"BS. There will be no change in Orwellianism in either the UK or the US unless and until the entire system is reformed. Witness the total farce that is the "change" Obama brought in."
You're generalising. The new British government has already improved the situation, ID cards for example are already out the window.
We're not talking about Obama's form of change, here we have actual change. Whilst as I said in my previous post there is no way they could do everything they wanted in a month, the fact that they have scrapped ID cards already and followed through on other pledges (non-civil liberties related) speaks volumes.
They're even opening up about plans to allow a full investigation into torture by our security services and that move is unprecedented- Obama did indeed just sweep all that under the carpet, but that does not seem to be the case here, full details are due this week.
Perhaps the fundamental difference is that we now have a coalition government, whereby no single party has complete say in the way the country runs. They have to compromise, and they both realise if they don't behave they could lose power at any moment. This is something that wasn't the case with our previous government, and isn't the case with the Obama administration- they could do pretty much what they want and they'd still hold power for the rest of their term.
It's simply not the case that the UK is seeing civil liberties eroded more since the change of government last month, already we've had firm action to reverse some of the policies of the previous government, and we've promises of much more to come- if even some of them are followed it puts the UK in a much better state.
I'm not naive enough to believe things will be perfect, but currently the situation in the UK is certainly that civil liberties situation in general is actually improving from where it was, not getting worse, for now at least.
That's a horrendously biased account that misses some extremely important facts, and you are outright incorrect in most areas.
Starting with SO15, it's not just a rebadged special branch at all, and your suggestion of special branches role is rather narrow so as to be utterly misleading. No, SO15's official name is "Counter Terrorism Command", see here for a list of their roles:
Note how they're entirely terrorism focussed nowadays, and have been since well before Damien Green's arrest?
Moving on from the role of SO15, the issue isn't the branch of police involved, the issue is the way they were involved, and to some degree, the fact they were involved at all.
If you agree that they should have been involved, then the question arises as to why due process wasn't followed, why despite initial denial that there appeared to have been contact between the police and the opposing (then ruling) party or at least some members of it, and why the police investigation involved searching for things clearly unrelated to the leaks but which are extremely suggestive of political motivation.
But there's a valid question as to whether the police should've been involved at all, because there was a clear public interest defence and the CPS would've hence never been able to pursue a case anyway, this adds further evidence towards the idea that the raid was entirely politically motivated- clearly no real prospect of a conviction, searches for and through unrelated data, then why bother? This is ultimately why the case was dropped, your theory about MPs standing together makes no sense, because the vast majority of Labour were very much interested in a prosecution and they held the majority of seats in parliament.
Realistically it was almost certainly another one of Jacqui Smiths grossly authoritarian moves, and it failed miserably. It's not a case of one rule for them, one rule for everyone else- the public interest defence which would've defeated any charges with ease in this particular case (you're right there was plenty of evidence he did it, that wasn't in dispute, there was just no evidence is wasn't in the public interest) applies to anyone. In fact, to prove this point this is also why the people involved in the MP expenses leak last year avoided any charges or prosecution too, because despite pressure from MPs to act, the police also dropped that investigation because there was no way they could defeat a public interest defence against that act of leaking those documents. The evidence they did it was there, the evidence it wasn't in public interest simply didn't exist. The people responsible for that leak weren't politicians or anything of the like, they were normal citizens yet contrary to your point, public interest prevailed in their favour.
Or Iceland whose major banks had their assets frozen using anti-terror laws.
I'm British and even I think that move was absolutely shocking. It's not that I disagree with freezing the assets of the banks necessarily although I do believe it was a rushed decision that wasn't thought through in the slightest, it's the fact we were willing to effectively brand an entire nation as terrorists just because we didn't want their banks to take our cash with them when they went under.
Local councils under the last government were also using anti-terror legislation to spy on families who registered their kids outside their catchment areas, to perform surveillance on people whose dogs had fouled on public property and not been picked up.
Anti-terror legislation has a long history of abuse under the old government, I just sincerely hope that under our new government this is merely a remaining trace element that will be delt with, but we'll see I guess.
Still, Damian Green's party hold the majority of power in the coalition government right now, so hopefully having been victims first hand they know the importance of fixing bad anti-terror legislation.
FYI the Orwellian government in the UK was overthrown in elections in May.
The new regime isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better, and has done more for civil liberties in the last month than the old government did in 13 years.
What they'll do about things like this is yet to be seen, but sadly these things take time, although some people will cry on about things like this as examples of their failure, the reality is it takes more than a month to change these things. The real test will be in a year or two, to see if they've lived up to their promises.
I hate the new government for it's stance on some things, it's lack of mention of the Digital Economy Act for example, but looking at our old government, and at many other Western governments around the world it's hard not to be grateful because the new government at least so far looks much better than the governments a lot of other major Western powers are lumped with, and the one we used to have. Looking at the likes of the US, Australia, France, Germany and such it's possible that right now we actually have the least Orwellian government out the lot, but time will tell for sure I suppose.
Q. - but you think encouraging companies to take down expression is respecting rights? This is how you make enforcement comply with freedom of expression?
A. French delegate: You think in EU we live in a totalitarian state? Is France a dictatorship? Have you no rights in France?
Q. That is not my question.
A. I am telling you it will comply with EU law. Are you saying EU does not comply with fundamental freedoms?
Q. It is companies that collect the information. You are encouraging the companies to use that information in ways that, if done by the state, would violate fundamental privacy protections. Is that promoting fundamental rights?
A (French): Is France a totalitarian state? Is it?
Q: No, that is not what I am saying. Ok, fine. You have addressed the issue. Lets move on
The correct response to the final question should've been "Yes, have you seen HADOPI and the way Sarkozy cracks down on things he doesn't like?"
I was going to post about this, but you've already covered part of it, so I'll reply instead.
I take issue with this statement from the summary:
"But anyone who argues the brain isn't a pretty spiffy processing system ends up looking pretty silly."
No, they don't look silly, they look smarter and more knowledgeable about the topic than the idiot who made this comment. The human brain has multiple flaws, and whilst it's excellent for some things, it's terrible for others. The human brain relies on emergence, which is great for solving some problems but not so for others. To give an example, the human brain is great for picking out an object in a scene, but hopeless for calculating with a reasonable degree of accuracy the actual distance to that object- the margin of error for most people is on average going to be quite large.
But also the human brain is prone to mistakes, minor changes to it's working can make it come up with odd results- notice how sometimes something you know inside out you just happen to get wrong? Look at how sometimes people are mid-conversation, talking about something they know in depth and suddenly they forget what they were going to say- this is because processing in the brain has gone completely off track.
The fundamental problem with copying the brain is that it's far from perfect, it doesn't give us the level of preciseness that classic computing generally does. It doesn't guarantee there wont be fluctuations in a task every single time it performs that task.
A brain like computer would certainly be useful, it could help solve some interesting problems, but it's most definitely not perfect, and it's most definitely not the ultimate solution to our computing problems- there are plenty of scenarios where it would be completely useless. This is after all, why we bother to have computers in the first place.
I do not see the brain as any more spiffy than computing technology, sure its amazingly powerful, but there's a lot that current computers can do that the brain can't- serious large scale number crunching for example. Could we ever trust a brain like model to crunch numbers when we know full well the brain could make a mistake giving erroneus results on a few of those numbers where the computer would not?
It's only irrelevant to you because you're choosing to discount it from the problem hence the ambiguity you deny exists. But as it is part of the question, your discounting of the information makes you interpretation far less correct than one that does take account for it, and the solution that does take account of all the information is the one that is accepted as most correct- the result being 13/27.
It sucks for you if you don't get it, but quit pretending you're some super genius that gets it whilst no one else, even some of the most skilled mathematical minds on the planet do. You're not that genius, you clearly don't understand the problem, and you are wrong.
If you don't understand maths and have no intention of learning maths and it's relation to the real world then fine, but don't pester everyone else with your ignorance declaring your ignorance as the one true way.
To give you another example that might fry your brain and help you realise your lack of understanding of the subject. Can you for example explain the following? It's a good place for you to start such that you can then work from there:
The probability of flipping a coin and getting heads 11 times in a row is 1 in 2048. So why if you flip a coin 10 times, and get heads every time, is the chance of your next flip being heads also 1 in 2?
The argument is in the ambiguity of the statement, many people are trying to map to the real world, but the point is that you can build an argument based off a literal reading of the statement that does in fact 13/27, and after much debate amongst the math community this has in fact found general acceptance as the correct answer.
The debate arises largely because of a clash between the ambiguity and impreciseness of language and the preciseness of math, but the answer stems from logical reasoning eliminating the ambiguity of language with assumptions where required. This of course means where people make opposing assumptions- sometimes without even realising it then they come up with a different answer, many simply don't even understand the arguments at all and ignorant insist they are correct as was the case with the person I responded to above originally.
No, it apparently proves that some people like yourself as so incapable of seeing the argument, and understanding the resultant math that underlies that argument that you'll go to the extreme of declaring everyone else, including people that are almost certainly far smarter than you as being wrong.
Go read the discussion about it rather than sit puzzling yourself over it declaring the rest of the world wrong in the process.
Your ignorance of a subject doesn't make everyone else wrong about it.
Would the patents Nokia is currently suing Apple over cover those parts of the GSM/UMTS standard?
Could this be the problem? That because Apple has refused to pay the patent fee that it's having to either try and work around the patents, or because it's out on it's own having no support from the developers of the standard because it hasn't licensed them?
Interesting read, and a good insight but personally I suspect the guy wasn't being sincere. His suggestion that his comments get taken out of context because they were meant for investors is one thing, but his fundamental problem is that his words have carried through into the games his firm churns out. The fact is he has taken the fun out of some series, he is trying to charge more for some games.
So how can gamers view his comments as being merely taken out of context, when his comments have been followed through in cold hard actions? Why is the next Call of Duty pre-order already £5 - £10 more in price than any other 360 game from other manufacturers? He is ripping customers off, that's the problem.
So if the story is true, I also wouldn't put it past him to be the one to lobby against a tax break either. Despite that, there is one other possibility that hasn't been mentioned here though- Ubisoft.
Ubisoft seems to be the only publisher away from Activision, Take-Two, EA, MGS that don't have a prescence in the UK. Ubisoft have also been the biggest takers in taking advantage of Canada's video game developer tax breaks so perhaps they're concerned about others getting similar breaks to them now they've invested so heavily in moving a ton of their developers to Canada already. So despite Kotick's attitude, he has something to gain from a UK tax break in having two studios here who would benefit from it, Ubisoft have nothing to gain from a UK tax break it would appear.
To be fair though, the tax break was only something like £40 mill. If the UK had attracted additional game developers to the degree Canada has from it's tax breaks for game developers it could've easily made that back in tax and then a whole lot more. If this tax break was dropped as part of the fiscal responsibility plans I imagine that they decided that a £40 mill break wasn't enough to attract additional developers, and they'd likely have had to offer higher breaks to attract developers for it to be worth it, making it a more risky path. The other possibility is that the £40 mill would only benefit existing studios, as new studios would take at minimum a couple of years to set up and get products out there it may be that waiting 2 years for the benefits of the tax break to be realised whilst in the meantime existing studios are getting a break for nothing wasn't seen as acceptable. It could possibly have been decision made for short term gain at the expense of the longer term too then.
So you could well be right then, it could be for fiscal responsibility but its not as if tax breaks are done for the benefit of industry over the country, they're done as a calculated way of increasing tax income by attract more companies to the country setting the tax break than would otherwise be there with the goal being it's win-win for everyone- the industry pays less tax, but the industry is bigger so the tax income is greater overall.
Whilst I agree the TFA is so light on details it does indeed stink of bullshit, I am somewhat suprised that they feel the tax break wouldn't have helped. The games industry is such a massive sector, and still has so much room to grow, particularly with the rise of gaming on the new more powerful mobile handsets hitting the shelves this last few years, and the rise of casual gaming on consoles. Attracting more devs, and preventing more leaving for places where there are tax breaks for their industry would surely have benefited the country, and helped in reducing it's debt in the long run at least.
There was no allegedly about the Boeing case, EADS/Northrop initially won the contract, but immense lobbying by US politicians to make it a US only contract hence bolstering the US market at the expense of the European market even though the primarily European tender was deemed far superior ended up leaving EADS/Northrop no choice but to withdraw because it had been made clear the tender was being switched to Boeing after EADS/Northrop had already wasted millions on the project.
Regarding the Eurofighter deal I'm not sure what you mean, national security for who? It was the US fining a British defence company for winning a contract with Saudi Arabia allegedly because the British defence firm bribed the Saudi leadership to get the contract. National security is none of the US' fucking businesses when it's a deal between two non-US sovereign nations. The fine was because the US companies didn't in this case win the contract, even though as demonstrated with the Boeing deal the US demonstrated it's guilty of exactly the same things. Similar examples stem from the likes of Halliburton in Iraq and such.
"Nigeria? Why the hell should the US government be responsible for overseeing environmental protection elsewhere in the world?"
You know, many non-Americans are asking why a British company that adhered to US law, was operating within US regulations, should be expected to pay billions when under US law it only has to pay $75 million whilst at the same time the US allows it's companies to avoid paying compensation elsewhere often through applying political pressure to nations that can't stand up against the US. The gulf of Mexico leak has been turned around as a massive political tool to weaken a foreign oil competitor's standing in the market even though that company had offered to go well over and above it's legal responsibilities in the US from the outset in offering to pay full costs beyond the $75 million it actually owed by law- the political attacks beyond that have been blatant attempts at destabilising BP as a company far beyond anything that's ever been done to any US corporation guilty of similar things. Do you really believe if Nigeria told the US it's companies couldn't operate their anymore because of their lack of environmental responsibility that the US would just say "Okay then" and pull out? Absolutely not, as history has demonstrated it would almost certainly make Nigeria the next target for sanctions, invasion, or other hardships.
"It's the Chinese government blocking foreign companies from doing business, not just encouraging local ones"
No it's not, Google can still do business there, they've just go to change the way they do business and work with local companies.
"Hate the US government as much as you like and it certainly does its share of questionable and bad things, but comparing it to China is way overboard and reeks of bias or ignorance."
Really? The US can't be compared to China in any way whatsoever? There's no possible factors between the countries that can ever possibly be allowed to be compared? Or were you instead suggesting that comparing US protectionism to Chinese protectionism is directly equivalent to comparing US to China on every possible factor? Both possible interpretations of your comment make no sense at all, as it's clear I was merely comparing one facet of the two nations, rather than the two nations as a whole.
I don't "hate" the US government or the US overall, but I do think it's guilty of gross hypocrisy in some areas such as environmental responsibility and protectionism. You need to get a grip if you think the US is perfect in every possible way, or if you think an attack on a single facet of US policy inherently means someone hates everything about the US.
"Whether the motivation is espionage or "encouraging growth of domestic companies", the results are similar. China has no problems bending the laws to benefit their companies at the expense of foreign ones."
Sorry, but how is this different from the US exactly?
- The current BP leak is a fine example, BP is being held to higher standards than the US companies that are responsible for Exxon Valdez sized leaks every single year in Nigeria, and well, Bhopal is a fine example of US environmental hypocrisy too
- BAE was fined by the US over a bribery scandal in the Saudi Eurofighter deal, yet US companies do this exact same thing all the time
- Boeing was given massively unfair advantage in the next generation tanker deal
Other examples where the US has acted illegaly in a similar respect include lumber (Complainant: Canada), cotton (Complainant: Brazil), steel (Complainant: Britain), online gambling (Complainant: Antigua).
It's a bit rich for an American company to complain about an overseas company bending the law to favour local companies when the US is one of the worst offenders internationally for this sort of thing.
It's hard to look badly at China when they do this- at least they're open and honest about it, which is more than can be said about the US' hush hush attitude to turning a blind eye to corrupt practices for local companies, and the environmental irresponsibility of US companies overseas. It's hard to even blame China when they look across the Pacific and see the US doing exactly the same sort of thing.
You realise iPod nanos specifically were notorious for screen scratches, so much so that Apple owned up to it and had to pay out a $22.5million settlement? -
Sure not all device screens scratch easily, but the problem is you don't know which ones do until it's too late and you've scratched it, and as some quite blatantly do (you're welcome to do more Google searches yourself to find plenty of evidence to that effect) you've got to be quite stupid to risk it.
I have around 170 retail XBox 360 games, I've had 4 XBox's due to 3 RROD failures in the early years. I've had my dog knock my console over whilst playing once or twice and have knocked it over myself once and since moved it and placed it horizontally.
Through all this I've yet to have a single disc scratch. I suspect to get disc scratching you have to go through some quite speciifc motions, which seems to be what happens in this video- a quick abrupt shake:
I also suspect that it's something that effects many DVD drives in general as there's nothing specific about the XBox 360's, only most people don't tend to give their DVD player or PC an abrubpt shake.
Just as most people have learnt that putting a device like a mobile phone or an iPod in your pocket along with your keys (the screen will get scratched) is a bad idea, I think this is probably one of those problems that just requires a bit of common sense to solve.
Certainly with all the general wear and tear my 4 XBoxs have faced and the amount of discs that have been through them, the amount of usage they've had, although the RROD has been a frustrating problem until the latest one which seems fine now at around 2 years old, disc scratching has been an absolute non-issue.
It depends where you come from I suppose. Personally in the UK, or in fact Europe, the idea of a female leadership figure being the first in some European nation probably wouldn't figure high on people's list because we've long had Queens and we've had the likes of Thatcher, Merkel etc.
I can still understand why for example, the first female president in the US would be big news though because I pay attention to world politics. In the context of the fact that's not groundbreaking in some parts of the world though I can also understand why some people just say "So what?".
This is why HTML5's attempt at moving towards the semantic web by introducing tags like header and footer are misguided at best.
The real solution would be to use a semantic defintion language and allow semantics to be attached to classes and ids like styles are. This would have a number of advantage:
- It would maintain separation of concerns in large development teams, so that semantics could be applied to a site by someone who doesn't need to interfere with the developers/designers work
- It would allow external providers to provide semantic definitions for sites that don't have them, or are no longer maintained, allowing browsers to look up external lists. This list could be provided by volunteers, or presumably before long a company like Google could largely automate the process creating it's own semantic provider service
- It would make it easier to handle things like translation combining the above two features
We learnt with CSS and Javascript that separating these things off is the smart route, quite why the HTML5 team hasn't learnt and realised this lesson in the face of semantics, which is more data we want to attach to web sites I don't know. Embedding something new directly in the spec isn't flexible enough, and doesn't work well, we've learnt this at least twice already.
"Meanwhile, the proposal for XHTML 2.0 was unsuccessful because it was created almost completely without regard for what browsers and coders were already doing"
Certainly for professional developers XHTML2.0 was a massive step forward as it focussed on making working with XHTML fit into existing development ideologies and technologies much more gracefully. The only coders it was bad for were those who are hobbyists and don't have the will to learn how to produce proper code and proper markup.
The HTML vs. XML markup is the obvious choice, XHTML usage has grown enormously over the years, and is far better for developers because XML data manipulation is supported pretty much everywhere. In contrast, HTML5 has been pushing HTML markup over XML markup with XHTML5 rarely being mentioned as anything other than a footnote. How can you possibly suggest that XML, a widely supported format being treated second class to HTML which will inevitably increase the proportion of people using HTML rather than XML syntax markup is better for coders?
The real problem is browser developers, as always. The same folks who have been keeping the web an incompatible mess are now the ones controlling the spec even. They've demonstrated over the years their inability to do things right, and do them well with the amount of incompatibilities, the vast amount of security exploits and bugs and so on, so why the fuck are these people now running the show to the detriment of professional coders- the ones who have to actually develop the tools, content and backends? That's the problem here, and that's why many professional developers who know a bit about separation of concerns, interoperability, maintainability and so on are unimpressed by HTML5.
XHTML2 was far from perfect, but it's extremely dishonest to suggest HTML5 does professional developers any favour over XHTML2 because it does the opposite, HTML5 causes developers far more headaches than a purely XML based approach would and does.
"I don't get why that is an issue. If you want to write clean markup, write clean markup. And today's browsers are perfectly capable of handling all manner of weird and wonderful markup."
Then I would wager you're not a developer right, or at least not a professional developer?
HTML markup will spread, because:
- People with a lack of understanding about the intricacies of HTML vs. XML markup will go for HTML because it's the one that's being pushed
- Companies developing solutions hiring cheap developers to maximise profit are often driven by buzzwords, and HTML5 is a buzzword that such low-quality development companies will target without focus on the benefits for clients of XML
So what's the problem of increased HTML markup? Well the most prominent ones are:
- Page scraping becomes more of a nightmare on HTML markup sites meaning less interesting pages are likely. You can no longer simply just use the XML toolkit that comes with just about every language as standard nowadays and will need an HTML5 parser, this greatly increases bloat also.
- Interoperability options for dealing with proprietary black box systems are greatly decreased, working with XML is easy, you can just XSLT transform the output into something that fits your system, then XSLT transform it back to their system, this means interfacing with legacy or proprietary stuff is easy.
So you see, the issue isn't what browsers can/can't render, the fundamental issue is for applications that use web data. That's suddenly going to become a lot harder, that means we're almost certainly going to see a decrease in innovation as working with web data becomes less trivial. Effectively XML markup means that a web page isn't just a document you look at, it is in itself data that can be manipulated, used, and transformed in all sorts of wonderful ways, and as it's such a prominent standard, it's also largely futureproof in this respect. This isn't the case with HTML markup.
The problems wont be for the average joe, they'll be for the innovators, and the developers that work with data, data that may need to be manipulated for years to come. Pushing the web towards XML was the best thing ever for the web as it opened up so many doors and made so many things easier to do, primarily it increased interoperability. The HTML5 spec is undoing that good work- and that's before you step outside the markup debate and look at the guts of the HTML5 spec itself and see what other things it makes worse, but those are another discussion, and look like they've already been covered elsewhere in this discussion.
Surviving on £30 a week less is better than the alternative of having the entire economy fail because if it did your £30 a week wouldn't be worth shit anyway.
I'm not saying we should decrease the state pension, I'm not saying that at all, I'm just pointing out that if we really reached crisis point it would be at least one option that would allow us to avoid complete and utter national meltdown.
You're having a laugh if you think HTML5 will settle the browser wars. Even before it's finalised the video tag has ended up as a terrible failure and Apple has already started trying to push Safari only demonstrations.
I suspect that's just a preview of what's to come.
Increased competition in the browser market doesn't stop any one vendor wanting to try whatever they can get away with to take as much control of the future as the web as possible. Even if HTML5 was the perfect spec (which I personally think it's far from being) there'd still be vested interests in screwing the other browsers in some way or another.
Slashdot Mirror
"BS. There will be no change in Orwellianism in either the UK or the US unless and until the entire system is reformed. Witness the total farce that is the "change" Obama brought in."
You're generalising. The new British government has already improved the situation, ID cards for example are already out the window.
We're not talking about Obama's form of change, here we have actual change. Whilst as I said in my previous post there is no way they could do everything they wanted in a month, the fact that they have scrapped ID cards already and followed through on other pledges (non-civil liberties related) speaks volumes.
They're even opening up about plans to allow a full investigation into torture by our security services and that move is unprecedented- Obama did indeed just sweep all that under the carpet, but that does not seem to be the case here, full details are due this week.
Perhaps the fundamental difference is that we now have a coalition government, whereby no single party has complete say in the way the country runs. They have to compromise, and they both realise if they don't behave they could lose power at any moment. This is something that wasn't the case with our previous government, and isn't the case with the Obama administration- they could do pretty much what they want and they'd still hold power for the rest of their term.
I explained a bit more about the change of government here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702892&cid=32742270
It's simply not the case that the UK is seeing civil liberties eroded more since the change of government last month, already we've had firm action to reverse some of the policies of the previous government, and we've promises of much more to come- if even some of them are followed it puts the UK in a much better state.
I'm not naive enough to believe things will be perfect, but currently the situation in the UK is certainly that civil liberties situation in general is actually improving from where it was, not getting worse, for now at least.
That's a horrendously biased account that misses some extremely important facts, and you are outright incorrect in most areas.
Starting with SO15, it's not just a rebadged special branch at all, and your suggestion of special branches role is rather narrow so as to be utterly misleading. No, SO15's official name is "Counter Terrorism Command", see here for a list of their roles:
http://www.met.police.uk/so/counter_terrorism.htm
Note how they're entirely terrorism focussed nowadays, and have been since well before Damien Green's arrest?
Moving on from the role of SO15, the issue isn't the branch of police involved, the issue is the way they were involved, and to some degree, the fact they were involved at all.
If you agree that they should have been involved, then the question arises as to why due process wasn't followed, why despite initial denial that there appeared to have been contact between the police and the opposing (then ruling) party or at least some members of it, and why the police investigation involved searching for things clearly unrelated to the leaks but which are extremely suggestive of political motivation.
But there's a valid question as to whether the police should've been involved at all, because there was a clear public interest defence and the CPS would've hence never been able to pursue a case anyway, this adds further evidence towards the idea that the raid was entirely politically motivated- clearly no real prospect of a conviction, searches for and through unrelated data, then why bother? This is ultimately why the case was dropped, your theory about MPs standing together makes no sense, because the vast majority of Labour were very much interested in a prosecution and they held the majority of seats in parliament.
Realistically it was almost certainly another one of Jacqui Smiths grossly authoritarian moves, and it failed miserably. It's not a case of one rule for them, one rule for everyone else- the public interest defence which would've defeated any charges with ease in this particular case (you're right there was plenty of evidence he did it, that wasn't in dispute, there was just no evidence is wasn't in the public interest) applies to anyone. In fact, to prove this point this is also why the people involved in the MP expenses leak last year avoided any charges or prosecution too, because despite pressure from MPs to act, the police also dropped that investigation because there was no way they could defeat a public interest defence against that act of leaking those documents. The evidence they did it was there, the evidence it wasn't in public interest simply didn't exist. The people responsible for that leak weren't politicians or anything of the like, they were normal citizens yet contrary to your point, public interest prevailed in their favour.
Or Iceland whose major banks had their assets frozen using anti-terror laws.
I'm British and even I think that move was absolutely shocking. It's not that I disagree with freezing the assets of the banks necessarily although I do believe it was a rushed decision that wasn't thought through in the slightest, it's the fact we were willing to effectively brand an entire nation as terrorists just because we didn't want their banks to take our cash with them when they went under.
Local councils under the last government were also using anti-terror legislation to spy on families who registered their kids outside their catchment areas, to perform surveillance on people whose dogs had fouled on public property and not been picked up.
Anti-terror legislation has a long history of abuse under the old government, I just sincerely hope that under our new government this is merely a remaining trace element that will be delt with, but we'll see I guess.
Still, Damian Green's party hold the majority of power in the coalition government right now, so hopefully having been victims first hand they know the importance of fixing bad anti-terror legislation.
FYI the Orwellian government in the UK was overthrown in elections in May.
The new regime isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better, and has done more for civil liberties in the last month than the old government did in 13 years.
What they'll do about things like this is yet to be seen, but sadly these things take time, although some people will cry on about things like this as examples of their failure, the reality is it takes more than a month to change these things. The real test will be in a year or two, to see if they've lived up to their promises.
I hate the new government for it's stance on some things, it's lack of mention of the Digital Economy Act for example, but looking at our old government, and at many other Western governments around the world it's hard not to be grateful because the new government at least so far looks much better than the governments a lot of other major Western powers are lumped with, and the one we used to have. Looking at the likes of the US, Australia, France, Germany and such it's possible that right now we actually have the least Orwellian government out the lot, but time will tell for sure I suppose.
Q. - but you think encouraging companies to take down expression is respecting rights? This is how you make enforcement comply with freedom of expression?
A. French delegate: You think in EU we live in a totalitarian state? Is France a dictatorship? Have you no rights in France?
Q. That is not my question.
A. I am telling you it will comply with EU law. Are you saying EU does not comply with fundamental freedoms?
Q. It is companies that collect the information. You are encouraging the companies to use that information in ways that, if done by the state, would violate fundamental privacy protections. Is that promoting fundamental rights?
A (French): Is France a totalitarian state? Is it?
Q: No, that is not what I am saying. Ok, fine. You have addressed the issue. Lets move on
The correct response to the final question should've been "Yes, have you seen HADOPI and the way Sarkozy cracks down on things he doesn't like?"
I was going to post about this, but you've already covered part of it, so I'll reply instead.
I take issue with this statement from the summary:
"But anyone who argues the brain isn't a pretty spiffy processing system ends up looking pretty silly."
No, they don't look silly, they look smarter and more knowledgeable about the topic than the idiot who made this comment. The human brain has multiple flaws, and whilst it's excellent for some things, it's terrible for others. The human brain relies on emergence, which is great for solving some problems but not so for others. To give an example, the human brain is great for picking out an object in a scene, but hopeless for calculating with a reasonable degree of accuracy the actual distance to that object- the margin of error for most people is on average going to be quite large.
But also the human brain is prone to mistakes, minor changes to it's working can make it come up with odd results- notice how sometimes something you know inside out you just happen to get wrong? Look at how sometimes people are mid-conversation, talking about something they know in depth and suddenly they forget what they were going to say- this is because processing in the brain has gone completely off track.
The fundamental problem with copying the brain is that it's far from perfect, it doesn't give us the level of preciseness that classic computing generally does. It doesn't guarantee there wont be fluctuations in a task every single time it performs that task.
A brain like computer would certainly be useful, it could help solve some interesting problems, but it's most definitely not perfect, and it's most definitely not the ultimate solution to our computing problems- there are plenty of scenarios where it would be completely useless. This is after all, why we bother to have computers in the first place.
I do not see the brain as any more spiffy than computing technology, sure its amazingly powerful, but there's a lot that current computers can do that the brain can't- serious large scale number crunching for example. Could we ever trust a brain like model to crunch numbers when we know full well the brain could make a mistake giving erroneus results on a few of those numbers where the computer would not?
It's only irrelevant to you because you're choosing to discount it from the problem hence the ambiguity you deny exists. But as it is part of the question, your discounting of the information makes you interpretation far less correct than one that does take account for it, and the solution that does take account of all the information is the one that is accepted as most correct- the result being 13/27.
It sucks for you if you don't get it, but quit pretending you're some super genius that gets it whilst no one else, even some of the most skilled mathematical minds on the planet do. You're not that genius, you clearly don't understand the problem, and you are wrong.
If you don't understand maths and have no intention of learning maths and it's relation to the real world then fine, but don't pester everyone else with your ignorance declaring your ignorance as the one true way.
To give you another example that might fry your brain and help you realise your lack of understanding of the subject. Can you for example explain the following? It's a good place for you to start such that you can then work from there:
The probability of flipping a coin and getting heads 11 times in a row is 1 in 2048. So why if you flip a coin 10 times, and get heads every time, is the chance of your next flip being heads also 1 in 2?
The argument is in the ambiguity of the statement, many people are trying to map to the real world, but the point is that you can build an argument based off a literal reading of the statement that does in fact 13/27, and after much debate amongst the math community this has in fact found general acceptance as the correct answer.
The debate arises largely because of a clash between the ambiguity and impreciseness of language and the preciseness of math, but the answer stems from logical reasoning eliminating the ambiguity of language with assumptions where required. This of course means where people make opposing assumptions- sometimes without even realising it then they come up with a different answer, many simply don't even understand the arguments at all and ignorant insist they are correct as was the case with the person I responded to above originally.
No, it apparently proves that some people like yourself as so incapable of seeing the argument, and understanding the resultant math that underlies that argument that you'll go to the extreme of declaring everyone else, including people that are almost certainly far smarter than you as being wrong.
Go read the discussion about it rather than sit puzzling yourself over it declaring the rest of the world wrong in the process.
Your ignorance of a subject doesn't make everyone else wrong about it.
Would the patents Nokia is currently suing Apple over cover those parts of the GSM/UMTS standard?
Could this be the problem? That because Apple has refused to pay the patent fee that it's having to either try and work around the patents, or because it's out on it's own having no support from the developers of the standard because it hasn't licensed them?
Interesting read, and a good insight but personally I suspect the guy wasn't being sincere. His suggestion that his comments get taken out of context because they were meant for investors is one thing, but his fundamental problem is that his words have carried through into the games his firm churns out. The fact is he has taken the fun out of some series, he is trying to charge more for some games.
So how can gamers view his comments as being merely taken out of context, when his comments have been followed through in cold hard actions? Why is the next Call of Duty pre-order already £5 - £10 more in price than any other 360 game from other manufacturers? He is ripping customers off, that's the problem.
So if the story is true, I also wouldn't put it past him to be the one to lobby against a tax break either. Despite that, there is one other possibility that hasn't been mentioned here though- Ubisoft.
Ubisoft seems to be the only publisher away from Activision, Take-Two, EA, MGS that don't have a prescence in the UK. Ubisoft have also been the biggest takers in taking advantage of Canada's video game developer tax breaks so perhaps they're concerned about others getting similar breaks to them now they've invested so heavily in moving a ton of their developers to Canada already. So despite Kotick's attitude, he has something to gain from a UK tax break in having two studios here who would benefit from it, Ubisoft have nothing to gain from a UK tax break it would appear.
To be fair though, the tax break was only something like £40 mill. If the UK had attracted additional game developers to the degree Canada has from it's tax breaks for game developers it could've easily made that back in tax and then a whole lot more.
If this tax break was dropped as part of the fiscal responsibility plans I imagine that they decided that a £40 mill break wasn't enough to attract additional developers, and they'd likely have had to offer higher breaks to attract developers for it to be worth it, making it a more risky path. The other possibility is that the £40 mill would only benefit existing studios, as new studios would take at minimum a couple of years to set up and get products out there it may be that waiting 2 years for the benefits of the tax break to be realised whilst in the meantime existing studios are getting a break for nothing wasn't seen as acceptable. It could possibly have been decision made for short term gain at the expense of the longer term too then.
So you could well be right then, it could be for fiscal responsibility but its not as if tax breaks are done for the benefit of industry over the country, they're done as a calculated way of increasing tax income by attract more companies to the country setting the tax break than would otherwise be there with the goal being it's win-win for everyone- the industry pays less tax, but the industry is bigger so the tax income is greater overall.
Whilst I agree the TFA is so light on details it does indeed stink of bullshit, I am somewhat suprised that they feel the tax break wouldn't have helped. The games industry is such a massive sector, and still has so much room to grow, particularly with the rise of gaming on the new more powerful mobile handsets hitting the shelves this last few years, and the rise of casual gaming on consoles. Attracting more devs, and preventing more leaving for places where there are tax breaks for their industry would surely have benefited the country, and helped in reducing it's debt in the long run at least.
There was no allegedly about the Boeing case, EADS/Northrop initially won the contract, but immense lobbying by US politicians to make it a US only contract hence bolstering the US market at the expense of the European market even though the primarily European tender was deemed far superior ended up leaving EADS/Northrop no choice but to withdraw because it had been made clear the tender was being switched to Boeing after EADS/Northrop had already wasted millions on the project.
Regarding the Eurofighter deal I'm not sure what you mean, national security for who? It was the US fining a British defence company for winning a contract with Saudi Arabia allegedly because the British defence firm bribed the Saudi leadership to get the contract. National security is none of the US' fucking businesses when it's a deal between two non-US sovereign nations. The fine was because the US companies didn't in this case win the contract, even though as demonstrated with the Boeing deal the US demonstrated it's guilty of exactly the same things. Similar examples stem from the likes of Halliburton in Iraq and such.
"Nigeria? Why the hell should the US government be responsible for overseeing environmental protection elsewhere in the world?"
You know, many non-Americans are asking why a British company that adhered to US law, was operating within US regulations, should be expected to pay billions when under US law it only has to pay $75 million whilst at the same time the US allows it's companies to avoid paying compensation elsewhere often through applying political pressure to nations that can't stand up against the US. The gulf of Mexico leak has been turned around as a massive political tool to weaken a foreign oil competitor's standing in the market even though that company had offered to go well over and above it's legal responsibilities in the US from the outset in offering to pay full costs beyond the $75 million it actually owed by law- the political attacks beyond that have been blatant attempts at destabilising BP as a company far beyond anything that's ever been done to any US corporation guilty of similar things. Do you really believe if Nigeria told the US it's companies couldn't operate their anymore because of their lack of environmental responsibility that the US would just say "Okay then" and pull out? Absolutely not, as history has demonstrated it would almost certainly make Nigeria the next target for sanctions, invasion, or other hardships.
"It's the Chinese government blocking foreign companies from doing business, not just encouraging local ones"
No it's not, Google can still do business there, they've just go to change the way they do business and work with local companies.
"Hate the US government as much as you like and it certainly does its share of questionable and bad things, but comparing it to China is way overboard and reeks of bias or ignorance."
Really? The US can't be compared to China in any way whatsoever? There's no possible factors between the countries that can ever possibly be allowed to be compared? Or were you instead suggesting that comparing US protectionism to Chinese protectionism is directly equivalent to comparing US to China on every possible factor? Both possible interpretations of your comment make no sense at all, as it's clear I was merely comparing one facet of the two nations, rather than the two nations as a whole.
I don't "hate" the US government or the US overall, but I do think it's guilty of gross hypocrisy in some areas such as environmental responsibility and protectionism. You need to get a grip if you think the US is perfect in every possible way, or if you think an attack on a single facet of US policy inherently means someone hates everything about the US.
"Whether the motivation is espionage or "encouraging growth of domestic companies", the results are similar. China has no problems bending the laws to benefit their companies at the expense of foreign ones."
Sorry, but how is this different from the US exactly?
- The current BP leak is a fine example, BP is being held to higher standards than the US companies that are responsible for Exxon Valdez sized leaks every single year in Nigeria, and well, Bhopal is a fine example of US environmental hypocrisy too
- BAE was fined by the US over a bribery scandal in the Saudi Eurofighter deal, yet US companies do this exact same thing all the time
- Boeing was given massively unfair advantage in the next generation tanker deal
Other examples where the US has acted illegaly in a similar respect include lumber (Complainant: Canada), cotton (Complainant: Brazil), steel (Complainant: Britain), online gambling (Complainant: Antigua).
It's a bit rich for an American company to complain about an overseas company bending the law to favour local companies when the US is one of the worst offenders internationally for this sort of thing.
It's hard to look badly at China when they do this- at least they're open and honest about it, which is more than can be said about the US' hush hush attitude to turning a blind eye to corrupt practices for local companies, and the environmental irresponsibility of US companies overseas. It's hard to even blame China when they look across the Pacific and see the US doing exactly the same sort of thing.
No it wasn't, it was temporarily part of their tax dodge strategy and that's it.
You realise iPod nanos specifically were notorious for screen scratches, so much so that Apple owned up to it and had to pay out a $22.5million settlement? -
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10149328-37.html
Sure not all device screens scratch easily, but the problem is you don't know which ones do until it's too late and you've scratched it, and as some quite blatantly do (you're welcome to do more Google searches yourself to find plenty of evidence to that effect) you've got to be quite stupid to risk it.
No, of course they didn't, that'd be stupid when it's the centrepiece of their current XNA strategy.
I have around 170 retail XBox 360 games, I've had 4 XBox's due to 3 RROD failures in the early years. I've had my dog knock my console over whilst playing once or twice and have knocked it over myself once and since moved it and placed it horizontally.
Through all this I've yet to have a single disc scratch. I suspect to get disc scratching you have to go through some quite speciifc motions, which seems to be what happens in this video- a quick abrupt shake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdOjzuJByXg
I also suspect that it's something that effects many DVD drives in general as there's nothing specific about the XBox 360's, only most people don't tend to give their DVD player or PC an abrubpt shake.
Just as most people have learnt that putting a device like a mobile phone or an iPod in your pocket along with your keys (the screen will get scratched) is a bad idea, I think this is probably one of those problems that just requires a bit of common sense to solve.
Certainly with all the general wear and tear my 4 XBoxs have faced and the amount of discs that have been through them, the amount of usage they've had, although the RROD has been a frustrating problem until the latest one which seems fine now at around 2 years old, disc scratching has been an absolute non-issue.
It depends where you come from I suppose. Personally in the UK, or in fact Europe, the idea of a female leadership figure being the first in some European nation probably wouldn't figure high on people's list because we've long had Queens and we've had the likes of Thatcher, Merkel etc.
I can still understand why for example, the first female president in the US would be big news though because I pay attention to world politics. In the context of the fact that's not groundbreaking in some parts of the world though I can also understand why some people just say "So what?".
This is why HTML5's attempt at moving towards the semantic web by introducing tags like header and footer are misguided at best.
The real solution would be to use a semantic defintion language and allow semantics to be attached to classes and ids like styles are. This would have a number of advantage:
- It would maintain separation of concerns in large development teams, so that semantics could be applied to a site by someone who doesn't need to interfere with the developers/designers work
- It would allow external providers to provide semantic definitions for sites that don't have them, or are no longer maintained, allowing browsers to look up external lists. This list could be provided by volunteers, or presumably before long a company like Google could largely automate the process creating it's own semantic provider service
- It would make it easier to handle things like translation combining the above two features
We learnt with CSS and Javascript that separating these things off is the smart route, quite why the HTML5 team hasn't learnt and realised this lesson in the face of semantics, which is more data we want to attach to web sites I don't know. Embedding something new directly in the spec isn't flexible enough, and doesn't work well, we've learnt this at least twice already.
"Meanwhile, the proposal for XHTML 2.0 was unsuccessful because it was created almost completely without regard for what browsers and coders were already doing"
Certainly for professional developers XHTML2.0 was a massive step forward as it focussed on making working with XHTML fit into existing development ideologies and technologies much more gracefully. The only coders it was bad for were those who are hobbyists and don't have the will to learn how to produce proper code and proper markup.
The HTML vs. XML markup is the obvious choice, XHTML usage has grown enormously over the years, and is far better for developers because XML data manipulation is supported pretty much everywhere. In contrast, HTML5 has been pushing HTML markup over XML markup with XHTML5 rarely being mentioned as anything other than a footnote. How can you possibly suggest that XML, a widely supported format being treated second class to HTML which will inevitably increase the proportion of people using HTML rather than XML syntax markup is better for coders?
The real problem is browser developers, as always. The same folks who have been keeping the web an incompatible mess are now the ones controlling the spec even. They've demonstrated over the years their inability to do things right, and do them well with the amount of incompatibilities, the vast amount of security exploits and bugs and so on, so why the fuck are these people now running the show to the detriment of professional coders- the ones who have to actually develop the tools, content and backends? That's the problem here, and that's why many professional developers who know a bit about separation of concerns, interoperability, maintainability and so on are unimpressed by HTML5.
XHTML2 was far from perfect, but it's extremely dishonest to suggest HTML5 does professional developers any favour over XHTML2 because it does the opposite, HTML5 causes developers far more headaches than a purely XML based approach would and does.
"I don't get why that is an issue. If you want to write clean markup, write clean markup. And today's browsers are perfectly capable of handling all manner of weird and wonderful markup."
Then I would wager you're not a developer right, or at least not a professional developer?
HTML markup will spread, because:
- People with a lack of understanding about the intricacies of HTML vs. XML markup will go for HTML because it's the one that's being pushed
- Companies developing solutions hiring cheap developers to maximise profit are often driven by buzzwords, and HTML5 is a buzzword that such low-quality development companies will target without focus on the benefits for clients of XML
So what's the problem of increased HTML markup? Well the most prominent ones are:
- Page scraping becomes more of a nightmare on HTML markup sites meaning less interesting pages are likely. You can no longer simply just use the XML toolkit that comes with just about every language as standard nowadays and will need an HTML5 parser, this greatly increases bloat also.
- Interoperability options for dealing with proprietary black box systems are greatly decreased, working with XML is easy, you can just XSLT transform the output into something that fits your system, then XSLT transform it back to their system, this means interfacing with legacy or proprietary stuff is easy.
So you see, the issue isn't what browsers can/can't render, the fundamental issue is for applications that use web data. That's suddenly going to become a lot harder, that means we're almost certainly going to see a decrease in innovation as working with web data becomes less trivial. Effectively XML markup means that a web page isn't just a document you look at, it is in itself data that can be manipulated, used, and transformed in all sorts of wonderful ways, and as it's such a prominent standard, it's also largely futureproof in this respect. This isn't the case with HTML markup.
The problems wont be for the average joe, they'll be for the innovators, and the developers that work with data, data that may need to be manipulated for years to come. Pushing the web towards XML was the best thing ever for the web as it opened up so many doors and made so many things easier to do, primarily it increased interoperability. The HTML5 spec is undoing that good work- and that's before you step outside the markup debate and look at the guts of the HTML5 spec itself and see what other things it makes worse, but those are another discussion, and look like they've already been covered elsewhere in this discussion.
I think you completely missed the point.
Surviving on £30 a week less is better than the alternative of having the entire economy fail because if it did your £30 a week wouldn't be worth shit anyway.
I'm not saying we should decrease the state pension, I'm not saying that at all, I'm just pointing out that if we really reached crisis point it would be at least one option that would allow us to avoid complete and utter national meltdown.
You're having a laugh if you think HTML5 will settle the browser wars. Even before it's finalised the video tag has ended up as a terrible failure and Apple has already started trying to push Safari only demonstrations.
I suspect that's just a preview of what's to come.
Increased competition in the browser market doesn't stop any one vendor wanting to try whatever they can get away with to take as much control of the future as the web as possible. Even if HTML5 was the perfect spec (which I personally think it's far from being) there'd still be vested interests in screwing the other browsers in some way or another.