Slicing up assets also means slicing up debts. Or would you be OK with all Scottish pensions being vaporised overnight because the UK still exists, so the UK will have the pensions?
I don't see what the beef over immigration is -- it actually works both ways. There are about 1 million Britons living in Spain right now under the same rules.
I've never met anyone in the UK who has a problem with immigration from west European countries that are culturally similar to themselves. Most of the problems crop up with poorly integrated Islamic integration where you get entire neighbourhoods in some cities that look basically like Pakistan: people wearing veils, not speaking English, etc.
The other issue is economic, the UK didn't use transitional controls when Poland entered the EU to delay immigration, so it got a really really large number of Polish immigrants because they had few other places to go. The evidence suggests the UK benefited from this economically but given the sheer speed and scale of the migration it's not hard to see why people got antsy.
The same did not happen when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU so I'm hoping immigration will blow over in the coming years if the economy continues to recover. But we'll see. It's not a UK specific problem, there's anti-immigration sentiment in populations all over Europe.
Also an English guy, I don't think you understand that you've not exactly treated Scotland very well and that's one of the reasons it wants to leave.
Scotland has been treated very well indeed. When it joined the Union its people were piss poor and its "government" was bankrupt. It's now a wealthy first world country, with lots of MPs in its Parliament, large amounts of money spent on its people and it's contributed multiple Prime Ministers and senior government figures.
Despite all that, a large number of Scottish people have repeatedly attempted to trash their own country and England too by blindly supporting policies that are - to put not too fine a point on it - communist. This is a part of the world where as late as 1989 an MP was trying to get elected by recalling "Red Clydeside". This is a part of the world where hatred of Thatcher is practically a national pasttime, although her crimes amounted to ending communist policies like massive state ownership of industry and trade union control. Scotland failed to adapt to deindustrialisation and failed so hard that decades after the rest of the country has moved on, lots of people there are still nursing a massive grudge.
Scotland's current state isn't because it was badly treated by England. Arguably the south of England saved Scotland in the 1980's. Leaving behind Soviet-style economic policies wasn't a choice, it was an inevitability, as the USSR would prove when it collapsed around the time Thatcher was booted out.
Now we see in the Yes campaign socialism rear its ugly head once again. The most common reason I've seen for voting for independence is that the nasty mean English vote Tory and Scots are fairer, kinder and more hard working than that. Even Salmond, the man who runs a political party that has basically mainstream economic policies, doesn't hesitate to take a giant dump on the English by implying that an independent Scotland would be a utopia of milk and honey once the hated Tories are overthrown. When asked what kind of spending cuts would happen post independence Sturgeon simply said "there wouldn't be any".
The reality is that Yes is campaigning on a framework of economic illiteracy. If they win independence, there are really only two possible outcomes - one is that the rest of Scotland manages to counterbalane the hard left somehow and Holyrood runs governments that look much like those in Westminster from an economic perspective. The other possibility is that disaster strikes and people who want to roll Scotland back to the chaos of the 1970's actually start winning elections, in which case Scotland will probably end up looking like Ireland did for much of the 20th century (dirt poor with large amounts of emigration).
Do you think that when the Irish Republicans were fighting (and dying) for their independence from the UK that they ever once thought, "But what will the economic implications of our independence be? What will our credit rating become??"
Probably not, but it's hardly a surprise that people who were practically Marxist guerillas didn't fully think through what they were doing.
Post independence Ireland's economy went down the shitter for a loooooong time and lots of people were very miserable. Emigration was rampant and Ireland became a place supported by remittances, like a third world country. It wasn't until they modernised their economy that things started to improve.
Scotland MUST vote for its independence. If things don't work out, they can always rejoin with England (England would bend over backwards to welcome Scotland back if it ever came to that).
This is like saying someone MUST divorce their spouse because they can always just get back together. I think you'll find this campaign has huge potential to wreck relations between Scotland and the rest of the UK. In the short run it won't just make Scotland poorer, it'll hurt everyone. Not to mention that the most common justification for independence can be summed up as "the English are nasty and unfair and everything wrong with Scotland is their fault".
With respect to trade, unfortunately the independence negotiations could be very complicated and nasty if they vote yes, as Salmond has promised the moon including things he knows he can't get. When he's told - again - he won't be able to get the things he wants, he'll once again blame the English and start trying to make the breakup as nasty as he can to try and save face. A trade war or widespread unofficial boycotts are not exactly unthinkable.
Heck, I wasn't planning on going on vacation to Scotland any time soon but I wouldn't have been against the idea. But after watching all of this?? Why would I go somewhere where apparently 50% of the population are quasi-Marxists who think all English people suck?
I don't see why Scotland would be rejected, especially since the UK has been a pain in the arse ever since it joined the EU. As a matter of fact, many countries in the EU would welcome Scotland just to piss off the Brits.
New countries can be vetoed by another other. Most people talk about Spain in this context, but the UK could do it too if Salmond were to play hard ball (and the evidence suggests he would).
You are not making any sense - again, the currency you use is totally independent from EU membership itself.
No, adopting the Euro is a requirement for new entrants. Countries that were previously part of the EU and did not adopt were grandfathered in and don't have to change, but for new entrants it's not optional.
As a fellow European (Belgium, not UK) it's funny to see the arguments being used by the "better together" campaign. They are all typically the same arguments used by the rest of Europe for increased European integration, which the same UK people are typically opposed to.
Don't paint all Brits with the same brush. Yes, some people in the UK are not keen on the current arrangements with Europe, largely because of the massive influx of immigrants in recent years (an issue Scotland has experienced to nowhere near the same extent). But the economic arguments for being in are strong and the EU in/out referendum debate has hardly begun.
I suspect the way things might go is like this - if there's a yes vote, the complications of cleaving the UK in two will soak up all spare Parliamentary time and political capacity for the next few years and push out an EU in/out referendum by some time. By this point the English will have realised that Scotland is desperately trying to get back in and being a part of the EU is a significant bargaining tool with the new iScotland. Seeing the effects of not being in the EU first hand will change a lot of minds, especially once the serious debates start going.
That said, local government isn't inherently a bad thing. It's just that the arguments for it in Scotland have been pretty weak. They're not overwhelmingly strong with respect to Brussels either, but with the EU it's more the general trend that worries people. Europe is trending towards centralisation and shows no signs of slowing down. The UK has been trending towards devolution for some time. So the two aren't exactly comparable.
they can still secure loans from the continent... it is unlikely that anyone in Europe will spite UK this way
I rather think they would. Banks are not known for national alliances trumping profits, assuming lenders care one way or another (they don't).
Scotland will find it very hard to raise the funding it needs in the markets if it goes independent, but that'll be because Salmond seems to think walking away from their share of the UK debt is a viable option at all. I expect that if they did that, they could tell lenders that was a one off and they fully intend to repay debts accumulated by the new country, and I expect that lenders would buy it (after all HMG will still pay off the old Scottish debt).
But if they are actually stupid enough to do that they'll have made an enemy of an economy much larger than theirs, their largest export market, a country they're heavily dependent on for the basic infrastructure of running a government and a country that could veto their entry into Europe. Scotland really does NOT want a nasty, vicious divorce from the UK, but Salmond doesn't appear to be thinking that far ahead.
Additionally, raising funds would be tough because a significant part of the yes campaign appears to be predicated on the belief that post-independence Scotland will veer hard to the left. In the 1970's the north of the UK was practically communist and it appears many there still hanker for those times. A half-country that just pissed off its most important partner and is determined to re-run the Soviet experiment is not gonna be a good credit risk no matter what national allegiances one may have.
Google's C-levels say things like "privacy is dead" and "if you have something to hide you shouldn't be doing it".
Sigh. This has to go down as one of the most commonly manipulated misquotes in history.
Schmidt was saying something along the lines of "privacy is dead" in response to a question about the PATRIOT Act. He was telling it like it is, giving as much of a warning of what was going on as he could without actually doing a Snowden. He wasn't expressing happyness about that state of affairs, just pointing out that US laws give the US government enormous powers over people's personal information. And his last comment (actually "maybe" you shouldn't be doing it) was an observation of the fact that these things are not black and white: there's a small contingent of people who genuinely need nobody at all to know what they're doing for noble political reasons. And then there are all the people who aren't Snowden and are just trying to hack someone else's nude photos.
Switzerland survives because its main export is untraceable (sort-of) banking. Ireland is still close to being financially untenable. Not exactly worthy models to emulate. No one is served by a race to the bottom.
Um, no. That is dead wrong.
The entire financial sector including pensions and insurance is less than 10% of Swiss GDP. By the way you cannot "export" banking. For things you can export, there is a table of Swiss exports here or in diagram form. Regardless the USA has been incredibly aggressive against the Swiss banking sector in recent years, completely ignoring borders and national sovereignty in order to enforce the absurd US citizenship based taxation policies. They've arrested Swiss bankers and threatened many, many more even though they broke no laws in the country where they live and are based. The result is that Swiss banking secrecy (or privacy if you're of a libertarian bent) is basically dead, especially for Americans.
Regardless, the Swiss economy is still doing fantastically well.
Meanwhile, Ireland was doing just great up until their stupid politicians panicked and guaranteed the debt of one of the major banks, without really thinking through just how huge that debt was. Ireland was brought low by the banks but didn't build their economy on them.
So both your stereotypes about other countries with lower tax rates are not supported by reality.
It probably doesn't. This Secure Element+rotating CVV thing is the same as what Google Wallet uses/used, and it's just not the same technology as EMV. Similar concept from what I understand but not actually the same. EMV requires merchants to upgrade their backend infrastructure because they fundamentally aren't just passing around credit card numbers anymore, whereas this is designed to let merchants skip all that and pretend they're still charging regular credit card numbers, with the last three digits changing per transaction. One question in my mind is what happens after you made 1000 transactions: presumably the CVVs start being reused? Or perhaps if they're semi-random they start colliding before that.
At any rate, the big question is whether VISA/MC/the banks will interpret this half-assed non-EMV thing as being as secure as regular EMV. I don't see how it can be, myself, but I've never looked at this in depth. The 2015 date refers to the liability shift. It doesn't imply an actual flag day or widespread deployment of EMV. The idea is after that date whoever has the weaker technology pays for fraud. If the bank hasn't deployed EMV and the merchant has, the bank pays. Otherwise it's vice versa. But I'm not sure how that works here - banks aren't issuing iPhones to people, so when does the merchant win? If the user doesn't have an iPhone? Seems tricky.
Anyway don't expect this to work outside the USA. Not only is the tech different but it's also fundamentally useless. Contactless EMV cards are being rolled out around the world now and they're convenient because you don't have to type in the PIN for small amounts, whilst still being secure. For larger amounts, the PIN is still required. But the cards don't require batteries, can be dropped on the ground, slide inside a wallet, can't be hacked, make payments in just a second or two etc. So it's not clear why you'd want to use a phone instead of a card for this.
These things rarely if ever go to court. Sometimes there's simply no relevance because the regulators have the power to fine companies without winning a court case, and sometimes (like with NY DFS) the laws involved have such insanely high criminal penalties attached - like 20 year jail sentences - you'd have to be crazy to roll the dice instead of just paying up.
This stuff goes both ways. New York State has become notorious for trumping up charges against financial companies and draining mind-boggling sums of money directly into their own accounts. Governments are waking up to the fact that they've passed so many vague laws that basically any company can be "investigated" for breaching them, and given those governments are all heavily in debt and trying to cut back spending the temptation to go whack some foreign company and extract money from it is overwhelming. Compared to taxing their own citizens this seems like free money, plus they get to tell themselves and others that they're fighting the good fight against the evil corporations.
When you dig into the details, that's when this story unravels. But most people never do.
wouldn't implementing such kill switches on weapons be as ineffective as DRM for copyrighted material, with undesirable side-effects for "legitimate uses" and plenty of workarounds for "illegitimate" users?
No.
Such techniques have been used to dramatic effect in vehicle immobilisers, with sharp falls in auto theft directly traceable to their deployment. Having the key fob do a handshake with the engine control computer has - when properly implemented - basically killed most auto theft with what remains being hotwiring very old cars, deliberately searching for cars that have messed up immobiliser implemenations, or just grabbing the driver and forcing them to give up the keys.
Do you know what the vulns are? Tomcat has a list of vulnerabilities on their website but they're all DoS attacks or information disclosure. It's pretty hard to write a Java app that can actually be completely taken over via the network, although I've seen one or two spectacularly dumb web server designs that allowed it anyway (e.g. url parameter names were treated as arbitrary paths through the entire apps object heirarchy using reflection, letting anyone modify any global variable by just doing a GET - no language can save you from this kind of idiocy).
Regardless of political preferences... I simply can't imagine in what form those threats could have been made. Phone call? Letter? Email? How can anyone be so [IMHO, unrealistically] stupid to mention using nuclear weapons knowing that every word in today's communications is being recorded and would be published by the opposite side?
It was made during a verbal question and answer session some days ago. You can read a transcript of the full thing, without western media's blatantly selective quoting and bias, right here. Do go read it for yourself. The press has been having a field day with taking individual sentences out of context, in many cases not even mentioning that Putin was responding to questions from Russian citizens, to make it look like he's issuing press releases about Ukraine specifically. It's the most amazingly dangerous set of selective quotations I've ever seen. In this case Putin wasn't even talking about Ukraine!
I copy/pasted the full question and answer in a post below. But you can easily find it in that page. It's a long answer to a relatively vague question that asks (amongst other things) about how Russia can avoid being drawn into large scale conflicts. So right at the start he says he doesn't want to be drawn into any large conflicts, he doesn't think it's going to happen and that he thinks nobody has any intention of starting a large scale conflict (er, he might want to re-evaluate that given the noise coming out of NATO). Then he goes on to point out that Russia can defend itself, and talks about the "nuclear deterrent" (same language as the UK uses), and then states again that it's for defence.
You can choose not to believe him if you like. But the USA and UK also have "nuclear deterrents" and their so-called Departments of Defence routinely engage in offence at the drop of a hat. We routinely see far more aggressive language coming out of the White House. So I don't think anything Putin is saying here is particularly unique or unusual.
Full transcript of this youth camp Q and A session is available here.
ROMAN SMAGIN: Good afternoon, Mr President.
I am Roman Smagin from Novosibirsk Teacher Training University.
It’s no secret to anyone that history tends to repeat itself. Historical events seem to unfold according to a cyclical theory. Over these last two years we have remembered and celebrated the historic choices that Russia made at important moments for our country’s destiny, such as in 1612, 1812, and 1914.
In this context, I want to ask you what view you take of the cyclical nature of history as we can see it in Russia. Also, I want to ask you about your view of historical memory, how it helps us, how it can help to preserve Russia’s political influence on the international stage, contribute to our society’s development, and not let Russia be drawn into a new open global conflict.
Thank you.
VLADIMIR PUTIN: Historical memory is a very important part of our culture, history and present. Of course, we must draw on our historical experience and historical memory as we look towards the future. I can therefore say straight away that Russia is certainly not about to let itself be drawn into any large-scale conflicts. We do not want this and will not let this happen.
Naturally, we need to be ready to respond to any aggression against Russia. Our partners, no matter what the situation in their countries and the foreign policy ideas they follow, always need to be aware that it is better not to enter into any potential armed conflict against us. Fortunately though, I don’t think anyone has the intention today of trying to start a large-scale conflict against Russia.
Let me remind you that Russia is one of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. These are not just words – this is the reality. What’s more, we are strengthening our nuclear deterrent capability and developing our armed forces. They have become more compact and effective and are becoming more modern in terms of the weapons at their disposal. We are continuing this work to build up our potential and will keep doing so, not in order to threaten anyone, but so as to be able to feel safe, ensure our security and be able to carry out our economic and social development plans.
As far as cycles are concerned, yes, I think that the world’s development does go in cycles. This has pretty much been proven as far as the economy is concerned. There are economists here and they can no doubt explain it better than I can, but there are various cycles in the economy, small waves, large waves and so on, and any country’s development depends on the state of the economy. This is why economic growth and the transition from one technological level to another always have an impact on people’s lives and prosperity and on the social and political situation.
Just look, for example, at the way demand is growing in the European countries, and how hard it is to keep up with this constantly growing demand even at today’s level of technological development. This is a sign that there is a need for something else, that we must compensate somewhere for what we are not managing to achieve with the help of foreign policy and defence policy.
I hope very much that not just Russia’s historical memory but that all of humanity will prompt us to search for peaceful solutions to the various conflicts that are currently unfolding and that will arise in the future. We support political dialogue and the search for compromise.
You mean these satellite images? The ones that have the following quotes attached to them?
At a press conference on Thursday, August 28, Dutch Brig. Gen. Nico Tak, a senior NATO commander, revealed satellite images of what NATO says are Russian combat forces engaged in military operations in or near Ukrainian territory. NATO said this image shows Russian self-propelled artillery units set up in firing positions near Krasnodon, in eastern Ukraine.
This is an extremely misleading way to phrase things. Krasnodon is not just "in eastern Ukraine". It's right on the border. So being near it can also mean in Russia. The above comments from NATO mean nothing, assuming CNN is reporting them accurately. What about the others.... hmm let's see.
Image 2 is from inside Russia and they say so. Image 3 is also in Russia. Image 5 is captioned twice, once with "Russian self propelled artillery unit inside Ukraine" and again, but this time it's again "near Krasnodon", which is practically in Russia. If there's an obviously demarcated border in this area it's hard to see based on the Google satellite images. The last image doesn't even claim to be of anything in particular, the caption is merely summarising story in general.
Both Russian and Ukranian troops appear to regularly cross the border without realising it - there have been repeated reports of Ukrainian forces entering Russia and then being redirected back across the border, with no obvious blowback. Given these things, and the fact that western media is in full-blown propaganda mode and not even hiding it, I'm going to want way stronger evidence than this.
But honestly, even if Russia did invade, this would merely make it on par with the USA and UK, both countries that practically revel in invading other countries and wading into other countries civil wars. So a part of me couldn't get too excited even if it did happen. It's definitely NOT worth a serious, major conflict between Russia and the west.
Yes, but the tanks and artillery the "separatists" keep popping up with are coming from somewhere. At this late stage in the game, they certainly aren't Ukrainian remnants that the separatists have captured in those Ukrainian territories - those were used and destroyed many months ago.
Really? I was reading in the Guardian (which has proven itself to be woefully biased in the past few months) that the separatists were surrounding and capturing Ukranian army units just last week. What's more, in the past days we've been reading about waves of deserters from the Ukrainian army. Nobody is claiming the separatists are armed only with stuff they got months ago. They're claiming, and so is Kiev, that they've been able to obtain large quantities of arms from the fleeing, conscript-based Ukrainian army.
Meanwhile Poroshenko is trying to claim that there's an Russian army rolling around in his country...... yet so far nobody has been able to actually find it. An entire army! Over 1000 soldiers and 100 tanks! Such a unit requires support vehicles, a tent town, supply lines.... so where is it? Maybe it's sort of like invasion by aid convoy.
NFC payment cards in Australia/Europe cryptographically sign a challenge from the terminal, using basically standard crypto. It's EMV all the way. In-person magstripe payments are carefully controlled and risk analysed to ensure they only occur if, for example, the card is broken - or outright banned.
NFC payments in the USA involve the phone sending regular magstripe data to the terminal, with only the CVC code being some kind of cryptographic derivative - a three digit number (less than 1000). The reason for this crazy setup is so merchants don't have to update their backend/PoS systems that still expect magstripe data. There is no plan to perform a complete upgrade thus old style transactions cannot be phased out. It's a dramatically less secure system.
Your card was declined because they're totally different and incompatible technologies. NFC payment cards from outside the USA aren't the same as "NFC payments" inside the USA (which require mobile phones as far as I can tell).
More importantly, the underlying technology is totally different. VISA Europe is not at all the same as VISA USA. VISA in Europe is a coalition of banks, VISA USA is a private company. America has never rolled out EMV, making its banking industry a ridiculous joke compared to, well, everywhere else. You don't get reports of major European supermarket chains getting their PoS systems hacked and magstripes skimmed like you do in the US, because EMV is a much more secure system.
The NFC payment cards that are rolling out around the world (outside USA) now are basically a variant of EMV/Chip and PIN. The underlying crypto is the same. The card signs a challenge from the terminal. They're upgrading to elliptic curve crypto at the moment actually, not sure if all NFC cards do that or not but it would not surprise me. NFC as tried by Google in America is actually a very minor variant on just sending your magstripe data via radio. I believe the CVC code rotates (three digits of entropy lol) and the tech is based on a Secure Element hard-wired to the NFC radio. But the phone has minimal control over the actual payment transaction, thus doesn't add much value beyond being a big battery, and that's why the tech largely stalled. Also they screwed up the compatibility testing and the terminals were full of bugs that meant transactions just sort of randomly failed.
So don't be fooled. The "NFC payments" that we know outside of North America is totally different to what they call "NFC payments", which is an unfortunate piece of linguistic confusion.
Here's a tip, my Russian friend: if you want to pretend to be a neutral observer on the Ukrainian conflict in an internet forum, then you'd do better to proofread your post again and again until you manage to remove the little telltale signs that your native language is Russian. No informed reader of your post above is going to be convinced you don't have a significant dog in this fight.
You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?
Suck on this. I'm a native English speaker from the UK, I have never been to Russia, I have been reading Slashdot for about 14-15 years, posting for most of that time too. And the Anonymous Coward tells it like it is. Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already. He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross. In fact he asserted he'd shell said convoy, so the Red Cross chickened out, but the crazy Russians just drove right in there and delivered that aid anyway.
So as a native speaker, please heed my call - let's all stop abusing the English language shall we? We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq. It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building. It does not look like journalists scrabbling around presenting the testimony of a milkmaid in a farcical attempt to find an army, as the Guardian did only a few days ago. Now condemn Putin for militarily supporting the rebels if you like (though the proof of this is wafer thin as well), just be aware that this is something many countries do, including the ones that are currently being most shrill about Ukraine. So such an argument doesn't have much impact, unfortunately, though I wish we lived in a world where it did.
That's a rather one-sided view of what happened. Yes, the Soviet Union did invade Afghanistan as part of pushing its global ideology, much like the USA invaded Vietnam. But the stone age state of Afghanistan at the time of the US invasion in 2001 was a direct result of America supporting religious fanatics in a proxy war, the mujahideen, who after the war ended and the Soviet's were defeated went on to become the Taliban. That's why bin Laden is so famously a former ally of the US.
The USA is not only building an empire but doing so in plain sight of everyone. To quote Putin directly:
Our partners, especially in the United Sates, always clearly formulate their own geopolitical and state interests and follow them with persistence. Then, using the principle “You’re either with us or against us” they draw the whole world in. And those who do not join in get ‘beaten’ until they do.
This principle is most clearly visible in two acts. One is that the sanctions on Iran are built as a "you're with us or against us" model. Any country that is seen by America to be "undermining" the sanctions i.e. not joining in is itself sanctioned. And the second act is again sanctions based: every financial institution in the world is being taken over by Washington via a system of recursive ("viral" if you like) sanctions that require banks to obey the USA even if that would contradict local laws. The goal is to collect tax from American's abroad. It's called FATCA and it's resulted in many, many nations having to repeal their own privacy laws, in order to allow banks to become agents of the US Government. They were given no choice in the matter.
So the USA has found ways of forcing people in countries all over the world to: (a) engage in economic warfare against America's enemies and (b) pay taxes directly to America, all regardless of what the local government wants or how the local people vote.
Being able to conscript people to their fights and force payment of taxes is the very foundation of empire itself.
Check back in 6 months, compare what they reported on this conflict to what really happened. Because they were reporting the Ukrainian protests as being a bunch of Fascists who, if they had their way, would be building concentration camps for Russian speakers. Of course, the protesters won, got new elections, and turned out to be what they appeared to be; moderate youths who want increased relations with the EU.
Let's set aside the idea that RT is somehow horrendously biased and we can learn what really happened by, er, reading our totally neutral and trustworthy western newspapers.
Let's instead focus on an indisputable fact. This wonderful new parliament put in place by moderate youths who wanted only increased EU relations, on the very next day after the ex-President fled (the one who did actually win an election), voted overwhelmingly to repeal a law that made Russian an official language. Their first act wasn't to improve relations with the EU, or heal the giant rift between east and west Ukraine, their first order of business was to drive an even bigger wedge right between their own citizens.
Is it any wonder that this glorious democratic government our leaders love so much reacted to an independence movement in their country with massive military force, and has been shelling their own citizens ever since?
That's sort of like saying the Soviet's didn't invade anywhere during the cold war. They just supported puppet governments and militias in their place, as did America (hence Osama bin Laden being a former employee of the CIA).
They all still have both political sovereignty, and also control of their legal borders.
You can't claim that America deciding unilaterally to engage in "regime change" to use the delightful term is respecting political sovereignty. What happens is the USA evaluates a government and if it's not one they like, sometimes they remove it by force and replace it with a new one they like better. Said country has "control of their borders" only if you ignore that the US military operates within those borders at will.
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Slicing up assets also means slicing up debts. Or would you be OK with all Scottish pensions being vaporised overnight because the UK still exists, so the UK will have the pensions?
I've never met anyone in the UK who has a problem with immigration from west European countries that are culturally similar to themselves. Most of the problems crop up with poorly integrated Islamic integration where you get entire neighbourhoods in some cities that look basically like Pakistan: people wearing veils, not speaking English, etc.
The other issue is economic, the UK didn't use transitional controls when Poland entered the EU to delay immigration, so it got a really really large number of Polish immigrants because they had few other places to go. The evidence suggests the UK benefited from this economically but given the sheer speed and scale of the migration it's not hard to see why people got antsy.
The same did not happen when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU so I'm hoping immigration will blow over in the coming years if the economy continues to recover. But we'll see. It's not a UK specific problem, there's anti-immigration sentiment in populations all over Europe.
Scotland has been treated very well indeed. When it joined the Union its people were piss poor and its "government" was bankrupt. It's now a wealthy first world country, with lots of MPs in its Parliament, large amounts of money spent on its people and it's contributed multiple Prime Ministers and senior government figures.
Despite all that, a large number of Scottish people have repeatedly attempted to trash their own country and England too by blindly supporting policies that are - to put not too fine a point on it - communist. This is a part of the world where as late as 1989 an MP was trying to get elected by recalling "Red Clydeside". This is a part of the world where hatred of Thatcher is practically a national pasttime, although her crimes amounted to ending communist policies like massive state ownership of industry and trade union control. Scotland failed to adapt to deindustrialisation and failed so hard that decades after the rest of the country has moved on, lots of people there are still nursing a massive grudge.
Scotland's current state isn't because it was badly treated by England. Arguably the south of England saved Scotland in the 1980's. Leaving behind Soviet-style economic policies wasn't a choice, it was an inevitability, as the USSR would prove when it collapsed around the time Thatcher was booted out.
Now we see in the Yes campaign socialism rear its ugly head once again. The most common reason I've seen for voting for independence is that the nasty mean English vote Tory and Scots are fairer, kinder and more hard working than that. Even Salmond, the man who runs a political party that has basically mainstream economic policies, doesn't hesitate to take a giant dump on the English by implying that an independent Scotland would be a utopia of milk and honey once the hated Tories are overthrown. When asked what kind of spending cuts would happen post independence Sturgeon simply said "there wouldn't be any".
The reality is that Yes is campaigning on a framework of economic illiteracy. If they win independence, there are really only two possible outcomes - one is that the rest of Scotland manages to counterbalane the hard left somehow and Holyrood runs governments that look much like those in Westminster from an economic perspective. The other possibility is that disaster strikes and people who want to roll Scotland back to the chaos of the 1970's actually start winning elections, in which case Scotland will probably end up looking like Ireland did for much of the 20th century (dirt poor with large amounts of emigration).
Probably not, but it's hardly a surprise that people who were practically Marxist guerillas didn't fully think through what they were doing.
Post independence Ireland's economy went down the shitter for a loooooong time and lots of people were very miserable. Emigration was rampant and Ireland became a place supported by remittances, like a third world country. It wasn't until they modernised their economy that things started to improve.
This is like saying someone MUST divorce their spouse because they can always just get back together. I think you'll find this campaign has huge potential to wreck relations between Scotland and the rest of the UK. In the short run it won't just make Scotland poorer, it'll hurt everyone. Not to mention that the most common justification for independence can be summed up as "the English are nasty and unfair and everything wrong with Scotland is their fault".
With respect to trade, unfortunately the independence negotiations could be very complicated and nasty if they vote yes, as Salmond has promised the moon including things he knows he can't get. When he's told - again - he won't be able to get the things he wants, he'll once again blame the English and start trying to make the breakup as nasty as he can to try and save face. A trade war or widespread unofficial boycotts are not exactly unthinkable.
Heck, I wasn't planning on going on vacation to Scotland any time soon but I wouldn't have been against the idea. But after watching all of this?? Why would I go somewhere where apparently 50% of the population are quasi-Marxists who think all English people suck?
New countries can be vetoed by another other. Most people talk about Spain in this context, but the UK could do it too if Salmond were to play hard ball (and the evidence suggests he would).
No, adopting the Euro is a requirement for new entrants. Countries that were previously part of the EU and did not adopt were grandfathered in and don't have to change, but for new entrants it's not optional.
Don't paint all Brits with the same brush. Yes, some people in the UK are not keen on the current arrangements with Europe, largely because of the massive influx of immigrants in recent years (an issue Scotland has experienced to nowhere near the same extent). But the economic arguments for being in are strong and the EU in/out referendum debate has hardly begun.
I suspect the way things might go is like this - if there's a yes vote, the complications of cleaving the UK in two will soak up all spare Parliamentary time and political capacity for the next few years and push out an EU in/out referendum by some time. By this point the English will have realised that Scotland is desperately trying to get back in and being a part of the EU is a significant bargaining tool with the new iScotland. Seeing the effects of not being in the EU first hand will change a lot of minds, especially once the serious debates start going.
That said, local government isn't inherently a bad thing. It's just that the arguments for it in Scotland have been pretty weak. They're not overwhelmingly strong with respect to Brussels either, but with the EU it's more the general trend that worries people. Europe is trending towards centralisation and shows no signs of slowing down. The UK has been trending towards devolution for some time. So the two aren't exactly comparable.
I rather think they would. Banks are not known for national alliances trumping profits, assuming lenders care one way or another (they don't).
Scotland will find it very hard to raise the funding it needs in the markets if it goes independent, but that'll be because Salmond seems to think walking away from their share of the UK debt is a viable option at all. I expect that if they did that, they could tell lenders that was a one off and they fully intend to repay debts accumulated by the new country, and I expect that lenders would buy it (after all HMG will still pay off the old Scottish debt).
But if they are actually stupid enough to do that they'll have made an enemy of an economy much larger than theirs, their largest export market, a country they're heavily dependent on for the basic infrastructure of running a government and a country that could veto their entry into Europe. Scotland really does NOT want a nasty, vicious divorce from the UK, but Salmond doesn't appear to be thinking that far ahead.
Additionally, raising funds would be tough because a significant part of the yes campaign appears to be predicated on the belief that post-independence Scotland will veer hard to the left. In the 1970's the north of the UK was practically communist and it appears many there still hanker for those times. A half-country that just pissed off its most important partner and is determined to re-run the Soviet experiment is not gonna be a good credit risk no matter what national allegiances one may have.
Sigh. This has to go down as one of the most commonly manipulated misquotes in history.
Schmidt was saying something along the lines of "privacy is dead" in response to a question about the PATRIOT Act. He was telling it like it is, giving as much of a warning of what was going on as he could without actually doing a Snowden. He wasn't expressing happyness about that state of affairs, just pointing out that US laws give the US government enormous powers over people's personal information. And his last comment (actually "maybe" you shouldn't be doing it) was an observation of the fact that these things are not black and white: there's a small contingent of people who genuinely need nobody at all to know what they're doing for noble political reasons. And then there are all the people who aren't Snowden and are just trying to hack someone else's nude photos.
Um, no. That is dead wrong.
The entire financial sector including pensions and insurance is less than 10% of Swiss GDP. By the way you cannot "export" banking. For things you can export, there is a table of Swiss exports here or in diagram form. Regardless the USA has been incredibly aggressive against the Swiss banking sector in recent years, completely ignoring borders and national sovereignty in order to enforce the absurd US citizenship based taxation policies. They've arrested Swiss bankers and threatened many, many more even though they broke no laws in the country where they live and are based. The result is that Swiss banking secrecy (or privacy if you're of a libertarian bent) is basically dead, especially for Americans.
Regardless, the Swiss economy is still doing fantastically well.
Meanwhile, Ireland was doing just great up until their stupid politicians panicked and guaranteed the debt of one of the major banks, without really thinking through just how huge that debt was. Ireland was brought low by the banks but didn't build their economy on them.
So both your stereotypes about other countries with lower tax rates are not supported by reality.
It probably doesn't. This Secure Element+rotating CVV thing is the same as what Google Wallet uses/used, and it's just not the same technology as EMV. Similar concept from what I understand but not actually the same. EMV requires merchants to upgrade their backend infrastructure because they fundamentally aren't just passing around credit card numbers anymore, whereas this is designed to let merchants skip all that and pretend they're still charging regular credit card numbers, with the last three digits changing per transaction. One question in my mind is what happens after you made 1000 transactions: presumably the CVVs start being reused? Or perhaps if they're semi-random they start colliding before that.
At any rate, the big question is whether VISA/MC/the banks will interpret this half-assed non-EMV thing as being as secure as regular EMV. I don't see how it can be, myself, but I've never looked at this in depth. The 2015 date refers to the liability shift. It doesn't imply an actual flag day or widespread deployment of EMV. The idea is after that date whoever has the weaker technology pays for fraud. If the bank hasn't deployed EMV and the merchant has, the bank pays. Otherwise it's vice versa. But I'm not sure how that works here - banks aren't issuing iPhones to people, so when does the merchant win? If the user doesn't have an iPhone? Seems tricky.
Anyway don't expect this to work outside the USA. Not only is the tech different but it's also fundamentally useless. Contactless EMV cards are being rolled out around the world now and they're convenient because you don't have to type in the PIN for small amounts, whilst still being secure. For larger amounts, the PIN is still required. But the cards don't require batteries, can be dropped on the ground, slide inside a wallet, can't be hacked, make payments in just a second or two etc. So it's not clear why you'd want to use a phone instead of a card for this.
These things rarely if ever go to court. Sometimes there's simply no relevance because the regulators have the power to fine companies without winning a court case, and sometimes (like with NY DFS) the laws involved have such insanely high criminal penalties attached - like 20 year jail sentences - you'd have to be crazy to roll the dice instead of just paying up.
This stuff goes both ways. New York State has become notorious for trumping up charges against financial companies and draining mind-boggling sums of money directly into their own accounts. Governments are waking up to the fact that they've passed so many vague laws that basically any company can be "investigated" for breaching them, and given those governments are all heavily in debt and trying to cut back spending the temptation to go whack some foreign company and extract money from it is overwhelming. Compared to taxing their own citizens this seems like free money, plus they get to tell themselves and others that they're fighting the good fight against the evil corporations.
When you dig into the details, that's when this story unravels. But most people never do.
No.
Such techniques have been used to dramatic effect in vehicle immobilisers, with sharp falls in auto theft directly traceable to their deployment. Having the key fob do a handshake with the engine control computer has - when properly implemented - basically killed most auto theft with what remains being hotwiring very old cars, deliberately searching for cars that have messed up immobiliser implemenations, or just grabbing the driver and forcing them to give up the keys.
Do you know what the vulns are? Tomcat has a list of vulnerabilities on their website but they're all DoS attacks or information disclosure. It's pretty hard to write a Java app that can actually be completely taken over via the network, although I've seen one or two spectacularly dumb web server designs that allowed it anyway (e.g. url parameter names were treated as arbitrary paths through the entire apps object heirarchy using reflection, letting anyone modify any global variable by just doing a GET - no language can save you from this kind of idiocy).
It was made during a verbal question and answer session some days ago. You can read a transcript of the full thing, without western media's blatantly selective quoting and bias, right here. Do go read it for yourself. The press has been having a field day with taking individual sentences out of context, in many cases not even mentioning that Putin was responding to questions from Russian citizens, to make it look like he's issuing press releases about Ukraine specifically. It's the most amazingly dangerous set of selective quotations I've ever seen. In this case Putin wasn't even talking about Ukraine!
I copy/pasted the full question and answer in a post below. But you can easily find it in that page. It's a long answer to a relatively vague question that asks (amongst other things) about how Russia can avoid being drawn into large scale conflicts. So right at the start he says he doesn't want to be drawn into any large conflicts, he doesn't think it's going to happen and that he thinks nobody has any intention of starting a large scale conflict (er, he might want to re-evaluate that given the noise coming out of NATO). Then he goes on to point out that Russia can defend itself, and talks about the "nuclear deterrent" (same language as the UK uses), and then states again that it's for defence.
You can choose not to believe him if you like. But the USA and UK also have "nuclear deterrents" and their so-called Departments of Defence routinely engage in offence at the drop of a hat. We routinely see far more aggressive language coming out of the White House. So I don't think anything Putin is saying here is particularly unique or unusual.
Full transcript of this youth camp Q and A session is available here.
You mean these satellite images? The ones that have the following quotes attached to them?
This is an extremely misleading way to phrase things. Krasnodon is not just "in eastern Ukraine". It's right on the border. So being near it can also mean in Russia. The above comments from NATO mean nothing, assuming CNN is reporting them accurately. What about the others .... hmm let's see.
Image 2 is from inside Russia and they say so. Image 3 is also in Russia. Image 5 is captioned twice, once with "Russian self propelled artillery unit inside Ukraine" and again, but this time it's again "near Krasnodon", which is practically in Russia. If there's an obviously demarcated border in this area it's hard to see based on the Google satellite images. The last image doesn't even claim to be of anything in particular, the caption is merely summarising story in general.
Both Russian and Ukranian troops appear to regularly cross the border without realising it - there have been repeated reports of Ukrainian forces entering Russia and then being redirected back across the border, with no obvious blowback. Given these things, and the fact that western media is in full-blown propaganda mode and not even hiding it, I'm going to want way stronger evidence than this.
But honestly, even if Russia did invade, this would merely make it on par with the USA and UK, both countries that practically revel in invading other countries and wading into other countries civil wars. So a part of me couldn't get too excited even if it did happen. It's definitely NOT worth a serious, major conflict between Russia and the west.
Really? I was reading in the Guardian (which has proven itself to be woefully biased in the past few months) that the separatists were surrounding and capturing Ukranian army units just last week. What's more, in the past days we've been reading about waves of deserters from the Ukrainian army. Nobody is claiming the separatists are armed only with stuff they got months ago. They're claiming, and so is Kiev, that they've been able to obtain large quantities of arms from the fleeing, conscript-based Ukrainian army.
Meanwhile Poroshenko is trying to claim that there's an Russian army rolling around in his country ...... yet so far nobody has been able to actually find it. An entire army! Over 1000 soldiers and 100 tanks! Such a unit requires support vehicles, a tent town, supply lines .... so where is it? Maybe it's sort of like invasion by aid convoy.
NFC payment cards in Australia/Europe cryptographically sign a challenge from the terminal, using basically standard crypto. It's EMV all the way. In-person magstripe payments are carefully controlled and risk analysed to ensure they only occur if, for example, the card is broken - or outright banned.
NFC payments in the USA involve the phone sending regular magstripe data to the terminal, with only the CVC code being some kind of cryptographic derivative - a three digit number (less than 1000). The reason for this crazy setup is so merchants don't have to update their backend/PoS systems that still expect magstripe data. There is no plan to perform a complete upgrade thus old style transactions cannot be phased out. It's a dramatically less secure system.
Your card was declined because they're totally different and incompatible technologies. NFC payment cards from outside the USA aren't the same as "NFC payments" inside the USA (which require mobile phones as far as I can tell).
More importantly, the underlying technology is totally different. VISA Europe is not at all the same as VISA USA. VISA in Europe is a coalition of banks, VISA USA is a private company. America has never rolled out EMV, making its banking industry a ridiculous joke compared to, well, everywhere else. You don't get reports of major European supermarket chains getting their PoS systems hacked and magstripes skimmed like you do in the US, because EMV is a much more secure system.
The NFC payment cards that are rolling out around the world (outside USA) now are basically a variant of EMV/Chip and PIN. The underlying crypto is the same. The card signs a challenge from the terminal. They're upgrading to elliptic curve crypto at the moment actually, not sure if all NFC cards do that or not but it would not surprise me. NFC as tried by Google in America is actually a very minor variant on just sending your magstripe data via radio. I believe the CVC code rotates (three digits of entropy lol) and the tech is based on a Secure Element hard-wired to the NFC radio. But the phone has minimal control over the actual payment transaction, thus doesn't add much value beyond being a big battery, and that's why the tech largely stalled. Also they screwed up the compatibility testing and the terminals were full of bugs that meant transactions just sort of randomly failed.
So don't be fooled. The "NFC payments" that we know outside of North America is totally different to what they call "NFC payments", which is an unfortunate piece of linguistic confusion.
You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?
Suck on this. I'm a native English speaker from the UK, I have never been to Russia, I have been reading Slashdot for about 14-15 years, posting for most of that time too. And the Anonymous Coward tells it like it is. Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already. He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross. In fact he asserted he'd shell said convoy, so the Red Cross chickened out, but the crazy Russians just drove right in there and delivered that aid anyway.
So as a native speaker, please heed my call - let's all stop abusing the English language shall we? We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq. It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building. It does not look like journalists scrabbling around presenting the testimony of a milkmaid in a farcical attempt to find an army, as the Guardian did only a few days ago. Now condemn Putin for militarily supporting the rebels if you like (though the proof of this is wafer thin as well), just be aware that this is something many countries do, including the ones that are currently being most shrill about Ukraine. So such an argument doesn't have much impact, unfortunately, though I wish we lived in a world where it did.
That's a rather one-sided view of what happened. Yes, the Soviet Union did invade Afghanistan as part of pushing its global ideology, much like the USA invaded Vietnam. But the stone age state of Afghanistan at the time of the US invasion in 2001 was a direct result of America supporting religious fanatics in a proxy war, the mujahideen, who after the war ended and the Soviet's were defeated went on to become the Taliban. That's why bin Laden is so famously a former ally of the US.
The USA is not only building an empire but doing so in plain sight of everyone. To quote Putin directly:
This principle is most clearly visible in two acts. One is that the sanctions on Iran are built as a "you're with us or against us" model. Any country that is seen by America to be "undermining" the sanctions i.e. not joining in is itself sanctioned. And the second act is again sanctions based: every financial institution in the world is being taken over by Washington via a system of recursive ("viral" if you like) sanctions that require banks to obey the USA even if that would contradict local laws. The goal is to collect tax from American's abroad. It's called FATCA and it's resulted in many, many nations having to repeal their own privacy laws, in order to allow banks to become agents of the US Government. They were given no choice in the matter.
So the USA has found ways of forcing people in countries all over the world to: (a) engage in economic warfare against America's enemies and (b) pay taxes directly to America, all regardless of what the local government wants or how the local people vote.
Being able to conscript people to their fights and force payment of taxes is the very foundation of empire itself.
Let's set aside the idea that RT is somehow horrendously biased and we can learn what really happened by, er, reading our totally neutral and trustworthy western newspapers.
Let's instead focus on an indisputable fact. This wonderful new parliament put in place by moderate youths who wanted only increased EU relations, on the very next day after the ex-President fled (the one who did actually win an election), voted overwhelmingly to repeal a law that made Russian an official language. Their first act wasn't to improve relations with the EU, or heal the giant rift between east and west Ukraine, their first order of business was to drive an even bigger wedge right between their own citizens.
Is it any wonder that this glorious democratic government our leaders love so much reacted to an independence movement in their country with massive military force, and has been shelling their own citizens ever since?
By the way, here's how RT reported it at the time. Seems pretty accurate to me.
That's sort of like saying the Soviet's didn't invade anywhere during the cold war. They just supported puppet governments and militias in their place, as did America (hence Osama bin Laden being a former employee of the CIA).
You can't claim that America deciding unilaterally to engage in "regime change" to use the delightful term is respecting political sovereignty. What happens is the USA evaluates a government and if it's not one they like, sometimes they remove it by force and replace it with a new one they like better. Said country has "control of their borders" only if you ignore that the US military operates within those borders at will.