A couple of days ago on Twitter I was informed in all seriousness by some Trump supporter in Louisiana that David Cameron and Theresa May are 'more socialist than they should be' and that some of their policies are 'communist'.
Unfortunately, even if the rest of what he says appears rather unhinged, it doesn't look like a parody account.
The Guardian 'one of the most extreme left news outlets in the UK'? Ha!
If that is true, it is only in comparison to the right-wing bias of most UK dailies than any objective measurement of the Guardian's left-wing bias. Most of the time its editorial line is to the right even of large parts of the Liberal party. It would probably be fair to say the The Guardian is mostly social democratic in its outlook, but to call it even socialist would be a misnomer, 'extreme left' even more so.
That's as may be in Helsinki for video surveillance. We've become rather accustomed to that in the UK.
The line that's being crossed here (not particularly well highlighted in the summary) is that they will be making *audio* recordings of the interior of the taxi too.
IIRC the old 'jelly mould' Saabs of the 1960s (and many of the later ones) are designed to coast in neutral.
The freewheel automatically disengages the clutch when you take your foot off the accelerator pedal, like that on a bicycle. It was a feature originally something to do with lubricating the 2-stroke engines fitted in the earliest models, not a bug or poor driving technique.
A friend of mine who used to live near Whitby, Yorkshire (which has its fair share of hills) found it rather alarming at first, but got used to it.
> All systems aimed to reduce crime, yet this study suggests that CCTV has generally failed to > achieve this. Although police-recorded crime has decreased in six out of the 13 systems for > which data were available, in only three cases might this decrease be attributable to CCTV, > and in only two areas was there a significant decrease compared with the control.
and somewhat bizarrely
> Moreover, in some cases (although not many) an increase in crime was an indicator of success
(on the basis that CCTV led to the detection of crime that had previously been unreported)
more importantly in the context of continuing the expansion of our surveillance society, the Home Office conclude
> there was a lack of realism about what could be expected from CCTV. In short, it > was oversold - by successive governments - as the answer (indeed the 'magic bullet', Ditton > and Short, 1999) to crime problems. Few seeking a share of the available funding saw it as > necessary to demonstrate CCTV's effectiveness. After all, why would the government be > giving out money for this and not other measures if it did not work? Yet it was rarely obvious > why CCTV was the best response to crime in particular circumstances.
If you're arrested, your prints and DNA are recorded and go on the database permanently. Even if you're never charged, the charges are dropped or you're found innocent in court, there's no way to be removed unless it's subsequently proven that *no crime had ever taken place*.
If you're in Germany and order things from Italy, you pay Italian VAT on your invoice. You can reclaim the VAT only if you're exporting the item outside the EU.
A limited range customs duties still exist for trade between member countries for commercial purposes - the UK still levies duty on alcohol and tobacco imported from France if it's for resale in the UK, for example - UK duties on these goods are significantly higher than those in most of the rest of Europe. For most goods, though, there aren't import tariffs.
If you're bringing it yourself into the country for personal use, however, there is no duty to be levied. UK Customs & Excise have rapped over the knuckles by the courts after confiscating goods and vehicles belonging to people going on a 'booze cruise' over the Channel to stock up on drink on suspicion that they're going to resell it. If you order a case of wine from France to be delivered to your home, duty is still applicable, though.
Buying stuff from outside the EU is a bit of a lottery. The value of goods have to be declared as they pass through customs and any Duties and VAT will be due. If it's under £18 (about USD 33) VAT and duty may be exempted.
You could under-declare the value of items, but then your goods would be under-insured. There's a healthy trade along these lines in camera equipment from Hong Kong where the vendor will guarantee to refund your VAT if the item is stopped at Customs.
Wising up, the EU has started working over the last couple of years, with major internet retailers like Amazon US to ensure that VAT is levied at the point of sale, before it hits European borders.
The UK is something of a DNA record kleptocracy, with a national DNA database now well in excess of three million records, and with new sampling opportunities available to the police on remarkably easy terms. These days it's ever so easy to get onto the UK database, but how do you get off?
What's that you say? You don't? Well, up to a point - but it's not strictly true to say that once you're on the database you absolutely can't get off again. It's just very, very hard and it's going to take you a long, long time. Fortunately, would-be escapees now have the benefit of some guidance from the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Exceptional Case Procedures for Removal DNA, Fingerprints and PNC Records, released by ACPO on 24th April, is in part a response to recent decisions made by the Information Tribunal in connection with police retention of criminal records data. Alongside this, "recent widespread media coverage relating to the retention of DNA", ACPO says, is likely to result in a high volume of removal requests over the next 12 months. These requests will in the first instance be made to Chief Officers in their role of data controller, and ACPO feels that it is important that "national consistency" is achieved in their responses.
OK? So how does it work? "Exception cases will by definition be rare," says ACPO, and might well include cases "where the original arrest or sampling was found to be unlawful." Or, if it turns out to be absolutely clear that there wasn't any offence in the first place, that might count. And ACPO gives a specific example:
"For example where a dead body is found in a multi-occupancy dwelling and the cause of death is not immediately obvious. All the occupants are arrested on suspicion of murder pending the outcome of a post mortem. All arrested persons are detained at the local police station and samples taken. It later transpires that the deceased person died of natural causes. No offence therefore exists, and all persons are released from custody."
Find corpse, nick everybody within range just in case? One certainly hopes that's seriously exceptional. Fortunately though, the honest Chief Copper doesn't have to wrestle with these thorny issues alone. Or possibly, at all, considering ACPO's recommended procedure.
First, a request for deletion of a Police National Computer (PNC) record, DNA sample or fingerprints should be viewed as being "a request to remove all items." It is then "essential", says ACPO, that the DNA and fingerprint records are matched correctly to the appropriate arrest summons number on the PNC record. But here comes a gotcha: "Samples taken on other occasions should not be deleted." Which we take to mean that if you're not pursuing a DNA record specific to a PNC arrest record, then you're not going to get off the database. Close the door on your way out.
But what if it is associated with an arrest record? "In the first instance applicants should be sent a letter informing them that the samples and associated PNC record are lawfully held and that their request for deletion / destruction is refused" Oh, right... "unless the applicant believes the application should be regarded as exceptional." In that case, "the applicant should be invited to state the grounds upon which they believe their case to be exceptional."
And then the Chief Officer gets to decide? Well, not exactly. "The Chief Officer is asked to consider any response and either reply to the applicant rejecting the application for the removal of the record(s)" Oh, right... "or refer the case papers to the DNAFRP [DNA & Fingerprint Retention Project], thus ensuring that a consistent approach is adopted nationally." Then DNAFRP will respond with advice taking into account any relevant precedents, and then the Chief Officer gets to decide. Using a response letter template supplied by DNAFRP. It may be occurring to you that one might easily die of old age while this process was under way. But don't you go thinking dying's going to get you off the database, sunshine, oh no... ®
From TFA: "No one knows what caused the octopus to attack. It may have been curious, looking for a meal or a girlfriend, said Jim Cosgrove of the Royal B.C. Museum."
We have similar debates over the funding of the National Health Service in the UK. The answer is that to allow the rich to opt out would undermine the whole point of any social security system, which is to protect the poorer members of society who *can't* afford a pension, health care, or to be unable to work for a period of time for whatever reason.
Social funds like SS and the NHS recognise that capitalism depends on inequities in the distribution of wealth as part of its basic mechanism and spread the cost of their funding across the whole of society, leveraging the wealth of those with more money to help out those who have less to help mitigate that.
The alternative is to suggest that all taxation should be hypothecated and that you have the right to withdraw your participation in those areas where you're not going to directly benefit from a particular levy. People who don't have children or who send their children to private schools would be allowed to opt out of paying for state education, etc. The logical outcome would be that you pay a fee to the fire brigade when they attend a fire at your house, or to the police to investigate a burglary there and pay nothing at other times.
That's under consideration too. There are plans in the pipeline to also make 'tamper-proof' number plates mandatory: these are designed to self-destruct when they are removed.
"19. The use of number plates that cannot be re-used once detached from a vehicle would be a major step forward in preventing the theft of number plates for cloning vehicles or to avoid congestion charges etc."
It's also worth noting paragraph 1. of the same consultation document.
"The culture of secure number plates that we are attempting to develop requires that plates should no longer be seen as isolated commodities but as an integral part of the vehicle. "
Adobe GoLive started out life in 1996 as a Mac-only product called GoLive Pro made a German company called Gonet, predating Dreamweaver by about 18 months. I happened to be working for their UK distributor at the time I got my hands on an early copy. It had a rather quirky Tag mode where you could drop graphic tag icons into the page together with images, IIRC.
For me, the main selling point was that it was the first graphical HTML editor that didn't mess about seriously with your code if you tried to step outside the bounds of the stuff it already knew about. Remember this was at a time when the HTML standard was in considerable flux, with Netscape and Microsoft in particular introducing new tags with every revision of their browsers. For its time, it was an excellent piece of software, Version 2.0 in in the summer of 1997 brought a more extensible architecture; it was way ahead of the pack in terms of functionality, speed and minimal machine-generated HTML code bloat, particularly when you compared it to clunky behemoths like NetObjects Fusion that were its main competitors. Fusion, like so many other products that were around at the time, stored the site in a proprietary format file and merely published to HTML; as soon as you needed to tweak something, you were on your own and couldn't roll the changes back into the source file.
Macromedia didn't ship Dreamweaver 1.0 until December 1997 and IMHO it wasn't really until v1.2 that it became useful.
Adobe bought the product in 1999, took it over to Windows and made some changes, but Macromedia steadily improved Dreamweaver until version 3.0 was vastly superior. I gave up on GoLive around that point, especially as Dreamweaver worked so much better with my usual weapon of choice, hand-coding with BBEdit.
I can't really comment on GoLive as a 'ripoff of Dreamweaver' nowadays, I've not used it since version 5.0, but in some respects you could argue that it's the other way round.:)
Less water the world over. Probably the 2 best countries with fairly good water will be America and Russia. In contrast, China and India (the 2 most populus nations) will have quite a bit less water.
Do you really want to live in a world where two other highly-populated nuclear powers face political instability because of a shortage of water while you apparently still have enough to spare?
How do people who are not privileged enough to be able to go to driving school get to and from work?
By using public transport, like most of the rest of us. Duh!
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of days ago on Twitter I was informed in all seriousness by some Trump supporter in Louisiana that David Cameron and Theresa May are 'more socialist than they should be' and that some of their policies are 'communist'.
Unfortunately, even if the rest of what he says appears rather unhinged, it doesn't look like a parody account.
Are you incapable of looking it up in the Bill? It's a matter of official public record.
As you have already been told it is in Schedule 4 of the Act (though technically it's still a Bill until it receives Royal Assent
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-public-bill-office/2016-17/compared-bills/Investigatory-Powers-AAC-Tracked-Changes-version.pdf
Schedule 4 begins on page 219, though heaven knows why I'm being so helpful for a sweary AC
The Guardian 'one of the most extreme left news outlets in the UK'? Ha!
If that is true, it is only in comparison to the right-wing bias of most UK dailies than any objective measurement of the Guardian's left-wing bias. Most of the time its editorial line is to the right even of large parts of the Liberal party. It would probably be fair to say the The Guardian is mostly social democratic in its outlook, but to call it even socialist would be a misnomer, 'extreme left' even more so.
85900 and still around. :-)
I guess I will be in for some serious questioning next time I go to the US...
So the fact that the government mandates insurance if I want to drive my car on the road means the cost of my car insurance is actually a tax?
TBF, the guy in the Huff Po story you linked to only killed himself
That's as may be in Helsinki for video surveillance. We've become rather accustomed to that in the UK.
The line that's being crossed here (not particularly well highlighted in the summary) is that they will be making *audio* recordings of the interior of the taxi too.
Apparently
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG7IURgryjA
For non-UK readers, Sky News is part of News International's UK TV operation.
Maybe News International threw in the towel and pulled the plug on them.
IIRC the old 'jelly mould' Saabs of the 1960s (and many of the later ones) are designed to coast in neutral.
The freewheel automatically disengages the clutch when you take your foot off the accelerator pedal, like that on a bicycle. It was a feature originally something to do with lubricating the 2-stroke engines fitted in the earliest models, not a bug or poor driving technique.
A friend of mine who used to live near Whitby, Yorkshire (which has its fair share of hills) found it rather alarming at first, but got used to it.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pd f
> All systems aimed to reduce crime, yet this study suggests that CCTV has generally failed to
> achieve this. Although police-recorded crime has decreased in six out of the 13 systems for
> which data were available, in only three cases might this decrease be attributable to CCTV,
> and in only two areas was there a significant decrease compared with the control.
and somewhat bizarrely
> Moreover, in some cases (although not many) an increase in crime was an indicator of success
(on the basis that CCTV led to the detection of crime that had previously been unreported)
more importantly in the context of continuing the expansion of our surveillance society, the Home Office conclude
> there was a lack of realism about what could be expected from CCTV. In short, it
> was oversold - by successive governments - as the answer (indeed the 'magic bullet', Ditton
> and Short, 1999) to crime problems. Few seeking a share of the available funding saw it as
> necessary to demonstrate CCTV's effectiveness. After all, why would the government be
> giving out money for this and not other measures if it did not work? Yet it was rarely obvious
> why CCTV was the best response to crime in particular circumstances.
If you're arrested, your prints and DNA are recorded and go on the database permanently. Even if you're never charged, the charges are dropped or you're found innocent in court, there's no way to be removed unless it's subsequently proven that *no crime had ever taken place*.
a se_removal/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/26/dna_datab
http://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/display.var.88442 1.0.fingerprint_plan_to_stop_pub_yobs.php
:-)
It's hardly Sheffield or Coventry, admittedly.
If you're in Germany and order things from Italy, you pay Italian VAT on your invoice. You can reclaim the VAT only if you're exporting the item outside the EU.
A limited range customs duties still exist for trade between member countries for commercial purposes - the UK still levies duty on alcohol and tobacco imported from France if it's for resale in the UK, for example - UK duties on these goods are significantly higher than those in most of the rest of Europe. For most goods, though, there aren't import tariffs.
If you're bringing it yourself into the country for personal use, however, there is no duty to be levied. UK Customs & Excise have rapped over the knuckles by the courts after confiscating goods and vehicles belonging to people going on a 'booze cruise' over the Channel to stock up on drink on suspicion that they're going to resell it. If you order a case of wine from France to be delivered to your home, duty is still applicable, though.
Buying stuff from outside the EU is a bit of a lottery. The value of goods have to be declared as they pass through customs and any Duties and VAT will be due. If it's under £18 (about USD 33) VAT and duty may be exempted.
You could under-declare the value of items, but then your goods would be under-insured. There's a healthy trade along these lines in camera equipment from Hong Kong where the vendor will guarantee to refund your VAT if the item is stopped at Customs.
Wising up, the EU has started working over the last couple of years, with major internet retailers like Amazon US to ensure that VAT is levied at the point of sale, before it hits European borders.
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/26/dna_databa se_removal/
The UK is something of a DNA record kleptocracy, with a national DNA database now well in excess of three million records, and with new sampling opportunities available to the police on remarkably easy terms. These days it's ever so easy to get onto the UK database, but how do you get off?
What's that you say? You don't? Well, up to a point - but it's not strictly true to say that once you're on the database you absolutely can't get off again. It's just very, very hard and it's going to take you a long, long time. Fortunately, would-be escapees now have the benefit of some guidance from the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Exceptional Case Procedures for Removal DNA, Fingerprints and PNC Records, released by ACPO on 24th April, is in part a response to recent decisions made by the Information Tribunal in connection with police retention of criminal records data. Alongside this, "recent widespread media coverage relating to the retention of DNA", ACPO says, is likely to result in a high volume of removal requests over the next 12 months. These requests will in the first instance be made to Chief Officers in their role of data controller, and ACPO feels that it is important that "national consistency" is achieved in their responses.
OK? So how does it work? "Exception cases will by definition be rare," says ACPO, and might well include cases "where the original arrest or sampling was found to be unlawful." Or, if it turns out to be absolutely clear that there wasn't any offence in the first place, that might count. And ACPO gives a specific example:
"For example where a dead body is found in a multi-occupancy dwelling and the cause of death is not immediately obvious. All the occupants are arrested on suspicion of murder pending the outcome of a post mortem. All arrested persons are detained at the local police station and samples taken. It later transpires that the deceased person died of natural causes. No offence therefore exists, and all persons are released from custody."
Find corpse, nick everybody within range just in case? One certainly hopes that's seriously exceptional. Fortunately though, the honest Chief Copper doesn't have to wrestle with these thorny issues alone. Or possibly, at all, considering ACPO's recommended procedure.
First, a request for deletion of a Police National Computer (PNC) record, DNA sample or fingerprints should be viewed as being "a request to remove all items." It is then "essential", says ACPO, that the DNA and fingerprint records are matched correctly to the appropriate arrest summons number on the PNC record. But here comes a gotcha: "Samples taken on other occasions should not be deleted." Which we take to mean that if you're not pursuing a DNA record specific to a PNC arrest record, then you're not going to get off the database. Close the door on your way out.
But what if it is associated with an arrest record? "In the first instance applicants should be sent a letter informing them that the samples and associated PNC record are lawfully held and that their request for deletion / destruction is refused" Oh, right... "unless the applicant believes the application should be regarded as exceptional." In that case, "the applicant should be invited to state the grounds upon which they believe their case to be exceptional."
And then the Chief Officer gets to decide? Well, not exactly. "The Chief Officer is asked to consider any response and either reply to the applicant rejecting the application for the removal of the record(s)" Oh, right... "or refer the case papers to the DNAFRP [DNA & Fingerprint Retention Project], thus ensuring that a consistent approach is adopted nationally."
Then DNAFRP will respond with advice taking into account any relevant precedents, and then the Chief Officer gets to decide. Using a response letter template supplied by DNAFRP. It may be occurring to you that one might easily die of old age while this process was under way. But don't you go thinking dying's going to get you off the database, sunshine, oh no... ®
> random people who sneeze wrong
bioterrorist!
With an indeterminate end point, the government can keep people on a war footing indefinitely and do whatever they like.
From TFA: "No one knows what caused the octopus to attack. It may have been curious, looking for a meal or a girlfriend, said Jim Cosgrove of the Royal B.C. Museum."
I didn't know that Slashdot had Octopodal readers
We have similar debates over the funding of the National Health Service in the UK. The answer is that to allow the rich to opt out would undermine the whole point of any social security system, which is to protect the poorer members of society who *can't* afford a pension, health care, or to be unable to work for a period of time for whatever reason.
Social funds like SS and the NHS recognise that capitalism depends on inequities in the distribution of wealth as part of its basic mechanism and spread the cost of their funding across the whole of society, leveraging the wealth of those with more money to help out those who have less to help mitigate that.
The alternative is to suggest that all taxation should be hypothecated and that you have the right to withdraw your participation in those areas where you're not going to directly benefit from a particular levy. People who don't have children or who send their children to private schools would be allowed to opt out of paying for state education, etc. The logical outcome would be that you pay a fee to the fire brigade when they attend a fire at your house, or to the police to investigate a burglary there and pay nothing at other times.
Taxation is not a consumer service fee.
That's under consideration too. There are plans in the pipeline to also make 'tamper-proof' number plates mandatory: these are designed to self-destruct when they are removed.
e p_veh_num_plate_sec.htm
http://www.dvla.gov.uk/public/consult/consultee_r
"19. The use of number plates that cannot be re-used once detached from a vehicle would be a major step forward in preventing the theft of number plates for cloning vehicles or to avoid congestion charges etc."
It's also worth noting paragraph 1. of the same consultation document.
"The culture of secure number plates that we are attempting to develop requires that plates should no longer be seen as isolated commodities but as an integral part of the vehicle. "
Adobe GoLive started out life in 1996 as a Mac-only product called GoLive Pro made a German company called Gonet, predating Dreamweaver by about 18 months. I happened to be working for their UK distributor at the time I got my hands on an early copy. It had a rather quirky Tag mode where you could drop graphic tag icons into the page together with images, IIRC.
:)
4 /26/golive_history.html
For me, the main selling point was that it was the first graphical HTML editor that didn't mess about seriously with your code if you tried to step outside the bounds of the stuff it already knew about. Remember this was at a time when the HTML standard was in considerable flux, with Netscape and Microsoft in particular introducing new tags with every revision of their browsers. For its time, it was an excellent piece of software, Version 2.0 in in the summer of 1997 brought a more extensible architecture; it was way ahead of the pack in terms of functionality, speed and minimal machine-generated HTML code bloat, particularly when you compared it to clunky behemoths like NetObjects Fusion that were its main competitors. Fusion, like so many other products that were around at the time, stored the site in a proprietary format file and merely published to HTML; as soon as you needed to tweak something, you were on your own and couldn't roll the changes back into the source file.
Macromedia didn't ship Dreamweaver 1.0 until December 1997 and IMHO it wasn't really until v1.2 that it became useful.
Adobe bought the product in 1999, took it over to Windows and made some changes, but Macromedia steadily improved Dreamweaver until version 3.0 was vastly superior. I gave up on GoLive around that point, especially as Dreamweaver worked so much better with my usual weapon of choice, hand-coding with BBEdit.
I can't really comment on GoLive as a 'ripoff of Dreamweaver' nowadays, I've not used it since version 5.0, but in some respects you could argue that it's the other way round.
There's a potted history of GoLive on the O'Reilly site: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/0
Less water the world over. Probably the 2 best countries with fairly good water will be America and Russia. In contrast, China and India (the 2 most populus nations) will have quite a bit less water.
Do you really want to live in a world where two other highly-populated nuclear powers face political instability because of a shortage of water while you apparently still have enough to spare?How do people who are not privileged enough to be able to go to driving school get to and from work?
By using public transport, like most of the rest of us. Duh!
Yikes! Your Tax authority bombs you into paying up?!
No wonder Americans don't like tax increases...
Awesome. I loved it.
:)
And it's about cricket.