"Given voter turnouts, you're rarely going to have a situation where the majority of people eligible to vote have elected their rulers."
The problem isn't directly the majority of people, the voter turnout is a good representation of the percentage of people who want a particular party so even 45% voter turnout is fine. The issue is that power isn't proportionate in FPTP. There will always be a majority of voters whose vote isn't heard, which can hence fairly accurately be statistically extrapolated to the whole population so voter turnout is largely irrelevant to the problems with FPTP although FPTP does correlate with lower turnouts as people become disillusioned that their vote simply doesn't matter.
"No. Laws are made by parliament, which the PM does not control."
Yes he does, if his party holds a majority of parliament, and his party adhere to the whip system as most do he and his elite have effective full control.
"The PM can be unseated by a vote of non-confidence and Gordon Brown has come close to being chucked out by his own party a few times now."
Yes but he hasn't, because a big enough majority of his party is all he needs. Because he has a disproportionate hold on power in the first place this simply doesn't work. He wouldn't even have such power if it weren't for FPTP.
"Additionally MPs, including the PM face free and open elections every 4-5 years and elections can even be called earlier if there is insufficient support for the government. How is this politically equivalent to a dictatorship?"
I guess you didn't bother to read my post then, I pointed out the fact you have someone in power who is there against the will of the majority is fairly similar to a dictatorship. Certainly we do not have a true democracy as that is defined as a system where power is held by the people, it's not, it's held by a minority group of the people.
"So? They have to call an election next year by law and certainly will, if not earlier. That is the constitutional law that they and every other government has abided by. Low approval is a rationale for going to the polls, but not a requirement. If you made it a requirement, governments would be paralysed by fear of ever doing anything unpopular even if it was for the good of the country. Not giving the government time to fix problems would create unstable quick-fix populist governments which would be far worse over the long term."
So why is it that nations like Canada, which despite using FPTP are fortunate enough that the safe seats are distributed more evenly has a minority government and has had elections pretty much every year for the last few years is the fastest growing economy in the G7? Didn't have to bail out any banks? Has some of the best civil liberty laws of any nation in the world? Has a fantastic, first class health service? Has a strong military? No, the reason governments in stale mates work better is because the only laws that get stalled are laws that are simply not popular. If a law was important enough but unpopular you'd still get the cross-party support you needed to pass it, you just wont get cross party support for idiotic laws no one wants like, say, ID cards which would never have got off the ground in a proportional representation system but have been pushed and pushed and pushed by a party elected against the will of 65% of the population.
"A general election must be held every five years (or more frequently). Is this dictatorial? No. If an unpopular government proceeds with elections at the legally required time, are they being dictatorial? No. IF they don't hold elections earlier, are they being dictatorial? No, because they're not required to and the public will have the chance to see if the government can fix things and if not then send a clear message when the election does come around. In the mean time they can send a message by the way they vote in by-elections, council elections and European elections - as has just happened. Poor showings there makes the ruling party nervous, nearly
A common comment I see here is "Facebook groups achieve nothing" in respect to groups that have been setup to protest some specific issue.
This type of comment misses the point, of course a Facebook group wont directly influence say some political point, but because Facebook group joins are viral in that one person joins, their friend sees the cause, they join and so on these groups do spread the word about issues to people who wouldn't otherwise be aware.
These new Web 2.0 tools are excellent not for direct action but for spreading the word, the situation in Iran with Twitter has demonstrated this in an impressive manner.
Presumably, should a full blown war start, we'd see countries using these tools to intentionally spread misinformation and propaganda among the civilian population perhaps in an attempt to cause panic or similar because of course, methods of spreading information virally can be abused as well as used.
I call them dictators because they're still getting in to power through a minority just as a military dictator may get in through support of a minority group (i.e. the military).
Certainly it's a lot more bloodless, and certainly they're not as untouchable as most dictators, but politically the effect is identical. You have someone in power against the majority of the people who cannot be removed. This is particularly prominent in the current situation where approval ratings for Brown and Labour have been put as low as 15% in some cases, but at most around 20%. If 80%+ of the population are unhappy with the leadership and have no power other than to wait whilst they continue to push unpopular laws that do not have the support of the population is that really any different than a dictatorship politically?
I think it's wrong to assume a dictatorship is a violent bloody regime, yes that's a possibility but certainly some of the official defintions of dictator fit the description of Brown and his elite quite well.
But if Cameron wins the election you suggest he's not a dictator because he's elected, but the method of getting in isn't relevant to be defined as a dictator, merely the idea that a single person or small group of people hold absolute power without true accountability to the people, as the majority of the people do not support him (he wont get over 50% of the vote) but can also still do nothing about him being in power then there's certainly room to suggest that we do in fact live in a dictatorship under FPTP. Perhaps the only area where the comparison falls down is the fact that there are term limits, that'd certainly be the key sticking point.
I certainly do not intend to demean those who live under a dictatorship but similarly there are dictatorships where the majority of citizens are actually happy, so it's also wrong to link dictatorships with the idea that they're all bloody and violent regimes.
Dictatorships are bad not because some oppress their people in the most violent of manners, but because they take away power from the people, they do not give people a say in how their lives are run and this is the fundamental problem with FPTP - the majority of the population do not get a true say in how their lives are run. I was particularly shocked to find that last general election 19 million votes were wasted by people who voted for opposition parties in safe seat areas so before you even factor in those whose vote didn't matter outside of safe seat areas you have almost 1/3rd of the population (which is well over 1/3rd the voting population) whose voice simply was not heard. When you have that many people who despite having the right to vote do not actually really have a say in the running of the country whilst one man and his elite get to pass whichever laws they deem necessary then it's hard not to suggest at very least there are some strong parallels with a dictatorship, even if you argue we're not in one explicitly.
Effectively, at the end of the day, we still have a minority supported leader dictating to the majority how their lives should be run against their will, even if it's a different minority supported leader dictating it every 5 years.
This is why ISPs could freely implement deep packet inspection, phorm and so on without even asking anyone first as opposed to the US where the FCC etc. investigated usage of DPI in trying to disrupt Bittorrent.
The problem is, the next government, the Conservatives, are more than happy with Labour's proposals on filesharing.
They're going to happen regardless I'm afraid out with the old dictator, in with the new. As Cameron refuses a change from first past the post because he knows it guarantees him and his party 100% power even with only 38% of popular vote he IS a dictator, just like Brown was a dictator on 0% of the vote and Blair on 35%. But that's the problem with Britain, we live in a country where FPTP guarantees minority rule to the most organised minority rather than balanced representation. So yes, if you live in a safe-seat area and don't support a safe-seat your vote is a complete waste and yes, it means there is nothing whatsoever you can do about these laws.
"The price of broadband in the UK has decreased hugely over the last couple of years, not least because of the competitive market."
Er, it has?
5 years ago I could downloads 100s of gb per month for £24.99. Then I could download about 100gb for £19.99 on peak.
Now I can download 20gbps for £24.99 on peak.
So not only is the price back where i started, but I only have a fraction of the bandwidth I used to get for that price.
I can only assume you're referring to the £5 packages or the free carphone warehouse type packages, but these are massively restricted, cut down products and aren't like for like.
If you compare like for like, broadband costs have drastically increased in the last few years in the UK. You could argue that broadband pricing has become more flexible, that's certainly true - you couldn't get away with offering a £5 package a few years ago due to the base wholesale cost. You certainly can't argue it's decreased though, because although the price has gone down, what you get for that price has also drastically decreased. If you want equivalent to what you could get for £20 years ago then you're going to be paying a couple of hundred £ per month due to BT charging unacceptably high prices for bandwidth at their backbone.
But then, the fact prices have effectively increased shouldn't come as a suprise when despite technology getting ever cheaper, and bandwidth out to external networks on the internet getting ever cheaper, BT upped the cost of a 622mbps link to their back bone by 24% (£250,000) last December.
The problem is it's only the last mile and cabinet access they're really forced to share.
They still do whatever they want with the backbone that everything connects back to, and as of last December they did a 24% increase in costs for ISPs connecting to their backbone.
The more OFCOM tells them to stop ripping everyone off on the last mile, the more they rip us all off further up the line where OFCOM takes no action.
"These are the sites that use but don't abuse Flash, and are the best candidates for HTML 5's more lightweight environment. If the designers and developers of these sites can be convinced it's worth migrating from Flash for the decreased overhead, they just might."
Or they can just use Javascript and/or CSS already without needing to wait for HTML5.
The thing is they don't, but then that goes back to the original point in this thread - it's the tools.
The issue is as you say even if one browser scores lower than another, the things it fails on may be things that are completely and utterly irrelevant in the real world.
If Firefox only gets 72% but IE gets 90% yet the 10% of things IE fails on are more common whilst the 28% that Firefox fails on are irrelevant for normal usage anyway it paints an incorrect picture of the quality of the browsers standards compliance.
Check the UK's digital Britain report released today. Under their plans to tackle file sharing they will start by sending letters.
If file sharing hasn't dropped by 70%, they're going to start blocking sites, packet shaping, etc.
It doesn't make for pleasant reading, there is absolutely no way they'll get a 70% drop in file sharing, especially not in 6 months so effectively it sounds like the government is using citizens not stopping file sharing as an excuse for a much greater censorship program by setting unrealistic targets on file sharing.
It's nice to know the Labour government is finished, but it's disturbing to know that the Tories will almost certainly follow through with this legislation and that even some of the Lib Dems support it.
The score refers to how usable a browser is to someone on acid, so 100/100 means someone on acid can use the browser fully. It came about as a realisation that some of the worlds greatest computer scientists were users of acid, particularly at Berkley and hence there was recognition that we needed to ensure that they too can use the internet.
No, seriously though that's bullshit, it's actually a standards compliance test. If you've used multiple browsers you may have come across some times that just don't look right, where something is out of place or something - this is ever less common now, but it's generally because a browser doesn't properly support the standards that make up web pages - standards such as HTML, XHTML, CSS etc.
If a browser has 100/100 on the test it means it can correctly render everything that the test consists of as it's supposed to according to the standards.
Chances are if your browser doesn't score 100/100 in the acid tests there will be some sites that don't look as they should, although you may never even know as some of the things it covers are non-obvious unless you're aware of the issue beforehand.
Yes, so I heard last night. I wondered at the time whether I'd jinxed things for us Europeans!
Sounds like she had other complications though - giving birth prematurely whilst infected by it so it's still yet to take anyone healthy outside the Americas even if the fact it's taken anyone at all is still quite tragic.
It'll be interesting (and again, tragic) if deaths outside the Americas become even more prominent and if they start occuring in healthy people at all or whether it'll be weeks again before someone else succumbs to it outside the Americas. I'm suprised places with lower healthcare standards outside the Americas (i.e. China?) haven't seen more deaths yet which is partly what leads me to think it's not too much to worry about still.
"To rule, you need a majority of power. People aren't equally powerful, so you do not necessarily need a majority of people to rule.
Minorities can and do keep majorities hostage."
Indeed, people seem to think it's limited to Middle Eastern or South American dictatorships and such too yet here in Britain, thanks to the first past the post system we have a party that got only 35% of the popular voting holding effective 100% of the power due to this being enough to give them a majority in parliament.
Couple this with the party sytem and the whip system and you have one man, Gordon Brown and his inner circle effectively controlling policy of the whole nation against the will of 65% of the people, possibly even more (i.e. those that voted Labour but not Brown) at the time of the election and now possibly against over 80% of the population if some of the polls are to be believed.
A similar point could be made about George Bush's election vs. Al Gore and the dodgy result that got him in.
The point is that power worldwide is held often against the will of the majority even in the most advanced democracies as you say. It's only nations with proportional representation that are really balanced and they're not overly common.
Everywhere else didn't see search as core to the internet, they saw portals as core to people's internet usage and search was just a minor part of that, to them search had to just about work but not be particularly amazing because if people wanted information on a particular subject they'd just go through their portal's lovely directory.
But of course Google realised they were wrong, Google realised people just wanted to type in what they wanted and get it and that's effectively what Google does well. It gives you what you ask for, it wont answer questions very well but it'll give you some of the best information relevant to whatever you asked. This was far and away above what search engines prior to Google were doing, they often responded with a load of crap and you'd actually have to go past the first page to find what you wanted all too often.
As you say, Google got where they are because the other web companies of the time were too incompetent to notice what people actually wanted.
Yeah but even the council only exists as a result of elected bodies so it's still accountable.
That said I guess what they've effectively created is a loop - the Guardian Council fiddles the election to get their preferred candidates in parliament and the assembly of experts, and then they in turn elect a favourable Guardian Council.
There are weak links in their loop - parliament rather than just the president and also the judiciary could potentially break the cycle.
Interestingly I was looking at the way the Iranian political system works, and apparently the supreme unelected nutjob isn't actually entirely unelected. I was under the impression too that he was unelected - effectively like a monarch, but he's apparently chosen by an expert assembly, who are in turn elected by the people. The leader of that assembly is apparently the person that lost the election to Ahmadinejad in 2005. Potentially, the grand nutjob Ayatollah could be pushed out from what I understand by an elected body. Of course, the real issue is, if he has the power to fiddle the election to get his pet Nazi sympathiser in the chances are he's pretty well protected against being ousted. The Iranian political system doesn't look that bad if it weren't for the fact it was corrupt to the core - remove the corruption and I think it'd be little worse than most Western systems.
See here, the Iranian system looks like it's set up to be theoretically quite accountable, Iran just needs to make that work in practice. Presumably if they can fiddle the election for Ahmadinejad, they can fiddle the election of the assembly of experts in their favour too.
Unfortunately it states the assembly of experts isn't due for re-election until 2014 so if they're just lame ducks and don't do anything about the Ayatollah and hence Ahmadinejad now then it wont be possible to hold them accountable until then.
Perhaps what's amazed me most about all the recent elections is that Europe has gone more right wing and voted in more extreme right people, Iran has had Ahmadinejad re-elected (fairly or not) yet Lebanon of all places is the country that voted no to allowing Hezbollah to strengthen their grip.
With America voting for Obama over McCain we're effectively tied 2 - 2 in the battle of intelligence vs. ignorance right now. That's not an entirely fair assesment though as places like India have had their elections too but I must admit I'm not clear on how good or bad the new Indian adminsitration is, I don't really follow their politics and also to be fair, the European result isn't that bad, it's just not as good as it could've been, it certainly wasn't a step forward, primarily just more of the same.
Well here's the original article (a quick search for "Swine flu WHO humanity at risk" brings up plenty of other sources).
The quote in full from the article:
"She said action should be undertaken with "increased urgency".
She added: "It really is the whole of humanity that is under threat in a pandemic.""
I understand what you're saying, perhaps it's been misinterpreted, but the way it's phrased sounds quite alarmist, as I say in the best case it sounds like she suggested the whole of humanity is under threat of catching it, but again even that's false because as I mentioned previously even the 1918 pandemic only affected 40% of the world's population I believe.
"The WHO's doing that for you, so you don't have to. Don't blame them for doing their jobs, blame the media for always hyping everything beyond its actual importance/relevance."
Normally I would but as it was the director-general of the WHO that suggested the whole of humanity is at risk because of Swine flu I'd argue it's actually the WHO that's doing the hyping this time round, this is my problem with them right now. Even if you take that less explicitly and assume she meant the whole of humanity is at risk from catching it it seems to be a severe exageration, afaik even the 1918 Spanish flu still only infected 40% of the world despite how bad it was.
"I guess I don't agree that a well thought out response is an "over-reaction", or that it was clear your response was "non-serious". Your response sounded to me like a complete dismissal of the whole situation, which is equally foolish."
Generally when people start mentioning alien invasions it's a good idea to realise they're not making a serious comparison;)
"I don't think we need to "worry" the general populace, I think we need to educate them."
I'm glad we agree.
"Explaining to people about potential threats might "worry" some people, but that's just the way the world works. Why you continue to think I'm talking about panic here I don't quite understand."
I guess you missed my comment about the head of the WHO suggesting the whole of the human race is under threat? I'm not suggesting you're talking about panic, I suggested the WTO is talking in a manner that causes panic and it seems to be for little reason other than grabbing headlines and putting themselves in the spotlight. The media is often similarly irresponsible in this respect but this time round the WHO seems to be acting worse than the general media. Ultimately this degrades people's view of them so when there is a major problem and they need people to listen, people wont listen.
"Worrying about things never really got anyone anything useful. Planning for threats, understanding them and overcoming them is what has increased our life span and made us healthier. Worrying about them has only caused some lost sleep."
"Why is it people have to turn to some other equally idiotic extreme? Global nuclear was and "alien invasion" have never happened except in movies. Global disease outbreaks including flu that killed millions of people have happened with some regularity for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In all likelihood this whole thing will turn out to be nothing as H1N1 is unlikely to mutate into something more deadly. Putting it in the same category as "alien invasion" is just as stupid as all the fear mongering the media outlets love to do."
More appropriately, why is it that people have to overreact to what was clearly a non-serious comparison? All you needed to take away from my comment was that swine flu regardless of how likely it is to other major problems is not something I'm going to spend my time worrying about day to day because it's not that big a deal right now. If you take anything more away from it you are simply getting uptight about something that you've strung together yourself. Being equally pedantic though you might want to re-think that argument that nuclear war is unlikely to happen because it's never happened before whilst global pandemics are more likely because they have happened before. The two events are entirely unliked, and the history of nuclear weapons is far too short to start doing a statistical comparison of the two possible events. Nuclear weapons were about 25 years off even being invented when the last serious pandemic occured. FWIW, I do not believe little green men capable of invading our planet even exist.
"If we're close to a deadly flu outbreak, it's really already too late. We need to start developing techniques to get faster vaccines now, not just before it happens. If this HAD been the real-deal, a several month delay to make the vaccine is just too long. You don't need to sit around and cower in fear or start wearing face masks that likely do nothing. You do need to start thinking about how we should be better prepared."
Yes, but there are people whose job it is to do that. There's no point worrying the general public about it when there's nothing they personally can do other than be taught good general hygeine measures and sickness prevention measures in the first place such as not going into work, and working from home if you're ill as well as washing your hands, blowing your nose with something disposable like a tissue etc.
There is absolutely no point me worrying about it, because a) the odds right now are there is nothing to worry about, b) there's nothing I can do other than what I do anyway even if it was worth worrying about.
I was looking at the details about Swine flu the other day, regarding death tolls and that sort of thing.
Apparently seasonal flu mortality rate is 0.1%, some places said 0.5% but this seems to only be in less trustworthy sources like the general media vs. medical journals and scientific articles etc. which suggest 0.1%.
Now, worldwide the swine flu mortality rate is 0.47% last time I calculated it (I don't have the numbers to hand now) which is to be fair, at least 4 times higher than that of seasonal flu.
However, if you examine the situation in Mexico where as of 5th June 97 of the 117 confirmed deaths had occured you'll notice that it's an anomally. The amount of deaths in Mexico is vastly higher in the rest of the world, despite there now being many more cases outside of Mexico than there are in. Why this is could be any number of reasons - poor healthcare, first place hit so they didn't know how to deal with it, lower quality of life in Mexico city and hence people less healthy - who knows, it could be anything. The point is though, that Mexico IS an anomally.
If you factor Mexico out of the equation (both death rates and infection rates) the mortality rate of Swine flu is drastically lower and really is no worse than that of seasonal flu from a percentage standpoint. In fact, outside of the Americas, despite thousands of cases, no one has died at all.
But of course, mortality rate as a percentage isn't the full story. There seem to be two other factors suggesting Swine flu is a problem, these are:
1) The possibility of it mutating to become worse
2) It's more contagious, so even though the mortality rate as a percentage is lower, more people die because more people get infected
As for point 1) I really am not going to worry about this, I don't like to worry about something that is merely speculation, plan for it and account for the possibility? yes, worry about it? No. Is there even any evidence it's more likely to become worse than a particular strain seasonal flu? Point 2 is the real issue, because although it's no more lethal, more people are going to die because of the contagious nature of it, that said even this might not be the case, I don't know how contagious seasonal flu is in comparison.
With Margaret Chan the director of the WHO coming out with such gems as "After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic." I've lost a lot of respect for them. Swine flu is undoubtedly a problem but I get the impression the WHO is loving this situation because it's a chance for them to get their names in the news but it's not even the first time - look at all the fear mongering over bird flu and apocalyptic scenarios they told us to expect then, how a bird flu pandemic was inevitable etc. within just a few months at the time, remind me, how did that turn out again?
I'm more concerned that we've got a case of the boy who cried wolf, even this time round swine flu reporting seems to be less prominent than the H5N1 bird flu was at the time so I wonder if even media outlets have already decided to treat what the WHO say with a bit more scepticism.
If you want a real apocalyptic scenario then there's the idea that Swine flu both mutates to become worse and is vastly more contagious but personally, I'll file that alongside worrying about global nuclear war and alien invasion. When there's any evidence to suggest we're closer to any of these I'll start worrying or even caring a bit more. Until then, I'll continue living life as always, washing my hands before I eat, after I sneeze and so on as I always have anyway because it's simply good practice if you want to avoid being ill.
Yeah I understand it doesn't necessarily produce open source code.
My point is that it's still parsable in the sense that the browser can work with it. Effectively it can still be used with say, accessibility tools such as screen readers - even if a string of text to be displayed on a messagebox is obfuscated in code, it still has to be de-obfuscated before it's rendered by the browser for example and so it can still be used with a screen reader, or perhaps for kids a piece of filtering software. Plugin based setups like Flash in contrast can't interoperate well with things like screen readers, they'd have to implement these themselves as there is no standardised way across browsers for plugins to interoprated.
Effectively because even though some Javascript is obfuscated, it still has to be standard to output to the browser so the browser can still interoperate well with it. In contrast with applets like Flash they're given their own little playground and the browser can only limit what it does via the plugin API and not necessarily interoperate with it quite so well. Of course you could argue more work could be done to standardise plugin APIs to ensure there is this two way communication but this has problems in itself. With Javascript we've already got the situation where it can work with the browser, rather than as a separate entity within the browser.
BTW, I just had a look at GWT and it seems that the obfuscation and compression is an optional thing although enabled by default:
I've not looked at it to be honest, is it obfuscated or has it simply been run through a non-destructive compression process to shrink the size of the.js file downloads for clients?
Either way the process should be entirely reversible else the Javascript interpreter wont be able to do anything with it.
But that's really the beauty of Javascript - it's open, with a plugin you have no idea what it's going to do unless the plugin explicitly allows you to do so, however with Javascript as it's open a Javascript interpreter can block specific actions at the users request (commonly blocking the ability to open popup windows, or resize browser windows for example). You're not restricted in where it can be used so much, if a browser supports Javascript then your application will run, there is no worry about finding an application that supports Javascript and then searching for a working plugin on top.
Plugins are often less rigorously tested than browsers too simply because browsers have a much wider audience so in general plugins are more problem prone - I'm sure most people who have worked in IT have dealt with the absolute pain that a broken Flash install can be.
Slashdot Mirror
"Given voter turnouts, you're rarely going to have a situation where the majority of people eligible to vote have elected their rulers."
The problem isn't directly the majority of people, the voter turnout is a good representation of the percentage of people who want a particular party so even 45% voter turnout is fine. The issue is that power isn't proportionate in FPTP. There will always be a majority of voters whose vote isn't heard, which can hence fairly accurately be statistically extrapolated to the whole population so voter turnout is largely irrelevant to the problems with FPTP although FPTP does correlate with lower turnouts as people become disillusioned that their vote simply doesn't matter.
"No. Laws are made by parliament, which the PM does not control."
Yes he does, if his party holds a majority of parliament, and his party adhere to the whip system as most do he and his elite have effective full control.
"The PM can be unseated by a vote of non-confidence and Gordon Brown has come close to being chucked out by his own party a few times now."
Yes but he hasn't, because a big enough majority of his party is all he needs. Because he has a disproportionate hold on power in the first place this simply doesn't work. He wouldn't even have such power if it weren't for FPTP.
"Additionally MPs, including the PM face free and open elections every 4-5 years and elections can even be called earlier if there is insufficient support for the government. How is this politically equivalent to a dictatorship?"
I guess you didn't bother to read my post then, I pointed out the fact you have someone in power who is there against the will of the majority is fairly similar to a dictatorship. Certainly we do not have a true democracy as that is defined as a system where power is held by the people, it's not, it's held by a minority group of the people.
"So? They have to call an election next year by law and certainly will, if not earlier. That is the constitutional law that they and every other government has abided by. Low approval is a rationale for going to the polls, but not a requirement. If you made it a requirement, governments would be paralysed by fear of ever doing anything unpopular even if it was for the good of the country. Not giving the government time to fix problems would create unstable quick-fix populist governments which would be far worse over the long term."
So why is it that nations like Canada, which despite using FPTP are fortunate enough that the safe seats are distributed more evenly has a minority government and has had elections pretty much every year for the last few years is the fastest growing economy in the G7? Didn't have to bail out any banks? Has some of the best civil liberty laws of any nation in the world? Has a fantastic, first class health service? Has a strong military? No, the reason governments in stale mates work better is because the only laws that get stalled are laws that are simply not popular. If a law was important enough but unpopular you'd still get the cross-party support you needed to pass it, you just wont get cross party support for idiotic laws no one wants like, say, ID cards which would never have got off the ground in a proportional representation system but have been pushed and pushed and pushed by a party elected against the will of 65% of the population.
"A general election must be held every five years (or more frequently). Is this dictatorial? No. If an unpopular government proceeds with elections at the legally required time, are they being dictatorial? No. IF they don't hold elections earlier, are they being dictatorial? No, because they're not required to and the public will have the chance to see if the government can fix things and if not then send a clear message when the election does come around. In the mean time they can send a message by the way they vote in by-elections, council elections and European elections - as has just happened. Poor showings there makes the ruling party nervous, nearly
A common comment I see here is "Facebook groups achieve nothing" in respect to groups that have been setup to protest some specific issue.
This type of comment misses the point, of course a Facebook group wont directly influence say some political point, but because Facebook group joins are viral in that one person joins, their friend sees the cause, they join and so on these groups do spread the word about issues to people who wouldn't otherwise be aware.
These new Web 2.0 tools are excellent not for direct action but for spreading the word, the situation in Iran with Twitter has demonstrated this in an impressive manner.
Presumably, should a full blown war start, we'd see countries using these tools to intentionally spread misinformation and propaganda among the civilian population perhaps in an attempt to cause panic or similar because of course, methods of spreading information virally can be abused as well as used.
I call them dictators because they're still getting in to power through a minority just as a military dictator may get in through support of a minority group (i.e. the military).
Certainly it's a lot more bloodless, and certainly they're not as untouchable as most dictators, but politically the effect is identical. You have someone in power against the majority of the people who cannot be removed. This is particularly prominent in the current situation where approval ratings for Brown and Labour have been put as low as 15% in some cases, but at most around 20%. If 80%+ of the population are unhappy with the leadership and have no power other than to wait whilst they continue to push unpopular laws that do not have the support of the population is that really any different than a dictatorship politically?
I think it's wrong to assume a dictatorship is a violent bloody regime, yes that's a possibility but certainly some of the official defintions of dictator fit the description of Brown and his elite quite well.
But if Cameron wins the election you suggest he's not a dictator because he's elected, but the method of getting in isn't relevant to be defined as a dictator, merely the idea that a single person or small group of people hold absolute power without true accountability to the people, as the majority of the people do not support him (he wont get over 50% of the vote) but can also still do nothing about him being in power then there's certainly room to suggest that we do in fact live in a dictatorship under FPTP. Perhaps the only area where the comparison falls down is the fact that there are term limits, that'd certainly be the key sticking point.
I certainly do not intend to demean those who live under a dictatorship but similarly there are dictatorships where the majority of citizens are actually happy, so it's also wrong to link dictatorships with the idea that they're all bloody and violent regimes.
Dictatorships are bad not because some oppress their people in the most violent of manners, but because they take away power from the people, they do not give people a say in how their lives are run and this is the fundamental problem with FPTP - the majority of the population do not get a true say in how their lives are run. I was particularly shocked to find that last general election 19 million votes were wasted by people who voted for opposition parties in safe seat areas so before you even factor in those whose vote didn't matter outside of safe seat areas you have almost 1/3rd of the population (which is well over 1/3rd the voting population) whose voice simply was not heard. When you have that many people who despite having the right to vote do not actually really have a say in the running of the country whilst one man and his elite get to pass whichever laws they deem necessary then it's hard not to suggest at very least there are some strong parallels with a dictatorship, even if you argue we're not in one explicitly.
Effectively, at the end of the day, we still have a minority supported leader dictating to the majority how their lives should be run against their will, even if it's a different minority supported leader dictating it every 5 years.
I believe no such thing exists in the UK.
This is why ISPs could freely implement deep packet inspection, phorm and so on without even asking anyone first as opposed to the US where the FCC etc. investigated usage of DPI in trying to disrupt Bittorrent.
I agree.
The problem is, the next government, the Conservatives, are more than happy with Labour's proposals on filesharing.
They're going to happen regardless I'm afraid out with the old dictator, in with the new. As Cameron refuses a change from first past the post because he knows it guarantees him and his party 100% power even with only 38% of popular vote he IS a dictator, just like Brown was a dictator on 0% of the vote and Blair on 35%. But that's the problem with Britain, we live in a country where FPTP guarantees minority rule to the most organised minority rather than balanced representation. So yes, if you live in a safe-seat area and don't support a safe-seat your vote is a complete waste and yes, it means there is nothing whatsoever you can do about these laws.
Really kinda sucks.
"The price of broadband in the UK has decreased hugely over the last couple of years, not least because of the competitive market."
Er, it has?
5 years ago I could downloads 100s of gb per month for £24.99. Then I could download about 100gb for £19.99 on peak.
Now I can download 20gbps for £24.99 on peak.
So not only is the price back where i started, but I only have a fraction of the bandwidth I used to get for that price.
I can only assume you're referring to the £5 packages or the free carphone warehouse type packages, but these are massively restricted, cut down products and aren't like for like.
If you compare like for like, broadband costs have drastically increased in the last few years in the UK. You could argue that broadband pricing has become more flexible, that's certainly true - you couldn't get away with offering a £5 package a few years ago due to the base wholesale cost. You certainly can't argue it's decreased though, because although the price has gone down, what you get for that price has also drastically decreased. If you want equivalent to what you could get for £20 years ago then you're going to be paying a couple of hundred £ per month due to BT charging unacceptably high prices for bandwidth at their backbone.
But then, the fact prices have effectively increased shouldn't come as a suprise when despite technology getting ever cheaper, and bandwidth out to external networks on the internet getting ever cheaper, BT upped the cost of a 622mbps link to their back bone by 24% (£250,000) last December.
The problem is it's only the last mile and cabinet access they're really forced to share.
They still do whatever they want with the backbone that everything connects back to, and as of last December they did a 24% increase in costs for ISPs connecting to their backbone.
The more OFCOM tells them to stop ripping everyone off on the last mile, the more they rip us all off further up the line where OFCOM takes no action.
"These are the sites that use but don't abuse Flash, and are the best candidates for HTML 5's more lightweight environment. If the designers and developers of these sites can be convinced it's worth migrating from Flash for the decreased overhead, they just might."
Or they can just use Javascript and/or CSS already without needing to wait for HTML5.
The thing is they don't, but then that goes back to the original point in this thread - it's the tools.
"Netscape, Real Media was killed this way."
Or it could just be that both of them were impressively crap.
Yeah, I agree to be honest.
The issue is as you say even if one browser scores lower than another, the things it fails on may be things that are completely and utterly irrelevant in the real world.
If Firefox only gets 72% but IE gets 90% yet the 10% of things IE fails on are more common whilst the 28% that Firefox fails on are irrelevant for normal usage anyway it paints an incorrect picture of the quality of the browsers standards compliance.
Check the UK's digital Britain report released today. Under their plans to tackle file sharing they will start by sending letters.
If file sharing hasn't dropped by 70%, they're going to start blocking sites, packet shaping, etc.
It doesn't make for pleasant reading, there is absolutely no way they'll get a 70% drop in file sharing, especially not in 6 months so effectively it sounds like the government is using citizens not stopping file sharing as an excuse for a much greater censorship program by setting unrealistic targets on file sharing.
It's nice to know the Labour government is finished, but it's disturbing to know that the Tories will almost certainly follow through with this legislation and that even some of the Lib Dems support it.
It's an accessibility thing.
The score refers to how usable a browser is to someone on acid, so 100/100 means someone on acid can use the browser fully. It came about as a realisation that some of the worlds greatest computer scientists were users of acid, particularly at Berkley and hence there was recognition that we needed to ensure that they too can use the internet.
No, seriously though that's bullshit, it's actually a standards compliance test. If you've used multiple browsers you may have come across some times that just don't look right, where something is out of place or something - this is ever less common now, but it's generally because a browser doesn't properly support the standards that make up web pages - standards such as HTML, XHTML, CSS etc.
If a browser has 100/100 on the test it means it can correctly render everything that the test consists of as it's supposed to according to the standards.
Chances are if your browser doesn't score 100/100 in the acid tests there will be some sites that don't look as they should, although you may never even know as some of the things it covers are non-obvious unless you're aware of the issue beforehand.
Yes, so I heard last night. I wondered at the time whether I'd jinxed things for us Europeans!
Sounds like she had other complications though - giving birth prematurely whilst infected by it so it's still yet to take anyone healthy outside the Americas even if the fact it's taken anyone at all is still quite tragic.
It'll be interesting (and again, tragic) if deaths outside the Americas become even more prominent and if they start occuring in healthy people at all or whether it'll be weeks again before someone else succumbs to it outside the Americas. I'm suprised places with lower healthcare standards outside the Americas (i.e. China?) haven't seen more deaths yet which is partly what leads me to think it's not too much to worry about still.
"To rule, you need a majority of power. People aren't equally powerful, so you do not necessarily need a majority of people to rule.
Minorities can and do keep majorities hostage."
Indeed, people seem to think it's limited to Middle Eastern or South American dictatorships and such too yet here in Britain, thanks to the first past the post system we have a party that got only 35% of the popular voting holding effective 100% of the power due to this being enough to give them a majority in parliament.
Couple this with the party sytem and the whip system and you have one man, Gordon Brown and his inner circle effectively controlling policy of the whole nation against the will of 65% of the people, possibly even more (i.e. those that voted Labour but not Brown) at the time of the election and now possibly against over 80% of the population if some of the polls are to be believed.
A similar point could be made about George Bush's election vs. Al Gore and the dodgy result that got him in.
The point is that power worldwide is held often against the will of the majority even in the most advanced democracies as you say. It's only nations with proportional representation that are really balanced and they're not overly common.
You hit the nail on the head really.
Everywhere else didn't see search as core to the internet, they saw portals as core to people's internet usage and search was just a minor part of that, to them search had to just about work but not be particularly amazing because if people wanted information on a particular subject they'd just go through their portal's lovely directory.
But of course Google realised they were wrong, Google realised people just wanted to type in what they wanted and get it and that's effectively what Google does well. It gives you what you ask for, it wont answer questions very well but it'll give you some of the best information relevant to whatever you asked. This was far and away above what search engines prior to Google were doing, they often responded with a load of crap and you'd actually have to go past the first page to find what you wanted all too often.
As you say, Google got where they are because the other web companies of the time were too incompetent to notice what people actually wanted.
Yeah but even the council only exists as a result of elected bodies so it's still accountable.
That said I guess what they've effectively created is a loop - the Guardian Council fiddles the election to get their preferred candidates in parliament and the assembly of experts, and then they in turn elect a favourable Guardian Council.
There are weak links in their loop - parliament rather than just the president and also the judiciary could potentially break the cycle.
Interestingly I was looking at the way the Iranian political system works, and apparently the supreme unelected nutjob isn't actually entirely unelected. I was under the impression too that he was unelected - effectively like a monarch, but he's apparently chosen by an expert assembly, who are in turn elected by the people. The leader of that assembly is apparently the person that lost the election to Ahmadinejad in 2005. Potentially, the grand nutjob Ayatollah could be pushed out from what I understand by an elected body. Of course, the real issue is, if he has the power to fiddle the election to get his pet Nazi sympathiser in the chances are he's pretty well protected against being ousted. The Iranian political system doesn't look that bad if it weren't for the fact it was corrupt to the core - remove the corruption and I think it'd be little worse than most Western systems.
See here, the Iranian system looks like it's set up to be theoretically quite accountable, Iran just needs to make that work in practice. Presumably if they can fiddle the election for Ahmadinejad, they can fiddle the election of the assembly of experts in their favour too.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8051750.stm
Unfortunately it states the assembly of experts isn't due for re-election until 2014 so if they're just lame ducks and don't do anything about the Ayatollah and hence Ahmadinejad now then it wont be possible to hold them accountable until then.
Perhaps what's amazed me most about all the recent elections is that Europe has gone more right wing and voted in more extreme right people, Iran has had Ahmadinejad re-elected (fairly or not) yet Lebanon of all places is the country that voted no to allowing Hezbollah to strengthen their grip.
With America voting for Obama over McCain we're effectively tied 2 - 2 in the battle of intelligence vs. ignorance right now. That's not an entirely fair assesment though as places like India have had their elections too but I must admit I'm not clear on how good or bad the new Indian adminsitration is, I don't really follow their politics and also to be fair, the European result isn't that bad, it's just not as good as it could've been, it certainly wasn't a step forward, primarily just more of the same.
Well here's the original article (a quick search for "Swine flu WHO humanity at risk" brings up plenty of other sources).
The quote in full from the article:
"She said action should be undertaken with "increased urgency".
She added: "It really is the whole of humanity that is under threat in a pandemic.""
I understand what you're saying, perhaps it's been misinterpreted, but the way it's phrased sounds quite alarmist, as I say in the best case it sounds like she suggested the whole of humanity is under threat of catching it, but again even that's false because as I mentioned previously even the 1918 pandemic only affected 40% of the world's population I believe.
"The WHO's doing that for you, so you don't have to. Don't blame them for doing their jobs, blame the media for always hyping everything beyond its actual importance/relevance."
Normally I would but as it was the director-general of the WHO that suggested the whole of humanity is at risk because of Swine flu I'd argue it's actually the WHO that's doing the hyping this time round, this is my problem with them right now. Even if you take that less explicitly and assume she meant the whole of humanity is at risk from catching it it seems to be a severe exageration, afaik even the 1918 Spanish flu still only infected 40% of the world despite how bad it was.
"I guess I don't agree that a well thought out response is an "over-reaction", or that it was clear your response was "non-serious". Your response sounded to me like a complete dismissal of the whole situation, which is equally foolish."
Generally when people start mentioning alien invasions it's a good idea to realise they're not making a serious comparison ;)
"I don't think we need to "worry" the general populace, I think we need to educate them."
I'm glad we agree.
"Explaining to people about potential threats might "worry" some people, but that's just the way the world works. Why you continue to think I'm talking about panic here I don't quite understand."
I guess you missed my comment about the head of the WHO suggesting the whole of the human race is under threat? I'm not suggesting you're talking about panic, I suggested the WTO is talking in a manner that causes panic and it seems to be for little reason other than grabbing headlines and putting themselves in the spotlight. The media is often similarly irresponsible in this respect but this time round the WHO seems to be acting worse than the general media. Ultimately this degrades people's view of them so when there is a major problem and they need people to listen, people wont listen.
"Worrying about things never really got anyone anything useful. Planning for threats, understanding them and overcoming them is what has increased our life span and made us healthier. Worrying about them has only caused some lost sleep."
Exactly my point.
"Why is it people have to turn to some other equally idiotic extreme? Global nuclear was and "alien invasion" have never happened except in movies. Global disease outbreaks including flu that killed millions of people have happened with some regularity for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In all likelihood this whole thing will turn out to be nothing as H1N1 is unlikely to mutate into something more deadly. Putting it in the same category as "alien invasion" is just as stupid as all the fear mongering the media outlets love to do."
More appropriately, why is it that people have to overreact to what was clearly a non-serious comparison? All you needed to take away from my comment was that swine flu regardless of how likely it is to other major problems is not something I'm going to spend my time worrying about day to day because it's not that big a deal right now. If you take anything more away from it you are simply getting uptight about something that you've strung together yourself. Being equally pedantic though you might want to re-think that argument that nuclear war is unlikely to happen because it's never happened before whilst global pandemics are more likely because they have happened before. The two events are entirely unliked, and the history of nuclear weapons is far too short to start doing a statistical comparison of the two possible events. Nuclear weapons were about 25 years off even being invented when the last serious pandemic occured. FWIW, I do not believe little green men capable of invading our planet even exist.
"If we're close to a deadly flu outbreak, it's really already too late. We need to start developing techniques to get faster vaccines now, not just before it happens. If this HAD been the real-deal, a several month delay to make the vaccine is just too long. You don't need to sit around and cower in fear or start wearing face masks that likely do nothing. You do need to start thinking about how we should be better prepared."
Yes, but there are people whose job it is to do that. There's no point worrying the general public about it when there's nothing they personally can do other than be taught good general hygeine measures and sickness prevention measures in the first place such as not going into work, and working from home if you're ill as well as washing your hands, blowing your nose with something disposable like a tissue etc.
There is absolutely no point me worrying about it, because a) the odds right now are there is nothing to worry about, b) there's nothing I can do other than what I do anyway even if it was worth worrying about.
Funnily enough even that figure is skewed.
I was looking at the details about Swine flu the other day, regarding death tolls and that sort of thing.
Apparently seasonal flu mortality rate is 0.1%, some places said 0.5% but this seems to only be in less trustworthy sources like the general media vs. medical journals and scientific articles etc. which suggest 0.1%.
Now, worldwide the swine flu mortality rate is 0.47% last time I calculated it (I don't have the numbers to hand now) which is to be fair, at least 4 times higher than that of seasonal flu.
However, if you examine the situation in Mexico where as of 5th June 97 of the 117 confirmed deaths had occured you'll notice that it's an anomally. The amount of deaths in Mexico is vastly higher in the rest of the world, despite there now being many more cases outside of Mexico than there are in. Why this is could be any number of reasons - poor healthcare, first place hit so they didn't know how to deal with it, lower quality of life in Mexico city and hence people less healthy - who knows, it could be anything. The point is though, that Mexico IS an anomally.
If you factor Mexico out of the equation (both death rates and infection rates) the mortality rate of Swine flu is drastically lower and really is no worse than that of seasonal flu from a percentage standpoint. In fact, outside of the Americas, despite thousands of cases, no one has died at all.
But of course, mortality rate as a percentage isn't the full story. There seem to be two other factors suggesting Swine flu is a problem, these are:
1) The possibility of it mutating to become worse
2) It's more contagious, so even though the mortality rate as a percentage is lower, more people die because more people get infected
As for point 1) I really am not going to worry about this, I don't like to worry about something that is merely speculation, plan for it and account for the possibility? yes, worry about it? No. Is there even any evidence it's more likely to become worse than a particular strain seasonal flu? Point 2 is the real issue, because although it's no more lethal, more people are going to die because of the contagious nature of it, that said even this might not be the case, I don't know how contagious seasonal flu is in comparison.
With Margaret Chan the director of the WHO coming out with such gems as "After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic." I've lost a lot of respect for them. Swine flu is undoubtedly a problem but I get the impression the WHO is loving this situation because it's a chance for them to get their names in the news but it's not even the first time - look at all the fear mongering over bird flu and apocalyptic scenarios they told us to expect then, how a bird flu pandemic was inevitable etc. within just a few months at the time, remind me, how did that turn out again?
I'm more concerned that we've got a case of the boy who cried wolf, even this time round swine flu reporting seems to be less prominent than the H5N1 bird flu was at the time so I wonder if even media outlets have already decided to treat what the WHO say with a bit more scepticism.
If you want a real apocalyptic scenario then there's the idea that Swine flu both mutates to become worse and is vastly more contagious but personally, I'll file that alongside worrying about global nuclear war and alien invasion. When there's any evidence to suggest we're closer to any of these I'll start worrying or even caring a bit more. Until then, I'll continue living life as always, washing my hands before I eat, after I sneeze and so on as I always have anyway because it's simply good practice if you want to avoid being ill.
Who says they don't show more?
It seems pointless to speculate about, we can only assume business as usual until there's suggestion otherwise.
Yeah I understand it doesn't necessarily produce open source code.
My point is that it's still parsable in the sense that the browser can work with it. Effectively it can still be used with say, accessibility tools such as screen readers - even if a string of text to be displayed on a messagebox is obfuscated in code, it still has to be de-obfuscated before it's rendered by the browser for example and so it can still be used with a screen reader, or perhaps for kids a piece of filtering software. Plugin based setups like Flash in contrast can't interoperate well with things like screen readers, they'd have to implement these themselves as there is no standardised way across browsers for plugins to interoprated.
Effectively because even though some Javascript is obfuscated, it still has to be standard to output to the browser so the browser can still interoperate well with it. In contrast with applets like Flash they're given their own little playground and the browser can only limit what it does via the plugin API and not necessarily interoperate with it quite so well. Of course you could argue more work could be done to standardise plugin APIs to ensure there is this two way communication but this has problems in itself. With Javascript we've already got the situation where it can work with the browser, rather than as a separate entity within the browser.
BTW, I just had a look at GWT and it seems that the obfuscation and compression is an optional thing although enabled by default:
http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=55203&topic=10212
I've not looked at it to be honest, is it obfuscated or has it simply been run through a non-destructive compression process to shrink the size of the .js file downloads for clients?
Either way the process should be entirely reversible else the Javascript interpreter wont be able to do anything with it.
But that's really the beauty of Javascript - it's open, with a plugin you have no idea what it's going to do unless the plugin explicitly allows you to do so, however with Javascript as it's open a Javascript interpreter can block specific actions at the users request (commonly blocking the ability to open popup windows, or resize browser windows for example). You're not restricted in where it can be used so much, if a browser supports Javascript then your application will run, there is no worry about finding an application that supports Javascript and then searching for a working plugin on top.
Plugins are often less rigorously tested than browsers too simply because browsers have a much wider audience so in general plugins are more problem prone - I'm sure most people who have worked in IT have dealt with the absolute pain that a broken Flash install can be.