Unfortunately, since the guy down the road cracked the cheap, insecure system they gave you within about two minutes and used your broadband to download content illegally, your connection is now being revoked and you can't access any government system any more. Thanks for playing, and congratulations on now being unable to meet your statutory tax obligations due to legal restrictions on Internet access.
It is quite remarkable that no-one in government seems to have noticed the obvious conflict between the draconian, Big-Media-backed provisions in the Digital Economy Bill and the push to get more essential government services on-line.
It's a fundamental flaw in the architecture, which allows (at a minimum) any web page to trivially lock up the entire browser, causing the loss of whatever is being done in the other tabs.
I love the way you implicitly assume that exactly the same problems don't apply to Microsoft/IE, or any other browser development team.
Did you realise that you are the guy the grandparent post was mocking?