Please elaborate, I'm intrigued, what exactly do you think it is? An agricultural company? A financial services company? An automotive company?
What about Facebook as a business makes it not an information technology company when it's whole business is built around technology that deals with information?
"It is an indisputable fact that violence goes down in well armed states. It is a fact. You may not like the fact, but it is a fact nonetheless."
Of course, that's why Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan are the most peaceful nations on earth, because of the massive proliferation of arms.
Obviously you're more than just a little bit dumb.
"Regarding your first link, it's unlcear what the chart is depicting. The vertical axis is labelled "Numbers", with each data series corresponding to a different kind of weapon. Are these numbers of weapons? Numbers of violent crimes committed with these weapons? Numbers of homicides committed with these weapons? The chart, on its own, doesn't make that clear."
Sorry, I should've posted the full link. It's the number of recorded incidents:
"In the end, I'm curious as to why there's an apparent discrepancy between the claims made by the WSJ and BBC. It's sad that even with an issue that's so thoroughly documented, it's hard to get a straight answer."
I don't know why either, but personally I'd be inclined to consider that the WSJ article is an opinion piece by someone who seems to have a history of being a bit of an anti-gun control zealot and provides absolutely no citations, whilst the BBC article is an actual news report reporting on the actual ONS figures. It wouldn't be like it's the first time that Dr. Malcolm had just made stuff up on violent crime:
I know I know, this is an ad-hominem argument against her, but without citations to consider or dispute what is left? Honestly, it's gotten to the point where I almost just discount US sources automatically because the debate there is so polarised and so full of dirty tactics on both sides. I shouldn't of course, because there's the danger in discounting sources of only ending up with one side of the picture, but when it comes down to outright lies (again as is the case with The Daily Mail) it becomes ever harder to give such sources just consideration.
As an aside, the first article looks a bit dodgy too, I only just bothered to read it, i.e.:
"Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself."
It seems oblivious to the fact that that was committed purely with legally owned (i.e. not banned) firearms. You could just as well argue that this case is a reason to further restrict guns rather than the contrary.
"Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action."
This is also not entirely true. The author is restating the defendants claim but the prosecution had other evidence and a counterclaim, such as for example additional ammunition and so forth which he eventually admitted he kept there because he couldn't be bothered to return it to the base gun lockup after doing firearms practice. It was for this reason he was initially convicted, because laziness isn't an excuse for breaking the law - he knew what it was and one has to bear in mind the police only investigated this because someone reported it, so harmless claims of "oh I forgot about it it's no big deal" are obviously not born out given the fact someone was concerned enough to report he was keeping live firearms and live ammunition. It's not as simple a case as his side of the story makes out.
The final conclusion is a bit of a stretch too:
"What to conclude? Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems."
Effectively he's arguing that gun control doesn't work because it doesn't correlate with reduced violent crime. This ignores the fact that it does correlate with reduced gun crime and reduced homicides. I don't think anyone has ever tried to pretend that gun control is a magic wand that fixes all crime even those unrelated to firearms, but it's dishonest of him to deny there isn't positive correlating effects that may suggest that gun crime has a positive impact, but is only part of the solution, and certainly not the whole solution.
I'm not going to pretend that this definitely means gun control in itself fixes gun crime because the whole point of my argument is that there is too many variables to possibly be sure. But fundamentally my point is that there is as much evidence for positive effects (if not more) as there is for negative effects so to suggest it's "obvious" one way or the other and dismissing the existence of another side of the story as the person I was originally referring to did is extremely dishonest.
My gut, based on the statistics I've seen for the UK, and the timing of things however leads me to suspect that gun control doesn't instantly reduce gun crime, but it does create an environment whereby it's easier for the police to remove guns from criminals and eventually reduce gun crime - post ban it looked like it took some time for police to get a handle on how to deal with inner London gun crime, but once they did being able to remove guns from gangs meant it was easier to reduce gun crime than if there was no ban, because without a ban criminals would've just been replacing seized weapons with newly bought ones. That's much harder when the route to acquiring firearms are much more risky. Of course, as I say this is just a suspicion but it seems to play out reasonably - that is, it seems realistic that gun control isn't an instant fix, but combined with effective policing to seize illegally held guns post gun-control it does indeed reduce gun crime. So the mantra of the NRA and it's ilk of "If you ban guns, only criminals have guns" actually seems somewhat true, however there's also a flip side too it - when only criminals have guns, it's much easier to find them and take them off them and to prevent them rearming afterwards.
The problem is the article you cite uses The Daily Mail as it's source, I'm almost inclined to say that automatically makes it wrong, because on average if you take a Daily Mail article and say it's wrong to at least some degree you'll more often be right than not as The Daily Mail exists purely to push a political agenda that often runs against the grain of reality - more recent examples being gay marriage, when the law was going through parliament they published polls saying the majority opposed it, but that ran contrary to every other poll in existence. One of The Daily Mail's past articles (in fact it's the one linked at the bottom of the second article you linked I believe) even conflates crimes and violent crime, so it doesn't even get the absolute most basic comprehension of the numbers right but jumps to conclusions anyway.
Part the issue in comparing firearms offences in the UK is the fact that firearms offence can mean anything from a kid carrying a realistic looking toy gun in public and being told by the police you can't carry realistic looking weapons around, to someone going on a massacre. Whilst firearms themselves are defined in law as non-air weapons - i.e. what most people would see as "proper guns" a firearms offence can involve something that isn't a firearm but looks like one, through to air rifles, through to actual proper guns.
This doesn't contrast well to nations like the US and South Africa where many such offences are kept well away from firearms statistics, but in The Daily Mail's comparisons often ignore this sort of disparity because it doesn't paint the picture they want to paint. Or in other words, many UK firearms offences are actually completely non-violent crimes. Even illegal poaching leads to such offences, for example, carrying a shotgun on private farm land without permission would be an offence under the firearms act.
UK murder rates are even more encouraging now, the UK's homicide rate is below that of nations often seen as some of the most peaceful on earth:
Well yes, that's probably because the accounts you've heard are the same accounts that everyone desperate to try and claim that the UK is an ultra-violent place grasp on to. Unfortunately:
- You need to read the date on the article, even if true it's from 2003 (hint: that's 11 years ago)
- Firearms offences in the UK include air rifles, imitation firearms and so forth, so it's possible for firearms offences to increase whilst actual shootings and violence go down. A kid carrying a realistic immitation pistol or rifle down the high street reported to the police would class as a firearms offence. Few firearms offences actually include discharging of real actual bullets.
- Increases are still trivial for a single year, a 32% increase in firearms murders is listed as a mere 23 cases total so a once in a decade case of family annihilation in a year can massively distort the stats for a single year when compared to the overall trend
- It's the Daily Mail so probably isn't entirely true in the first place. You have to understand that The Daily Mail is probably the least trustworthy paper in the UK, they don't just put a spin on things, they often outright lie about things. It's not uncommon for them to take a number everyone else is reporting on their front page and double it just to make it look like they have some edge to the story that no one else does but then completely fail to justify their figure precisely because it's a lie. As an example, The Daily Mail when trying to defame the government of the time made the claim that the UK is the most violent country in Europe and more violent than the US and South Africa, they did this by comparing crime rates in the UK, against violent crime rates elsewhere. Yes, that's right, they determined things like speeding tickets to be violent crime in the UK but nowhere else.
- Real actual modern stats will help clarify the truth of the matter (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2... or from the previous year and different study http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...). Homicide rates even before these drops (from 2011/2012) show an even more glaring disparity putting the UK below even commonly seen as relatively murder-free nations like Norway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Long story short, the only place that seems to consistently claim the UK is more violent than ever is The Daily Mail, they've been doing this for some time, but official statistics from both police reporting, and the national crime survey, as well as third parties show a completely opposite story. As an aside, official statistics come from an organisation that's independent from government, and that has on numerous occasions criticised serving governments for mis-representing their statistics so it's a very trustworthy organisation. The Daily Mail is pretty much alone in it's claims, and again, given it's propensity to lie I'd rather take multiple sources with much better reputations over an agenda based lie piece.
Unfortunately your typo was indistinguishable from the rest of your stupidity. Given your propensity to lie about most other things you said coupled with the fact you clearly had no idea what you're talking about it's not obvious that you didn't in fact want to pretend that you'd been to 365 countries until it was pointed out to you that that would actually be impossible.
If you really had a leg to stand on in your argument you'd demonstrate why I am wrong, but given that that is impossible because I've posted the actual law as written, and explained that no RIPA password case to date has gone the way you claim it's not surprise you went off on a rant about the UK.
So thank you for confirming that deep down you accept you are wrong, but are just too childish to ever admit it publicly. The right answer is obvious when it's right in front your face, apparently you can't even spot it even then.
The fact you even have to ask that question demonstrates that you're completely out of your depth on this topic.
I can't possibly list them all, but they include things such as the economy/poverty levels, policing efforts, changes in societal attitudes, levels of education, cost of ammunition, criminal justice changes, environmental factors. Inside many of these factors are many sub-factors too which is precisely why it's too complex to resort to simplistic conclusions based on just two out of literally thousands, maybe millions of variables.
You told someone else it's up to those claiming gun control leads to decrease violent crime to prove their case by demonstrating confounding factors break your argument. That's incorrect, it's upto whoever makes the claim to prove their case, whatever side of the argument they're on so yes that includes those like you claiming a simple two variable correlation that ignores confounding factors is proof of something.
I agree it's really interesting. What was particularly surprising in the UK is that crime actually consistently declined during the economic turmoil to the point it's now at it's lowest level in recorded history, which may mean it's at it's lowest level ever.
Most people were expecting an upturn in crime during recession as people became more desperate and policing budgets were slashed but in fact the exact opposite happened.
Perhaps most interestingly is that the current generation of teenagers and early 20 somethings in the UK are also the least criminal ever. The UK had a long problem with binge drinking but the current generation of teenagers seems to have completely foregone it. It could simply therefore be just changes in attitude - it could even be the internet, as kids have become more connected with more outlets than ever for instant entertainment and more ability to speak to people when distressed and share knowledge, understanding and experience different cultures then maybe there's just less tendency to commit crime from that. Current stats show that the most criminal generation in the UK is my generation - that which just about pre-dates the internet.
But it's just a guess, it really could just be a combination of things. We may well never know exactly what single or combination of factors are the biggest cause especially given that recent data shows that most assumptions about it being tied to poverty levels hints that even that may not actually be true.
Except that's not what I did. I cited it as a counter-example to the argument that increased gun control also equals decreased crime. Obviously that's completely false given the fact that the opposite happened in the UK.
Yes it's a very different country and yes there are different variables, and that's exactly the point - gun control correlated against crime levels without taking into account other confounding factors obviously results in meaningless conclusions.
"I agree that these things are hard to get a handle on. So hard that your claim of gun restrictions reducing violence in the UK is as unsupportable as the other comments in the thread. "
I just want to make abundantly clear that again that's not my claim, I'm citing the example of the UK as a correlation that acts as a counter-example to the suggestions that the correlation always goes in the opposite direction. Obviously it doesn't, depending on what subset of data you take there are correlations in both directions, hence why using the correlations at all to imply causation is completely meaningless.
The claim, if I made it, would be unsupportable, but use of it as a counter-example, as I have, is not unsupportable.
"Jane Q Public's argument is sound. If the incidence of X increases while the incidence of Y decreases, X clearly does NOT cause Y. If X causes Y, then when X increases Y must also increase."
No it isn't. What you say is only true, if, and only if there are no confounding factors that have not been taken into account and it's that fundamentally important point that she has completely and utterly avoided dismissing it as not relevant when it's in fact wholly relevant.
You're arguing, as she did, that if we have decreased violent crime in the face of increased gun ownership then it's disproven that increased gun ownership causes an increase in crime. This is completely false because there are many other factors involved and it could in fact be these factors that have resulted in the decrease in crime counter-balancing what would otherwise have been an increase.
If you increase the amount of guns available then it's perfectly plausible that the baseline amount of crime actually goes up, but that there is another completely different factor that is acting against it, such that without any change in gun ownership but with that factor crime would've instead decreased even further, meaning that more guns is still increasing crime, just that the increase is masked by something else causing a decrease such as better proactive policing measures in the same period to deter criminals.
I'm not saying this is what's happening, I have no idea what's happening because there are too many variables in play for you, me, or anyone here on Slashdot to know what the actual effect of gun control is, but I'm highlighting why Jane Q Public's argument is a fallacy with a plausible example.
To claim what you have is true, and to genuinely reach a sound scientific conclusion, you have to completely isolate the possibility of there being any additional outside factors that could've been the actual cause for the decrease in violent crime. Neither of you have done this, so neither of you are adhering to genuinely sound scientific principle but are applying a weak understanding of statistics and logic to reach conclusions that cannot be validly reached based simply on the information you have.
That doesn't contradict anything I've said though, it's just a further example of my underlying point that there are too many confounding factors involved for it to be simple enough to jump to a conclusion based on simple correlation.
His argument was specifically that relaxation of gun control results in decreasing crime (after an initial peak) and that strengthening of gun control correlates with increasing crime. I was merely providing a counterexample, where strengthening of gun control results in decreasing crime, which is enough to act as a proof by counter-example that he is simply wrong, that as you clearly note, it's a far more complex equation than that.
I wasn't trying to get into the argument beyond that because unlike the above I do have at least some grounding in statistics and I know that I couldn't even begin to take into account all of the factors to come to a genuinely valid and logical conclusion. I know what my gut feeling is, but that makes no difference and unlike the folks above I'm not about to try and dress up my gut feeling with arguments that claim to be logically sound, but are demonstrably not.
I don't really have a problem with people stating their gut feeling on an issue and arguing why they believe it's true. I have a problem with people who clearly neither understand logical inference or statistics pretending they do to suggest what is really just their gut feeling has added weight beyond that which it actually does.
As an aside I think you have your figures backwards, it's the US' homicide rate that is 4x higher than the UK's, not vice versa. But regardless, even here you have to take into account so many other factors, what was the relevant difference in increase in police spending? is it simply a natural trend (itself based on numerous factors) that you get diminishing returns from measures to reduce violence the less violent a nation is for example? if lead is a factor, did the UK already have a difference in lead pollutants leaving it less or more scope to see gains from that? As I say, anyone pretending they know what the answer is and are suggesting their argument is more than just opinion based on the small handful of factors they've personally seen studied are either full of shit, or have done one of the most incredibly deep analyses of a complex massively multi-variable problem ever done. Statistically, it's more likely that they're just full of shit.
Well, given that the AC is absolutely right and that you've jumped to a conclusion based on a misunderstanding of cause and effect and lack of understanding of the importance of confounding factors I'd say that the more likely people that are wrong are your statistics professors and logic professors and whatever textbooks you supposedly read.
Maybe you should've gone to a better school where the teachers and textbooks are actually correct?
Watching this thread of the three of you talking about logic is one of the most painful things I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Yes, the logic is fine, but the fundamental premises being used as starting points are not.
Jane Q Public uses a very simplified example of a dog, and uses that simplified example to try and justify her jumping to a conclusion in a far more complex scenario when the two have absolutely no relationship whatsoever. It's about as valid a logical argument as saying my username is Xest, which is true, thus it must also be true that guns increase crime. Obviously that's completely fucking stupid. She washed away the whole basis of the discussion with "It gets a bit more complicated when the numbers go up but the same principle still holds." which is completely not logic. It's an affront to logical argument.
Runaway1956 used the premise "Time and again, when cities and states make gun laws stricter, crime increases. And, repeatedly, when gun laws are relaxed, there is a short initial period of increased violence, followed by a decidedly downward trend in crime." which is false. In the UK increased restrictions on gun ownership actually show the opposite pattern. The idea that there's any kind of consistency in the evidence that more gun ownership results in less crime is completely and utterly false.
Now you hold this up as an example of impeccable logic, you accuse others of debating only with emotion. Guess what you're doing? Guess why you were willing to turn a blind eye to these blatant gaping holes in their arguments? Because you're not interested in logic, you're interested in emotion.
Throwing up words like logic and coming to potentially incorrect conclusions because of flawed foundations to an argument doesn't suddenly make the argument logical. Realistically there are far too many factors to ever reach a genuine logical conclusion as to the impact of guns, if you're pretending otherwise like you three have then you're simply full of shit.
It's an emotional debate because there's always scope for doubt in any evidence that can be introduced into the discussion. If there was a simple demonstrable way to prove one way or the other the effect of guns then the debate would be over, but no such thing exists, or likely ever can exist. So talking about armouries deterring confrontational crime and the like is just equally meaningless bollocks, especially given we've seen the exact same decrease in the UK of confrontational crimes but instead correlating with less guns.
"You may be right that there are lots of people in the country who have guns. But it would have to be pretty much EVERY person who lives in the countryside, and with "countryside" defined as towns of under 10,000 (approx., the size of London in the Middle Ages) for you to approach your claimed figure of about 6 million guns."
What an arbitrary made up figure. Countryside is anything that isn't city or some other type of terrain like mountains. That's the vast majority of the country. Urban areas make up less than 7% of the UK's land mass, and whilst they contain (including suburbia) 80% of the UK's population, that still leaves 12.8million people living in the actual countryside. Given that many in suburbia also hunt in the countryside, (and even some in the city) I don't know what you find so awkward to believe about it.
"That thing about "cadet hall staff"... are you implying that people are allowed near kids with guns, and not being employed by the armed forces."
Yes exactly. Most are at least ex military to be fair though. There are plenty of CRB checks nowadays though so I don't see what the problem would be. What you should be more concerned about is the poor enforcement of gun licensing such that people who have been flagged as a risk like Derrick Bird can still get shotguns and hunting rifles.
It seems you're one of those Slash idiots I was referring to if you're incapable of reading. RIPA states in plain English that there is a presumption someone hasn't got the key unless the police can prove beyond all reasonable doubt otherwise. What is so hard to grasp about that?
I even quoted the relevant passage, what's so difficult for you? You don't get to just dismiss the law as it's actually written by claiming I'm wrong. The law is the law, I'm sorry it demonstrates very clearly that you have no idea what you are talking about but it is what it is so get over it.
"Having always lived in the UK doesn't give you the position of authority you think it does on the matter. I've been traveling for the last 16 years or so, been to 365 countries....you would probably be shocked at just how misinformed people are about their country of residence."
I'd really love to know how you've been to 365 countries. Even with countries that have been and gone in the last 16 years there haven't been 365 countries to travel to in that time. You're right that being in the UK doesn't give explicit advantage, but it does if like me you actually bother to take the time to research issues in your own country, something you clearly cannot claim to have done given that you are demonstrably wrong, that despite your constant claims otherwise, the law is in direct contradiction to your claims. Given your blatant lie about travelling to countries that don't exist I think it's becoming quite obvious how full of shit you actually are.
"RIPA is bad. The law has been abused, and contrary to what you say, does in fact, in practice, assume that the owner of an encrypted file has access to the key for that encrypted file."
Why are you denying the law says what it says? I've posted the link, I've posted the quote. You're verifiably wrong. It clearly states the accused is understood to have shown they do not have the case unless the prosecution can prove otherwise. That's innocent until proven guilty in it's very essence.
"Reasonable Doubt does not exist in the UK."
Oh shut the fuck up already. Yes it does. Just because you can't interpret a ruling doesn't mean reasonable doubt has magically ceased to exist. Even Cambridge law professors agree you're full of shit:
The Wikipedia article you're desperately clinging on to doesn't even say what you seem to think it does. All it says is that jurors aren't asked explicitly using the term beyond reasonable doubt precisely because it's unclear (you yourself demonstrated in your previous post you don't understand what it means) therefore it's now asked in a clearer manner. The legal standard of beyond reasonable doubt isn't in any way moved or removed by this however - it's simply explained in clearer terms to the jury so that their decisions don't get caught up on philosophical debates about what it means in practice.
"We disagree, so lets leave it at that."
Yes we disagree, because you're completely and utterly wrong but still grasping at straws otherwise. I've been pleasant, I've been straightforward, and I've cited evidence in all my responses. Despite demonstrably showing why you are wrong you insist on continuing to be wrong though, thus I will treat you with the level of idiocy you seem desperate to stoop to.
"Like the appeals notes for the case, and perhaps a legal breakdown (by a solicitor, plenty such breakdowns available) of just why RIPA is bad."
I've already done all the necessary research and provided citations for all my claims. You've done nothing other than deny reality and make some half arsed comments about how somewhere on the net there is some mystical evidence proving you right and proving that the very law itself is somehow wrong, even though that's a logical impossibility. The law is the law, so it is what it is, it cannot both be what it is and something it's not - i.e. what you're claiming it it is.
"While we disagree, it would be nice if you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss my arguments as nonsense conclusions that I'm jumping to."
I'm dismissing them because I live here, have always lived here, and do not see any evidence of the frequency you're claiming. Despite being immersed in the media day in day out because I follow the news constantly and because I've been across the country and met many people. If what you're saying is true, that the problem is widespread, then where is the evidence?
"As for R v Majid, I shall quote from the Wikipedia page on Reasonable Doubt:"
I guess that's the problem with Wikipedia. It's not always right, reading the appeal courts notes I linked tells a very different story.
"The problem with the law is that it is still assuming that the person does have the key. I know that the law is worded to assume the person does not have a key unless it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but in practice that is apparently an easy thing to prove (and perhaps skirt the intention of that clause), based on prosecutions. The law is flawed...it shouldn't have such a clause at all."
Again, where is the evidence? You're taking some nonsense on Wikipedia that contradicts the actual law itself and then throwing out some wishy washy comment about how easy it is to prove in practice. Where in practice has this been shown? No case to date has seen anyone convicted of this law without them either admitting they lied about knowing the password and handing it over eventually (hence falling foul of not honouring the initial request) or people that have done stupid stuff as in my original comment - claimed they don't know it but then had their computer checked by forensicists who could prove they did in fact know and use the password at a time they were claiming they didn't know it only to then admit they knew it and to hand it over hoping for leniency. There have then been a ton of cases where the police dropped the charge precisely because they couldn't prove it. There's not been a single case where anyone has been convicted of that clause of RIPA and still to this day claims they knew it.
"And what constitutes reasonable doubt?"
That's what the original case you spoke of when wrongly claiming reasonable doubt doesn't exist anymore covered - it's not something that is trivially defined, but what is well understood is that it means a high standard of evidence is required, such that no reasonable counter-claim is not realistic. Again as per my original example, it's not realistic to claim you don't know it if you logged in 2 hours after and 2 hours before you were asked twice by police and evidence of that was available.
"Any such law like that should be written to only persecute people if they are known to have a key and refuse to hand it over."
Which is exactly what it does and is exactly what the well established principle of reasonable doubt in law seeks to ensure. If you're arguing that conviction based on guilt beyond reasonble doubt is insufficient then that means every murder law in every country across the globe is now meaningless and that all prosecution for murder might as well be stopped. It's a stupid argument, we can't ever get a 100% accurate conviction rate, but without just giving up with the idea of enforcing any law at all with court convictions then it's the best we have and I see no problem with that standard being applied for something like RIPA's password key clause if it's good enough as a standard for determining guilt for murder convictions and other equally serious crimes.
"Another point, what is the criteria for determining ifi information is encrypted or not? Lets say I have an encrypted partition disguised as a garbage file...they can't prove it is an encrypted volume, but what is to stop them from being sure it is and prosecuting me if they don't hand over they key?"
Stop asking me and start reading the actual law. It's all defined in there. Rather than making excuses as to why it's bad without u
Right but America is in a different position to us. America is a two party state that has converged towards a centre.
The UK was like that, but last election a third party finally got enough votes force a coalition (neither of the usual two opposition parties got a majority).
Now there's another party that is gaining a large share of the vote with distinctly difference far-right views.
Yes you're right if you live in a democracy with two fairly identical incumbents then voting wont change much. If you live in a healthier democracy with a number of well supported parties then voting has much more impact.
Right but PC vs. console controls aside and focussing on just console controllers the XBox 360 controller is IMO the single most comfortable and nicest to use out there.
I use one on my Raspberry Pi with RetroPie to play old Megadrive, SNES, NES, Master System games and so forth for this reason. It's much nicer than trying to play Mario with say a keyboard.
Sometimes these controllers just make more sense, not all the time by any means, but sometimes.
Actually I think the summary is just simply awful and that's the problem here.
From what I understand, up until now, Microsoft has reserved 10% of processing time for Kinect. All they're doing is dropping that reservation.
So if you're doing something like playing a Kinect focussed game that game can still reserve 10% processing time for Kinect to do Kinect properly, it's just that it's optional now such that non-Kinect games are no longer stuck with a 10% reservation for something they'll never use.
So it's not plugging it in or unplugging it that speeds up your system. It's presumably the operating system itself that was forcing the reservation, and now just makes it optional.
"The problem with photographers is yes, police who don't know better and harass photographers. It's actually a big problem and occurs far more frequently than you may realize."
That's the problem, I don't think it does. I think it's newsworthy precisely because it is such an odd thing to happen.
By law photographers have every right to photograph, so it's not as if there is some section enshrined in law that cripples the rights of photographers, simply a training issue amongst some police officers (one that I believe police forces have been informed to resolve) that they aren't aware that people can in fact take photos in public - even of potentially sensitive things. Googling "police harass photographer" highlights far more cases of it in the US for what it's worth.
"Also, the burden of reasonable doubt does not apply in the UK, which is sad. Indeed, R v Majid was overturned due for this very reason."
I've never heard of this case, but I had a look here:
It seems there's absolutely nothing to suggest that what you say is true, merely that there was a procedural error in this specific case. This document seems to suggest the appeal was actually dismissed because the case was strong and despite the judge's mis-step the initial verdict would not have been different regardless.
Fundamentally though, the beyond reasonable doubt clause is actually written directly into this particular clause of RIPA itself, so even if your suggestion were true that this no longer generally applies in the UK, it most definitely applies to this particular provision of RIPA regardless because that's exactly how the law is scripted. See here:
Section 3) b) is the relevant section of the law. It clearly states:
"(3) For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time ifâ"
(a)sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and
(b)the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt."
Note that there is an assumption that the person has shown they have not been in possession of the key unless it is proven beyond all reasonable doubt, thus your assertion that the law relies on good intent is in itself false. The law as written pre-supposes that the defendant has by default shown that they don't have the key - it is up to the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable that they in fact do for a prosecution to succeed.
Which highlights my point, most people slagging off RIPA haven't even bothered to read what it says in practice. Most of the commonly cited issues with the UK aren't what they seem in practice - even the one thing I agree is a problem, proliferation of CCTV, is largely misunderstood based on incorrect assumptions such as that speed cameras are all permanently on and can all stream live feeds, that the same is true of ANPR, and that the oft-cited report about numbers of CCTV cameras in the UK is talking about state cameras when in fact it's folding private (e.g. shop) CCTV into the mix.
As I say I have many problems with the UK but much of those cited as examples of how the UK has "become an authoritarian Orwell fantasy" are completely false. Slashdot just isn't a good place to have rational discussions or gain an understanding of these issues because it rapidly enters batshit crazy territory based on people without a clue jumping to extreme conclusions. Take the many people claiming the right to be forgotten in the EU will allow censorship of the media and rewriting of history for example, the actual draft law includes explicit provisions excluding the media and freedom of expression from it so it doesn't even apply in the way people claim anyway.
It'd just be nice if we could have these discussions on Slashdot based on the facts, not nonsense conclusions people have jumped to.
Well he's right. Honestly you shouldn't consider the JS and PHP documentation as authoritative for any kind of computer science terminology given that both languages are probably the two worst applications of computer science principles going. PHP doesn't even get transitivity right and JS thinks a language is object oriented even if you can only have two out of three fundamental pillars of OO at once.
Which isn't to say I'm necessarily trying to slag those languages off, simply making the point that the rigour of computer science isn't something those languages do well. It's largely a cultural thing with those languages - you look at many PHP and Javascript frameworks for example and some of them try and redefine MVC with arguments like "well MVC isn't well defined so we've decided to redefine it as...". This is nonsense, it's a well defined pattern. What they really mean is "We failed comp. sci. 101 but we're not going to let that stop us writing a framework, we don't totally grasp MVC but we're going to do something that we feel is close enough".
So use those technologies away as much as you wish to, but don't take them as examples of correctness from a comp. sci. point of view.
I can only speak for the UK's Data Protection Act, but I'd assume it's the same elsewhere in Europe. Under the UK's implementation of the European Data Protection Directive dead people aren't covered by the act.
I've posted a few times before but it sounds like you're in a situation where this information is useful to you so I'll repeat this again as you may find it helpful.
The right to be forgotten is not actually law yet, the press has been misreporting the whole situation regarding the Gonzalez case. The Gonzalez case was simply a ruling that Google was in breach of the 1995 European Data Protection directive and has nothing to do with the right to be forgotten. It was a straight up case that companies cannot hold personal data without specific cause or reason. For example, in the UK if you have a county court judgement against you because you defaulted on a debt that becomes public record. Credit reference agencies can take this information and use it when doing credit scoring, so if you apply for a credit card, the bank will request from a CRA your credit data and they'll get this back, but, and here's the thing, they can only return that data for 7 years, after that point whilst it remains in public court records it is deemed to be no longer relevant as it's a past judgement from a long time ago. This is where Google fell foul, they were ignoring the laws on personal data that other companies have to and generally do adhere to, they were simply being held to the same standard as everyone else.
The right to be forgotten is a clause in an update to the European Data Protection Directive first initiated in 2012, still in draft form and not yet law. This helps clarify things a bit more for the internet age. If Google wants a search engine exemption then this is where they should've been paying attention and what they should be lobbying for (and no doubt are now). But I will quote the following from the draft law because I think the confusion over the Gonzalez case and the poor media reporting has muddied what the law actually says, and as a result the internet has gone wild about unfounded conspiracy theories about censorship of the media and rewriting history. The actual law tells a very different tale:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate and legally justified interest to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media."
Ironically, there was a slightly better link than this that provided details of the reasoning and limitations etc. but it seems to have gone missing from Google when I try and dig it out. Conspiracy theory time I think:)
Slashdot Mirror
Please elaborate, I'm intrigued, what exactly do you think it is? An agricultural company? A financial services company? An automotive company?
What about Facebook as a business makes it not an information technology company when it's whole business is built around technology that deals with information?
"It is an indisputable fact that violence goes down in well armed states. It is a fact. You may not like the fact, but it is a fact nonetheless."
Of course, that's why Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan are the most peaceful nations on earth, because of the massive proliferation of arms.
Obviously you're more than just a little bit dumb.
"Regarding your first link, it's unlcear what the chart is depicting. The vertical axis is labelled "Numbers", with each data series corresponding to a different kind of weapon. Are these numbers of weapons? Numbers of violent crimes committed with these weapons? Numbers of homicides committed with these weapons? The chart, on its own, doesn't make that clear."
Sorry, I should've posted the full link. It's the number of recorded incidents:
http://www.publications.parlia...
"In the end, I'm curious as to why there's an apparent discrepancy between the claims made by the WSJ and BBC. It's sad that even with an issue that's so thoroughly documented, it's hard to get a straight answer."
I don't know why either, but personally I'd be inclined to consider that the WSJ article is an opinion piece by someone who seems to have a history of being a bit of an anti-gun control zealot and provides absolutely no citations, whilst the BBC article is an actual news report reporting on the actual ONS figures. It wouldn't be like it's the first time that Dr. Malcolm had just made stuff up on violent crime:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoi...
I know I know, this is an ad-hominem argument against her, but without citations to consider or dispute what is left? Honestly, it's gotten to the point where I almost just discount US sources automatically because the debate there is so polarised and so full of dirty tactics on both sides. I shouldn't of course, because there's the danger in discounting sources of only ending up with one side of the picture, but when it comes down to outright lies (again as is the case with The Daily Mail) it becomes ever harder to give such sources just consideration.
As an aside, the first article looks a bit dodgy too, I only just bothered to read it, i.e.:
"Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself."
It seems oblivious to the fact that that was committed purely with legally owned (i.e. not banned) firearms. You could just as well argue that this case is a reason to further restrict guns rather than the contrary.
"Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action."
This is also not entirely true. The author is restating the defendants claim but the prosecution had other evidence and a counterclaim, such as for example additional ammunition and so forth which he eventually admitted he kept there because he couldn't be bothered to return it to the base gun lockup after doing firearms practice. It was for this reason he was initially convicted, because laziness isn't an excuse for breaking the law - he knew what it was and one has to bear in mind the police only investigated this because someone reported it, so harmless claims of "oh I forgot about it it's no big deal" are obviously not born out given the fact someone was concerned enough to report he was keeping live firearms and live ammunition. It's not as simple a case as his side of the story makes out.
The final conclusion is a bit of a stretch too:
"What to conclude? Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems."
Effectively he's arguing that gun control doesn't work because it doesn't correlate with reduced violent crime. This ignores the fact that it does correlate with reduced gun crime and reduced homicides. I don't think anyone has ever tried to pretend that gun control is a magic wand that fixes all crime even those unrelated to firearms, but it's dishonest of him to deny there isn't positive correlating effects that may suggest that gun crime has a positive impact, but is only part of the solution, and certainly not the whole solution.
I'm not going to pretend that this definitely means gun control in itself fixes gun crime because the whole point of my argument is that there is too many variables to possibly be sure. But fundamentally my point is that there is as much evidence for positive effects (if not more) as there is for negative effects so to suggest it's "obvious" one way or the other and dismissing the existence of another side of the story as the person I was originally referring to did is extremely dishonest.
My gut, based on the statistics I've seen for the UK, and the timing of things however leads me to suspect that gun control doesn't instantly reduce gun crime, but it does create an environment whereby it's easier for the police to remove guns from criminals and eventually reduce gun crime - post ban it looked like it took some time for police to get a handle on how to deal with inner London gun crime, but once they did being able to remove guns from gangs meant it was easier to reduce gun crime than if there was no ban, because without a ban criminals would've just been replacing seized weapons with newly bought ones. That's much harder when the route to acquiring firearms are much more risky. Of course, as I say this is just a suspicion but it seems to play out reasonably - that is, it seems realistic that gun control isn't an instant fix, but combined with effective policing to seize illegally held guns post gun-control it does indeed reduce gun crime. So the mantra of the NRA and it's ilk of "If you ban guns, only criminals have guns" actually seems somewhat true, however there's also a flip side too it - when only criminals have guns, it's much easier to find them and take them off them and to prevent them rearming afterwards.
Will this do?
http://www.publications.parlia...
The graph finishes early, but the trend has continued downwards (i.e. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...)
The problem is the article you cite uses The Daily Mail as it's source, I'm almost inclined to say that automatically makes it wrong, because on average if you take a Daily Mail article and say it's wrong to at least some degree you'll more often be right than not as The Daily Mail exists purely to push a political agenda that often runs against the grain of reality - more recent examples being gay marriage, when the law was going through parliament they published polls saying the majority opposed it, but that ran contrary to every other poll in existence. One of The Daily Mail's past articles (in fact it's the one linked at the bottom of the second article you linked I believe) even conflates crimes and violent crime, so it doesn't even get the absolute most basic comprehension of the numbers right but jumps to conclusions anyway.
Part the issue in comparing firearms offences in the UK is the fact that firearms offence can mean anything from a kid carrying a realistic looking toy gun in public and being told by the police you can't carry realistic looking weapons around, to someone going on a massacre. Whilst firearms themselves are defined in law as non-air weapons - i.e. what most people would see as "proper guns" a firearms offence can involve something that isn't a firearm but looks like one, through to air rifles, through to actual proper guns.
This doesn't contrast well to nations like the US and South Africa where many such offences are kept well away from firearms statistics, but in The Daily Mail's comparisons often ignore this sort of disparity because it doesn't paint the picture they want to paint. Or in other words, many UK firearms offences are actually completely non-violent crimes. Even illegal poaching leads to such offences, for example, carrying a shotgun on private farm land without permission would be an offence under the firearms act.
UK murder rates are even more encouraging now, the UK's homicide rate is below that of nations often seen as some of the most peaceful on earth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
If you don't trust Wikipedia, the World Bank provides the same data, but the presentation is much more awful IMO:
http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
Well yes, that's probably because the accounts you've heard are the same accounts that everyone desperate to try and claim that the UK is an ultra-violent place grasp on to. Unfortunately:
- You need to read the date on the article, even if true it's from 2003 (hint: that's 11 years ago)
- Firearms offences in the UK include air rifles, imitation firearms and so forth, so it's possible for firearms offences to increase whilst actual shootings and violence go down. A kid carrying a realistic immitation pistol or rifle down the high street reported to the police would class as a firearms offence. Few firearms offences actually include discharging of real actual bullets.
- Increases are still trivial for a single year, a 32% increase in firearms murders is listed as a mere 23 cases total so a once in a decade case of family annihilation in a year can massively distort the stats for a single year when compared to the overall trend
- It's the Daily Mail so probably isn't entirely true in the first place. You have to understand that The Daily Mail is probably the least trustworthy paper in the UK, they don't just put a spin on things, they often outright lie about things. It's not uncommon for them to take a number everyone else is reporting on their front page and double it just to make it look like they have some edge to the story that no one else does but then completely fail to justify their figure precisely because it's a lie. As an example, The Daily Mail when trying to defame the government of the time made the claim that the UK is the most violent country in Europe and more violent than the US and South Africa, they did this by comparing crime rates in the UK, against violent crime rates elsewhere. Yes, that's right, they determined things like speeding tickets to be violent crime in the UK but nowhere else.
- Real actual modern stats will help clarify the truth of the matter (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2... or from the previous year and different study http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...). Homicide rates even before these drops (from 2011/2012) show an even more glaring disparity putting the UK below even commonly seen as relatively murder-free nations like Norway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Long story short, the only place that seems to consistently claim the UK is more violent than ever is The Daily Mail, they've been doing this for some time, but official statistics from both police reporting, and the national crime survey, as well as third parties show a completely opposite story. As an aside, official statistics come from an organisation that's independent from government, and that has on numerous occasions criticised serving governments for mis-representing their statistics so it's a very trustworthy organisation. The Daily Mail is pretty much alone in it's claims, and again, given it's propensity to lie I'd rather take multiple sources with much better reputations over an agenda based lie piece.
Unfortunately your typo was indistinguishable from the rest of your stupidity. Given your propensity to lie about most other things you said coupled with the fact you clearly had no idea what you're talking about it's not obvious that you didn't in fact want to pretend that you'd been to 365 countries until it was pointed out to you that that would actually be impossible.
If you really had a leg to stand on in your argument you'd demonstrate why I am wrong, but given that that is impossible because I've posted the actual law as written, and explained that no RIPA password case to date has gone the way you claim it's not surprise you went off on a rant about the UK.
So thank you for confirming that deep down you accept you are wrong, but are just too childish to ever admit it publicly. The right answer is obvious when it's right in front your face, apparently you can't even spot it even then.
The fact you even have to ask that question demonstrates that you're completely out of your depth on this topic.
I can't possibly list them all, but they include things such as the economy/poverty levels, policing efforts, changes in societal attitudes, levels of education, cost of ammunition, criminal justice changes, environmental factors. Inside many of these factors are many sub-factors too which is precisely why it's too complex to resort to simplistic conclusions based on just two out of literally thousands, maybe millions of variables.
You told someone else it's up to those claiming gun control leads to decrease violent crime to prove their case by demonstrating confounding factors break your argument. That's incorrect, it's upto whoever makes the claim to prove their case, whatever side of the argument they're on so yes that includes those like you claiming a simple two variable correlation that ignores confounding factors is proof of something.
I agree it's really interesting. What was particularly surprising in the UK is that crime actually consistently declined during the economic turmoil to the point it's now at it's lowest level in recorded history, which may mean it's at it's lowest level ever.
Most people were expecting an upturn in crime during recession as people became more desperate and policing budgets were slashed but in fact the exact opposite happened.
Perhaps most interestingly is that the current generation of teenagers and early 20 somethings in the UK are also the least criminal ever. The UK had a long problem with binge drinking but the current generation of teenagers seems to have completely foregone it. It could simply therefore be just changes in attitude - it could even be the internet, as kids have become more connected with more outlets than ever for instant entertainment and more ability to speak to people when distressed and share knowledge, understanding and experience different cultures then maybe there's just less tendency to commit crime from that. Current stats show that the most criminal generation in the UK is my generation - that which just about pre-dates the internet.
But it's just a guess, it really could just be a combination of things. We may well never know exactly what single or combination of factors are the biggest cause especially given that recent data shows that most assumptions about it being tied to poverty levels hints that even that may not actually be true.
Except that's not what I did. I cited it as a counter-example to the argument that increased gun control also equals decreased crime. Obviously that's completely false given the fact that the opposite happened in the UK.
Yes it's a very different country and yes there are different variables, and that's exactly the point - gun control correlated against crime levels without taking into account other confounding factors obviously results in meaningless conclusions.
"I agree that these things are hard to get a handle on. So hard that your claim of gun restrictions reducing violence in the UK is as unsupportable as the other comments in the thread. "
I just want to make abundantly clear that again that's not my claim, I'm citing the example of the UK as a correlation that acts as a counter-example to the suggestions that the correlation always goes in the opposite direction. Obviously it doesn't, depending on what subset of data you take there are correlations in both directions, hence why using the correlations at all to imply causation is completely meaningless.
The claim, if I made it, would be unsupportable, but use of it as a counter-example, as I have, is not unsupportable.
"Jane Q Public's argument is sound. If the incidence of X increases while the incidence of Y decreases, X clearly does NOT cause Y. If X causes Y, then when X increases Y must also increase."
No it isn't. What you say is only true, if, and only if there are no confounding factors that have not been taken into account and it's that fundamentally important point that she has completely and utterly avoided dismissing it as not relevant when it's in fact wholly relevant.
You're arguing, as she did, that if we have decreased violent crime in the face of increased gun ownership then it's disproven that increased gun ownership causes an increase in crime. This is completely false because there are many other factors involved and it could in fact be these factors that have resulted in the decrease in crime counter-balancing what would otherwise have been an increase.
If you increase the amount of guns available then it's perfectly plausible that the baseline amount of crime actually goes up, but that there is another completely different factor that is acting against it, such that without any change in gun ownership but with that factor crime would've instead decreased even further, meaning that more guns is still increasing crime, just that the increase is masked by something else causing a decrease such as better proactive policing measures in the same period to deter criminals.
I'm not saying this is what's happening, I have no idea what's happening because there are too many variables in play for you, me, or anyone here on Slashdot to know what the actual effect of gun control is, but I'm highlighting why Jane Q Public's argument is a fallacy with a plausible example.
To claim what you have is true, and to genuinely reach a sound scientific conclusion, you have to completely isolate the possibility of there being any additional outside factors that could've been the actual cause for the decrease in violent crime. Neither of you have done this, so neither of you are adhering to genuinely sound scientific principle but are applying a weak understanding of statistics and logic to reach conclusions that cannot be validly reached based simply on the information you have.
That doesn't contradict anything I've said though, it's just a further example of my underlying point that there are too many confounding factors involved for it to be simple enough to jump to a conclusion based on simple correlation.
His argument was specifically that relaxation of gun control results in decreasing crime (after an initial peak) and that strengthening of gun control correlates with increasing crime. I was merely providing a counterexample, where strengthening of gun control results in decreasing crime, which is enough to act as a proof by counter-example that he is simply wrong, that as you clearly note, it's a far more complex equation than that.
I wasn't trying to get into the argument beyond that because unlike the above I do have at least some grounding in statistics and I know that I couldn't even begin to take into account all of the factors to come to a genuinely valid and logical conclusion. I know what my gut feeling is, but that makes no difference and unlike the folks above I'm not about to try and dress up my gut feeling with arguments that claim to be logically sound, but are demonstrably not.
I don't really have a problem with people stating their gut feeling on an issue and arguing why they believe it's true. I have a problem with people who clearly neither understand logical inference or statistics pretending they do to suggest what is really just their gut feeling has added weight beyond that which it actually does.
As an aside I think you have your figures backwards, it's the US' homicide rate that is 4x higher than the UK's, not vice versa. But regardless, even here you have to take into account so many other factors, what was the relevant difference in increase in police spending? is it simply a natural trend (itself based on numerous factors) that you get diminishing returns from measures to reduce violence the less violent a nation is for example? if lead is a factor, did the UK already have a difference in lead pollutants leaving it less or more scope to see gains from that? As I say, anyone pretending they know what the answer is and are suggesting their argument is more than just opinion based on the small handful of factors they've personally seen studied are either full of shit, or have done one of the most incredibly deep analyses of a complex massively multi-variable problem ever done. Statistically, it's more likely that they're just full of shit.
Well, given that the AC is absolutely right and that you've jumped to a conclusion based on a misunderstanding of cause and effect and lack of understanding of the importance of confounding factors I'd say that the more likely people that are wrong are your statistics professors and logic professors and whatever textbooks you supposedly read.
Maybe you should've gone to a better school where the teachers and textbooks are actually correct?
Watching this thread of the three of you talking about logic is one of the most painful things I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Yes, the logic is fine, but the fundamental premises being used as starting points are not.
Jane Q Public uses a very simplified example of a dog, and uses that simplified example to try and justify her jumping to a conclusion in a far more complex scenario when the two have absolutely no relationship whatsoever. It's about as valid a logical argument as saying my username is Xest, which is true, thus it must also be true that guns increase crime. Obviously that's completely fucking stupid. She washed away the whole basis of the discussion with "It gets a bit more complicated when the numbers go up but the same principle still holds." which is completely not logic. It's an affront to logical argument.
Runaway1956 used the premise "Time and again, when cities and states make gun laws stricter, crime increases. And, repeatedly, when gun laws are relaxed, there is a short initial period of increased violence, followed by a decidedly downward trend in crime." which is false. In the UK increased restrictions on gun ownership actually show the opposite pattern. The idea that there's any kind of consistency in the evidence that more gun ownership results in less crime is completely and utterly false.
Now you hold this up as an example of impeccable logic, you accuse others of debating only with emotion. Guess what you're doing? Guess why you were willing to turn a blind eye to these blatant gaping holes in their arguments? Because you're not interested in logic, you're interested in emotion.
Throwing up words like logic and coming to potentially incorrect conclusions because of flawed foundations to an argument doesn't suddenly make the argument logical. Realistically there are far too many factors to ever reach a genuine logical conclusion as to the impact of guns, if you're pretending otherwise like you three have then you're simply full of shit.
It's an emotional debate because there's always scope for doubt in any evidence that can be introduced into the discussion. If there was a simple demonstrable way to prove one way or the other the effect of guns then the debate would be over, but no such thing exists, or likely ever can exist. So talking about armouries deterring confrontational crime and the like is just equally meaningless bollocks, especially given we've seen the exact same decrease in the UK of confrontational crimes but instead correlating with less guns.
"You may be right that there are lots of people in the country who have guns. But it would have to be pretty much EVERY person who lives in the countryside, and with "countryside" defined as towns of under 10,000 (approx., the size of London in the Middle Ages) for you to approach your claimed figure of about 6 million guns."
What an arbitrary made up figure. Countryside is anything that isn't city or some other type of terrain like mountains. That's the vast majority of the country. Urban areas make up less than 7% of the UK's land mass, and whilst they contain (including suburbia) 80% of the UK's population, that still leaves 12.8million people living in the actual countryside. Given that many in suburbia also hunt in the countryside, (and even some in the city) I don't know what you find so awkward to believe about it.
"That thing about "cadet hall staff" ... are you implying that people are allowed near kids with guns, and not being employed by the armed forces."
Yes exactly. Most are at least ex military to be fair though. There are plenty of CRB checks nowadays though so I don't see what the problem would be. What you should be more concerned about is the poor enforcement of gun licensing such that people who have been flagged as a risk like Derrick Bird can still get shotguns and hunting rifles.
It seems you're one of those Slash idiots I was referring to if you're incapable of reading. RIPA states in plain English that there is a presumption someone hasn't got the key unless the police can prove beyond all reasonable doubt otherwise. What is so hard to grasp about that?
I even quoted the relevant passage, what's so difficult for you? You don't get to just dismiss the law as it's actually written by claiming I'm wrong. The law is the law, I'm sorry it demonstrates very clearly that you have no idea what you are talking about but it is what it is so get over it.
"Having always lived in the UK doesn't give you the position of authority you think it does on the matter. I've been traveling for the last 16 years or so, been to 365 countries....you would probably be shocked at just how misinformed people are about their country of residence."
I'd really love to know how you've been to 365 countries. Even with countries that have been and gone in the last 16 years there haven't been 365 countries to travel to in that time. You're right that being in the UK doesn't give explicit advantage, but it does if like me you actually bother to take the time to research issues in your own country, something you clearly cannot claim to have done given that you are demonstrably wrong, that despite your constant claims otherwise, the law is in direct contradiction to your claims. Given your blatant lie about travelling to countries that don't exist I think it's becoming quite obvious how full of shit you actually are.
"RIPA is bad. The law has been abused, and contrary to what you say, does in fact, in practice, assume that the owner of an encrypted file has access to the key for that encrypted file."
Why are you denying the law says what it says? I've posted the link, I've posted the quote. You're verifiably wrong. It clearly states the accused is understood to have shown they do not have the case unless the prosecution can prove otherwise. That's innocent until proven guilty in it's very essence.
"Reasonable Doubt does not exist in the UK."
Oh shut the fuck up already. Yes it does. Just because you can't interpret a ruling doesn't mean reasonable doubt has magically ceased to exist. Even Cambridge law professors agree you're full of shit:
http://www.crim.cam.ac.uk/rese...
The Wikipedia article you're desperately clinging on to doesn't even say what you seem to think it does. All it says is that jurors aren't asked explicitly using the term beyond reasonable doubt precisely because it's unclear (you yourself demonstrated in your previous post you don't understand what it means) therefore it's now asked in a clearer manner. The legal standard of beyond reasonable doubt isn't in any way moved or removed by this however - it's simply explained in clearer terms to the jury so that their decisions don't get caught up on philosophical debates about what it means in practice.
"We disagree, so lets leave it at that."
Yes we disagree, because you're completely and utterly wrong but still grasping at straws otherwise. I've been pleasant, I've been straightforward, and I've cited evidence in all my responses. Despite demonstrably showing why you are wrong you insist on continuing to be wrong though, thus I will treat you with the level of idiocy you seem desperate to stoop to.
"Like the appeals notes for the case, and perhaps a legal breakdown (by a solicitor, plenty such breakdowns available) of just why RIPA is bad."
I've already done all the necessary research and provided citations for all my claims. You've done nothing other than deny reality and make some half arsed comments about how somewhere on the net there is some mystical evidence proving you right and proving that the very law itself is somehow wrong, even though that's a logical impossibility. The law is the law, so it is what it is, it cannot both be what it is and something it's not - i.e. what you're claiming it it is.
"While we disagree, it would be nice if you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss my arguments as nonsense conclusions that I'm jumping to."
I'm dismissing them because I live here, have always lived here, and do not see any evidence of the frequency you're claiming. Despite being immersed in the media day in day out because I follow the news constantly and because I've been across the country and met many people. If what you're saying is true, that the problem is widespread, then where is the evidence?
"As for R v Majid, I shall quote from the Wikipedia page on Reasonable Doubt :"
I guess that's the problem with Wikipedia. It's not always right, reading the appeal courts notes I linked tells a very different story.
"The problem with the law is that it is still assuming that the person does have the key. I know that the law is worded to assume the person does not have a key unless it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but in practice that is apparently an easy thing to prove (and perhaps skirt the intention of that clause), based on prosecutions. The law is flawed...it shouldn't have such a clause at all."
Again, where is the evidence? You're taking some nonsense on Wikipedia that contradicts the actual law itself and then throwing out some wishy washy comment about how easy it is to prove in practice. Where in practice has this been shown? No case to date has seen anyone convicted of this law without them either admitting they lied about knowing the password and handing it over eventually (hence falling foul of not honouring the initial request) or people that have done stupid stuff as in my original comment - claimed they don't know it but then had their computer checked by forensicists who could prove they did in fact know and use the password at a time they were claiming they didn't know it only to then admit they knew it and to hand it over hoping for leniency. There have then been a ton of cases where the police dropped the charge precisely because they couldn't prove it. There's not been a single case where anyone has been convicted of that clause of RIPA and still to this day claims they knew it.
"And what constitutes reasonable doubt?"
That's what the original case you spoke of when wrongly claiming reasonable doubt doesn't exist anymore covered - it's not something that is trivially defined, but what is well understood is that it means a high standard of evidence is required, such that no reasonable counter-claim is not realistic. Again as per my original example, it's not realistic to claim you don't know it if you logged in 2 hours after and 2 hours before you were asked twice by police and evidence of that was available.
"Any such law like that should be written to only persecute people if they are known to have a key and refuse to hand it over."
Which is exactly what it does and is exactly what the well established principle of reasonable doubt in law seeks to ensure. If you're arguing that conviction based on guilt beyond reasonble doubt is insufficient then that means every murder law in every country across the globe is now meaningless and that all prosecution for murder might as well be stopped. It's a stupid argument, we can't ever get a 100% accurate conviction rate, but without just giving up with the idea of enforcing any law at all with court convictions then it's the best we have and I see no problem with that standard being applied for something like RIPA's password key clause if it's good enough as a standard for determining guilt for murder convictions and other equally serious crimes.
"Another point, what is the criteria for determining ifi information is encrypted or not? Lets say I have an encrypted partition disguised as a garbage file...they can't prove it is an encrypted volume, but what is to stop them from being sure it is and prosecuting me if they don't hand over they key?"
Stop asking me and start reading the actual law. It's all defined in there. Rather than making excuses as to why it's bad without u
Right but America is in a different position to us. America is a two party state that has converged towards a centre.
The UK was like that, but last election a third party finally got enough votes force a coalition (neither of the usual two opposition parties got a majority).
Now there's another party that is gaining a large share of the vote with distinctly difference far-right views.
Yes you're right if you live in a democracy with two fairly identical incumbents then voting wont change much. If you live in a healthier democracy with a number of well supported parties then voting has much more impact.
Right but PC vs. console controls aside and focussing on just console controllers the XBox 360 controller is IMO the single most comfortable and nicest to use out there.
I use one on my Raspberry Pi with RetroPie to play old Megadrive, SNES, NES, Master System games and so forth for this reason. It's much nicer than trying to play Mario with say a keyboard.
Sometimes these controllers just make more sense, not all the time by any means, but sometimes.
Actually I think the summary is just simply awful and that's the problem here.
From what I understand, up until now, Microsoft has reserved 10% of processing time for Kinect. All they're doing is dropping that reservation.
So if you're doing something like playing a Kinect focussed game that game can still reserve 10% processing time for Kinect to do Kinect properly, it's just that it's optional now such that non-Kinect games are no longer stuck with a 10% reservation for something they'll never use.
So it's not plugging it in or unplugging it that speeds up your system. It's presumably the operating system itself that was forcing the reservation, and now just makes it optional.
"The problem with photographers is yes, police who don't know better and harass photographers. It's actually a big problem and occurs far more frequently than you may realize."
That's the problem, I don't think it does. I think it's newsworthy precisely because it is such an odd thing to happen.
By law photographers have every right to photograph, so it's not as if there is some section enshrined in law that cripples the rights of photographers, simply a training issue amongst some police officers (one that I believe police forces have been informed to resolve) that they aren't aware that people can in fact take photos in public - even of potentially sensitive things. Googling "police harass photographer" highlights far more cases of it in the US for what it's worth.
"Also, the burden of reasonable doubt does not apply in the UK, which is sad. Indeed, R v Majid was overturned due for this very reason."
I've never heard of this case, but I had a look here:
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases...
It seems there's absolutely nothing to suggest that what you say is true, merely that there was a procedural error in this specific case. This document seems to suggest the appeal was actually dismissed because the case was strong and despite the judge's mis-step the initial verdict would not have been different regardless.
Fundamentally though, the beyond reasonable doubt clause is actually written directly into this particular clause of RIPA itself, so even if your suggestion were true that this no longer generally applies in the UK, it most definitely applies to this particular provision of RIPA regardless because that's exactly how the law is scripted. See here:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/...
Section 3) b) is the relevant section of the law. It clearly states:
"(3) For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time ifâ"
(a)sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and
(b)the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt."
Note that there is an assumption that the person has shown they have not been in possession of the key unless it is proven beyond all reasonable doubt, thus your assertion that the law relies on good intent is in itself false. The law as written pre-supposes that the defendant has by default shown that they don't have the key - it is up to the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable that they in fact do for a prosecution to succeed.
Which highlights my point, most people slagging off RIPA haven't even bothered to read what it says in practice. Most of the commonly cited issues with the UK aren't what they seem in practice - even the one thing I agree is a problem, proliferation of CCTV, is largely misunderstood based on incorrect assumptions such as that speed cameras are all permanently on and can all stream live feeds, that the same is true of ANPR, and that the oft-cited report about numbers of CCTV cameras in the UK is talking about state cameras when in fact it's folding private (e.g. shop) CCTV into the mix.
As I say I have many problems with the UK but much of those cited as examples of how the UK has "become an authoritarian Orwell fantasy" are completely false. Slashdot just isn't a good place to have rational discussions or gain an understanding of these issues because it rapidly enters batshit crazy territory based on people without a clue jumping to extreme conclusions. Take the many people claiming the right to be forgotten in the EU will allow censorship of the media and rewriting of history for example, the actual draft law includes explicit provisions excluding the media and freedom of expression from it so it doesn't even apply in the way people claim anyway.
It'd just be nice if we could have these discussions on Slashdot based on the facts, not nonsense conclusions people have jumped to.
How is -$83million (AMD) close to $581million (nVidia)?
Well he's right. Honestly you shouldn't consider the JS and PHP documentation as authoritative for any kind of computer science terminology given that both languages are probably the two worst applications of computer science principles going. PHP doesn't even get transitivity right and JS thinks a language is object oriented even if you can only have two out of three fundamental pillars of OO at once.
Which isn't to say I'm necessarily trying to slag those languages off, simply making the point that the rigour of computer science isn't something those languages do well. It's largely a cultural thing with those languages - you look at many PHP and Javascript frameworks for example and some of them try and redefine MVC with arguments like "well MVC isn't well defined so we've decided to redefine it as...". This is nonsense, it's a well defined pattern. What they really mean is "We failed comp. sci. 101 but we're not going to let that stop us writing a framework, we don't totally grasp MVC but we're going to do something that we feel is close enough".
So use those technologies away as much as you wish to, but don't take them as examples of correctness from a comp. sci. point of view.
I can only speak for the UK's Data Protection Act, but I'd assume it's the same elsewhere in Europe. Under the UK's implementation of the European Data Protection Directive dead people aren't covered by the act.
I've posted a few times before but it sounds like you're in a situation where this information is useful to you so I'll repeat this again as you may find it helpful.
The right to be forgotten is not actually law yet, the press has been misreporting the whole situation regarding the Gonzalez case. The Gonzalez case was simply a ruling that Google was in breach of the 1995 European Data Protection directive and has nothing to do with the right to be forgotten. It was a straight up case that companies cannot hold personal data without specific cause or reason. For example, in the UK if you have a county court judgement against you because you defaulted on a debt that becomes public record. Credit reference agencies can take this information and use it when doing credit scoring, so if you apply for a credit card, the bank will request from a CRA your credit data and they'll get this back, but, and here's the thing, they can only return that data for 7 years, after that point whilst it remains in public court records it is deemed to be no longer relevant as it's a past judgement from a long time ago. This is where Google fell foul, they were ignoring the laws on personal data that other companies have to and generally do adhere to, they were simply being held to the same standard as everyone else.
The right to be forgotten is a clause in an update to the European Data Protection Directive first initiated in 2012, still in draft form and not yet law. This helps clarify things a bit more for the internet age. If Google wants a search engine exemption then this is where they should've been paying attention and what they should be lobbying for (and no doubt are now). But I will quote the following from the draft law because I think the confusion over the Gonzalez case and the poor media reporting has muddied what the law actually says, and as a result the internet has gone wild about unfounded conspiracy theories about censorship of the media and rewriting history. The actual law tells a very different tale:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate and legally justified interest to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media."
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...
Ironically, there was a slightly better link than this that provided details of the reasoning and limitations etc. but it seems to have gone missing from Google when I try and dig it out. Conspiracy theory time I think :)