"That Muslim loon actually has a church preaching the death and destruction."
I guess you never got to see a Catholic IRA affiliated preacher in action.
Or Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist leader in Burma that has been, and still is leading the massacre of thousands of muslims in the name of Buddhism (yes, really).
Or the many Buddhist preachers in Sri Lanka that supported and continue to support the massacre of Hindu Tamils.
Or the Orthodox leaders in Bosnia in the 90s, that preached in support of the Serbian genocide of over 10,000 muslims.
Or Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army preaching that they're doing the Lord's work in killing civilians in parts of Africa still to this day.
Turns out, bad people can coopt religion and use it as an excuse to do their bidding whatever that religion may be.
You hear about muslims the most because that is the group that most concerns the Western media. Militant Buddhists in Asia, and Christian warlords in Africa just aren't a threat to us, so the media just doesn't care about those.
Frankly, I defend none of them, extremists are extremists and are all vile human beings, but when people try and pretend that muslims are the only real problem it gives away a disappointing lack of global knowledge in an individual. It comes across as incredibly insular, that you're unaware of anything going on outside your own bubble.
So sure, chat away about this being the biggest threat to the West, you wouldn't be wrong, but you can't rationally pretend that there's something inherently more problematic about their religion than any other. There are over a billion of them living perfectly peacefully wishing no harm on anyone just as most Christians living in America and Europe are doing exactly the same. Most people in the world are decent human beings, you can't let extremists win by falling into the hate trap they're pushing, by seeking to divide those of us who are decent people against each other. I'm an atheist and I find religion nonsensical but blaming a whole group for the actions of a minority? pretending it's inherent to the majority of the group as a whole? It's not a nice path to go down and it simply isn't true. It's also exactly what extremists that you profess to hate want you to do, so if you really hate islamic extremists then why are you giving into them and doing exactly what they want? They want division between otherwise peaceful people who identify with different religions because they see that as the path to holy war (jihad), and that's exactly what you're giving them.
Do you also replace the word 'asynchronous' with 'not synchronous'?
You know the a in atheist means not theist right? Like asexual, meaning not sexual, or atypical meaning not typical.
When you understand that basic and fairly common element of the English language you'll recognise that your whole post makes no sense. You're declaring yourself an atheist (because non-theist means the exact same thing in the English language as atheist) but saying you're not because you believe atheist means something else.
Atheists believe there is no god or equivalent higher being, agnostics claim they just don't know so don't really have an opinion.
You've really messed up your undestand of these meanings, and you've come up with an argument that makes no sense, and has no evidence. For example, I'm an atheist as I do not believe in god or any other higher being, but I was never a theist either.
Well obviously you know nothing about geopolitcs and the global economic situation if you believe that because you're simply wrong.
"Norway has unusually high productivity because of the size of its oil and hydroelectric generation per capita. It's a different sort of cherry picking you do here. Sure, if the entire world could be massive oil producers with huge hydro reserves exporting to some immense buyer, then we could all enjoy the level of productivity of Norway."
Except the US has those resources, but fails to do the same, highlighting the fact that productivity from working hours and holiday days is irrelevant compared to things like poor resource management. Which, you know, was my point, so thanks for finally agreeing.
"Then by all means show this. One country with an unusual level of natural resources doesn't qualify as "plenty of examples" though."
Yet, I also pointed out that the UK has some of the highest working hours and lowest holidays in Europe and is still less productive than those countries with shorter working hours and more holidays like Germany and France. I guess you ignored that example though because you've moved into the usual "Fuck, looks like I am wrong, but there's no way I'll admit it on the internet because I'm way too insecure for that" territory.
"No, what annoys me are the Pollyannas who just assert stuff without considering even in the slightest the drawbacks of their schemes. If all you consider are the benefits, then anything looks wonderful."
But you've not explained what the drawbacks are exactly, they're certainly not the things you state because there is no evidence at all that greater working hours and less holidays actually lead to more productivity. There have been a number of studies showing the opposite however (feel free to Google them, I can't be arsed). If you want something interactive though then see here, you can add the US to the chart. You might not want to though, because it'll be embarasing for your argument.
"Cherry picking two years of data isn't any better."
You pick date that best eliminates any confounding factors, factoring in data that is confounded by things like the EU referendum in the UK, or the recession which effected different countries in distinctly different ways tells us nothing about the impact of increased holidays.
"Aside from the fact that the US is more productive per capita than the UK is."
Right, but not Norway, I wasn't using the UK as a an example of productivity per-capita, we know the UK has a productivity problem unrelated to amount of leave because we're also less productive that European countries like Germany that have way more leave and work way less hours than us too. Again, you're mixing and matching stats to try and falsely make a point.
The point remains that there are plenty of examples of countries who have higher productivity and more leave and lower working hours than countries who have less leave and longer working hours proving the point that there is absolutely no demonstrable link between the two.
I guess you just have sour grapes that you're stuck in an environment where you get worked senseless and have no free time to yourself and rather than fight that to get better conditions that would have absolutely no negative cost for you or your country you insecurely try and justify it as somehow in your benefit when it's very obviously not. It seems clear you wont accept the reality and change your opinion though, so all I can really say is good luck throwing away hours of your life for a company that doesn't care about you for no practical benefit if you really think that's somehow a good thing.
Yes, that's absolutely true if you cherry pick one single month of data.
For the last full year of data, for Norway we have GDP per person of $68k US, and $55k US for the US. That's substantially higher economic output per person than the US, despite working far fewer hours. The trend has been true for many years now however.
Since we finally jumped out of the financial crisis and started to grow again, the UK achieved 3.2% growth followed by 2.7%, vs. the US' 2.2% followed by 3.1%.
Furthermore, the UK and Norway have achieved these figures without having to rely on spending money they don't have - the UK's debt to GDP is 5% lower than the UK's, Norway's debt to GDP is 162% lower than the US' (because it runs a surplus).
Statistics doesn't work by picking a figure that suits your argument, it works by looking at overall trends, so sorry that you suck at statistics, but you sucking at statistics and getting things wrong doesn't make you right.
Again, there is absolutely zero evidence that longer working hours result in higher productivity. Giving people decent amounts of leave can clearly do just as well for a nation as working them stupid. Hmm, working them stupid, that would explain a lot.
Yep, I think you're exactly right. Perhaps one solution would be to create an unused property tax, and peg it to the appreciation price of land in an area +10% or something to force development.
London is also somewhat of a special case though, the UK is almost begging for it's capital to be moved Brasil style to redistribute housing demand and spread out the pressure and balance it across the country, though that'll never happen of course. Alternatively I think it's South Africa that has 3 capital cities to force distribution of the pressure on people being drawn to capitals.
Data controllers don't require registration, anyone who collects personal data automatically becomes a data controller.
"But then there's nothing to say explicitly where that permission does or doesn't end, and that creates huge grey areas in the kind of situation we're talking about."
I see this sort of comment a lot on Slashdot, but I think Slashdot with it's large technical crowd is often guilty of seeing things too logically, and too binary because it's ultimately in our nature with what we do. The reality is quite different, law and law making have many grey areas, and judges and juries do often have to engage in decision making that isn't defined by perfect logical inference. I actually learnt something of this when I was, randomly (don't ask) watching a debate about pesticide laws and the banning of imidacloprid, a form of neonicotinoid. There was an argument that the problem with it is that it was potentially responsible for the decline of bees across Europe, and as such a temporary ban across Europe should be put in place to see if it imporves thing. That was largely agreeable in itself as an interim test, but much of the dispute came from questions about amateur gardens who depend on it for pest control, there aren't really any other equivalently effective systemic inseciticides and that could mean a blight across Europe for amateur gardeners who don't use it in sufficient quantities to cause damage as farmers do, so they decided to try and define exceptions to the ban to allow this use - i.e. it can only be sold in bottles upto 500ml - but what if farmers still just buy bulk lots and use it anyway?, or it can only be used in private gardens - but what if farmers just declare their field their garden?, or it can only be used in non-commercial settings - but what about garden centres trying to keep their stock protected?, or it can only be used in areas smaller than 500m^2 - but what if farmers just claim to sub-divide their fields?... and on, and on, and on. The end result was that exceptions were unworkable, and could always be exploited by farmers trying to flout the ban, and so it was recognised that the only option was to pass the law with no exceptions, but compel national governments to only enforce it when it was in their own judgement being done on a harmful scale. So what's the moral of the story here? the moral is that contrary to my long held belief that the law was a logical, firmly defined thing, that that's simply not the case, the law regularly has to deal with fringe cases, and it always becomes a judgement call at that point. This is why sometimes the law is just outright unfair, but there's no better alternative, because to cover every fringe case you have to write more law, but when you write more law you create more loopholes, and you can just never win - look at tax law, it's often claimed it's too complex, but it's complex to cover fringe cases that companies wanted, but then those fringe cases are poured over to find tax loopholes and it becomes a wholly self-defeating exercise.
So my point here is that I think it's wrong to think that the law ever can or will define everything perfectly such that outcomes can be decided purely on consistent and exact logical reasoning, reality is inevitably going to require judgement calls to be made at some point, mostly I think the UK's judicial system is independent and smart enough to do a good job of this, but sometimes it wont. It's just the unfortunate nature of the beast.
Beyond that though I do agree with everything you say, and whilst I don't think the law can ever be perfect as for above, I do agree that there are ways in which it can be made better. I think it's about precisely targetting law effectively at areas that definietely need clear legislation, whilst getting a fine balance with not leaving the law too wide open to be abused, or to specific to be trivially worked around. Honestly, it's easy to slag politicians off, but watching them in action in actual committee debates where law is actually made (rather th
Except Britain suffers none of those things because it's the world's 5th largest economy, and the fastest growing developed economy in the world over the last two years.
Countries in Europe such as Norway have even higher average levels of leave than us, and produce even more per-person than we do.
The idea that reasonable levels of annual leave somehow cause harm to an economy is demonstrably false.
"I'd like to think that was the case, and as I read the law it always seemed to be. However, it makes me wonder how social media apps get away with harvesting their users' entire phone/address books"
There isn't really one answer, the answers range from them being covered by data processor sections of the DPA, through to them simply breaking the law but having not been challenged.
I hate using the term Right to be Forgotten, because that's a provision of the updated Data Protection Directive, but if you look at Google's Right to be Forgotten case what that is really when you cut away all the bullshit and propaganda is the fact that Google has simply breached the Data Protection Directive (the Data Protection Act in the UK) - this is effectively exactly what you're talking about, by harvesting personal data Google is in breach of the Data Protection Act, but this is an act that's been around since Google's birth, so why now? Simply because only recently did it ever make it to court. Google has never been DPA compliant on this front, so it's been breaking the law for what, 15 years or so? but nothing happens until a complaint is lodged. Regardless of whether it's good or bad (that's not what I'm trying to debate here regarding the right to be forgotten case as it's incorrectly called) the point was always that Google was harvesting personal data that it simply had no legal defence for collecting. So hopefully that explains simply why the regulators haven't acted against things that seem illegal - they simply just wont until they're forced to by a complaint. This isn't always entirely their fault to be fair, some regulators have it in their mandate that they're only there to be reactive to complaints and not to proactively seek problems, others feel they only have the budget to deal with complaints reactively, and others are just simply incompetent. I don't know which excuse of these the UK's ICO has to be honest.
Aside from outright illegality that simply hasn't been dealt with by regulators, there's the aformentioned data processing laws. In data protection parlance, someone who obtains data originally and owns it is called a data controller (they must of course collect it legally), these data controllers can in strict circumstances pass the data on to 3rd parties without you having any relationship with or giving permission to those third parties for processing purposes. So for example, you may apply for a mortgage, you give the bank your personal details, but say the bank doesn't do the mortgage decision making themselves, say they outsource that, then they may legally be able to pass it to the mortgage decision company for processing without you ever knowing. The restrictions are that the data controller is still legally responsible for the data (i.e. it's security, correctness etc.), the data processor may only use the data for the agreed processing and must delete it when finished, and may not pass it on to anyone else or use it in any other way.
In terms then of how things like automatic phone book uploads work, effectively what's happening here is that your friend gives you their phone number, you are then the data controller, you've been given that data for the purpose of being able to store it and find it when you need to. When you agree to upload it to Google or Facebook's services you're effectively contracting out to them as data processors, such that they're offering to help you store, and help you find this number as and when they need it. That's why this is legal, but here's where social networks could, and probably have (even if not prosecuted) fallen foul of the law - if they start using those phone numbers for any other reason than simply storing them and helping you find them then they're breaking their obligations as a data processor. In theory you could also be held liable because you're the DC but in practice there will be no public interest in punishing you as a private citizen for trusting a large company, but there will be public interest in charging the company.
"What is worrying me is that I can't immediately see why this would be illegal under current data protection law in England and Wales"
There are two reasons, first, that I have covered elsewhere, is that they're providing a credit score. This is a regulated industry by the FCA, and they're not registered as a financial services company with the FCA for this purpose. Registering imposes certain requirements on them, such as being able to justify how they came to a credit score. If they're using artificial intelligence/statistical techniques as they claim to determine credit score from social media data then it's near impossible to fulfil this obligation because retracing how and why such systems came up with the score they did on an individual basis is damn near impossible, it just doesn't give the auditability required for FCA compliance, and they're not FCA registered anyway.
From a non-financial aspect in terms of the DPA, the DPA states that an organisation cannot capture more data than is necessary for the purposes of their business. Given that their business is effectively evaluating people by capturing social media data, and that some of that data will be inherently irrelevant to determining trust, but that they're relying on statistical algorithms to figure out which data is and isn't valid, as well as including data that they're simply not even legally allowed to use as a determination (gender, sex, sexuality) then it seems pretty clear that they're not in compliance with the DPA. Perhaps most damingly is the fact that upon loading a post onto their own systems, or a picture, they may be capturing data of other people. If a person being evaluated posts "£50k to blow at Joe Bloggs 30th Birthday on Friday!" then they've already taken data illegaly about Joe Bloggs - his name, his birthday, and his age. No individual can ever give permission to a company to harvest another individual's data in this way.
The reason the big boys in this industry haven't done any of this is precisely because it's an unnavigable minefield. When you start introducing non-deterministic algorithms into the fray, with data that can be so arbitrary such as social media posts, there is absolutely no way whatsoever you can guarantee that your system is not going to discriminate based on sex, race, religion, and so on and so forth. It only takes one case where someone suggests that their race, or sex, or sexuality or similar has been taken into account creating bias in the outcome, for that data to be stored on the company's system (which it is, see the example profile) and for the company not to be able to prove otherwise for the whole system to be shut down as non-compliant and for a fine to be issued.
You're right in that there's nothing to stop an organisation harvesting data about an individual that they've been given permission to harvest by that individual, but as soon as you start doing evaluation on that data in a non, or effectively non-deterministic manner, and when that data can include personal information about others then you're going to cross the line.
But again, in this case, they've outright failed on their FCA obligations alone before you even factor that in so regardless this company is not fulfilling their legal obligations.
"Our planning system mostly dates from the late 1960s and was designed to limit urban sprawl. That's getting very painful in light of the population growth we've seen over the last two decades, but the system has a powerful NIMBY lobby that defends it from any attempts at reform."
I don't think that's entirely fair, part the problem is that there are massive amounts of disused brownfield territory, but developers, despite making absolutely massive profits given the money in the housing market currently, have been lobbying to destroy greenfield natural sites to build upon, because it's cheaper for them than knocking down old disused buildings, or ripping up old foundations, pipework etc. from disused ex-industrial sites.
The fact is that there is more than enough disused brownfield land to solve for the UK's housing crisis many times over. People aren't rejecting building on greenfield sites because of NIMBYism, they're rejecting it because it's simply unnecessary and because people would rather see ghastly unused ex-industrial areas turned into shiny new housing developments than they would pristine natural areas turned into shiny new housing developments.
I don't think we should be destroying our argicultural and natural landscapes just because it's cheaper for property developers to build on fresh land than it is to tidy up old industrial areas. If we allow them to do that then we still end up with tatty old industrial areas that look awful, bring down the value of an area, and increase crime as a result whilst destroying nice argicultural or recreational area needlessly.
I think most people would be more than happy with building on these old sites, because it raises the value of an area for people already living around. It's win-win for everyone except property developers who make on slightly less massive profits.
This isn't to say that there aren't legislative changes that can be made to improve the housing situation, there are, an obvious one being that anyone not using land they own that is disused but could be regenerated sould be forced to sell it of or regenerate it themselves rather than sit on it simply in the hope of profiting off the increases in land value at some arbitrary point in the future even though it adds to the artificial land scarcity and brings down the value of an area, but we don't need to make it easier to build on green belt, we already have way more than enough unprotected land to satisfy the country's building needs long into the future. We just need to make sure it's used sensibly.
Yes, simply put, what this organisation is claiming to do is illegal, however, judging by the amount of Lorem Ipsum on the site, the lack of any pricing et. al. I think it's highly likely that this whole thing is a scam, or just a snake oil peddler.
I work in the fraud/credit industry and can categorically state that you cannot simply just do what these people are claiming to do without undergoing serious compliance efforts. First and foremost is the fact that they're engaging in financial services by including credit risk worthiness, and this would require them to register with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, however there is no registration at the address on the website as a financial services company:
Beyond the financial aspect of professing to evaluate people's financial worthiness amongst other criteria the amount of detail they're collecting would appear to place them in clear breach of the data protection act in general also.
In recent years the reality is that there is actually a lot of oversight in the UK of companies providing financial services, in large part as a result of the excesses of the 00s and the mis-selling, the financial crisis et. al., the predatory payday loans companies that profited from people etc. For precisely this reason you cannot simply start a company and start bandying about financial data like credit risk as these guys profess to with absolutely no oversight.
Anyone in their right mind would steer clear of this company both as an investor, and as a customer. Again, if it is doing what it says it is doing, then it is operating outside the law.
Someone just needs to build a router that connects you via Tor or some known secure VPN channel automatically that people can plug in to their existing routers and then build a new network within that.
The problem right now is that doing all that is too hard for the layperson, and even for people that know, many can't be arsed. Give people a box they can just plug in, and then plug in devices when they want this free version of the internet as opposed to the broken version and I suspect it'll get adopted quite well over time. You'd effectively be recreating the internet as a layer on top of the internet, but do so in a way that makes use of greater decentralisation. People paid £50 to buy a modem to use the internet the first time around, I'd imagine they'd be willing to do so a second time around if it offers compelling reason like enhanced security, uncensored content etc.
The problem with this argument often parroted by Brexiters is that it assumes that the only factors at play are trade between Britain and the rest of the EU as single entities in isolation.
But the problem is more complex than that, the danger for the EU is that if Britain leaves and gets a sweatheart deal, that other countries will question why they're even in the EU if they can get better deals with the EU outside. This will mean other nations will quit, it means red tape between nations in the EU will increase, and it means that any benefit to retaining trade with the UK on terms favourable to the UK is lost.
Yes, it will hurt Germany and France to see decreased trade with the UK, but it'll hurt them even more if other nations leave the EU and become more expensive to trade with. This isn't a risk Germany and France are willing to take, so they'll accept the blow on decreased trade with the UK to make sure that the rest of the EU is kept together such that trade there remains efficient and strong.
For France and Germany the calculation isn't simply a yes/no question of "Do we want to retain trade with the UK at current levels?", it's "What's worse, losing some trade with the UK, or dealing with the risk and associated costs of potential collapse of the EU in general?". I think it's pretty obvious what they're going to choose, the loss of trade with us is small fry compared to widespread departures from the EU and the costly disentanglements that would entail. Sacrificing trade with us to punish us is a price well worth paying to them if the alternative is to see massive damage to the EU and the greater costs to them that that would result in.
Anyone simplifying it as simply cutting their nose off to spite their face, and that they wouldn't do that because they want the income from UK trade is both economically and politically illiterate because the alternative has an even greater cost to them. They'll make sure Brexit hurts not simply to spite the UK, but to protect themselves - they're always going to put their interests before the UK's if the UK decides to shun them. It's nonsensical to believe they'd do the UK a favour at massive risk to their own wellbeing.
To be fair I wouldn't read too much into the relative votes, the real test is always the final vote in the commons. A lot of MPs that don't support these bills still vote for them before the final stage precisely because they either want the Lords to analyse it before making a final decision, or because they want the Lords to scrap it.
The thing to realise is that if they vote against it they're embroiled in a political campaign, come re-election time their opponents can claim they're pro-terrorist and other such nonsense. By voting to pass it up to the Lords to amend or reject, they don't have that worry - the Lords can get away with it because they're unelected and so unaccountable. The Lords therefore makes a useful waste paper bin to throw bad law in to in this respect. MPs will only take the political battle on if they disagree with the Lords and don't like what the Lords have pushed back.
As such one shouldn't read the vote for the bill as a large endorsement for it as is, that's really not what it is, it's just an endorsement for the fact that it should be passed up to the Lords to scrutinise.
"Not even remotely possible say the pot on the accelerator went bad contact, demanded max throttle and that left the audit trail in the logs?"
But why would it demand max throttle? we're pretty good at error detection in electronics nowadays, we've been doing it for a long time now. If something is wrong the default will be zero acceleration not maximum acceleration.
Effectively then the only input that can trigger maximum acceleration is depression of the pedal.
This doesn't mean that something couldn't be dropped on the pedal, or that the pedal can't get mechanically stuck, but neither of those things are being claimed here. What's being claimed is that auto-pilot did it, but auto-pilot wasn't engaged and something pressed the pedal.
"Just getting to the point where you can fail isn't exactly easy"
Well I'm not entirely sure that's true, despite my lack of knowledge on this topic I'm pretty sure even I could fashion some kind of pointy tube out of metal, fill it full of some kind of fuel, shove a fuse made of string or something dipped in fuel and light it only to have it probably blow up on the floor or a few feet off of it.
I'm assuming you meant that getting to the point where you have something theoretically viable but fail is difficult as I'm pretty sure just outright failing by having it on the ground blowing up isn't too hard:)
I've heard this a few times, there must be something really odd going on with the game because my 2008 2.83ghz quad core with 8gb of RAM handles it without breaking a sweat at 1080p and above default settings for draw distance etc.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because I know someone else mentioned this once before that they had problems with a PC far more powerful than mine, but I'd argue that it doesn't inherently need a powerful PC, it's just that there is something that causes poor performance on some systems that's never been fixed.
"I can't leave the building? Well, here's my badge, I'm off to work for the guys you're so threatened by and that don't treat their staff like dicks. I'm also taking all my knowledge of your solutions to the threat with me. Fuck you."
Sure each to their own, but I have a hard time believing anyone whose done serious work (i.e. 12 months+ development, using the bulk of the functionality) in Eclipse and Visual Studio could ever objectively argue in favour of Eclipse. Eclipse is slow, cumbersome, has a broken plugin system that often results in you requiring multiple installs for using multiple languages/technologies (try merging STS and Zend if you use Java/Spring and PHP/Zend), and it's also much more buggy. Of course, you don't even have to take my word on that one, just look at the downloads page with all the different convoluted versions that often crossover leaving the user puzzled as to what the fuck they actually need. Visual Studio has versions, but they're mostly related to scale of development (student, independent, businesses, really big business) rather than being language/tool specific.
Visual Studio really does just work, and it's auto-complete isn't merely marginally better, it actually works. For many languages Eclipse is so slow that you've typed the code before auto-complete pops up, whilst Visual Studio lets you stream out an entire line of code with only a few button presses. When you factor in Visual Studio's debugging, collaboration, and profiling tools the gap just widens further. I do think Eclipse does a better job when it comes to testing though, however I have that impression mostly from Eclipse plugins, whereas I never really bother with much beyond NUnit with Visual Studio.
People are always going to prefer what they're used to and what they've used the most, but frankly I always even prefererred NetBeans over Eclipse (though it's been sometime since I used NB), it was always much more stable and much more performant. I've been fortunate enough to have a few years solid experience on all these IDEs and I just can't see how objectively Eclipse could be deemed to be a better IDE.
Despite all this I think the trend for Visual Studio is downwards and has been for quite some years now. This news doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, it comes across as simply that everyone has left the Visual Studio team that has the confidence to make such a change, so instead we're going to pretend we just don't need to make it. It bothers me that rather than doing this sort of thing that people actually want and is useful they're doing things like making the icons fucking shite and less usable, they're doing things like capitalising the menu items and then undoing it next release, they're doing things like ripping out useful functionality to replace it with a more flexible alternative that doesn't actually offer half the previous functionality (i.e. you can no longer auto-generate unit test skeletons for a class definition).
This isn't just a Visual Studio problem though, it's a problem with Microsoft's development offerings in general - things like ASP.NET MVC have had their classic membership/role provider offerings replaced by default with Identity, but Identity doesn't offer half the config based configurability you had with membership/role providers - i.e. you can't easily switch between AD and SQL authentication via mere config with Identity without doing a lot of work and having a hell of a lot more of your own code to maintain.
Microsoft seem to have forgotten who their core audience is on this front and how loyal they've been and how much money that loyalty has netted them and instead let their teams focus way too much on pet projects rather than what their customers actually want and need. I'm not against letting developers have the freedom to work on pet projects as in Google's 20% time, but without the customers there'll eventually be no money for that anyway. The customer matters, and modern Microsoft just doesn't seem to get that like old Microsoft did. Even outside of Microsoft's development tools and technologies division this was a lesson hard learnt when Microsoft initially announced the Xbox One to be a fuck the consumer industry slave box until the realisation that this would kill the prod
"Makes me wonder if the NSA/CIA has some leverage on her, something they know about her, to get her to have such zeal in violating her oath to uphold the Constitution."
For some people it's merely about personal greed. The phrase "Knowledge is power" is true, and people like her will put morals aside in the pursuit of power and wealth. She knows that the people who can most well provide her knoweldge that she can use to achieve power and pursue money are those whom she is giving so much freedom to break the US constitution to.
She knows that even if she leaves politics she'll have a job waiting at some large global investment bank willing to pay her millions because she's built up such a great relationship with those that can provide her knowledge that gives that bank an edge over it's competitors. "Hey John, how are things at the NSA now? Listen, I was wondering if you could let me know what the real financial situation of this country is so that our bank can bet on it's collapse". In the meantime she'll just accept the dirt on her political opponents so that she can cement power against them as far as possible.
They don't need anything on her, they just need to find the politicians willing to sacrifice everything that's good and right in the pursuit of their own personal wealth and power.
This is how the world works, this is why people like ex-prime ministers of the UK get ridiculously well paying jobs. Companies don't employ them and pay them millions because of friendships, personalities, or skills. They employ them because of what they know and who their contacts are.
Oh are you still here being wrong, failing at science and struggling to cope with the realisation that you're part of a dying breed?
I've answered everything, it's not my fault you're the part of the human race that's too mentally flawed to cope with things like science and that still believes in fairy tales. The type of person that, as and adult, still believes stories akin to santa claus and the easter bunny to be truth in the most laughably child like manner. If you can't recognise how ludicrous that is then of course you can't understand why you're wrong, so I guess I'll leave you to keep being wrong, you're just not mentally capable of anything else, it is precisely those defective genes that lead you to be part of the human race that is dying out.
Of course, you still wont understand this, you'll still keep spouting drivel, still keep being wrong, again, for the simple fact that you just cannot understand science. I can, that's how I make good money doing it, how I help develop things that actually offer something useful to the world rather than merely spouting child-mind drivel about fantasy stories being true. How many people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and pay you to use your supposed knowledge of the realm of fairy tales? None? I thought that might be the case. Sucks to be you as part of the dying dead end breed I guess.
But that was really my point - you make statements that simply aren't true. Even the peer-reviewed evidence you refer to is not evidence of theism, it's research you've chosen to claim is evidence of theism, but it's nothing of the sort.
As for the trend - well, you brought it up. You made this weird claim that atheists were all going to die out because they were being selected against, something that again there is no evidence of right now, and in fact the contrary - there is a growing atheist population, and a declining theist population in developed nations (and as nations become more developed and better educated the trend is always towards declining theism).
There is also of course something that can survive - the subsection of the species that are atheists, those who are less genetically pre-disposed to believing in theism, and hence are more productive and more useful members of society in a developed world. In contrast, nature is selecting against the sub-section of the human race that remains attached to theism.
So as I said, you aren't interested in intelligent discussion because we have a combination of you making things up, lying, and getting confused against fairly basic scientific concepts. Again, all you want to do is preach, but I'm not buying what you're selling, I don't do fairy tales, I do science and logic and no amount of you trying to re-declare logic as the thing you do but isn't will make it so. You're still wrong and the only way you can be right is by dropping the whole theological mysticism nonsense.
There's a certain irony in your ad-hominem attacks on me given that you cried so hard about them last post. I used them because I knew it was pointless trying to engage with you, you're using them because you know deep down you've already long lost the argument but are too desperate and insecure in your beliefs to ever admit it.
I don't answer your questions because they're convoluted nonsense. I'm not going to engage with you in your debate because you just twist it and turn it into a combination of things people haven't said, things that aren't true, and things you just outright don't understand.
If you were even remotely capable of intelligent conversation I'd engage, but as is I'll just continue to stick to the indisputable fact that when you're gone, you're gone, and your ideas are going with you as your ideas and fairy tale belief die out also, whilst mine are spreading and growing in number. This is a fact you still so desperately want to avoid and as you can't even accept that you're part of a dying trend whilst I'm part of a growing trend then what's the point getting into things like evolution that you clearly don't understand?
I'm perfectly capable of it, and I know it very well - you asked what an atheist's definition of a human is, I'll tell you, it's a biological organism defined by a set of genes that match a pattern within a relatively small statistical degree of variation. I doubt you can even grasp what that means though, and it's also a factually accurate description - you'll undoubtedly argue against it regardless of the fact you'd be wrong. If you want to debate with people you need to start accepting which parts of your argument are just plain objectively wrong, and I'm afraid so far that's the vast majority of them. Given this, what you're after is not a debate, but an attempt to preach your preconceived ideas without challenge regardless of the high levels of factual inaccuracy within them.
You know you already lost the debate like 5 days ago right?
You seem to think if you keep posting drivel it'll somehow change the reality of the fact that atheism is on the rise, and theism is in decline in the developed world. It really wont. You're still a dying breed, and no amount of flapping about is going to change that.
You keep spouting mis-logic and I really really would like to give you the benefit of the doubt in thinking that you're just trolling and aren't actually that stupid, but I don't think it's really true is it? I mean, you really are actually so dumb that you a) believe what you're saying, b) fail incredibly hard at even the most basic forms of logical thinking, and c) really don't even understand half the concepts you're referencing.
When I talk about dying out, you know I'm talking about the segment of the human race that has the now undesirable genes that cause them to believe in fairy tales. I'm not talking about individuals but the whole, and again, folks like you with those undesirable genes that leave you believing in fairy tales are on the decline, there's just no place for people with such poor mental capacity as to believe that stuff in the gene pool as the gene pool increases in intelligence. Your anti-intellectualism is a relic, a no longer fit trait. This is why people like you are in decline, and people like me are not.
But I'll tell you what, let's do a deal, I'll go back to being a productive member of society, an atheism, part of the rising and growing and successful trend of humanity. You go back to being a relic that is easily fooled by the most nonsensical of discussion and that is part of the declining segment of humanity because you no longer have anything to offer the species. I'm sure you wont want this, because you can't accept that you're a dead end in the gene pool, but oh well, it's not really my problem is it? I'm not part of the dying trend.
Slashdot Mirror
"That Muslim loon actually has a church preaching the death and destruction."
I guess you never got to see a Catholic IRA affiliated preacher in action.
Or Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist leader in Burma that has been, and still is leading the massacre of thousands of muslims in the name of Buddhism (yes, really).
Or the many Buddhist preachers in Sri Lanka that supported and continue to support the massacre of Hindu Tamils.
Or the Orthodox leaders in Bosnia in the 90s, that preached in support of the Serbian genocide of over 10,000 muslims.
Or Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army preaching that they're doing the Lord's work in killing civilians in parts of Africa still to this day.
Turns out, bad people can coopt religion and use it as an excuse to do their bidding whatever that religion may be.
You hear about muslims the most because that is the group that most concerns the Western media. Militant Buddhists in Asia, and Christian warlords in Africa just aren't a threat to us, so the media just doesn't care about those.
Frankly, I defend none of them, extremists are extremists and are all vile human beings, but when people try and pretend that muslims are the only real problem it gives away a disappointing lack of global knowledge in an individual. It comes across as incredibly insular, that you're unaware of anything going on outside your own bubble.
So sure, chat away about this being the biggest threat to the West, you wouldn't be wrong, but you can't rationally pretend that there's something inherently more problematic about their religion than any other. There are over a billion of them living perfectly peacefully wishing no harm on anyone just as most Christians living in America and Europe are doing exactly the same. Most people in the world are decent human beings, you can't let extremists win by falling into the hate trap they're pushing, by seeking to divide those of us who are decent people against each other. I'm an atheist and I find religion nonsensical but blaming a whole group for the actions of a minority? pretending it's inherent to the majority of the group as a whole? It's not a nice path to go down and it simply isn't true. It's also exactly what extremists that you profess to hate want you to do, so if you really hate islamic extremists then why are you giving into them and doing exactly what they want? They want division between otherwise peaceful people who identify with different religions because they see that as the path to holy war (jihad), and that's exactly what you're giving them.
Do you also replace the word 'asynchronous' with 'not synchronous'?
You know the a in atheist means not theist right? Like asexual, meaning not sexual, or atypical meaning not typical.
When you understand that basic and fairly common element of the English language you'll recognise that your whole post makes no sense. You're declaring yourself an atheist (because non-theist means the exact same thing in the English language as atheist) but saying you're not because you believe atheist means something else.
Atheists believe there is no god or equivalent higher being, agnostics claim they just don't know so don't really have an opinion.
You've really messed up your undestand of these meanings, and you've come up with an argument that makes no sense, and has no evidence. For example, I'm an atheist as I do not believe in god or any other higher being, but I was never a theist either.
"Your two year sample doesn't do that."
Well obviously you know nothing about geopolitcs and the global economic situation if you believe that because you're simply wrong.
"Norway has unusually high productivity because of the size of its oil and hydroelectric generation per capita. It's a different sort of cherry picking you do here. Sure, if the entire world could be massive oil producers with huge hydro reserves exporting to some immense buyer, then we could all enjoy the level of productivity of Norway."
Except the US has those resources, but fails to do the same, highlighting the fact that productivity from working hours and holiday days is irrelevant compared to things like poor resource management. Which, you know, was my point, so thanks for finally agreeing.
"Then by all means show this. One country with an unusual level of natural resources doesn't qualify as "plenty of examples" though."
Yet, I also pointed out that the UK has some of the highest working hours and lowest holidays in Europe and is still less productive than those countries with shorter working hours and more holidays like Germany and France. I guess you ignored that example though because you've moved into the usual "Fuck, looks like I am wrong, but there's no way I'll admit it on the internet because I'm way too insecure for that" territory.
"No, what annoys me are the Pollyannas who just assert stuff without considering even in the slightest the drawbacks of their schemes. If all you consider are the benefits, then anything looks wonderful."
But you've not explained what the drawbacks are exactly, they're certainly not the things you state because there is no evidence at all that greater working hours and less holidays actually lead to more productivity. There have been a number of studies showing the opposite however (feel free to Google them, I can't be arsed). If you want something interactive though then see here, you can add the US to the chart. You might not want to though, because it'll be embarasing for your argument.
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/g...
"Cherry picking two years of data isn't any better."
You pick date that best eliminates any confounding factors, factoring in data that is confounded by things like the EU referendum in the UK, or the recession which effected different countries in distinctly different ways tells us nothing about the impact of increased holidays.
"Aside from the fact that the US is more productive per capita than the UK is."
Right, but not Norway, I wasn't using the UK as a an example of productivity per-capita, we know the UK has a productivity problem unrelated to amount of leave because we're also less productive that European countries like Germany that have way more leave and work way less hours than us too. Again, you're mixing and matching stats to try and falsely make a point.
The point remains that there are plenty of examples of countries who have higher productivity and more leave and lower working hours than countries who have less leave and longer working hours proving the point that there is absolutely no demonstrable link between the two.
I guess you just have sour grapes that you're stuck in an environment where you get worked senseless and have no free time to yourself and rather than fight that to get better conditions that would have absolutely no negative cost for you or your country you insecurely try and justify it as somehow in your benefit when it's very obviously not. It seems clear you wont accept the reality and change your opinion though, so all I can really say is good luck throwing away hours of your life for a company that doesn't care about you for no practical benefit if you really think that's somehow a good thing.
Yes, that's absolutely true if you cherry pick one single month of data.
For the last full year of data, for Norway we have GDP per person of $68k US, and $55k US for the US. That's substantially higher economic output per person than the US, despite working far fewer hours. The trend has been true for many years now however.
Since we finally jumped out of the financial crisis and started to grow again, the UK achieved 3.2% growth followed by 2.7%, vs. the US' 2.2% followed by 3.1%.
Furthermore, the UK and Norway have achieved these figures without having to rely on spending money they don't have - the UK's debt to GDP is 5% lower than the UK's, Norway's debt to GDP is 162% lower than the US' (because it runs a surplus).
Statistics doesn't work by picking a figure that suits your argument, it works by looking at overall trends, so sorry that you suck at statistics, but you sucking at statistics and getting things wrong doesn't make you right.
Again, there is absolutely zero evidence that longer working hours result in higher productivity. Giving people decent amounts of leave can clearly do just as well for a nation as working them stupid. Hmm, working them stupid, that would explain a lot.
Yep, I think you're exactly right. Perhaps one solution would be to create an unused property tax, and peg it to the appreciation price of land in an area +10% or something to force development.
London is also somewhat of a special case though, the UK is almost begging for it's capital to be moved Brasil style to redistribute housing demand and spread out the pressure and balance it across the country, though that'll never happen of course. Alternatively I think it's South Africa that has 3 capital cities to force distribution of the pressure on people being drawn to capitals.
Data controllers don't require registration, anyone who collects personal data automatically becomes a data controller.
"But then there's nothing to say explicitly where that permission does or doesn't end, and that creates huge grey areas in the kind of situation we're talking about."
I see this sort of comment a lot on Slashdot, but I think Slashdot with it's large technical crowd is often guilty of seeing things too logically, and too binary because it's ultimately in our nature with what we do. The reality is quite different, law and law making have many grey areas, and judges and juries do often have to engage in decision making that isn't defined by perfect logical inference. I actually learnt something of this when I was, randomly (don't ask) watching a debate about pesticide laws and the banning of imidacloprid, a form of neonicotinoid. There was an argument that the problem with it is that it was potentially responsible for the decline of bees across Europe, and as such a temporary ban across Europe should be put in place to see if it imporves thing. That was largely agreeable in itself as an interim test, but much of the dispute came from questions about amateur gardens who depend on it for pest control, there aren't really any other equivalently effective systemic inseciticides and that could mean a blight across Europe for amateur gardeners who don't use it in sufficient quantities to cause damage as farmers do, so they decided to try and define exceptions to the ban to allow this use - i.e. it can only be sold in bottles upto 500ml - but what if farmers still just buy bulk lots and use it anyway?, or it can only be used in private gardens - but what if farmers just declare their field their garden?, or it can only be used in non-commercial settings - but what about garden centres trying to keep their stock protected?, or it can only be used in areas smaller than 500m^2 - but what if farmers just claim to sub-divide their fields?... and on, and on, and on. The end result was that exceptions were unworkable, and could always be exploited by farmers trying to flout the ban, and so it was recognised that the only option was to pass the law with no exceptions, but compel national governments to only enforce it when it was in their own judgement being done on a harmful scale. So what's the moral of the story here? the moral is that contrary to my long held belief that the law was a logical, firmly defined thing, that that's simply not the case, the law regularly has to deal with fringe cases, and it always becomes a judgement call at that point. This is why sometimes the law is just outright unfair, but there's no better alternative, because to cover every fringe case you have to write more law, but when you write more law you create more loopholes, and you can just never win - look at tax law, it's often claimed it's too complex, but it's complex to cover fringe cases that companies wanted, but then those fringe cases are poured over to find tax loopholes and it becomes a wholly self-defeating exercise.
So my point here is that I think it's wrong to think that the law ever can or will define everything perfectly such that outcomes can be decided purely on consistent and exact logical reasoning, reality is inevitably going to require judgement calls to be made at some point, mostly I think the UK's judicial system is independent and smart enough to do a good job of this, but sometimes it wont. It's just the unfortunate nature of the beast.
Beyond that though I do agree with everything you say, and whilst I don't think the law can ever be perfect as for above, I do agree that there are ways in which it can be made better. I think it's about precisely targetting law effectively at areas that definietely need clear legislation, whilst getting a fine balance with not leaving the law too wide open to be abused, or to specific to be trivially worked around. Honestly, it's easy to slag politicians off, but watching them in action in actual committee debates where law is actually made (rather th
Except Britain suffers none of those things because it's the world's 5th largest economy, and the fastest growing developed economy in the world over the last two years.
Countries in Europe such as Norway have even higher average levels of leave than us, and produce even more per-person than we do.
The idea that reasonable levels of annual leave somehow cause harm to an economy is demonstrably false.
"I'd like to think that was the case, and as I read the law it always seemed to be. However, it makes me wonder how social media apps get away with harvesting their users' entire phone/address books"
There isn't really one answer, the answers range from them being covered by data processor sections of the DPA, through to them simply breaking the law but having not been challenged.
I hate using the term Right to be Forgotten, because that's a provision of the updated Data Protection Directive, but if you look at Google's Right to be Forgotten case what that is really when you cut away all the bullshit and propaganda is the fact that Google has simply breached the Data Protection Directive (the Data Protection Act in the UK) - this is effectively exactly what you're talking about, by harvesting personal data Google is in breach of the Data Protection Act, but this is an act that's been around since Google's birth, so why now? Simply because only recently did it ever make it to court. Google has never been DPA compliant on this front, so it's been breaking the law for what, 15 years or so? but nothing happens until a complaint is lodged. Regardless of whether it's good or bad (that's not what I'm trying to debate here regarding the right to be forgotten case as it's incorrectly called) the point was always that Google was harvesting personal data that it simply had no legal defence for collecting. So hopefully that explains simply why the regulators haven't acted against things that seem illegal - they simply just wont until they're forced to by a complaint. This isn't always entirely their fault to be fair, some regulators have it in their mandate that they're only there to be reactive to complaints and not to proactively seek problems, others feel they only have the budget to deal with complaints reactively, and others are just simply incompetent. I don't know which excuse of these the UK's ICO has to be honest.
Aside from outright illegality that simply hasn't been dealt with by regulators, there's the aformentioned data processing laws. In data protection parlance, someone who obtains data originally and owns it is called a data controller (they must of course collect it legally), these data controllers can in strict circumstances pass the data on to 3rd parties without you having any relationship with or giving permission to those third parties for processing purposes. So for example, you may apply for a mortgage, you give the bank your personal details, but say the bank doesn't do the mortgage decision making themselves, say they outsource that, then they may legally be able to pass it to the mortgage decision company for processing without you ever knowing. The restrictions are that the data controller is still legally responsible for the data (i.e. it's security, correctness etc.), the data processor may only use the data for the agreed processing and must delete it when finished, and may not pass it on to anyone else or use it in any other way.
In terms then of how things like automatic phone book uploads work, effectively what's happening here is that your friend gives you their phone number, you are then the data controller, you've been given that data for the purpose of being able to store it and find it when you need to. When you agree to upload it to Google or Facebook's services you're effectively contracting out to them as data processors, such that they're offering to help you store, and help you find this number as and when they need it. That's why this is legal, but here's where social networks could, and probably have (even if not prosecuted) fallen foul of the law - if they start using those phone numbers for any other reason than simply storing them and helping you find them then they're breaking their obligations as a data processor. In theory you could also be held liable because you're the DC but in practice there will be no public interest in punishing you as a private citizen for trusting a large company, but there will be public interest in charging the company.
B
"What is worrying me is that I can't immediately see why this would be illegal under current data protection law in England and Wales"
There are two reasons, first, that I have covered elsewhere, is that they're providing a credit score. This is a regulated industry by the FCA, and they're not registered as a financial services company with the FCA for this purpose. Registering imposes certain requirements on them, such as being able to justify how they came to a credit score. If they're using artificial intelligence/statistical techniques as they claim to determine credit score from social media data then it's near impossible to fulfil this obligation because retracing how and why such systems came up with the score they did on an individual basis is damn near impossible, it just doesn't give the auditability required for FCA compliance, and they're not FCA registered anyway.
From a non-financial aspect in terms of the DPA, the DPA states that an organisation cannot capture more data than is necessary for the purposes of their business. Given that their business is effectively evaluating people by capturing social media data, and that some of that data will be inherently irrelevant to determining trust, but that they're relying on statistical algorithms to figure out which data is and isn't valid, as well as including data that they're simply not even legally allowed to use as a determination (gender, sex, sexuality) then it seems pretty clear that they're not in compliance with the DPA. Perhaps most damingly is the fact that upon loading a post onto their own systems, or a picture, they may be capturing data of other people. If a person being evaluated posts "£50k to blow at Joe Bloggs 30th Birthday on Friday!" then they've already taken data illegaly about Joe Bloggs - his name, his birthday, and his age. No individual can ever give permission to a company to harvest another individual's data in this way.
The reason the big boys in this industry haven't done any of this is precisely because it's an unnavigable minefield. When you start introducing non-deterministic algorithms into the fray, with data that can be so arbitrary such as social media posts, there is absolutely no way whatsoever you can guarantee that your system is not going to discriminate based on sex, race, religion, and so on and so forth. It only takes one case where someone suggests that their race, or sex, or sexuality or similar has been taken into account creating bias in the outcome, for that data to be stored on the company's system (which it is, see the example profile) and for the company not to be able to prove otherwise for the whole system to be shut down as non-compliant and for a fine to be issued.
You're right in that there's nothing to stop an organisation harvesting data about an individual that they've been given permission to harvest by that individual, but as soon as you start doing evaluation on that data in a non, or effectively non-deterministic manner, and when that data can include personal information about others then you're going to cross the line.
But again, in this case, they've outright failed on their FCA obligations alone before you even factor that in so regardless this company is not fulfilling their legal obligations.
"Our planning system mostly dates from the late 1960s and was designed to limit urban sprawl. That's getting very painful in light of the population growth we've seen over the last two decades, but the system has a powerful NIMBY lobby that defends it from any attempts at reform."
I don't think that's entirely fair, part the problem is that there are massive amounts of disused brownfield territory, but developers, despite making absolutely massive profits given the money in the housing market currently, have been lobbying to destroy greenfield natural sites to build upon, because it's cheaper for them than knocking down old disused buildings, or ripping up old foundations, pipework etc. from disused ex-industrial sites.
The fact is that there is more than enough disused brownfield land to solve for the UK's housing crisis many times over. People aren't rejecting building on greenfield sites because of NIMBYism, they're rejecting it because it's simply unnecessary and because people would rather see ghastly unused ex-industrial areas turned into shiny new housing developments than they would pristine natural areas turned into shiny new housing developments.
I don't think we should be destroying our argicultural and natural landscapes just because it's cheaper for property developers to build on fresh land than it is to tidy up old industrial areas. If we allow them to do that then we still end up with tatty old industrial areas that look awful, bring down the value of an area, and increase crime as a result whilst destroying nice argicultural or recreational area needlessly.
I think most people would be more than happy with building on these old sites, because it raises the value of an area for people already living around. It's win-win for everyone except property developers who make on slightly less massive profits.
This isn't to say that there aren't legislative changes that can be made to improve the housing situation, there are, an obvious one being that anyone not using land they own that is disused but could be regenerated sould be forced to sell it of or regenerate it themselves rather than sit on it simply in the hope of profiting off the increases in land value at some arbitrary point in the future even though it adds to the artificial land scarcity and brings down the value of an area, but we don't need to make it easier to build on green belt, we already have way more than enough unprotected land to satisfy the country's building needs long into the future. We just need to make sure it's used sensibly.
Yes, simply put, what this organisation is claiming to do is illegal, however, judging by the amount of Lorem Ipsum on the site, the lack of any pricing et. al. I think it's highly likely that this whole thing is a scam, or just a snake oil peddler.
I work in the fraud/credit industry and can categorically state that you cannot simply just do what these people are claiming to do without undergoing serious compliance efforts. First and foremost is the fact that they're engaging in financial services by including credit risk worthiness, and this would require them to register with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, however there is no registration at the address on the website as a financial services company:
https://register.fca.org.uk/sh...
This is despite the fact that they MUST acquire permission to operate in this industry from the FCA and undergo necessary compliance checks, see here:
https://www.the-fca.org.uk/aut...
The relevant listing is "providing credit information services".
The company is however genuinely registered so isn't a complete hoax:
https://beta.companieshouse.go...
Beyond the financial aspect of professing to evaluate people's financial worthiness amongst other criteria the amount of detail they're collecting would appear to place them in clear breach of the data protection act in general also.
In recent years the reality is that there is actually a lot of oversight in the UK of companies providing financial services, in large part as a result of the excesses of the 00s and the mis-selling, the financial crisis et. al., the predatory payday loans companies that profited from people etc. For precisely this reason you cannot simply start a company and start bandying about financial data like credit risk as these guys profess to with absolutely no oversight.
Anyone in their right mind would steer clear of this company both as an investor, and as a customer. Again, if it is doing what it says it is doing, then it is operating outside the law.
Someone just needs to build a router that connects you via Tor or some known secure VPN channel automatically that people can plug in to their existing routers and then build a new network within that.
The problem right now is that doing all that is too hard for the layperson, and even for people that know, many can't be arsed. Give people a box they can just plug in, and then plug in devices when they want this free version of the internet as opposed to the broken version and I suspect it'll get adopted quite well over time. You'd effectively be recreating the internet as a layer on top of the internet, but do so in a way that makes use of greater decentralisation. People paid £50 to buy a modem to use the internet the first time around, I'd imagine they'd be willing to do so a second time around if it offers compelling reason like enhanced security, uncensored content etc.
The problem with this argument often parroted by Brexiters is that it assumes that the only factors at play are trade between Britain and the rest of the EU as single entities in isolation.
But the problem is more complex than that, the danger for the EU is that if Britain leaves and gets a sweatheart deal, that other countries will question why they're even in the EU if they can get better deals with the EU outside. This will mean other nations will quit, it means red tape between nations in the EU will increase, and it means that any benefit to retaining trade with the UK on terms favourable to the UK is lost.
Yes, it will hurt Germany and France to see decreased trade with the UK, but it'll hurt them even more if other nations leave the EU and become more expensive to trade with. This isn't a risk Germany and France are willing to take, so they'll accept the blow on decreased trade with the UK to make sure that the rest of the EU is kept together such that trade there remains efficient and strong.
For France and Germany the calculation isn't simply a yes/no question of "Do we want to retain trade with the UK at current levels?", it's "What's worse, losing some trade with the UK, or dealing with the risk and associated costs of potential collapse of the EU in general?". I think it's pretty obvious what they're going to choose, the loss of trade with us is small fry compared to widespread departures from the EU and the costly disentanglements that would entail. Sacrificing trade with us to punish us is a price well worth paying to them if the alternative is to see massive damage to the EU and the greater costs to them that that would result in.
Anyone simplifying it as simply cutting their nose off to spite their face, and that they wouldn't do that because they want the income from UK trade is both economically and politically illiterate because the alternative has an even greater cost to them. They'll make sure Brexit hurts not simply to spite the UK, but to protect themselves - they're always going to put their interests before the UK's if the UK decides to shun them. It's nonsensical to believe they'd do the UK a favour at massive risk to their own wellbeing.
To be fair I wouldn't read too much into the relative votes, the real test is always the final vote in the commons. A lot of MPs that don't support these bills still vote for them before the final stage precisely because they either want the Lords to analyse it before making a final decision, or because they want the Lords to scrap it.
The thing to realise is that if they vote against it they're embroiled in a political campaign, come re-election time their opponents can claim they're pro-terrorist and other such nonsense. By voting to pass it up to the Lords to amend or reject, they don't have that worry - the Lords can get away with it because they're unelected and so unaccountable. The Lords therefore makes a useful waste paper bin to throw bad law in to in this respect. MPs will only take the political battle on if they disagree with the Lords and don't like what the Lords have pushed back.
As such one shouldn't read the vote for the bill as a large endorsement for it as is, that's really not what it is, it's just an endorsement for the fact that it should be passed up to the Lords to scrutinise.
"Not even remotely possible say the pot on the accelerator went bad contact, demanded max throttle and that left the audit trail in the logs?"
But why would it demand max throttle? we're pretty good at error detection in electronics nowadays, we've been doing it for a long time now. If something is wrong the default will be zero acceleration not maximum acceleration.
Effectively then the only input that can trigger maximum acceleration is depression of the pedal.
This doesn't mean that something couldn't be dropped on the pedal, or that the pedal can't get mechanically stuck, but neither of those things are being claimed here. What's being claimed is that auto-pilot did it, but auto-pilot wasn't engaged and something pressed the pedal.
"Just getting to the point where you can fail isn't exactly easy"
Well I'm not entirely sure that's true, despite my lack of knowledge on this topic I'm pretty sure even I could fashion some kind of pointy tube out of metal, fill it full of some kind of fuel, shove a fuse made of string or something dipped in fuel and light it only to have it probably blow up on the floor or a few feet off of it.
I'm assuming you meant that getting to the point where you have something theoretically viable but fail is difficult as I'm pretty sure just outright failing by having it on the ground blowing up isn't too hard :)
I've heard this a few times, there must be something really odd going on with the game because my 2008 2.83ghz quad core with 8gb of RAM handles it without breaking a sweat at 1080p and above default settings for draw distance etc.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because I know someone else mentioned this once before that they had problems with a PC far more powerful than mine, but I'd argue that it doesn't inherently need a powerful PC, it's just that there is something that causes poor performance on some systems that's never been fixed.
"I can't leave the building? Well, here's my badge, I'm off to work for the guys you're so threatened by and that don't treat their staff like dicks. I'm also taking all my knowledge of your solutions to the threat with me. Fuck you."
FTFY.
Sure each to their own, but I have a hard time believing anyone whose done serious work (i.e. 12 months+ development, using the bulk of the functionality) in Eclipse and Visual Studio could ever objectively argue in favour of Eclipse. Eclipse is slow, cumbersome, has a broken plugin system that often results in you requiring multiple installs for using multiple languages/technologies (try merging STS and Zend if you use Java/Spring and PHP/Zend), and it's also much more buggy. Of course, you don't even have to take my word on that one, just look at the downloads page with all the different convoluted versions that often crossover leaving the user puzzled as to what the fuck they actually need. Visual Studio has versions, but they're mostly related to scale of development (student, independent, businesses, really big business) rather than being language/tool specific.
Visual Studio really does just work, and it's auto-complete isn't merely marginally better, it actually works. For many languages Eclipse is so slow that you've typed the code before auto-complete pops up, whilst Visual Studio lets you stream out an entire line of code with only a few button presses. When you factor in Visual Studio's debugging, collaboration, and profiling tools the gap just widens further. I do think Eclipse does a better job when it comes to testing though, however I have that impression mostly from Eclipse plugins, whereas I never really bother with much beyond NUnit with Visual Studio.
People are always going to prefer what they're used to and what they've used the most, but frankly I always even prefererred NetBeans over Eclipse (though it's been sometime since I used NB), it was always much more stable and much more performant. I've been fortunate enough to have a few years solid experience on all these IDEs and I just can't see how objectively Eclipse could be deemed to be a better IDE.
Despite all this I think the trend for Visual Studio is downwards and has been for quite some years now. This news doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, it comes across as simply that everyone has left the Visual Studio team that has the confidence to make such a change, so instead we're going to pretend we just don't need to make it. It bothers me that rather than doing this sort of thing that people actually want and is useful they're doing things like making the icons fucking shite and less usable, they're doing things like capitalising the menu items and then undoing it next release, they're doing things like ripping out useful functionality to replace it with a more flexible alternative that doesn't actually offer half the previous functionality (i.e. you can no longer auto-generate unit test skeletons for a class definition).
This isn't just a Visual Studio problem though, it's a problem with Microsoft's development offerings in general - things like ASP.NET MVC have had their classic membership/role provider offerings replaced by default with Identity, but Identity doesn't offer half the config based configurability you had with membership/role providers - i.e. you can't easily switch between AD and SQL authentication via mere config with Identity without doing a lot of work and having a hell of a lot more of your own code to maintain.
Microsoft seem to have forgotten who their core audience is on this front and how loyal they've been and how much money that loyalty has netted them and instead let their teams focus way too much on pet projects rather than what their customers actually want and need. I'm not against letting developers have the freedom to work on pet projects as in Google's 20% time, but without the customers there'll eventually be no money for that anyway. The customer matters, and modern Microsoft just doesn't seem to get that like old Microsoft did. Even outside of Microsoft's development tools and technologies division this was a lesson hard learnt when Microsoft initially announced the Xbox One to be a fuck the consumer industry slave box until the realisation that this would kill the prod
"Makes me wonder if the NSA/CIA has some leverage on her, something they know about her, to get her to have such zeal in violating her oath to uphold the Constitution."
For some people it's merely about personal greed. The phrase "Knowledge is power" is true, and people like her will put morals aside in the pursuit of power and wealth. She knows that the people who can most well provide her knoweldge that she can use to achieve power and pursue money are those whom she is giving so much freedom to break the US constitution to.
She knows that even if she leaves politics she'll have a job waiting at some large global investment bank willing to pay her millions because she's built up such a great relationship with those that can provide her knowledge that gives that bank an edge over it's competitors. "Hey John, how are things at the NSA now? Listen, I was wondering if you could let me know what the real financial situation of this country is so that our bank can bet on it's collapse". In the meantime she'll just accept the dirt on her political opponents so that she can cement power against them as far as possible.
They don't need anything on her, they just need to find the politicians willing to sacrifice everything that's good and right in the pursuit of their own personal wealth and power.
This is how the world works, this is why people like ex-prime ministers of the UK get ridiculously well paying jobs. Companies don't employ them and pay them millions because of friendships, personalities, or skills. They employ them because of what they know and who their contacts are.
Oh are you still here being wrong, failing at science and struggling to cope with the realisation that you're part of a dying breed?
I've answered everything, it's not my fault you're the part of the human race that's too mentally flawed to cope with things like science and that still believes in fairy tales. The type of person that, as and adult, still believes stories akin to santa claus and the easter bunny to be truth in the most laughably child like manner. If you can't recognise how ludicrous that is then of course you can't understand why you're wrong, so I guess I'll leave you to keep being wrong, you're just not mentally capable of anything else, it is precisely those defective genes that lead you to be part of the human race that is dying out.
Of course, you still wont understand this, you'll still keep spouting drivel, still keep being wrong, again, for the simple fact that you just cannot understand science. I can, that's how I make good money doing it, how I help develop things that actually offer something useful to the world rather than merely spouting child-mind drivel about fantasy stories being true. How many people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and pay you to use your supposed knowledge of the realm of fairy tales? None? I thought that might be the case. Sucks to be you as part of the dying dead end breed I guess.
But that was really my point - you make statements that simply aren't true. Even the peer-reviewed evidence you refer to is not evidence of theism, it's research you've chosen to claim is evidence of theism, but it's nothing of the sort.
As for the trend - well, you brought it up. You made this weird claim that atheists were all going to die out because they were being selected against, something that again there is no evidence of right now, and in fact the contrary - there is a growing atheist population, and a declining theist population in developed nations (and as nations become more developed and better educated the trend is always towards declining theism).
There is also of course something that can survive - the subsection of the species that are atheists, those who are less genetically pre-disposed to believing in theism, and hence are more productive and more useful members of society in a developed world. In contrast, nature is selecting against the sub-section of the human race that remains attached to theism.
So as I said, you aren't interested in intelligent discussion because we have a combination of you making things up, lying, and getting confused against fairly basic scientific concepts. Again, all you want to do is preach, but I'm not buying what you're selling, I don't do fairy tales, I do science and logic and no amount of you trying to re-declare logic as the thing you do but isn't will make it so. You're still wrong and the only way you can be right is by dropping the whole theological mysticism nonsense.
There's a certain irony in your ad-hominem attacks on me given that you cried so hard about them last post. I used them because I knew it was pointless trying to engage with you, you're using them because you know deep down you've already long lost the argument but are too desperate and insecure in your beliefs to ever admit it.
I don't answer your questions because they're convoluted nonsense. I'm not going to engage with you in your debate because you just twist it and turn it into a combination of things people haven't said, things that aren't true, and things you just outright don't understand.
If you were even remotely capable of intelligent conversation I'd engage, but as is I'll just continue to stick to the indisputable fact that when you're gone, you're gone, and your ideas are going with you as your ideas and fairy tale belief die out also, whilst mine are spreading and growing in number. This is a fact you still so desperately want to avoid and as you can't even accept that you're part of a dying trend whilst I'm part of a growing trend then what's the point getting into things like evolution that you clearly don't understand?
I'm perfectly capable of it, and I know it very well - you asked what an atheist's definition of a human is, I'll tell you, it's a biological organism defined by a set of genes that match a pattern within a relatively small statistical degree of variation. I doubt you can even grasp what that means though, and it's also a factually accurate description - you'll undoubtedly argue against it regardless of the fact you'd be wrong. If you want to debate with people you need to start accepting which parts of your argument are just plain objectively wrong, and I'm afraid so far that's the vast majority of them. Given this, what you're after is not a debate, but an attempt to preach your preconceived ideas without challenge regardless of the high levels of factual inaccuracy within them.
You know you already lost the debate like 5 days ago right?
You seem to think if you keep posting drivel it'll somehow change the reality of the fact that atheism is on the rise, and theism is in decline in the developed world. It really wont. You're still a dying breed, and no amount of flapping about is going to change that.
You keep spouting mis-logic and I really really would like to give you the benefit of the doubt in thinking that you're just trolling and aren't actually that stupid, but I don't think it's really true is it? I mean, you really are actually so dumb that you a) believe what you're saying, b) fail incredibly hard at even the most basic forms of logical thinking, and c) really don't even understand half the concepts you're referencing.
When I talk about dying out, you know I'm talking about the segment of the human race that has the now undesirable genes that cause them to believe in fairy tales. I'm not talking about individuals but the whole, and again, folks like you with those undesirable genes that leave you believing in fairy tales are on the decline, there's just no place for people with such poor mental capacity as to believe that stuff in the gene pool as the gene pool increases in intelligence. Your anti-intellectualism is a relic, a no longer fit trait. This is why people like you are in decline, and people like me are not.
But I'll tell you what, let's do a deal, I'll go back to being a productive member of society, an atheism, part of the rising and growing and successful trend of humanity. You go back to being a relic that is easily fooled by the most nonsensical of discussion and that is part of the declining segment of humanity because you no longer have anything to offer the species. I'm sure you wont want this, because you can't accept that you're a dead end in the gene pool, but oh well, it's not really my problem is it? I'm not part of the dying trend.