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  1. Re:Majority Rules on New Zealand Spy Agency To Vet Network Builds, Provider Staff · · Score: 1

    You could certainly argue this where the legislation, as in this case, has passed through a legislature.

    The way this would play out in the UK (and appears to have happened in the US) is that you get invited to a meeting in a government office and some people whose exact role is not clear will explain how important they feel it is for you to co-operate in the interests of national security. They might hint at the unfortunate consequences of being unco-operative or of letting anyone know that the meeting has taken place. You then leave and do as you're told.

    When the government's policies (and, indeed the laws) are secret, you can't blame the voters, because they don't get to find out what the government is actually doing, as opposed to what it says it's doing. There is an elected government and an unelected shadow government - which, by means of a similar process of nods and winks, makes sure that no-one who stands for election is a threat to them.

  2. Look at it from a different perspective on Nintendo Apologizes For Not Allowing Same-Sex Relationships In Life Sim Game · · Score: 2

    These are just avatars in a game. Someone actively decided that certain rules would apply to their interactions - there was no necessity to impose any societal values on those interactions, players would simply have applied those values they felt appropriate for themselves. In other words, the developers decided to impose their own vision of societal norms when there was no real need to do so.

    This is a very similar issue to the "emoji racism" campaign - someone actively designed the almost-exclusively-white characters, even though there was no functional or other requirement to exclude black faces. It almost certainly wasn't concious racism - they just failed to think beyond their limited personal experience and reflect the wider world.

    That's a reasonable thing to call out.

  3. Re:Buggy whips on London Black Cabs Threaten Chaos To Stop Uber · · Score: 1

    Actually, up until 1976 it was a legal requirement for taxi drivers to carry hay in case their horses got a bit peckish. It's an area in which regulations seem to change very slowly.

    There's been a (decades-) long ongoing war between black-cab taxis (which you can hail on the street) and minicabs (private cars you book by phone) and this is merely another phase of that battle.

    There is a genuine issue of ensuring standards (for example, disabled accessibility to vehicles), but these are things taxi drivers have historically resisted themselves. As taxi drivers tend to be one man bands in London their earnings are also somewhat opaque and I'm sure they're not only concerned about competition, but also about a growing expectation that your journey can be recorded by a third party llike Uber whose records might be available to the tax authorities.

  4. Re:Screwed the Pooch on Sony Warns Demand For Blu-Ray Diminishing Faster Than Expected · · Score: 1

    I did buy a Blu Ray player, because it was being heavily discounted and had streaming built in (and, more importantly for me, it was at the time the cheapest way to add BBC iPlayer to my TV). I've never bought a Blu Ray disc - the cheap ones seem to be forgettable Hollywood potboilers and the films I might want to watch I already have on (ripped) DVDs and I don't personally see the value in reacquiring them for the modest increase in quality that's possible in the averagely-sized living room. In fact, I've barely used the disc drawer. And I'm hardly "younger people"...

  5. Re:Microsoft Has These Patches on Why Microsoft Shouldn't Patch the XP Internet Explorer Flaw · · Score: 1

    Additionally, a chunk of those end users who still have XP machines and obey the call to replace them are going to go out and buy iPads or Android tablets because they'll do the job well enough and be a lot less trouble. You'd think Microsoft would have an interest in keeping people on planet Windows until they're ready for their next fix.

  6. Re:Huh? on One-a-Day-Compiles: Good Enough For Government Work In 1983 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >terminals and PCs w(h)ere common in 1983

    No they weren't.

    The IBM PC was introduced in 1981. You couldn't do much with it, certainly not much related to mainframe programming. They were very expensive for what they did. Minicomputers existed, but they also didn't cross over mainframe territory.

    People with heavy data processing requirements were mostly using DOS/VSE on S/370 and 4300 mainframes. No timesharing in DOS. It was still extremely common in industry to have people sitting with coding forms that were then passed to data preparation teams for punching. I've sat with teams painstakingly writing DOS JCL onto coding sheets.

    If you were a larger user that could justify the investment in MVS, you could potentially use the Time Sharing Option, an interactive environment with a reputation for being cumbersome and inefficient - you'd only extend the "luxury "of using it to a comparatively few select people.

    Computer time was also extremely expensive. Cambridge University wrote their own version of timesharing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_%28computer%29) for their (early) S/370 in order to support a larger number of users and time on it was still so restricted that usage was "priced" to reflect demand at different times of day and CS students would either have to work at 3am or make extensive use of cards or other offline data entry to get their projects completed within the allocated budget.

    Whereas there were minicomputers and early personal computers around, they were scarcely to be seen in what was still the predominant environment of the computer industry - the (IBM) mainframe shop.

    Actually, the British government tended to prefer homegrown procurement and more of its staff were likely to be working with George 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEORGE_%28operating_system%29), which had a far better interactive environment than IBM offered.

  7. Re:Time to move into the Century of the fruit bat. on Oklahoma Botched an Execution With Untested Lethal Injection Drugs · · Score: 0

    For the same reason they're so keen on guns and against healthcare - the populus been induced into a state of perpetual fear so that it might more easily be manipulated. And fear needs to be fed.

  8. Re:+1 on Mathematicians Push Back Against the NSA · · Score: 1

    And even for the unwilling, there's very little moral determination that can't be diluted with sufficient money.

  9. Re:And this is just fine. on Amazon Embodies the Gender Gap in Tech · · Score: 1

    Of course, if women don't have children, the near future for most of us is pretty bleak - no income, no services, no food.

    There's a clear societal benefit in both enouraging women to work and to have children - until such time as they're grown in jars.

    The issue here seems to be that the necessary cost of doing that is unfairly and randomly dumped on employers who will likely, whatever the legal position, attempt to minimise their exposure to risk. It's really a cost that needs to be born from general taxation.

  10. Re:Flamebait on TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA · · Score: 1

    This is the same Vint Cerf who opined recently that "privacy may be an anomaly" and "[our] experience with privacy is a result of our own behavior".

    It's precisely because such people are so keen to work on stuff they "couldn't share ... with friends" that their friends find themselves the target of what they've developed.

  11. Re:Done over 50 years ago on Prototype Volvo Flywheel Tech Uses Car's Wasted Brake Energy · · Score: 1

    There's a UK rail service that uses this technology:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

  12. Re:And the obvious result is... on US Intelligence Officials To Monitor Federal Employees With Security Clearances · · Score: 1

    And people who are secretly resentful, and people who are keeping their noses clean until they have worked their way into a position useful to their foreign handlers.

    The more you seek to eliminate the people of whom you might be suspicious, the greater becomes the proportion of the people left who are either disaffected or "not suspicious" as a result of knowing how your "suspicions" are aroused.

  13. Re:Who believe "just metadata" reassurances anyway on Metadata and the Intrusive State · · Score: 1

    Merry Contemporary England still has a system in which the power of the government is theoretically delegated from the Sovereign whose authority is established by divine right.

    The Founding Fathers' descendants still have a system based on the quasi-divine right of the constitution.

    One has GCHQ, the other has the NSA.

    Using only one side of the paper, explain how the "US Concept" to which you refer makes a material difference to "The People".

  14. Re:Well it IS the BBC on Jewish School Removes Evolution Questions From Exams · · Score: 2

    >It's the one Jewish school that they pick on.

    No, it isn't.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

    However, one Jewish reference gets the propaganda industry into full swing.

  15. Please correct me if I'm wrong... on Most Alarming: IETF Draft Proposes "Trusted Proxy" In HTTP/2.0 · · Score: 2

    But as I read it, the issue seems to arise from the fact that HTTP2 will permit TLS to be used with both http: and https: URLs. If it is used for http: URLs, then existing proxy and caching mechanisms will simply break. I think this is a proposal for "trused proxies" to be permitted where an http: URL is in use and TLS is also employed, I don't think it's proposed that this should apply to https: URLs.

    In other words, it doesn't make things any worse than the current situation (where http: URLS are retrieved in plain text all the time) and does permit the user to control whether they want some protection against interception or potentially better performance. And it doesn't appear to change the situation for https: at all.

    Or that's how it appears to me.

  16. Re:Of course it's "lawful" on High Court Rules Detention of David Miranda Was Lawful · · Score: 1

    The fact that judges have opinions that are regarded as controversial doesn't always mean that their opinions cannot be predicted to be pro-government in specific cases. Laws has already made it very clear that whereas it may be that certain countries see the judiciary as a check on state actions, in Britain there is:

    a deep sense that matters of state policy are in essence the responsibility of the elected arms of government

    In other words, it was quite predictable that he would side with the executive in this matter. That's probably not a coincidence, either.

  17. Re:Of course it's "lawful" on High Court Rules Detention of David Miranda Was Lawful · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It has been a tradition in the UK for courts to refuse to intervene in executive decisions made on "security" grounds, with the justification that as the courts have no access to classified materials, they can't come to a judgment about whether the decision was properly made.

    The rather notorious judge Lord Denning summed this up quite nicely in his decision supporting the deporation from the UK of US journalist Mark Hosenball for daring to mention the existence of GCHQ in an article for Time Out magazine:

    They [the executive] have never interfered with the liberty or the freedom of movement of any individual except where it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the state. In this case we are assured that the Home Secretary himself gave it his personal consideration, and I have no reason whatever to doubt the care with which he considered the whole matter. He is answerable to Parliament as to the way in which he did it and not to the courts here.

    The extent of his cognitive dissonance can be seen from his prefacing remarks:

    In some parts of the world national security has on occasions been used as an excuse for all sorts of infringements of individual liberty. But not in England.

    In other words, Denning (and two other judges on the bench concurred) was simulaneously of the opinion that every judgment the government had ever made in the past in curtailing liberty was justified; that the Home Secretary was above challenge in a court of law; and that England was a bastion of individual liberty.

    With judges like that, courts are essentially redundant.

    Incidentally, in a judgment on an attempt by the Birmingham Six (whose convictions as IRA bombers were finally quashed) to sue the police for beatings they received before finally confessing, Denning said:

    If the six men win, it will mean . . . that the convictions were erronoeous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would either have to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the Court of Appeal . . . This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say it cannot be right that these actions should go any further.

    So, don't look to the law if you want justice.

  18. Re:I think I have to say... on Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash · · Score: 0

    It's not people who work for a living that are at particular risk, it's people who work for a living AND have ordered their affairs in such a way that even a short absence of work would result in financial disaster.

    Fortunately for employers, most people do arrange their lives in this way. It's easy to see why - you can have your house, car, wife and 2 veg, shiny stuff and the occasional vacation at the time you feel entitled to them, rather than when you're old, jaded and impotent. Of course, the more stuff you acquire on credit or contract to pay for in endless monthly installments, the more jobs of precisely this kind become available and the more money there is for the people who employ them.

    It's not even a new phemomenon, back in the days of the company store, it would be well stocked with alcohol at the end of the week so that the workers' wages would be in till by the end of the weekend and the penniless workers would have no choice but to be in work bright and early on Monday morning.

    If more people had a "fuck you" buffer in their finance stream, the employment experience would be very different. Most people, though, don't even consciously think about their leap into premature indebtedness and most of those that do would take the badge rather than feel they were "reduced" to using public transport or drinking water from the tap.

  19. Re:it's been twenty years, or forty on Ask Slashdot: Events Calendar Software For Local Community? · · Score: 1

    I was confronted by this problem about 15 years ago when I was asked by a listings magazine to provide them with a system that would allow the input not only of community events, but theatre performances, film showings, exhibitions etc. and then use this data to automatically lay out their print as fell as feed their emerging website.

    I did an extensive search of software available at the time and nothing really cut it and had to develop something from scratch. Although it's easy for one-off events, when it comes to events that repeat every alternate Tuesday except at half-term and you want to show them precisely once in a listing of events occuring over an arbitrary period (rather than once for each occurrence), it's a really tricky problem to solve. Even finding a data representation which can be searched in a reasonable time is hard - scouring through thousands of iCalendar files isn't a solution. Finding a workable user interface that allows the entry of the whole range of wacky recurrence rules is harder still. In the end, I compromised and did the whole thing by date only, leaving times (e.g. a film that might run at 14:00, 16:00, 18:30 and 21:00) to be recorded simply in the text description of the event. And I didn't have to bother with time zones, daylight savings times, etc.

    Although I'm now retired, they're still using my software from 15 years ago and I occasionally have to dig out the documentation to pass on to the next IT company they appoint, promising to come up with a more modern solution and finally thinking better of it.

    If you did put in all the work to create a completely generic solution, potential users would just turn round and complain it was too complicated for their very specific subset of needs. So people create solutions that meet specific requirements that then don't work for other people.

  20. Re:Sigh... on Sites Blocked By Smartfilter, Censored in Saudi Arabia · · Score: 2

    Quite. I have just received from Linked In a message that: "McAfee, Verizon and AT&T are looking for candidates like you". I now loathe myself for apparently exhibiting qualities they appreciate...

  21. Re:Decriminalize on Cartels Are Using Firetruck-Sized Drillers To Make Drug Pipelines · · Score: 1

    To the uninitiated observer from a distant galaxy, it might appear incongruous that the right to possess lethal manufactured goods (leading to 30,000 deaths per year) is sacrosanct, whereas the possession of naturally-occuring plant material (leading to 0 deaths per year) is severely punished.

    It's might seem odder that the main reason advanced for the right to bear lethal manufactured goods is to ensure that the right to bear lethal manufactured goods continues. And that the possession of naturally-occuring plant material is allegedly punished to prevent thousands of deaths occurring.

    However, it explains pretty much everything you need to know about the human race.

  22. Re:Also, on Are New Technologies Undermining the Laws of War? · · Score: 1

    Well, apart from the fact that #3 was arguably necessary to buy time owing to the lack of military preparedness compared with Germany, the result of an accommodation between the UK and Germany (on which Hitler was quite keen) would have been the division of Europe with a large area under totalitarian control and the widespread extermination of civilians considered "undesirable". Whereas the result of failing to settle an accommodation was the division of Europe with a large area under totalitarian control and the widespread extermination of civilians considered "undesirable" - alongside the massive loss of life and economic damage.

    Of course this is all a matter of hindsight, but the problem with war is that everyone enters with the expectation that it won't last.

  23. Re:Shooting the messenger on Protesters Block Apple and Google Buses In California · · Score: 2, Insightful

    >The tech industry is not responsible for driving up housing prices

    Yes it is. The tech industry is supposed to have made location an irrelevant criterion.

    The tech industry is not only refusing to eat its own dog food, it's wilfully jacking up its costs and risk by insisting on stockpiling its live meat in one location.

  24. Re:And I'm enjoying the benefits on It's Not Just the NSA: Police Are Tracking Your Car · · Score: 1

    Actually, if 3rd party insurance were provided by the state and funded from fuel taxes, we could ensure everyone was insured, everyone's premiums were lower, save a fortune on IT and not have to track anyone.

    Of course that would be too convenient and remove authoriteh from too many jobsworths.

  25. Re:Can Digital Music Replace Most Musicians? on Ask Slashdot: Can Digital Music Replace Most Instrumental Musicians? · · Score: 1

    It's not just about earning money. Don't underestimate the desire of people to perform. There's a well-organised programme of community music where I live and there are many hundreds of people participating in live music - choirs, small jazz and folk groups, community orchestras etc - and they're paying to take part (to cover professional teachers/conductors/accompanists/venues...). Most of the live bands you find in pubs will not be covering their costs, but they do it because they enjoy it.

    Of course, in terms of technical quality, synthesisers would beat many of these performances hands down - but that's not really the point.

    What is a more interesting question is whether the lack of career opportunities for merely competent jobbing instrumentalists leads to a lack of infrastructure to develop the talent of the exceptional performers that people will still want to pay to hear play.

    Given that musicians have in the past had better career options than most authors or painters - and we hardly seem short of the latter even now, though of course it's much easier to be a individual contributor as an author than as a viola player - I don't see an imminent shortage of soloists. And I still see plenty of young faces in orchestras (or at least they seem young to me...), certainly young enough to have grown up with electronic music.