The main three parties were all in favour of this. This wasn't just a stitch-up amongst the leadership with the MPs given a free choice - the party machinery was obviously forcing their MPs to vote in favour too. At this point I feel deeply embarassed to be British, as the way our elected representatives have acted makes the rubber-stamp parliaments in third world military dictatorships look better. I don't understand why even the Lib Dems were for this - electorally they have pretty much nothing to lose at this point and it would at least make them look like they had SOME of the principles people thought they had.
I'm not fortunate enough to have a local MP who voted even half-against this. I wrote to her and she wrote me a long, obviously cut and pasted email response (even down to the differing font sizes for different sections of text). Didn't even mention her personal views, just what Ed Miliband (the leader of the Labour party) had as his soundbite of the day.
So what I'd desparately like to know is, who can I vote for at the next election who won't stand for this sort of bullshit. If there is someone who is actually against this, and who has proper credibility (i.e. not the Lib Dems), I'd love to know. I'd rather not vote for the Greens (I am naturally a free market sort of person and would like to see a libertarian conservative type of candidate elected) but if they're the only option, they've got my vote as a result of this.
The result is that tuition has gone through the roof. The same degree that was free for me 25 years ago now costs £9,000/year ($16,400/year). It is also now a 4 year degree (used to be 3 years) because of the lower standards in school. Of course this means that students acquire so much debt that they have to be extremely concerned about their potential salary after graduating. The puts an increasing pressure for universities to shift from the academic institutes of higher education which have served society for the best part of a millennium (or possibly longer in some cases) towards becoming vocational training colleges where each course is targeted to a specific career which provides enough income to pay of the massive debt so good luck finding the next generation of teachers!
The current UK system for tuition is really much closer to a graduate tax than "tuition fees". Everyone automatically gets a loan for the fees. The amount you repay is collected through the tax system, based on a percentage of your income above a certain level, after you've graduated. If you never earn above that amount (£25k currently), you never make repayments. If you reach age 65 without repaying the "loan", it gets written off. If you make yourself bankrupt, it doesn't go away. About the only meaningful differences are (1) you still have to pay it even if you move abroad/out of UK tax, (2) you can eventually pay it all off if you earn enough and (3) you can pay the fees at the time if you want to instead.
Compared to the "golden age" which many people think of in terms of UK university education, there's not much difference. Marginal personal tax rates are lower now than they were in the 60s, 70s and early 80s so people may well be better off on graduating than they would have been under the old system if taken in its totality.
The real difference is the fact that students are now expected to cover their own living costs while studying, vs previously receiving grants to cover these. That is a meaningful disincentive to go to university but the constant bluster from student "unions" that student debt is a problem is, I suspect, putting far more people off university under what is basically a relatively fair system.
Invalid passport, copy of a booklet or even possession of illegal weapon are insufficient to prove that someone is a terrorist.
True if you are talking about the common language definition. But absolutely not true if you are talking about the legal definition. For example, how about this woman who was convicted (although this was later overturned on appeal) of terrorism for possessing books (including poetry she herself had written).
The senior judiciary appear to be pretty horrified by the prospect as well so there is perhaps some hope. See this article by Lord Phillips, who before he retired had been Lord Chief Justice, the Senior Law Lord and the president of the Supreme Court.
I've seen this repeated a few times in this thread (and indeed whenever the intersection between homosexuality and Christianity is raised as a topic), however it is a misunderstanding of the theology of the most common Christian traditions. The dietary laws of the Old Testament are generally viewed in these traditions as forming a part of the Old Covenant which came to an end with Jesus (along with other laws which separated Jews from Gentiles) and were not a part of the New Covenant. This article has more detail on the differences between traditions.
This is apparently an issue particularly in Switzerland where the local banks now won't touch anyone who is even married to a US citizen (even if they are not themselves a US citizen). Many banks and other financial institutions have also closed the existing accounts of US citizens at very short notice and as a consequence US citizens are now excluded from a large part of the financial services market in that country.
Even if you agree with the concept of "global taxation" of foreign resident citizens, FATCA in particular seems to have been pretty counterproductive. Those who are truly evading US taxes and have dual citizenship could presumably bank with one of the local banks who don't share any information and declare themselves not a US citizen (using their second country passport as "proof"). Meanwhile those who play by the rules get stuck with access to at best a limited banking market which will presumably charge them heavily for the privilege of dealing with them.
MS can't even make their own products backwards/forwards-compatible without subtle formatting or processing bugs creeping in - so even with the best will in the world I'm just not sure this is an easily solvable problem.
The other big problem is that LibreOffice Calc in particular is still a long way behind Excel in terms of functionality. Even ignoring VBA, the basic formula support just isn't there. I don't know if this is lack of work, copyright/patent issues or something else but it means I simply can't use Calc for work at the moment. Anyone who needs to interoperate with Excel needs to buy Excel, and that means forcing people to use something else is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
I expect what will actually happen is that we'll end up with a (long) period of "Works best in Internet Explorer"-style hell. People who need to work with government will resort to doing their work in MS products then copying the outputs into LibreOffice, or using PDFs, or other equally time-wasting strategies. Everyone will hate it. And everyone will blame LibreOffice (and by extension, OSS) for it.
What is more interesting is the Cabinet Office banning (excpet under 'expcetional' circumstances) all IT projects billing more than £100M - in order to stop them being locked into a few big integrators. You never know, perhaps they'll start delivering IT projects that are semi-functional and only a factor two over budget - that would be a real improvement.
I'll believe that when I see it. Every IT project of that size was already "exceptional" in terms of trying to deliver some promised huge benefits to someone (service users, taxpayers, etc). If they really meant it they would be banning "transformational" projects of any type in government (whether IT-related or not) and just get on with trying to cut small incremental levels of cost out of how they run the current system each year.
I've been using the Ribbon format for about 3 years now and I STILL hate it. The newer versions of Outlook are the worst - the combination of the ribbon and the way MS couldn't be bothered to reimplement the compact header format really eat up vertical screen space for those of us who prefer the bottom preview pane layout (yes I know I can hide the ribbon but then I lose all the buttons which do what I use all the time, which is mainly the quick search box). On a laptop with only 768 vertical pixels (when I'm not docked) that is a serious headache which leaves me using OWA instead of the full blown outlook usually.
As you point out, the 2003->2007+ switch was therefore a huge opportunity for OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whichever fork is your favourite. The UI is great, easy to understand and the small differences from Office 2003 (like where the cursor ends up mid-editing a formula in Excel) are actually mostly positive incremental steps. You theoretically get the usability benefits of 2007+ (particularly for Excel, where memory/size constraints in 2003 were getting to be a problem for many).
Unfortunately though, interoperability is extremely poor - LibreOffice simply can't handle a big Excel spreadsheet (which is in my experience at least 60% of what most businesses buy Office for), and I've sent docx files from LibreOffice where, when people open them in MS Word, all the line breaks are suddenly gone or other formatting oddities appear. As another example, trying to use LibreOffice's "track changes" equivalent functionality left me with a docx file that Word (and often LibreOffice itself) is unable to open.
I would love to think that if the UK Government does move to LibreOffice they would fund someone to provide decent support who can fix a lot of these issues - that is supposed to be how the model works and fixing these issues would be of huge benefit to everyone. Unfortunately I can't really see that happening. I suspect instead it will end up being a typical government cock-up and massively overspend/under-deliver. I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.
Actually in the UK we do (at least in theory) have an explicit right to a "fair" trial under Article 6 of the ECHR which is incorporated into English law via the Human Rights Act 1998.
Interestingly, digging a bit deeper and looking at the average sentences (in 2009, the most recent year available) for those given immediate custodial sentences (which is not all of those convicted), the statistics say 33.6 months was the average for robbery and 48.7 months for sexual offences (which are statistically the longest sentences on average). Of course the lengthiest of sentences for those offences will have been much longer but as a taxpayer the cost of jailing this guy Vickerman for 5 years for what was, after all, a non-violent crime doesn't sit well with me in context (although admittedly I know nothing about the details of the case). See here, page 40 for the stats.
This brings up an interesting division in how people think about crime. Some (many?) people would say that stealing a penny each from 5 million people is a crime for which a lesser punishment is justified than stealing £50,000 from one individual, despite the monetary amounts involved being the same (and the first scheme being more audacious). The debate over whether harsh penalties for infringement of IP laws are justified (leaving aside the issue of whether the existence or persistence of the IP in question is in itself just) is really another version of that debate. I wonder if perhaps a generational difference in attitudes about this aspect of morality (ie older legislators and executives appear to view infringement so much more seriously than younger people).
I'm actually not so bothered by this as a business practice per se. When e.g. MS does the same thing with CALs etc, the issue is really about lack of competition in certain segments. Noone else has a product as slick as Outlook or Excel otherwise they would take MS's business in a shot. Economists might desscribe this as MS "adding value" (much as I'm personally loath to think of Outlook and Excel doing that...).
Back to the car market and in theory, a competitor with the same cost base may well be able to offer a product which is priced at, or slightly above (to account for marginally reduced total volumes) the weighted average price of the SKUs offered on this model while offering ALL the top-end features - so the market ought to ensure it disappears except for features which are truly unique to one or another manufacturer (which tend to be right at the top end anyway). Seat-heaters don't really qualify for this IMHO.
So the fact that this is happening indicates, to me, that there is an (at least slightly) disfunctional market operating in the car market in the US. That is certainly not down to this practice and is, I suspect, more down to things like import tariffs and regulations making it difficult for new competitors to enter the market.
Really? I've seen cars which pre-dated the Model T and are still road-legal (at least in the UK) at vintage/veteran car events.
It is expensive to maintain (and run, if you drive long distances - at least compared to modern cars which are vastly more fuel-efficient) older cars properly if you're used to something <3 years old - but compared to the cost of maintaining an average 1980s (ie 30-year old) car, there's not a huge amount of difference. The main difficulty with replacement parts is you need to find an engineering shop which will do one-offs for those more often than not. But there are a *lot* of people (not owners) who will do this as (at least in part) a labour of love, just for the pleasure of seeing these machines continue to run.
Fuel also isn't a real issue. Leaded petrol (and additives for unleaded) are still available, at least in the UK, from specialist suppliers. For older cars, it was never an issue anyway - as they were never built for leaded petrol anyway and the move back to unleaded petrol was actually a positive for those owners if they hadn't converted their cars. Have a look here for example.
That might open a whole can of worms. I imagine the interaction between DMCA and Magnusson-Moss Act is pretty ripe for some protracted and expensive litigation (and as usual, I suspect the lawyers will end up th biggest winners from that)
If a human can view the content and work out where the ads are, so (ultimately) can a computer - the obvious fix for now is that Greasemonkey can be used to sort those out.
I'd also add though, this may well be heavily counter-productive for many sites. There is very little truly unique content out there in reality - and as a consequence it is worth far less to the marginal user than the site owners often think it is. Some of the sites which lose viewers because of this may simply say "good riddance" as those users are a net drain on resources - but that's a dangerous path to take as those people are, I would imagine, more likely to be either influential opinion-formers (who drive much more traffic to the site who won't block ads), or providing user-generated content which has value in itself.
Otherwise, chasing *alleged* "assassin" motorcyclist through town on market day is EXACTLY what this law will be used to get a free pass for.
Remember Tony Blair's chauffeur driving him down the M4 bus lane? I can easily see this being abused for "politician or important official is late for a meeting" type situations too (in fact those will be the more visible cases).
Actually I'd be quite happy if the police were banned from engaging in high-speed car chases. They just create more danger for everyone else on the road, encouraging those being chased to drive even more dangerously as well as the risk that the police cars themselves cause an accident. There are other ways of catching criminals which do not create such danger for the rest of us.
Serving members of the security services carry a warrant card. If they are speeding the police may well pull them over. Displaying the warrant card and explaining they are on a live op *may* get them let off, but there is no requirement for the police to treat them any differently to the general public. This changes that, and about time.
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
Utter BS. It's just people who enjoy being "above the law" wanting to be *more* above the law and feel important. Noone should be above the law. They are not an emergency service and they are not police. The only justification for speeding should be to get *to* an emergency situation as a first responder, ie paramedic or fire crew.
Similarly as the dedicated hardware gets more advanced, mining on GPUs and especially CPUs becomes completely useless, so even with thousands of nodes you will never make any worthwhile amount. The returns from using malware to mine bitcoins must be pretty tiny today, even with huge numbers of infected systems.
This is interesting because it relates to one of the problems I have wondered about with Bitcoin for a while. Largely, trust in Bitcoin (at least for me) depends on the idea that "anyone" can (and will) verify a block and hence it is difficult to cheat. But as mining becomes uneconomic for anyone who doesn't have specialised rigs, the number of people who can realistically and economically verify blocks starts to shrink, potentially quite rapidly.
This effect is irrespective of the USD/whatever value of a Bitcoin and of the absolute number of Bitcoins earned in a mining transaction - it's simply about economies of scale in the marginal cost for mining which leads to marginal revenue being below the marginal cost for most people using the currency - ie the gradual appearance of a barrier to entry in mining for smaller players. This in turn magnifies the risk of collusion. Thus as Bitcoin becomes more popular, it also becomes less trustworthy, which is not a property you would ideally want it to have.
In reality I doubt this is likely to be a big problem as most people are willing to trust central banks already, compared to which Bitcoin is always likely to be a least a little bit "better"; but it is an interesting philosophical question.
This is precisely why I refuse to use Bitcoin. Its requirement to perform energy-wasting computation is a serious design flaw.
Of course some mining work is necessary -- we need 3rd-party validation of signatures and transactions, and we need a financial incentive to perform those calculations. Unfortunately, Bitcoin also requires the mining process to perform useless calculations, which take the vast majority of the mining time.
This makes Bitcoin highly susceptible to irrelevance, once new digital currencies are developed that have a more elegant and efficient design.
Actually, those calculations are not entirely useless. Yes there needs to be a verification of signatures and transactions BUT this process also needs to be "hard" to achieve so that I can't just invite six of my friends to immediately verify both double-spend transactions I have just posted. In turn, the fact that these need to be "hard" transactions is why there is an economic incentive to perform them. What's more, you also need the "hard" work to be dependent on the specific ordering of the blockchain so that you can't solve a bunch of it in advance but not share the results until you are ready to send your double-spending transactions to the blockchain. Think of it as similar to (though not the same as) the idea that you want a password hashing function to be slow (have a high number of rounds/good salts/etc) to make brute-force attacks harder.
There are potential alternative scheme which mean the hard work is less "useless" (e.g. protein folding) but I think it's highly likely that these only really work if you have a system with more centralised tracking of the "work" (to produce the path-dependency); at that point, you could simply ask "why not just trust a central authority to verify the transactions in the first place"...
It's not a currency, you fucking retard. It is a commodity. The fact that it can lose--what are we at now--66% of it's value overnight pretty much makes it clear it isn't money, but rather a security. And a very volatile one at that.
Utter rubbish. Whatever you think about Bitcoin, stability of exchange rate has nothing to do with whether something is a "currency" or not. The Mexican Peso dropped by nearly 50% in less than a week in 1994. The Russian Rouble dropped by 70% in less than 6 months in 1998. Argentina's peso devalued by around 75% in a similarly short space of time in 2002 (including at least a 30% drop overnight). There are lots and lots of examples of rapid currency devaluations throughout history.
I'm also in Europe and in my experience the lifetime of CFLs has been approximately equal to the incandescents they replaced, but the failure pattern is different. Incandescents used to see a bunch failing when we got the first onset of colder weather each winter, with a bunch of bulbs going at roughly the same time; CFLs fail more evenly throughout the year but nonetheless they do fail at about the same average age, I'd guess c.12 months. The failure modes I've seen are that they simply don't start any more, start flickering like mad or just get very dark. No fires or the like.
The other issues with CFLs also all still hold - slow to start, bad colour temperature, and most significantly mislabeling ("100W" equivalent bulbs are reallty more like 50-60W, and the "true" 100W equivalents are much more expensive and difficult to find).
Overall though the impact on our lives has been pretty minimal because we basically avoided using them in areas where we spend long amounts of time. Firstly, we already had halogen bulbs/fittings in some of these areas (using a dimmer halogen still gives a nice quality of light) and secondly where we didn't we now use candles a lot more than we used to. Actually candlelight is nicer even than incandescents used to be so in a weird way it's sort of been a positive.
BUT - governments are special; essentially you can't sue them unless they agree to allow it.
In the UK, unlike in the US, there is no longer automatic sovereign immunity for the government from suits for contract or tort. However the legislation which governs the intelligence services is so very broadly drawn that I suspect that anything and everything they do is always legal (or, at least, can be authorised ex post facto by a minister without the involvement of parliament or a court and thus made legal). That leaves, perhaps, seeking a judicial review of the authorising minister's decision but I'm not sure how successful you might be there. This is what GCHQ was boasting about in some of the "marketing" slides which were published by the Guardian.
Erm - the guy that jumped the ticket barrier <snip>...
He didn't jump any ticket barrier. The "jumped the ticket barrier" comment was attributed at the time to an eyewitness but it has been alleged that it was in fact one of the police officers involved (and if that's true then it appears consistent with the idea of the Met realising their mistake and trying to smear him through this and other 'off the record' briefings to the press with the aim of making themselves look less incompetent).
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The main three parties were all in favour of this. This wasn't just a stitch-up amongst the leadership with the MPs given a free choice - the party machinery was obviously forcing their MPs to vote in favour too. At this point I feel deeply embarassed to be British, as the way our elected representatives have acted makes the rubber-stamp parliaments in third world military dictatorships look better. I don't understand why even the Lib Dems were for this - electorally they have pretty much nothing to lose at this point and it would at least make them look like they had SOME of the principles people thought they had.
I'm not fortunate enough to have a local MP who voted even half-against this. I wrote to her and she wrote me a long, obviously cut and pasted email response (even down to the differing font sizes for different sections of text). Didn't even mention her personal views, just what Ed Miliband (the leader of the Labour party) had as his soundbite of the day.
So what I'd desparately like to know is, who can I vote for at the next election who won't stand for this sort of bullshit. If there is someone who is actually against this, and who has proper credibility (i.e. not the Lib Dems), I'd love to know. I'd rather not vote for the Greens (I am naturally a free market sort of person and would like to see a libertarian conservative type of candidate elected) but if they're the only option, they've got my vote as a result of this.
The result is that tuition has gone through the roof. The same degree that was free for me 25 years ago now costs £9,000/year ($16,400/year). It is also now a 4 year degree (used to be 3 years) because of the lower standards in school. Of course this means that students acquire so much debt that they have to be extremely concerned about their potential salary after graduating. The puts an increasing pressure for universities to shift from the academic institutes of higher education which have served society for the best part of a millennium (or possibly longer in some cases) towards becoming vocational training colleges where each course is targeted to a specific career which provides enough income to pay of the massive debt so good luck finding the next generation of teachers!
The current UK system for tuition is really much closer to a graduate tax than "tuition fees". Everyone automatically gets a loan for the fees. The amount you repay is collected through the tax system, based on a percentage of your income above a certain level, after you've graduated. If you never earn above that amount (£25k currently), you never make repayments. If you reach age 65 without repaying the "loan", it gets written off. If you make yourself bankrupt, it doesn't go away. About the only meaningful differences are (1) you still have to pay it even if you move abroad/out of UK tax, (2) you can eventually pay it all off if you earn enough and (3) you can pay the fees at the time if you want to instead.
Compared to the "golden age" which many people think of in terms of UK university education, there's not much difference. Marginal personal tax rates are lower now than they were in the 60s, 70s and early 80s so people may well be better off on graduating than they would have been under the old system if taken in its totality.
The real difference is the fact that students are now expected to cover their own living costs while studying, vs previously receiving grants to cover these. That is a meaningful disincentive to go to university but the constant bluster from student "unions" that student debt is a problem is, I suspect, putting far more people off university under what is basically a relatively fair system.
Invalid passport, copy of a booklet or even possession of illegal weapon are insufficient to prove that someone is a terrorist.
True if you are talking about the common language definition. But absolutely not true if you are talking about the legal definition. For example, how about this woman who was convicted (although this was later overturned on appeal) of terrorism for possessing books (including poetry she herself had written).
The senior judiciary appear to be pretty horrified by the prospect as well so there is perhaps some hope. See this article by Lord Phillips, who before he retired had been Lord Chief Justice, the Senior Law Lord and the president of the Supreme Court.
Eating pig? sin.
I've seen this repeated a few times in this thread (and indeed whenever the intersection between homosexuality and Christianity is raised as a topic), however it is a misunderstanding of the theology of the most common Christian traditions. The dietary laws of the Old Testament are generally viewed in these traditions as forming a part of the Old Covenant which came to an end with Jesus (along with other laws which separated Jews from Gentiles) and were not a part of the New Covenant. This article has more detail on the differences between traditions.
This is apparently an issue particularly in Switzerland where the local banks now won't touch anyone who is even married to a US citizen (even if they are not themselves a US citizen). Many banks and other financial institutions have also closed the existing accounts of US citizens at very short notice and as a consequence US citizens are now excluded from a large part of the financial services market in that country.
Even if you agree with the concept of "global taxation" of foreign resident citizens, FATCA in particular seems to have been pretty counterproductive. Those who are truly evading US taxes and have dual citizenship could presumably bank with one of the local banks who don't share any information and declare themselves not a US citizen (using their second country passport as "proof"). Meanwhile those who play by the rules get stuck with access to at best a limited banking market which will presumably charge them heavily for the privilege of dealing with them.
MS can't even make their own products backwards/forwards-compatible without subtle formatting or processing bugs creeping in - so even with the best will in the world I'm just not sure this is an easily solvable problem.
The other big problem is that LibreOffice Calc in particular is still a long way behind Excel in terms of functionality. Even ignoring VBA, the basic formula support just isn't there. I don't know if this is lack of work, copyright/patent issues or something else but it means I simply can't use Calc for work at the moment. Anyone who needs to interoperate with Excel needs to buy Excel, and that means forcing people to use something else is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
I expect what will actually happen is that we'll end up with a (long) period of "Works best in Internet Explorer"-style hell. People who need to work with government will resort to doing their work in MS products then copying the outputs into LibreOffice, or using PDFs, or other equally time-wasting strategies. Everyone will hate it. And everyone will blame LibreOffice (and by extension, OSS) for it.
You are assuming that MS Office's handling of ODF is the same as LibreOffice's. It isn't.
What is more interesting is the Cabinet Office banning (excpet under 'expcetional' circumstances) all IT projects billing more than £100M - in order to stop them being locked into a few big integrators. You never know, perhaps they'll start delivering IT projects that are semi-functional and only a factor two over budget - that would be a real improvement.
I'll believe that when I see it. Every IT project of that size was already "exceptional" in terms of trying to deliver some promised huge benefits to someone (service users, taxpayers, etc). If they really meant it they would be banning "transformational" projects of any type in government (whether IT-related or not) and just get on with trying to cut small incremental levels of cost out of how they run the current system each year.
I've been using the Ribbon format for about 3 years now and I STILL hate it. The newer versions of Outlook are the worst - the combination of the ribbon and the way MS couldn't be bothered to reimplement the compact header format really eat up vertical screen space for those of us who prefer the bottom preview pane layout (yes I know I can hide the ribbon but then I lose all the buttons which do what I use all the time, which is mainly the quick search box). On a laptop with only 768 vertical pixels (when I'm not docked) that is a serious headache which leaves me using OWA instead of the full blown outlook usually.
As you point out, the 2003->2007+ switch was therefore a huge opportunity for OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whichever fork is your favourite. The UI is great, easy to understand and the small differences from Office 2003 (like where the cursor ends up mid-editing a formula in Excel) are actually mostly positive incremental steps. You theoretically get the usability benefits of 2007+ (particularly for Excel, where memory/size constraints in 2003 were getting to be a problem for many).
Unfortunately though, interoperability is extremely poor - LibreOffice simply can't handle a big Excel spreadsheet (which is in my experience at least 60% of what most businesses buy Office for), and I've sent docx files from LibreOffice where, when people open them in MS Word, all the line breaks are suddenly gone or other formatting oddities appear. As another example, trying to use LibreOffice's "track changes" equivalent functionality left me with a docx file that Word (and often LibreOffice itself) is unable to open.
I would love to think that if the UK Government does move to LibreOffice they would fund someone to provide decent support who can fix a lot of these issues - that is supposed to be how the model works and fixing these issues would be of huge benefit to everyone. Unfortunately I can't really see that happening. I suspect instead it will end up being a typical government cock-up and massively overspend/under-deliver. I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.
Actually in the UK we do (at least in theory) have an explicit right to a "fair" trial under Article 6 of the ECHR which is incorporated into English law via the Human Rights Act 1998.
Interestingly, digging a bit deeper and looking at the average sentences (in 2009, the most recent year available) for those given immediate custodial sentences (which is not all of those convicted), the statistics say 33.6 months was the average for robbery and 48.7 months for sexual offences (which are statistically the longest sentences on average). Of course the lengthiest of sentences for those offences will have been much longer but as a taxpayer the cost of jailing this guy Vickerman for 5 years for what was, after all, a non-violent crime doesn't sit well with me in context (although admittedly I know nothing about the details of the case). See here, page 40 for the stats.
This brings up an interesting division in how people think about crime. Some (many?) people would say that stealing a penny each from 5 million people is a crime for which a lesser punishment is justified than stealing £50,000 from one individual, despite the monetary amounts involved being the same (and the first scheme being more audacious). The debate over whether harsh penalties for infringement of IP laws are justified (leaving aside the issue of whether the existence or persistence of the IP in question is in itself just) is really another version of that debate. I wonder if perhaps a generational difference in attitudes about this aspect of morality (ie older legislators and executives appear to view infringement so much more seriously than younger people).
I'm actually not so bothered by this as a business practice per se. When e.g. MS does the same thing with CALs etc, the issue is really about lack of competition in certain segments. Noone else has a product as slick as Outlook or Excel otherwise they would take MS's business in a shot. Economists might desscribe this as MS "adding value" (much as I'm personally loath to think of Outlook and Excel doing that...).
Back to the car market and in theory, a competitor with the same cost base may well be able to offer a product which is priced at, or slightly above (to account for marginally reduced total volumes) the weighted average price of the SKUs offered on this model while offering ALL the top-end features - so the market ought to ensure it disappears except for features which are truly unique to one or another manufacturer (which tend to be right at the top end anyway). Seat-heaters don't really qualify for this IMHO.
So the fact that this is happening indicates, to me, that there is an (at least slightly) disfunctional market operating in the car market in the US. That is certainly not down to this practice and is, I suspect, more down to things like import tariffs and regulations making it difficult for new competitors to enter the market.
Really? I've seen cars which pre-dated the Model T and are still road-legal (at least in the UK) at vintage/veteran car events.
It is expensive to maintain (and run, if you drive long distances - at least compared to modern cars which are vastly more fuel-efficient) older cars properly if you're used to something <3 years old - but compared to the cost of maintaining an average 1980s (ie 30-year old) car, there's not a huge amount of difference. The main difficulty with replacement parts is you need to find an engineering shop which will do one-offs for those more often than not. But there are a *lot* of people (not owners) who will do this as (at least in part) a labour of love, just for the pleasure of seeing these machines continue to run.
Fuel also isn't a real issue. Leaded petrol (and additives for unleaded) are still available, at least in the UK, from specialist suppliers. For older cars, it was never an issue anyway - as they were never built for leaded petrol anyway and the move back to unleaded petrol was actually a positive for those owners if they hadn't converted their cars. Have a look here for example.
That might open a whole can of worms. I imagine the interaction between DMCA and Magnusson-Moss Act is pretty ripe for some protracted and expensive litigation (and as usual, I suspect the lawyers will end up th biggest winners from that)
If a human can view the content and work out where the ads are, so (ultimately) can a computer - the obvious fix for now is that Greasemonkey can be used to sort those out.
I'd also add though, this may well be heavily counter-productive for many sites. There is very little truly unique content out there in reality - and as a consequence it is worth far less to the marginal user than the site owners often think it is. Some of the sites which lose viewers because of this may simply say "good riddance" as those users are a net drain on resources - but that's a dangerous path to take as those people are, I would imagine, more likely to be either influential opinion-formers (who drive much more traffic to the site who won't block ads), or providing user-generated content which has value in itself.
Otherwise, chasing *alleged* "assassin" motorcyclist through town on market day is EXACTLY what this law will be used to get a free pass for.
Remember Tony Blair's chauffeur driving him down the M4 bus lane? I can easily see this being abused for "politician or important official is late for a meeting" type situations too (in fact those will be the more visible cases).
Actually I'd be quite happy if the police were banned from engaging in high-speed car chases. They just create more danger for everyone else on the road, encouraging those being chased to drive even more dangerously as well as the risk that the police cars themselves cause an accident. There are other ways of catching criminals which do not create such danger for the rest of us.
Serving members of the security services carry a warrant card. If they are speeding the police may well pull them over. Displaying the warrant card and explaining they are on a live op *may* get them let off, but there is no requirement for the police to treat them any differently to the general public. This changes that, and about time.
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
Utter BS. It's just people who enjoy being "above the law" wanting to be *more* above the law and feel important. Noone should be above the law. They are not an emergency service and they are not police. The only justification for speeding should be to get *to* an emergency situation as a first responder, ie paramedic or fire crew.
Similarly as the dedicated hardware gets more advanced, mining on GPUs and especially CPUs becomes completely useless, so even with thousands of nodes you will never make any worthwhile amount. The returns from using malware to mine bitcoins must be pretty tiny today, even with huge numbers of infected systems.
This is interesting because it relates to one of the problems I have wondered about with Bitcoin for a while. Largely, trust in Bitcoin (at least for me) depends on the idea that "anyone" can (and will) verify a block and hence it is difficult to cheat. But as mining becomes uneconomic for anyone who doesn't have specialised rigs, the number of people who can realistically and economically verify blocks starts to shrink, potentially quite rapidly.
This effect is irrespective of the USD/whatever value of a Bitcoin and of the absolute number of Bitcoins earned in a mining transaction - it's simply about economies of scale in the marginal cost for mining which leads to marginal revenue being below the marginal cost for most people using the currency - ie the gradual appearance of a barrier to entry in mining for smaller players. This in turn magnifies the risk of collusion. Thus as Bitcoin becomes more popular, it also becomes less trustworthy, which is not a property you would ideally want it to have.
In reality I doubt this is likely to be a big problem as most people are willing to trust central banks already, compared to which Bitcoin is always likely to be a least a little bit "better"; but it is an interesting philosophical question.
This is precisely why I refuse to use Bitcoin. Its requirement to perform energy-wasting computation is a serious design flaw.
Of course some mining work is necessary -- we need 3rd-party validation of signatures and transactions, and we need a financial incentive to perform those calculations. Unfortunately, Bitcoin also requires the mining process to perform useless calculations, which take the vast majority of the mining time.
This makes Bitcoin highly susceptible to irrelevance, once new digital currencies are developed that have a more elegant and efficient design.
Actually, those calculations are not entirely useless. Yes there needs to be a verification of signatures and transactions BUT this process also needs to be "hard" to achieve so that I can't just invite six of my friends to immediately verify both double-spend transactions I have just posted. In turn, the fact that these need to be "hard" transactions is why there is an economic incentive to perform them. What's more, you also need the "hard" work to be dependent on the specific ordering of the blockchain so that you can't solve a bunch of it in advance but not share the results until you are ready to send your double-spending transactions to the blockchain. Think of it as similar to (though not the same as) the idea that you want a password hashing function to be slow (have a high number of rounds/good salts/etc) to make brute-force attacks harder.
There are potential alternative scheme which mean the hard work is less "useless" (e.g. protein folding) but I think it's highly likely that these only really work if you have a system with more centralised tracking of the "work" (to produce the path-dependency); at that point, you could simply ask "why not just trust a central authority to verify the transactions in the first place"...
It's not a currency, you fucking retard. It is a commodity. The fact that it can lose--what are we at now--66% of it's value overnight pretty much makes it clear it isn't money, but rather a security. And a very volatile one at that.
Utter rubbish. Whatever you think about Bitcoin, stability of exchange rate has nothing to do with whether something is a "currency" or not. The Mexican Peso dropped by nearly 50% in less than a week in 1994. The Russian Rouble dropped by 70% in less than 6 months in 1998. Argentina's peso devalued by around 75% in a similarly short space of time in 2002 (including at least a 30% drop overnight). There are lots and lots of examples of rapid currency devaluations throughout history.
I'm also in Europe and in my experience the lifetime of CFLs has been approximately equal to the incandescents they replaced, but the failure pattern is different. Incandescents used to see a bunch failing when we got the first onset of colder weather each winter, with a bunch of bulbs going at roughly the same time; CFLs fail more evenly throughout the year but nonetheless they do fail at about the same average age, I'd guess c.12 months. The failure modes I've seen are that they simply don't start any more, start flickering like mad or just get very dark. No fires or the like.
The other issues with CFLs also all still hold - slow to start, bad colour temperature, and most significantly mislabeling ("100W" equivalent bulbs are reallty more like 50-60W, and the "true" 100W equivalents are much more expensive and difficult to find).
Overall though the impact on our lives has been pretty minimal because we basically avoided using them in areas where we spend long amounts of time. Firstly, we already had halogen bulbs/fittings in some of these areas (using a dimmer halogen still gives a nice quality of light) and secondly where we didn't we now use candles a lot more than we used to. Actually candlelight is nicer even than incandescents used to be so in a weird way it's sort of been a positive.
BUT - governments are special; essentially you can't sue them unless they agree to allow it.
In the UK, unlike in the US, there is no longer automatic sovereign immunity for the government from suits for contract or tort. However the legislation which governs the intelligence services is so very broadly drawn that I suspect that anything and everything they do is always legal (or, at least, can be authorised ex post facto by a minister without the involvement of parliament or a court and thus made legal). That leaves, perhaps, seeking a judicial review of the authorising minister's decision but I'm not sure how successful you might be there. This is what GCHQ was boasting about in some of the "marketing" slides which were published by the Guardian.
Erm - the guy that jumped the ticket barrier <snip> ...
He didn't jump any ticket barrier. The "jumped the ticket barrier" comment was attributed at the time to an eyewitness but it has been alleged that it was in fact one of the police officers involved (and if that's true then it appears consistent with the idea of the Met realising their mistake and trying to smear him through this and other 'off the record' briefings to the press with the aim of making themselves look less incompetent).