"Sure it might annoy those who prefer driving with one hand, but I suspect driving with two hands might be inherently safer anyway."
Maybe if you drive automatic I guess, but whilst it used to be true with all vehicles, I don't think that's really the case anymore if you drive manual. I find a lot of circumstances where being able to change gear quickly is much more important than two hands on the wheel. Why do I think that's the case now and didn't before? Power steering. Sure without it it is kinda important to use two hands on the wheel, but I do drive with my hand on the stick for more than 30 seconds quite a lot- bad weather, dodgy roads, mad drivers on the road (Friday afternoons!). Certainly I'll admit sometimes I keep my hand on the stick just because it's comfier, but with power steering I'd struggle to see how it's inherently less safe, unless power steering failed.
Particularly in the UK over the last few months we've had phenomenally bad weather, I know for sure it was more important being able to shift gears on snowy/icey hills because a lower gears can help you keep traction, but when you have grip you need to be in a lower gears to get some speed up so you make it up the hill. Having a vehicle shouting at me because I wasn't doing what it wanted in conditions like that? No thank you.
But then, I'm not someone whose ever used a phone whilst driving, or who smokes whilst driving (well, at all actually) either, I take it out my pocket and put it in the side pocket and only deal with missed calls/messages when I reach my destinaton. In other words, something like this could only ever be an added hindrance, a distraction, a danger.
I presume because in this case it's a genetic trait, and if we eliminate genetic traits from the gene pool then we're messing with evolution.
My gut instinct is to agree with you though, that this probably isn't too big a deal right now. I suppose the question is whether we cure every genetic "defect" though. What if a new disease comes along that spreads easily, and causes blindness, but doesn't effect those who are colour blind for example? I suppose this is the general line of thinking they're trying to get at.
So whilst I disagree in this particular case with them that it matters at all because I believe the likelihood of it being a problem is pretty much negligible, I think the debate is worth having in the case of "curing" genetic differences in the first place.
I don't use any Facebook apps at all, besides, afaik Farmville is a Flash game, and I pointed out I had no Flash, Java or Silverlight stuff running, it was only the core browser, and yes, it managed to rack up that usage all by itself.
"Gun crime stats suggests criminals can get guns just as easily in the UK as they ever have been able to, despite a string of legislation over the last 13 years that's supposed to prevent it. And driving in London's no worse than in any other major city..."
That's a bit of an oversimplification of the system though.
Criminals getting guns is a bit misleading, because, well, when you get a gun like a handgun under UK laws you become a criminal. For example, the perpertrator in Virginia Tech or Columbine weren't criminals before they went on a rampage, they were non-criminals, and it is people like this who struggle to get hold of guns in the UK because they simply do not have the criminal connections, or the state of mind to build the criminal connections. Further, there's less incidence of death and injury from accidental discharges, heat of the moment arguments and that sort of thing. The key then is the amount of non-crminals getting guns, something which has drastically decreased. As harsh as it sounds, criminals with guns generally use them on other criminals rather than random passers by, you wont for example see criminals stealing handbags or whatever with guns on the streets in the UK, because they seem them as so precious they tend to keep them for gang warfare and such.
Also, of those criminals who do have guns we're often talking about rusty old lugers, and shotguns or rifles (which are still legal for hunting etc.) which get stolen. Occurences of things like assault rifles which can really do some damage are extremely rare. Most criminals are really scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of the firearms they acquire now. Sure there's the odd Mac 10, and I think there was an older 'nam era M16 a few months back, but it's far less common.
Effectively then, yeah criminals might be able to get hold of guns just as easily as before, but if non-criminals thinking of committing crimes are deterred by the fact it's too difficult to get a gun, if the people with guns are mostly just going to use them against each other rather than innocent passers by, and if the guns that criminals do get hold of are unreliable, more expensive, and of poor quality and low killing ability, it's still a major improvement.
Now despite that, I'm not making an assertion here over the validity of the laws, because knife crime has become a major problem, and I suspect that's precisely because gun crime has decreased, so whether gun crime has decreased or not doesn't seem to matter if the number of deaths is still high. The fundamental violence problem is still there, although violent crime has seen a pretty big decrease in the UK over the last 15 years to be fair. I agree that gun laws aren't a magical be all and end all solution to violent crime, far from it, but it's dishonest to say that gun laws in the UK haven't massively improved the situation in lessening the effects of gun crime, it just means other weapons have filled the void, and provides at least a decrease, because weapons like knives aren't quite as lethal and hard to defend against.
"the tens of thousands of pedestrians crossing the street in front of you"
Am I the only one who read this and started thinking about how much score you could earn if you just put your foot down?...too much Carmageddon, GTA and such over the years I guess;)
This has largely been my experience, when I've been thinking what language to have a look at next over the years I've gone to TIOBE. I've then looked at actual job adverts and found the TIOBE doesn't even match closely the jobs around my area.
Currently for example, a search for jobs around here on jobsite.co.uk requiring an understanding of Java is at 7 for the week, there are none at all looking for C developers, 3 looking for PHP developers and 15 looking for C# developers. If TIOBE was in any way relevant to the job market the figures basing off the Java ones would be something like 7 Java jobs, 7 C jobs, 4 PHP jobs, 1 C# job. I've not seen a C job listed in over a year in fact, and C++ jobs are relatively few and far bewteen compared to Java and.NET jobs. PHP comes up, but nowhere near as much as.NET.
If you look at wages too,.NET positions are far and away offering the highest average salaries right now around here.
I guess as you say it varies from region to region, but TIOBE is basically completely useless for me here, and I find it hard to believe it's relevant in many places at all. Looking at TIOBE doesn't actually really tell me anything useful at all.
Personally though, I'm not too fussed what technology I work with any proper language like C#, Java, C++ is fine with me! I'll take whatever jobs give the best mix of pay, benefits, enjoyment at the end of the day and ensure my skills are up to date in all the main languages.
That's okay, most Brits think German women are big butch hairy armpitted monsters named Gertrude.
I guess stereotypes work both ways, but they're rarely accurate.
That said, in some parts of Yorkshire where I currently live I'd be inclined to agree, although it's certainly not true for most of the rest of the country;)
I cultivate rare and endagered plants, to try and reduce the strain on habitat populations from poaching, or to assist in ensuring we have a healthily sized pool of genetically pure reserve specimens. Part the problem of ex-situ conservation efforts in the past is that they've involved only cultivating a few specific individuals of a species that was likely to go extinct in habitat but could be reintroduced, when you only have a few then you don't have enough genetic variation to ensure a viable population to reintroduce as they may not be able to adapt to disease or similar fast enough.
Because this plant material is rare and endangered, it is not sensible to collect more than just a small amount of seeds, or plant material, and some propagation therefore involves taking cuttings and rooting them down, which gives you multiple plants, but they're all clones of the species from that one cutting. It is imperative to keep all plants whether grown from seed and hence genetically different, or grown from cuttings or using tissue culture well documented and labelled, as it would be a tragedy for example, if specimens were lost and only those remaining all happened to be cuttings from the same original parent on a plant that requires cross-pollination between two genetically distinct species as you would not get any seed- effectively although you had multiple plants, they'd all be a clone of the same plant, and that plant may well end up being the last of it's kind making the species effectively extinct.
With this material I send it all across the world to various botanical gardens and nurseries who are responsible in helping with this type of conservation and will also go on to propagate these species ensuring a good healthy global reserve collection. As such I've had a lot of experience with CITES as pretty much all of the species are CITES listed (although some are not). I've found the results to be wildly different from country to country, the theory is that any species that is CITES listed should need a CITES certificate to move between country to country (although the EU is a special case- it's treated as one country so movement from say, England to Germany requires no such certificate).
Enforcement ranges from strict to the point where some countries wont even allow export of CITES materials at all (Mexico generally tends to be this way) which actually hurts conservation because it means the only materials that get out do so through illegal smuggling, to pretty much no real enforcement at all even though the countries are CITES signatories (some Eastern European countries).
CITES really is a mess in this respect, for example I have seen for sale on eBay illegaly habitat collected plants from Chile (you can tell they are habitat collected because they have a white tint to them which only occurs on that plant from the salty mists in that region- something you can't replicate in cultivation) for sale by a seller in Bulgaria, so whilst you'd never get a plant like this into the UK directly, you can transfer it to Bulgaria whose customs officers appear to simply not care about any CITES enforcement and then move it using EU rules from Bulgaria to the UK. Of course, the Chilean export controls are clearly lacking too.
It doesn't suprise me that CITES one way was easy, but the other was a problem for you, and it really reflects how utterly pointless and counterproductive it generally is. If you were smuggling endangered species up from Mexico into Canada no one might bat an eyelid, but if you were trying to move legitimately cultivated specimens into the US to take to say Huntingdon Botanical Gardens in California, then you may well face the inquisition, and sometimes even with valid CITES certificates, or perhaps valid certificates with a slight typographic error on the species name may find these specimens seized and destroyed regardless- vital conservation material simply burnt because pretty much no country in the world actually understands how they're really supposed to enforce CITES.
I too have experienced crashes with Firefox since 3.6, and awful slow downs, in fact, I left it running overnight and locked my computer then came down the next morning to find my computer running slow. I checked task manager and found that Firefox was sat using 1.8gb of RAM, so certainly there seemed to be something screwy with memory management there.
I _think_ the problem is down to handling of some Javascript, when it's crashed it's been loading certain pages, but I can't say for sure. I've always had quite a few tabs open so as to which one might have been the cause I've no idea. I have AdBlock Plus and Firebug installed, as well as the usual Java, Flash and Silverlight plugins, but I've never had any sites using these technologies open when it's happened. I run it on Windows 7 64 bit, which is a fairly clean install, as I've not really installed much since moving to Windows 7, which in itself was a clean install.
Since 3.5 Firefox has become much more sluggish, and since 3.6, much more unstable. It's not a user fault, the software has simply just got worse. Firefox absolutely does have instability issues nowadays, and even when it hasn't crashed I suspect it's not closed properly when I've exited it, because when I've loaded it back up I've seen the "Oops, well this is embarassing" page where it asks if I want to restore my previously opened tabs or start afresh- that's again, not something that can be blamed on the user.
Why are you so sure it's a user problem? Why is his post misleading? I can attest to the fact Firefox absolutely does crash through no real fault of the user, it seems more misleading of you to suggest that Firefox has no instability issues. For what it's worth, the issues don't seem to affect my work laptop which runs Windows XP, but they do affect my secondary home PC which runs XP, so certainly it's not unstable in general- I'm more than happy with it on my work laptop, but it's at the point where it's become such a slow unstable browser back home I'm tempted to just go back to IE or to switch to Chrome. I've not had as many issues with a web browser in terms of performance and stability as I have recent releases of Firefox since older versions of IE like IE5 or the earlier releases of IE6.
Of course browsers don't just "crash on their own", but if they crash in response to a valid user interaction, which Firefox does indeed do, then how is that in any way the user's fault? The GP's got a fairly low UID which suggests he's been using the internet for a fair amount of time, I doubt he's a naive web user, I'm sure when he says his browser crashes it's through no fault of his own, and certainly in my case I know it's through no fault of my own either. I do agree the unstable browser thing is largely a thing of the past, which is why I'm quite suprised that Firefox does have instabilities again, it seems to be a large step backwards- I always figured we were well past that point now.
I love Firefox and support it's goals entirely, in recent years I've always pushed for the rollout of Firefox as the primary browser at companies I've worked at (I've always had that influence as I've been in lead developer roles for bespoke web apps), however I'd not do that right now, I do not currently believe the Firefox platform is reliable enough to put my reputation on pushing for migration to it over anymore, and as things actually seem to be getting worse over the last few releases, rather than better, it's going to take a few versions where things clearly improve before I can honestly go back to having that position. It's not that I don't want to, but I think the Firefox team has lost their way somewhat and needs to take a step back and look at what went wrong.
"Chavez has supporters right in the Obama administration. One is Obamas' "Diversity Czar" Mark Lloyd at the FCC. Talk about a scary scenario, having a guy like Lloyd in a position of power over the nations' communications!"
No, seriously, the reality is you can find people willing to make all sorts of links of varying degrees, there are plenty of conspiracy theories out there putting Bush administration down as the people behind 9/11. Do you believe them? if so then you're really a lost cause, if not, then the fact you believe this instead when it's equally insane shows you're so lost in your bias and hate presumably of the Democrats and Obama that you've lost all ability to be rational and objective.
Either way, your thinking is entirely irrational, you need to really start striving to be a little more objective and better at stepping back from your viewpoint and looking at alternate possible explanations, else you'll just remain one of those wing nuts than most the world points and laughs about because they can't believe anyone would be so ignorant. That's really not a good thing to be.
"Today's growth of Chinese GDP proves that it is more effective in current economical situation than either US or EU."
No, it proves no such thing. All the Chinese GDP growth proves is that artificial manipulation of exchange rates by the Chinese government are more effective than the West's current plan of pushing and protecting free-trade even in the face of such manipulation. China's growth depends almost entirely on the West, and if Chinese goods become more expensive because the West finally gets tired of China's refusal to stop manipulating their currency so drastically then it's growth will plummet whether it's totalitarian, authoritarian, a democracy or whatever. Now, you could argue that that manipulation is part of their authoritarianist attitude, which is true, but it still doesn't ignore the fact that Western democracies could crush it by adding tariffs on imports in China to correct China's currency manipulation anyway. As a counter-example to yours, look at the USSR, it was totalitarian yet it fell into absolute ruins because Russia did not have access to the Western markets that China enjoys right now. It's also worth noting that the US' economy is still 3.5x as large as China's and the EU's is 4.5x as large as Chinas, so even if China can keep up current rates they have a hell of a long way to go. That's not to say they wont become a more important world player politically than they historically have been however of course, they almost certainly will.
"Don't forget, during the last twenty centuries, China had the largest economy on Earth for 18 centuries, and it always was totalitarian."
For at least a few of the last 20 centuries it appeared to be authoritarian rather than totalitarian. Despite all that, I'd be intrigued to see how it managed to be the largest economy over 18 of the last 20 centuries in the face of some pretty large empires and the loss of large amounts of territory during some periods so I'd be greatful if you've got some sources you can point me to.
I was around the same age when the wall fell, and I distinctly remember the scenes on TV of people scaling it, pulling it apart and so on.
I didn't really understand why the wall existed, what it was for, or even geographically at that age, where it was in relation to me. Despite that, I still have images in my memory of those scenes when it fell, because for some reason I too knew it was an important moment. This is despite the fact I was in the UK, a country where such an event had no noticable direct effect on me at that age.
I suspect it was even more prominent for Brin, because that sudden change, from living in the USSR, to living in America where suddenly things he probably wasn't allowed to do, places he'd never seen before, foods and products he never experienced in the USSR, and probably even the types of programs shown on TV that weren't shown in the USSR suddenly became commonplace. I agree with you, a kid is bound to notice such a drastic change in their life even at an age that young, and even if the reality of what that change was about doesn't bite until they get older.
"So basically: just because you can put a medical sounding name on going to sleep late doesn't necessarily make it an objective medical condition."
Unfortunately, it doesn't mean it isn't either.
Further, I suspect things like procrastination and laziness do have at least some phsycological basis as actual problems, the former probably being related to attention deficit disorders, and the latter often possibly related to demotivation due to depression or similar.
Now, I'm not excusing laziness or procrastination, but I think it's rather unfair to basically say "I don't have that problem, so it's not possible that anyone else can". I think there probably are some people who truly do struggle to keep their attention focussed enough to do something, or struggle to find the motivation to do things no matter how hard they try but just get told they're procrastinating or lazy.
I've always struggled with getting up early, and I do not believe it's the same as that which most other people experience of just not liking to get up early. Currently I get up at 6am each morning to get into work for about 8am. I do this 5 days a week so for me it's not that it's such a problem that I can't sleep, but the issue is this- if I don't sleep in until 10am (which I do on weekends) then it does not matter if I've had 4 hours sleep, 12 hours sleep, or anywhere in between, if I am up earlier I am just simply exhausted all day long. In contrast, it doesn't matter if I go to bed at 8pm or 2am, if I get up around 10am - 11am, I feel completely refreshed, as you should after a nights sleep. The thing is, I've been in this situation for 10 years now, starting when I was in college and could actually do late nights and late mornings because I didn't have to be up for work, and through my working life since, I've tried many different things over the years and have had long enough to try doing them for extended periods- i.e. making sure I go to bed at a sensible time on the dot for over 2 years on end.
For me it's not that I have problems getting to sleep, although I do sometimes but I suspect that's down to stress (I work full time AND study full time- it can be hard going sometimes), but simply that I feel exhausted if I get up early. It's something I have to live with, because if I don't it dents my job opportunities severely, but if you believe it's not a real issue and that I'm doing something wrong I'd love to hear your theories on what I can change, because certainly just going to bed at a sensible time and getting plenty of sleep is absolutely not the solution. In a decade, the only solution I have found that has any effect is to simply wake up later and go to sleep later. It's also not all bad to be fair, between around 11pm and 2am on a weeked I become truly alive and write all my best code and do all my best work at this point, it's certainly the peak period of the day for me in terms of productivity, some might argue it's because it's quieter at those times, but I disagree, because mentally I feel much more alive, and much more capable at those times.
Perhaps somewhat interestingly, when I travel abroad, for example to Ottawa in Canada which I visit once or twice each year for a week or two, I generally always feel refreshed whilst I'm there even if I wake up early Canadian time (say 6am) and I suspect this is because they are 5 hours behind and hence much more in tune with my natural body clock. Whether moving there permanently would yield the same effects or whether it'd catch up due to sunrise/sunset changes in the long run or something I've no idea.
"I don't know... my experience has been that it's all a feedback loop. Sure, sleeping one hour later is going to make you happier for a month or a trimester or a year, but then you just become used to going to bed one hour later, and the cycle repeats. Now instead of going to bed at 10 PM and maybe pushing it to 11 PM now and then, the normal go to bed hour becomes 11 PM and you start pushing towards midnight on those days when you think "nah, one less hour of sleep won't kill me." Except eventually it accumulates and now you'd be happy to have one _more_ hour."
That's the assumption I used to make until I found out it was a real problem for some. Some people just don't work well on the working 9 - 5 cycle, and if they're pushing an extra hour, and an extra hour, and so on, then it's because they're just trying to get to the pattern that's most natural to them. I've yet to meet anyone that will keep pushing that extra hour until they've gone full circle for example, they all seem to reach a peak at varying times where they're happy and comfortable enough to stop and just go to bed.
"Retailers abuse the Sales of Goods Act. Products should be made to last a reasonable amount of time, retailers are responsible for 6 years."
That's not quite true, they're responsible for 6 months with the burden of proof being on them to demonstrate it's not a warranty repair if they try and choose to do so, and after that for the reasonable lifetime of the product, it is up to you to prove it did not fail because of anything other than normal use.
You're right in that for many pieces of equipment 6 years would be classed as a reasonable amount of time, but it really depends on the product in general, and ultimately it's down to the court to decide if it goes that far, most people wont want to risk facing court and losing over it so the older a product gets, the less likelihood people will pursue it.
Certainly though anything like a computer failing after 2 or 3 years would be something people would be stupid not to pursue. Personally I'd rather take my chance in a small claims court if it got that far than pay a few hundred £ for an extended warranty on a laptop though!
I agree there should be no need for tax free repair, and on the contrary, I'd rather these laws were toughened up - i.e. make it illegal for a store to outright refuse repair and pretend the sale of goods act doesn't exist, if someone requests repair stores should be legally obliged to either accept the repair, or issue a challenge to the consumer that they do not believe it failed because of normal usage and let the consumer prove otherwise by getting them to get a 3rd party (most people know IT folk) to put their name and reputation behind it, because this is precisely what the law in the UK allows for. Outright denying a repair is just wrong, the store is literally lying about their obligations, yet it is not illegal for them to do so and most consumers are unaware. Further, if you keep the tax on repairs and fix the enforcement of the Sale of goods act then you could just ring fence those taxes for recycling initiatives for hardware that really is beyond economical repair.
Besides, call my cynical, but as is usually the case, I suspect this campaign is more a case of "Dodgy PC repair man seeks tax dodge, finds excuse" or at least something along those lines, but I'll admit I didn't RTFA.
"However, unsupervised time is directly correlated with delinquent behavior."
So we're back to the GP's point then in other words? That parents who do not bring up their children well, also happen to be the same parents who neglect to supervise their children once they have brought them up in a manner where they're easily influenced by gangs and so forth? The mantra correlation is not causation is repeated enough on Slashdot, and your post seems to give the impression that you're implying unsupervised time is the cause, when as per my explanation here, it could well be that that's simply not the case and that your comment merely backs up the GP's point.
You bring in a personal anecdote which is great, but it doesn't mirror my personal experience growing up, and I suspect it's down to where exactly you were brought up I suppose, whether you were fortunate enough to be brought up in a nice area. Regardless, I was allowed to roam free from about the age of 7 - I used to walk or cycle to school and back by myself every single day by this age and used to walk or cycle for miles with my friends after school and on weekends, all of this unsupervised, my parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing. Sure we used to prat around, if we found a box of matches or something we might randomly burn a few twigs or something but mostly we'd be building damns in streams just because it was intriguing watching the water build up, or we'd be climbing trees and building tree houses in the woods, or playing around in parks, picking conkers from trees or going to the local swimming pool to swim, building rafts out of pallettes and such being thrown away from shops. A large portion, I'd say well over half of my childhood was unsupervised, but gang culture? paedophiles? what the hell are they we'd have said. There was really none of that shit, and this was only 15 - 20 years ago, I'm not that old! Despite all this unsupervised time, I've never once smoked a cigarette even, some of my friends went about as far as smoking weed (Oooh, daring!) but we'd just never felt the need to get involved in or start any gangs or anything like that.
Really, if we're going to go by correlation as evidence I'd like to point out the fact that supervision only seems to have increased since the fear of the apparently ever present paedophile waiting at every corner came to be common belief amongst the Daily Mail reading modern parenting crowd and yet, along with this supervision we've seen a rise in knife crime, a rise in underage drinking, a rise in illegal drug taking amongst the young, a rise in gang culture. Perhaps when you breed fear of rapists, murderers at every corner into your children they feel more of a need to hang around in gangs or to carry knives?
I actually like the story in TFA, because I've never been a morning person, I'm more of a night owl, I like to sleep around 2am/3am to 10am/11am , and think whoever decided that everyone should work 9 - 5, or has always been the case in jobs I've been in, more like 8 - 5 should be shot. I just wish there were more jobs that would let me sleep in until 9am/10am whilst still paying decently!!!
That was primarily my point though, the reason the 50 years of self-governing clause exists in Hong Kong is not for the sake of the British, but because the people of Hong Kong were much happy with the British way of life, the British education system than they were with the Chinese. They simply weren't willing to just change to the Chinese way of doing things, or fall under the Chinese government. The people of Hong Kong don't have the same view of having to serve the government no matter what that has been forced across large parts of mainland China, they've got their taste of freedom.
Besides, I think China probably realises they have enough on their plate already anyway- internally they've got Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, then they've got the countless internal dissidents, territorial disputes with Russia, Japan and India. I doubt they'd want to add Hong Kong to the list, but we'll see I susppose as it could well mean they'd be biting off more than they can chew. I suspect they'll just merely block mainland China's access to google.com.hk though.
There are few other places in the world where you can give such a close analogy, few countries have the same sorts of zealotry against government that the US has and particularly the state of Texas is a good example state. I'm pretty sure based on comments over the years that the majority of Slashdots population are from the US, so it's really an example that a large part of Slashdot's community should be able to understand well because they can imagine how much uproar they'd be if the US government did take such an action, it's a situation a good portion of the Slashdot community could relate to.
I could've used the example of Britain taking back powers from Wales or something, but as there's only like 5 people or something that live in Wales, it wouldn't have had much benefit and wouldn't have related to more than a handful of the community here. Most people who aren't from the US but who have witnessed discussions on healthcare and the fear of central government displayed often in that discussions will also be able to understand the analogy of Texas and the US government well too, so it's not as if non-Americans couldn't clearly understand the analogy too, whilst again, with something like Wales for example, most people would probably not have understood the importance.
Now despite all that, I'll admit I do think that generally people from the US have less of a grip on global politics and geography, and I say this as someone who has travelled widely across the world and met many people of many cultures, including multiple US states, although I'll admit I haven't travelled through Asia much. I think the fact that someone like Sarah Palin could get as far up the tree of power as she did, almost becoming VP whilst not understanding that Africa is a continent, not a country is a demonstration of how little respect the American population puts in to an understanding of global politics- in many other parts of the world, anyone with that much ignorance of the world would be lucky to get a job at all, let alone reach the level of VP candidate.
So, it wasn't intended as offence, but I think you overstate the average American's understanding of global politics too - although yes, certainly most people here are smart enough to have a better than average understanding. Even then though, I'm not even saying such ignorance is necessarily a bad thing- when I travelled through the US one realisation I came to is why would half the people there give a damn about the rest of the world when they have a beautiful country and nice houses and standards of living right at their fingertips? Arizona for example is my favourite place on Earth that I've been to so far (or close to, I guess it probably shares joint first with Bahia, Brazil), it's such a beautiful state, but it'd still be wrong to pretend there was a good understanding of the outside world there. What struck me by suprise however, although only because I had a rather unfair preconceived notion at the time, was that one of the people I was best able to have a discussion about world politics with was a native American guy just on the Utah/Arizona border in Navajo territory whilst some of the richer white Americans from supposedly much better educated backgrounds were the ones consistently making comments to me when they found I was British assuming I was from London as if London was the only city in the UK and having little understanding of the world outside the US.
Hong Kong was a British colony for over a hundred years, the people of Hong Kong aren't as hook line and sinker for the old following of the party line- they had a fairly British education system run there for the best part of a hundred years. Also, as part of the hand back to China, Hong Kong has 50 years protection (so what, around 37 left?) to self-govern, any attempts to change that by China would be a big deal internationally, pretty much akin to China anexing a neighbouring country on the political scale. They could do it, but it wouldn't be pretty for them.
For the Americans, I suppose it would be akin to federal government taking full control of the state of Texas and disposing of state powers or something like that.
It is slightly different in theory- the biometric passport just means your passport can be verified by your biometrics. The ID card scheme was a problem because it was designed to be your entire identity document, if someone copies a biometric passport it'll be useless because in the cases where the passport is required (i.e. airports) it wont be valid because the biometrics wont match.
If however they clone your identity card it will be used in a variety of circumstances where biometrics aren't checked which makes it much more of a problem, particularly as much more trust is being put in it, incorrectly. Particularly as they're talking about tying these ID cards to your bank accounts, collection of any benefits you may be owed and so forth- theft or faking of an ID card allows for much more damage than theft of a biometric passport.
Now, that's really the theoretical view of it, in practice I think creating fake biometric passports will just become trivial in the long run so ultimately offer no real protection, I also don't really want the government holding a database of any of my biometrics either. So I do agree with you that it'd be nicer to get rid of it all, but personally I'm much happier with the idea of it being limited to biometric passports, than I am with a full blown ID card roll out! I certainly don't think groups like NO2ID should stop until we get the likes of biometric passports dealt with either though but the point is, killing the ID card scheme is a damn good start- that's the worst of it out the way at least, we just have to finish the rest of it off!
Yes, sorry, you're completely right. You won me over with your awesome trolls and insults, they gave such a compelling background to your comments about how it'll cost more to drop the contracts than pay the get-out compensation, I just didn't know how you could possibly be wrong afterwards.
Your ability to see the future is amazing, you're right, I just know it now, I will vote Lib Dem, you're totally right, I mean, why didn't I see it? It couldn't possibly be the case that someone would be capable of changing their political affiliation through time depending on how different parties act or anything could it? I mean this is the UK, we don't vote for parties based on their policies or actions do we? That'd be stupid! We do it because we pick one, probably the one our parents supported, and support it like a football team, and who wouldn't support their favourite team no matter what right?
No, really though, the National Identity Register contract has been awarded to IBM and paid for already, the enrollment contract has been awarded to CSC and paid for already, these two contracts totalled £650m. The contract to produce the initial cards for the trial (which is due to last around 3 more years under a continued Labour government) was awarded to Thales, at £18m, this has also already been paid for. The total cost of the scheme until 2017 has been filed by Labour as £5.7bn, thus, any incoming government can save at least £5bn on the scheme by ceasing it, it is only the remaining £0.7bn that would be lost at most- money that could really be used to help cut the deficit right now, but still not enough to deter cancelling the scheme and enjoying the £5bn over 10 year savings.
Regarding the "ID card industry", of the three companies that won the contracts, 2 are American, 1 is French, so there's no more than a negligible benefit to UK industry from pursuing the scheme.
At worst they'll keep some of the components of it that have been paid for but then, the Tories have said this all along- specifically, the parts relating to biometric passports.
What they wont be interested in is a national role out and mandating of cards for everybody or further expansion of the scheme.
What the hell as a false EU promise referendum got to do with ID cards? It's entirely irrelevant and a completely different situation. I'm not a Tory support (I'm tentatively Lib Dem) but he's quite right that a referendum post Lisbon treaty would be completely and utterly meaningless.
It sounds like you're just angry about that, and are somehow extrapolating it to the party and all policies in general.
I'd never believe a politician or party entirely, but odds of Labours full blown ID card scheme being kept on if Labour don't win are pretty low, hell, even if Labour do win and they finally figure out where they want to make cuts to cut the deficit there's a decent chance the scheme will be scaled back. It just has no real support outside Labour whatsoever, and even within Labour support for it is shrinking.
Yeah, it's sensationalist. The dog's DNA was just additional evidence.
I think the fact that witnesses came forward was probably a more prominent reason as to why the guy got sent down.
This is what happens when you use the likes of The Times though as a source and don't bother checking any others. The same story, from two different British news publications for example, we have from The Times as in tfa:
"Killer convicted using dog DNA in legal first"
Suggesting he was convicted using the dog DNA, and putting the emphasis on that. In contrast, The Guardian:
"Dog DNA used in conviction for teenager's murderer"
Which puts more of an emphasis on the fact the DNA was simply used in the conviction.
Neither story gives much detail on the rest of the trial sadly, but I guess it's because they're both focussing on the dog related part (as dogs are currently the latest think of the children target). Subtle differences in headlines though tell completely different stories. I pointed this out elsewhere the other day- the BBC used a headline along the lines of "Government climate ads exaggerated climate change", when the actual story was that only 2 out of 3 ads were found to be misleading, so a more accurate headline would've been "Majority of climate change ads vindicated" - obviously these two headlines tell completely different stories, yet the former, which gives an inaccurate impression was used.
It's typical media fact raping. This story is a bit more useful, it mentions the fact there were 3 of boys victim in the same assault, all who survived (and hence, you know, kinda make good witnesses) as well as pointing out other eyewitnesses were around:
Slashdot Mirror
So Linux and all other FOSS software isn't actually free because you have to buy a computing device to run it on then?
"Sure it might annoy those who prefer driving with one hand, but I suspect driving with two hands might be inherently safer anyway."
Maybe if you drive automatic I guess, but whilst it used to be true with all vehicles, I don't think that's really the case anymore if you drive manual. I find a lot of circumstances where being able to change gear quickly is much more important than two hands on the wheel. Why do I think that's the case now and didn't before? Power steering. Sure without it it is kinda important to use two hands on the wheel, but I do drive with my hand on the stick for more than 30 seconds quite a lot- bad weather, dodgy roads, mad drivers on the road (Friday afternoons!). Certainly I'll admit sometimes I keep my hand on the stick just because it's comfier, but with power steering I'd struggle to see how it's inherently less safe, unless power steering failed.
Particularly in the UK over the last few months we've had phenomenally bad weather, I know for sure it was more important being able to shift gears on snowy/icey hills because a lower gears can help you keep traction, but when you have grip you need to be in a lower gears to get some speed up so you make it up the hill. Having a vehicle shouting at me because I wasn't doing what it wanted in conditions like that? No thank you.
But then, I'm not someone whose ever used a phone whilst driving, or who smokes whilst driving (well, at all actually) either, I take it out my pocket and put it in the side pocket and only deal with missed calls/messages when I reach my destinaton. In other words, something like this could only ever be an added hindrance, a distraction, a danger.
I presume because in this case it's a genetic trait, and if we eliminate genetic traits from the gene pool then we're messing with evolution.
My gut instinct is to agree with you though, that this probably isn't too big a deal right now. I suppose the question is whether we cure every genetic "defect" though. What if a new disease comes along that spreads easily, and causes blindness, but doesn't effect those who are colour blind for example? I suppose this is the general line of thinking they're trying to get at.
So whilst I disagree in this particular case with them that it matters at all because I believe the likelihood of it being a problem is pretty much negligible, I think the debate is worth having in the case of "curing" genetic differences in the first place.
I don't use any Facebook apps at all, besides, afaik Farmville is a Flash game, and I pointed out I had no Flash, Java or Silverlight stuff running, it was only the core browser, and yes, it managed to rack up that usage all by itself.
"Gun crime stats suggests criminals can get guns just as easily in the UK as they ever have been able to, despite a string of legislation over the last 13 years that's supposed to prevent it. And driving in London's no worse than in any other major city..."
That's a bit of an oversimplification of the system though.
Criminals getting guns is a bit misleading, because, well, when you get a gun like a handgun under UK laws you become a criminal. For example, the perpertrator in Virginia Tech or Columbine weren't criminals before they went on a rampage, they were non-criminals, and it is people like this who struggle to get hold of guns in the UK because they simply do not have the criminal connections, or the state of mind to build the criminal connections. Further, there's less incidence of death and injury from accidental discharges, heat of the moment arguments and that sort of thing. The key then is the amount of non-crminals getting guns, something which has drastically decreased. As harsh as it sounds, criminals with guns generally use them on other criminals rather than random passers by, you wont for example see criminals stealing handbags or whatever with guns on the streets in the UK, because they seem them as so precious they tend to keep them for gang warfare and such.
Also, of those criminals who do have guns we're often talking about rusty old lugers, and shotguns or rifles (which are still legal for hunting etc.) which get stolen. Occurences of things like assault rifles which can really do some damage are extremely rare. Most criminals are really scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of the firearms they acquire now. Sure there's the odd Mac 10, and I think there was an older 'nam era M16 a few months back, but it's far less common.
Effectively then, yeah criminals might be able to get hold of guns just as easily as before, but if non-criminals thinking of committing crimes are deterred by the fact it's too difficult to get a gun, if the people with guns are mostly just going to use them against each other rather than innocent passers by, and if the guns that criminals do get hold of are unreliable, more expensive, and of poor quality and low killing ability, it's still a major improvement.
Now despite that, I'm not making an assertion here over the validity of the laws, because knife crime has become a major problem, and I suspect that's precisely because gun crime has decreased, so whether gun crime has decreased or not doesn't seem to matter if the number of deaths is still high. The fundamental violence problem is still there, although violent crime has seen a pretty big decrease in the UK over the last 15 years to be fair. I agree that gun laws aren't a magical be all and end all solution to violent crime, far from it, but it's dishonest to say that gun laws in the UK haven't massively improved the situation in lessening the effects of gun crime, it just means other weapons have filled the void, and provides at least a decrease, because weapons like knives aren't quite as lethal and hard to defend against.
"the tens of thousands of pedestrians crossing the street in front of you"
Am I the only one who read this and started thinking about how much score you could earn if you just put your foot down? ...too much Carmageddon, GTA and such over the years I guess ;)
This has largely been my experience, when I've been thinking what language to have a look at next over the years I've gone to TIOBE. I've then looked at actual job adverts and found the TIOBE doesn't even match closely the jobs around my area.
Currently for example, a search for jobs around here on jobsite.co.uk requiring an understanding of Java is at 7 for the week, there are none at all looking for C developers, 3 looking for PHP developers and 15 looking for C# developers. If TIOBE was in any way relevant to the job market the figures basing off the Java ones would be something like 7 Java jobs, 7 C jobs, 4 PHP jobs, 1 C# job. I've not seen a C job listed in over a year in fact, and C++ jobs are relatively few and far bewteen compared to Java and .NET jobs. PHP comes up, but nowhere near as much as .NET.
If you look at wages too, .NET positions are far and away offering the highest average salaries right now around here.
I guess as you say it varies from region to region, but TIOBE is basically completely useless for me here, and I find it hard to believe it's relevant in many places at all. Looking at TIOBE doesn't actually really tell me anything useful at all.
Personally though, I'm not too fussed what technology I work with any proper language like C#, Java, C++ is fine with me! I'll take whatever jobs give the best mix of pay, benefits, enjoyment at the end of the day and ensure my skills are up to date in all the main languages.
That's okay, most Brits think German women are big butch hairy armpitted monsters named Gertrude.
I guess stereotypes work both ways, but they're rarely accurate.
That said, in some parts of Yorkshire where I currently live I'd be inclined to agree, although it's certainly not true for most of the rest of the country ;)
I cultivate rare and endagered plants, to try and reduce the strain on habitat populations from poaching, or to assist in ensuring we have a healthily sized pool of genetically pure reserve specimens. Part the problem of ex-situ conservation efforts in the past is that they've involved only cultivating a few specific individuals of a species that was likely to go extinct in habitat but could be reintroduced, when you only have a few then you don't have enough genetic variation to ensure a viable population to reintroduce as they may not be able to adapt to disease or similar fast enough.
Because this plant material is rare and endangered, it is not sensible to collect more than just a small amount of seeds, or plant material, and some propagation therefore involves taking cuttings and rooting them down, which gives you multiple plants, but they're all clones of the species from that one cutting. It is imperative to keep all plants whether grown from seed and hence genetically different, or grown from cuttings or using tissue culture well documented and labelled, as it would be a tragedy for example, if specimens were lost and only those remaining all happened to be cuttings from the same original parent on a plant that requires cross-pollination between two genetically distinct species as you would not get any seed- effectively although you had multiple plants, they'd all be a clone of the same plant, and that plant may well end up being the last of it's kind making the species effectively extinct.
With this material I send it all across the world to various botanical gardens and nurseries who are responsible in helping with this type of conservation and will also go on to propagate these species ensuring a good healthy global reserve collection. As such I've had a lot of experience with CITES as pretty much all of the species are CITES listed (although some are not). I've found the results to be wildly different from country to country, the theory is that any species that is CITES listed should need a CITES certificate to move between country to country (although the EU is a special case- it's treated as one country so movement from say, England to Germany requires no such certificate).
Enforcement ranges from strict to the point where some countries wont even allow export of CITES materials at all (Mexico generally tends to be this way) which actually hurts conservation because it means the only materials that get out do so through illegal smuggling, to pretty much no real enforcement at all even though the countries are CITES signatories (some Eastern European countries).
CITES really is a mess in this respect, for example I have seen for sale on eBay illegaly habitat collected plants from Chile (you can tell they are habitat collected because they have a white tint to them which only occurs on that plant from the salty mists in that region- something you can't replicate in cultivation) for sale by a seller in Bulgaria, so whilst you'd never get a plant like this into the UK directly, you can transfer it to Bulgaria whose customs officers appear to simply not care about any CITES enforcement and then move it using EU rules from Bulgaria to the UK. Of course, the Chilean export controls are clearly lacking too.
It doesn't suprise me that CITES one way was easy, but the other was a problem for you, and it really reflects how utterly pointless and counterproductive it generally is. If you were smuggling endangered species up from Mexico into Canada no one might bat an eyelid, but if you were trying to move legitimately cultivated specimens into the US to take to say Huntingdon Botanical Gardens in California, then you may well face the inquisition, and sometimes even with valid CITES certificates, or perhaps valid certificates with a slight typographic error on the species name may find these specimens seized and destroyed regardless- vital conservation material simply burnt because pretty much no country in the world actually understands how they're really supposed to enforce CITES.
I too have experienced crashes with Firefox since 3.6, and awful slow downs, in fact, I left it running overnight and locked my computer then came down the next morning to find my computer running slow. I checked task manager and found that Firefox was sat using 1.8gb of RAM, so certainly there seemed to be something screwy with memory management there.
I _think_ the problem is down to handling of some Javascript, when it's crashed it's been loading certain pages, but I can't say for sure. I've always had quite a few tabs open so as to which one might have been the cause I've no idea. I have AdBlock Plus and Firebug installed, as well as the usual Java, Flash and Silverlight plugins, but I've never had any sites using these technologies open when it's happened. I run it on Windows 7 64 bit, which is a fairly clean install, as I've not really installed much since moving to Windows 7, which in itself was a clean install.
Since 3.5 Firefox has become much more sluggish, and since 3.6, much more unstable. It's not a user fault, the software has simply just got worse. Firefox absolutely does have instability issues nowadays, and even when it hasn't crashed I suspect it's not closed properly when I've exited it, because when I've loaded it back up I've seen the "Oops, well this is embarassing" page where it asks if I want to restore my previously opened tabs or start afresh- that's again, not something that can be blamed on the user.
Why are you so sure it's a user problem? Why is his post misleading? I can attest to the fact Firefox absolutely does crash through no real fault of the user, it seems more misleading of you to suggest that Firefox has no instability issues. For what it's worth, the issues don't seem to affect my work laptop which runs Windows XP, but they do affect my secondary home PC which runs XP, so certainly it's not unstable in general- I'm more than happy with it on my work laptop, but it's at the point where it's become such a slow unstable browser back home I'm tempted to just go back to IE or to switch to Chrome. I've not had as many issues with a web browser in terms of performance and stability as I have recent releases of Firefox since older versions of IE like IE5 or the earlier releases of IE6.
Of course browsers don't just "crash on their own", but if they crash in response to a valid user interaction, which Firefox does indeed do, then how is that in any way the user's fault? The GP's got a fairly low UID which suggests he's been using the internet for a fair amount of time, I doubt he's a naive web user, I'm sure when he says his browser crashes it's through no fault of his own, and certainly in my case I know it's through no fault of my own either. I do agree the unstable browser thing is largely a thing of the past, which is why I'm quite suprised that Firefox does have instabilities again, it seems to be a large step backwards- I always figured we were well past that point now.
I love Firefox and support it's goals entirely, in recent years I've always pushed for the rollout of Firefox as the primary browser at companies I've worked at (I've always had that influence as I've been in lead developer roles for bespoke web apps), however I'd not do that right now, I do not currently believe the Firefox platform is reliable enough to put my reputation on pushing for migration to it over anymore, and as things actually seem to be getting worse over the last few releases, rather than better, it's going to take a few versions where things clearly improve before I can honestly go back to having that position. It's not that I don't want to, but I think the Firefox team has lost their way somewhat and needs to take a step back and look at what went wrong.
"Chavez has supporters right in the Obama administration. One is Obamas' "Diversity Czar" Mark Lloyd at the FCC. Talk about a scary scenario, having a guy like Lloyd in a position of power over the nations' communications!"
Jesus man, that's some scary shit. Imagine if something like that was the case under the Republic administration? like if Bush had links to Osama Bin Laden or something like that?
No, seriously, the reality is you can find people willing to make all sorts of links of varying degrees, there are plenty of conspiracy theories out there putting Bush administration down as the people behind 9/11. Do you believe them? if so then you're really a lost cause, if not, then the fact you believe this instead when it's equally insane shows you're so lost in your bias and hate presumably of the Democrats and Obama that you've lost all ability to be rational and objective.
Either way, your thinking is entirely irrational, you need to really start striving to be a little more objective and better at stepping back from your viewpoint and looking at alternate possible explanations, else you'll just remain one of those wing nuts than most the world points and laughs about because they can't believe anyone would be so ignorant. That's really not a good thing to be.
"Today's growth of Chinese GDP proves that it is more effective in current economical situation than either US or EU."
No, it proves no such thing. All the Chinese GDP growth proves is that artificial manipulation of exchange rates by the Chinese government are more effective than the West's current plan of pushing and protecting free-trade even in the face of such manipulation. China's growth depends almost entirely on the West, and if Chinese goods become more expensive because the West finally gets tired of China's refusal to stop manipulating their currency so drastically then it's growth will plummet whether it's totalitarian, authoritarian, a democracy or whatever. Now, you could argue that that manipulation is part of their authoritarianist attitude, which is true, but it still doesn't ignore the fact that Western democracies could crush it by adding tariffs on imports in China to correct China's currency manipulation anyway. As a counter-example to yours, look at the USSR, it was totalitarian yet it fell into absolute ruins because Russia did not have access to the Western markets that China enjoys right now. It's also worth noting that the US' economy is still 3.5x as large as China's and the EU's is 4.5x as large as Chinas, so even if China can keep up current rates they have a hell of a long way to go. That's not to say they wont become a more important world player politically than they historically have been however of course, they almost certainly will.
"Don't forget, during the last twenty centuries, China had the largest economy on Earth for 18 centuries, and it always was totalitarian."
For at least a few of the last 20 centuries it appeared to be authoritarian rather than totalitarian. Despite all that, I'd be intrigued to see how it managed to be the largest economy over 18 of the last 20 centuries in the face of some pretty large empires and the loss of large amounts of territory during some periods so I'd be greatful if you've got some sources you can point me to.
I was around the same age when the wall fell, and I distinctly remember the scenes on TV of people scaling it, pulling it apart and so on.
I didn't really understand why the wall existed, what it was for, or even geographically at that age, where it was in relation to me. Despite that, I still have images in my memory of those scenes when it fell, because for some reason I too knew it was an important moment. This is despite the fact I was in the UK, a country where such an event had no noticable direct effect on me at that age.
I suspect it was even more prominent for Brin, because that sudden change, from living in the USSR, to living in America where suddenly things he probably wasn't allowed to do, places he'd never seen before, foods and products he never experienced in the USSR, and probably even the types of programs shown on TV that weren't shown in the USSR suddenly became commonplace. I agree with you, a kid is bound to notice such a drastic change in their life even at an age that young, and even if the reality of what that change was about doesn't bite until they get older.
"So basically: just because you can put a medical sounding name on going to sleep late doesn't necessarily make it an objective medical condition."
Unfortunately, it doesn't mean it isn't either.
Further, I suspect things like procrastination and laziness do have at least some phsycological basis as actual problems, the former probably being related to attention deficit disorders, and the latter often possibly related to demotivation due to depression or similar.
Now, I'm not excusing laziness or procrastination, but I think it's rather unfair to basically say "I don't have that problem, so it's not possible that anyone else can". I think there probably are some people who truly do struggle to keep their attention focussed enough to do something, or struggle to find the motivation to do things no matter how hard they try but just get told they're procrastinating or lazy.
I've always struggled with getting up early, and I do not believe it's the same as that which most other people experience of just not liking to get up early. Currently I get up at 6am each morning to get into work for about 8am. I do this 5 days a week so for me it's not that it's such a problem that I can't sleep, but the issue is this- if I don't sleep in until 10am (which I do on weekends) then it does not matter if I've had 4 hours sleep, 12 hours sleep, or anywhere in between, if I am up earlier I am just simply exhausted all day long. In contrast, it doesn't matter if I go to bed at 8pm or 2am, if I get up around 10am - 11am, I feel completely refreshed, as you should after a nights sleep. The thing is, I've been in this situation for 10 years now, starting when I was in college and could actually do late nights and late mornings because I didn't have to be up for work, and through my working life since, I've tried many different things over the years and have had long enough to try doing them for extended periods- i.e. making sure I go to bed at a sensible time on the dot for over 2 years on end.
For me it's not that I have problems getting to sleep, although I do sometimes but I suspect that's down to stress (I work full time AND study full time- it can be hard going sometimes), but simply that I feel exhausted if I get up early. It's something I have to live with, because if I don't it dents my job opportunities severely, but if you believe it's not a real issue and that I'm doing something wrong I'd love to hear your theories on what I can change, because certainly just going to bed at a sensible time and getting plenty of sleep is absolutely not the solution. In a decade, the only solution I have found that has any effect is to simply wake up later and go to sleep later. It's also not all bad to be fair, between around 11pm and 2am on a weeked I become truly alive and write all my best code and do all my best work at this point, it's certainly the peak period of the day for me in terms of productivity, some might argue it's because it's quieter at those times, but I disagree, because mentally I feel much more alive, and much more capable at those times.
Perhaps somewhat interestingly, when I travel abroad, for example to Ottawa in Canada which I visit once or twice each year for a week or two, I generally always feel refreshed whilst I'm there even if I wake up early Canadian time (say 6am) and I suspect this is because they are 5 hours behind and hence much more in tune with my natural body clock. Whether moving there permanently would yield the same effects or whether it'd catch up due to sunrise/sunset changes in the long run or something I've no idea.
"I don't know... my experience has been that it's all a feedback loop. Sure, sleeping one hour later is going to make you happier for a month or a trimester or a year, but then you just become used to going to bed one hour later, and the cycle repeats. Now instead of going to bed at 10 PM and maybe pushing it to 11 PM now and then, the normal go to bed hour becomes 11 PM and you start pushing towards midnight on those days when you think "nah, one less hour of sleep won't kill me." Except eventually it accumulates and now you'd be happy to have one _more_ hour."
That's the assumption I used to make until I found out it was a real problem for some. Some people just don't work well on the working 9 - 5 cycle, and if they're pushing an extra hour, and an extra hour, and so on, then it's because they're just trying to get to the pattern that's most natural to them. I've yet to meet anyone that will keep pushing that extra hour until they've gone full circle for example, they all seem to reach a peak at varying times where they're happy and comfortable enough to stop and just go to bed.
"Retailers abuse the Sales of Goods Act. Products should be made to last a reasonable amount of time, retailers are responsible for 6 years."
That's not quite true, they're responsible for 6 months with the burden of proof being on them to demonstrate it's not a warranty repair if they try and choose to do so, and after that for the reasonable lifetime of the product, it is up to you to prove it did not fail because of anything other than normal use.
You're right in that for many pieces of equipment 6 years would be classed as a reasonable amount of time, but it really depends on the product in general, and ultimately it's down to the court to decide if it goes that far, most people wont want to risk facing court and losing over it so the older a product gets, the less likelihood people will pursue it.
Certainly though anything like a computer failing after 2 or 3 years would be something people would be stupid not to pursue. Personally I'd rather take my chance in a small claims court if it got that far than pay a few hundred £ for an extended warranty on a laptop though!
I agree there should be no need for tax free repair, and on the contrary, I'd rather these laws were toughened up - i.e. make it illegal for a store to outright refuse repair and pretend the sale of goods act doesn't exist, if someone requests repair stores should be legally obliged to either accept the repair, or issue a challenge to the consumer that they do not believe it failed because of normal usage and let the consumer prove otherwise by getting them to get a 3rd party (most people know IT folk) to put their name and reputation behind it, because this is precisely what the law in the UK allows for. Outright denying a repair is just wrong, the store is literally lying about their obligations, yet it is not illegal for them to do so and most consumers are unaware. Further, if you keep the tax on repairs and fix the enforcement of the Sale of goods act then you could just ring fence those taxes for recycling initiatives for hardware that really is beyond economical repair.
Besides, call my cynical, but as is usually the case, I suspect this campaign is more a case of "Dodgy PC repair man seeks tax dodge, finds excuse" or at least something along those lines, but I'll admit I didn't RTFA.
"However, unsupervised time is directly correlated with delinquent behavior."
So we're back to the GP's point then in other words? That parents who do not bring up their children well, also happen to be the same parents who neglect to supervise their children once they have brought them up in a manner where they're easily influenced by gangs and so forth? The mantra correlation is not causation is repeated enough on Slashdot, and your post seems to give the impression that you're implying unsupervised time is the cause, when as per my explanation here, it could well be that that's simply not the case and that your comment merely backs up the GP's point.
You bring in a personal anecdote which is great, but it doesn't mirror my personal experience growing up, and I suspect it's down to where exactly you were brought up I suppose, whether you were fortunate enough to be brought up in a nice area. Regardless, I was allowed to roam free from about the age of 7 - I used to walk or cycle to school and back by myself every single day by this age and used to walk or cycle for miles with my friends after school and on weekends, all of this unsupervised, my parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing. Sure we used to prat around, if we found a box of matches or something we might randomly burn a few twigs or something but mostly we'd be building damns in streams just because it was intriguing watching the water build up, or we'd be climbing trees and building tree houses in the woods, or playing around in parks, picking conkers from trees or going to the local swimming pool to swim, building rafts out of pallettes and such being thrown away from shops. A large portion, I'd say well over half of my childhood was unsupervised, but gang culture? paedophiles? what the hell are they we'd have said. There was really none of that shit, and this was only 15 - 20 years ago, I'm not that old! Despite all this unsupervised time, I've never once smoked a cigarette even, some of my friends went about as far as smoking weed (Oooh, daring!) but we'd just never felt the need to get involved in or start any gangs or anything like that.
Really, if we're going to go by correlation as evidence I'd like to point out the fact that supervision only seems to have increased since the fear of the apparently ever present paedophile waiting at every corner came to be common belief amongst the Daily Mail reading modern parenting crowd and yet, along with this supervision we've seen a rise in knife crime, a rise in underage drinking, a rise in illegal drug taking amongst the young, a rise in gang culture. Perhaps when you breed fear of rapists, murderers at every corner into your children they feel more of a need to hang around in gangs or to carry knives?
I actually like the story in TFA, because I've never been a morning person, I'm more of a night owl, I like to sleep around 2am/3am to 10am/11am , and think whoever decided that everyone should work 9 - 5, or has always been the case in jobs I've been in, more like 8 - 5 should be shot. I just wish there were more jobs that would let me sleep in until 9am/10am whilst still paying decently!!!
That was primarily my point though, the reason the 50 years of self-governing clause exists in Hong Kong is not for the sake of the British, but because the people of Hong Kong were much happy with the British way of life, the British education system than they were with the Chinese. They simply weren't willing to just change to the Chinese way of doing things, or fall under the Chinese government. The people of Hong Kong don't have the same view of having to serve the government no matter what that has been forced across large parts of mainland China, they've got their taste of freedom.
Besides, I think China probably realises they have enough on their plate already anyway- internally they've got Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, then they've got the countless internal dissidents, territorial disputes with Russia, Japan and India. I doubt they'd want to add Hong Kong to the list, but we'll see I susppose as it could well mean they'd be biting off more than they can chew. I suspect they'll just merely block mainland China's access to google.com.hk though.
There are few other places in the world where you can give such a close analogy, few countries have the same sorts of zealotry against government that the US has and particularly the state of Texas is a good example state. I'm pretty sure based on comments over the years that the majority of Slashdots population are from the US, so it's really an example that a large part of Slashdot's community should be able to understand well because they can imagine how much uproar they'd be if the US government did take such an action, it's a situation a good portion of the Slashdot community could relate to.
I could've used the example of Britain taking back powers from Wales or something, but as there's only like 5 people or something that live in Wales, it wouldn't have had much benefit and wouldn't have related to more than a handful of the community here. Most people who aren't from the US but who have witnessed discussions on healthcare and the fear of central government displayed often in that discussions will also be able to understand the analogy of Texas and the US government well too, so it's not as if non-Americans couldn't clearly understand the analogy too, whilst again, with something like Wales for example, most people would probably not have understood the importance.
Now despite all that, I'll admit I do think that generally people from the US have less of a grip on global politics and geography, and I say this as someone who has travelled widely across the world and met many people of many cultures, including multiple US states, although I'll admit I haven't travelled through Asia much. I think the fact that someone like Sarah Palin could get as far up the tree of power as she did, almost becoming VP whilst not understanding that Africa is a continent, not a country is a demonstration of how little respect the American population puts in to an understanding of global politics- in many other parts of the world, anyone with that much ignorance of the world would be lucky to get a job at all, let alone reach the level of VP candidate.
So, it wasn't intended as offence, but I think you overstate the average American's understanding of global politics too - although yes, certainly most people here are smart enough to have a better than average understanding. Even then though, I'm not even saying such ignorance is necessarily a bad thing- when I travelled through the US one realisation I came to is why would half the people there give a damn about the rest of the world when they have a beautiful country and nice houses and standards of living right at their fingertips? Arizona for example is my favourite place on Earth that I've been to so far (or close to, I guess it probably shares joint first with Bahia, Brazil), it's such a beautiful state, but it'd still be wrong to pretend there was a good understanding of the outside world there. What struck me by suprise however, although only because I had a rather unfair preconceived notion at the time, was that one of the people I was best able to have a discussion about world politics with was a native American guy just on the Utah/Arizona border in Navajo territory whilst some of the richer white Americans from supposedly much better educated backgrounds were the ones consistently making comments to me when they found I was British assuming I was from London as if London was the only city in the UK and having little understanding of the world outside the US.
Hong Kong was a British colony for over a hundred years, the people of Hong Kong aren't as hook line and sinker for the old following of the party line- they had a fairly British education system run there for the best part of a hundred years. Also, as part of the hand back to China, Hong Kong has 50 years protection (so what, around 37 left?) to self-govern, any attempts to change that by China would be a big deal internationally, pretty much akin to China anexing a neighbouring country on the political scale. They could do it, but it wouldn't be pretty for them.
For the Americans, I suppose it would be akin to federal government taking full control of the state of Texas and disposing of state powers or something like that.
It is slightly different in theory- the biometric passport just means your passport can be verified by your biometrics. The ID card scheme was a problem because it was designed to be your entire identity document, if someone copies a biometric passport it'll be useless because in the cases where the passport is required (i.e. airports) it wont be valid because the biometrics wont match.
If however they clone your identity card it will be used in a variety of circumstances where biometrics aren't checked which makes it much more of a problem, particularly as much more trust is being put in it, incorrectly. Particularly as they're talking about tying these ID cards to your bank accounts, collection of any benefits you may be owed and so forth- theft or faking of an ID card allows for much more damage than theft of a biometric passport.
Now, that's really the theoretical view of it, in practice I think creating fake biometric passports will just become trivial in the long run so ultimately offer no real protection, I also don't really want the government holding a database of any of my biometrics either. So I do agree with you that it'd be nicer to get rid of it all, but personally I'm much happier with the idea of it being limited to biometric passports, than I am with a full blown ID card roll out! I certainly don't think groups like NO2ID should stop until we get the likes of biometric passports dealt with either though but the point is, killing the ID card scheme is a damn good start- that's the worst of it out the way at least, we just have to finish the rest of it off!
Yes, sorry, you're completely right. You won me over with your awesome trolls and insults, they gave such a compelling background to your comments about how it'll cost more to drop the contracts than pay the get-out compensation, I just didn't know how you could possibly be wrong afterwards.
Your ability to see the future is amazing, you're right, I just know it now, I will vote Lib Dem, you're totally right, I mean, why didn't I see it? It couldn't possibly be the case that someone would be capable of changing their political affiliation through time depending on how different parties act or anything could it? I mean this is the UK, we don't vote for parties based on their policies or actions do we? That'd be stupid! We do it because we pick one, probably the one our parents supported, and support it like a football team, and who wouldn't support their favourite team no matter what right?
No, really though, the National Identity Register contract has been awarded to IBM and paid for already, the enrollment contract has been awarded to CSC and paid for already, these two contracts totalled £650m. The contract to produce the initial cards for the trial (which is due to last around 3 more years under a continued Labour government) was awarded to Thales, at £18m, this has also already been paid for. The total cost of the scheme until 2017 has been filed by Labour as £5.7bn, thus, any incoming government can save at least £5bn on the scheme by ceasing it, it is only the remaining £0.7bn that would be lost at most- money that could really be used to help cut the deficit right now, but still not enough to deter cancelling the scheme and enjoying the £5bn over 10 year savings.
Regarding the "ID card industry", of the three companies that won the contracts, 2 are American, 1 is French, so there's no more than a negligible benefit to UK industry from pursuing the scheme.
Yes, because it's simply unaffordable.
At worst they'll keep some of the components of it that have been paid for but then, the Tories have said this all along- specifically, the parts relating to biometric passports.
What they wont be interested in is a national role out and mandating of cards for everybody or further expansion of the scheme.
What the hell as a false EU promise referendum got to do with ID cards? It's entirely irrelevant and a completely different situation. I'm not a Tory support (I'm tentatively Lib Dem) but he's quite right that a referendum post Lisbon treaty would be completely and utterly meaningless.
It sounds like you're just angry about that, and are somehow extrapolating it to the party and all policies in general.
I'd never believe a politician or party entirely, but odds of Labours full blown ID card scheme being kept on if Labour don't win are pretty low, hell, even if Labour do win and they finally figure out where they want to make cuts to cut the deficit there's a decent chance the scheme will be scaled back. It just has no real support outside Labour whatsoever, and even within Labour support for it is shrinking.
None of the parties can afford to keep them.
Even Labour has damped down their plans for them.
Yeah, it's sensationalist. The dog's DNA was just additional evidence.
I think the fact that witnesses came forward was probably a more prominent reason as to why the guy got sent down.
This is what happens when you use the likes of The Times though as a source and don't bother checking any others. The same story, from two different British news publications for example, we have from The Times as in tfa:
"Killer convicted using dog DNA in legal first"
Suggesting he was convicted using the dog DNA, and putting the emphasis on that. In contrast, The Guardian:
"Dog DNA used in conviction for teenager's murderer"
Which puts more of an emphasis on the fact the DNA was simply used in the conviction.
Neither story gives much detail on the rest of the trial sadly, but I guess it's because they're both focussing on the dog related part (as dogs are currently the latest think of the children target). Subtle differences in headlines though tell completely different stories. I pointed this out elsewhere the other day- the BBC used a headline along the lines of "Government climate ads exaggerated climate change", when the actual story was that only 2 out of 3 ads were found to be misleading, so a more accurate headline would've been "Majority of climate change ads vindicated" - obviously these two headlines tell completely different stories, yet the former, which gives an inaccurate impression was used.
It's typical media fact raping. This story is a bit more useful, it mentions the fact there were 3 of boys victim in the same assault, all who survived (and hence, you know, kinda make good witnesses) as well as pointing out other eyewitnesses were around:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23816750-man-guilty-of-teenagers-weapon-dog-murder-in-south-london-park.do