You know who is NEVER impacted by this sort of problem? Anyone without an iPod.
Yeah right. No one with another brand of MP3 player ever lost music files. Even though many of them apparently have music on their MP3 player that they don't have on their PC. No one ever lost or broke the MP3 player with their only copy one. The disk never went corrupt. And no one ever got confused during all that manual file management with Windows Explorer and deleted some music accidentally.
Me, I've got an iPod and I back up my computer automatically (Time Machine). If I lose or break the iPod, then I buy another and one sync gets me exactly the same stuff on it as I had before. If the computer breaks I have a backup, and have exactly the same data as I did before. If I somehow do the wrong thing with a friends iPod or a friends computer, and read the dialogs wrong, and somehow lose music on the iPod or the computer or both, then I can retrieve the music from the backup.
Not that any of those problems have ever happened to me in 10 years of iPod ownership. But if they did, being a sensible person who spent £65 on a drive for the system supplied backup software to back up onto. I'm confident that I won't have lost anything.
What kind of stupid idiot doesn't back up their computer? The same idiots that complain that they lost music files because they couldn't retrieve them from an iPod.
Hand cranking a car and the weekly maintenance of lead/acid batteries were basic tasks that taught to drivers in times gone by.
Modern cars have starter motors and sealed batteries. And so the driver has to do less.
We're also in the process of moving from people navigating by paper map to GPS.
We're only 30-40 years into the development of personal computer systems. Exposed file systems and the necessary manual file management is a feature of primitive computing systems. Technology is beginning to move away from that. Which everyone will be happy with except for a few slashdotters. Just as everyone is happy that cars are easier to drive and need less maintenance except for a few car maintenance geeks.
I can honestly say, other than on Slashdot, I haven't heard anyone curse iTunes. On the other hand, I was roped in to help the father of a friend who had bought a commodity MP4 player. He was reasonably technical for an old-timer, and had worked out how to drag'n'drop to the device. But none of his videos would play. Of course they needed transcoding to work on the MP4 player. The MP4 player had some software for doing that, but it was another step of converting on the PC, and then transferring. And it didn't support the format that his videos were in anyway.
I backed out, as this was getting to be too much hassle and I didn't want to be brought in every time he had new videos.
Next thing I knew is he'd returned the MP4 player and bought an iPod instead. It automatically transcoded all of his videos as it copied them to the iPod, without him doing anything.
And I'd go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of people want to deal with iTunes even less than Explorer
And that would be a limb that would break. In the MP3 player market iPod was and is way out in the lead. People love the system.
Though the fact that there's so little demand for other devices to be supported by iTunes is a testament to that fact, so maybe it's not so much going out on a limb.
How to completely mis-represent the market share of MP3 players. Other MP3 player manufacturers would love to have native syncing with iTunes. But Apple rightly see iTunes as a USP for their iP* devices, and no longer allow other manufacturers to do it. Apple with it's effortless iTunes syncing system remains by far the most popular MP3 player system. Few people want drag n drop manual music file management.
By any reasonable definition, it's a backup, since the files are physically there. It does, however, deliberately pretend for them to be inaccessible, unlike every other similar device on the planet.
That would be the definition of a copy, not a backup. Backup implies more than just a copy. It implies a safe way to create that copy and to restore it. iPod/iPhone/iPad is not a backup, and Apple never claimed to be one.
Apples actual personal backup system is fantastic and is included as standard in the OS. It's called Time machine. Everyone on OS X should be using it. And if they do so, then they won't ever lose their music files.
Case in point: when I bought my (non-computer-savvy) mother an iPad, the first thing that got her extremely annoyed was that she couldn't just drag and drop files to it in Explorer like she used to do with her USB sticks, MP3 player, and camera, but had to go through setting up sync in iTunes. She doesn't know what iTunes is, and doesn't want to learn yet another way of doing the exact same thing she already knows how to do.
The iPod was the most popular MP3 player on the planet. Most people found that once they had put their music in iTunes, the iPod updated every time they plugged it into their PC/Mac, without any other intervention. No drag and drop needed. The simplest system on the market.
What's wrong with you and/or your mother that you couldn't set it up or she couldn't do what all those other people were?
Lamenting the lack of drag'n'drop for music file management is like lamenting the fact that gramophones don't have handles to wind them up with. Regretting that you used to have to do a task manually and now it's done for you.
It's no coincidence that Apple is doing better with Mac hardware that is pretty much PC hardware after floundering with much more proprietary platforms.
Actually it is a coincidence. Apple had to switch from PowerPC to X86 architectures for no other reason than the top of the range PowerPC chips were always underpowered compared to the top of the range X86 chips. And that was due to the fact that X86 chips were more popular than PowerPC chips, and thus more R&D money went into their development.
X86 PC architecture is both relatively open and popular, but those are orthogonal properties. In other markets, those properties don't coincide. For example closed proprietary games consoles are overwhelmingly more popular than open ones. Proprietary razor systems and printers are also far more popular than open ones.
The rest of the industry is finding it awfully hard to undercut the iPad with anything that works as well.
For example, HP just pulled out of the tablet market because they had to price their Touchpad at the same price as the iPad 2. Now they're on fire sale as the only way to shift them off the shelves.
There are cheaper no-name Chinese tablets, but they are no good. They are only 7", resistive touchpad, underpowered so the UI is jerky, buggy etc.
The iPhone is price comparable with equivalent smartphones.
In the PC world, for sure, Apple isn't as cheap. But that's because the other PC makers have price warred themselves into a no profit situation. IBM got itself out of the PC market years ago because it wasn't profitable. HP is the current market leader in PC sales, and yet they too are now going to pull out of the market. It's not that Macs are expensive. It's that Apple is the only PC manufacturer that has the product differentiation (OS X) to make a sustainable profit on their PC sales.
Your post is a bit hazy. Of course all tech products are come up by "nerds". Not just the "cool" stuff, however you want to define that.
Perhaps by "nerds" you mean nerds working independently, rather than for a corporation. But then I can't see that they do come up with the cool stuff at all.
Of course it depends what you mean by "cool". Elsewhere in the comments someone is doing the usual decrying of Apple products as being popular because they are "cool and shiny". Negative implications of coolness. You seem to be using "cool" as a positive, and perhaps implying things like Linux/Arduino/NewGraphicsAlgorithm.
You're also claiming that nerds create the cool stuff, and then illustrating that claim with examples of nerds being early adopters of cool stuff.
Finally, nice segue into the think different text. It's lovely, but it's not talking about nerds. It's talking about mold-breaking creative people. and that's orthogonal to nerdiness. Some nerds are mold-breakingly creative, most nerds are not. Same as the rest of the population.
Aircraft safety is similar to software freedom in the way that everyone takes it for granted yet has little idea on what is actually important and in the fact that it's all accomplished by a small group of dedicated people so that everyone can enjoy it.
However it fails as an analogy as airplane safety is unquestionably both a good thing and of life and death importance. Computer platform openness is neither.
The history of consumer technology is littered with superior products that lost out to something lesser with good marketing.
Littered? Lets see, Betamax/VHS is often quoted. But that was won because VHS had longer tapes, players with more functionality, and were cheaper. Those advantages were preferred by the consumers to the better picture quality of BetaMax.
DOS? The major competitor in those days was CP/M. DOS was better.
Windows/MacOS? It was price and software/hardware compatibility that won it for Windows.
None of those were marketing. But perhaps you weren't thinking of those. So give me three of your own examples.
The vast majority simply wants what's "cool" and "shiny".
How are you defining "cool" and "shiny"? The most obvious definition for a "cool" is something like "what most people want to have." And thus your claim is tautologous.
And what do you mean by "shiny"? The HP Touchpad is certainly shiny. And yet within weeks of launch, it's so unwanted it's on fire sale for $99 and HP has pulled out of the market.
If the platform you prefer was popular, then people would describe it as "cool and shiny". But it's not popular, so they don't.
I imagine that plastic dog turds will always be available. By your logic that means that people care about plastic dog turds.
The truth is that SOME people care about plastic dog turds, and openness in computing. But availability doesn't imply that the people that care are more than a small fraction of the population.
It's so hard for me to believe that so many people still use Windows.
So there's something wrong with your belief system.
Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'.
So clearly you're atypical. It looked like Linux was going to make some progress when it seemed to be the right thing for manufacturers to ship on low-power and cheap netbooks. But it turned out that was a mistake as they had such a large return rate. People wanted Windows.
Windows market share is very slowly erroding, but mostly towards OS X, not desktop Linux.
There's no sign of Linux ever being ready for ordinary desktop users.
Whilst you rightly point out that there is no standard filepath system for Windows to differ from, it's a shame you fall into the same trap of criticising another OS for no better reason than you are unfamiliar with it.
Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT.
It's not so much a matter of losing it. It's the fact that it gets filled up with obsolete crap over time. Which was always the primary reason Windows slowed down over time and eventually needed reinstalling. The registry is one of the worst software design blunders of all time.
App store security is a nightmare compared to PC security (or the security of PC-like OSes such as Maemo/MeeGo). And yes, App Store security is even worse than Windows security.
Tens of thousands of PC viruses and trojans says you're wrong.
PCs allow locally controllable
And locally fuckup-able - which is a problem when most people don't know anything about security.
centralized management
If you have an IT dept behind you.
the installation of HIDS and antivirus products that are also locally controllable and centrally managed
In order for malware to be detected by antivirus, a central authority such as Sophos or Norton need to become aware of is and add it's signature or a heuristic to the AV Product. If there's malware for iOS, then a central authority - Apple - will pull it off the App Store. And if it's malicious, kill it. Rather than detecting the malware after you've downloaded it, you just won't be able to download it.
Android lets you run antivirus software. The freedom that means that third parties can write and distribute anti-virus software is the same freedom that means that there is far more malware on Android than iOS.
Open gives you the ability to guard against problems that are only there because the platform is open. It's a net loss.
Security of the App Store? Security on iOS devices is a fucking nightmare. Apple doesn't do code reviews of any of the apps it approves - that's how a tethering app was able to slip by disguised as a flashlight app, for one example of many (including actual malware).
In what way is that "a nightmare"? What other app ecosystem has code reviews of third party apps? What is the Apple App Store security "a nightmare" compared to?
You're criticising Apple for not doing something that no one else is doing either. And no one is doing it because it's completely impractical. It could only be suggested by someone who's never done a code review in his life.
And don't bother trying Android as an example of something more secure. There are far fewer Android apps, but far more Android malware. Open does not make it more secure. The evidence is precisely the opposite.
They're not innocent. Incitement to commit a crime is a crime in itself. In England at least, which is the jurisdiction in question. That's a matter of fact, not opinion.
And both are aware they committed a crime - they pleaded guilty.
And then again, some things are going to be easier with a tablet and some things with a phone.
But I don't think that this trend of little apps rather than web apps is really about the form factor. It's about the ease of purchase and installation, ease of use, and security (real and perceived, software and transaction) of the App Store. And the low prices. Collectively known as lower barriers to purchase.
Now that Apple has an App Store for the Mac, I find myself buying desktop apps far more often.
Likewise, books are my most frequent on-line purchase, because I have a trusted, easy, one stop shop for any book purchase. Amazon. If there wasn't a single bookshop that I felt had a comprehensive stock, at good prices, and I felt I had to shop around on-line among stores that I don't have a trust relationship with, then I'd no doubt buy a lot less books on-line.
No they probably won't catch most. There were an awful lot of rioters and looters. But they have arrested nearly 3000 people with 1300 having been in front of the courts so far. And they'll be continuing to track them down for weeks or months to come. So it's not that they don't have people who actually rioted/looted that they can make examples of.
The motivation is obvious. They don't want anyone else to incite a riot. Deterrence being one of the 3 justifications for punishment, and the most important one in this case.
Did you have a particular manslaughter case in mind? Typically manslaughter would not be less than 4 years. It might be on occasion, but it would no doubt be because of mitigating circumstances.
Where is the limit with political speech ? Is that forbidden to state the opinion that violent action is the only way to bring change in a corrupt system ? Not that I defend this opinion, but the fact that is is censored disturbs me deeply.
Airing that opinion in itself is not a crime (or censored). It becomes a crime when you actually encourage others to do it. If you suggest a particular object, place and/or time for example.
You've picked one place that had trouble THREE YEARS AGO, in arguably the second worst newspaper in the country?
I didn't pick it. It was linked to from TFA. And I've since linked to a Telegraph article that covers the same ground.
TLDR; keep yourself up to date: MI5 joins social messaging trawl for riot organisers [guardian.co.uk], Riot inquiry to go ahead as MI5 helps investigations [smh.com.au] and Prime Minister David Cameron said last week that the government would investigate shutting down social networking platforms like BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter if they were helping to "plot" crime. The police recently called on MI5 to crack encrypted messages sent through BBM. [wired.co.uk].
I was aware of all that. None of which indicates that GCHQ has made the breakthrough in cryptography that would be needed to crack the 256 bit AES encryption on Blackberry messages in less than a few million years. And note that each message has a different key, so they don't just have to crack it once.
Why are MI5 involved?
Because that's who the government would ask. Yet they are no more capable of hacking the contents of Blackberry messages than GCHQ or RIM themselves.
Of course it's not impossible that GCHQ HAVE made a breakthough in cryptography that no one else is aware of. However it's more likely that someone who received the message just passed it onto the police. As I said, Occam's razor.
This is a annual water fight, it's meant to be a bit of fun, ffs!!
So you keep asserting, with no more evidence for your certainty than you had for the "hacking" claim.
Slashdot Mirror
You know who is NEVER impacted by this sort of problem? Anyone without an iPod.
Yeah right. No one with another brand of MP3 player ever lost music files. Even though many of them apparently have music on their MP3 player that they don't have on their PC. No one ever lost or broke the MP3 player with their only copy one. The disk never went corrupt. And no one ever got confused during all that manual file management with Windows Explorer and deleted some music accidentally.
Me, I've got an iPod and I back up my computer automatically (Time Machine). If I lose or break the iPod, then I buy another and one sync gets me exactly the same stuff on it as I had before. If the computer breaks I have a backup, and have exactly the same data as I did before. If I somehow do the wrong thing with a friends iPod or a friends computer, and read the dialogs wrong, and somehow lose music on the iPod or the computer or both, then I can retrieve the music from the backup.
Not that any of those problems have ever happened to me in 10 years of iPod ownership. But if they did, being a sensible person who spent £65 on a drive for the system supplied backup software to back up onto. I'm confident that I won't have lost anything.
What kind of stupid idiot doesn't back up their computer? The same idiots that complain that they lost music files because they couldn't retrieve them from an iPod.
Hand cranking a car and the weekly maintenance of lead/acid batteries were basic tasks that taught to drivers in times gone by.
Modern cars have starter motors and sealed batteries. And so the driver has to do less.
We're also in the process of moving from people navigating by paper map to GPS.
We're only 30-40 years into the development of personal computer systems. Exposed file systems and the necessary manual file management is a feature of primitive computing systems. Technology is beginning to move away from that. Which everyone will be happy with except for a few slashdotters. Just as everyone is happy that cars are easier to drive and need less maintenance except for a few car maintenance geeks.
I can honestly say, other than on Slashdot, I haven't heard anyone curse iTunes. On the other hand, I was roped in to help the father of a friend who had bought a commodity MP4 player. He was reasonably technical for an old-timer, and had worked out how to drag'n'drop to the device. But none of his videos would play. Of course they needed transcoding to work on the MP4 player. The MP4 player had some software for doing that, but it was another step of converting on the PC, and then transferring. And it didn't support the format that his videos were in anyway.
I backed out, as this was getting to be too much hassle and I didn't want to be brought in every time he had new videos.
Next thing I knew is he'd returned the MP4 player and bought an iPod instead. It automatically transcoded all of his videos as it copied them to the iPod, without him doing anything.
And I'd go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of people want to deal with iTunes even less than Explorer
And that would be a limb that would break. In the MP3 player market iPod was and is way out in the lead. People love the system.
Though the fact that there's so little demand for other devices to be supported by iTunes is a testament to that fact, so maybe it's not so much going out on a limb.
How to completely mis-represent the market share of MP3 players. Other MP3 player manufacturers would love to have native syncing with iTunes. But Apple rightly see iTunes as a USP for their iP* devices, and no longer allow other manufacturers to do it. Apple with it's effortless iTunes syncing system remains by far the most popular MP3 player system. Few people want drag n drop manual music file management.
By any reasonable definition, it's a backup, since the files are physically there. It does, however, deliberately pretend for them to be inaccessible, unlike every other similar device on the planet.
That would be the definition of a copy, not a backup. Backup implies more than just a copy. It implies a safe way to create that copy and to restore it. iPod/iPhone/iPad is not a backup, and Apple never claimed to be one.
Apples actual personal backup system is fantastic and is included as standard in the OS. It's called Time machine. Everyone on OS X should be using it. And if they do so, then they won't ever lose their music files.
Case in point: when I bought my (non-computer-savvy) mother an iPad, the first thing that got her extremely annoyed was that she couldn't just drag and drop files to it in Explorer like she used to do with her USB sticks, MP3 player, and camera, but had to go through setting up sync in iTunes. She doesn't know what iTunes is, and doesn't want to learn yet another way of doing the exact same thing she already knows how to do.
The iPod was the most popular MP3 player on the planet. Most people found that once they had put their music in iTunes, the iPod updated every time they plugged it into their PC/Mac, without any other intervention. No drag and drop needed. The simplest system on the market.
What's wrong with you and/or your mother that you couldn't set it up or she couldn't do what all those other people were?
Lamenting the lack of drag'n'drop for music file management is like lamenting the fact that gramophones don't have handles to wind them up with. Regretting that you used to have to do a task manually and now it's done for you.
It's no coincidence that Apple is doing better with Mac hardware that is pretty much PC hardware after floundering with much more proprietary platforms.
Actually it is a coincidence. Apple had to switch from PowerPC to X86 architectures for no other reason than the top of the range PowerPC chips were always underpowered compared to the top of the range X86 chips. And that was due to the fact that X86 chips were more popular than PowerPC chips, and thus more R&D money went into their development.
X86 PC architecture is both relatively open and popular, but those are orthogonal properties. In other markets, those properties don't coincide. For example closed proprietary games consoles are overwhelmingly more popular than open ones. Proprietary razor systems and printers are also far more popular than open ones.
The rest of the industry is finding it awfully hard to undercut the iPad with anything that works as well.
For example, HP just pulled out of the tablet market because they had to price their Touchpad at the same price as the iPad 2. Now they're on fire sale as the only way to shift them off the shelves.
There are cheaper no-name Chinese tablets, but they are no good. They are only 7", resistive touchpad, underpowered so the UI is jerky, buggy etc.
The iPhone is price comparable with equivalent smartphones.
In the PC world, for sure, Apple isn't as cheap. But that's because the other PC makers have price warred themselves into a no profit situation. IBM got itself out of the PC market years ago because it wasn't profitable. HP is the current market leader in PC sales, and yet they too are now going to pull out of the market. It's not that Macs are expensive. It's that Apple is the only PC manufacturer that has the product differentiation (OS X) to make a sustainable profit on their PC sales.
Your post is a bit hazy. Of course all tech products are come up by "nerds". Not just the "cool" stuff, however you want to define that.
Perhaps by "nerds" you mean nerds working independently, rather than for a corporation. But then I can't see that they do come up with the cool stuff at all.
Of course it depends what you mean by "cool". Elsewhere in the comments someone is doing the usual decrying of Apple products as being popular because they are "cool and shiny". Negative implications of coolness. You seem to be using "cool" as a positive, and perhaps implying things like Linux/Arduino/NewGraphicsAlgorithm.
You're also claiming that nerds create the cool stuff, and then illustrating that claim with examples of nerds being early adopters of cool stuff.
Finally, nice segue into the think different text. It's lovely, but it's not talking about nerds. It's talking about mold-breaking creative people. and that's orthogonal to nerdiness. Some nerds are mold-breakingly creative, most nerds are not. Same as the rest of the population.
Aircraft safety is similar to software freedom in the way that everyone takes it for granted yet has little idea on what is actually important and in the fact that it's all accomplished by a small group of dedicated people so that everyone can enjoy it.
However it fails as an analogy as airplane safety is unquestionably both a good thing and of life and death importance. Computer platform openness is neither.
The history of consumer technology is littered with superior products that lost out to something lesser with good marketing.
Littered? Lets see, Betamax/VHS is often quoted. But that was won because VHS had longer tapes, players with more functionality, and were cheaper. Those advantages were preferred by the consumers to the better picture quality of BetaMax.
DOS? The major competitor in those days was CP/M. DOS was better.
Windows/MacOS? It was price and software/hardware compatibility that won it for Windows.
None of those were marketing. But perhaps you weren't thinking of those. So give me three of your own examples.
The vast majority simply wants what's "cool" and "shiny".
How are you defining "cool" and "shiny"? The most obvious definition for a "cool" is something like "what most people want to have." And thus your claim is tautologous.
And what do you mean by "shiny"? The HP Touchpad is certainly shiny. And yet within weeks of launch, it's so unwanted it's on fire sale for $99 and HP has pulled out of the market.
If the platform you prefer was popular, then people would describe it as "cool and shiny". But it's not popular, so they don't.
I imagine that plastic dog turds will always be available. By your logic that means that people care about plastic dog turds.
The truth is that SOME people care about plastic dog turds, and openness in computing. But availability doesn't imply that the people that care are more than a small fraction of the population.
It's so hard for me to believe that so many people still use Windows.
So there's something wrong with your belief system.
Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'.
So clearly you're atypical. It looked like Linux was going to make some progress when it seemed to be the right thing for manufacturers to ship on low-power and cheap netbooks. But it turned out that was a mistake as they had such a large return rate. People wanted Windows.
Windows market share is very slowly erroding, but mostly towards OS X, not desktop Linux.
There's no sign of Linux ever being ready for ordinary desktop users.
VMS was this massive mess
Whilst you rightly point out that there is no standard filepath system for Windows to differ from, it's a shame you fall into the same trap of criticising another OS for no better reason than you are unfamiliar with it.
Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT.
It's not so much a matter of losing it. It's the fact that it gets filled up with obsolete crap over time. Which was always the primary reason Windows slowed down over time and eventually needed reinstalling. The registry is one of the worst software design blunders of all time.
App store security is a nightmare compared to PC security (or the security of PC-like OSes such as Maemo/MeeGo). And yes, App Store security is even worse than Windows security.
Tens of thousands of PC viruses and trojans says you're wrong.
PCs allow locally controllable
And locally fuckup-able - which is a problem when most people don't know anything about security.
centralized management
If you have an IT dept behind you.
the installation of HIDS and antivirus products that are also locally controllable and centrally managed
In order for malware to be detected by antivirus, a central authority such as Sophos or Norton need to become aware of is and add it's signature or a heuristic to the AV Product. If there's malware for iOS, then a central authority - Apple - will pull it off the App Store. And if it's malicious, kill it. Rather than detecting the malware after you've downloaded it, you just won't be able to download it.
Android lets you run antivirus software. The freedom that means that third parties can write and distribute anti-virus software is the same freedom that means that there is far more malware on Android than iOS.
Open gives you the ability to guard against problems that are only there because the platform is open. It's a net loss.
Agreed. Arresting a few more MPs would also be nice.
Security of the App Store? Security on iOS devices is a fucking nightmare. Apple doesn't do code reviews of any of the apps it approves - that's how a tethering app was able to slip by disguised as a flashlight app, for one example of many (including actual malware).
In what way is that "a nightmare"? What other app ecosystem has code reviews of third party apps? What is the Apple App Store security "a nightmare" compared to?
You're criticising Apple for not doing something that no one else is doing either. And no one is doing it because it's completely impractical. It could only be suggested by someone who's never done a code review in his life.
And don't bother trying Android as an example of something more secure. There are far fewer Android apps, but far more Android malware. Open does not make it more secure. The evidence is precisely the opposite.
They're not innocent. Incitement to commit a crime is a crime in itself. In England at least, which is the jurisdiction in question. That's a matter of fact, not opinion.
And both are aware they committed a crime - they pleaded guilty.
And then again, some things are going to be easier with a tablet and some things with a phone.
But I don't think that this trend of little apps rather than web apps is really about the form factor. It's about the ease of purchase and installation, ease of use, and security (real and perceived, software and transaction) of the App Store. And the low prices. Collectively known as lower barriers to purchase.
Now that Apple has an App Store for the Mac, I find myself buying desktop apps far more often.
Likewise, books are my most frequent on-line purchase, because I have a trusted, easy, one stop shop for any book purchase. Amazon. If there wasn't a single bookshop that I felt had a comprehensive stock, at good prices, and I felt I had to shop around on-line among stores that I don't have a trust relationship with, then I'd no doubt buy a lot less books on-line.
You've been successfully trolled.
No they probably won't catch most. There were an awful lot of rioters and looters. But they have arrested nearly 3000 people with 1300 having been in front of the courts so far. And they'll be continuing to track them down for weeks or months to come. So it's not that they don't have people who actually rioted/looted that they can make examples of.
The motivation is obvious. They don't want anyone else to incite a riot. Deterrence being one of the 3 justifications for punishment, and the most important one in this case.
Did you have a particular manslaughter case in mind? Typically manslaughter would not be less than 4 years. It might be on occasion, but it would no doubt be because of mitigating circumstances.
Where is the limit with political speech ? Is that forbidden to state the opinion that violent action is the only way to bring change in a corrupt system ? Not that I defend this opinion, but the fact that is is censored disturbs me deeply.
Airing that opinion in itself is not a crime (or censored). It becomes a crime when you actually encourage others to do it. If you suggest a particular object, place and/or time for example.
How do you pronounce that? It's like they want to advertise that this is a baroque language.
You've picked one place that had trouble THREE YEARS AGO, in arguably the second worst newspaper in the country?
I didn't pick it. It was linked to from TFA. And I've since linked to a Telegraph article that covers the same ground.
TLDR; keep yourself up to date: MI5 joins social messaging trawl for riot organisers [guardian.co.uk], Riot inquiry to go ahead as MI5 helps investigations [smh.com.au] and Prime Minister David Cameron said last week that the government would investigate shutting down social networking platforms like BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter if they were helping to "plot" crime. The police recently called on MI5 to crack encrypted messages sent through BBM. [wired.co.uk].
I was aware of all that. None of which indicates that GCHQ has made the breakthrough in cryptography that would be needed to crack the 256 bit AES encryption on Blackberry messages in less than a few million years. And note that each message has a different key, so they don't just have to crack it once.
Why are MI5 involved?
Because that's who the government would ask. Yet they are no more capable of hacking the contents of Blackberry messages than GCHQ or RIM themselves.
Of course it's not impossible that GCHQ HAVE made a breakthough in cryptography that no one else is aware of. However it's more likely that someone who received the message just passed it onto the police. As I said, Occam's razor.
This is a annual water fight, it's meant to be a bit of fun, ffs!!
So you keep asserting, with no more evidence for your certainty than you had for the "hacking" claim.