"The third one is the toughest. Nuclear power, today, is more expensive than wind and in some places, more expensive than solar."
The problem as I see it is not the cost of nuclear vs. renewables, but the cost of nuclear vs. the status quo. We still have too many gas and coal power plants, and yet their cost is much higher than nuclear when externalities (e.g. health costs) are factored in.
So the point is that if we're going to insist on keeping expensive plants around, it's still cheaper to replace all our coal plants with less expensive nuclear plants. The cost of coal is hidden in the fact that healthcare issues caused by it are paid by everyone other than the people profiting off the coal plant. If you made coal plant providers pay the respective healthcare costs then coal power would be dead already as for example, in the UK, coal providers would be paying the NHS literally many billions of pounds.
So the point is we can replace big plants (as opposed to lots of small distributed renewables) like our coal plants with nuclear and still come out better off. Move the cost of paying for coal induced healthcare issues into nuclear subsidy and it'll cost less overall because the population will be healthier and more productive, the cost of healthcare will reduce. Even in states like the US where citizens typically pay for their own healthcare the removal of coal should typically reduce healthcare insurance premiums such that people would have more money to pay for unsubsidised nuclear and still have change left over.
You're right, we don't necessarily need coal OR nuclear, but given that we have an insistence on these big plant projects, the fact we're even persisting with coal is nonsensical and is only the case due to massive state or private subsidies to the coal industry in private citizens and the government paying for the problems coal causes, rather than the coal providers themselves paying it as should be the case. Coal is only more financially viable than nuclear because that section of the industry has, for historic reasons, managed to shirk responsibility for the bulk of it's real costs onto everyone else. When you pay for coal energy you're paying twice - you're paying your electricity bill, and you're paying your otherwise unnecessarily medical insurance/tax bill as well. Might as well replace with nuclear and just shift the costs where they belong - directly onto the electricity bill where energy market competition would force prices down (towards cheaper renewables in the long run). Right now, heavily subsidised coal is a major blocking problem as it grossly distorts the market and prevents progress when there's no real reason it should because it's simply not as cheap as it pretends all things considered.
I suggest you Google it, it's like when one person has 1 apple and one has a million apples, yes they both have apples, but one has apples on a much greater scale.
I'm amazed I need to explain these things in kiddy language on Slashdot of all places.
Anyone who knows my history of posting on the whole Iran/nuclear topic knows that I'm about as far from an Iran apologist as you can get, but frankly your post is pretty much entirely bullshit.
Nuclear technology transfer has been in the exact opposite direction, rather than Iran transferring knowledge and information to Iran, it is in fact North Korea that transferred to Iran (and it's close ally Syria).
North Korea's nuclear programme stems back much further than both Iran and Syria, and in fact, Iran was still largely under Western influence long after North Korea had already decided to pursue the nuclear weapons route.
The early North Korean weapons effort was largely kickstarted by the USSR under the form of an initially civilian effort and this gave North Korea the initial technology it needed to start refining Uranium (the same sort of enrichment technology that has been at the heart of the current Iranian nuclear drama). As such, North Korea was doing what Iran is being criticised for 40 years before Iran really started though North Korea never really got anywhere through that time until the 90s when it benefitted from the AQ Khan network. That is, it was our supposed ally (as fucking usual) Pakistan that traded nuclear weapon technology with North Korea and made them a nuclear weapon capable state.
Whilst there has been ample evidence over the years that Iran has at least dabbled in pursuing nuclear weapons (though personally I think they did more than dabble) we don't necessarily know in much detail what shape that took. We do know however that when Syria's al-Kibar nuclear programme was unveiled by the fact Israel blew the fucking thing up, that it was basically an exact clone of North Korea's programme. Had Iran had it's own indigenous built programme with no outside influence, it would seem odd that Syria's programme looked like North Korea's, not Iran's, when Syria and Iran are far closer partners (to the extent that Iran is currently paying in the blood of it's special forces and top generals to prop up Assad right now).
Which is why in all likelihood, there's little that North Korea could gain from Iran. North Korea's programme is decades ahead, and whilst Iran was also a beneficiary of the AQ Khan network it still lacked the actual experience and knowledge of enrichment that North Korea had.
So the idea that Iran is somehow coaching the North Koreans makes absolutely no sense, NK's programme is a year short of 55 years in the making, whereas Iran's is sat at about 15 to 20 years at best, the bulk of which has been spent recreating that which NK already had been handed outright in the 1960s by the soviets.
For all the criticism I've had of Iran over the years, I'm optimistic about the nuclear deal. The biggest problem I've had with Iran's nuclear programme is simply that it's completely blocked the IAEA from confirming that it isn't producing weapons by outright blocking access to key nuclear facilities, and as such this is why I believe that the only reason Iran would do this is because it did genuinely have something to hide - there's no point suffering crippling economic sanctions just to pretend you're trying to make nukes if you're not. If Iran is now willing to allow full and thorough inspections, then I suspect that's because it's now got nothing to hide any more because it genuinely has given up on it's pursuit of nuclear weapons.
It's pretty clear that the path Ahmadinejad carved wasn't working for Iran, that Iran was getting weaker, poorer, and increasingly more isolated. The arab spring was the wake up call to Iran's elite that that path simply was not sustainable. Whilst I'm not particularly a fan of Rouhani, because he was still ultimately a vetted option and still under the thumb of Khamenei, he is at least reversing many of Ahmadinejad's bad ideas (like the pursuit of nuclear weapons) precisely because the alternative is collapse of the Iranian political system, and likely a Syria-esque civil war.
I take issue with ads regardless because I have literally zero interest in them, having never clicked one intentionally (sometimes they've used exploits to force me to click them when I click elsewhere on the page, but that's frankly a form of hacking and should be illegal if it's not). They're just a waste of time and bandwidth to me, therefore nowadays I block every type of ad I can.
The real problem is that you don't know if a page is ad sponsored until you visit it. Sites should have to disclose they're ad sponsored to search engines, such that search engines can show an icon or similar denoting each result as ad sponsored and allow users to filter results based on this (and potentially other flags - i.e. Paywall).
Whilst companies expect to be visible on the public web, whilst also expecting you to pay them somehow and crying when you choose not to (by blocking ads) then frankly I have little sympathy. They can't expect to have their cake and eat it too - whilst users don't get to make an informed choice about whether they wish to visit a site based on whether it has ads or tracking or not, sites using ads should not complain that users decide to block them. It's a two way street, if I don't know ahead of time what they expect from me before I view the content, then they can't complain when I restrict how I view the content (i.e. minus the ads).
There are specific guidelines on what speed limits should be set where (i.e. 30mph if a house is within a certain distance from a road) in the UK.
This alters over time depending on conditions, a spate of car crash incidents or cars hitting people will lead to the lowering of limits, whereas areas not inhabited by anyone and hence unlikely to have people around or crossing are set at the national speed limit (60mph for single lane, 70mph for dual carriageway).
We do have some of the safest roads in the world though (IIRC we're in the top 5), so yes, it's possible things are different here. Looking it up it seems the US has 11.6 road fatalities per 100,000 people vs. the UK's 3.5 which is a drastic difference.
What the fuck? How did I get from Manchester, England to Chicago O'Hare, or London, England to Phoenix, Arizona, or Manchester, England to Philadelphia all by plane if JFK was the only international airport which I most definitely have never ever been to?
The US has a metric fuckton of international airports, these are just some of the ones I've been through, and that's before you include giants elsewhere in the US, like LAX.
"A British Muslim family heading for Disneyland was barred from boarding a flight to Los Angeles by US authorities at Londonâ(TM)s Gatwick airport...
Wow, is it true? The US "authorities" have pretty long arms."
It wouldn't be unusual, I cleared US security at Canada's Ottawa airport once. I cleared British security in Prague and in Narvik, Norway some years ago, closer to 9/11.
Many of the security-paranoid states in the world have security positioned outside of their own territory in foreign airports that you must clear before boarding. Countries accept it because it's far easier and cheaper than being denied or restricted access to some of the busiest airports and hence global connections in the world.
But that doesn't need facial recognition, it's already well covered by vetting through things like references and criminal records checks.
You can't just steal in this country, and then go down the road and get hired straight into another job, it's typically quite different to the hire at will culture in many US states. That's why I say employee theft isn't an issue for a lot of retail companies nowadays - the checks they do on staff can be pretty rigorous (and some use more positive methods, like actual decent pay) such that there is little incentive to steal and the people they hire are typically not pre-disposed to theft in the first place.
The companies that suffer the biggest loss from employee theft nowadays are typically larger chains who do everything on the cheap (including hiring people), they've effectively decided that it's a cost of doing business, and that suffering stock loss through not spending on checks/security is cheaper than paying decent wages etc. to discourage it. This typically includes things like Supermarkets, the big electronics chains like Currys/PC World, and so on. There's recently been a big case in the UK where a company Sports Direct wanted it both ways - they want to pay minimum wage AND wanted to do rigorous security checks, the problem is, they wanted those rigorous security checks done on staff time, such that staff were being forced to hang around to be searched for upto 30 minutes after they'd stopped being paid. This has been outed quite rightly as an illegal practice, because if the staff HAVE to be there then it's work, in which case they should be paid, and as they weren't, that pushed their defacto salary below the legal minimum wage.
I'd wager the largest theft type for businesses in the UK in this day and age is probably people who get paid expenses fiddling them.
I think the problem is that statistics is a far more detailed and complicated topic than that, and that the sort of thing you suggested is the sort of thing that's already taught well, but such a tiny miniscule tip of the iceberg that it's the rest of it that needs be taught.
I agree with the person below who mentioned intuition, mostly the biggest problem I see when it comes to statistics amongst people of every age and group is that very few people seem to grasp the issues that may face a statistical result. People in general struggle to understand what the numbers actually mean, they're hopeless at figuring out what confounding factors may exist in a result.
So might I suggest a decent idea might be to find some bad statistical studies and create some exercises that help them understand why they're bad. The examples don't need to be difficult, but should be varied to help them understand why correlation does not mean causation, and why causation doesn't even necessarily imply (at least linear) correlation amongst other things.
Wikipedia's list would probably provide a reasonable starting point for some examples to cover:
I'd suggest, that by teaching kids how to question statistics, and how to spot when someone is using statistics to spout bullshit (which you'll find happens all the fucking time, basically every single day of your life if you're adept at spotting it) they'll be better placed to learn how to do statistics properly.
If they know how to tell when a result is wrong, they'll hopefully be encouraged to find out how to do it right, and how to mitigate these issues. I think without ever learning to recognise how people do statistics wrong on a daily basis, it's hard to know how to do it right, and so the issue just proliferates.
You realise I already explained why employee theft, and especially overall employee theft across all sectors is completely and utterly irrelevant to the discussion right?
It's like you've decided to say I'm wrong by having your own completely different conversation that has nothing to do with the conversation we were having previously.
What the fuck has someone stealing an office stapler in a non-retail environment have to do with the fact that you don't understand what racism is?
Please stick to the discussion because I'm not interested in your tangential conversation that has nothing to do with anything as on that I completely agree with you - I absolutely think employee theft is probably the largest cause of stock loss across companies, but that's not the discussion here.
The discussion here is whether an automated data sharing facial recognition system can help stop crime, and the answer is yes, to which I provided an example of the sort of current crime it can stop - that of widespread single day hits by roma gangs traveling a distance to carry them out precisely because it's a rapid response system involving automated sharing, whilst most existing systems take days, by which time it's too late. If this topic had come up 5 years ago I'd have picked a different example of crime at the time, my choice of roma gangs was for no other reason than because it's topical, it's relevant to the sort of problems retail in the UK is currently facing that this system is designed to solve. In 5 years time it'll be another type of crime that will likely have nothing to do with roma gangs.
I'm sorry you can't follow a discussion, but that's really not my fault.
Right, except to be a bigot, I'd have to be again implying that the whole culture or similar is guilty of this, yet only you and the GP are making that association.
The fact that the two of you believe that any suggestion of theft by a certain community implies the whole community is involved in fact shows a disgusting amount of bigotry on your behalves.
For me to be prejudiced in this respect, you would need to show that there are no roma gypsy gangs engaging in widespread theft such that I've made an invalid association. The problem is, we know that isn't true:
Thus, the only bigotry here is being performed by you and the GP.
I'm a firm believer in the EU in large part because I'm not bigoted, because personally I feel no greater emotional attachment to the guy down the street I've never met than I do to someone part way across the world I've never met, where we're born is merely a matter of randomness and circumstance and I'm lucky to have been born, brought up, and to live somewhere that is relatively incredibly stable, safe, and wealthy. Even the particular criminal groups I mentioned I somewhat get, they ultimately just want the standard of living we have, and whilst I believe theft is a lazy route to get there, I can understand full well what drives them.
But that does not mean that we should pretend that such groups with specific identities do not exist, to do so ignores reality, and makes a complete and utter mockery of any argument based upon it. Folks like you crying "racism!" every time someone raises a legitimate and valid point are the reason actually fascist groups like UKIP are on the rise, because it's kickback by those more easily swayed by their arguments being fed up of being told they're racist just because they said something that's neither racist, nor false - you are the problem, the associations you make and then project onto others are the problem. Would you have even batted an eyelid if I instead chose "South London chav gangs?" as an example? "What about overprivileged rich white kids who want a taste of the wild side"? I doubt for a second you would, though it would make no practical difference and such groups are currently slightly less relevant in this context.
So like all over zealous SJWs, you seem to have gone so far left that you've come all the way round again to the far right, by in yourself making hypocritically bigoted associations, and by helping drive others into the arms of the far right. You're no better than idiots like Corbyn whose solution to an overly aggressive right wing responsible for many of the worlds current geopolitical ills, is to start hugging and defending real actual terrorists. Or whose solution to sexist pigs who molest women on trains is to segregate women into women only carriages, rather than, you know, deal with the actual problem - the sexual predators themselves by dealing with them as the criminals they are using the CCTV that's already prevalent on the trains in question.
Quit with the idiot think and start being a bit more realistic and rational before throwing around terms you don't understand and yet are guilty of yourself please. I doubt you will though, because apparently you like to accuse others of being Daily Mail readers whilst apparently being one of those Ban the Burqa types:
You seem to be taking some random stat from the US and applying it globally, which is complete bollocks. In some stores employee theft is completely and utterly solved, they have zero theft by employees such that external theft, particularly by crime gangs are their biggest problem. You can't arbitrarily take one metric from one country (which may well include data on stealing office post-its and so forth) and suggest therefore that another problem in another country, with different metrics, and different levels of crime should somehow be ignored. That's before you consider that some types of theft require different solutions anyway this system wont handle employee theft well anyway because their faces and identities are already known, so it's pretty irrelevant to the discussion. For the purposes of discussing this system you can pretty much discount that entire class of theft regardless.
Rather than admit that you don't have the slightest clue about crime trends in the UK, you've gone off on a pointless tangent with completely irrelevant and meaningless data. The fact is, gang sweeps by that community are currently a high impact crime in the UK that has become increasingly prominent in recent years, and it's exactly the sort of crime this system will work well to prevent.
"As for the middle east having an Islamic terrorism problem, what it has in reality is a "regime change didn't work so well the last few times we tried it, and now we have to clean up the mess we made, so let's do the whole regime change thing again because it's the thing we have the most experience with."
You can argue what you want about the causes of the problems in the middle east, there are many views, and I've probably heard them all by now, but it's all irrelevant to the discussion at hand regardless because the underlying causes don't change the fact that the statement is true and certainly not racist.
I was using an example of a real actual problem, saying the UK has a roma gypsy gang theft problem right now is no different to saying the middle east has an Islamic terrorism problem.
It doesn't in any way imply that I believe that all, or even close the majority of muslims are terrorists, which is actually racist, it's merely a statement of fact - you're surely not going to deny the middle east has an Islamic terrorism problem right now? No, I didn't think so, so why pretend someone is racist for also stating a fact that the UK has a roma gypsy gang theft problem right now when it's a simple statement of fact? It's exactly the sort of current crime problem the UK is facing that this sort of system is designed to hit - gangs that hit lots of shops in an area in a single day of which the roma are currently the biggest perpetrators.
Any presumption of racism - that I was somehow implying that all roma are thieves or whatever you assumed is an idea entirely of your own making, and demonstrates bigotry on your behalf for assuming that mention of theft by roma is somehow a suggestion that all roma are thieves.
The fact is Romania is one of the poorest, but also the newest entrants into the EU, and as a result of that it has created new problems of which this is an example. We've previously (and in some areas still do) have problems with Somali and Nigerian gangs and to point out those things as fact is not racist, unless you also say all Somalis and Nigerians are criminals, which isn't remotely what I think, nor is it what I said.
That's just fear mongering nonsense, that wouldn't even be remotely legal.
There are very few exceptions by which businesses can gather data on an individual without their permission, and crime prevention is one of them.
So all this can legally be used for is crime prevention, if it's used for being selective about customers then they've crossed the line into illegality and will be liable for massive fines (far more than it would've cost to just serve you).
This is only ever going to be a problem for you if you got caught shoplifting on CCTV, or as my partner who manages a number of retail stores found the other day, for junkies that decide to shoot up in your changing room spraying quite possible HIV infested blood all over the fucking place before running out into the store and stripping naked then running away before the cops turn up.
Having actually now had a look at the Facewatch site, it's also pretty fucking explicit that it's about crime prevention and this new real-time functionality is intended to allow incidents of shoplifting to be shared in real time. So next time roma gypsy gangs come across from the continent on the ferry to rape just about every shop in a particular city / shopping centre in the space of a few hours before heading back home again on the ferry with a boat load of stolen shit they can actually be caught in the act. Up until now because they typically hit a different city or shopping centre every time they're not known and so it's typically been dependent on catching them at port whilst they wait for their get away ferry.
The UK has pretty strong data protection laws. It'd be hard to abuse this without getting severely fucked by the ICO. In fact, frankly, you can't even really use CCTV for crime prevention unless you can justify that there is actually a crime problem. If your store has never been a victim of shoplifting, you'd be hard pressed to prove your case for CCTV to the ICO.
That's true anyway though. Speed limits are typically set not to completely prevent fatalities, but to minimise them.
Speed limits in the UK around pedestrianised areas are set at 30mph not because that means you're guaranteed to be able to stop if a kid runs out in front of you, but because at that speed there's a very high chance that such a collision will not be fatal (whereas at 40mph it would pretty much always be fatal).
Getting driverless cars to adhere to the limit doesn't seem like a particularly big deal - they don't need to slow down to avoid all collisions altogether, just enough to almost certainly prevent fatalities - that's always going to be way better than now where human reaction times are such that they can't react to drop speed as fast as a computer.
There is no moral dilemma because existing standards are sufficient, we've already made these decisions, computers needn't be treated specially. It's like saying if 5 people jump out in front of a car now, should you swerve into a wall and kill yourself, or should you kill them? Sorry but if they jump in front of a car that's travelling legally without giving it time to stop then that's on them - in this case the driver is the only innocent, because they're the one that hasn't acted in a profoundly stupid manner and so does simply not deserve to die, whereas the other 5 people were basically choosing an action equivalent to suicide.
Even if you come up with some convoluted theory such as "What if the people are being blown across the road by a hurricane and have no choice" there's no real argument, because you're legally supposed to drive in a manner safe enough for the weather conditions, not simply the speed limit - any driverless car programmed to follow the rules of the road will know this and will be travelling slowly and safely enough in hurricane conditions for this to not be an issue.
We already have automated trains, and if you jump out onto the track in front of them without them having chance to stop we call it what it is - suicide.
Driverless cars only really introduce questions of liability and responsibility for people who don't know that those liability and responsibility questions are already well answered in existing law. All you have to do is substitute "What should the computer do?" with "What should the driver do?" and you already have your answer enshrined and well tested in existing law.
Because Trump was the Darling of the SNP for quite a while.
Alex Salmond, famous for his supposed love of Scotland and it's people overruled a local ruling and a local man who refused to sell his farm for Trump's golf course because what Alex Salmond actually gives a shit about is power and money, not Scottish people and he saw Trump as a path to that. This is also why he has courted Murdoch on numerous occasions.
But then Murdoch got into phone hacking and Trump got pissed about wind energy, and became quite embarrassing, so Salmond instead decided to pretend he hated these hard right types that he'd been courting so hard for so long at the expense of the Scottish people.
The only travesty is that Scots with a nationalist leaning hate England and in particular Westminster so much because they're so full of nationalist bile that they're willing to fall hook line and sinker for the myth that Salmond and co. give a shit about anything other than themselves and their own thirst for power. The idea they give a shit about Scotland or the average Scotsman is laughable given how close Salmond and the SNP were to people like Trump to the point of being willing to fuck over Scottish people to Trump's benefit. Scottish nationalism is mostly about a racist hate for the English by people who naively thought Braveheart was a factual documentary, because the SNP have shown many a time they have no problem selling parts of Scotland and it's people down river to anyone else, like Trump.
So there's your answer. They awarded it to him because for some time he was the darling of the SNP, which shows what a fucking joke the SNP are to anyone with half a brain as much as they may claim to hate and want to distance themselves from him now. But here is old Alex with his mates that he now likes to pretend were never any such thing, because, as they say, a picture paints a thousand words:
No they're not, if someone leaves their car door unlocked, and you tell them, and they still don't lock it, it doesn't give you the right to go for a joyride, break a few speed limits, and run a few people over. No matter what the circumstances, it's pretty clear this guy broke numerous laws regardless of how inept Facebook were.
The best you can do if someone doesn't act when you alert them is to go public, and hope that scares them into taking the issue a bit more seriously.
Yeah, as much as I hate to defend Facebook here, I fail to see how Facebook is in the wrong here, it's clear the guy didn't just find an exploit, but used it to scour into the deepest depths of Facebooks network and to exfiltrate the most sensitive of data.
That's not security research uncovering a vulnerability, that's outright hacking in to Instagram and then saying "Oh I was just doing you a favour" after the fact.
When you find an exploit you report it, if instead you delve into the system and start to not only exfiltrate sensitive data, but start breaking the encryption on it too, then you're going beyond mere discovery into a fully fledged attack, and as you say, for that to be legal it requires actual permission.
The security "researcher" in this article is genuinely the bad guy here, he's broken just about every rule in the book of ethical security research.
There's no reason to crack the passwords. Knowing that the encryption used is crackable is sufficient enough for a report, just as knowing that Amazon bucket access info is sufficient enough for a report without needing to delve into them and copy private data from them onto your own computer.
I don't think it's as well thought through as that in these cases. Last year Lizard Squad were shouting about how they loved ISIS.
I think Lumpy has it right above - angry little shits whose parents are pissed that all their friends have Xbox's/Playstations and they don't so are lashing out at the world, there doesn't seem any more to it than that as their political message is all over the place and doesn't make any kind of sense.
"No, if a company can't compete in other countries because of Qualcomm's alleged violations in the EU, then they wouldn't have made money in those other countries anyways."
Why not? If Qualcomm has amassed a fortune by cheating in the EU then it's bound to have an advantage outside of the EU because of all that wealth it has obtained and can use to strengthen itself elsewhere. For example, if there's a hot new startup in China, and Qualcomm has a billion pounds to bid to acquire it, but it's EU competitor only has £0.2bn because it didn't break the law, then who do you think will win the acquisition and grow and continue to have a bigger advantage? This isn't rocket science, cheating inside the EU most definitely benefits outside of the EU to the detriment of EU companies, it's nonsense to pretend otherwise no matter how much you may wish to clutch at straws on the issue.
The whole Swiss economy has historically been built around this idea, Switzerland is a wealthy country only because it acted as a haven for illegally obtained money through tax evasion, theft, and looting. It's banks were then able to loan Swiss companies like Nestle massive loans with ease to purchase foreign companies and become a giant and in turn trivially pay back those loans. It can turn around and say "okay we'll crack down on tax avoidance, evasion, and outright theft now using our banks" because the damage is already done - it's already used dirty money to grow it's indigenous companies to a level they would much less likely otherwise be able to achieve. By letting Swiss companies cheat, we effectively ended up seeing many other country's companies be taken abroad to Switzerland along with their profits as a result when we really should've been penalising Swiss companies and banks from the outset for using stolen money to grow.
"The EU should not be policing antitrust violations outside of the EU; that's just trying to be the world's policeman, and that's a bad thing (just like when America does it)."
There's a subtle difference between what you claim it's doing and what it's actually doing though, what you talk about does apply to America in many ways - America for example fined BAE, a British company for bribing Saudi Royalty to win a fighter deal. In this case the deal didn't touch the US - there was no wrongdoing by a US national, a US company, or on US soil - I agree that that's wrong because that really is a case of policing things outside your borders.
In this case, the wrongdoing happened within the EU, so the EU has every right to penalise it to whatever degree it sees fit. Consider this, you have a problem with the use of 10% of global revenues, what if they just said 100% of EU revenue when that might turnout to be 20% or more of global revenues? What if it just set a static figure that also was more than 10% of global revenues? It's really meaningless how you phrase it - the fundamental fact is the company broke the law within the EU, and the EU can set whatever financial penalty it wants on that and it's something a company must accept if they choose to do business in the EU. There's nothing extra-territorial about what the EU is doing, other than the fact they choose to use global revenues in their penalty statement, which could just as well be "unlimited fines" and implemented as equivalent of 10% of global revenue - you're surely not arguing the EU shouldn't be able to punish multi-national companies that do wrong within it's borders, so really all you're arguing about is language. The language can be changed, but the effect will be the same yet your argument will be nullified, hence why I think your argument is pointless - if mere wording nullifies your argument, then practically, it's not worth arguing, there's no substance to it, it's just pedantry at best.
I'm not being Eurocentric, because what I believe I believe applies to any jurisdiction. I do think the US takes it too far as with the BAE/Saudi deal - that certainly needed punishing, but it wasn't for the US to punish them. When the US only takes it to the extent the EU does I don't really see the problem - the same goes for China or any other.
But it's not about what they've earned, that's not the point of the law. The point is to stop companies doing something that harm competition.
"With regards to your hypothetical company - how would their actions in the EU prevent a competitor from entering the global market? If the competitor can compete in the global market with the antitrust violations"
You have this completely backwards, if a company can compete regardless of the anti-trust violations then, great, but what if it can't compete because of the anti-trust violations? It means it's only option is to go out of business, withdraw to Europe where the violating competitor has been blocked from violating, or break the law itself. Neither of these options are fair, because it means that a law breaking company is getting away with breaking the law and harming Europe as a result such that either Europe gets poorer, or Europe also starts breaking the law and acting anti-competitively creating a race to the bottom which benefits no one.
Companies can act illegal if they want and not do business in Europe and not be subject to these penalties, but the EU is the world's single largest market, so the price of profiting from that market is to play by the rules, and if you don't, suffer the consequences.
No one is stopping Qualcomm from not paying the fine and withdrawing from the EU market place, but it wants to act illegaly and anti-competitively and still be able to exploit the European marketplace as well. Sorry, it doesn't work like that, it's a two way street.
What you're basically arguing is that companies should be free to fuck companies over with anti-competitive practices outside of Europe as long as they behave whilst within Europe. Sorry but why should we accept them in Europe at all if they're going to fuck over our companies with illegal practices outside of Europe? The other option is we block them from Europe altogether, and as the largest market that'll hurt them far more than a fine of global revenues for a year will - again, they can even choose this option for themselves if they wish.
Let's be honest, the ATI purchase was a bold move that had the potential to pay off big time in an era when we were seeing convergence between GPUs and CPUs with GPGPUs and such.
Unfortunately, it was a gamble that they lost, the market they foresaw never came to fruition to the degree they were expecting, in large part because everyone got distracted by mobile which became the new thing and the new focus. Had the iPhone and Android never have happened a completely different set of chip designs may have become the fad and it may have been a completely different story for their gamble.
I never really liked AMD since I started buying Intel years ago and found Intel chips to just perform so much better, and run so much less hot, but I can't really fault them for the gamble they made - at the time it was actually a pretty reasonable bet to make, no one could've seen the level of market disruption that came along and derailed it. I think they were really nothing more than just plain unlucky - good try, but no dice. Their attempt at disruption got disrupted.
Because it's meant to be a punishment and deterrent, not a pointless slap on the wrist that doesn't achieve anything.
The real question is why do you think it's unfair? If their practices have prevented a competitor in Europe from from getting in on the action to obtain profits in the global marketplace, then what's the problem with taking the infringers profits obtained in the global marketplace? They're only taking back what the infringing company potentially prevented Europe from obtaining from the global market place.
It makes sense to have this as a potential sanction for cases where it can be proven that Europe lost out due to illegal actions as it's a punishment that can be used to match the crime. Hurt European companies in the global marketplace, get hurt in the global market place, I don't see the unfairness here.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you that it's impractical, I presume it indeed is otherwise they would have done it, I suspect your point number 4 is the most relevant, presumably in WW2 it worked because the weapons were just that much more primitive.
I see 1 as being a different issue, that's what CIWS like Phalanx are for, 2 could presumably be mitigated based on the design of such a defence to deflect the force away somewhat, and 3 is why I suggested it as a deployable option - though there's a question of whether it could ever be deployed in time presumably.
Slashdot Mirror
"The third one is the toughest. Nuclear power, today, is more expensive than wind and in some places, more expensive than solar."
The problem as I see it is not the cost of nuclear vs. renewables, but the cost of nuclear vs. the status quo. We still have too many gas and coal power plants, and yet their cost is much higher than nuclear when externalities (e.g. health costs) are factored in.
So the point is that if we're going to insist on keeping expensive plants around, it's still cheaper to replace all our coal plants with less expensive nuclear plants. The cost of coal is hidden in the fact that healthcare issues caused by it are paid by everyone other than the people profiting off the coal plant. If you made coal plant providers pay the respective healthcare costs then coal power would be dead already as for example, in the UK, coal providers would be paying the NHS literally many billions of pounds.
So the point is we can replace big plants (as opposed to lots of small distributed renewables) like our coal plants with nuclear and still come out better off. Move the cost of paying for coal induced healthcare issues into nuclear subsidy and it'll cost less overall because the population will be healthier and more productive, the cost of healthcare will reduce. Even in states like the US where citizens typically pay for their own healthcare the removal of coal should typically reduce healthcare insurance premiums such that people would have more money to pay for unsubsidised nuclear and still have change left over.
You're right, we don't necessarily need coal OR nuclear, but given that we have an insistence on these big plant projects, the fact we're even persisting with coal is nonsensical and is only the case due to massive state or private subsidies to the coal industry in private citizens and the government paying for the problems coal causes, rather than the coal providers themselves paying it as should be the case. Coal is only more financially viable than nuclear because that section of the industry has, for historic reasons, managed to shirk responsibility for the bulk of it's real costs onto everyone else. When you pay for coal energy you're paying twice - you're paying your electricity bill, and you're paying your otherwise unnecessarily medical insurance/tax bill as well. Might as well replace with nuclear and just shift the costs where they belong - directly onto the electricity bill where energy market competition would force prices down (towards cheaper renewables in the long run). Right now, heavily subsidised coal is a major blocking problem as it grossly distorts the market and prevents progress when there's no real reason it should because it's simply not as cheap as it pretends all things considered.
A thing called scale exists.
I suggest you Google it, it's like when one person has 1 apple and one has a million apples, yes they both have apples, but one has apples on a much greater scale.
I'm amazed I need to explain these things in kiddy language on Slashdot of all places.
Anyone who knows my history of posting on the whole Iran/nuclear topic knows that I'm about as far from an Iran apologist as you can get, but frankly your post is pretty much entirely bullshit.
Nuclear technology transfer has been in the exact opposite direction, rather than Iran transferring knowledge and information to Iran, it is in fact North Korea that transferred to Iran (and it's close ally Syria).
North Korea's nuclear programme stems back much further than both Iran and Syria, and in fact, Iran was still largely under Western influence long after North Korea had already decided to pursue the nuclear weapons route.
The early North Korean weapons effort was largely kickstarted by the USSR under the form of an initially civilian effort and this gave North Korea the initial technology it needed to start refining Uranium (the same sort of enrichment technology that has been at the heart of the current Iranian nuclear drama). As such, North Korea was doing what Iran is being criticised for 40 years before Iran really started though North Korea never really got anywhere through that time until the 90s when it benefitted from the AQ Khan network. That is, it was our supposed ally (as fucking usual) Pakistan that traded nuclear weapon technology with North Korea and made them a nuclear weapon capable state.
Whilst there has been ample evidence over the years that Iran has at least dabbled in pursuing nuclear weapons (though personally I think they did more than dabble) we don't necessarily know in much detail what shape that took. We do know however that when Syria's al-Kibar nuclear programme was unveiled by the fact Israel blew the fucking thing up, that it was basically an exact clone of North Korea's programme. Had Iran had it's own indigenous built programme with no outside influence, it would seem odd that Syria's programme looked like North Korea's, not Iran's, when Syria and Iran are far closer partners (to the extent that Iran is currently paying in the blood of it's special forces and top generals to prop up Assad right now).
Which is why in all likelihood, there's little that North Korea could gain from Iran. North Korea's programme is decades ahead, and whilst Iran was also a beneficiary of the AQ Khan network it still lacked the actual experience and knowledge of enrichment that North Korea had.
So the idea that Iran is somehow coaching the North Koreans makes absolutely no sense, NK's programme is a year short of 55 years in the making, whereas Iran's is sat at about 15 to 20 years at best, the bulk of which has been spent recreating that which NK already had been handed outright in the 1960s by the soviets.
For all the criticism I've had of Iran over the years, I'm optimistic about the nuclear deal. The biggest problem I've had with Iran's nuclear programme is simply that it's completely blocked the IAEA from confirming that it isn't producing weapons by outright blocking access to key nuclear facilities, and as such this is why I believe that the only reason Iran would do this is because it did genuinely have something to hide - there's no point suffering crippling economic sanctions just to pretend you're trying to make nukes if you're not. If Iran is now willing to allow full and thorough inspections, then I suspect that's because it's now got nothing to hide any more because it genuinely has given up on it's pursuit of nuclear weapons.
It's pretty clear that the path Ahmadinejad carved wasn't working for Iran, that Iran was getting weaker, poorer, and increasingly more isolated. The arab spring was the wake up call to Iran's elite that that path simply was not sustainable. Whilst I'm not particularly a fan of Rouhani, because he was still ultimately a vetted option and still under the thumb of Khamenei, he is at least reversing many of Ahmadinejad's bad ideas (like the pursuit of nuclear weapons) precisely because the alternative is collapse of the Iranian political system, and likely a Syria-esque civil war.
That is why it's both nonsense to sug
I take issue with ads regardless because I have literally zero interest in them, having never clicked one intentionally (sometimes they've used exploits to force me to click them when I click elsewhere on the page, but that's frankly a form of hacking and should be illegal if it's not). They're just a waste of time and bandwidth to me, therefore nowadays I block every type of ad I can.
The real problem is that you don't know if a page is ad sponsored until you visit it. Sites should have to disclose they're ad sponsored to search engines, such that search engines can show an icon or similar denoting each result as ad sponsored and allow users to filter results based on this (and potentially other flags - i.e. Paywall).
Whilst companies expect to be visible on the public web, whilst also expecting you to pay them somehow and crying when you choose not to (by blocking ads) then frankly I have little sympathy. They can't expect to have their cake and eat it too - whilst users don't get to make an informed choice about whether they wish to visit a site based on whether it has ads or tracking or not, sites using ads should not complain that users decide to block them. It's a two way street, if I don't know ahead of time what they expect from me before I view the content, then they can't complain when I restrict how I view the content (i.e. minus the ads).
There probably isn't some asshat intentionally inserting bogus facts onto reference sites like Wolfram either.
You seem to be equating Wikipedia with the entire internet. It's really not, there are other web pages out there.
There are specific guidelines on what speed limits should be set where (i.e. 30mph if a house is within a certain distance from a road) in the UK.
This alters over time depending on conditions, a spate of car crash incidents or cars hitting people will lead to the lowering of limits, whereas areas not inhabited by anyone and hence unlikely to have people around or crossing are set at the national speed limit (60mph for single lane, 70mph for dual carriageway).
We do have some of the safest roads in the world though (IIRC we're in the top 5), so yes, it's possible things are different here. Looking it up it seems the US has 11.6 road fatalities per 100,000 people vs. the UK's 3.5 which is a drastic difference.
What the fuck? How did I get from Manchester, England to Chicago O'Hare, or London, England to Phoenix, Arizona, or Manchester, England to Philadelphia all by plane if JFK was the only international airport which I most definitely have never ever been to?
The US has a metric fuckton of international airports, these are just some of the ones I've been through, and that's before you include giants elsewhere in the US, like LAX.
"A British Muslim family heading for Disneyland was barred from boarding a flight to Los Angeles by US authorities at Londonâ(TM)s Gatwick airport...
Wow, is it true? The US "authorities" have pretty long arms."
It wouldn't be unusual, I cleared US security at Canada's Ottawa airport once. I cleared British security in Prague and in Narvik, Norway some years ago, closer to 9/11.
Many of the security-paranoid states in the world have security positioned outside of their own territory in foreign airports that you must clear before boarding. Countries accept it because it's far easier and cheaper than being denied or restricted access to some of the busiest airports and hence global connections in the world.
But that doesn't need facial recognition, it's already well covered by vetting through things like references and criminal records checks.
You can't just steal in this country, and then go down the road and get hired straight into another job, it's typically quite different to the hire at will culture in many US states. That's why I say employee theft isn't an issue for a lot of retail companies nowadays - the checks they do on staff can be pretty rigorous (and some use more positive methods, like actual decent pay) such that there is little incentive to steal and the people they hire are typically not pre-disposed to theft in the first place.
The companies that suffer the biggest loss from employee theft nowadays are typically larger chains who do everything on the cheap (including hiring people), they've effectively decided that it's a cost of doing business, and that suffering stock loss through not spending on checks/security is cheaper than paying decent wages etc. to discourage it. This typically includes things like Supermarkets, the big electronics chains like Currys/PC World, and so on. There's recently been a big case in the UK where a company Sports Direct wanted it both ways - they want to pay minimum wage AND wanted to do rigorous security checks, the problem is, they wanted those rigorous security checks done on staff time, such that staff were being forced to hang around to be searched for upto 30 minutes after they'd stopped being paid. This has been outed quite rightly as an illegal practice, because if the staff HAVE to be there then it's work, in which case they should be paid, and as they weren't, that pushed their defacto salary below the legal minimum wage.
I'd wager the largest theft type for businesses in the UK in this day and age is probably people who get paid expenses fiddling them.
I think the problem is that statistics is a far more detailed and complicated topic than that, and that the sort of thing you suggested is the sort of thing that's already taught well, but such a tiny miniscule tip of the iceberg that it's the rest of it that needs be taught.
I agree with the person below who mentioned intuition, mostly the biggest problem I see when it comes to statistics amongst people of every age and group is that very few people seem to grasp the issues that may face a statistical result. People in general struggle to understand what the numbers actually mean, they're hopeless at figuring out what confounding factors may exist in a result.
So might I suggest a decent idea might be to find some bad statistical studies and create some exercises that help them understand why they're bad. The examples don't need to be difficult, but should be varied to help them understand why correlation does not mean causation, and why causation doesn't even necessarily imply (at least linear) correlation amongst other things.
Wikipedia's list would probably provide a reasonable starting point for some examples to cover:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'd suggest, that by teaching kids how to question statistics, and how to spot when someone is using statistics to spout bullshit (which you'll find happens all the fucking time, basically every single day of your life if you're adept at spotting it) they'll be better placed to learn how to do statistics properly.
If they know how to tell when a result is wrong, they'll hopefully be encouraged to find out how to do it right, and how to mitigate these issues. I think without ever learning to recognise how people do statistics wrong on a daily basis, it's hard to know how to do it right, and so the issue just proliferates.
You realise I already explained why employee theft, and especially overall employee theft across all sectors is completely and utterly irrelevant to the discussion right?
It's like you've decided to say I'm wrong by having your own completely different conversation that has nothing to do with the conversation we were having previously.
What the fuck has someone stealing an office stapler in a non-retail environment have to do with the fact that you don't understand what racism is?
Please stick to the discussion because I'm not interested in your tangential conversation that has nothing to do with anything as on that I completely agree with you - I absolutely think employee theft is probably the largest cause of stock loss across companies, but that's not the discussion here.
The discussion here is whether an automated data sharing facial recognition system can help stop crime, and the answer is yes, to which I provided an example of the sort of current crime it can stop - that of widespread single day hits by roma gangs traveling a distance to carry them out precisely because it's a rapid response system involving automated sharing, whilst most existing systems take days, by which time it's too late. If this topic had come up 5 years ago I'd have picked a different example of crime at the time, my choice of roma gangs was for no other reason than because it's topical, it's relevant to the sort of problems retail in the UK is currently facing that this system is designed to solve. In 5 years time it'll be another type of crime that will likely have nothing to do with roma gangs.
I'm sorry you can't follow a discussion, but that's really not my fault.
Right, except to be a bigot, I'd have to be again implying that the whole culture or similar is guilty of this, yet only you and the GP are making that association.
The fact that the two of you believe that any suggestion of theft by a certain community implies the whole community is involved in fact shows a disgusting amount of bigotry on your behalves.
For me to be prejudiced in this respect, you would need to show that there are no roma gypsy gangs engaging in widespread theft such that I've made an invalid association. The problem is, we know that isn't true:
http://www.northamptonchron.co...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Thus, the only bigotry here is being performed by you and the GP.
I'm a firm believer in the EU in large part because I'm not bigoted, because personally I feel no greater emotional attachment to the guy down the street I've never met than I do to someone part way across the world I've never met, where we're born is merely a matter of randomness and circumstance and I'm lucky to have been born, brought up, and to live somewhere that is relatively incredibly stable, safe, and wealthy. Even the particular criminal groups I mentioned I somewhat get, they ultimately just want the standard of living we have, and whilst I believe theft is a lazy route to get there, I can understand full well what drives them.
But that does not mean that we should pretend that such groups with specific identities do not exist, to do so ignores reality, and makes a complete and utter mockery of any argument based upon it. Folks like you crying "racism!" every time someone raises a legitimate and valid point are the reason actually fascist groups like UKIP are on the rise, because it's kickback by those more easily swayed by their arguments being fed up of being told they're racist just because they said something that's neither racist, nor false - you are the problem, the associations you make and then project onto others are the problem. Would you have even batted an eyelid if I instead chose "South London chav gangs?" as an example? "What about overprivileged rich white kids who want a taste of the wild side"? I doubt for a second you would, though it would make no practical difference and such groups are currently slightly less relevant in this context.
So like all over zealous SJWs, you seem to have gone so far left that you've come all the way round again to the far right, by in yourself making hypocritically bigoted associations, and by helping drive others into the arms of the far right. You're no better than idiots like Corbyn whose solution to an overly aggressive right wing responsible for many of the worlds current geopolitical ills, is to start hugging and defending real actual terrorists. Or whose solution to sexist pigs who molest women on trains is to segregate women into women only carriages, rather than, you know, deal with the actual problem - the sexual predators themselves by dealing with them as the criminals they are using the CCTV that's already prevalent on the trains in question.
Quit with the idiot think and start being a bit more realistic and rational before throwing around terms you don't understand and yet are guilty of yourself please. I doubt you will though, because apparently you like to accuse others of being Daily Mail readers whilst apparently being one of those Ban the Burqa types:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You seem to be taking some random stat from the US and applying it globally, which is complete bollocks. In some stores employee theft is completely and utterly solved, they have zero theft by employees such that external theft, particularly by crime gangs are their biggest problem. You can't arbitrarily take one metric from one country (which may well include data on stealing office post-its and so forth) and suggest therefore that another problem in another country, with different metrics, and different levels of crime should somehow be ignored. That's before you consider that some types of theft require different solutions anyway this system wont handle employee theft well anyway because their faces and identities are already known, so it's pretty irrelevant to the discussion. For the purposes of discussing this system you can pretty much discount that entire class of theft regardless.
Rather than admit that you don't have the slightest clue about crime trends in the UK, you've gone off on a pointless tangent with completely irrelevant and meaningless data. The fact is, gang sweeps by that community are currently a high impact crime in the UK that has become increasingly prominent in recent years, and it's exactly the sort of crime this system will work well to prevent.
"As for the middle east having an Islamic terrorism problem, what it has in reality is a "regime change didn't work so well the last few times we tried it, and now we have to clean up the mess we made, so let's do the whole regime change thing again because it's the thing we have the most experience with."
You can argue what you want about the causes of the problems in the middle east, there are many views, and I've probably heard them all by now, but it's all irrelevant to the discussion at hand regardless because the underlying causes don't change the fact that the statement is true and certainly not racist.
I was using an example of a real actual problem, saying the UK has a roma gypsy gang theft problem right now is no different to saying the middle east has an Islamic terrorism problem.
It doesn't in any way imply that I believe that all, or even close the majority of muslims are terrorists, which is actually racist, it's merely a statement of fact - you're surely not going to deny the middle east has an Islamic terrorism problem right now? No, I didn't think so, so why pretend someone is racist for also stating a fact that the UK has a roma gypsy gang theft problem right now when it's a simple statement of fact? It's exactly the sort of current crime problem the UK is facing that this sort of system is designed to hit - gangs that hit lots of shops in an area in a single day of which the roma are currently the biggest perpetrators.
Any presumption of racism - that I was somehow implying that all roma are thieves or whatever you assumed is an idea entirely of your own making, and demonstrates bigotry on your behalf for assuming that mention of theft by roma is somehow a suggestion that all roma are thieves.
The fact is Romania is one of the poorest, but also the newest entrants into the EU, and as a result of that it has created new problems of which this is an example. We've previously (and in some areas still do) have problems with Somali and Nigerian gangs and to point out those things as fact is not racist, unless you also say all Somalis and Nigerians are criminals, which isn't remotely what I think, nor is it what I said.
That's just fear mongering nonsense, that wouldn't even be remotely legal.
There are very few exceptions by which businesses can gather data on an individual without their permission, and crime prevention is one of them.
So all this can legally be used for is crime prevention, if it's used for being selective about customers then they've crossed the line into illegality and will be liable for massive fines (far more than it would've cost to just serve you).
This is only ever going to be a problem for you if you got caught shoplifting on CCTV, or as my partner who manages a number of retail stores found the other day, for junkies that decide to shoot up in your changing room spraying quite possible HIV infested blood all over the fucking place before running out into the store and stripping naked then running away before the cops turn up.
Having actually now had a look at the Facewatch site, it's also pretty fucking explicit that it's about crime prevention and this new real-time functionality is intended to allow incidents of shoplifting to be shared in real time. So next time roma gypsy gangs come across from the continent on the ferry to rape just about every shop in a particular city / shopping centre in the space of a few hours before heading back home again on the ferry with a boat load of stolen shit they can actually be caught in the act. Up until now because they typically hit a different city or shopping centre every time they're not known and so it's typically been dependent on catching them at port whilst they wait for their get away ferry.
The UK has pretty strong data protection laws. It'd be hard to abuse this without getting severely fucked by the ICO. In fact, frankly, you can't even really use CCTV for crime prevention unless you can justify that there is actually a crime problem. If your store has never been a victim of shoplifting, you'd be hard pressed to prove your case for CCTV to the ICO.
You can read all about it for yourself here:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-o...
That's true anyway though. Speed limits are typically set not to completely prevent fatalities, but to minimise them.
Speed limits in the UK around pedestrianised areas are set at 30mph not because that means you're guaranteed to be able to stop if a kid runs out in front of you, but because at that speed there's a very high chance that such a collision will not be fatal (whereas at 40mph it would pretty much always be fatal).
Getting driverless cars to adhere to the limit doesn't seem like a particularly big deal - they don't need to slow down to avoid all collisions altogether, just enough to almost certainly prevent fatalities - that's always going to be way better than now where human reaction times are such that they can't react to drop speed as fast as a computer.
There is no moral dilemma because existing standards are sufficient, we've already made these decisions, computers needn't be treated specially. It's like saying if 5 people jump out in front of a car now, should you swerve into a wall and kill yourself, or should you kill them? Sorry but if they jump in front of a car that's travelling legally without giving it time to stop then that's on them - in this case the driver is the only innocent, because they're the one that hasn't acted in a profoundly stupid manner and so does simply not deserve to die, whereas the other 5 people were basically choosing an action equivalent to suicide.
Even if you come up with some convoluted theory such as "What if the people are being blown across the road by a hurricane and have no choice" there's no real argument, because you're legally supposed to drive in a manner safe enough for the weather conditions, not simply the speed limit - any driverless car programmed to follow the rules of the road will know this and will be travelling slowly and safely enough in hurricane conditions for this to not be an issue.
We already have automated trains, and if you jump out onto the track in front of them without them having chance to stop we call it what it is - suicide.
Driverless cars only really introduce questions of liability and responsibility for people who don't know that those liability and responsibility questions are already well answered in existing law. All you have to do is substitute "What should the computer do?" with "What should the driver do?" and you already have your answer enshrined and well tested in existing law.
Because Trump was the Darling of the SNP for quite a while.
Alex Salmond, famous for his supposed love of Scotland and it's people overruled a local ruling and a local man who refused to sell his farm for Trump's golf course because what Alex Salmond actually gives a shit about is power and money, not Scottish people and he saw Trump as a path to that. This is also why he has courted Murdoch on numerous occasions.
But then Murdoch got into phone hacking and Trump got pissed about wind energy, and became quite embarrassing, so Salmond instead decided to pretend he hated these hard right types that he'd been courting so hard for so long at the expense of the Scottish people.
The only travesty is that Scots with a nationalist leaning hate England and in particular Westminster so much because they're so full of nationalist bile that they're willing to fall hook line and sinker for the myth that Salmond and co. give a shit about anything other than themselves and their own thirst for power. The idea they give a shit about Scotland or the average Scotsman is laughable given how close Salmond and the SNP were to people like Trump to the point of being willing to fuck over Scottish people to Trump's benefit. Scottish nationalism is mostly about a racist hate for the English by people who naively thought Braveheart was a factual documentary, because the SNP have shown many a time they have no problem selling parts of Scotland and it's people down river to anyone else, like Trump.
So there's your answer. They awarded it to him because for some time he was the darling of the SNP, which shows what a fucking joke the SNP are to anyone with half a brain as much as they may claim to hate and want to distance themselves from him now. But here is old Alex with his mates that he now likes to pretend were never any such thing, because, as they say, a picture paints a thousand words:
http://cdn2.spectator.co.uk/fi...
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multi...
http://www.heraldscotland.com/...
No they're not, if someone leaves their car door unlocked, and you tell them, and they still don't lock it, it doesn't give you the right to go for a joyride, break a few speed limits, and run a few people over. No matter what the circumstances, it's pretty clear this guy broke numerous laws regardless of how inept Facebook were.
The best you can do if someone doesn't act when you alert them is to go public, and hope that scares them into taking the issue a bit more seriously.
Yeah, as much as I hate to defend Facebook here, I fail to see how Facebook is in the wrong here, it's clear the guy didn't just find an exploit, but used it to scour into the deepest depths of Facebooks network and to exfiltrate the most sensitive of data.
That's not security research uncovering a vulnerability, that's outright hacking in to Instagram and then saying "Oh I was just doing you a favour" after the fact.
When you find an exploit you report it, if instead you delve into the system and start to not only exfiltrate sensitive data, but start breaking the encryption on it too, then you're going beyond mere discovery into a fully fledged attack, and as you say, for that to be legal it requires actual permission.
The security "researcher" in this article is genuinely the bad guy here, he's broken just about every rule in the book of ethical security research.
There's no reason to crack the passwords. Knowing that the encryption used is crackable is sufficient enough for a report, just as knowing that Amazon bucket access info is sufficient enough for a report without needing to delve into them and copy private data from them onto your own computer.
I don't think it's as well thought through as that in these cases. Last year Lizard Squad were shouting about how they loved ISIS.
I think Lumpy has it right above - angry little shits whose parents are pissed that all their friends have Xbox's/Playstations and they don't so are lashing out at the world, there doesn't seem any more to it than that as their political message is all over the place and doesn't make any kind of sense.
"No, if a company can't compete in other countries because of Qualcomm's alleged violations in the EU, then they wouldn't have made money in those other countries anyways."
Why not? If Qualcomm has amassed a fortune by cheating in the EU then it's bound to have an advantage outside of the EU because of all that wealth it has obtained and can use to strengthen itself elsewhere. For example, if there's a hot new startup in China, and Qualcomm has a billion pounds to bid to acquire it, but it's EU competitor only has £0.2bn because it didn't break the law, then who do you think will win the acquisition and grow and continue to have a bigger advantage? This isn't rocket science, cheating inside the EU most definitely benefits outside of the EU to the detriment of EU companies, it's nonsense to pretend otherwise no matter how much you may wish to clutch at straws on the issue.
The whole Swiss economy has historically been built around this idea, Switzerland is a wealthy country only because it acted as a haven for illegally obtained money through tax evasion, theft, and looting. It's banks were then able to loan Swiss companies like Nestle massive loans with ease to purchase foreign companies and become a giant and in turn trivially pay back those loans. It can turn around and say "okay we'll crack down on tax avoidance, evasion, and outright theft now using our banks" because the damage is already done - it's already used dirty money to grow it's indigenous companies to a level they would much less likely otherwise be able to achieve. By letting Swiss companies cheat, we effectively ended up seeing many other country's companies be taken abroad to Switzerland along with their profits as a result when we really should've been penalising Swiss companies and banks from the outset for using stolen money to grow.
"The EU should not be policing antitrust violations outside of the EU; that's just trying to be the world's policeman, and that's a bad thing (just like when America does it)."
There's a subtle difference between what you claim it's doing and what it's actually doing though, what you talk about does apply to America in many ways - America for example fined BAE, a British company for bribing Saudi Royalty to win a fighter deal. In this case the deal didn't touch the US - there was no wrongdoing by a US national, a US company, or on US soil - I agree that that's wrong because that really is a case of policing things outside your borders.
In this case, the wrongdoing happened within the EU, so the EU has every right to penalise it to whatever degree it sees fit. Consider this, you have a problem with the use of 10% of global revenues, what if they just said 100% of EU revenue when that might turnout to be 20% or more of global revenues? What if it just set a static figure that also was more than 10% of global revenues? It's really meaningless how you phrase it - the fundamental fact is the company broke the law within the EU, and the EU can set whatever financial penalty it wants on that and it's something a company must accept if they choose to do business in the EU. There's nothing extra-territorial about what the EU is doing, other than the fact they choose to use global revenues in their penalty statement, which could just as well be "unlimited fines" and implemented as equivalent of 10% of global revenue - you're surely not arguing the EU shouldn't be able to punish multi-national companies that do wrong within it's borders, so really all you're arguing about is language. The language can be changed, but the effect will be the same yet your argument will be nullified, hence why I think your argument is pointless - if mere wording nullifies your argument, then practically, it's not worth arguing, there's no substance to it, it's just pedantry at best.
I'm not being Eurocentric, because what I believe I believe applies to any jurisdiction. I do think the US takes it too far as with the BAE/Saudi deal - that certainly needed punishing, but it wasn't for the US to punish them. When the US only takes it to the extent the EU does I don't really see the problem - the same goes for China or any other.
But it's not about what they've earned, that's not the point of the law. The point is to stop companies doing something that harm competition.
"With regards to your hypothetical company - how would their actions in the EU prevent a competitor from entering the global market? If the competitor can compete in the global market with the antitrust violations"
You have this completely backwards, if a company can compete regardless of the anti-trust violations then, great, but what if it can't compete because of the anti-trust violations? It means it's only option is to go out of business, withdraw to Europe where the violating competitor has been blocked from violating, or break the law itself. Neither of these options are fair, because it means that a law breaking company is getting away with breaking the law and harming Europe as a result such that either Europe gets poorer, or Europe also starts breaking the law and acting anti-competitively creating a race to the bottom which benefits no one.
Companies can act illegal if they want and not do business in Europe and not be subject to these penalties, but the EU is the world's single largest market, so the price of profiting from that market is to play by the rules, and if you don't, suffer the consequences.
No one is stopping Qualcomm from not paying the fine and withdrawing from the EU market place, but it wants to act illegaly and anti-competitively and still be able to exploit the European marketplace as well. Sorry, it doesn't work like that, it's a two way street.
What you're basically arguing is that companies should be free to fuck companies over with anti-competitive practices outside of Europe as long as they behave whilst within Europe. Sorry but why should we accept them in Europe at all if they're going to fuck over our companies with illegal practices outside of Europe? The other option is we block them from Europe altogether, and as the largest market that'll hurt them far more than a fine of global revenues for a year will - again, they can even choose this option for themselves if they wish.
Let's be honest, the ATI purchase was a bold move that had the potential to pay off big time in an era when we were seeing convergence between GPUs and CPUs with GPGPUs and such.
Unfortunately, it was a gamble that they lost, the market they foresaw never came to fruition to the degree they were expecting, in large part because everyone got distracted by mobile which became the new thing and the new focus. Had the iPhone and Android never have happened a completely different set of chip designs may have become the fad and it may have been a completely different story for their gamble.
I never really liked AMD since I started buying Intel years ago and found Intel chips to just perform so much better, and run so much less hot, but I can't really fault them for the gamble they made - at the time it was actually a pretty reasonable bet to make, no one could've seen the level of market disruption that came along and derailed it. I think they were really nothing more than just plain unlucky - good try, but no dice. Their attempt at disruption got disrupted.
Because it's meant to be a punishment and deterrent, not a pointless slap on the wrist that doesn't achieve anything.
The real question is why do you think it's unfair? If their practices have prevented a competitor in Europe from from getting in on the action to obtain profits in the global marketplace, then what's the problem with taking the infringers profits obtained in the global marketplace? They're only taking back what the infringing company potentially prevented Europe from obtaining from the global market place.
It makes sense to have this as a potential sanction for cases where it can be proven that Europe lost out due to illegal actions as it's a punishment that can be used to match the crime. Hurt European companies in the global marketplace, get hurt in the global market place, I don't see the unfairness here.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you that it's impractical, I presume it indeed is otherwise they would have done it, I suspect your point number 4 is the most relevant, presumably in WW2 it worked because the weapons were just that much more primitive.
I see 1 as being a different issue, that's what CIWS like Phalanx are for, 2 could presumably be mitigated based on the design of such a defence to deflect the force away somewhat, and 3 is why I suggested it as a deployable option - though there's a question of whether it could ever be deployed in time presumably.