When we talk about freedom of speech, "speech" means the expression (and usually distribution) of ideas. Supressing speech is censorship. There cannot be true freedom of speech without anonymity. There cannot be true freedom without freedom of speech.
And what of the rights that get trampled when anomyity can be used as a shield? What of the importance of telling the truth, or of respecting professional confidentiality when dealing with sensitive matters, for example? This sort of case is why an absolute freedom of speech, backed by anonymity or otherwise, is a dangerous thing. Too often it is used to override other, equally or more important, basic ethical principles.
I am completely against many of the UK government's current abusive policies; for example, see the other BBC News story in the past few hours, about police stop and search powers in London. But I believe that with freedom comes responsibility. Anonymity removes any ability to hold someone to account for the words they use, even if those words are unfair, untrue, or revealing secrets disclosed in confidence. I don't think that's a healthy path to walk.
I know the British people have never been all that excited about their individual rights, but the police state that's sprung up there in the last decade is not going away now. (At least not, without some major revolution... you tell me what the odds are on that.)
Well, we've just seen the Speaker kicked out for the first time in 300 years, numerous MPs including some at the highest levels have just had their careers ended because of some financial irregularities, the current administration is falling apart, the other big parties got their asses kicked almost as much as Labour recently, public trust in Parliament is at an all-time low, public trust in the police is also very low in light of things like the police brutality allegations at recent protests and a string of stories about abuse of powers, things like creating a second elected chamber and changing our highly controversial voting system are being actively discussed again, and politicians are already desperately trying to look like they have some integrity left in time to regain some public support before a general election that will be held, one way or another, within the next year. Oh, and there are a lot of seriously unhappy people in the country whose jobs, homes, pensions and other vital interests have been threatened or outright destroyed in recent months, and taxes are only going up and the job market and public services are only going down for the next few months. So right now, I'd say the chances of open revolt are higher than they've been in a very long time, and if whoever comes out on top of the political mess doesn't get their house in order pretty quickly, there is actually a chance of serious civil disorder.
I dunno, maybe because the kind of people in cases serious enough to involve witness protection don't exactly play by the rules?
Governments in free countries, however, are required to do so, and not to penalise those who happen to disagree with their political position. That, arguably, is the very definition of "free country".
One of the best ways of keeping the political classes honest is to ensure the freedom of the press to publish the results of investigative journalism — a freedom that was clearly upheld in this particular court ruling. As long as the same standards are applied when outing, say, ministerial aides who brief anonymously and get caught telling lies about opposition politicians, the system is probably healthy.
And of course, all of that said, we have to be very wary of permitting any kind of anonymous evidence in court cases as well. No matter how serious the charge, it's a big leap to say that evidence can be given against the defendant that the defendant does not have full ability to contest, including by challenging the credibility of the witness. There can be no completely fair resolution of that particular dilemma, of course, hence the debates about whether to allow such evidence and the existence of witness protection schemes.
...but since he dared to cut the middle man and publish himself he should be punished?
Did you actually read what was in the blog?
Are you still sure he shouldn't be punished?
Perhaps we should start allowing doctors and lawyers to violate doctor-patient confidentiality and attorney-client privilege as well, as long as they pseudo-anonymise the blogs where they do it? Then we could start respecting the anonymous briefing around Westminster, because those guys are totally doing it for the good of everyone, and I'd definitely want the media to give full weight to what they have to say without putting their name to it.
Indeed. That was one of the most loaded Slashdot summaries I've seen in a long time. For example, contrary to the direct claim in the summary, the officer's career is not in danger. He appears to have received a formal, written warning about behaviour in violation of professional standards he knew he was violating when he wrote the blog.
In any case, I'm not sure this ruling is a bad thing. As the judge pointed out, if someone is being critical of essential public institutions and claiming a certain authority, there is a public interest argument that the people reading the blog should not be prevented through legal restraint from finding out how qualified and experienced the person actually is. After all, if The Times could identify the blogger, they obviously weren't really anonymous in the first place, were they? And as the parent points out, upholding anonymity here would in turn violate the freedom of the press, also not something to be done without a very good reason.
In any case, if something being announced or discussed on a blog is serious enough to threaten the blogger's career prospects, shouldn't that blogger already be questioning the ethics of continuing to work for that employer anyway? There's a long-standing tradition that when senior military or political figures wish to criticise something they truly believe to be unethical or inappropriate behaviour, they do so in their resignation speech.
I thought one of the most interesting parts of the Digital Britain report was the commentary on copyright and related subjects, which took a reasonably realistic and balanced view IMHO, e.g.,
Copyright infringment for profit is viewed as theft.
Fair use needs updating, but this is heavily restricted by Europe-level regulation at present.
A lot of people who infringe copyright do not realise that what they are doing is illegal. Most people are not intimately familiar with copyright law.
Most people will obtain content through legitimate channels if they are convenient and cheap, so such alternatives should be promoted.
Business models must keep up with new technology; various alternative models, such as Spotify's, are acknowledged.
"Rightsholder" is not assumed to be the same as another role such as "artist" or "distributor".
Of course, some of the measures and timescales they propose to support these things are rather unrealistic, but I'd be happy if we at least started moving in the right direction: working in Europe to fix restrictions on fair use, going after persistent pirates (but only with real evidence and a court order to identify them) rather than those who just don't know how the rules work, and so on.
My two big disappointments with this section were that it didn't consider the possibility of more radical changes in the longer term, e.g., replacing copyright with some alternative form of exclusive rights more in the artist's favour than the middleman's; and that it didn't consider the copyright term extension problem (though this is perhaps unsurprising given the government's quiet U-turn on that question a few months ago).
I rather doubt it will usher in The Year of Windows 7 on the Desktop either.
Or The Year of Vista on the Desktop, for that matter.
You would think that Microsoft would have learned after the Vista fiasco that their corporate clients aren't playing their game any more — and that was before the major financial crisis that means everyone's budget is seriously constrained. When the first major clients threaten to switch platforms, or just to delay their upgrade cycles indefinitely, Microsoft will cave.
Either that or they'll become the next casualty of the financial mess, anyway. As we've seen, no corporation is too big to go under in the current climate, and Microsoft's financial reserves (and the career expectancy of its executives) will shrink to a very low level if there's another Vista/Office 2007 PR disaster.
If it's ever not more economic to do code reviews, then I respectfully submit that You're Doing Them Wrong(TM).
The improvements in the general standard of code, and consequently its maintainability, should easily outweigh the modest time spent on reviews. Likewise, the efficiency benefits just from sharing basic awareness of how various systems work and useful coding techniques around a development group should be enough to justify the time spent. And those are both without allowing for any actual bugs that would have been observed by your customers but got fixed much earlier and cheaper because the review caught them.
Incidentally, if you don't think it's worth getting even a quick glance from a second pair of eyes on even a small bug fix, you should look up the research on how many bugs originate from a one- or two-line change to the code. It's a staggeringly high proportion.
Now, a lot of places have tried full, Fagan-style, heavyweight reviews, and yeah, those pretty much suck for most software development groups. But that doesn't mean you can't employ a lighter process with the same goals. With the kinds of tools available to co-ordinate reviews and annotate code these days, your overheads should be near zero and you can do a lot of the work on-line rather than shoving everyone into a room for a few relatively unproductive hours.
So in this new constitution, what role do you want to assign the government in terms of creating/maintaining/regulating communications infrastructure?
None whatsoever. Regulation of specific communication channels in specific ways is well short of a constitutional issue. Heck, even the existence of specific communication channels is well short of a consitutional issue. The right to make political statements via any public medium without fear of government persecution is the sort of things that needs to be enshrined in a constitution.
As it happens, I think there's also a decent argument that if you allow artificial legal entities such as corporations then you also mandate a limit on their powers at the same legal level. That might include provision for controlling competition/collaboration/monopoly exploitation, which would clearly be relevant to communication channel providers.
But any essential regulation follows from broad principles such as these. There is no need for specifics in a constitution-level document; in fact, having them there is actively harmful.
The US Constitution also gives the federal government the power to grant copyrights. Given the current technological age, if you were writing the Constitution today, would you have included that?
Well, I don't believe in absolute freedom of speech, so personally I wouldn't have needed a constitution-level loophole for that one.
But in any case, the mistake the US made there was saying "for a limited time" without giving any specific criteria to define what that limit is. Such a constraint is, as we have seen, meaningless.
Should the government be required by the constitution to disseminate any particular information in any particular way? Just a random example: you could make it required that any laws be posted on the Internet at least 5 days before any vote. What format do you want it in?
No. Again, these sorts of provision are far too specific for a constitution.
The government should be compelled to disclose all information requested by any citizen within a reasonable (specified) period and at a cost no higher than some specified level (as in, no more than the direct costs incurred by the government exclusively and necessarily in the course of disclosing the requested information, not as in a specific amount of currency). If there is to be any exception whatsoever, there should be a specific statement of the criteria to be met, and I would argue that there should be provision for a statutory, independent authority whose approval must be obtained by any government department any time it wishes to appeal to the exception, such as a constitutional court. As with corporations, this is a case of if you create a loophole for someone at constitutional level, you have to regulate it at the same level.
The format of the disclosure merely needs to be something that is readily accessible to the citizen who requests the data. It doesn't matter what that is. Heck, I don't care if the only copy of the government records that is accessible to the public is stored in paper files on the moon, as long as the government provides safe and cost-effective lunar transportation system so anyone may retrieve it reasonably quickly and without undue expense. (It will soon become apparent that the costs incurred in this case are not necessary and the government will get spanked for it accordingly, of course, sooner or later probably leading to some official library arrangement or similar.)
What kinds of records may the government keep on the citizenry? What kinds of databases and compilations of information can they reference, and under what circumstances?
Once again, specifics are inappropriate. The point is that the government should not be keeping any records on any citizen beyond those reasonably necessary to administer the system (e.g., keeping a register of electors) and to fulfil its statutory duties to the public. Once again, the default should be that no-one in government can keep any records on anyone for any reason, and the exceptions to that rule need to be monitored in a specific way, if only by a constitional court.
There should be no such thing as separate "digital rights". Computers are just tools, and nowhere near important enough to be a special case in a national constitution.
Of course, many rights and freedoms that we might like to see preserved on-line in the Internet age are worth preserving in general: freedom of belief, freedom of association, freedom of expression, the right to a private life, and so on. But it doesn't matter in the slightest whether the infringement of such rights and freedoms is done via digital means or otherwise.
But the quick and easy ones would be; all of history proves that intellectual development happens without IP and most protection never generates any kind of financial return.
I'm afraid you'll have to try harder than that.:-)
The question isn't whether development happened before copyright; of course it did. What matters is whether copyright is an effective incentive: do more and better works get shared so more people can enjoy them with or without copyright?
On that basis, it seems that copyright has been overwhelmingly successful. Compared to the patron-funded models of a few hundred years ago, under copyright millions of people are involved in creating works and they can reach audiences of hundreds of millions.
I don't know how you can possibly claim that "most protection never generates any kind of financial return", looking at the number of people making a living as part of the copyright-supported system.
The economic incentive of copyright is derived from the ability to enforce monopoly pricing. The pricing curve for monopoly pricing always means that maximum revenue is generated when market demand is unfulfilled; therefore copyright inherently and provably leads to less people enjoying the work than without it.
I appreciate the effort to use some real economics rather than hand-waving, but your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. You are ignoring a couple of fundamental properties of the way copyright works.
Firstly, without the monopoly a work might not have been cost-effective to produce at all. The big benefit of copyright compared to any other system I've seen proposed is that it allows the cost of a very expensive work to be spread across a large audience, with each individual consumer contributing only a small part of the cost.
This allows you, for example, to make very expensive movies without the patronage of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, because millions of viewers can each pay their $10 at the cinema. As another example, it also allows you to make OK-but-nothing-special novels that no one person would pay for entirely because the quality is not sufficient, but that a few people will enjoy reading while on the train enough to justify paying a small price for them, collectively supporting the author.
Another factor that your argument doesn't consider is that pricing doesn't have to stay the same over time. Indeed, it doesn't in practice, as you can tell by looking at, say, how much Amazon sells newly released film/TV series DVDs for compared to how much it sells them for a year later.
Out of the money people spend on copyrighted works only a fraction reaches the actual creators.
I'll be the first to agree that the current implementation of copyright is deeply flawed. One of those deep flaws is the way it allows powerful middlemen to benefit rather than either the artist or the consumer, which is clearly broken. I would support measures that prevented this, for example by allowing only a temporary (with the duration limited to a very short period by statute) assignment of exclusive rights from the artist to an agent.
Under such a system, an agent who did well for the artist could then renew their agreement, while one who failed or who ripped off the artist when their product became wildly successfuly would find the artist choosing to use someone else the following year. No-one but the original artist(s) would retain any semi-permanent rights until the work fell into the public domain, so you couldn't have the likes of Disney exploiting things decades after the artists' death or singing Happy Birthday in public being a copyright infringement.
Then we have the loss of the ability of works to significantly build upon eachother (well, apart from Disney building on everyone else, of course) and the loss of freedom to translate. We have the examples of works being permanently lost due to right
While this is obviously a welcome result for those who support The Pirate Party, I think a lot of people posting here over-estimate the influence one MEP is going to have. At least I hope they do, because here in the UK, the British National Party just won a seat as well.
It could start by procuring some actual scientific evidence around the economic effects of intellectual 'property'. Research, comparisons, even simulations of various forms of models of systems would be nice. There is plenty of evidence that intellectual 'property' is, in fact, not needed as an incentive, and even counterproductive.
Yet curiously, you haven't cited anything either, and unlike the organisation in question, you also fail to distinguish between different kinds of IP.
For example, trademarks seem to be relatively uncontroversial: I've never seen anyone argue that allowing one organisation to pass itself off as another and trade on their positive reputation is a good thing.
Patents, on the other hand, are frequently criticised, particularly in jurisdictions where the concept has been stretched beyond physical inventions to things like mathematical algorithms and business processes.
What we're talking about here is copyright, and while there is no doubt that this is a controversial subject, I'm still waiting for any evidence that it is counterproductive, while hundreds of thousands of people make a living based on it and hundreds of millions of people enjoy works supported by copyright every day.
Trying to explain the demise of an obsolete business model without taking the obvious into account is hard!
You could start by explaining what alternative you propose, if the current model is "obsolete" and its flaws are "obvious".
You can certainly criticise some of the current pricing, aggressive legal strategies and industry propaganda. However, you can't deny that ultimately, it does cost a lot of money to make movies, software, etc., and that some of these products are valued by a lot of people. Moreover, there has to be some return on investment for those who back the successful projects, because a lot of the others make big losses, and no-one would back a new project if the best it was going to do was break even. This is basic economics, and the fact that the marginal cost of distributing a work can be close to zero in the Internet age is not the whole equation.
The Unit is an interesting case, because I suspect it died for similar reasons to T:SCC — the actions scenes and undercover plot stuff were entertaining enough, but jeez, skip through anything with the wives in it already.
Summer Glau played River Tam, a disturbed girl with a mysterious past(TM), in the series Firefly and the follow-up film Serenity.
She also had a recurring role in an early series of The Unit, playing a disturbing girlfriend with a predictable future(TM).
I don't know whether her agent should be praised or cursed: she's already had prominent roles in three fairly high profile TV shows, which is no mean feat at her age, but on the other hand her characters (despite being by far the most interesting in the two shows where she was a lead) almost forced her into off-the-wall, somewhat stereotyped portrayals at times. I suspect she made as good a job as she could given the script and direction, but unless she particularly likes that kind of character, I'm guessing she ought to do something a bit more "normal human being" next to prove that she's not relying on the eccentricity as a crutch to cover acting weaknesses.
Are you saying that you have evidence of people becoming obese after drinking diet soda, in a controlled experiment?
A controlled, large-scale study? No, I don't know of one.
A personal experiment, sure: I switched from drinking lots of regular cola to diet for several weeks when I started to get concerned about my weight, there were no other major lifestyle changes during the same period that seem likely to be relevant, and I certainly did experience the increased hunger and worsening weight problem that some claim are associated with the diet drinks. Moreover, when I switched back to drinking regular cola, the hunger/weight issues decreased to their previous levels. Of course, this only tells us that diet cola didn't work for me, but after hearing the same story from other people, I'm starting to think a proper scientific study should be done to put this one to bed once and for all.
OK, now I'm pretty sure you're trolling, but just in case you really believe what you're writing...
A good driver will drive below the speed limit, even if it's a poorly chosen limit.
Surely a good driver will drive safely, efficiently, and with consideration for others? Those are far more valuable goals that obeying any particular law.
If 85% of people ignore the limit and speed, there's 15% of people who aren't. There's a now a safety issue. The majority are in the wrong.
Wow. 85% of skilled, trained individuals make the same judgement on something, and you're going to side with the 15% and actually state that the majority (and it's near-enough a 5:1 majority) are the ones in the wrong? I'm not sure how you figure that one out.
If local 500 people manage to get the speed limit lowered, there's a valid reason.
See, now this is where I actually laughed out loud. There are two local examples that always strike me about lowering speed limits in response to local pressure, with sharply contrasting results.
The first example is a village I drive through on the way to see my parents. It's on a 60mph road, and the limit used to be 40mph through the village, but that was crazy and most people went much slower. One day, I was sorry to see a big pile of flowers outside the local school, and that pretty much every home in the village now had home-made 30mph signs outside it; it didn't take a genius to realise what had happened. After a while, the limit was lowered to 30mph officially. Most people's driving didn't change, because most people weren't going faster than that before anyway.
The other example is a road in the city here, also with a school on it, with the standard 30mph limit applying by default. In response to several minor accidents, a study was undertaken to establish the cause. It reported that it was actually the parents dropping kids off at school causing the biggest danger, as they parked along the sides of the road, both obstructing the view of other drivers and leaving little room to manoeuvre if a child did run out into the road.
As well as banning parking along the roadside in that area, the local authorities also introduced a 20mph speed limit, not only outside the school or during school hours, but along the entire road and complete with so-called traffic calming measures. The thing is, that road also happens to be well over a mile long, with generally good views and perfectly safe (literally: I've seen the accident stats) for a 30mph limit along most of its length and at most times of the day. It also happens to be a popular rat-run, which is political speak for "a road that drivers use perfectly legally when there isn't sufficient capacity on the surrounding roads but where the locals would like the drivers to F off and bother someone else".
Unsurprisingly, approximately 100% of drivers ignore the 20mph limit on that road other than around the school at school times, and again, no-one was really crazy enough to do 30mph past a school as young kids were coming out at the end of their day anyway. If anything, the average speeds have probably increased on the road: a lot of people used to stick to 30mph, but now you see loads doing more like 35mph, presumably having decided that if they're going to break the law anyway they might as well drive at their judgement of an appropriate speed while they're doing it. To my knowledge, the police have turned a blind eye to this, probably because they've got better things to do than run road safety patrols on a stretch of road that had literally no accidents in the past few years.
Why should people who from outside the area dictate their lives?
Because if everyone can set the rules but only for their own street, then NIMBYism takes over. Road safety policy starts being dictated by political expediency for local officials who are almost universally not experts in traffic enginee
I thought my consumption was much higher than it should be, because on a stressful day when I'm working for a long time on a pet project, I sometimes get through five or six 330ml cans. My GF has been telling me off about this since forever.
However, let's do a bit of maths here, using just the low end of the spectrum mentioned in these articles for illustration...
One 330ml can of Coke contains approximately 140 Calories. That's 210 Calories for a 500ml bottle, and a staggering 840 Calories in a 2L bottle (or six cans, or four small bottles).
A healthy daily Calorie intake for an average adult male with typical exercise levels and eating a reasonable diet is around 2,500 Calories. For an average adult female with similar criteria it's around 2,000 Calories. (For contrast, a typical front-line trooper in the army, performing a very physically demanding job, might consume about 4,000 Calories per day. An adult female professional dancer eating a careful diet to maintain health and fitness while losing weight to tone their figure might go down towards 1,200 Calories but would probably get told off for trying to go any lower.)
Put that together, and drinking 2L of Coke per day is the equivalent of about 1/3 of the total daily Calorie allowance for an adult male. Drinking 3L is about half of the daily intake. Drinking 3L of Coke per day on top of an otherwise healthy and balanced diet is worth the equivalent of the energy expended in running about half a marathon. Doing that every day for a week is the energy equivalent of not losing a little over 2lb of fat every week, though of course nutrition isn't quite as simple as this!
In short, drinking that much Coke is a serious problem even without the chemical imbalances it causes, that nasty bloaty feeling (if you can get past the nausea), the acid damage to teeth, and all that stuff. You'd have to be crazy to get to 3L in one day, and certifiably insane to drink it routinely, day after day.
"...More likely, she says, it shows that something linked to diet soda drinking is also linked to obesity." Correlation. Causation. Has Slashdot not gotten the hang of this yet?
Correlation does not imply lack of causation either, particularly when there are very plausible explanations for possible causative effects, and when plenty of people have made that particular shift without any other major lifestyle changes and then experienced the theorised consequences.
The problem here is that you're making standard road safety debate bad assumption #1: equating exceeding the legal speed limit with being ignorant and/or unsafe.
The entire point of the argument is that if the legal speed limits are not set appropriately according to the road conditions, this is not the case, and the law is then criminalising typically large numbers of people whose behaviour is reasonable. As bad law-making goes, that's pretty much one of the worst things you can do.
Even worse, by implementing such a policy in law, you create an artificial distinction between good driving and legal driving. Some decent drivers will obey the law anyway. Some decent drivers will trust their own judgement and choose to break the law. By causing them to take different actions, you actually make it more like that an accident will occur than if you just stayed out of it completely. You become part of the problem.
And who's to say that a speed is unreasonably low?
If it's well below the 85% guideline and there is no clear reason for it, then the standard policy of several national governments (and states in the US), many traffic engineers, police and road safety organisations, large numbers of academic studies, research by various professional organisations and government transport research labs in various countries, and perhaps most important of all, 5/6 of the drivers who use that stretch of road.
Do you really think a bureaucrat in an office hundreds of miles away or a local council official bowing to political pressure from the 500 people who elect them and live near the road are going to make a more informed judgement about this? Really?
Speeding isn't acceptable, and you're an idiot if do so.
Driving dangerously or inconsiderately isn't acceptable. If driving safely and with consideration for others is still speeding, your speed limit is broken.
As a cyclist, then yes: I would prefer to ban cars (except for those who really need them) BUT I am happy to compromise by *sharing* the *public* roads with motorists.
It's funny you should mention that. I live in Cambridge, which has a much higher than average concentration of cyclists. A certain proportion of those cyclists are quite militant about cyclists' rights and the dangers of cars.
Some of them have good reason to be, and make fair arguments about motorists abusing their big metal frames. They ask for drivers not to pass too close, not to edge forward into or cut across cycle-only spaces at junctions, and so on.
On the other hand, a lot of cyclists here, perhaps even the majority, seem to think they have some God-given right to do whatever they like, ignoring traffic laws at will and cycling dangerously (both to other cyclists and pedestrians they might hit, and to larger vehicles that might have to swerve to avoid them). We have a few who even go so far as to say that the law should presume guilt on the part of any driver involved in an accident with a cyclist, just because cars are the larger vehicles, completely ignoring the way many cyclists ride here.
Now, I don't have any exact figures on the causes of accidents involving cyclists, but I do have a lot of experience driving around the city, and I have seen the official accident maps prepared by our local authorities. It doesn't take a genius to spot that most accidents don't happen either on the faster roads or on the busiest junctions, but rather on more minor junctions where cyclists often run red lights or swerve out across the main traffic lanes as they exit from side roads, or on stretches of road with obvious design flaws that practically force different types of road user into conflict unless everyone realises what's going to happen and actively avoids it. Neither of these has anything to do with speed; indeed, most motorists drive well below the speed limits in these areas, and it is more often the cyclists you see travelling faster than they could control effectively in an emergency.
So given that I had to take lessons and pass a competence test before I was allowed to drive on the roads independently, drivers' contributions through driving-related taxes are far higher than the proportion of government spending that goes back into road-related services, I am legally required to have (and pay several hundred pounds a year for) insurance and regular testing of my vehicle's roadworthiness even though I have never needed either, and I am required to carry identifying marks on my vehicle that can be used to find me if I break any of the rules, exactly none of which applies to cyclists, and meanwhile my use of the roads around here is increasingly being restricted while cyclists are increasingly being allowed to do things outside the rules that apply to everyone else (despite criticism that those things are dangerous and/or actively screwing things up for every other type of road user and/or pedestrians), I'm afraid I am slightly irritated by your not-so-generous compromise that you will share the public roads with me. Your phrasing suggests a sense of entitlement rather like the wrong kind of cyclists I mentioned earlier. I don't mind sharing the road with cyclists — I cycle some places, too — but I do dislike it when cyclists get all high and mighty about equal rights, as if motorists are the guests on the roads their taxes pay for.
And, yes, I would prefer to get the bad drivers rather that the fast drivers off the road. But how ?
Stop focussing most of the enforcement effort on speed and automated devices that can only possibly deal with arbitrary technical offences.
Instead, spend the budget on getting police traffic units up to their old levels of training and resources. Traffic officers tend to have a very reasonable view of what to go after and what to let go in my experience, perhaps more so than any other group among the polic
I'm curious to know which page you found. I was referring to this one, which basically just collects a lot of citations for material from other sources without making comment or drawing conclusions.
The guy collecting the data certainly is pro-driver, but he cites a range of sources that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be so.
FWIW, I'm not quite sure how your characterisation of his positions ties up with what he says about his future plans for the site, though his personal views weren't particularly the reason I mentioned his page.
Slashdot Mirror
When we talk about freedom of speech, "speech" means the expression (and usually distribution) of ideas. Supressing speech is censorship. There cannot be true freedom of speech without anonymity. There cannot be true freedom without freedom of speech.
And what of the rights that get trampled when anomyity can be used as a shield? What of the importance of telling the truth, or of respecting professional confidentiality when dealing with sensitive matters, for example? This sort of case is why an absolute freedom of speech, backed by anonymity or otherwise, is a dangerous thing. Too often it is used to override other, equally or more important, basic ethical principles.
I am completely against many of the UK government's current abusive policies; for example, see the other BBC News story in the past few hours, about police stop and search powers in London. But I believe that with freedom comes responsibility. Anonymity removes any ability to hold someone to account for the words they use, even if those words are unfair, untrue, or revealing secrets disclosed in confidence. I don't think that's a healthy path to walk.
I know the British people have never been all that excited about their individual rights, but the police state that's sprung up there in the last decade is not going away now. (At least not, without some major revolution... you tell me what the odds are on that.)
Well, we've just seen the Speaker kicked out for the first time in 300 years, numerous MPs including some at the highest levels have just had their careers ended because of some financial irregularities, the current administration is falling apart, the other big parties got their asses kicked almost as much as Labour recently, public trust in Parliament is at an all-time low, public trust in the police is also very low in light of things like the police brutality allegations at recent protests and a string of stories about abuse of powers, things like creating a second elected chamber and changing our highly controversial voting system are being actively discussed again, and politicians are already desperately trying to look like they have some integrity left in time to regain some public support before a general election that will be held, one way or another, within the next year. Oh, and there are a lot of seriously unhappy people in the country whose jobs, homes, pensions and other vital interests have been threatened or outright destroyed in recent months, and taxes are only going up and the job market and public services are only going down for the next few months. So right now, I'd say the chances of open revolt are higher than they've been in a very long time, and if whoever comes out on top of the political mess doesn't get their house in order pretty quickly, there is actually a chance of serious civil disorder.
I dunno, maybe because the kind of people in cases serious enough to involve witness protection don't exactly play by the rules?
Governments in free countries, however, are required to do so, and not to penalise those who happen to disagree with their political position. That, arguably, is the very definition of "free country".
One of the best ways of keeping the political classes honest is to ensure the freedom of the press to publish the results of investigative journalism — a freedom that was clearly upheld in this particular court ruling. As long as the same standards are applied when outing, say, ministerial aides who brief anonymously and get caught telling lies about opposition politicians, the system is probably healthy.
And of course, all of that said, we have to be very wary of permitting any kind of anonymous evidence in court cases as well. No matter how serious the charge, it's a big leap to say that evidence can be given against the defendant that the defendant does not have full ability to contest, including by challenging the credibility of the witness. There can be no completely fair resolution of that particular dilemma, of course, hence the debates about whether to allow such evidence and the existence of witness protection schemes.
...but since he dared to cut the middle man and publish himself he should be punished?
Did you actually read what was in the blog?
Are you still sure he shouldn't be punished?
Perhaps we should start allowing doctors and lawyers to violate doctor-patient confidentiality and attorney-client privilege as well, as long as they pseudo-anonymise the blogs where they do it? Then we could start respecting the anonymous briefing around Westminster, because those guys are totally doing it for the good of everyone, and I'd definitely want the media to give full weight to what they have to say without putting their name to it.
So can this be appealed to a higher court, and will the order be stayed until such time as it can be reviewed?
This was a case heard in the High Court.
Unless there was some failure in the application of the legal process, it's hard to see the Appeal Court getting involved.
You don't get to appeal to a higher court and expect a different decision just because you didn't like the decision you got the first time!
Indeed. That was one of the most loaded Slashdot summaries I've seen in a long time. For example, contrary to the direct claim in the summary, the officer's career is not in danger. He appears to have received a formal, written warning about behaviour in violation of professional standards he knew he was violating when he wrote the blog.
In any case, I'm not sure this ruling is a bad thing. As the judge pointed out, if someone is being critical of essential public institutions and claiming a certain authority, there is a public interest argument that the people reading the blog should not be prevented through legal restraint from finding out how qualified and experienced the person actually is. After all, if The Times could identify the blogger, they obviously weren't really anonymous in the first place, were they? And as the parent points out, upholding anonymity here would in turn violate the freedom of the press, also not something to be done without a very good reason.
In any case, if something being announced or discussed on a blog is serious enough to threaten the blogger's career prospects, shouldn't that blogger already be questioning the ethics of continuing to work for that employer anyway? There's a long-standing tradition that when senior military or political figures wish to criticise something they truly believe to be unethical or inappropriate behaviour, they do so in their resignation speech.
I thought one of the most interesting parts of the Digital Britain report was the commentary on copyright and related subjects, which took a reasonably realistic and balanced view IMHO, e.g.,
Of course, some of the measures and timescales they propose to support these things are rather unrealistic, but I'd be happy if we at least started moving in the right direction: working in Europe to fix restrictions on fair use, going after persistent pirates (but only with real evidence and a court order to identify them) rather than those who just don't know how the rules work, and so on.
My two big disappointments with this section were that it didn't consider the possibility of more radical changes in the longer term, e.g., replacing copyright with some alternative form of exclusive rights more in the artist's favour than the middleman's; and that it didn't consider the copyright term extension problem (though this is perhaps unsurprising given the government's quiet U-turn on that question a few months ago).
I rather doubt it will usher in The Year of Windows 7 on the Desktop either.
Or The Year of Vista on the Desktop, for that matter.
You would think that Microsoft would have learned after the Vista fiasco that their corporate clients aren't playing their game any more — and that was before the major financial crisis that means everyone's budget is seriously constrained. When the first major clients threaten to switch platforms, or just to delay their upgrade cycles indefinitely, Microsoft will cave.
Either that or they'll become the next casualty of the financial mess, anyway. As we've seen, no corporation is too big to go under in the current climate, and Microsoft's financial reserves (and the career expectancy of its executives) will shrink to a very low level if there's another Vista/Office 2007 PR disaster.
If it's ever not more economic to do code reviews, then I respectfully submit that You're Doing Them Wrong(TM).
The improvements in the general standard of code, and consequently its maintainability, should easily outweigh the modest time spent on reviews. Likewise, the efficiency benefits just from sharing basic awareness of how various systems work and useful coding techniques around a development group should be enough to justify the time spent. And those are both without allowing for any actual bugs that would have been observed by your customers but got fixed much earlier and cheaper because the review caught them.
Incidentally, if you don't think it's worth getting even a quick glance from a second pair of eyes on even a small bug fix, you should look up the research on how many bugs originate from a one- or two-line change to the code. It's a staggeringly high proportion.
Now, a lot of places have tried full, Fagan-style, heavyweight reviews, and yeah, those pretty much suck for most software development groups. But that doesn't mean you can't employ a lighter process with the same goals. With the kinds of tools available to co-ordinate reviews and annotate code these days, your overheads should be near zero and you can do a lot of the work on-line rather than shoving everyone into a room for a few relatively unproductive hours.
So in this new constitution, what role do you want to assign the government in terms of creating/maintaining/regulating communications infrastructure?
None whatsoever. Regulation of specific communication channels in specific ways is well short of a constitutional issue. Heck, even the existence of specific communication channels is well short of a consitutional issue. The right to make political statements via any public medium without fear of government persecution is the sort of things that needs to be enshrined in a constitution.
As it happens, I think there's also a decent argument that if you allow artificial legal entities such as corporations then you also mandate a limit on their powers at the same legal level. That might include provision for controlling competition/collaboration/monopoly exploitation, which would clearly be relevant to communication channel providers.
But any essential regulation follows from broad principles such as these. There is no need for specifics in a constitution-level document; in fact, having them there is actively harmful.
The US Constitution also gives the federal government the power to grant copyrights. Given the current technological age, if you were writing the Constitution today, would you have included that?
Well, I don't believe in absolute freedom of speech, so personally I wouldn't have needed a constitution-level loophole for that one.
But in any case, the mistake the US made there was saying "for a limited time" without giving any specific criteria to define what that limit is. Such a constraint is, as we have seen, meaningless.
Should the government be required by the constitution to disseminate any particular information in any particular way? Just a random example: you could make it required that any laws be posted on the Internet at least 5 days before any vote. What format do you want it in?
No. Again, these sorts of provision are far too specific for a constitution.
The government should be compelled to disclose all information requested by any citizen within a reasonable (specified) period and at a cost no higher than some specified level (as in, no more than the direct costs incurred by the government exclusively and necessarily in the course of disclosing the requested information, not as in a specific amount of currency). If there is to be any exception whatsoever, there should be a specific statement of the criteria to be met, and I would argue that there should be provision for a statutory, independent authority whose approval must be obtained by any government department any time it wishes to appeal to the exception, such as a constitutional court. As with corporations, this is a case of if you create a loophole for someone at constitutional level, you have to regulate it at the same level.
The format of the disclosure merely needs to be something that is readily accessible to the citizen who requests the data. It doesn't matter what that is. Heck, I don't care if the only copy of the government records that is accessible to the public is stored in paper files on the moon, as long as the government provides safe and cost-effective lunar transportation system so anyone may retrieve it reasonably quickly and without undue expense. (It will soon become apparent that the costs incurred in this case are not necessary and the government will get spanked for it accordingly, of course, sooner or later probably leading to some official library arrangement or similar.)
What kinds of records may the government keep on the citizenry? What kinds of databases and compilations of information can they reference, and under what circumstances?
Once again, specifics are inappropriate. The point is that the government should not be keeping any records on any citizen beyond those reasonably necessary to administer the system (e.g., keeping a register of electors) and to fulfil its statutory duties to the public. Once again, the default should be that no-one in government can keep any records on anyone for any reason, and the exceptions to that rule need to be monitored in a specific way, if only by a constitional court.
There should be no such thing as separate "digital rights". Computers are just tools, and nowhere near important enough to be a special case in a national constitution.
Of course, many rights and freedoms that we might like to see preserved on-line in the Internet age are worth preserving in general: freedom of belief, freedom of association, freedom of expression, the right to a private life, and so on. But it doesn't matter in the slightest whether the infringement of such rights and freedoms is done via digital means or otherwise.
But the quick and easy ones would be; all of history proves that intellectual development happens without IP and most protection never generates any kind of financial return.
I'm afraid you'll have to try harder than that. :-)
The question isn't whether development happened before copyright; of course it did. What matters is whether copyright is an effective incentive: do more and better works get shared so more people can enjoy them with or without copyright?
On that basis, it seems that copyright has been overwhelmingly successful. Compared to the patron-funded models of a few hundred years ago, under copyright millions of people are involved in creating works and they can reach audiences of hundreds of millions.
I don't know how you can possibly claim that "most protection never generates any kind of financial return", looking at the number of people making a living as part of the copyright-supported system.
The economic incentive of copyright is derived from the ability to enforce monopoly pricing. The pricing curve for monopoly pricing always means that maximum revenue is generated when market demand is unfulfilled; therefore copyright inherently and provably leads to less people enjoying the work than without it.
I appreciate the effort to use some real economics rather than hand-waving, but your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. You are ignoring a couple of fundamental properties of the way copyright works.
Firstly, without the monopoly a work might not have been cost-effective to produce at all. The big benefit of copyright compared to any other system I've seen proposed is that it allows the cost of a very expensive work to be spread across a large audience, with each individual consumer contributing only a small part of the cost.
This allows you, for example, to make very expensive movies without the patronage of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, because millions of viewers can each pay their $10 at the cinema. As another example, it also allows you to make OK-but-nothing-special novels that no one person would pay for entirely because the quality is not sufficient, but that a few people will enjoy reading while on the train enough to justify paying a small price for them, collectively supporting the author.
Another factor that your argument doesn't consider is that pricing doesn't have to stay the same over time. Indeed, it doesn't in practice, as you can tell by looking at, say, how much Amazon sells newly released film/TV series DVDs for compared to how much it sells them for a year later.
Out of the money people spend on copyrighted works only a fraction reaches the actual creators.
I'll be the first to agree that the current implementation of copyright is deeply flawed. One of those deep flaws is the way it allows powerful middlemen to benefit rather than either the artist or the consumer, which is clearly broken. I would support measures that prevented this, for example by allowing only a temporary (with the duration limited to a very short period by statute) assignment of exclusive rights from the artist to an agent.
Under such a system, an agent who did well for the artist could then renew their agreement, while one who failed or who ripped off the artist when their product became wildly successfuly would find the artist choosing to use someone else the following year. No-one but the original artist(s) would retain any semi-permanent rights until the work fell into the public domain, so you couldn't have the likes of Disney exploiting things decades after the artists' death or singing Happy Birthday in public being a copyright infringement.
Then we have the loss of the ability of works to significantly build upon eachother (well, apart from Disney building on everyone else, of course) and the loss of freedom to translate. We have the examples of works being permanently lost due to right
Honestly - I have no idea what the BNP voters hope to achieve.
For many of them, Gordon Brown's resignation, I would imagine.
While this is obviously a welcome result for those who support The Pirate Party, I think a lot of people posting here over-estimate the influence one MEP is going to have. At least I hope they do, because here in the UK, the British National Party just won a seat as well.
It could start by procuring some actual scientific evidence around the economic effects of intellectual 'property'. Research, comparisons, even simulations of various forms of models of systems would be nice. There is plenty of evidence that intellectual 'property' is, in fact, not needed as an incentive, and even counterproductive.
Yet curiously, you haven't cited anything either, and unlike the organisation in question, you also fail to distinguish between different kinds of IP.
For example, trademarks seem to be relatively uncontroversial: I've never seen anyone argue that allowing one organisation to pass itself off as another and trade on their positive reputation is a good thing.
Patents, on the other hand, are frequently criticised, particularly in jurisdictions where the concept has been stretched beyond physical inventions to things like mathematical algorithms and business processes.
What we're talking about here is copyright, and while there is no doubt that this is a controversial subject, I'm still waiting for any evidence that it is counterproductive, while hundreds of thousands of people make a living based on it and hundreds of millions of people enjoy works supported by copyright every day.
Trying to explain the demise of an obsolete business model without taking the obvious into account is hard!
You could start by explaining what alternative you propose, if the current model is "obsolete" and its flaws are "obvious".
You can certainly criticise some of the current pricing, aggressive legal strategies and industry propaganda. However, you can't deny that ultimately, it does cost a lot of money to make movies, software, etc., and that some of these products are valued by a lot of people. Moreover, there has to be some return on investment for those who back the successful projects, because a lot of the others make big losses, and no-one would back a new project if the best it was going to do was break even. This is basic economics, and the fact that the marginal cost of distributing a work can be close to zero in the Internet age is not the whole equation.
According to Wikipedia, that string is the one thing you can't switch off. Is their information incorrect?
The Unit is an interesting case, because I suspect it died for similar reasons to T:SCC — the actions scenes and undercover plot stuff were entertaining enough, but jeez, skip through anything with the wives in it already.
Summer Glau played River Tam, a disturbed girl with a mysterious past(TM), in the series Firefly and the follow-up film Serenity.
She also had a recurring role in an early series of The Unit, playing a disturbing girlfriend with a predictable future(TM).
I don't know whether her agent should be praised or cursed: she's already had prominent roles in three fairly high profile TV shows, which is no mean feat at her age, but on the other hand her characters (despite being by far the most interesting in the two shows where she was a lead) almost forced her into off-the-wall, somewhat stereotyped portrayals at times. I suspect she made as good a job as she could given the script and direction, but unless she particularly likes that kind of character, I'm guessing she ought to do something a bit more "normal human being" next to prove that she's not relying on the eccentricity as a crutch to cover acting weaknesses.
Are you saying that you have evidence of people becoming obese after drinking diet soda, in a controlled experiment?
A controlled, large-scale study? No, I don't know of one.
A personal experiment, sure: I switched from drinking lots of regular cola to diet for several weeks when I started to get concerned about my weight, there were no other major lifestyle changes during the same period that seem likely to be relevant, and I certainly did experience the increased hunger and worsening weight problem that some claim are associated with the diet drinks. Moreover, when I switched back to drinking regular cola, the hunger/weight issues decreased to their previous levels. Of course, this only tells us that diet cola didn't work for me, but after hearing the same story from other people, I'm starting to think a proper scientific study should be done to put this one to bed once and for all.
OK, now I'm pretty sure you're trolling, but just in case you really believe what you're writing...
A good driver will drive below the speed limit, even if it's a poorly chosen limit.
Surely a good driver will drive safely, efficiently, and with consideration for others? Those are far more valuable goals that obeying any particular law.
If 85% of people ignore the limit and speed, there's 15% of people who aren't. There's a now a safety issue. The majority are in the wrong.
Wow. 85% of skilled, trained individuals make the same judgement on something, and you're going to side with the 15% and actually state that the majority (and it's near-enough a 5:1 majority) are the ones in the wrong? I'm not sure how you figure that one out.
If local 500 people manage to get the speed limit lowered, there's a valid reason.
See, now this is where I actually laughed out loud. There are two local examples that always strike me about lowering speed limits in response to local pressure, with sharply contrasting results.
The first example is a village I drive through on the way to see my parents. It's on a 60mph road, and the limit used to be 40mph through the village, but that was crazy and most people went much slower. One day, I was sorry to see a big pile of flowers outside the local school, and that pretty much every home in the village now had home-made 30mph signs outside it; it didn't take a genius to realise what had happened. After a while, the limit was lowered to 30mph officially. Most people's driving didn't change, because most people weren't going faster than that before anyway.
The other example is a road in the city here, also with a school on it, with the standard 30mph limit applying by default. In response to several minor accidents, a study was undertaken to establish the cause. It reported that it was actually the parents dropping kids off at school causing the biggest danger, as they parked along the sides of the road, both obstructing the view of other drivers and leaving little room to manoeuvre if a child did run out into the road.
As well as banning parking along the roadside in that area, the local authorities also introduced a 20mph speed limit, not only outside the school or during school hours, but along the entire road and complete with so-called traffic calming measures. The thing is, that road also happens to be well over a mile long, with generally good views and perfectly safe (literally: I've seen the accident stats) for a 30mph limit along most of its length and at most times of the day. It also happens to be a popular rat-run, which is political speak for "a road that drivers use perfectly legally when there isn't sufficient capacity on the surrounding roads but where the locals would like the drivers to F off and bother someone else".
Unsurprisingly, approximately 100% of drivers ignore the 20mph limit on that road other than around the school at school times, and again, no-one was really crazy enough to do 30mph past a school as young kids were coming out at the end of their day anyway. If anything, the average speeds have probably increased on the road: a lot of people used to stick to 30mph, but now you see loads doing more like 35mph, presumably having decided that if they're going to break the law anyway they might as well drive at their judgement of an appropriate speed while they're doing it. To my knowledge, the police have turned a blind eye to this, probably because they've got better things to do than run road safety patrols on a stretch of road that had literally no accidents in the past few years.
Why should people who from outside the area dictate their lives?
Because if everyone can set the rules but only for their own street, then NIMBYism takes over. Road safety policy starts being dictated by political expediency for local officials who are almost universally not experts in traffic enginee
I thought my consumption was much higher than it should be, because on a stressful day when I'm working for a long time on a pet project, I sometimes get through five or six 330ml cans. My GF has been telling me off about this since forever.
However, let's do a bit of maths here, using just the low end of the spectrum mentioned in these articles for illustration...
One 330ml can of Coke contains approximately 140 Calories. That's 210 Calories for a 500ml bottle, and a staggering 840 Calories in a 2L bottle (or six cans, or four small bottles).
A healthy daily Calorie intake for an average adult male with typical exercise levels and eating a reasonable diet is around 2,500 Calories. For an average adult female with similar criteria it's around 2,000 Calories. (For contrast, a typical front-line trooper in the army, performing a very physically demanding job, might consume about 4,000 Calories per day. An adult female professional dancer eating a careful diet to maintain health and fitness while losing weight to tone their figure might go down towards 1,200 Calories but would probably get told off for trying to go any lower.)
Put that together, and drinking 2L of Coke per day is the equivalent of about 1/3 of the total daily Calorie allowance for an adult male. Drinking 3L is about half of the daily intake. Drinking 3L of Coke per day on top of an otherwise healthy and balanced diet is worth the equivalent of the energy expended in running about half a marathon. Doing that every day for a week is the energy equivalent of not losing a little over 2lb of fat every week, though of course nutrition isn't quite as simple as this!
In short, drinking that much Coke is a serious problem even without the chemical imbalances it causes, that nasty bloaty feeling (if you can get past the nausea), the acid damage to teeth, and all that stuff. You'd have to be crazy to get to 3L in one day, and certifiably insane to drink it routinely, day after day.
"...More likely, she says, it shows that something linked to diet soda drinking is also linked to obesity." Correlation. Causation. Has Slashdot not gotten the hang of this yet?
Correlation does not imply lack of causation either, particularly when there are very plausible explanations for possible causative effects, and when plenty of people have made that particular shift without any other major lifestyle changes and then experienced the theorised consequences.
The problem here is that you're making standard road safety debate bad assumption #1: equating exceeding the legal speed limit with being ignorant and/or unsafe.
The entire point of the argument is that if the legal speed limits are not set appropriately according to the road conditions, this is not the case, and the law is then criminalising typically large numbers of people whose behaviour is reasonable. As bad law-making goes, that's pretty much one of the worst things you can do.
Even worse, by implementing such a policy in law, you create an artificial distinction between good driving and legal driving. Some decent drivers will obey the law anyway. Some decent drivers will trust their own judgement and choose to break the law. By causing them to take different actions, you actually make it more like that an accident will occur than if you just stayed out of it completely. You become part of the problem.
And who's to say that a speed is unreasonably low?
If it's well below the 85% guideline and there is no clear reason for it, then the standard policy of several national governments (and states in the US), many traffic engineers, police and road safety organisations, large numbers of academic studies, research by various professional organisations and government transport research labs in various countries, and perhaps most important of all, 5/6 of the drivers who use that stretch of road.
Do you really think a bureaucrat in an office hundreds of miles away or a local council official bowing to political pressure from the 500 people who elect them and live near the road are going to make a more informed judgement about this? Really?
Speeding isn't acceptable, and you're an idiot if do so.
Driving dangerously or inconsiderately isn't acceptable. If driving safely and with consideration for others is still speeding, your speed limit is broken.
As a cyclist, then yes: I would prefer to ban cars (except for those who really need them) BUT I am happy to compromise by *sharing* the *public* roads with motorists.
It's funny you should mention that. I live in Cambridge, which has a much higher than average concentration of cyclists. A certain proportion of those cyclists are quite militant about cyclists' rights and the dangers of cars.
Some of them have good reason to be, and make fair arguments about motorists abusing their big metal frames. They ask for drivers not to pass too close, not to edge forward into or cut across cycle-only spaces at junctions, and so on.
On the other hand, a lot of cyclists here, perhaps even the majority, seem to think they have some God-given right to do whatever they like, ignoring traffic laws at will and cycling dangerously (both to other cyclists and pedestrians they might hit, and to larger vehicles that might have to swerve to avoid them). We have a few who even go so far as to say that the law should presume guilt on the part of any driver involved in an accident with a cyclist, just because cars are the larger vehicles, completely ignoring the way many cyclists ride here.
Now, I don't have any exact figures on the causes of accidents involving cyclists, but I do have a lot of experience driving around the city, and I have seen the official accident maps prepared by our local authorities. It doesn't take a genius to spot that most accidents don't happen either on the faster roads or on the busiest junctions, but rather on more minor junctions where cyclists often run red lights or swerve out across the main traffic lanes as they exit from side roads, or on stretches of road with obvious design flaws that practically force different types of road user into conflict unless everyone realises what's going to happen and actively avoids it. Neither of these has anything to do with speed; indeed, most motorists drive well below the speed limits in these areas, and it is more often the cyclists you see travelling faster than they could control effectively in an emergency.
So given that I had to take lessons and pass a competence test before I was allowed to drive on the roads independently, drivers' contributions through driving-related taxes are far higher than the proportion of government spending that goes back into road-related services, I am legally required to have (and pay several hundred pounds a year for) insurance and regular testing of my vehicle's roadworthiness even though I have never needed either, and I am required to carry identifying marks on my vehicle that can be used to find me if I break any of the rules, exactly none of which applies to cyclists, and meanwhile my use of the roads around here is increasingly being restricted while cyclists are increasingly being allowed to do things outside the rules that apply to everyone else (despite criticism that those things are dangerous and/or actively screwing things up for every other type of road user and/or pedestrians), I'm afraid I am slightly irritated by your not-so-generous compromise that you will share the public roads with me. Your phrasing suggests a sense of entitlement rather like the wrong kind of cyclists I mentioned earlier. I don't mind sharing the road with cyclists — I cycle some places, too — but I do dislike it when cyclists get all high and mighty about equal rights, as if motorists are the guests on the roads their taxes pay for.
And, yes, I would prefer to get the bad drivers rather that the fast drivers off the road. But how ?
Stop focussing most of the enforcement effort on speed and automated devices that can only possibly deal with arbitrary technical offences.
Instead, spend the budget on getting police traffic units up to their old levels of training and resources. Traffic officers tend to have a very reasonable view of what to go after and what to let go in my experience, perhaps more so than any other group among the polic
I'm curious to know which page you found. I was referring to this one, which basically just collects a lot of citations for material from other sources without making comment or drawing conclusions.
The guy collecting the data certainly is pro-driver, but he cites a range of sources that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be so.
FWIW, I'm not quite sure how your characterisation of his positions ties up with what he says about his future plans for the site, though his personal views weren't particularly the reason I mentioned his page.