Only for those of us who won't have to pay for it. You'd expect the overpaid sinecurists who lost all this data to be trying to minimise the consequences of their laxity but they're doing the opposite. To the point that it's now an 'infinite' amount of damage caused. One that will, by extension, require an infinite amount of money to fix.
Unless the politicians see through this outrageous bit of self-interested lobbying, and there's no reason to suspect that they will, a whole lot of taxes will shortly be heading not to help the poor or sick or fix the roads, but to a bunch of lying charlatans. Like the bank bailout, but with none of the benefits.
The only novel thing, and by far the spookiest, about this "research" is that it's coming from a "Department of Psychology".
As for the ramifications, it'll be a long time before North Korea's press officers get much overtime on the back of it. I doubt it'll be of interest even to domestic security services. However cheap and widespread hi-res cameras become, 90% reliability is woefully low. They can get much better than that already, just with a board and a bucket.
That's a very good point. Hospice care is seen as gentle and dignified, but that's only because by the time you're in a hospice the amount of morphine needed to stop you screaming (the apparent definition of 'comfort' is an absence of screams) will stop you doing, or thinking, anything much at all. All you can do is lie there, staring at the ceiling, listening to your own bones crumble and/or waiting for your organs to fail.
I know this because my father died in a hospice after a few weeks of cheerful and dedicated care. Four or five days before he died, after a long period of silence, and when we thought (and had been reassured) that he'd be more or less unaware of anything, he escaped the befuddlement for a moment and shouted his last words "I wish I'd blown my ****** brains out". It was the most shocking experience of my life, not least because he was not a man for swearing. The effort it took him to do this, and the obvious terror he was in, was enough to convince me that hospices, though better than the legal alternatives, are a fraud. They're a chemically-imposed torture, and only accepted because we'll happily confuse incapacity for comfort, and muteness for contentment. Hospices deliver death by lethal injection, just like euthanasia, but spread over weeks or months to keep it legal. Like a nice funeral, it's not done in the interests of the victims, but to give the survivors the impression they've done the right thing. To my mind, that's just cruel.
That's a good description, with interesting ramifications.
One thing that seems to be falling out of this is that, on account of the secret work of these secret agencies being secret, they're not really accountable. They can't, for example, publish the data they're not supposed to know about, or reveal very much of it even to the governments that are supposed to be running them. Effectively there's a massive, largely autonomous, supra-national bureaucracy, analogous to the G8 or the OECD or whatever, but unanswerable to any such organization or individual government.
Given the intriguing suggestion that every past human civilization has fallen owing to their bureaucracy going rogue - either becoming so unwieldy or corrupt that it's become impossible for governments to govern - I'm wondering if this mightn't be the start of something interesting.
I'm not sure about that. Judging by Hillsborough, De Menezes and Tomlinson, the courts never confuse suspicion with evidence, and are happy to accept almost any account, provided enough police officers deliver an identical version of it (even down to the punctuation, which just shows how well they're trained). Where the absence of video is concerned, the simultaneous and comprehensive failure of CCTV cameras in a given radius (which may, in London, be a few dozen) has become so commonplace in cases where police misconduct is alleged that it's hardly grounds for suspicion.
In any case, the courts rarely get involved until years later, if at all. In England and Wales, we have an Independent Police Complaints Commission, which deals with all such cases, and which is firmly on the side of justice. Where upsetting incidents occur, the IPCC's job is to issue a press release, an hour or so before any complaint, setting out the results of their inquiry. If an investigation is, despite that, still needed, they usually outsource it to the police force in question, who are better placed to know exactly what they want to have happened. This not only produces quicker results, but insures against the further waste of public money in the courts. It is a system that, bar a few high-profile cases pursued by especially persistent mobs of bereaved troublemakers, has served them all very well for many years.
Simple operation? You've clearly never worked for a large company.
Even if a warning wasn't trickled down a month ago, and we've no reason to assume it wasn't, the person whose job it is to act on it, provided they weren't on vacation, won't have simply thrown five dollars at a registrar. They'll have had to put in a request to the finance department, probably via a cost-management chain of command, with a full description of what needed to be paid to whom and why, with payee reference, cost-center code, expense code and departmental authorization, and hoped it would arrive in time to be allocated to the next monthly rubber-stamp meeting. Assuming the application contained no errors, was suitably endorsed and was made against an allocated budget that hadn't been over-spent and wasn't under review, then, perhaps, in the fullness of time, it might have received approval and have been sent back down the chain for subsequent escalation to the bought-ledger department, who'd have looked at the due date, added ninety days and put it on the bottom of the pile. After those ninety days, when the finance folk began to take a view to assessing its urgency, unless they found a proper purchase order from the supplier, and a full set of signed terms and conditions of purchase, non-disclosure agreements, sustainability declarations and ethical supply-chain statements, as now required by any self-respecting outfit, it'll have been put aside and, eventually, sent back round to be done properly. Or, if it all checked out first time, it'll have been put on the system for calendering into the next round of payment processing.
I'm sure it might be possible to streamline aspects of such mechanisms, but to suggest there's anything trivial about them is a touch hasty. But you never know. Perhaps they're already thinking of planning a meeting to discuss it, and are working on a framework for identifying the stakeholders as I write.
This week, you've saved a bit of time and paperwork that may, or may not, make a difference to the overall profitability of the place you work, by happening to have the right bit of knowledge at the right time. Next week, you'll be the guy that fixes things.
I guarantee you, however, that not everything you read on Google is correct. And, one day, you'll apply your skills to a few thousand dollars-worth of equipment and, through carelessness or misinformation or a pesky warranty violation, you'll stop being the guy that fixes things.
That'll be the day when you'll decide that being a jack-of-all trades is not necessarily an advantage in this world. It is sometimes better just to do one thing right, and let other people earn a living at what they're good at. That'll be the day when, if you keep your job, you'll turn into a "stubborn case-screw" who reckons that a regular income beats bragging rights.
But don't stop until you do. Your colleagues will have learnt that lesson the hard way, and will be looking forward to when you do the same.
This always annoys me, whatever the company concerned. The distinction between 'people' and 'employees' mightn't be conscious, but it's an insidious feature of the commodification of human resources. Every time I hear a phrase like it I fear we're one step closer to the sweatshop.
We have medical records already. Comparisons across populations already happen. The effect of habits on lifestyles can already be measured. Choices are available. Education is imposed Unfortunately, the two things we've found that make any significant difference to people's health are where they live and how much money they've got.
As for personal analytics, there's little chance of that extending beyond the small, self-selecting group that has a temporary interest. We've been able to count calories and measure our weight for the best part of a century, but only the self-obsessed bother, and not for long at that. What seems an exciting opportunity for the technocrat is a pain in the backside for the ordinary human who, on the whole, doesn't really care what you think they should die of.
If you really want to encourage healthy lifestyles, you need to convince people that dementia really is better than cancer, and that dying of cancer is more fun than a heart attack. Otherwise, the bad food wins.
Perhaps. Though if this report is anything to go by, their celebrated longevity might be at least partly explained by the near quarter-million immortals whose relatives have been dutifully drawing their pensions for them for up to half a century
The scanner being presented is an infrared camera, nothing more
So it's an infrared camera. But it's not just an infrared scanner, it's a fiscal stimulus. Look, we're in hard times and there are real sinecures at stake here - nobody will thank you for holding up the gravy train or peeing in the pork barrel.
Besides, since the Sniffex debacle, the US is lagging badly behind the UK in the production and marketing of high-ticket hobdangles aimed at the tax-guzzling fringes of the global paranoia industry, and it's about time it fought back.
We therefore have a duty to leave it to the experts. They're the one's being paid to go "reading the energy people emit" and if they think conductivity's a myth, then so it must be.
"apparently they wish to 'encourage the sort of creative innovation that occurs in America.' One can only assume that they've been missing the continual assault on the Fair Use doctrine here in the States."
The two aren't mutually exclusive and, in the UK, revisions to our laws would help address a pernicious problem. It goes without saying that the US has, partly as a result of such nebulous doctrines, the most creative legal industry on the planet; one which contributes significantly to the overall economy. In the UK, where the economy is so fragile that even lawyers with parliamentary incomes are feeling the squeeze, borrowing such innovations makes perfect and practical sense.
...but the idea of armed police is an absolute no go...launching Tasers from the sky would be public relations disaster.
First, the UK's armed police is significantly on the rise (for the Met, deployments have risen over 50% in six years, despite firearm incidents falling), and they're almost part of the landscape in London. Most of them are still static patrols of high-profile locations, but the Met has been actively planning for routine armed patrols.
The UK Police also seem immune to legal boundaries - their retention of DNA and the use of 'stop-and-search' have both been ruled illegal, with no discernible effect to date. More worryingly, even in high-profile cases of physical abuse, manslaughter and credit-card fraud, officers have been quietly rewarded rather than disciplined.
Secondly, they're getting much better at PR. If the Guardian is right, they started using the spy drones to scour the coast for immigrants: "There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be projected as a 'good news' story to the public rather than more 'big brother'." And, since then, they've been practicing on the BNP (paradoxically an anti-immigration minority party with a poor reputation).
It would be utterly wrong to conclude that the UK police are power-hungry, trigger-happy thugs with mental deficiencies, lethal toys, immunity from sanction and slick PR skills. But it would be incautious not to consider the possibility.
Depending on the sort of molecule they're sniffing for, and the detection method, traces in the parts-per-billion range can be detected almost instantly. The limitation is often the speed at which you can get a billion bits of air through your nozzle - or the wind-speed your detection method can withstand. Honeybees, for example, make good detectors in some circumstances, but get miffed in moderate breezes and refuse to work at all if you blow their antennae off.
However, even if they have to parcel up the smells and post them to a lab in Wisconsin, it'll still be quicker and probably cheaper than six years in Cuba.
As for usefulness, I don't think that's the point. It's not meant to be useful, it's meant to give the government a justification for the presumption of guilt. Although the Bill of Rights and the Majesty of the Law are worthy of respect, they are historical throwbacks that aren't always appropriate for a fast-changing world. Any device that can improve the efficiency of justice, even indirectly, must be welcomed by hard-pressed taxpayers.
I've rarely such unexpurgated garbage in my life. It's a sterile semantic argument stirred with misapprehensions.
For a start, Newtonian mechanics is referred to, and often, sometimes by proper scientists, even though Newton didn't do all the work. It's just a shorthand for a model that works adequately in the everyday human-scale world.
In the same way, Darwinian evolution is shorthand for the simple rules of thumb that Darwin suggested, and we refer to Darwinism because Wallacism sounds silly.
And the hubristic assertion that science was 'primitive' in Darwin's day assumes that science today is 'advanced'. Give it another 150 years, and that claim might look a little premature.
Finally, creationism belongs in a different category. Creationists have one thing to say, and they've said it. What more do they want?Scientists, on the other hand, have lots of interesting and useful things to find out, and need support and encouragement to do so. Pitching the two against each other is like pitching bassoonists against bankers - there's no appropriate contest and thus no sensible outcome.
It's admittedly odd that taxpayers are forced to pay for the scheme, targeted minorities are forced to buy the cards, the but the authorities can decide whether or not it's a sensible use of money.
On the other hand, there isn't much point having the readers unless there's a reason to suspect the bearer's identity. As the scheme is voluntary, those with suspect identities won't be the first in the queue for the cards.
As law-enforcement will only interested in those without cards, then there's not much point buying in them buying readers. That doesn't, on the other hand, invalidate the cards, which do still serve a purpose.
At present, the standard identification document is the gas bill which, naturally, discriminates against tenants, people without a gas supply and people who have pre-pay meters (usually the poor). The cards therefore improve the ability of poor people to pay for the privilege of 'interacting with government', and thus improve both 'social mobility' and 'engagement'. In addition, a card with a picture on it has to be arguably more reliable than a piece of paper that can be borrowed out of a dustbin by anyone with a mind to.
Google's definition of words is continually evolving. 'Evil' was, as older readers may remember, one of the first to mutate. Now it looks like 'harm' is on the move, too, and will soon join its little relatives 'fun', 'tax' and 'useful' in Google's rehabilitation centre for disadvantaged words.
'In his first act as prime minister, he transferred several significant powers to the Commons.'
There's a difference between power and responsibility, and a majority government has remarkably little difficulty in getting any result it wants out of the Commons, as demonstrated in the case of the Iraq War which was sanctioned by the Commons back in 2003. Electoral reform may redress this imbalance, but electoral reform has been quietly dropped from the Brown agenda, in much the same way is it was dropped from Blair's.
The end result is to diffuse democratic accountability, rather than focus it. The power is in the same hands, but the scapegoats are different.
Older readers will draw comparison with his first action as chancellor, which was to hand direct control of interest rates to the Bank of England, an act of scapegoat-management that's paying dividends at the moment.
I think they mean without the use of gases - current bulbs contain mixtures of gases that, I imagine, take a fair amount of energy to produce and aren't always nice to handle.
What they want is something entirely solid, requires a minimal amount of electricity and preferably renewable. Something like a beeswax candle...
Good time to pick up a new skill/programming language or refresh your knowledge, etc. Agreed. In my experience, there's nothing more fulfilling than learning the banjo.
As one of the plug-uglies that live in the UK, where we're promised equality of opportunity on a weekly basis, I've been consistently miffed by the the government's failure to address this kind of discrimination.
However, if this really is the dawn of a truly objective metric for ugliness, then I'm all in favour. No longer will there be a reason for the government to refuse to determine fairer tax rates, employment contracts, healthcare provision and pension terms for those who lack the facial symmetry of our richer peers, and it should be trivial to calculate them in the data-acquisition phase of our much-heralded Identity Register.
Such negativity. What's not to like about a ghetto for the narrow-minded, where flame-warriors can disappear up their own MySpace?
The only downside is, if TFA is to be believed, this: "once a person builds a profile, he must log in to search, and that identity can no longer be used as a proxy."
If I've read that right, unless you want your employer, spouse, child and/or stalker investigating whatever interests and opinions you may once have had, you'll need to build yourself a profile. But, after that, you won't have to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Good?
Only for those of us who won't have to pay for it. You'd expect the overpaid sinecurists who lost all this data to be trying to minimise the consequences of their laxity but they're doing the opposite. To the point that it's now an 'infinite' amount of damage caused. One that will, by extension, require an infinite amount of money to fix.
Unless the politicians see through this outrageous bit of self-interested lobbying, and there's no reason to suspect that they will, a whole lot of taxes will shortly be heading not to help the poor or sick or fix the roads, but to a bunch of lying charlatans. Like the bank bailout, but with none of the benefits.
The only novel thing, and by far the spookiest, about this "research" is that it's coming from a "Department of Psychology".
As for the ramifications, it'll be a long time before North Korea's press officers get much overtime on the back of it. I doubt it'll be of interest even to domestic security services. However cheap and widespread hi-res cameras become, 90% reliability is woefully low. They can get much better than that already, just with a board and a bucket.
That's a very good point. Hospice care is seen as gentle and dignified, but that's only because by the time you're in a hospice the amount of morphine needed to stop you screaming (the apparent definition of 'comfort' is an absence of screams) will stop you doing, or thinking, anything much at all. All you can do is lie there, staring at the ceiling, listening to your own bones crumble and/or waiting for your organs to fail.
I know this because my father died in a hospice after a few weeks of cheerful and dedicated care. Four or five days before he died, after a long period of silence, and when we thought (and had been reassured) that he'd be more or less unaware of anything, he escaped the befuddlement for a moment and shouted his last words "I wish I'd blown my ****** brains out". It was the most shocking experience of my life, not least because he was not a man for swearing. The effort it took him to do this, and the obvious terror he was in, was enough to convince me that hospices, though better than the legal alternatives, are a fraud. They're a chemically-imposed torture, and only accepted because we'll happily confuse incapacity for comfort, and muteness for contentment. Hospices deliver death by lethal injection, just like euthanasia, but spread over weeks or months to keep it legal. Like a nice funeral, it's not done in the interests of the victims, but to give the survivors the impression they've done the right thing. To my mind, that's just cruel.
That's a good description, with interesting ramifications.
One thing that seems to be falling out of this is that, on account of the secret work of these secret agencies being secret, they're not really accountable. They can't, for example, publish the data they're not supposed to know about, or reveal very much of it even to the governments that are supposed to be running them. Effectively there's a massive, largely autonomous, supra-national bureaucracy, analogous to the G8 or the OECD or whatever, but unanswerable to any such organization or individual government.
Given the intriguing suggestion that every past human civilization has fallen owing to their bureaucracy going rogue - either becoming so unwieldy or corrupt that it's become impossible for governments to govern - I'm wondering if this mightn't be the start of something interesting.
I'm not sure about that. Judging by Hillsborough, De Menezes and Tomlinson, the courts never confuse suspicion with evidence, and are happy to accept almost any account, provided enough police officers deliver an identical version of it (even down to the punctuation, which just shows how well they're trained). Where the absence of video is concerned, the simultaneous and comprehensive failure of CCTV cameras in a given radius (which may, in London, be a few dozen) has become so commonplace in cases where police misconduct is alleged that it's hardly grounds for suspicion.
In any case, the courts rarely get involved until years later, if at all. In England and Wales, we have an Independent Police Complaints Commission, which deals with all such cases, and which is firmly on the side of justice. Where upsetting incidents occur, the IPCC's job is to issue a press release, an hour or so before any complaint, setting out the results of their inquiry. If an investigation is, despite that, still needed, they usually outsource it to the police force in question, who are better placed to know exactly what they want to have happened. This not only produces quicker results, but insures against the further waste of public money in the courts. It is a system that, bar a few high-profile cases pursued by especially persistent mobs of bereaved troublemakers, has served them all very well for many years.
Simple operation? You've clearly never worked for a large company.
Even if a warning wasn't trickled down a month ago, and we've no reason to assume it wasn't, the person whose job it is to act on it, provided they weren't on vacation, won't have simply thrown five dollars at a registrar. They'll have had to put in a request to the finance department, probably via a cost-management chain of command, with a full description of what needed to be paid to whom and why, with payee reference, cost-center code, expense code and departmental authorization, and hoped it would arrive in time to be allocated to the next monthly rubber-stamp meeting. Assuming the application contained no errors, was suitably endorsed and was made against an allocated budget that hadn't been over-spent and wasn't under review, then, perhaps, in the fullness of time, it might have received approval and have been sent back down the chain for subsequent escalation to the bought-ledger department, who'd have looked at the due date, added ninety days and put it on the bottom of the pile. After those ninety days, when the finance folk began to take a view to assessing its urgency, unless they found a proper purchase order from the supplier, and a full set of signed terms and conditions of purchase, non-disclosure agreements, sustainability declarations and ethical supply-chain statements, as now required by any self-respecting outfit, it'll have been put aside and, eventually, sent back round to be done properly. Or, if it all checked out first time, it'll have been put on the system for calendering into the next round of payment processing.
I'm sure it might be possible to streamline aspects of such mechanisms, but to suggest there's anything trivial about them is a touch hasty. But you never know. Perhaps they're already thinking of planning a meeting to discuss it, and are working on a framework for identifying the stakeholders as I write.
Age is everything to do with it, I'm afraid.
This week, you've saved a bit of time and paperwork that may, or may not, make a difference to the overall profitability of the place you work, by happening to have the right bit of knowledge at the right time. Next week, you'll be the guy that fixes things.
I guarantee you, however, that not everything you read on Google is correct. And, one day, you'll apply your skills to a few thousand dollars-worth of equipment and, through carelessness or misinformation or a pesky warranty violation, you'll stop being the guy that fixes things.
That'll be the day when you'll decide that being a jack-of-all trades is not necessarily an advantage in this world. It is sometimes better just to do one thing right, and let other people earn a living at what they're good at. That'll be the day when, if you keep your job, you'll turn into a "stubborn case-screw" who reckons that a regular income beats bragging rights.
But don't stop until you do. Your colleagues will have learnt that lesson the hard way, and will be looking forward to when you do the same.
This always annoys me, whatever the company concerned. The distinction between 'people' and 'employees' mightn't be conscious, but it's an insidious feature of the commodification of human resources. Every time I hear a phrase like it I fear we're one step closer to the sweatshop.
We have medical records already. Comparisons across populations already happen. The effect of habits on lifestyles can already be measured. Choices are available. Education is imposed Unfortunately, the two things we've found that make any significant difference to people's health are where they live and how much money they've got.
As for personal analytics, there's little chance of that extending beyond the small, self-selecting group that has a temporary interest. We've been able to count calories and measure our weight for the best part of a century, but only the self-obsessed bother, and not for long at that. What seems an exciting opportunity for the technocrat is a pain in the backside for the ordinary human who, on the whole, doesn't really care what you think they should die of.
If you really want to encourage healthy lifestyles, you need to convince people that dementia really is better than cancer, and that dying of cancer is more fun than a heart attack. Otherwise, the bad food wins.
Perhaps. Though if this report is anything to go by, their celebrated longevity might be at least partly explained by the near quarter-million immortals whose relatives have been dutifully drawing their pensions for them for up to half a century
The scanner being presented is an infrared camera, nothing more
So it's an infrared camera. But it's not just an infrared scanner, it's a fiscal stimulus. Look, we're in hard times and there are real sinecures at stake here - nobody will thank you for holding up the gravy train or peeing in the pork barrel.
Besides, since the Sniffex debacle, the US is lagging badly behind the UK in the production and marketing of high-ticket hobdangles aimed at the tax-guzzling fringes of the global paranoia industry, and it's about time it fought back.
We therefore have a duty to leave it to the experts. They're the one's being paid to go "reading the energy people emit" and if they think conductivity's a myth, then so it must be.
There's a simple problem with social networking with pseudonyms: you can't find people from real life.
If you don't know their handle, they're not your friend. They're your victim.
"apparently they wish to 'encourage the sort of creative innovation that occurs in America.' One can only assume that they've been missing the continual assault on the Fair Use doctrine here in the States."
The two aren't mutually exclusive and, in the UK, revisions to our laws would help address a pernicious problem. It goes without saying that the US has, partly as a result of such nebulous doctrines, the most creative legal industry on the planet; one which contributes significantly to the overall economy. In the UK, where the economy is so fragile that even lawyers with parliamentary incomes are feeling the squeeze, borrowing such innovations makes perfect and practical sense.
...but the idea of armed police is an absolute no go...launching Tasers from the sky would be public relations disaster.
First, the UK's armed police is significantly on the rise (for the Met, deployments have risen over 50% in six years, despite firearm incidents falling), and they're almost part of the landscape in London. Most of them are still static patrols of high-profile locations, but the Met has been actively planning for routine armed patrols.
The UK Police also seem immune to legal boundaries - their retention of DNA and the use of 'stop-and-search' have both been ruled illegal, with no discernible effect to date. More worryingly, even in high-profile cases of physical abuse, manslaughter and credit-card fraud, officers have been quietly rewarded rather than disciplined.
Secondly, they're getting much better at PR. If the Guardian is right, they started using the spy drones to scour the coast for immigrants: "There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be projected as a 'good news' story to the public rather than more 'big brother'." And, since then, they've been practicing on the BNP (paradoxically an anti-immigration minority party with a poor reputation).
It would be utterly wrong to conclude that the UK police are power-hungry, trigger-happy thugs with mental deficiencies, lethal toys, immunity from sanction and slick PR skills. But it would be incautious not to consider the possibility.
Depending on the sort of molecule they're sniffing for, and the detection method, traces in the parts-per-billion range can be detected almost instantly. The limitation is often the speed at which you can get a billion bits of air through your nozzle - or the wind-speed your detection method can withstand. Honeybees, for example, make good detectors in some circumstances, but get miffed in moderate breezes and refuse to work at all if you blow their antennae off.
However, even if they have to parcel up the smells and post them to a lab in Wisconsin, it'll still be quicker and probably cheaper than six years in Cuba.
As for usefulness, I don't think that's the point. It's not meant to be useful, it's meant to give the government a justification for the presumption of guilt. Although the Bill of Rights and the Majesty of the Law are worthy of respect, they are historical throwbacks that aren't always appropriate for a fast-changing world. Any device that can improve the efficiency of justice, even indirectly, must be welcomed by hard-pressed taxpayers.
I've rarely such unexpurgated garbage in my life. It's a sterile semantic argument stirred with misapprehensions.
For a start, Newtonian mechanics is referred to, and often, sometimes by proper scientists, even though Newton didn't do all the work. It's just a shorthand for a model that works adequately in the everyday human-scale world.
In the same way, Darwinian evolution is shorthand for the simple rules of thumb that Darwin suggested, and we refer to Darwinism because Wallacism sounds silly.
And the hubristic assertion that science was 'primitive' in Darwin's day assumes that science today is 'advanced'. Give it another 150 years, and that claim might look a little premature.
Finally, creationism belongs in a different category. Creationists have one thing to say, and they've said it. What more do they want?Scientists, on the other hand, have lots of interesting and useful things to find out, and need support and encouragement to do so. Pitching the two against each other is like pitching bassoonists against bankers - there's no appropriate contest and thus no sensible outcome.
On the other hand, there isn't much point having the readers unless there's a reason to suspect the bearer's identity. As the scheme is voluntary, those with suspect identities won't be the first in the queue for the cards. As law-enforcement will only interested in those without cards, then there's not much point buying in them buying readers. That doesn't, on the other hand, invalidate the cards, which do still serve a purpose.
At present, the standard identification document is the gas bill which, naturally, discriminates against tenants, people without a gas supply and people who have pre-pay meters (usually the poor). The cards therefore improve the ability of poor people to pay for the privilege of 'interacting with government', and thus improve both 'social mobility' and 'engagement'. In addition, a card with a picture on it has to be arguably more reliable than a piece of paper that can be borrowed out of a dustbin by anyone with a mind to.
Google's definition of words is continually evolving. 'Evil' was, as older readers may remember, one of the first to mutate. Now it looks like 'harm' is on the move, too, and will soon join its little relatives 'fun', 'tax' and 'useful' in Google's rehabilitation centre for disadvantaged words.
'In his first act as prime minister, he transferred several significant powers to the Commons.'
There's a difference between power and responsibility, and a majority government has remarkably little difficulty in getting any result it wants out of the Commons, as demonstrated in the case of the Iraq War which was sanctioned by the Commons back in 2003. Electoral reform may redress this imbalance, but electoral reform has been quietly dropped from the Brown agenda, in much the same way is it was dropped from Blair's.
The end result is to diffuse democratic accountability, rather than focus it. The power is in the same hands, but the scapegoats are different.
Older readers will draw comparison with his first action as chancellor, which was to hand direct control of interest rates to the Bank of England, an act of scapegoat-management that's paying dividends at the moment.
Frankly, without someone to poke me with a sharp stick now and then, I wouldn't get much done.
Frankly, without anyone to poke with my sharp stick, I'd get nothing done.
I think they mean without the use of gases - current bulbs contain mixtures of gases that, I imagine, take a fair amount of energy to produce and aren't always nice to handle.
What they want is something entirely solid, requires a minimal amount of electricity and preferably renewable. Something like a beeswax candle...
"that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament)"
It's called the Civil Contingencies Act. And we've already got it, despite the efforts of the House of Lords.
Although you'd not expect the landowning classes to care much about civil liberty, the Earl of Onslow put it all fairly well in an open letter two years ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/apr/23/comment.conservatives
The Economist ran a Christmas article about 'beauty and success' (http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10311266), reporting the real, quantifiable inequalities in society that unfairly penalise the unfair.
As one of the plug-uglies that live in the UK, where we're promised equality of opportunity on a weekly basis, I've been consistently miffed by the the government's failure to address this kind of discrimination.
However, if this really is the dawn of a truly objective metric for ugliness, then I'm all in favour. No longer will there be a reason for the government to refuse to determine fairer tax rates, employment contracts, healthcare provision and pension terms for those who lack the facial symmetry of our richer peers, and it should be trivial to calculate them in the data-acquisition phase of our much-heralded Identity Register.
Such negativity. What's not to like about a ghetto for the narrow-minded, where flame-warriors can disappear up their own MySpace?
The only downside is, if TFA is to be believed, this: "once a person builds a profile, he must log in to search, and that identity can no longer be used as a proxy."
If I've read that right, unless you want your employer, spouse, child and/or stalker investigating whatever interests and opinions you may once have had, you'll need to build yourself a profile. But, after that, you won't have to use it.