Definitely. What has happened doesn't reflect well on the BBC and I'm not saying that they were right to run the story, as I have no idea how well the evidence was checked etc. That said, the point is that the BBC would have risked at least as much criticism if they hadn't run the story and it had been legitimate and that is why it was a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation.
One of the most powerful people in world media has resigned 'voluntarily' for running a hard news programme. If you don't think that's news that matters then it's your shortcoming not the sites fault. Furthermore, one of the reasons this has become such a big issue is because even though Newsnight didn't name the individual and left the description vague enough to give cover, and parliament were asked not to use privilege to name him via the house of commons, the name was outed on Twitter by various people (including other journalists) thus a clear tech connection that the summary missed.
Someone goes to the BBC an tells them he was abused by Lord McAlpine. The damned if you don't is that as the BBC has just been slagged off by the UK press and politicians for not airing a story about another child abuse case if they didn't air the show and it turned out that it had been Lord McAlpine then they would have been eviscerated for 'another cover-up'.
Factor in that Newsnight didn't name the person in question, that they certainly did some checking and it is clear that they didn't have a 100% clear case but also that they felt the story was strong enough to air. Did they make a mistake airing it? Possibly but where do you draw the line on when evidence is strong enough? If they were 95% confident it was him, would it be acceptable to tell the story (without naming the individual)? How about 99.9%? The view of the victim was that it had been covered up by the police in the same manner that much of Saville's behaviour had been so again if the BBC kept it quiet they risked a mass of criticism. It really was a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Fundamentally it is a size/shape issue. If you made the screen 4:3 and kept the same width you'd make the laptop considerably larger and if you cut the width to keep screen real estate the same then you'd have to shrink the keyboard width a lot. Personally I'd be happy if they could just get laptops up to a base standard of 1080px vertical. Sure it isn't perfect but the difference between 768 and 1080 is not just large numerically but night and day in normal use.
It depends on your definition of fine. Personally I prefer to spend on card rather than with cash:
I don't have to carry around coins and notes
I get an automatic record of my transactions making it easy for me to monitor my spending
I get the protections that come with buying with a credit card but pay the same as I would with cash (the retailer is giving Vise etc 2-3% and it won't change unless there is a mass shift to cash by everyone)
I get cashback on the majority of my spending
I can understand the benefits of cash and of having the ability to use cash for purchases you wish to keep anonymous etc but I honestly can't think of anything I've bought in the last couple of years where it was important; so I could use cash for everything, which would be inconvenient, in the hope that my personal spending would somehow keep cash as a viable option or I could accept that cash spending will continue to decline and benefit as much as possible.
NO country can "close the loopholes" as another suggested because we are not talking about the laws of ONE country, we are talking about the laws of ALL countries
Yes & no. In the EU there are a couple of countries with extremely low taxes that are used by many online businesses as nominal corporate HQs so they can sell freely into other EU countries without charging their higher rates of tax. That's why if you buy a DVD online in the UK it almost certainly will be posted from a warehouse in the UK from a company based in Luxemburg, Guernsey or somewhere else with low taxes.
How do you stop that? Change the rules. Require that sales into another country in the EU are topped up to the equivalent VAT (value added tax) of that country or some Union wide level.
In the case of the US if you know that a few small countries are being used to abuse your tax system then give them two options 1/ Stop using the ability to avoid US tax to bring in additional business 2/ We'll designate all money transferred into accounts in your country as profit and ignore the 'losses' from any debts/loans etc offered by entities in your country when working out tax.
I wasn't making an argument for or against but asking the question of where the limits of the law should be defined. Personally I agree that a trained animal should be treated in the same manner as other invasive intelligence tools; I don't want to set a precedent for having trained sniffer dogs patrolling the streets.
I am aware of the legal precedence, my point was about the philosophical question. I happen to a agree that using devices to see/hear what would normally be hidden from an observer should be restricted; however that is going to become more and more difficult to define over the next decade as augmented reality becomes more common and people continue to carry more powerful computing devices with them.
No it isn't and frankly pretending that the police force is just like any old business is naive at best.
I don't want the police deciding what people can or can't get into trouble for. For all the whining you do about the lack of democratic process in government it isn't like just handing control over the matter to the police directly somehow makes it more accountable. The people, via the government, should decide what is or isn't legal; the police should, within the bounds of the law, enforce those laws; and the courts should decide appropriate sanction for those who break them. Trying to merge these roles because you can't think of a way to fix them individually is only going to make things worse.
As much as I find it hard to motivate myself to defend the police, it isn't up to them to set the law or decide which laws they decide to enforce. Your government, and the general population, deserve the blame for anything wrong with that.
As to whether getting a warrant based on a sniffer dog is right. It really is hard to say; personally I think there should be a standard of a reasonable expectation of privacy but that becomes very hard to define. If a police officer overheard a conversation about bomb making through an open window when passing should it not be investigated? How about a large quantity of peroxide bottles left next to a bin visible at the side of the house. If a dog trained to detect explosives goes batshit crazy outside of a house should it be ignored? Most people accept that things that can be seen or heard from public property aren't private; how about if they are only visible/audible if using advanced equipment and manipulation (to for example filter sound). Is a smell emanating from a property supposed to be ignored? I doubt the police officer who ignored a strong burning smell and left someone to die would be praised.
That's a pretty blatant attempt at poor arguing via changing the subject. Election abuse doesn't become less problematic because it benefits the party you support; the fact that there are ignorant people out there, like you, who would happily see democracy thrown out of the window to get the candidate they want 'elected' emphasises the need for independent observation.
If I had mod-points I'd mod you down for trying to pre-emptively attack anyone who disagrees motive; it's very poor form.
The argument could be made that children shouldn't be constantly followed around by a parent with no personal freedom what-so-ever; if that is the case and a parent found the comfort of being able to 'find' their child if required made them more willing to let them play outside etc then the device could actually do some good by acting as a safety net. Personally, I'm not sure this is a good development; however like most things the application is just as important as the technology.
Given the timing I can't help but feel we gave them Abu Hamza and the other 4 'terror' suspects in return for them letting this go without a major fuss. That both your premise and mine both are based on the assumption that actual human rights and morality were largely irrelevant says something about our countries politics.
It's bollocks. Sending anyone to a foreign country, with a comparatively harsh penal system to serve 60 years is going to massively increase the risk of them committing suicide. I've seen nothing in this case that makes me think that his 'condition' should have any baring on whether he was extradited or not (regardless of whether the extradition should have happened for other reasons or not).
I'm fed up of seeing people abuse provisions that are put in place to protect those with genuine medical/pschological needs and getting away with it.
I'd love to see Google remove login ability from all Google products in France and see how long it takes for them to change their mind. I like the integration between Google services, if I was worried about how they were using the data I provide then I'd still be worried if it was silo'd into the different divisions. I still can't for the life of me understand how Google gets so much hassle for this when 'platforms' like Windows Live, iOS, Facebook etc collect at least as wide if not wider swathes of information and often far less transparently.
To be fair the light bulb ban is based on a technological advancement that can improve efficiency by an order of magnitude on probably the most numerous power consuming product on earth and where the saving in energy cost exceeds the initial outlay. In circumstances as one sided as that the case for a ban is more compelling.
Comparative to the complexity of setting acceptable power consumption figures for graphics cards and a myriad of other devices those obstacles are trivial. What about dual and quad card setups, what about clocking of cards (artificially limiting but allowing users to unclock), what about outsourcing gfx card work to other cards, how about people who are using gfx cards to handle work more efficiently than would be possible on a CPU etc.
Yes making electricity more expensive knocks onto hundreds of other things but so does making fuel more efficient and it hasn't stopped us implementing some of the highest taxes on fuel. There's also a reason why average MPG for cars in Europe are so high compared to the US.
If the issue is that certain high power consumption industries would cease to be viable because of the increased costs and risk of imports then bring in tariffs for imports that charge the balance. It already makes no sense that we require EU producers to manufacture products with high taxes on unsustainable behaviour and then allow the market for products to go to importers who don't have to follow those regulations.
Firstly it's not something that is even planned for implementation, let alone dated and incoming. If the EU really were to put a limit on the power draw of graphics card to come in 5 years from now which required cards to use 1/2 the power it would hardly matter. There would be a small decrease in the rate graphics improve while they focus on improving efficiency.
Probably my bigger gripe is that it would be simpler, and likely more effective, to tax power use rather than try and legislate what is/isn't allowed in various electronic devices. A generic tax would increase uptake and development of efficient devices and encourage people to be less wasteful while still allowing them to buy some inefficient items (gfx cards if required) and pay accordingly. They're going to tax us anyway so it might as well be focused on discouraging unsustainable behaviour instead of, for example, having an income.
Personally I'd be tempted to consider subscriptions to some business magazines. Personally I quite like Fortune and Harvard Business Review. They won't give you the depth of books focused on specific subjects but they give you a broader understanding of what is happening and can help direct you towards subjects you think are important and wish to investigate further.
I would however also suggest reading Robert Cialdini: Influence and Bruce Patton: Difficult Conversations. Neither are about business strategy or leadership instead they both focus on how to consider other peoples positions, how to interact effectively and build productive relationships.
Many of these online campaigns/polls etc are pretty meaningless. When you are after informed debate then having a barrier to entry can often facilitate it better than a free for all especially when so many of those 19,000 emails will be a template. The quantity of emails only tells you how many emails you have received, and with a bit of analysis how that compares to other issues of a similar type. It doesn't tell you how many valid concerns were raised, how many opinions were repeated or how interested the country as a whole is (an issue that affects 10,000 geeks will generate more emails than one that affects 10,000 Octogenarians).
As you then point out yourself people obviously didn't care that much about ID cards because it didn't change their opinions and it didn't cost them their seats. I wish people did, and I wish there was more genuine engagement by the public but that doesn't mean dumbing down engagement to email counts. You might as well base decisions on Facebook likes.
All of that can be true and largely non-consequential. The Desktop share of the computing market has dropped considerably. For most users how easy something is to upgrade and cost to repair don't really matter. I am now the only person in my family going up to my Grandparents level who have a pc (Grandparents have laptop and dock), parents have two laptops, me & partner have desktop and laptop and sisters + partner have 2 laptops. Pretty much all my friends barring those who are seriously into gaming or IT don't have desktops any-more, most don't even have docks. The only reason we have a desktop is that we needed a large screen for my partners work and 4 years ago when we bought it (it still is more than sufficient for the task) a capable laptop and dock was too much. When she gets her new work laptop we'll ditch the desktop and connect the screen/keyboard/mouse by a dock.
Really? All it would take is some basic ability to detect who enters the shower: IR cam, simple radar, weight/charge sensor in shower floor, normal cam etc which cost very little and a control unit in the power shower casing. Actually, thinking about it I'm slightly surprised no one offers it already; possibly there's no real demand currently.
The GPs post was pretty far off though. We use devices because they are effective, stylish and for many other criteria. A £5 watch is pretty much as good as a £5000 watch for most people. Many people use Smartphones as alarms. I have a chip based alarm system at home exactly because although cheap a metal key isn't good enough.
The problem with predictions of the future like this is that the truly transformational changes aren't usually obvious so they end up with incremental improvements instead. Why on earth would I still have 'a desktop' 15 years from now and what on earth would make me want to have some computing unit (CID) that I plug into various devices when that's even less useful than the closest current equivalent (a mobile phone and bluetooth/wifi). Why on earth would I despatch my car to go on a collection errand when there would be fleets of delivery vehicles constantly passing by etc. This strikes me as a particularly unimaginative and non-compelling attempt to predict the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely. What has happened doesn't reflect well on the BBC and I'm not saying that they were right to run the story, as I have no idea how well the evidence was checked etc. That said, the point is that the BBC would have risked at least as much criticism if they hadn't run the story and it had been legitimate and that is why it was a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation.
One of the most powerful people in world media has resigned 'voluntarily' for running a hard news programme. If you don't think that's news that matters then it's your shortcoming not the sites fault. Furthermore, one of the reasons this has become such a big issue is because even though Newsnight didn't name the individual and left the description vague enough to give cover, and parliament were asked not to use privilege to name him via the house of commons, the name was outed on Twitter by various people (including other journalists) thus a clear tech connection that the summary missed.
Someone goes to the BBC an tells them he was abused by Lord McAlpine. The damned if you don't is that as the BBC has just been slagged off by the UK press and politicians for not airing a story about another child abuse case if they didn't air the show and it turned out that it had been Lord McAlpine then they would have been eviscerated for 'another cover-up'.
Factor in that Newsnight didn't name the person in question, that they certainly did some checking and it is clear that they didn't have a 100% clear case but also that they felt the story was strong enough to air. Did they make a mistake airing it? Possibly but where do you draw the line on when evidence is strong enough? If they were 95% confident it was him, would it be acceptable to tell the story (without naming the individual)? How about 99.9%? The view of the victim was that it had been covered up by the police in the same manner that much of Saville's behaviour had been so again if the BBC kept it quiet they risked a mass of criticism. It really was a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Fundamentally it is a size/shape issue. If you made the screen 4:3 and kept the same width you'd make the laptop considerably larger and if you cut the width to keep screen real estate the same then you'd have to shrink the keyboard width a lot. Personally I'd be happy if they could just get laptops up to a base standard of 1080px vertical. Sure it isn't perfect but the difference between 768 and 1080 is not just large numerically but night and day in normal use.
It depends on your definition of fine. Personally I prefer to spend on card rather than with cash:
I don't have to carry around coins and notes
I get an automatic record of my transactions making it easy for me to monitor my spending
I get the protections that come with buying with a credit card but pay the same as I would with cash (the retailer is giving Vise etc 2-3% and it won't change unless there is a mass shift to cash by everyone)
I get cashback on the majority of my spending
I can understand the benefits of cash and of having the ability to use cash for purchases you wish to keep anonymous etc but I honestly can't think of anything I've bought in the last couple of years where it was important; so I could use cash for everything, which would be inconvenient, in the hope that my personal spending would somehow keep cash as a viable option or I could accept that cash spending will continue to decline and benefit as much as possible.
Yes & no. In the EU there are a couple of countries with extremely low taxes that are used by many online businesses as nominal corporate HQs so they can sell freely into other EU countries without charging their higher rates of tax. That's why if you buy a DVD online in the UK it almost certainly will be posted from a warehouse in the UK from a company based in Luxemburg, Guernsey or somewhere else with low taxes.
How do you stop that? Change the rules. Require that sales into another country in the EU are topped up to the equivalent VAT (value added tax) of that country or some Union wide level.
In the case of the US if you know that a few small countries are being used to abuse your tax system then give them two options 1/ Stop using the ability to avoid US tax to bring in additional business 2/ We'll designate all money transferred into accounts in your country as profit and ignore the 'losses' from any debts/loans etc offered by entities in your country when working out tax.
I wasn't making an argument for or against but asking the question of where the limits of the law should be defined. Personally I agree that a trained animal should be treated in the same manner as other invasive intelligence tools; I don't want to set a precedent for having trained sniffer dogs patrolling the streets.
I am aware of the legal precedence, my point was about the philosophical question. I happen to a agree that using devices to see/hear what would normally be hidden from an observer should be restricted; however that is going to become more and more difficult to define over the next decade as augmented reality becomes more common and people continue to carry more powerful computing devices with them.
No it isn't and frankly pretending that the police force is just like any old business is naive at best.
I don't want the police deciding what people can or can't get into trouble for. For all the whining you do about the lack of democratic process in government it isn't like just handing control over the matter to the police directly somehow makes it more accountable. The people, via the government, should decide what is or isn't legal; the police should, within the bounds of the law, enforce those laws; and the courts should decide appropriate sanction for those who break them. Trying to merge these roles because you can't think of a way to fix them individually is only going to make things worse.
As much as I find it hard to motivate myself to defend the police, it isn't up to them to set the law or decide which laws they decide to enforce. Your government, and the general population, deserve the blame for anything wrong with that.
As to whether getting a warrant based on a sniffer dog is right. It really is hard to say; personally I think there should be a standard of a reasonable expectation of privacy but that becomes very hard to define. If a police officer overheard a conversation about bomb making through an open window when passing should it not be investigated? How about a large quantity of peroxide bottles left next to a bin visible at the side of the house. If a dog trained to detect explosives goes batshit crazy outside of a house should it be ignored? Most people accept that things that can be seen or heard from public property aren't private; how about if they are only visible/audible if using advanced equipment and manipulation (to for example filter sound). Is a smell emanating from a property supposed to be ignored? I doubt the police officer who ignored a strong burning smell and left someone to die would be praised.
That's a pretty blatant attempt at poor arguing via changing the subject. Election abuse doesn't become less problematic because it benefits the party you support; the fact that there are ignorant people out there, like you, who would happily see democracy thrown out of the window to get the candidate they want 'elected' emphasises the need for independent observation.
If I had mod-points I'd mod you down for trying to pre-emptively attack anyone who disagrees motive; it's very poor form.
The argument could be made that children shouldn't be constantly followed around by a parent with no personal freedom what-so-ever; if that is the case and a parent found the comfort of being able to 'find' their child if required made them more willing to let them play outside etc then the device could actually do some good by acting as a safety net. Personally, I'm not sure this is a good development; however like most things the application is just as important as the technology.
Nah there's plenty of chumps who will try to derail these kinds of discussions for free in the West. Just look at your own post for a great example.
Sorry; I meant Country's
Given the timing I can't help but feel we gave them Abu Hamza and the other 4 'terror' suspects in return for them letting this go without a major fuss. That both your premise and mine both are based on the assumption that actual human rights and morality were largely irrelevant says something about our countries politics.
It's bollocks. Sending anyone to a foreign country, with a comparatively harsh penal system to serve 60 years is going to massively increase the risk of them committing suicide. I've seen nothing in this case that makes me think that his 'condition' should have any baring on whether he was extradited or not (regardless of whether the extradition should have happened for other reasons or not).
I'm fed up of seeing people abuse provisions that are put in place to protect those with genuine medical/pschological needs and getting away with it.
To be fair the light bulb ban is based on a technological advancement that can improve efficiency by an order of magnitude on probably the most numerous power consuming product on earth and where the saving in energy cost exceeds the initial outlay. In circumstances as one sided as that the case for a ban is more compelling.
Comparative to the complexity of setting acceptable power consumption figures for graphics cards and a myriad of other devices those obstacles are trivial. What about dual and quad card setups, what about clocking of cards (artificially limiting but allowing users to unclock), what about outsourcing gfx card work to other cards, how about people who are using gfx cards to handle work more efficiently than would be possible on a CPU etc.
Yes making electricity more expensive knocks onto hundreds of other things but so does making fuel more efficient and it hasn't stopped us implementing some of the highest taxes on fuel. There's also a reason why average MPG for cars in Europe are so high compared to the US.
If the issue is that certain high power consumption industries would cease to be viable because of the increased costs and risk of imports then bring in tariffs for imports that charge the balance. It already makes no sense that we require EU producers to manufacture products with high taxes on unsustainable behaviour and then allow the market for products to go to importers who don't have to follow those regulations.
Firstly it's not something that is even planned for implementation, let alone dated and incoming. If the EU really were to put a limit on the power draw of graphics card to come in 5 years from now which required cards to use 1/2 the power it would hardly matter. There would be a small decrease in the rate graphics improve while they focus on improving efficiency.
Probably my bigger gripe is that it would be simpler, and likely more effective, to tax power use rather than try and legislate what is/isn't allowed in various electronic devices. A generic tax would increase uptake and development of efficient devices and encourage people to be less wasteful while still allowing them to buy some inefficient items (gfx cards if required) and pay accordingly. They're going to tax us anyway so it might as well be focused on discouraging unsustainable behaviour instead of, for example, having an income.
Personally I'd be tempted to consider subscriptions to some business magazines. Personally I quite like Fortune and Harvard Business Review. They won't give you the depth of books focused on specific subjects but they give you a broader understanding of what is happening and can help direct you towards subjects you think are important and wish to investigate further.
I would however also suggest reading Robert Cialdini: Influence and Bruce Patton: Difficult Conversations. Neither are about business strategy or leadership instead they both focus on how to consider other peoples positions, how to interact effectively and build productive relationships.
Many of these online campaigns/polls etc are pretty meaningless. When you are after informed debate then having a barrier to entry can often facilitate it better than a free for all especially when so many of those 19,000 emails will be a template. The quantity of emails only tells you how many emails you have received, and with a bit of analysis how that compares to other issues of a similar type. It doesn't tell you how many valid concerns were raised, how many opinions were repeated or how interested the country as a whole is (an issue that affects 10,000 geeks will generate more emails than one that affects 10,000 Octogenarians).
As you then point out yourself people obviously didn't care that much about ID cards because it didn't change their opinions and it didn't cost them their seats. I wish people did, and I wish there was more genuine engagement by the public but that doesn't mean dumbing down engagement to email counts. You might as well base decisions on Facebook likes.
All of that can be true and largely non-consequential. The Desktop share of the computing market has dropped considerably. For most users how easy something is to upgrade and cost to repair don't really matter. I am now the only person in my family going up to my Grandparents level who have a pc (Grandparents have laptop and dock), parents have two laptops, me & partner have desktop and laptop and sisters + partner have 2 laptops. Pretty much all my friends barring those who are seriously into gaming or IT don't have desktops any-more, most don't even have docks. The only reason we have a desktop is that we needed a large screen for my partners work and 4 years ago when we bought it (it still is more than sufficient for the task) a capable laptop and dock was too much. When she gets her new work laptop we'll ditch the desktop and connect the screen/keyboard/mouse by a dock.
Really? All it would take is some basic ability to detect who enters the shower: IR cam, simple radar, weight/charge sensor in shower floor, normal cam etc which cost very little and a control unit in the power shower casing. Actually, thinking about it I'm slightly surprised no one offers it already; possibly there's no real demand currently.
The GPs post was pretty far off though. We use devices because they are effective, stylish and for many other criteria. A £5 watch is pretty much as good as a £5000 watch for most people. Many people use Smartphones as alarms. I have a chip based alarm system at home exactly because although cheap a metal key isn't good enough.
The problem with predictions of the future like this is that the truly transformational changes aren't usually obvious so they end up with incremental improvements instead. Why on earth would I still have 'a desktop' 15 years from now and what on earth would make me want to have some computing unit (CID) that I plug into various devices when that's even less useful than the closest current equivalent (a mobile phone and bluetooth/wifi). Why on earth would I despatch my car to go on a collection errand when there would be fleets of delivery vehicles constantly passing by etc. This strikes me as a particularly unimaginative and non-compelling attempt to predict the future.