For enforced laws, my other post gives examples of the Jesus is a Cunt law, where the laws concerned are things like "religiously aggravated..." and "religious prejudice".
The blasphemy law itself is still a problem even though it hasn't been used in 30 years. There is no guarantee it won't be used again (when it was used in the 70s, that was the first time it'd been used since the 20s, and people assumed it was an old dead law - they were wrong). The problem is therefore the chilling effect it has where people self-censor out of fear of prosecution. Also people have still tried to bring prosecutions - most recently, Stephen Green trying to prosecute the BBC for Jerry Springer the Opera. He wasn't allowed to go ahead (note, not because the courts threw out the law, they just didn't think it applied in this case), but a less powerful and less well funded organisation than the BBC may well have backed down before then, either out of fear of losing, or a lack of legal funds.
The blasphemy law is the best known example which the Government have said they will finally repeal (though they need to consult with the Church of England first, for some reason). Though these other religious-related laws are less well known, and will presumably still remain.
I just hope that these 110,000 muslims are happy with petitions, and not only don't resort to violence, but don't decide to start lobbying their politicians either.
Hell I could wear a t-shirt about claiming "Muhammad was an Asshat" (replace Muhammad with Jesus for you Xtians)
Interestingly, the "Jesus is a Cunt" t-shirts have been found to be illegal in the UK (for people wearing them in public, and the police also like to raid shops and arrest people for selling them). Thankfully they won't get stoned to death anymore, but let's not forget that religious attacks on freedom can come in various forms.
Lawyers aren't great, sure. But they're a hell of a lot better than armed mobs.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure a competition of which overly-offended religious group wanting censorship is worse is particularly useful though. Saying "But we're not as bad as those violent thugs" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement...
"Less liberty"? The last time I checked you can still stand up and oppose Christianity in the United States or Europe. Try flying to the Middle East and speaking out against Islam in the city square and let me know how that works out for you.....
Yes, it's still less liberty that we had before. I'm not sure what your point is - just because we're not as bad as some particularly oppressive places in the world, it's okay?
The difference being with Christians is that it's only figuratively speaking when you say 'up in arms'.
If by figuratively you mean punished by law, then yes they do. In the UK at least, Christians don't need to resort to violence, when the law is already on their side. (Thankfully it looks like the Government will finally repeal the blasphemy law, though there seem to be other religious related offences that are still law, and yes, still used.)
Isn't this a single point of failure to steal your entire online identity
In the same way that a single email account is a single point of failure.
Lots of people do fine with just one email account. Some have a few email accounts for different purposes. I know no one who has an email account at every single email provider they want to send to...
I wouldn't use OpenID for banking. But if someone hacking my LiveJournal also means they can post to Slashdot as me (if it supported OpenID), then - I don't think that's quite comparable to stealing one's identity.
now you're saying that they should be encouraged to have the same password for multiple sites
No, you use the same account for multiple sites. Not the same password for multiple sites. Just like I use the same email account for multiple people.
Before OpenID, the situation for websites was as if you needed a different email account for every different email provider where there was someone you wanted to contact. So in order to email someone at gmail, I'd need a gmail account; to email someone at yahoo, I'd need a yahoo account.
Then imagine someone proposes a revolutionary idea where people with gmail accounts can email people at yahoo. You are the person going "But but, now my password will be used for multiple sites! If someone gets my single email password, they'll be able to email anyone at both yahoo and gmail and elsewhere!"
Now I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a single email account, and just make sure I keep that _single_ password and _single_ account safe.
I don't think that's too much of a problem - if you're using a site enough to be doing something like keeping your own journal, it's not too much hassle to get an account. It is hassle to get an account just to make a single comment, which is the major hurdle OpenID overcomes.
join a community
I agree, this limitation seems a bit strange, especially as they allow OpenID users to keep friends lists.
comment on posts that have restricted comments to LiveJournal users
Although that's a choice that's up to the journal owner. They had to have that really, as originally there was the option to disallow anonymous comments, but for backwards compatibility, I think OpenID would have to fall into the same category. But it would be nice to have an option that says "Allow LiveJournal or OpenID comments, but not anonymous".
No it isn't - you seem to be complaining that as long as there exists one site where OpenID can't be used, it is useless.
Which is rubbish - as long as some sites support it, it is useful in that I no longer need as many logins. I already use my LiveJournal openID to post to other forums (and also allow blog posters to let me see non-public posts). It's a shame Slashdot doesn't support it. Plenty of sites support OpenID - just because Yahoo and AOL don't properly is beside the point.
I'm sure the religious right of the U.S. wouldn't mind seeing homosexuality being a crime punishable by law.
Indeed, one significant difference with the fundamental Christians is that whilst they may be less likely to resort to violence, they seem a lot more likely to engage in political lobbying. They might not get something this extreme, but they can help affect laws on a lesser scale.
If it was 110,000 Christians being offended over something in Wikipedia, I wouldn't be worrying about acts of violence - but I would be worrying about some do-gooder politician suggesting laws to censor things that might offend them.
The GP said "Even the atheists have been responsible for some atrocities."
And that claim is irrelevant to the point being made in the post he replied to - namely that some people commit violence in the name of Islam (yes, only a minority, but it's significant enough to be a worry if 110,000 muslims are getting angry over something - just look at the rioting that resulted from a cartoon).
The fact that say, some murderers happened to be atheists or bald people or whatever else is neither here nor there. Perhaps if you can point me to examples where atheists took to the streets for violent rioting over something that was offensive to atheism, you might have a point.
You give the your ID all the time, you have things nearly as good as a national ID (Driving license?), you are already registered in many Big Brother Databases (Income tax? Mobile phone records? Social Security?) and with all this the "I don't have to ID myself"-myth goes on.
Things like biometric information is not stored in these databases. Also there is a difference between information stored on a need-to-know basis across several databases, and collecting large amounts of info in one place. I very rarely give my ID in the UK, so I still don't know what you are on about.
And yes, we do already have forms of ID (e.g., passport), so that's a reason against introducing one that is more expensive.
The future doesn't lie in protecting the data, but to poison the data pool as a possible to reduce its reliability and make the access to data as fair as possible. As an example, the best way to get rid of the TSA No fly list would be to put half of the lawyers in America on it. I bet, inside a week, being on the no-fly list won't even delay your check in any more.
Sure, I don't disagree with that. Such acts will also come from those who oppose such systems. They won't come from people who say "But what's wrong with ID, I've got nothing to hide!"
You don't get it - when we say it's the database that's the problem, we mean, it's the database that's the problem. Which means that we would oppose such a system whether or not it has a bit of plastic card associated with it.
Whether the government collects data on everything you buy and everywhere you travel is completely independent of whether there is a national ID.
Yes, exactly. Those opposing these systems are well aware of that. It's only the people going "But, but, what's wrong with an ID card, it works okay in my country!" who think it's all about simply a "national ID".
in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks.
Well we have to register if you want to vote. Doing so doesn't require submitting fingerprints etc, or paying £93 for the privilege, so I'm not sure how this is relevant.
The benefit of having a national ID card on the other hand is, that there's only a small number of documents used commonly and if you have one, you are identified. No more 'Bring 3 types of ID' stuff. You have your driving license, your passport or your ID card, you are set. If those are good enough for the police, they are good enough for everyone else too (eg banks, insurances, airlines).
We already have passports in the UK - in fact, the new ID card is combined with the passport anyway. And it'll be much more expensive than the old non-ID-card passport. So the arguments about being able to identify and more able to trust people don't apply here.
At the same time identity theft a lot less of a problem here.
[citation needed]
So yes, the police may ask you at any time to identify yourself. If not, they can put you in lock-up for some time (similar to the 24 hours available to the American police if one can trust crime shows) to check your identity.
If I can be locked up because I've forgotten a card on me when I am not suspected of a crime, then yes, I do object to that. I don't care if that happens elsewhere and you don't object. (The police already have powers in the UK to arrest people if they do suspect them, and can then check their identity if they wish, so again this is no argument for ID cards.)
The voter register is a good thing, it makes fraud and manipulation at the time of elections a little harder - you ain't registered officially in the district, you ain't going to vote for it.
Evidence that there is less voter fraud in these European countries, please?
Not complying here fast enough / well enough isn't usually taken too seriously, you might get a slap on your fingers if you forget it.
In the UK, people will face a prison sentence for failing to notify authorities if a card is lost, stolen or damaged.
To sum it up, for people living in a country with national ID cards there aren't really any inconveniences, just a few benefits, the biggest being the reduction of identity theft.
Again, evidence that it reduces identity theft?
To sum it up: * Not all national ID cards are the same - just because yours works okay doesn't mean that there aren't problems with a very different system such as the UK's. * We already have a perfectly useable ID system, that works just as well as any ID card in Europe (the passport).
But I'm still not completely sold on why national ID is such a terrible idea and why it is such a profound violation of privacy.... I don't see why a national ID would necessarily make this process any easier. Even if the information was all in one database, access to it could be controlled with perms.
Not all "national ID" schemes are the same. I don't know about the Canadian system, but here in the UK the issue is with the database that goes with it (and the idea that this Government could be trusted to secure it is laughable, based on past experience).
It's not just consolidating existing information (most notably, the various biometric information that will be taken from everyone).
Plus there's simply the immense cost of it (in particular, way more than passports were, so the argument "But it'll be convenient not to have to get a passport" is nonsensical for the UK system).
Practically nonexistent marketshare + higher battery drain + taking their precious format waaaay to seriously = much deserved mocking.
Wait, wait, wait - Apple fans are mocking other people for "practically nonexistent marketshare" and "taking their precious [whatever] waaaay to seriously"? Or is it the battery issue that makes all the difference?
The countless people claiming that OGG is not popular are missing the point. Even if that is true, the OP's point is still valid, it's just that he was naughty to refer to it as "popular".
FWIW, all my music is in mp3s. But if someone was comparing phones, and their music collection was in OGG, ridiculing them with "well it's not popular" is hardly going to win them over.
(The irony is that when a company doesn't support Macs, I don't see Apple fans saying "That's okay, Macs aren't popular", on the basis that Windows, like mp3s, is far more popular. No, they complain like everyone else whose preferred niche product or in this case file format isn't supported.)
Every other product that gets an advert on Slashdot has people asking why they should use it or what's so good about it - why should Apple be held to a higher standard? Instead we just get "it's really really cool" like we're in school or something, or dismissed that we can't possibly understand if we don't own one.
(In fact it's more than that - for other products, people demand to know what features it has that no other competing product has. With Apple, whether it's Macs or the Iphone, it's considered good enough that it just works, or it doesn't suck as bad as one bad competing product.)
To be fair, I think we hold software to a higher standard. Yes, computers crash, but then cars don't start and equipment breaks down. And even structures like walls do need maintenance sometimes, and so roads and places get closed for repair work (and it seems like the railways have "engineering works" all the time!)
If a computer crashes, it's detected that something's gone wrong, and shuts down safely. People don't die. People could die if you were depending on the computer in some life critical way, but then people could die if you need the car to get you to a hospital, or the road on the way there is closed for repairs.
Imagine if everytime your computer crashed or there was a bug, someone had to be sent round to physically fix it? I think in some ways, software does better in trying to cope with every situation without intervention - but that seems to raise people's expectations to a higher standard.
You might wanna try communicating. Or actually - don't bother, I won't bother reading the reply. I'll stick with my just works phone which has more going for it than simply "well it works and the features don't suck etc".
I also wonder why in those cases it's not _them_ who are committing the crime - in that you've got an older woman pretending to be underage in order to meet young people...
Slashdot Mirror
For enforced laws, my other post gives examples of the Jesus is a Cunt law, where the laws concerned are things like "religiously aggravated ..." and "religious prejudice".
The blasphemy law itself is still a problem even though it hasn't been used in 30 years. There is no guarantee it won't be used again (when it was used in the 70s, that was the first time it'd been used since the 20s, and people assumed it was an old dead law - they were wrong). The problem is therefore the chilling effect it has where people self-censor out of fear of prosecution. Also people have still tried to bring prosecutions - most recently, Stephen Green trying to prosecute the BBC for Jerry Springer the Opera. He wasn't allowed to go ahead (note, not because the courts threw out the law, they just didn't think it applied in this case), but a less powerful and less well funded organisation than the BBC may well have backed down before then, either out of fear of losing, or a lack of legal funds.
The blasphemy law is the best known example which the Government have said they will finally repeal (though they need to consult with the Church of England first, for some reason). Though these other religious-related laws are less well known, and will presumably still remain.
I just hope that these 110,000 muslims are happy with petitions, and not only don't resort to violence, but don't decide to start lobbying their politicians either.
True, I guess that explains why they allow restricting of comments to LJ accounts and not OpenID.
Hell I could wear a t-shirt about claiming "Muhammad was an Asshat" (replace Muhammad with Jesus for you Xtians)
Interestingly, the "Jesus is a Cunt" t-shirts have been found to be illegal in the UK (for people wearing them in public, and the police also like to raid shops and arrest people for selling them). Thankfully they won't get stoned to death anymore, but let's not forget that religious attacks on freedom can come in various forms.
Lawyers aren't great, sure. But they're a hell of a lot better than armed mobs.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure a competition of which overly-offended religious group wanting censorship is worse is particularly useful though. Saying "But we're not as bad as those violent thugs" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement...
"Less liberty"? The last time I checked you can still stand up and oppose Christianity in the United States or Europe. Try flying to the Middle East and speaking out against Islam in the city square and let me know how that works out for you.....
Yes, it's still less liberty that we had before. I'm not sure what your point is - just because we're not as bad as some particularly oppressive places in the world, it's okay?
The difference being with Christians is that it's only figuratively speaking when you say 'up in arms'.
If by figuratively you mean punished by law, then yes they do. In the UK at least, Christians don't need to resort to violence, when the law is already on their side. (Thankfully it looks like the Government will finally repeal the blasphemy law, though there seem to be other religious related offences that are still law, and yes, still used.)
Get a history book, one that hasn't been sanitized by the PC Police
What has PC got to do with anything? Taking a slant that avoids offending Christians would be PC, if anything.
Isn't this a single point of failure to steal your entire online identity
In the same way that a single email account is a single point of failure.
Lots of people do fine with just one email account. Some have a few email accounts for different purposes. I know no one who has an email account at every single email provider they want to send to...
I wouldn't use OpenID for banking. But if someone hacking my LiveJournal also means they can post to Slashdot as me (if it supported OpenID), then - I don't think that's quite comparable to stealing one's identity.
now you're saying that they should be encouraged to have the same password for multiple sites
No, you use the same account for multiple sites. Not the same password for multiple sites. Just like I use the same email account for multiple people.
Before OpenID, the situation for websites was as if you needed a different email account for every different email provider where there was someone you wanted to contact. So in order to email someone at gmail, I'd need a gmail account; to email someone at yahoo, I'd need a yahoo account.
Then imagine someone proposes a revolutionary idea where people with gmail accounts can email people at yahoo. You are the person going "But but, now my password will be used for multiple sites! If someone gets my single email password, they'll be able to email anyone at both yahoo and gmail and elsewhere!"
Now I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a single email account, and just make sure I keep that _single_ password and _single_ account safe.
keep their own journal
I don't think that's too much of a problem - if you're using a site enough to be doing something like keeping your own journal, it's not too much hassle to get an account. It is hassle to get an account just to make a single comment, which is the major hurdle OpenID overcomes.
join a community
I agree, this limitation seems a bit strange, especially as they allow OpenID users to keep friends lists.
comment on posts that have restricted comments to LiveJournal users
Although that's a choice that's up to the journal owner. They had to have that really, as originally there was the option to disallow anonymous comments, but for backwards compatibility, I think OpenID would have to fall into the same category. But it would be nice to have an option that says "Allow LiveJournal or OpenID comments, but not anonymous".
One identity across the internet is the goal.
No it isn't - you seem to be complaining that as long as there exists one site where OpenID can't be used, it is useless.
Which is rubbish - as long as some sites support it, it is useful in that I no longer need as many logins. I already use my LiveJournal openID to post to other forums (and also allow blog posters to let me see non-public posts). It's a shame Slashdot doesn't support it. Plenty of sites support OpenID - just because Yahoo and AOL don't properly is beside the point.
I'm sure the religious right of the U.S. wouldn't mind seeing homosexuality being a crime punishable by law.
Indeed, one significant difference with the fundamental Christians is that whilst they may be less likely to resort to violence, they seem a lot more likely to engage in political lobbying. They might not get something this extreme, but they can help affect laws on a lesser scale.
If it was 110,000 Christians being offended over something in Wikipedia, I wouldn't be worrying about acts of violence - but I would be worrying about some do-gooder politician suggesting laws to censor things that might offend them.
The GP said "Even the atheists have been responsible for some atrocities."
And that claim is irrelevant to the point being made in the post he replied to - namely that some people commit violence in the name of Islam (yes, only a minority, but it's significant enough to be a worry if 110,000 muslims are getting angry over something - just look at the rioting that resulted from a cartoon).
The fact that say, some murderers happened to be atheists or bald people or whatever else is neither here nor there. Perhaps if you can point me to examples where atheists took to the streets for violent rioting over something that was offensive to atheism, you might have a point.
You give the your ID all the time, you have things nearly as good as a national ID (Driving license?), you are already registered in many Big Brother Databases (Income tax? Mobile phone records? Social Security?) and with all this the "I don't have to ID myself"-myth goes on.
Things like biometric information is not stored in these databases. Also there is a difference between information stored on a need-to-know basis across several databases, and collecting large amounts of info in one place. I very rarely give my ID in the UK, so I still don't know what you are on about.
And yes, we do already have forms of ID (e.g., passport), so that's a reason against introducing one that is more expensive.
The future doesn't lie in protecting the data, but to poison the data pool as a possible to reduce its reliability and make the access to data as fair as possible. As an example, the best way to get rid of the TSA No fly list would be to put half of the lawyers in America on it. I bet, inside a week, being on the no-fly list won't even delay your check in any more.
Sure, I don't disagree with that. Such acts will also come from those who oppose such systems. They won't come from people who say "But what's wrong with ID, I've got nothing to hide!"
they will create the database anyway
And we'll oppose the plans to do that too.
You don't get it - when we say it's the database that's the problem, we mean, it's the database that's the problem. Which means that we would oppose such a system whether or not it has a bit of plastic card associated with it.
Whether the government collects data on everything you buy and everywhere you travel is completely independent of whether there is a national ID.
Yes, exactly. Those opposing these systems are well aware of that. It's only the people going "But, but, what's wrong with an ID card, it works okay in my country!" who think it's all about simply a "national ID".
Speaking as someone in the UK...
in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks.
Well we have to register if you want to vote. Doing so doesn't require submitting fingerprints etc, or paying £93 for the privilege, so I'm not sure how this is relevant.
The benefit of having a national ID card on the other hand is, that there's only a small number of documents used commonly and if you have one, you are identified. No more 'Bring 3 types of ID' stuff. You have your driving license, your passport or your ID card, you are set. If those are good enough for the police, they are good enough for everyone else too (eg banks, insurances, airlines).
We already have passports in the UK - in fact, the new ID card is combined with the passport anyway. And it'll be much more expensive than the old non-ID-card passport. So the arguments about being able to identify and more able to trust people don't apply here.
At the same time identity theft a lot less of a problem here.
[citation needed]
So yes, the police may ask you at any time to identify yourself. If not, they can put you in lock-up for some time (similar to the 24 hours available to the American police if one can trust crime shows) to check your identity.
If I can be locked up because I've forgotten a card on me when I am not suspected of a crime, then yes, I do object to that. I don't care if that happens elsewhere and you don't object. (The police already have powers in the UK to arrest people if they do suspect them, and can then check their identity if they wish, so again this is no argument for ID cards.)
The voter register is a good thing, it makes fraud and manipulation at the time of elections a little harder - you ain't registered officially in the district, you ain't going to vote for it.
Evidence that there is less voter fraud in these European countries, please?
Not complying here fast enough / well enough isn't usually taken too seriously, you might get a slap on your fingers if you forget it.
In the UK, people will face a prison sentence for failing to notify authorities if a card is lost, stolen or damaged.
To sum it up, for people living in a country with national ID cards there aren't really any inconveniences, just a few benefits, the biggest being the reduction of identity theft.
Again, evidence that it reduces identity theft?
To sum it up:
* Not all national ID cards are the same - just because yours works okay doesn't mean that there aren't problems with a very different system such as the UK's.
* We already have a perfectly useable ID system, that works just as well as any ID card in Europe (the passport).
But I'm still not completely sold on why national ID is such a terrible idea and why it is such a profound violation of privacy. ... I don't see why a national ID would necessarily make this process any easier. Even if the information was all in one database, access to it could be controlled with perms.
Not all "national ID" schemes are the same. I don't know about the Canadian system, but here in the UK the issue is with the database that goes with it (and the idea that this Government could be trusted to secure it is laughable, based on past experience).
It's not just consolidating existing information (most notably, the various biometric information that will be taken from everyone).
Plus there's simply the immense cost of it (in particular, way more than passports were, so the argument "But it'll be convenient not to have to get a passport" is nonsensical for the UK system).
The hidden-partition feature is the bees knees, especially for those extra secret documents, just hide them behind some porn
Hey, in some backward prudish over-censoring countries like the UK, we have to hide our porn behind extra secret documents!
Practically nonexistent marketshare + higher battery drain + taking their precious format waaaay to seriously = much deserved mocking.
Wait, wait, wait - Apple fans are mocking other people for "practically nonexistent marketshare" and "taking their precious [whatever] waaaay to seriously"? Or is it the battery issue that makes all the difference?
The countless people claiming that OGG is not popular are missing the point. Even if that is true, the OP's point is still valid, it's just that he was naughty to refer to it as "popular".
FWIW, all my music is in mp3s. But if someone was comparing phones, and their music collection was in OGG, ridiculing them with "well it's not popular" is hardly going to win them over.
(The irony is that when a company doesn't support Macs, I don't see Apple fans saying "That's okay, Macs aren't popular", on the basis that Windows, like mp3s, is far more popular. No, they complain like everyone else whose preferred niche product or in this case file format isn't supported.)
I'll bite - I wanna know what it has?
Every other product that gets an advert on Slashdot has people asking why they should use it or what's so good about it - why should Apple be held to a higher standard? Instead we just get "it's really really cool" like we're in school or something, or dismissed that we can't possibly understand if we don't own one.
(In fact it's more than that - for other products, people demand to know what features it has that no other competing product has. With Apple, whether it's Macs or the Iphone, it's considered good enough that it just works, or it doesn't suck as bad as one bad competing product.)
To be fair, I think we hold software to a higher standard. Yes, computers crash, but then cars don't start and equipment breaks down. And even structures like walls do need maintenance sometimes, and so roads and places get closed for repair work (and it seems like the railways have "engineering works" all the time!)
If a computer crashes, it's detected that something's gone wrong, and shuts down safely. People don't die. People could die if you were depending on the computer in some life critical way, but then people could die if you need the car to get you to a hospital, or the road on the way there is closed for repairs.
Imagine if everytime your computer crashed or there was a bug, someone had to be sent round to physically fix it? I think in some ways, software does better in trying to cope with every situation without intervention - but that seems to raise people's expectations to a higher standard.
And sperms are not embryos.
And embryos are not people.
You might wanna try communicating. Or actually - don't bother, I won't bother reading the reply. I'll stick with my just works phone which has more going for it than simply "well it works and the features don't suck etc".
I also wonder why in those cases it's not _them_ who are committing the crime - in that you've got an older woman pretending to be underage in order to meet young people...