I dunno.. I'd be careful of web work. Once you get pegged as a "web developer" it can be hard to get a traditional programming job.
There's certainly an element of truth in that, but as long as you've got some "traditional" experience on the CV as well, web programming is a large and sometimes quite lucrative field. I wouldn't recommend going straight into it out of university unless you're going into serious web development (with the graphic design, usability and so on as well), but if it's of interest, I don't see any harm getting a bit of experience with it early in a career, perhaps as a side project outside of your main job if nothing else.
The idea is that you can apply computer science to any language you want to learn.
Which is great, except that with such a narrow range of languages to start with, the OP won't have the kind of general background knowledge and breadth of experience to do that yet. The saying that a good programmer can learn a new language in a week is bull and always has been, and it seems that this particular CS course has not covered as wide a range of languages as we might hope for.
To the original poster, while you still have an opportunity to do it easily, I strongly recommend exploring a few other languages, even if only to the level of basic familiarity that you now have with C, C++ and Java. You may not realise it yet, but those three languages are all more similar than different in the grand scheme of things, and there are more ways to solve programming problems than fairly low-level, imperative, statically typed programming with C-like syntax. To expand your thinking a bit, I would recommend at least learning:
a dynamically-typed scripting language (I'd probably suggest Python, but something like Perl or Ruby would do just as well);
a functional language (Haskell or OCaml are probably the best documented); and
JavaScript (useful if you're ever thinking of doing web work, but also as an example of a rather different way to do OO than the C++/Java approach, and of a mid-range language with C-like syntax but both dynamic and functional features integrated).
Most of these are immediately commercially relevant in large commercial fields anyway, and functional ideas (though perhaps not dedicated functional programming languages) are becoming more and more important. For bonus points, a bit of Lisp, Smalltalk and some sort of assembler wouldn't do you any harm either, but these are less directly applicable for most commercial roles. On the flip side, some exposure to.Net, probably via C#, is a valuable commercial asset even if it's rather similar to what you've already learned through C++ and Java: jobs working the typical Microsoft tool stack (C#/.Net libraries/ASP.Net/SQL Server...) are a big field.
The important thing is that you don't have to master each of these at this stage. Just play around enough, even with simple toy programs, to get the basic feel for the different approaches and understand that the C/C++/Java way is not the only one (and certainly not the best one for all jobs).
And all the while you're doing this, remember that a programming language is just a tool to express ideas. The more general CS knowledge — general data structures and algorithms, design skills, understanding specific fields such as database theory, graphics and operating systems, and so on — is every bit as important, whatever language you use.
The last three add-ins running in my Firefox 3 installed themselves, can't be uninstalled in the usual way, and don't do me any favours.
And Firefox's stability has sucked ever since they went in, even though they're all supposedly disabled. It could be coincidental, but it's a hell of a coincidence.
The offending add-ins are Java Quick Starter, Microsoft.Net Framework Assistant and AVG Safe Search, in case you're wondering.
*Unless they have servers located in the UK. With 200m or so users, they probably do
An increasing number of companies in Europe are explicitly requiring all the personal information they hold also to be hosted within Europe, to be sure they comply with data protection legislation. They're screwed if the hosting government decide to be abusive, but at least this way they're covered against claims they allowed other governments (such as the US, where privacy and data protection laws seem to be even looser than they are here) to be abusive.
This sort of thing isn't unreasonable if the people it hits are actually breaking the law. If the law is unreasonable, then getting the authorities to enforce that law uniformly and against everyone breaking it will make those authorities very unpopular and show the law to be flawed. Such laws rarely last much beyond the following election. On the other hand, if the law is reasonable, then impartially punishing those who break it is also reasonable. Personally, I don't have much sympathy for freeloaders.
Of course, we know that governments always follow due process in these cases, provide timely hearings where someone accused has an opportunity to defend themselves, and provide fair compensation if they screw up and an innocent party is damaged as a result, so there's really nothing to worry about.
I don't think your position is unreasonable in itself; after all, if we had the ultimate ability to invade privacy by reading minds, would we want to allow that as evidence in court, and if so, with what safeguards about anything else that might be encountered while collecting evidence? However, in this case, it sounds like the guy is arguing that he's suffering in some way that isn't necessarily externally observable, so if you can't look at evidence relating to his private thoughts, it's hard to see how it's fair to side with him in the case...
But what abut watching you in your house? That is private. Why is this not also private ?
Because it is directly relevant to a case being heard in a court of law.
I'm a firm believer in privacy rights and limiting government powers to investigate someone arbitrarily. However, for any justice system to function effectively, there must be some means of investigating the truth or otherwise of a claim as part of due process. In most of our countries today, this happens via a case being heard in court, and we give that court special privileges that Joe Public does not have so that it can carry out its duties.
See also search warrants, authorisations to intercept communications, and similar things that (in sane countries without the excessive government powers of arbitrary investigation) require a court order, but are legal with judicial oversight.
At lower levels, that is a common effect, but it's not turtles all the way down: senior management have nowhere left to get promoted to, and their goal should be (and, if their bonuses are stock-based, might actually be) to make the overall business more successful. This is more likely if you get rid of managers who are interested in self-promotion above all else, and promote those who do a good job of managing people as measured by the success/contribution of whatever part of the organisation they manage.
In other words, if you have a culture where all the middle managers are self-promoters and the good people never really get anywhere, it is not an unsolvable problem and it is by definition senior management's fault. But of course, those are the same senior managers who institute the kind of HR policies that assume humans are machines: the very name "human resources" has different — and much less pleasant — overtones to the old "personnel". So the kind of policy we're discussing here is really doing us all a favour, by providing a convenient way to detect such madness in the upper ranks of a company, infer that the company as a whole is probably screwed, and avoid wasting any time applying there.:-)
Everything I wrote is readily verifiable if you take even a couple of minutes to read the bug tracker (e.g., for the favicon mess or numerous printing bugs) or to search for obvious terms with your engine of choice (e.g., over the dubious way that other software can install its add-ons into Firefox without the user's consent and FF won't then allow them to be uninstalled).
Just because you've never encountered them, that doesn't mean they're not common. Irritation with issues like these is widespread among my more geekish friends — and we all have completely independent systems with diverse specs down to the hardware and OS we're running — which is why I posted the observation in the first place.
But this is my problem: the only extensions I have installed are the irritation blockers (Flashblock, Adblock), popular developer tools (Web Developer toolbar, Firefox Accessibility Extension, etc.) and those I wasn't given a choice about (from Java,.Net, AVG). I don't have zillions of random things I once downloaded clogging up my system.
I have disabled all of the involuntary ones, but it seems I can't remove them (WTF happened to giving me control of my own system?) and the stability seemed to drop pretty obviously around the time they decided to add themselves, so they are my prime suspects.
The others are the only reason I use Firefox rather than IE...
Thank you, that's a really useful tip and something I didn't know before.
It sounds like Windows 7 will be going a bit further towards "docking", which is probably a good thing too, though I think you have to use that sort of UI in practice to know if you really like it. If they just added a bit of cleverness with mouse acceleration (or rather, deceleration) around critical areas that aren't bounded by the screen edges in these tiled configurations, I'd be a very happy user.:-)
It's not Microsoft's fault that a 3rd party decided not to fully support your hardware with drivers for the latest OS.
It's not Microsoft's fault.
It is Microsoft's problem, if they want people with hardware older than a couple of years to upgrade to that latest OS.
The obvious way to solve this problem would be to implement standard interfaces for device drivers that were supported across all OS versions, at least for major categories of hardware that many people have, but for some strange reason Microsoft seem to be incapable of doing this even though just about every other OS in history has managed it.
My theory is that Firefox will ultimately kill windows, if not Microsoft itself.
Since Firefox has been getting worse with every major revision, I rather doubt that will happen any time soon.
I'm currently writing this in Firefox 3, which now crashes all over the place where previous versions never did, which has had yet another moderate and fairly pointless UI revamp of the kind that makes Office 2007 critics rub their hands with glee, which is getting favicons mixed up in all my bookmark folders almost every day, which as far as I can tell can't print anything properly any more, and which is running add-ons for both Java and.Net that I never agreed to and can't disable, FFS!
This is not the famous easy-to-use, super-secure, super-reliable web browser I remember installing a few years ago. This is the browser that I and many of my friends are considering abandoning in favour of IE7. If Windows 7 comes along and has IE8, and IE8 actually follows web standards to the extent that it sounds like it will, then I imagine Firefox will go back to being a niche browser beloved of OSS fans and ignored by almost everyone else not much later if it carries on in its current direction.
I use the maximise button all the time, and I'm writing this on a widescreen flat panel at 1920x1200.
Some of us don't like having borders and similar wasted pixels around the outside of our windows and don't necessarily want to work with fifteen virtual desktops. Personally, I prefer to concentrate on one thing at once, rather than constantly hopping around between several applications. For when I do want to multitask, well, that's what the other buttons are for.
Now, I would much prefer a window manager that could "lock" windows into some sort of tiled zone, so I can expand two windows to fill half my screen each, and some smart mouse handling so the pointer half-locks-on to things like scroll bars at the edge of those windows even if it's not the edge of the screen. And a decent notification system that was unintrusive but a bit cleaner than XP's current effort would go down well; I have no idea what they've done with that in Vista, since I have no intention of putting Vista on any PC I own. Maximise is certainly not the be-all and end-all of windowing UI, but it's still very useful.
I agree with some of what you say, but we have to blame our own UK politicians for many of the problems they blame on the EU
Sad, but true: a lot of the things I really don't like that come out of Europe were only put there by our lot in the first place, because they couldn't possibly get them to fly at home and needed a convenient excuse to push them through. I'm expecting the extension of music copyright to be done this way shortly, despite the overwhelming "no" response to the Gowers Review, the Review itself clearly recommending against the extension, and the government policy immediately afterwards reflecting that.
I'm in two minds on that one. On the one hand, I do think there is a role for governments to step in and prevent monopoly/oligopoly-like behaviour by employers in dictating unreasonable working conditions to employees. On the other hand, I'm not sure an absolute limit on working hours is the way to do it: I do far more than the weekly limit for my own company right now, for example, because it's still quite new and I want to see it be a success. Moreover, there are plenty of employers in most industries that don't expect silly hours from their staff, and the problem is that in the very industries that probably need this sort of absolute rule the most, there are exemptions (or an unwritten rule that everyone who wants to work in that industry will "voluntarily" opt out) anyway.
Also the charter of fundamental rights has some good stuff in it, but the UK government has an opt-out of that.
Exactly: even if the idea was decent, the implementation is filled with holes, so it's not worth much.
I also support the free movement of goods & labour brought about by the EU.
The free labour part, I have a big problem with, not on any fundamental, ethical level, but because I think it causes a lot of problem in practices because we're not ready for it yet. (I discussed this a little more in an earlier post to this thread if you're interested.)
As to other EU directives, I can't think of any off-hand, but good laws seldom come to public attention anyway, and when they do, do you think that UK politicians would give credit to Brussels, or take it themselves?
This is a big part of my problem: whenever anything decent comes out — if it ever does — the guys at home try to take the credit, but whenever there's something no-one (except possibly for the government of the day) wants, it's always Europe telling us we have to have it to comply with some directive or other.
Still, we hear so much silliness coming out of Europe, from our very own variation of the United States' DMCA to trying to force everyone to use units for purchasing food and drink that neither shoppers nor shopkeepers want, that it's hard to have much respect for them. In any case, the EU remains effectively an undemocratic legislature, expensive yet unaudited, and the source of a few seriously flawed laws. That is more than enough reason to want out.
You'd fail civics, if it were actually taught in this country.
You, on the other hand, apparently failed to even read the rest of the thread before posting. We've already covered that point.
Several other points in the same message suggest that when it comes to the various international institutions in which the UK participates, you are equally ignorant.
If you've got specifics you'd like to discuss, go ahead and name them. Otherwise, you're just a random AC throwing meaningless insults.
Ah, good catch, I had indeed forgotten the history of the ECHR. So in that case, is there anything really worthwhile in practice that's come out of the EU legislative process as far as the UK is concerned?
Keep your money, make your own laws, don't invade the continent, we won't invade you. Sounds like the recipe for a perfect friendship.
That works for me. I don't have any problem with mutually beneficial co-operation over things like trade, either, as was originally the point of the organisation that has become the EU.
But I don't see how tying an increasing number of countries with diverse national character into the same minor legislation really helps anyone. Even if we might agree on the principles of what we are trying to protect, the best implementation is likely to differ from country to country. Meanwhile, our legal systems suffer the interference of an effectively unaccountable body.
Likewise, I don't understand how stronger economic ties, such as a common currency and completely free movement of labour, can possibly be appropriate for all concerned when the member nations are starting from such different economic positions. Indeed, I find it hard to see how the large scale movement of labour after countries like Poland joined the EU is going to help either Poland or the nations where Polish workers have moved in the long run. Given approximate parity of economic power as a starting point, sure, free movement of labour and common currency have advantages, but that isn't where we started from, and it's become much worse since the last big round of additions to the EU.
To support all of this, a significant chunk of some member nations' budgets are diverted into a European black hole that hasn't had proper accounts prepared and audited in many years. A company in such a position would long since have been closed down by law! And yet we continue to permit insults like the CAP, so that instead of at least transferring money from the richer nations to help the poorer ones develop, we're busy funding less than 10 huge French farming companies who were in the right place at the right time.
So yes, keeping our money and making our own laws via our own properly elected politicians seems like a much better plan to me.
I'm all for the UK leaving the EU, since so much of the crap we put up with gets "justified" on the basis that the EU has decided we should have it, when it would be too politially expensive for even the current arrogant administration to push through at home. About the only really worthwhile thing we have had out of the EU in legislative terms is the ECHR via the Human Rights Act, and even that has frequently been a screw-up in practice even if the intent behind it might have been good.
Oh, and I'd like back the huge amount of my hard-earned cash that the government takes from me and gives to the EU to subsidise it as well, please.
Sorry, correcting myself here: apparently it was Indiana that almost passed legislation implying an incorrect value for pi. Learn something new every day.:-)
Ah, but IIRC it was the Federal Government that attempted to define pi to be 3. Isn't it a state government demonstrating their staggering lack of scentific awareness on this particular occasion?;-)
(As an aside, isn't it about time Slashdot joined the rest of the Internet and allowed Unicode characters in posts so we can write "pi" properly?)
Luckily for him we elect parties here and not people.
Yes, poor as that system it, it is indeed what we currently have.
Of course, we elect parties on the basis of what they say they will do and not do, typically in a manifesto. In this case, for example, Labour gave a clear commitment before the last election that Tony Blair would serve a full third term, and they gave that promise in the face of sufficient public concern over Blair stepping down early and Gordon Brown taking over by default that they were unlikely to be elected otherwise.
Even ignoring the major failings of our electoral system, you can't possibly argue that the Brown administration has any sort of public mandate. Labour were only elected after giving an absolute, unequivocal guarantee that they were not being elected so this could happen.
That only works until the mere presence of encryption (or any dataset that merely appears to be encrypted) is criminalized to a high degree.
Failing to provide any encryption key they think you have is already a criminal offence, potentially resulting in up to two years in jail, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
No2ID have the right idea. But... they really, really need to get their PR machine working. [...] They need to be organizing much more high profile stuff. They need to be getting in the press regularly and frequently.
I don't know which press you've been reading, but NO2ID have been mentioned in just about every article on anything related to this subject that I've seen for the past several years. I'd guess only Liberty manage to attract more coverage opposing these issues, and even that might not be true any more.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno.. I'd be careful of web work. Once you get pegged as a "web developer" it can be hard to get a traditional programming job.
There's certainly an element of truth in that, but as long as you've got some "traditional" experience on the CV as well, web programming is a large and sometimes quite lucrative field. I wouldn't recommend going straight into it out of university unless you're going into serious web development (with the graphic design, usability and so on as well), but if it's of interest, I don't see any harm getting a bit of experience with it early in a career, perhaps as a side project outside of your main job if nothing else.
The idea is that you can apply computer science to any language you want to learn.
Which is great, except that with such a narrow range of languages to start with, the OP won't have the kind of general background knowledge and breadth of experience to do that yet. The saying that a good programmer can learn a new language in a week is bull and always has been, and it seems that this particular CS course has not covered as wide a range of languages as we might hope for.
To the original poster, while you still have an opportunity to do it easily, I strongly recommend exploring a few other languages, even if only to the level of basic familiarity that you now have with C, C++ and Java. You may not realise it yet, but those three languages are all more similar than different in the grand scheme of things, and there are more ways to solve programming problems than fairly low-level, imperative, statically typed programming with C-like syntax. To expand your thinking a bit, I would recommend at least learning:
Most of these are immediately commercially relevant in large commercial fields anyway, and functional ideas (though perhaps not dedicated functional programming languages) are becoming more and more important. For bonus points, a bit of Lisp, Smalltalk and some sort of assembler wouldn't do you any harm either, but these are less directly applicable for most commercial roles. On the flip side, some exposure to .Net, probably via C#, is a valuable commercial asset even if it's rather similar to what you've already learned through C++ and Java: jobs working the typical Microsoft tool stack (C#/.Net libraries/ASP.Net/SQL Server...) are a big field.
The important thing is that you don't have to master each of these at this stage. Just play around enough, even with simple toy programs, to get the basic feel for the different approaches and understand that the C/C++/Java way is not the only one (and certainly not the best one for all jobs).
And all the while you're doing this, remember that a programming language is just a tool to express ideas. The more general CS knowledge — general data structures and algorithms, design skills, understanding specific fields such as database theory, graphics and operating systems, and so on — is every bit as important, whatever language you use.
The last three add-ins running in my Firefox 3 installed themselves, can't be uninstalled in the usual way, and don't do me any favours.
And Firefox's stability has sucked ever since they went in, even though they're all supposedly disabled. It could be coincidental, but it's a hell of a coincidence.
The offending add-ins are Java Quick Starter, Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant and AVG Safe Search, in case you're wondering.
*Unless they have servers located in the UK. With 200m or so users, they probably do
An increasing number of companies in Europe are explicitly requiring all the personal information they hold also to be hosted within Europe, to be sure they comply with data protection legislation. They're screwed if the hosting government decide to be abusive, but at least this way they're covered against claims they allowed other governments (such as the US, where privacy and data protection laws seem to be even looser than they are here) to be abusive.
This sort of thing isn't unreasonable if the people it hits are actually breaking the law. If the law is unreasonable, then getting the authorities to enforce that law uniformly and against everyone breaking it will make those authorities very unpopular and show the law to be flawed. Such laws rarely last much beyond the following election. On the other hand, if the law is reasonable, then impartially punishing those who break it is also reasonable. Personally, I don't have much sympathy for freeloaders.
Of course, we know that governments always follow due process in these cases, provide timely hearings where someone accused has an opportunity to defend themselves, and provide fair compensation if they screw up and an innocent party is damaged as a result, so there's really nothing to worry about.
I don't think your position is unreasonable in itself; after all, if we had the ultimate ability to invade privacy by reading minds, would we want to allow that as evidence in court, and if so, with what safeguards about anything else that might be encountered while collecting evidence? However, in this case, it sounds like the guy is arguing that he's suffering in some way that isn't necessarily externally observable, so if you can't look at evidence relating to his private thoughts, it's hard to see how it's fair to side with him in the case...
But what abut watching you in your house? That is private. Why is this not also private ?
Because it is directly relevant to a case being heard in a court of law.
I'm a firm believer in privacy rights and limiting government powers to investigate someone arbitrarily. However, for any justice system to function effectively, there must be some means of investigating the truth or otherwise of a claim as part of due process. In most of our countries today, this happens via a case being heard in court, and we give that court special privileges that Joe Public does not have so that it can carry out its duties.
See also search warrants, authorisations to intercept communications, and similar things that (in sane countries without the excessive government powers of arbitrary investigation) require a court order, but are legal with judicial oversight.
At lower levels, that is a common effect, but it's not turtles all the way down: senior management have nowhere left to get promoted to, and their goal should be (and, if their bonuses are stock-based, might actually be) to make the overall business more successful. This is more likely if you get rid of managers who are interested in self-promotion above all else, and promote those who do a good job of managing people as measured by the success/contribution of whatever part of the organisation they manage.
In other words, if you have a culture where all the middle managers are self-promoters and the good people never really get anywhere, it is not an unsolvable problem and it is by definition senior management's fault. But of course, those are the same senior managers who institute the kind of HR policies that assume humans are machines: the very name "human resources" has different — and much less pleasant — overtones to the old "personnel". So the kind of policy we're discussing here is really doing us all a favour, by providing a convenient way to detect such madness in the upper ranks of a company, infer that the company as a whole is probably screwed, and avoid wasting any time applying there. :-)
Everything I wrote is readily verifiable if you take even a couple of minutes to read the bug tracker (e.g., for the favicon mess or numerous printing bugs) or to search for obvious terms with your engine of choice (e.g., over the dubious way that other software can install its add-ons into Firefox without the user's consent and FF won't then allow them to be uninstalled).
Just because you've never encountered them, that doesn't mean they're not common. Irritation with issues like these is widespread among my more geekish friends — and we all have completely independent systems with diverse specs down to the hardware and OS we're running — which is why I posted the observation in the first place.
But this is my problem: the only extensions I have installed are the irritation blockers (Flashblock, Adblock), popular developer tools (Web Developer toolbar, Firefox Accessibility Extension, etc.) and those I wasn't given a choice about (from Java, .Net, AVG). I don't have zillions of random things I once downloaded clogging up my system.
I have disabled all of the involuntary ones, but it seems I can't remove them (WTF happened to giving me control of my own system?) and the stability seemed to drop pretty obviously around the time they decided to add themselves, so they are my prime suspects.
The others are the only reason I use Firefox rather than IE...
Thank you, that's a really useful tip and something I didn't know before.
It sounds like Windows 7 will be going a bit further towards "docking", which is probably a good thing too, though I think you have to use that sort of UI in practice to know if you really like it. If they just added a bit of cleverness with mouse acceleration (or rather, deceleration) around critical areas that aren't bounded by the screen edges in these tiled configurations, I'd be a very happy user. :-)
It's not Microsoft's fault that a 3rd party decided not to fully support your hardware with drivers for the latest OS.
It's not Microsoft's fault.
It is Microsoft's problem, if they want people with hardware older than a couple of years to upgrade to that latest OS.
The obvious way to solve this problem would be to implement standard interfaces for device drivers that were supported across all OS versions, at least for major categories of hardware that many people have, but for some strange reason Microsoft seem to be incapable of doing this even though just about every other OS in history has managed it.
My theory is that Firefox will ultimately kill windows, if not Microsoft itself.
Since Firefox has been getting worse with every major revision, I rather doubt that will happen any time soon.
I'm currently writing this in Firefox 3, which now crashes all over the place where previous versions never did, which has had yet another moderate and fairly pointless UI revamp of the kind that makes Office 2007 critics rub their hands with glee, which is getting favicons mixed up in all my bookmark folders almost every day, which as far as I can tell can't print anything properly any more, and which is running add-ons for both Java and .Net that I never agreed to and can't disable, FFS!
This is not the famous easy-to-use, super-secure, super-reliable web browser I remember installing a few years ago. This is the browser that I and many of my friends are considering abandoning in favour of IE7. If Windows 7 comes along and has IE8, and IE8 actually follows web standards to the extent that it sounds like it will, then I imagine Firefox will go back to being a niche browser beloved of OSS fans and ignored by almost everyone else not much later if it carries on in its current direction.
I use the maximise button all the time, and I'm writing this on a widescreen flat panel at 1920x1200.
Some of us don't like having borders and similar wasted pixels around the outside of our windows and don't necessarily want to work with fifteen virtual desktops. Personally, I prefer to concentrate on one thing at once, rather than constantly hopping around between several applications. For when I do want to multitask, well, that's what the other buttons are for.
Now, I would much prefer a window manager that could "lock" windows into some sort of tiled zone, so I can expand two windows to fill half my screen each, and some smart mouse handling so the pointer half-locks-on to things like scroll bars at the edge of those windows even if it's not the edge of the screen. And a decent notification system that was unintrusive but a bit cleaner than XP's current effort would go down well; I have no idea what they've done with that in Vista, since I have no intention of putting Vista on any PC I own. Maximise is certainly not the be-all and end-all of windowing UI, but it's still very useful.
I agree with some of what you say, but we have to blame our own UK politicians for many of the problems they blame on the EU
Sad, but true: a lot of the things I really don't like that come out of Europe were only put there by our lot in the first place, because they couldn't possibly get them to fly at home and needed a convenient excuse to push them through. I'm expecting the extension of music copyright to be done this way shortly, despite the overwhelming "no" response to the Gowers Review, the Review itself clearly recommending against the extension, and the government policy immediately afterwards reflecting that.
Personally I like the EU working time directive.
I'm in two minds on that one. On the one hand, I do think there is a role for governments to step in and prevent monopoly/oligopoly-like behaviour by employers in dictating unreasonable working conditions to employees. On the other hand, I'm not sure an absolute limit on working hours is the way to do it: I do far more than the weekly limit for my own company right now, for example, because it's still quite new and I want to see it be a success. Moreover, there are plenty of employers in most industries that don't expect silly hours from their staff, and the problem is that in the very industries that probably need this sort of absolute rule the most, there are exemptions (or an unwritten rule that everyone who wants to work in that industry will "voluntarily" opt out) anyway.
Also the charter of fundamental rights has some good stuff in it, but the UK government has an opt-out of that.
Exactly: even if the idea was decent, the implementation is filled with holes, so it's not worth much.
I also support the free movement of goods & labour brought about by the EU.
The free labour part, I have a big problem with, not on any fundamental, ethical level, but because I think it causes a lot of problem in practices because we're not ready for it yet. (I discussed this a little more in an earlier post to this thread if you're interested.)
As to other EU directives, I can't think of any off-hand, but good laws seldom come to public attention anyway, and when they do, do you think that UK politicians would give credit to Brussels, or take it themselves?
This is a big part of my problem: whenever anything decent comes out — if it ever does — the guys at home try to take the credit, but whenever there's something no-one (except possibly for the government of the day) wants, it's always Europe telling us we have to have it to comply with some directive or other.
Still, we hear so much silliness coming out of Europe, from our very own variation of the United States' DMCA to trying to force everyone to use units for purchasing food and drink that neither shoppers nor shopkeepers want, that it's hard to have much respect for them. In any case, the EU remains effectively an undemocratic legislature, expensive yet unaudited, and the source of a few seriously flawed laws. That is more than enough reason to want out.
You'd fail civics, if it were actually taught in this country.
You, on the other hand, apparently failed to even read the rest of the thread before posting. We've already covered that point.
Several other points in the same message suggest that when it comes to the various international institutions in which the UK participates, you are equally ignorant.
If you've got specifics you'd like to discuss, go ahead and name them. Otherwise, you're just a random AC throwing meaningless insults.
Ah, good catch, I had indeed forgotten the history of the ECHR. So in that case, is there anything really worthwhile in practice that's come out of the EU legislative process as far as the UK is concerned?
Keep your money, make your own laws, don't invade the continent, we won't invade you. Sounds like the recipe for a perfect friendship.
That works for me. I don't have any problem with mutually beneficial co-operation over things like trade, either, as was originally the point of the organisation that has become the EU.
But I don't see how tying an increasing number of countries with diverse national character into the same minor legislation really helps anyone. Even if we might agree on the principles of what we are trying to protect, the best implementation is likely to differ from country to country. Meanwhile, our legal systems suffer the interference of an effectively unaccountable body.
Likewise, I don't understand how stronger economic ties, such as a common currency and completely free movement of labour, can possibly be appropriate for all concerned when the member nations are starting from such different economic positions. Indeed, I find it hard to see how the large scale movement of labour after countries like Poland joined the EU is going to help either Poland or the nations where Polish workers have moved in the long run. Given approximate parity of economic power as a starting point, sure, free movement of labour and common currency have advantages, but that isn't where we started from, and it's become much worse since the last big round of additions to the EU.
To support all of this, a significant chunk of some member nations' budgets are diverted into a European black hole that hasn't had proper accounts prepared and audited in many years. A company in such a position would long since have been closed down by law! And yet we continue to permit insults like the CAP, so that instead of at least transferring money from the richer nations to help the poorer ones develop, we're busy funding less than 10 huge French farming companies who were in the right place at the right time.
So yes, keeping our money and making our own laws via our own properly elected politicians seems like a much better plan to me.
I'm all for the UK leaving the EU, since so much of the crap we put up with gets "justified" on the basis that the EU has decided we should have it, when it would be too politially expensive for even the current arrogant administration to push through at home. About the only really worthwhile thing we have had out of the EU in legislative terms is the ECHR via the Human Rights Act, and even that has frequently been a screw-up in practice even if the intent behind it might have been good.
Oh, and I'd like back the huge amount of my hard-earned cash that the government takes from me and gives to the EU to subsidise it as well, please.
Sorry, correcting myself here: apparently it was Indiana that almost passed legislation implying an incorrect value for pi. Learn something new every day. :-)
Ah, but IIRC it was the Federal Government that attempted to define pi to be 3. Isn't it a state government demonstrating their staggering lack of scentific awareness on this particular occasion? ;-)
(As an aside, isn't it about time Slashdot joined the rest of the Internet and allowed Unicode characters in posts so we can write "pi" properly?)
Luckily for him we elect parties here and not people.
Yes, poor as that system it, it is indeed what we currently have.
Of course, we elect parties on the basis of what they say they will do and not do, typically in a manifesto. In this case, for example, Labour gave a clear commitment before the last election that Tony Blair would serve a full third term, and they gave that promise in the face of sufficient public concern over Blair stepping down early and Gordon Brown taking over by default that they were unlikely to be elected otherwise.
Even ignoring the major failings of our electoral system, you can't possibly argue that the Brown administration has any sort of public mandate. Labour were only elected after giving an absolute, unequivocal guarantee that they were not being elected so this could happen.
That only works until the mere presence of encryption (or any dataset that merely appears to be encrypted) is criminalized to a high degree.
Failing to provide any encryption key they think you have is already a criminal offence, potentially resulting in up to two years in jail, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
No2ID have the right idea. But... they really, really need to get their PR machine working. [...] They need to be organizing much more high profile stuff. They need to be getting in the press regularly and frequently.
I don't know which press you've been reading, but NO2ID have been mentioned in just about every article on anything related to this subject that I've seen for the past several years. I'd guess only Liberty manage to attract more coverage opposing these issues, and even that might not be true any more.