Losing an eye or losing your house is a hell of a lot worse than some randomer calling you mean names.
That depends on the context. Someone calling you "mean names" that happen to imply socially unacceptable behaviour, in a public forum where you have no effective right to reply, can break families, destroy friendships, wreck careers... but under a US-style system as described by spun, unless you can link those things directly back to the comments concerned, prove malice, and quantify the damage caused in some meaningful way, it sounds like the law offers no protection from this.
Yes, I did know that. You did realise that it is just a matter of traditional civil behaviour in the House, in the same way that the Queen officially still signs things into law, right?
MPs just use more diplomatic language to challenge claims when speaking officially in Parliament, which may be unfortunate given the almost comical performances that sometimes ensue, but certainly doesn't mean claims are just accepted on the other guy's word. Heck, watch any political panel on the serious news programmes here, and you'll find no shortage of MPs making outright denials of the other guy's claims.
Under what libel/slander laws today can someone legally be jailed for the kinds of comments you describe? In fact, in what jurisdictions today do libel/slander carry jail time at all? They are typically civil laws, punishable with fines.
If they were indeed "used by leaders to imprison Americans in violation of their first amendment rights" then the imprisonment wasn't really legal at all, was it? The President might as well just ask the police to go shoot someone he doesn't like and then stop the prosecution because he controls those who would conduct it. It's not legal, it's just the guy with the guns doing whatever he wants, and I'm pretty sure that falls under my comments elsewhere about having a bigger problem if the guy who's supposed to be leading your government and defending your rights has no problem abusing the system or the people.
Moreover, are you really arguing that because a particular kind of law has been abused twice by senior government figures, once nearly a century ago and once more than two centuries ago, it's a bad law? That would be a weak argument even if we were talking about a genuine enforcement of the law, which appears not to be the case here.
Anyone can claim hurt feelings. Anyone can claim emotional damages. It's very easy to LIE about those kind of things. The US system is not blind to such claims, as you seem to imply, it is just harder to prove, which is fair and just.
It's easy to make false accusations of rape as well, and relatively few rape cases result in a conviction for similar reasons. Does that mean we should legalise rape, because it's hard to prove lack of consent anyway?
I guess what I'm getting at is that just because harm can't be objectively quantified by reduction to a dollar amount or some similar method, that does not imply that the harm is not real. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and you can acknowledge the reality that someone was hurt without being able to measure how much they were hurt on any objective scale.
How you assign a punishment to fit such a crime is a different question, of course, and I'm not claiming it is easy to ensure a just result in such cases. I am merely claiming that the little word "measurable" you used before makes a lot of difference.
So, if I say, your grandma makes the worst pies in the world, unless your grandma is in the pastry business or enters lots of baking contests, more than likely I haven't actually hurt anything more than her feelings
Quality of life is built on feelings. People have suffered great physical trauma, but recovered to lead happy and fulfilling lives. People have lost every penny they own, but recovered to lead happy and fulfilling lives. People who suffer damage to their reputation, their sense of honour, their self-confidence... these things cause scars for life, and the victims may never fully recover.
If all your law protects against is physical harm or direct financial loss, then your law is a mockery, written in the interests of ease of enforcement rather than of justice. You can't just turn a blind eye to the most serious kind of harm there is and mumble something about getting over it. People don't work like that, and the law shouldn't either.
That sounds good in theory and might even work for awhile, until you get yourself some future president who resembles Mao Tse Tung. Said future president will define anything he doesn't like as "false" and imprison you.
As is often the case in these discussions, if you reach that stage, you have bigger problems. The correct solution to those problems typically involves a wall, the causes of the problems, a firing squad, and a subsequent overhaul of government by the people as a whole, just as it has done throughout history.
Meanwhile, there is little point discussing any legal system on the assumption that some all-powerful dictator will eventually abuse it. Anyone with that much power can ignore/rewrite the law anyway.
For most places, most of the time, I'd rather have laws that reflect justice in our society than adopt anarchy-by-default.
You're implying a false dichotomy. There is a whole spectrum of positions on free speech vs. protection from defamation that do not involve either abuses by omnipotent undemocratic governments or letting anyone say anything without consequences, no matter how unfairly damaging to others it might be.
You seem to be missing the point. It is in the interests of certain EU governments to allow this sort of deal, because it means they can spy on their own people indirectly (via intelligence shared by the US) without having to violate any local laws and with plausible deniability as far as any political fallout goes if they get caught.
Why else do you think the appointed representatives of those governments tried to push through this measure while the still had the power to do so? It sure as hell wasn't for the good of the people they allegedly represent.
Sorry, just to clarify my own post: yes, the SWIFT-related deal is inherently one-sided in terms of the US getting the information first, but that isn't the cause of the main complaints here in the UK, at least not those that have been widely reported in the media AFAICS. People aren't asking why the US isn't doing something reciprocal (what would that be, given the nature of SWIFT?), they are asking why this is allowed at all.
Are you sure you're not confusing this with other recent controversial agreements, such as the extradition of people like Gary McKinnon? That agreement has been controversial both for being asymmetric and for the low standard of evidence and poor guarantees of a fair trial.
In this case, AIUI, the issue is data protection and privacy. The EU has much stricter rules on these things than the US, and normally the law prohibits exporting such data outside Europe without proper safeguards. The US in general does not provide those legal safeguards, and in this case, it's not even the legitimate users of the data who would be working with it outside the protections, it's a foreign government.
There is simply no reason they should be entitled to claim that information in some unrestricted, open-ended fashion. With the lack of guarantees we have, they could just pass it back to European governments (who may or may not be legally allowed to demand access to that information en masse and without reasonable grounds themselves) or to US-based businesses to give a commercial advantage over their EU-based competitors.
Actually, as I understand it, this one was more a case of I'll show you yours if you'll show me mine.
The intelligence "sharing" is done precisely because each side could get in legal and/or political trouble for spying on its own citizens without good cause. On the other hand, if it's just foreign intelligence provided by a friendly state, well, that's OK, then. This is as much one in the eye for certain EU governments (whose appointed representatives previously forced this measure through at European level mere hours before the Lisbon Treaty kicked in and meant the elected MEPs would get a say, remember) as it is for the US.
Compared to Excel, Calc is pretty good. Because for what it gets used for, Excel is a bug ridden mess that corrupts documents when you do elementary things.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "for what it gets used for", but I guess our experience is just very different.
I have never managed to corrupt anything in any moderately recent version of Excel. I literally get corruption so often in Calc that I use it for absolutely nothing other than a glorified table editor now. The examples I gave before weren't flippant. They have all happened to me, in as simple a form as they sound, on many occasions. On the other hand, all of those operations work 100% for me in alternative spreadsheets like Excel or Gnumeric.
Excel has its flaws, to be sure, and I'm not personally a fan of the new UI. But as far as reliability goes, it's in a different class to Calc IME.
OpenOffice.org Calc isn't good, by any standard. It is a bug-ridden mess that corrupts documents when you do elementary things like sorting data, using the undo command or trying to update the data sources for a chart after creation. Of course, you're also right about missing functionality and the poor usability.
OpenOffice.org Calc has become my canonical example whenever someone claims that the open approach to software development is somehow guaranteed to produce higher quality code than closed, proprietary development. Next on my hit list are Thunderbird (has silent data loss bugs in basic UI operations) and the GIMP (has all kinds of bugs and odd limitations).
I completely agree with the others above: I'd prefer to move to a different operating system and tell Microsoft to shove it, but until I can get good office software, graphics software and games for a rival platform, I shoot myself in the foot if I move from Windows. An operating system is just a means to an end, it's what you run on it that counts. Microsoft's advantage is not vendor lock-in, it's having no significant competition in too many important respects.
Exactly. I, too, know some people who have served as magistrates. Perhaps more importantly, I have been a witness in court and seen several magistrates at work. I found the behaviour of those I observed to be exemplary, and they did indeed consult with their "learned colleague" on several occasions while deliberating.
However, that does not mean I think they should have the power to legislate, even if I personally have never seen anyone abuse that power. Likewise, I do not think police officers or PCSOs should have any powers to issue summary fines on their own authority, even though I personally have never seen a false accusation made.
Justice systems need separation of powers and due process for the accused, because any system on that sort of scale is going to make mistakes even if everyone acts with the best of intentions, and the consequences of those mistakes for innocent people can be severe.
I am a lot more afraid of the increasingly draconian powers of governments than I am of terrorists.
The British authorities can impose heavy restrictions on individual liberties (is it a 16-hour curfew?) without actually having to win a case before a court.
We have more and more summary powers, where individual officials can impose punishments like fines on people, again without having to provide any evidence beyond their own word or having to make a case before a court.
We have more and more surveillance powers and government databases, where individual officials can access vast databases about people, often with dubious levels of justification or oversight. (Notice I keep writing "officials", by the way, because these powers apply to hundreds of thousands of people who aren't even part of the police/security services/courts.)
Courts themselves can impose ASBOs, which can criminalise activities that would otherwise be perfectly legal. In other words, magistrates (who are not even trained lawyers, and operate in our lowest tier of courts) can effectively legislate.
You can now be punished on mere suspicion. In addition to the control orders mentioned above, there are numerous crimes under recent legislation that ban collecting things that "might" be useful to bad people, or let the authorities act on "suspicion" that you might be doing something bad. Most of these are so broadly worded that things like carrying a camera and photographing a public building have been treated as covered by these laws. Don't even think about reading the Anarchist's Cookbook, which IIRC was doing the rounds in schools 20 years ago or more, or buying the kind of home chemistry set that the last generation or two enjoyed out of a simple curiosity about science.
Actually, scratch that "suspicion" requirement. There have actually been occasions where senior officials have stood up and, with a straight face, defended a policy that explicitly and in very simple words said that they could do bad things to members of the public without needing any reasonable grounds for suspicion.
The government have been told repeatedly by various courts that they have gone too far, and their response is typically to mumble something about national security and terrorism, and then completely ignore the court ruling. Yes, the administration are openly ignoring the rulings of courts when they don't like them.
Next to this lot, one more drone in the sky that isn't going to do more than spy on you, tase you or cause an epileptic fit with its strobe lights seems like nothing, which tells you have far we have fallen. Roll in 6 May, and may none of the big parties achieve a working majority that lets them take any of this madness any further.
By the way, was anyone else dumbfounded while listening to David Miliband talking about the release of the torture information yesterday? Speaking in Parliament, he seemed far more interested in being nice to the US and protecting the intelligence agencies than he was about the fact that our government knew about torture being carried out on a British resident, and did nothing about it! He even had the cheek to claim that the revelation of this information now showed that everyone had recourse to the law and the system was working, which I'm sure will be a great comfort to those under control orders who clearly do not have any such thing, not to mention to the man who was held and tortured for years in this particular case. I thought our succession of increasingly abusive Home Secretaries was bad, but Miliband, D. has just made it to second place on my "really doesn't get it" scale, right behind Blair, T.
I thought we were talking about the system, not the result?
We are, but I don't see how you can argue that a system that results in laws being passed that don't have popular support is democratic by any definition of term.
All of the UK votes in a UK general election. All of it.
Some parts of it get more votes than others, though. Scottish voters get to vote for Westminster MPs, who can then vote even on matters that only affect English people because the relevant powers are devolved in Scotland. In contrast, English people do not get to vote for a representative in the Scottish Parliament. Ditto for Wales, and to some extent for Northern Ireland, though of course they have problems of their own. Consequently, nations other than England currently have significantly more representation in government than the English do. How else do you think they get to have all these direct benefits and we don't, when it's all funded from the same tax pot?
What do you mean by actively disagree? Are you assuming (again) that anyone not for is against? What about those who don't care or are unsure?
By actively disagree, I mean actively disagree: the person is not merely ambivalent about a measure, they specifically do not want it.
To give an obvious example, you may have noticed that we recently went to war in Iraq, despite the reservations of just about everyone and the outright opposition by many, according to just about every opinion poll even at the peak, not to mention the literally millions of people who marched in protest in London. If you don't believe in guessing the views of those who don't show up, presumably you saw the march where millions more people turned out to support the war?
Are you assuming that if less laws get through, it'll be the better ones?
In recent history, most new laws have been bad laws. Even if they had the right intentions, they were rushed through and poorly thought out in the details. So yes, I pretty much do assume that if fewer laws got through things would be better. I'm not convinced that we wouldn't be better off if we just did a mass-unwind on all legislation passed for the past X years, for some fairly large value of X.
And what makes you think a compromise would be better? The NHS wasn't built that way. Thatcher's reforms didn't work that way.
You'll have to trust me on this, but you are really trying to convince the wrong person if you are arguing that the way the NHS is run is good. In my recent personal experience, it is poorly organised and ludicrously inefficient compared to the private alternatives. Indeed, it is practically the textbook example of a big organisation that now survives in spite of the way it operates rather than because of it.
Thatcher's reforms didn't work that way.
I'm not old enough to know exactly what you mean there, but as far as I can see Thatcher is another fine example of allowing one very strong personality's wishes to dominate everyone else.
The thing is, even with the bad areas here, at least we tend to tell our government and police/security services to shove it when they step over the line, and things usually get toned down to more reasonable levels once the initial hype behind the latest draconian measure has died down. See, for example, the way that ID cards have almost completely dropped off the political radar lately, recent public concern over the virtual strip searches being rolled out at airports, the actions of people in recording and circulating video of police abuses at peaceful demonstrations and the general concern over offensive tactics like kettling, and yes, the backlash that is building over the amount of CCTV we have now that its general lack of fitness for purpose and the frequency of abuse are becoming more widely understood.
Sadly, these things operate on political timescales measured in years, and it usually takes similar lengths of time to understand and fix the problems. Injustices do happen in between, and we do as a society put up with more crap than I would like for longer than I would prefer. But at least we still seem to have a healthy degree of scepticism both within significant chunks of the general population and within both the directly elected parts of our government and our judiciary.
Now, here's the kicker: even with all of these delays and the ever-present threats to basic rights, we still do better than the US, where it appears that any pretense of the federal government following even constitutional rules to protect the privacy and personal data of citizens is just a punchline (and God help anyone who isn't a US citizen and wants to have their basic rights respected, because the US legal system certainly won't).
Some of your other claims are simply untrue: you don't need electronic ID for any of the things you mentioned. You do need some basic ID to open financial accounts these days, as a basic precaution against money laundering, but the requirements are reasonable given the nature of financial accounts, and not onerous for the person doing the opening.
Sorry to bust your (probably British) bubble but there was nothing unelected about the guys that tried to sell us out.
They were all appointed by democratically elected governments.
Appointed, not elected, yes.
Democratically elected governments? Not here in the UK, that's for sure.
Labour received the support of only 22% of the population at the last general election. That corresponds to only 1/3 or so of those who actually voted; about twice as many people voted against them as for them.
Labour lost the popular vote in England outright. The Conservatives actually won that one.
Labour dropped Blair and held a coronation for Brown, which is explicitly and exactly what the voters were told repeatedly and unambiguously that they were not voting for if they voted Labour.
In short, the Brown administration has no popular mandate, not even if you accept the premise that electing individual MPs to the legislature and then determining who forms the executive by which party has the most MPs is a democratic system. The only way Brown's administration has any legitimacy is if you accept the black-and-white premise that a party in our system is entitled to do whatever it likes once elected, even if that directly contradicts what it told the voters before the election that it would do. Reconciling that with any claim of representative democracy is a pretty tough sell.
Or do you want to have an election for every clown in office?
If you mean everyone who has legislative powers, or who leads an organisation that has any statutory authority and/or spends a significant amount of taxpayers' money, then I really don't have much problem with that idea.
No, we could not continue to run our current form of government effectively under such a system, and yes, a lot of consolidation and centralisation of authority with directly elected (and therefore personally accountable) people would be required. I really don't have much problem with that idea, either.
Almost everything that has gone wrong with our government at any level in recent years could have been prevented if there were a direct feedback loop between those making the rules/spending the money and those they supposedly represent. Note, for example, the sharp contrast between the actions of the guys you claim were elected, and the actions of those who are in fact directly accountable to the people they are supposed to represent.
We have stronger data protection and personal privacy laws in the EU than those in the US seem to have, and just as important, people here seem to be generally more aware of the need for data protection and privacy after a string of high profile screw-ups. Both governments and businesses do get slapped down from time to time for trying to go too far.
The balance is still too far in favour of the data miners, and I think as time passes and the consequences become more apparent we will see popular opinion sway further toward protecting privacy. But even today, it's paradise here compared to the US, where even if there are legal safeguards, the executive and intelligence agencies are demonstrably willing to ignore them and then invoke special privilege crap to cover themselves after the fact.
Bottom line: Why the hell should EU-level bureaucrats kissing US ass give away sensitive data to the US when our laws would normally prohibit such action? Answer: because the unelected guys pushed it through literally within their final hours with that authority, knowing that as soon as the Lisbon Treaty took effect and elected MEPs started to get more power they wouldn't get away with it. The MEPs are now doing their job and fixing this problem.
A little off-topic, but FWIW, yes, Clancy really is a good author. His attention to detail is so remarkable that, rumour has it, he was visited by men in suits after the publication of the book, wanting to know how he had obtained so much detail about military matters. He replied that he wrote to the military and asked them. (He has since written many non-fiction books on the military, as well as continuing various fictional storylines.)
Even from the UK, flying to Europe is still a joke compared to other routes. I've been on two holidays abroad in the past couples of years, one to Paris (by Eurostar) and one to Rome (by plane).
Eurostar: Booked on-line, providing some basic details for both passengers, and went through a basic security and passport check in under five minutes at the terminal before the journey each way.
Flying: Booked on-line, providing some basic details for both passengers, and then went through several hours of multi-layered security scanning for who-knows-what at Stansted before boarding. Got to Italy, got off the plane, walked past a security guard with a sniffer dog and that was about it. On the way home, went through some basic security checks, where they apologised for making me throw away the suntan lotion I had forgotten to remove from an inside pocket in the pack I was taking on as hand luggage (and threw it into a vast bin containing thousands and thousands of similar sun protection products and 500ml drink bottles). Got back to Stansted, waited for another half hour in a queue to go through passport control, where a stern-looking security guard made an unnecessary show of scanning my passport, while several heavily armed police officers stood around with their guns pointing at people rather than in safe directions.
Guess which of these options I will be choosing for any future holidays?
Oh, and count me as another one who would like to visit the US and Japan, but would rather go to other interesting and more welcoming places than put up with being treated as a dangerous criminal the moment I think about booking a ticket.
Um, you don't suppose that might have something to do with the vastly improved security measures do you?
Well... No.
Firstly, there is little evidence that security measures have, in fact, vastly improved since 9/11 (as opposed to just introducing more security theatre and inconvenience for passengers).
Secondly, flying already had a relatively good safety record: look at the statistics for the 1990s in the link Peter Mork posted.
Britain's privacy laws are, self-evidently, not that great.
However, it seems likely that there will be a string of legal challenges based on European human rights rules and the like.
In any case, I expect this will quietly get "forgotten", a bit like ID Cards, once public opinion dies down (and I'm not sure public opinion here was ever that strong on this one, even immediately after the failed Christmas Day bombing). It's just too easy a target for opposition politicians as the public mood is swinging back towards privacy and concern about the surveillance state, and this particular measure is sufficiently offensive to enough people that it could actually make a significant difference to the numbers using airports if it's rolled out nationwide. That is, after all, why they waited until they had the old "national security" excuse before trying to push this out beyond a minor local airport previously.
Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright."
I'd like to hear a lawyer stand up and say that with a straight face. Trademarked? Possibly. Copyright? Not likely. And even it was a registered mark, I fail to see what food has to do with anything, or how it would be actionable unless the rightsholder is organising similar events that might be confused with whatever private viewing we're talking about here.
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Losing an eye or losing your house is a hell of a lot worse than some randomer calling you mean names.
That depends on the context. Someone calling you "mean names" that happen to imply socially unacceptable behaviour, in a public forum where you have no effective right to reply, can break families, destroy friendships, wreck careers... but under a US-style system as described by spun, unless you can link those things directly back to the comments concerned, prove malice, and quantify the damage caused in some meaningful way, it sounds like the law offers no protection from this.
Yes, I did know that. You did realise that it is just a matter of traditional civil behaviour in the House, in the same way that the Queen officially still signs things into law, right?
MPs just use more diplomatic language to challenge claims when speaking officially in Parliament, which may be unfortunate given the almost comical performances that sometimes ensue, but certainly doesn't mean claims are just accepted on the other guy's word. Heck, watch any political panel on the serious news programmes here, and you'll find no shortage of MPs making outright denials of the other guy's claims.
Under what libel/slander laws today can someone legally be jailed for the kinds of comments you describe? In fact, in what jurisdictions today do libel/slander carry jail time at all? They are typically civil laws, punishable with fines.
If they were indeed "used by leaders to imprison Americans in violation of their first amendment rights" then the imprisonment wasn't really legal at all, was it? The President might as well just ask the police to go shoot someone he doesn't like and then stop the prosecution because he controls those who would conduct it. It's not legal, it's just the guy with the guns doing whatever he wants, and I'm pretty sure that falls under my comments elsewhere about having a bigger problem if the guy who's supposed to be leading your government and defending your rights has no problem abusing the system or the people.
Moreover, are you really arguing that because a particular kind of law has been abused twice by senior government figures, once nearly a century ago and once more than two centuries ago, it's a bad law? That would be a weak argument even if we were talking about a genuine enforcement of the law, which appears not to be the case here.
Anyone can claim hurt feelings. Anyone can claim emotional damages. It's very easy to LIE about those kind of things. The US system is not blind to such claims, as you seem to imply, it is just harder to prove, which is fair and just.
It's easy to make false accusations of rape as well, and relatively few rape cases result in a conviction for similar reasons. Does that mean we should legalise rape, because it's hard to prove lack of consent anyway?
I guess what I'm getting at is that just because harm can't be objectively quantified by reduction to a dollar amount or some similar method, that does not imply that the harm is not real. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and you can acknowledge the reality that someone was hurt without being able to measure how much they were hurt on any objective scale.
How you assign a punishment to fit such a crime is a different question, of course, and I'm not claiming it is easy to ensure a just result in such cases. I am merely claiming that the little word "measurable" you used before makes a lot of difference.
The UK government is trying to use libel/slander laws to silence its critics?
If it is, then it's not doing it very well.
And the UK is, apparently, notorious for having strong anti-defamation laws.
So, if I say, your grandma makes the worst pies in the world, unless your grandma is in the pastry business or enters lots of baking contests, more than likely I haven't actually hurt anything more than her feelings
Quality of life is built on feelings. People have suffered great physical trauma, but recovered to lead happy and fulfilling lives. People have lost every penny they own, but recovered to lead happy and fulfilling lives. People who suffer damage to their reputation, their sense of honour, their self-confidence... these things cause scars for life, and the victims may never fully recover.
If all your law protects against is physical harm or direct financial loss, then your law is a mockery, written in the interests of ease of enforcement rather than of justice. You can't just turn a blind eye to the most serious kind of harm there is and mumble something about getting over it. People don't work like that, and the law shouldn't either.
That sounds good in theory and might even work for awhile, until you get yourself some future president who resembles Mao Tse Tung. Said future president will define anything he doesn't like as "false" and imprison you.
As is often the case in these discussions, if you reach that stage, you have bigger problems. The correct solution to those problems typically involves a wall, the causes of the problems, a firing squad, and a subsequent overhaul of government by the people as a whole, just as it has done throughout history.
Meanwhile, there is little point discussing any legal system on the assumption that some all-powerful dictator will eventually abuse it. Anyone with that much power can ignore/rewrite the law anyway.
For most places, most of the time, I'd rather have laws that reflect justice in our society than adopt anarchy-by-default.
You're implying a false dichotomy. There is a whole spectrum of positions on free speech vs. protection from defamation that do not involve either abuses by omnipotent undemocratic governments or letting anyone say anything without consequences, no matter how unfairly damaging to others it might be.
You seem to be missing the point. It is in the interests of certain EU governments to allow this sort of deal, because it means they can spy on their own people indirectly (via intelligence shared by the US) without having to violate any local laws and with plausible deniability as far as any political fallout goes if they get caught.
Why else do you think the appointed representatives of those governments tried to push through this measure while the still had the power to do so? It sure as hell wasn't for the good of the people they allegedly represent.
Sorry, just to clarify my own post: yes, the SWIFT-related deal is inherently one-sided in terms of the US getting the information first, but that isn't the cause of the main complaints here in the UK, at least not those that have been widely reported in the media AFAICS. People aren't asking why the US isn't doing something reciprocal (what would that be, given the nature of SWIFT?), they are asking why this is allowed at all.
Are you sure you're not confusing this with other recent controversial agreements, such as the extradition of people like Gary McKinnon? That agreement has been controversial both for being asymmetric and for the low standard of evidence and poor guarantees of a fair trial.
In this case, AIUI, the issue is data protection and privacy. The EU has much stricter rules on these things than the US, and normally the law prohibits exporting such data outside Europe without proper safeguards. The US in general does not provide those legal safeguards, and in this case, it's not even the legitimate users of the data who would be working with it outside the protections, it's a foreign government.
There is simply no reason they should be entitled to claim that information in some unrestricted, open-ended fashion. With the lack of guarantees we have, they could just pass it back to European governments (who may or may not be legally allowed to demand access to that information en masse and without reasonable grounds themselves) or to US-based businesses to give a commercial advantage over their EU-based competitors.
Actually, as I understand it, this one was more a case of I'll show you yours if you'll show me mine.
The intelligence "sharing" is done precisely because each side could get in legal and/or political trouble for spying on its own citizens without good cause. On the other hand, if it's just foreign intelligence provided by a friendly state, well, that's OK, then. This is as much one in the eye for certain EU governments (whose appointed representatives previously forced this measure through at European level mere hours before the Lisbon Treaty kicked in and meant the elected MEPs would get a say, remember) as it is for the US.
Compared to Excel, Calc is pretty good. Because for what it gets used for, Excel is a bug ridden mess that corrupts documents when you do elementary things.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "for what it gets used for", but I guess our experience is just very different.
I have never managed to corrupt anything in any moderately recent version of Excel. I literally get corruption so often in Calc that I use it for absolutely nothing other than a glorified table editor now. The examples I gave before weren't flippant. They have all happened to me, in as simple a form as they sound, on many occasions. On the other hand, all of those operations work 100% for me in alternative spreadsheets like Excel or Gnumeric.
Excel has its flaws, to be sure, and I'm not personally a fan of the new UI. But as far as reliability goes, it's in a different class to Calc IME.
OpenOffice.org Calc isn't good, by any standard. It is a bug-ridden mess that corrupts documents when you do elementary things like sorting data, using the undo command or trying to update the data sources for a chart after creation. Of course, you're also right about missing functionality and the poor usability.
OpenOffice.org Calc has become my canonical example whenever someone claims that the open approach to software development is somehow guaranteed to produce higher quality code than closed, proprietary development. Next on my hit list are Thunderbird (has silent data loss bugs in basic UI operations) and the GIMP (has all kinds of bugs and odd limitations).
I completely agree with the others above: I'd prefer to move to a different operating system and tell Microsoft to shove it, but until I can get good office software, graphics software and games for a rival platform, I shoot myself in the foot if I move from Windows. An operating system is just a means to an end, it's what you run on it that counts. Microsoft's advantage is not vendor lock-in, it's having no significant competition in too many important respects.
Exactly. I, too, know some people who have served as magistrates. Perhaps more importantly, I have been a witness in court and seen several magistrates at work. I found the behaviour of those I observed to be exemplary, and they did indeed consult with their "learned colleague" on several occasions while deliberating.
However, that does not mean I think they should have the power to legislate, even if I personally have never seen anyone abuse that power. Likewise, I do not think police officers or PCSOs should have any powers to issue summary fines on their own authority, even though I personally have never seen a false accusation made.
Justice systems need separation of powers and due process for the accused, because any system on that sort of scale is going to make mistakes even if everyone acts with the best of intentions, and the consequences of those mistakes for innocent people can be severe.
I am a lot more afraid of the increasingly draconian powers of governments than I am of terrorists.
Next to this lot, one more drone in the sky that isn't going to do more than spy on you, tase you or cause an epileptic fit with its strobe lights seems like nothing, which tells you have far we have fallen. Roll in 6 May, and may none of the big parties achieve a working majority that lets them take any of this madness any further.
By the way, was anyone else dumbfounded while listening to David Miliband talking about the release of the torture information yesterday? Speaking in Parliament, he seemed far more interested in being nice to the US and protecting the intelligence agencies than he was about the fact that our government knew about torture being carried out on a British resident, and did nothing about it! He even had the cheek to claim that the revelation of this information now showed that everyone had recourse to the law and the system was working, which I'm sure will be a great comfort to those under control orders who clearly do not have any such thing, not to mention to the man who was held and tortured for years in this particular case. I thought our succession of increasingly abusive Home Secretaries was bad, but Miliband, D. has just made it to second place on my "really doesn't get it" scale, right behind Blair, T.
I thought we were talking about the system, not the result?
We are, but I don't see how you can argue that a system that results in laws being passed that don't have popular support is democratic by any definition of term.
All of the UK votes in a UK general election. All of it.
Some parts of it get more votes than others, though. Scottish voters get to vote for Westminster MPs, who can then vote even on matters that only affect English people because the relevant powers are devolved in Scotland. In contrast, English people do not get to vote for a representative in the Scottish Parliament. Ditto for Wales, and to some extent for Northern Ireland, though of course they have problems of their own. Consequently, nations other than England currently have significantly more representation in government than the English do. How else do you think they get to have all these direct benefits and we don't, when it's all funded from the same tax pot?
What do you mean by actively disagree? Are you assuming (again) that anyone not for is against? What about those who don't care or are unsure?
By actively disagree, I mean actively disagree: the person is not merely ambivalent about a measure, they specifically do not want it.
To give an obvious example, you may have noticed that we recently went to war in Iraq, despite the reservations of just about everyone and the outright opposition by many, according to just about every opinion poll even at the peak, not to mention the literally millions of people who marched in protest in London. If you don't believe in guessing the views of those who don't show up, presumably you saw the march where millions more people turned out to support the war?
Are you assuming that if less laws get through, it'll be the better ones?
In recent history, most new laws have been bad laws. Even if they had the right intentions, they were rushed through and poorly thought out in the details. So yes, I pretty much do assume that if fewer laws got through things would be better. I'm not convinced that we wouldn't be better off if we just did a mass-unwind on all legislation passed for the past X years, for some fairly large value of X.
And what makes you think a compromise would be better? The NHS wasn't built that way. Thatcher's reforms didn't work that way.
You'll have to trust me on this, but you are really trying to convince the wrong person if you are arguing that the way the NHS is run is good. In my recent personal experience, it is poorly organised and ludicrously inefficient compared to the private alternatives. Indeed, it is practically the textbook example of a big organisation that now survives in spite of the way it operates rather than because of it.
Thatcher's reforms didn't work that way.
I'm not old enough to know exactly what you mean there, but as far as I can see Thatcher is another fine example of allowing one very strong personality's wishes to dominate everyone else.
The thing is, even with the bad areas here, at least we tend to tell our government and police/security services to shove it when they step over the line, and things usually get toned down to more reasonable levels once the initial hype behind the latest draconian measure has died down. See, for example, the way that ID cards have almost completely dropped off the political radar lately, recent public concern over the virtual strip searches being rolled out at airports, the actions of people in recording and circulating video of police abuses at peaceful demonstrations and the general concern over offensive tactics like kettling, and yes, the backlash that is building over the amount of CCTV we have now that its general lack of fitness for purpose and the frequency of abuse are becoming more widely understood.
Sadly, these things operate on political timescales measured in years, and it usually takes similar lengths of time to understand and fix the problems. Injustices do happen in between, and we do as a society put up with more crap than I would like for longer than I would prefer. But at least we still seem to have a healthy degree of scepticism both within significant chunks of the general population and within both the directly elected parts of our government and our judiciary.
Now, here's the kicker: even with all of these delays and the ever-present threats to basic rights, we still do better than the US, where it appears that any pretense of the federal government following even constitutional rules to protect the privacy and personal data of citizens is just a punchline (and God help anyone who isn't a US citizen and wants to have their basic rights respected, because the US legal system certainly won't).
Some of your other claims are simply untrue: you don't need electronic ID for any of the things you mentioned. You do need some basic ID to open financial accounts these days, as a basic precaution against money laundering, but the requirements are reasonable given the nature of financial accounts, and not onerous for the person doing the opening.
Sorry to bust your (probably British) bubble but there was nothing unelected about the guys that tried to sell us out.
They were all appointed by democratically elected governments.
Appointed, not elected, yes.
Democratically elected governments? Not here in the UK, that's for sure.
In short, the Brown administration has no popular mandate, not even if you accept the premise that electing individual MPs to the legislature and then determining who forms the executive by which party has the most MPs is a democratic system. The only way Brown's administration has any legitimacy is if you accept the black-and-white premise that a party in our system is entitled to do whatever it likes once elected, even if that directly contradicts what it told the voters before the election that it would do. Reconciling that with any claim of representative democracy is a pretty tough sell.
Or do you want to have an election for every clown in office?
If you mean everyone who has legislative powers, or who leads an organisation that has any statutory authority and/or spends a significant amount of taxpayers' money, then I really don't have much problem with that idea.
No, we could not continue to run our current form of government effectively under such a system, and yes, a lot of consolidation and centralisation of authority with directly elected (and therefore personally accountable) people would be required. I really don't have much problem with that idea, either.
Almost everything that has gone wrong with our government at any level in recent years could have been prevented if there were a direct feedback loop between those making the rules/spending the money and those they supposedly represent. Note, for example, the sharp contrast between the actions of the guys you claim were elected, and the actions of those who are in fact directly accountable to the people they are supposed to represent.
Well... Yes, frankly.
We have stronger data protection and personal privacy laws in the EU than those in the US seem to have, and just as important, people here seem to be generally more aware of the need for data protection and privacy after a string of high profile screw-ups. Both governments and businesses do get slapped down from time to time for trying to go too far.
The balance is still too far in favour of the data miners, and I think as time passes and the consequences become more apparent we will see popular opinion sway further toward protecting privacy. But even today, it's paradise here compared to the US, where even if there are legal safeguards, the executive and intelligence agencies are demonstrably willing to ignore them and then invoke special privilege crap to cover themselves after the fact.
Bottom line: Why the hell should EU-level bureaucrats kissing US ass give away sensitive data to the US when our laws would normally prohibit such action? Answer: because the unelected guys pushed it through literally within their final hours with that authority, knowing that as soon as the Lisbon Treaty took effect and elected MEPs started to get more power they wouldn't get away with it. The MEPs are now doing their job and fixing this problem.
A little off-topic, but FWIW, yes, Clancy really is a good author. His attention to detail is so remarkable that, rumour has it, he was visited by men in suits after the publication of the book, wanting to know how he had obtained so much detail about military matters. He replied that he wrote to the military and asked them. (He has since written many non-fiction books on the military, as well as continuing various fictional storylines.)
Even from the UK, flying to Europe is still a joke compared to other routes. I've been on two holidays abroad in the past couples of years, one to Paris (by Eurostar) and one to Rome (by plane).
Eurostar: Booked on-line, providing some basic details for both passengers, and went through a basic security and passport check in under five minutes at the terminal before the journey each way.
Flying: Booked on-line, providing some basic details for both passengers, and then went through several hours of multi-layered security scanning for who-knows-what at Stansted before boarding. Got to Italy, got off the plane, walked past a security guard with a sniffer dog and that was about it. On the way home, went through some basic security checks, where they apologised for making me throw away the suntan lotion I had forgotten to remove from an inside pocket in the pack I was taking on as hand luggage (and threw it into a vast bin containing thousands and thousands of similar sun protection products and 500ml drink bottles). Got back to Stansted, waited for another half hour in a queue to go through passport control, where a stern-looking security guard made an unnecessary show of scanning my passport, while several heavily armed police officers stood around with their guns pointing at people rather than in safe directions.
Guess which of these options I will be choosing for any future holidays?
Oh, and count me as another one who would like to visit the US and Japan, but would rather go to other interesting and more welcoming places than put up with being treated as a dangerous criminal the moment I think about booking a ticket.
Um, you don't suppose that might have something to do with the vastly improved security measures do you?
Well... No.
Firstly, there is little evidence that security measures have, in fact, vastly improved since 9/11 (as opposed to just introducing more security theatre and inconvenience for passengers).
Secondly, flying already had a relatively good safety record: look at the statistics for the 1990s in the link Peter Mork posted.
Britain's privacy laws are, self-evidently, not that great.
However, it seems likely that there will be a string of legal challenges based on European human rights rules and the like.
In any case, I expect this will quietly get "forgotten", a bit like ID Cards, once public opinion dies down (and I'm not sure public opinion here was ever that strong on this one, even immediately after the failed Christmas Day bombing). It's just too easy a target for opposition politicians as the public mood is swinging back towards privacy and concern about the surveillance state, and this particular measure is sufficiently offensive to enough people that it could actually make a significant difference to the numbers using airports if it's rolled out nationwide. That is, after all, why they waited until they had the old "national security" excuse before trying to push this out beyond a minor local airport previously.
Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright."
I'd like to hear a lawyer stand up and say that with a straight face. Trademarked? Possibly. Copyright? Not likely. And even it was a registered mark, I fail to see what food has to do with anything, or how it would be actionable unless the rightsholder is organising similar events that might be confused with whatever private viewing we're talking about here.