Like what? If you mean you can't go and break into someone's garden and take pictures of them naked through their bedroom window to sell to the tabloid press, then yes, we're absolutely awful in this respect. What a shame.
Other than that apart from some police officers who got it wrong in terms of letting people take pictures where they actually could I don't really see what the deal is. I've been able to take pictures just fine in everything from military bases, to the London tube, to parliament. I'm not sure what sort of pictures you want to take but aren't allowed to.
"and journalists"
We're not exactly top of the list but the UK is listed in the press freedom index well above countries like the US and Japan and also above even some European neighbours like France. Given the liberties journalists have taken with their freedoms such as spying on the telephone messages of a serving prime minister and deleting voicemails on the phone of a girl who was missing and being searched for giving parents false hope she was alive I don't think they have much to complain about. Journalists here seem to get plenty of freedom and those who have the most - print media actually do the worst reporting. By far most quality reporting comes on TV which is actually more regulated - certainly it took the more tightly regulated TV industry to break the Jimmy Savile scandal for example.
"ridiculous laws such as going to jail if you forget an encryption key..."
You're obviously not that familiar with the UK, because you're parroting the kind of nonsense that only people who read Slashdot but don't know much about the country would parrot now. RIPA states very clearly (and yes, I've read the actual law itself) that to get someone jailed for claiming to have lost a password you have to be able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that they haven't in fact forgotten it. The only way this has been used therefore is in cases where people have outright refused to hand it over, or where someone said in police interview they'd forgotten it, went home, accessed the information, and were raided under warrant shortly after only for the police to find log information showing they'd used the password yet were still claiming they've forgotten it, at that point it's hard to argue they weren't simply withholding it given that they'd clearly used it in a 2 hour or whatever window between denials of knowing it. You can't go to jail if you've actually forgotten your encryption key, because if you've actually genuinely forgotten it then there's no way the police can prove beyond reasonable doubt that you do in fact know it is there?
"Prison is not meant to be primarily a deterrent, but a way to rehabilitate if possible."
And this changes that how exactly? A life sentence in the UK just means a minimum term will be specified and that can be increased if the person hasn't shown signs of change or if they break their parole. It doesn't mean you spend your entire life in jail, few life sentences end up with people jailed for more than 10 years. This means we still have longer sentences than places like Norway but overall we still have one of the most liberal justice systems in the world in this respect.
A whole life order is the instrument used for someone who must stay in jail for their whole life, and this tends to be reserved for the most extreme cases such as serial killers. There are less than 50 of these in place, in a country with a population of just under 65 million that's not particularly a big deal.
I agree we have a lot of problems, GCHQ is out of control and we should never have gotten involved in the NSA spying. But even the CCTV issue is becoming less relevant since the current government placed curbs on it and many councils and police services who ran the CCTV networks have now shut many of them down.
I don't really like my country for what it's worth, I think it's full of ignorant xenophobes and people with horrendously selfish attitudes, couple
"I think you've missed the point here. If I post information explaining why Mr X shouldn't be trusted that's my information. Mr X can request Google to remove my site from their index by providing proof that he is Mr X. At no point does Google have to talk to me about it."
It depends what exactly you post. If you're just posting an opinion piece then yes that's your information. If you start posting his address, phone number and so forth then you're posting his personal data and that's what he can have removed.
"The whole scheme provides an extra-legal mechanism to censor the web."
Only to the extent he can censor personal data, that's all. It's just a mechanism to ensure you're not hounded by spammers or have decision made against you based on old outdated information. You seem to think it's more sinister than that but that's not the case. The European data protection directive only applies to personal data, not opinion pieces, literature and so forth and even then it only applies if there's no public interest defence and so forth.
That is regulated, that's the point. Credit reference agencies can only use this data going back between about 5 and 8 years depending on European jurisdiction in question (7 years in the UK).
The question is why Google should be given an exemption that credit reference agencies are not - the ability to allow decisions to be made on data that is, under current law, deemed to be no longer relevant.
I think there's a fair argument for search engine exemption but it has to be well thought through - if a search engine is exempt from the ban on profiting off this data, then does this mean CRAs can bypass the law by just linking Google search into their responses?
This is the problem, the law is already clear on this sort of data but Google has been ignoring it all this time, hence why they lost the court case - there is no legal exemption for search engines right now and they didn't bother to lobby for one, they just decided to ignore the law and got fucked as a result.
"Is it evil to refuse to delete information about a person's public comments or valid criminal record?"
That depends on the definition of valid doesn't it? Many countries believe in rehabilitation and it's not uncommon for criminal convictions to not have to be declared after a certain period of time.
In the case of Mr Gonzales which triggered all this he was asking for removal of a record of bad credit that even credit reference agencies would no longer legally be allowed to use because it was deemed to be no longer relevant.
I don't think anyone really seriously disputes the idea that uptodate and publicly relevant information should be available, such as someone serving a sentence for murder or whatever, but the argument beyond that comes down to a battle between those who believe in rehabilitation, and those who believe that allowing rehabilitation by letting people scrub the record clean once rehabilitated is censorship and that preventing such censorship is more important than allowing people a second chance.
If it's about secret trials for terrorism then America still trumps Britain to an even greater extent - they just skip them and go for summary execution, or abduction to black sites. Secret trials would actually be a step up for many terrorism suspects compared to what the US currently does, though I understand Obama has tried to justify this by claiming all such actions are carried out after consulting legal advice, so it's possible that they do carry out secret trials, albeit presumably without a civilian jury when deciding whether to send a hellfire from a reaper down a suspect's spine or not.
"should some random dude be able to remove _my_ information that I _want_ to be available?"
I don't know if you were implying otherwise, but it's probably worth making it explicitly clear that they can't easily do so, because Google require proof of ID to honour a request.
People are doing something, they're voting against the main parties.
The problem is in the process they're leaning towards the lures of the far right like UKIP with it's populist lies.
I find it incredible that the three main parties are running round like headless chickens screaming "Oh my god, we're losing votes to the far right, how do we stop this disease in our society!" yet remain completely oblivious to the fact that this sort of shit is exactly why people are flocking away from them en-masse.
I want them to change course not simply because things like this sicken me as they did during Brown era authoritarianism, but because the fact they're pushing people into the arms of the far right is even more disturbing.
Did you miss the Snowden revelations as to how US companies are being pressured into things? how the whole system of oversight of the NSA's activity works?
"Sorry regarding your SWT versus Swing example, you are clearly wrong."
How exactly? Please elaborate, saying someone is wrong doesn't magically make it so.
"It does not matter how I achieve a platform conform L&F: may it be a Skin or a native call."
Of course it does. If you're just making native calls to the OS' windowing API(s) like Win32, or MFC on Windows or similar on other platforms then you're just using the methods to render UI components that the OS does which means it is by definition rendered to the standard of the OS. If however you use a skin then it relies on you being able to replicate every single element of the underlying OS, which is something that to date, has never been achieved.
"And please stop turning words around. A programming language is not a platform, nor a technology, so your accusion of 'abysmal english comprehension' is... well, you insult yourself by continuing to argue."
Is there something wrong with you? seriously? I didn't say a programming language was a platform, I said a runtime for a language such as the JVM or the CLR is a platform - it's the execution environment that is the platform. A programming language is however a technology, stop trying to pretend your abysmal understanding of the English language somehow reflects the actual meaning of terms in English, it doesn't. I respect people who make efforts to speak in their non-native language, but not if they start demanding they're right when they misunderstand things. Sorry, but every single English dictionary says you are wrong.
"Sorry, read your old posts and stop insulting my or your own intelligence."
I think you're doing that all by yourself by implying well defined English terms are incorrect, and inventing arguments that were never even made. You don't need me to help you.
I guess we are following the Americans with their secret courts afterall. I was hoping we would avoid this.
I don't even understand the rationale behind it, the whole thing has to be held in secret because even naming the defendants would risk national security, but if it can't be held in secret and the defendants are named the case has to be dropped? So what's to stop the defendants or their family going to the media to say they're the defendants to get the case against them dropped? It doesn't make any sense.
At least it's still a jury trial if nothing else, but it begs the question as to how anyone outside the system can verify the jury isn't rigged.
"Your list does a lot of double-counting. What is the difference between a clay pigeon shooter and a competition shooter on which basis you count them separately?"
Because clay pidgeon shooting is not always about competition, sometimes it's just the fun of blowing things out the sky. Competition shooting can involve static or popup target shooting and not clay pidgeons. They're often not the same thing, the overlap is minimal.
"Rabbits etc (extremely rare)"
Sorry, I'm confused, are you saying rabbit hunting is extremely rare? are you actually serious? have you ever ventured into the British country side? You couldn't manage an hour walk without spotting someone whose been hunting rabbits. I could go for a walk from my house right now and find you someone hunting or returning from hunting rabbit. Most people who hunt rabbit do so either because it's one of the easiest animals to find that can be legally shot under the guise of pest control and they enjoy hunting live animals rather than target shooting or because they simply want rabbit for themselves. I agree there are few companies who hunt rabbit on a commercial scale, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who hunt rabbit for private use or enjoyment.
"Farmers I covered ; a good number have one or two guns ; many don't have any, but do have a friend."
Actually just about every farmer with livestock, and even the farm hands will have at least one gun, because it's the quickest way to put down a fatally injured animal without having it suffer until a vet can turn up.
"So you're implying that their younger colleagues are allowed (or even required) to own guns at home?"
No I'm saying some cadet hall staff will bring private rifles to let the cadets have a go at shooting. That's not the same as not returning an army owned L98 or similar (I don't even know if the military own any.22 calibre rifles directly, possibly for training, but that'd be it). I purposely left off military and police owned firearms as they're not under private ownership. Many cadet leaders aren't even in the military, some never even were, so I don't know why you'd even try and tally them against military personnel.
It sounds more than anything like you really don't know much about countryside life in your own country as much as anything. Perhaps when you do venture into it you just drive through it? Try going for a walk in the countryside sometime, you'll be surprised. If you're not doing that you're oblivious to guns because as I said, having them out on display would be an offence. It's an offence to have them out even on public footpaths but given that the police rarely venture out of urban areas or suburbia it's routinely done.
"We are talking about UIs, not code for the data model. Hence the term "platform". For non UI C++/Swift code the question of the platform is of nearly no concern (except the size of int etc.) And your terminology is wrong again, swift is not a technology, it is a programming language."
I don't know what you're talking about, but I and everyone else weren't just talking about UIs, we were talking about whole applications of which the UI is just a part. A platform consists of more than just it's UI. The term platform can encompass everything from the runtime, to the whole OS, to even the hardware itself, but in this context we were talking about software platforms so down to the OS level primarily. Oh and yes, Swift is a technology, programming languages are a type of technology. Technology is a very generic term, an example definition direct from Google:
"the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry."
I don't know if you have abysmal English and are struggling to say what you're thinking and are coming out with something that's completely nonsense, or if you don't know the topic or what, but you're not making much sense at all given all this.
"No I'm not mixing Swing with SWT."
Then you're simply wrong. Swing uses themes that try to closely represent the OS in question, whereas SWT uses JNI to make calls to the native OS UI functionality. Swing's themes are not identical to the underlying OS UI and there are clear differences that stand out like a sore thumb.
"HÃf? Why should swing not offer that? Ofc it does, that's the point of it."
No it doesn't. It tries, but some of the components are quite different to their standard counterparts. Maybe you're getting confused with SWT?
"That is impossible in the iOS versus OS X case anyway so even more my point: Swift isa new language and not a platform."
Incorrect. Both platforms support C++. You can easily write C++ code that's platform agnostic and compiles on either platform.
Your home page says you're an OO mentor, how can you mentor in OO and not grasp the basic concepts of code separation and reusable code?
And yes, I know Swift is a new language and not a platform, are you having a discussion with yourself or something as I didn't say otherwise. I said iOS and MacOS are platforms, I said Swift is a technology. A new one.
""Hunting" : the only two variants that happen in this country are fishing and fox-hunting"
Rabbits, pidgeons, squirrels, pheasants, grouse amongst others are all commonly hunted with guns also.
Some common gun owners:
- Farmers
- Animal control (badgers were recently hunted in trials with contracted hunters)
- Army/Navy/Airforce cadet leaders (.22 rifles are commonly used in weekly meets)
- Private hunters hunting for personal reasons
- Competition shooters
- Clay pidgeon shooters
- Vets
- Zookeepers
You don't see them often in the UK because we don't have a problem with insecurity about our ability to defend ourselves without a firearm like Americans do, coupled with the fact it's illegal to just walk around with one in public places anyway.
I don't know where you live, but I live in a rural area of England, and I regularly walk into people with guns whilst walking the dogs so whilst the stat may be surprising for a city slicker it's probably less so if you live and walk rurally.
Gun ownership laws are actually pretty lax when it comes to shotguns and hunting rifles, that's why crackpots like Derrick Bird and Raoul Moat were able to get hold of them (though I believe the one Raoul used had an illegal modification to make it a sawn off shotgun so although he didn't acquire it legally it was originally acquired legally by a friend).
Another fact people are often unaware of are the age requirements, I believe that you can, or at least until very recently could own a gun at a very young age too - I believe there are records of even 6 year olds owning guns.
Part the problem you're probably facing is that closures in Javascript are basically broken by the fact you can't trivially explicitly pass by value or pass by reference. This results in some non-obvious variable capture results that you don't see in many other languages because they're much better designed. The only way to work around them is indeed to use horrendous hacks, to, for example, force creation of a new scope which as you say absolutely destroys readability. See here for example, note that jQuery alleviates some of the issues at least by providing wrappers that hide much of such uglyness:
In languages with more sane closure support you can cut out a good few lines of code and a bunch of ugly syntax too from the example there.
I don't know so much about Perl, but Javascript at least, don't let it put you off anything, it's rarely an example of a language that does anything much well which isn't to say it doesn't work, but that it just inherently forces less readable code than many other languages.
"All Swing (Java) Applications I worked on are just fine under the targeted platforms (Mac Os X, Linux, Windows)."
To you yes, but for the end user it's a different story. They like the familiarity of their standard UI elements and Swing doesn't offer that.
"Bottom line I really wonder "who cares"? I never met one who actually cared."
Lots of people, if you have interaction with end users you'll see it, it's prolific. Many of them are horrified by even slight differences from the norm let alone when differences result in requirement of slightly different usage patterns.
If you're doing internal work you can normally get away with slightly crap UIs (though even there it'll raise eyelids), but if you're selling a product it's just tacky to give someone a half-arsed UI because you couldn't be bothered to make something that fits the platform. It's what makes your software lose out against the competition.
"It is neither a new technology nor a new platform: it is a simple programming language. Targeted for iOS and Mac OS X and you can bet an iOS App written with that language wont run on Mac OS X and vice verse."
A programming language is a technology so it doesn't make sense to say it's a new programming language but not a new technology, and how are iOS and MacOS X not platforms? I didn't say they were new. I just made the point that if a platform decides to go down the route of rejecting portability of all your code (as Windows Phone 7 did) then just don't waste your time with it. Focus on platforms where you can carry across the bulk of the code that makes up most applications that tends to be platform agnostic, they'll soon change their way to cater to portability of at least some of your code, just like Microsoft had to with Windows Phone 8.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, the promise of developing a UI once and having it just work right everywhere is one that's never been realised.
I think anyone looking for this is probably asking the wrong question when they say "So how do I write a cross platform UI now?".
I think the best solution for the problem is to write your data and logic libraries in a portable manner and, write the UI that consumes them in a platform specific technology. In practice that probably means write your libraries in C++ and then consume them with a platform specific UI technology like say WPF in Windows.
So the real question you should be asking is "Can this new technology interoperate with my existing C++ libraries?". If it can't, then just do not bother supporting that platform. This is something Microsoft learnt the hard way and hence why they started supporting exactly this with Windows Phone 8 - they were coming from a low point in the market anyway so why would anyone waste time developing for Windows when they couldn't even carry their shared iOS/Android libraries across?
The battle is already lost on a technology for good cross platform UI development as it was never practical when we have so many divergent UIs. The battle instead is about making sure code that is platform neutral can be carried between platforms and consumed by platform specific technologies.
Um no, that's the exact opposite of reality. British crime and violence rates have been falling for years, and they're now at their lowest point in recorded history. So you'd have had a good argument if your underlying premise wasn't completely wrong:
"Which country was it that a soldier was beheaded in broad daylight in the middle of the street?"
Not the one whose marathon runners were blown to bits at least and who had thousands of civilians killed by airliners being flown into a building. Nor the one where school children and university students are often gunned down. No that's the country where people just get their face eaten in broad daylight instead:
"Which country is doing it's best to achieve the total surveillance regime of 1984."
America, why? Did you miss the Snowden revelations or something? Oh you're talking about that long out of date report on the number of CCTV cameras in the UK? Don't you know that places in America with high population density actually have more cameras per head of population than equivalent places in the UK? The only reason America as a whole has less is because vast swathes of America are redneck towns where there's nothing worth stealing anyway. That doesn't stop the NSA harvesting every bit of information available there anyway though.
"Which country did we wisely give the boot to more than 200 years ago."
Who knows, it can't have been Britain given that we have a better education system, a better healthcare system, less crime, less violent crime, less murders, and higher levels of personal happiness.
Well, I suppose it could've been Britain if you're a criminal who likes being sick with a high chance of being beaten or murdered and is poorly educated and consistently unhappy. I suppose that would explain the high level of ignorance and falsehoods you've just managed to post in only a handful of sentences.
But I guess when you live in a country with as many problems as America you've got to try and justify your inaction somehow. It's okay I guess if it makes you feel better, keep telling yourself everything is okay as if that'll somehow fix the problem. Of course, in doing this you've missed the most important questions I asked. How exactly is widespread gun ownership in the US protecting your freedoms given their clear erosion? How did countries like Libya where citizens were banned from having guns rise up and overthrow their dictator if they didn't have guns? Both these things conflict directly with your argument and show how completely wrong it is, but you've avoided answering them instead going off on a rant about the UK because you know that these questions highlight the more simple fact that you are wrong to equate guns with freedom.
"Look, this isn't even a contentious point. Try it for yourself! PHP doesn't behave any differently here than other languages!"
You're still just making yourself look sillier and sillier. Most those conversions don't even work in other languages, there's not even a valid cast you can use in many cases precisely for the reason it doesn't make sense. It's kind of hard to try it in other languages when you can't even get to the point of working code in other languages.
Where you can cast in other languages in a manner where there's not a direct translation you get data loss. I'm not really sure why you find this so difficult to understand, I did think you were coming from a more academic background and your problem was lack of practical experience but it's not even that is it? you don't even have CS101 level knowledge, you're just outright inexperienced full stop.
"It's perfectly logical, as the author of your beloved nonsense article explains!"
It's not logical, because it evaluates in a manner that goes against all norms. This is like ignoring the standard order of operation in mathematics, it's like taking an equation like 2 + 7 * 5 - 4 and getting something other than 33. Yes you could evaluate it a different way, but only if you're utterly retarded and don't want to work in a way that the whole of the rest of the world works making you incredibly unhelpful and coming up with results that any informed and intelligent person would deem "wrong".
But given that's all you could really even begin to try and dispute, and yet again still failed, I shall take it that you've finally accepted deep down that you're wrong, even though you're too pathetic to ever openly admit it. You obviously couldn't even begin to find any argument on the other points, which means you finally accept that you're completely wrong to say the article is nearly all wrong. Obviously it's not, because you couldn't dispute it further once your lack of knowledge was explained to you.
Still I guess your answer is in regardless, you chose not to listen. You chose to become a wilful liar, rather than an informed individual. I guess that says all that needs to be said about you.
"I'm curious as to which one of my claims you think is extraordinary? What "established fact" am I "railing against"?"
The "PHP isn't badly designed" claim.
"Wrong! == is transitive provided you're not mixing types."
Exactly, so it's not transitive then. This is a dynamic language, so if you take your view that you shouldn't mix types with it then it's still broken because you can't mix types with one of it's operators. That means it's bad design whichever way you spin it.
"You'll find that (after doing the casting yourself) that == is not transitive between types in those languages either!"
I think you're confusing data loss with transitivity. These are two separate concepts that to the uneducated mind like yours would indeed appear confusing.
Oh and you missed one:
"== converts to numbers when possible (123 == "123foo"⦠although "123" != "123foo"), which means it converts to floats when possible. So large hex strings (like, say, password hashes) may occasionally compare true when theyâ(TM)re not. Even JavaScript doesnâ(TM)t do this."
Onto the follow on:
"This one is a bit debatable. It could be a bug, or intentional behavior as it is often desirable to ignore leading zeros when converting a string to a number. In either case, it's well-documented."
It's also bad design because it's not consistent.
"Just like Java. What did he expect? If it behaved differently, he might have a reason to complain!"
Except Java doesn't even have an === operator. Presumably you mean it's == operator, and that's widely criticised and hence why C#'s operator overloading was often cited as one of it's superior features compared to Java. The fact it's bad design in Java doesn't somehow make it good design in PHP.
"Oh, he's just a moron. Sorry, is the author just confused about what objects are and what the purpose of == is? Because the only one confused here seems to be him!"
No he's saying lack of consistency is bad design. It is.
"Total fail. The claim here is that Sorting is nondeterministic. This is laughably false (as he unwittingly admits after the semi-colon!). Maybe he just doesn't know what that term means? You'll also note the type conversion which, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he missed. It seems dynamic languages confuse him quite a bit."
No, it seems the importance of the mathematical property of transitivity confuses you. For someone that claims to be from an academic background you obviously never studied a moment of mathematics, especially as related to computability. If you had, you'd understand the point made here, which you don't.
"How would this bad?"
How would it be bad? Well it just doesn't work. You can fairly argue that you shouldn't do this, but if you shouldn't do it then it shouldn't fail silently, it should fail loudly. It's another bit of poor design that allows a developer to accidentally write broken code without ever knowing about it. Other languages either implement things more sanely, or fail loudly. Bad design.
"Again, how is this bad?"
Well what's the rationale behind it? A language just doing arbitrary things that may or may not make sense is bad design. Again, they should do something that makes sense, or if they can't do something that makes sense then fail loudly so it can be fixed.
""123""0123" returns false. I see you also didn't bother to check even single-line examples, eh? (On the author: Again, wasn't he paying attention to himself earlier?)"
You've got a few like this, where you "fact checked". You'd look less like a ranting lunatic if when you did your fact checking you checked the version of PHP available at the time the article was written. It's not a living document. A number of things have been fixed off the back of that article and the fact this is true only goes to prove he was right in the first place.
"Despite the craziness above, and the explicit rejection of Perlâ(TM)s pairs of string and numeric operators, PHP doe
You all have that right in America, to go out and arm yourself, but you're not are you? In contrast, countries like the UK with strong gun control laws have actually become more liberal without any hint of an armed uprising - this government has actually decreased surveillance powers (through changes to RIPA) and ended up blocking secret courts and so forth There's still a hell of a long way to go but the point is this - the trend is reversing here without easy access to guns, if guns bring freedom why is America in such an unstoppable downward spiral? why is the UK in reverse back towards a more liberal culture?
If guns are necessary for freedom how did the Libyans break rise up against Gaddaffi? the Syrian's against Assad? none of these societies allowed people to be armed but it didn't stop them.
So at the end of the day, the cry of guns and freedom is complete nonsense. Gun control law has nothing to do with freedom as you have some of the lax gun controls in the world coupled with a population more easily able to afford them and with easy access to them but it's not helped you in the slightest has it? You can gain greater freedom without widespread gun ownership, and widespread gun ownership doesn't in any way give you freedom, so why even make that argument? It's obviously wrong and we have the case studies to prove it.
It's not necessarily the case that when someone is convicted of something, that they actually did something illegal in practice.
Otherwise there'd be no such concept of a mistrial. You wouldn't have say, a 4% rate of innocents getting killed on death row. Just because someone has been convicted something does not inherently mean they did something illegal.
In this particular case the judge was a member of a music industry lobby group. In any sane legal jurisdiction the case would've been thrown out on this as a clear conflict of interest whether or not the judge actually let that sway his decision or not. It wasn't however because of the apparent corruption in the Swedish legal system. The fact this didn't happen suggests there's a very high chance that these guys did indeed do nothing illegal, but the powers that be wanted them convicted of something regardless.
You only have to look at the nonsense surrounding the Assange case "Oh we can't interview in a foreign country (even though we've done exactly that before), he just has to come here!" to see that the Swedish justice system has been subverted by American interests.
At the end of the day I'm not the one making extraordinary claims, my claims are well grounded, my claims are backed up by well thought through and justified articles like the fractal article.
On the other side of the discussion we have you, a crackpot who seems to rail against established fact, who rails against well written articles on the topic but who still cannot prove any of what he claims. You say pick a section, okay, I said you can have the whole article to make things easier for you, as that meant you could pick anything but despite me making it easier for you you're still using this as an excuse, so I pick the "Operators" section.
Of course this is already a section that you've been proven wrong on time and time again, but let's see you continue to be wrong. More than anything I'm just intrigued to see how you spin it now that I'm playing the game the way you want it to be played and still get it wrong.
Why oh why do people like you insist on linking that Daily Mail article? It's such a pathetic act of desperation. Ignoring the fact The Daily Mail was wrong in the first place in it's interpretation of the stats (which is basically par for the course of ever Daily Mail article referencing stats) and giving you the benefit of doubt for the moment, that article is from 2001, that's more than 10 years old. Violent crime in the UK has been in free fall over this period and year on year keeps finding itself at the lowest point it's ever been in recorded history.
" But, disarming the public never makes the public any safer. It only makes it safer for GOVERNMENT TO OPPRESS THE PEOPLE!!"
Well again you're wrong, and demonstrably so, but ignoring that for the moment the flip side of your argument is that you're implying that arming people makes the public more free. Are you saying that with a straight face given the revelations by Snowden that you're the most invasively surveilled and profiled state on the planet? with secret courts? detention without trial? summary executions? Are you really actually serious?
Compare that to countries like Egypt, Libya, and Syria where gun ownership was banned by the dictators but they still managed to rise up and free themselves and you'll surely begin to realise how stupid your argument actually is.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you're exposing personal data and have no public interest defence.
"very poor rights for photographers"
Like what? If you mean you can't go and break into someone's garden and take pictures of them naked through their bedroom window to sell to the tabloid press, then yes, we're absolutely awful in this respect. What a shame.
Other than that apart from some police officers who got it wrong in terms of letting people take pictures where they actually could I don't really see what the deal is. I've been able to take pictures just fine in everything from military bases, to the London tube, to parliament. I'm not sure what sort of pictures you want to take but aren't allowed to.
"and journalists"
We're not exactly top of the list but the UK is listed in the press freedom index well above countries like the US and Japan and also above even some European neighbours like France. Given the liberties journalists have taken with their freedoms such as spying on the telephone messages of a serving prime minister and deleting voicemails on the phone of a girl who was missing and being searched for giving parents false hope she was alive I don't think they have much to complain about. Journalists here seem to get plenty of freedom and those who have the most - print media actually do the worst reporting. By far most quality reporting comes on TV which is actually more regulated - certainly it took the more tightly regulated TV industry to break the Jimmy Savile scandal for example.
"ridiculous laws such as going to jail if you forget an encryption key..."
You're obviously not that familiar with the UK, because you're parroting the kind of nonsense that only people who read Slashdot but don't know much about the country would parrot now. RIPA states very clearly (and yes, I've read the actual law itself) that to get someone jailed for claiming to have lost a password you have to be able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that they haven't in fact forgotten it. The only way this has been used therefore is in cases where people have outright refused to hand it over, or where someone said in police interview they'd forgotten it, went home, accessed the information, and were raided under warrant shortly after only for the police to find log information showing they'd used the password yet were still claiming they've forgotten it, at that point it's hard to argue they weren't simply withholding it given that they'd clearly used it in a 2 hour or whatever window between denials of knowing it. You can't go to jail if you've actually forgotten your encryption key, because if you've actually genuinely forgotten it then there's no way the police can prove beyond reasonable doubt that you do in fact know it is there?
"Prison is not meant to be primarily a deterrent, but a way to rehabilitate if possible."
And this changes that how exactly? A life sentence in the UK just means a minimum term will be specified and that can be increased if the person hasn't shown signs of change or if they break their parole. It doesn't mean you spend your entire life in jail, few life sentences end up with people jailed for more than 10 years. This means we still have longer sentences than places like Norway but overall we still have one of the most liberal justice systems in the world in this respect.
A whole life order is the instrument used for someone who must stay in jail for their whole life, and this tends to be reserved for the most extreme cases such as serial killers. There are less than 50 of these in place, in a country with a population of just under 65 million that's not particularly a big deal.
I agree we have a lot of problems, GCHQ is out of control and we should never have gotten involved in the NSA spying. But even the CCTV issue is becoming less relevant since the current government placed curbs on it and many councils and police services who ran the CCTV networks have now shut many of them down.
I don't really like my country for what it's worth, I think it's full of ignorant xenophobes and people with horrendously selfish attitudes, couple
"I think you've missed the point here. If I post information explaining why Mr X shouldn't be trusted that's my information. Mr X can request Google to remove my site from their index by providing proof that he is Mr X. At no point does Google have to talk to me about it."
It depends what exactly you post. If you're just posting an opinion piece then yes that's your information. If you start posting his address, phone number and so forth then you're posting his personal data and that's what he can have removed.
"The whole scheme provides an extra-legal mechanism to censor the web."
Only to the extent he can censor personal data, that's all. It's just a mechanism to ensure you're not hounded by spammers or have decision made against you based on old outdated information. You seem to think it's more sinister than that but that's not the case. The European data protection directive only applies to personal data, not opinion pieces, literature and so forth and even then it only applies if there's no public interest defence and so forth.
That is regulated, that's the point. Credit reference agencies can only use this data going back between about 5 and 8 years depending on European jurisdiction in question (7 years in the UK).
The question is why Google should be given an exemption that credit reference agencies are not - the ability to allow decisions to be made on data that is, under current law, deemed to be no longer relevant.
I think there's a fair argument for search engine exemption but it has to be well thought through - if a search engine is exempt from the ban on profiting off this data, then does this mean CRAs can bypass the law by just linking Google search into their responses?
This is the problem, the law is already clear on this sort of data but Google has been ignoring it all this time, hence why they lost the court case - there is no legal exemption for search engines right now and they didn't bother to lobby for one, they just decided to ignore the law and got fucked as a result.
"Is it evil to refuse to delete information about a person's public comments or valid criminal record?"
That depends on the definition of valid doesn't it? Many countries believe in rehabilitation and it's not uncommon for criminal convictions to not have to be declared after a certain period of time.
In the case of Mr Gonzales which triggered all this he was asking for removal of a record of bad credit that even credit reference agencies would no longer legally be allowed to use because it was deemed to be no longer relevant.
I don't think anyone really seriously disputes the idea that uptodate and publicly relevant information should be available, such as someone serving a sentence for murder or whatever, but the argument beyond that comes down to a battle between those who believe in rehabilitation, and those who believe that allowing rehabilitation by letting people scrub the record clean once rehabilitated is censorship and that preventing such censorship is more important than allowing people a second chance.
So yes it's not black and white.
If it's about secret trials for terrorism then America still trumps Britain to an even greater extent - they just skip them and go for summary execution, or abduction to black sites. Secret trials would actually be a step up for many terrorism suspects compared to what the US currently does, though I understand Obama has tried to justify this by claiming all such actions are carried out after consulting legal advice, so it's possible that they do carry out secret trials, albeit presumably without a civilian jury when deciding whether to send a hellfire from a reaper down a suspect's spine or not.
"should some random dude be able to remove _my_ information that I _want_ to be available?"
I don't know if you were implying otherwise, but it's probably worth making it explicitly clear that they can't easily do so, because Google require proof of ID to honour a request.
People are doing something, they're voting against the main parties.
The problem is in the process they're leaning towards the lures of the far right like UKIP with it's populist lies.
I find it incredible that the three main parties are running round like headless chickens screaming "Oh my god, we're losing votes to the far right, how do we stop this disease in our society!" yet remain completely oblivious to the fact that this sort of shit is exactly why people are flocking away from them en-masse.
I want them to change course not simply because things like this sicken me as they did during Brown era authoritarianism, but because the fact they're pushing people into the arms of the far right is even more disturbing.
Did you miss the Snowden revelations as to how US companies are being pressured into things? how the whole system of oversight of the NSA's activity works?
"So C, C++, Prolog, SQL are technologies?"
Yes well done, you're beginning to get it now.
"Sorry regarding your SWT versus Swing example, you are clearly wrong."
How exactly? Please elaborate, saying someone is wrong doesn't magically make it so.
"It does not matter how I achieve a platform conform L&F: may it be a Skin or a native call."
Of course it does. If you're just making native calls to the OS' windowing API(s) like Win32, or MFC on Windows or similar on other platforms then you're just using the methods to render UI components that the OS does which means it is by definition rendered to the standard of the OS. If however you use a skin then it relies on you being able to replicate every single element of the underlying OS, which is something that to date, has never been achieved.
"And please stop turning words around. A programming language is not a platform, nor a technology, so your accusion of 'abysmal english comprehension' is ... well, you insult yourself by continuing to argue."
Is there something wrong with you? seriously? I didn't say a programming language was a platform, I said a runtime for a language such as the JVM or the CLR is a platform - it's the execution environment that is the platform. A programming language is however a technology, stop trying to pretend your abysmal understanding of the English language somehow reflects the actual meaning of terms in English, it doesn't. I respect people who make efforts to speak in their non-native language, but not if they start demanding they're right when they misunderstand things. Sorry, but every single English dictionary says you are wrong.
"Sorry, read your old posts and stop insulting my or your own intelligence."
I think you're doing that all by yourself by implying well defined English terms are incorrect, and inventing arguments that were never even made. You don't need me to help you.
I guess we are following the Americans with their secret courts afterall. I was hoping we would avoid this.
I don't even understand the rationale behind it, the whole thing has to be held in secret because even naming the defendants would risk national security, but if it can't be held in secret and the defendants are named the case has to be dropped? So what's to stop the defendants or their family going to the media to say they're the defendants to get the case against them dropped? It doesn't make any sense.
At least it's still a jury trial if nothing else, but it begs the question as to how anyone outside the system can verify the jury isn't rigged.
"Your list does a lot of double-counting. What is the difference between a clay pigeon shooter and a competition shooter on which basis you count them separately?"
Because clay pidgeon shooting is not always about competition, sometimes it's just the fun of blowing things out the sky. Competition shooting can involve static or popup target shooting and not clay pidgeons. They're often not the same thing, the overlap is minimal.
"Rabbits etc (extremely rare)"
Sorry, I'm confused, are you saying rabbit hunting is extremely rare? are you actually serious? have you ever ventured into the British country side? You couldn't manage an hour walk without spotting someone whose been hunting rabbits. I could go for a walk from my house right now and find you someone hunting or returning from hunting rabbit. Most people who hunt rabbit do so either because it's one of the easiest animals to find that can be legally shot under the guise of pest control and they enjoy hunting live animals rather than target shooting or because they simply want rabbit for themselves. I agree there are few companies who hunt rabbit on a commercial scale, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who hunt rabbit for private use or enjoyment.
"Farmers I covered ; a good number have one or two guns ; many don't have any, but do have a friend."
Actually just about every farmer with livestock, and even the farm hands will have at least one gun, because it's the quickest way to put down a fatally injured animal without having it suffer until a vet can turn up.
"So you're implying that their younger colleagues are allowed (or even required) to own guns at home?"
No I'm saying some cadet hall staff will bring private rifles to let the cadets have a go at shooting. That's not the same as not returning an army owned L98 or similar (I don't even know if the military own any .22 calibre rifles directly, possibly for training, but that'd be it). I purposely left off military and police owned firearms as they're not under private ownership. Many cadet leaders aren't even in the military, some never even were, so I don't know why you'd even try and tally them against military personnel.
It sounds more than anything like you really don't know much about countryside life in your own country as much as anything. Perhaps when you do venture into it you just drive through it? Try going for a walk in the countryside sometime, you'll be surprised. If you're not doing that you're oblivious to guns because as I said, having them out on display would be an offence. It's an offence to have them out even on public footpaths but given that the police rarely venture out of urban areas or suburbia it's routinely done.
"We are talking about UIs, not code for the data model. Hence the term "platform". For non UI C++/Swift code the question of the platform is of nearly no concern (except the size of int etc.)
And your terminology is wrong again, swift is not a technology, it is a programming language."
I don't know what you're talking about, but I and everyone else weren't just talking about UIs, we were talking about whole applications of which the UI is just a part. A platform consists of more than just it's UI. The term platform can encompass everything from the runtime, to the whole OS, to even the hardware itself, but in this context we were talking about software platforms so down to the OS level primarily. Oh and yes, Swift is a technology, programming languages are a type of technology. Technology is a very generic term, an example definition direct from Google:
"the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry."
I don't know if you have abysmal English and are struggling to say what you're thinking and are coming out with something that's completely nonsense, or if you don't know the topic or what, but you're not making much sense at all given all this.
"No I'm not mixing Swing with SWT."
Then you're simply wrong. Swing uses themes that try to closely represent the OS in question, whereas SWT uses JNI to make calls to the native OS UI functionality. Swing's themes are not identical to the underlying OS UI and there are clear differences that stand out like a sore thumb.
"HÃf? Why should swing not offer that? Ofc it does, that's the point of it."
No it doesn't. It tries, but some of the components are quite different to their standard counterparts. Maybe you're getting confused with SWT?
"That is impossible in the iOS versus OS X case anyway so even more my point: Swift isa new language and not a platform."
Incorrect. Both platforms support C++. You can easily write C++ code that's platform agnostic and compiles on either platform.
Your home page says you're an OO mentor, how can you mentor in OO and not grasp the basic concepts of code separation and reusable code?
And yes, I know Swift is a new language and not a platform, are you having a discussion with yourself or something as I didn't say otherwise. I said iOS and MacOS are platforms, I said Swift is a technology. A new one.
""Hunting" : the only two variants that happen in this country are fishing and fox-hunting"
Rabbits, pidgeons, squirrels, pheasants, grouse amongst others are all commonly hunted with guns also.
Some common gun owners:
- Farmers
- Animal control (badgers were recently hunted in trials with contracted hunters)
- Army/Navy/Airforce cadet leaders (.22 rifles are commonly used in weekly meets)
- Private hunters hunting for personal reasons
- Competition shooters
- Clay pidgeon shooters
- Vets
- Zookeepers
You don't see them often in the UK because we don't have a problem with insecurity about our ability to defend ourselves without a firearm like Americans do, coupled with the fact it's illegal to just walk around with one in public places anyway.
I don't know where you live, but I live in a rural area of England, and I regularly walk into people with guns whilst walking the dogs so whilst the stat may be surprising for a city slicker it's probably less so if you live and walk rurally.
Gun ownership laws are actually pretty lax when it comes to shotguns and hunting rifles, that's why crackpots like Derrick Bird and Raoul Moat were able to get hold of them (though I believe the one Raoul used had an illegal modification to make it a sawn off shotgun so although he didn't acquire it legally it was originally acquired legally by a friend).
Another fact people are often unaware of are the age requirements, I believe that you can, or at least until very recently could own a gun at a very young age too - I believe there are records of even 6 year olds owning guns.
Part the problem you're probably facing is that closures in Javascript are basically broken by the fact you can't trivially explicitly pass by value or pass by reference. This results in some non-obvious variable capture results that you don't see in many other languages because they're much better designed. The only way to work around them is indeed to use horrendous hacks, to, for example, force creation of a new scope which as you say absolutely destroys readability. See here for example, note that jQuery alleviates some of the issues at least by providing wrappers that hide much of such uglyness:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
In languages with more sane closure support you can cut out a good few lines of code and a bunch of ugly syntax too from the example there.
I don't know so much about Perl, but Javascript at least, don't let it put you off anything, it's rarely an example of a language that does anything much well which isn't to say it doesn't work, but that it just inherently forces less readable code than many other languages.
"All Swing (Java) Applications I worked on are just fine under the targeted platforms (Mac Os X, Linux, Windows)."
To you yes, but for the end user it's a different story. They like the familiarity of their standard UI elements and Swing doesn't offer that.
"Bottom line I really wonder "who cares"? I never met one who actually cared."
Lots of people, if you have interaction with end users you'll see it, it's prolific. Many of them are horrified by even slight differences from the norm let alone when differences result in requirement of slightly different usage patterns.
If you're doing internal work you can normally get away with slightly crap UIs (though even there it'll raise eyelids), but if you're selling a product it's just tacky to give someone a half-arsed UI because you couldn't be bothered to make something that fits the platform. It's what makes your software lose out against the competition.
"It is neither a new technology nor a new platform: it is a simple programming language. Targeted for iOS and Mac OS X and you can bet an iOS App written with that language wont run on Mac OS X and vice verse."
A programming language is a technology so it doesn't make sense to say it's a new programming language but not a new technology, and how are iOS and MacOS X not platforms? I didn't say they were new. I just made the point that if a platform decides to go down the route of rejecting portability of all your code (as Windows Phone 7 did) then just don't waste your time with it. Focus on platforms where you can carry across the bulk of the code that makes up most applications that tends to be platform agnostic, they'll soon change their way to cater to portability of at least some of your code, just like Microsoft had to with Windows Phone 8.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, the promise of developing a UI once and having it just work right everywhere is one that's never been realised.
I think anyone looking for this is probably asking the wrong question when they say "So how do I write a cross platform UI now?".
I think the best solution for the problem is to write your data and logic libraries in a portable manner and, write the UI that consumes them in a platform specific technology. In practice that probably means write your libraries in C++ and then consume them with a platform specific UI technology like say WPF in Windows.
So the real question you should be asking is "Can this new technology interoperate with my existing C++ libraries?". If it can't, then just do not bother supporting that platform. This is something Microsoft learnt the hard way and hence why they started supporting exactly this with Windows Phone 8 - they were coming from a low point in the market anyway so why would anyone waste time developing for Windows when they couldn't even carry their shared iOS/Android libraries across?
The battle is already lost on a technology for good cross platform UI development as it was never practical when we have so many divergent UIs. The battle instead is about making sure code that is platform neutral can be carried between platforms and consumed by platform specific technologies.
Um no, that's the exact opposite of reality. British crime and violence rates have been falling for years, and they're now at their lowest point in recorded history. So you'd have had a good argument if your underlying premise wasn't completely wrong:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-...
"Which country was it that a soldier was beheaded in broad daylight in the middle of the street?"
Not the one whose marathon runners were blown to bits at least and who had thousands of civilians killed by airliners being flown into a building. Nor the one where school children and university students are often gunned down. No that's the country where people just get their face eaten in broad daylight instead:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t...
"Which country is doing it's best to achieve the total surveillance regime of 1984."
America, why? Did you miss the Snowden revelations or something? Oh you're talking about that long out of date report on the number of CCTV cameras in the UK? Don't you know that places in America with high population density actually have more cameras per head of population than equivalent places in the UK? The only reason America as a whole has less is because vast swathes of America are redneck towns where there's nothing worth stealing anyway. That doesn't stop the NSA harvesting every bit of information available there anyway though.
"Which country did we wisely give the boot to more than 200 years ago."
Who knows, it can't have been Britain given that we have a better education system, a better healthcare system, less crime, less violent crime, less murders, and higher levels of personal happiness.
Well, I suppose it could've been Britain if you're a criminal who likes being sick with a high chance of being beaten or murdered and is poorly educated and consistently unhappy. I suppose that would explain the high level of ignorance and falsehoods you've just managed to post in only a handful of sentences.
But I guess when you live in a country with as many problems as America you've got to try and justify your inaction somehow. It's okay I guess if it makes you feel better, keep telling yourself everything is okay as if that'll somehow fix the problem. Of course, in doing this you've missed the most important questions I asked. How exactly is widespread gun ownership in the US protecting your freedoms given their clear erosion? How did countries like Libya where citizens were banned from having guns rise up and overthrow their dictator if they didn't have guns? Both these things conflict directly with your argument and show how completely wrong it is, but you've avoided answering them instead going off on a rant about the UK because you know that these questions highlight the more simple fact that you are wrong to equate guns with freedom.
"Look, this isn't even a contentious point. Try it for yourself! PHP doesn't behave any differently here than other languages!"
You're still just making yourself look sillier and sillier. Most those conversions don't even work in other languages, there's not even a valid cast you can use in many cases precisely for the reason it doesn't make sense. It's kind of hard to try it in other languages when you can't even get to the point of working code in other languages.
Where you can cast in other languages in a manner where there's not a direct translation you get data loss. I'm not really sure why you find this so difficult to understand, I did think you were coming from a more academic background and your problem was lack of practical experience but it's not even that is it? you don't even have CS101 level knowledge, you're just outright inexperienced full stop.
"It's perfectly logical, as the author of your beloved nonsense article explains!"
It's not logical, because it evaluates in a manner that goes against all norms. This is like ignoring the standard order of operation in mathematics, it's like taking an equation like 2 + 7 * 5 - 4 and getting something other than 33. Yes you could evaluate it a different way, but only if you're utterly retarded and don't want to work in a way that the whole of the rest of the world works making you incredibly unhelpful and coming up with results that any informed and intelligent person would deem "wrong".
But given that's all you could really even begin to try and dispute, and yet again still failed, I shall take it that you've finally accepted deep down that you're wrong, even though you're too pathetic to ever openly admit it. You obviously couldn't even begin to find any argument on the other points, which means you finally accept that you're completely wrong to say the article is nearly all wrong. Obviously it's not, because you couldn't dispute it further once your lack of knowledge was explained to you.
Still I guess your answer is in regardless, you chose not to listen. You chose to become a wilful liar, rather than an informed individual. I guess that says all that needs to be said about you.
"I'm curious as to which one of my claims you think is extraordinary? What "established fact" am I "railing against"?"
The "PHP isn't badly designed" claim.
"Wrong! == is transitive provided you're not mixing types."
Exactly, so it's not transitive then. This is a dynamic language, so if you take your view that you shouldn't mix types with it then it's still broken because you can't mix types with one of it's operators. That means it's bad design whichever way you spin it.
"You'll find that (after doing the casting yourself) that == is not transitive between types in those languages either!"
I think you're confusing data loss with transitivity. These are two separate concepts that to the uneducated mind like yours would indeed appear confusing.
Oh and you missed one:
"== converts to numbers when possible (123 == "123foo"⦠although "123" != "123foo"), which means it converts to floats when possible. So large hex strings (like, say, password hashes) may occasionally compare true when theyâ(TM)re not. Even JavaScript doesnâ(TM)t do this."
Onto the follow on:
"This one is a bit debatable. It could be a bug, or intentional behavior as it is often desirable to ignore leading zeros when converting a string to a number. In either case, it's well-documented."
It's also bad design because it's not consistent.
"Just like Java. What did he expect? If it behaved differently, he might have a reason to complain!"
Except Java doesn't even have an === operator. Presumably you mean it's == operator, and that's widely criticised and hence why C#'s operator overloading was often cited as one of it's superior features compared to Java. The fact it's bad design in Java doesn't somehow make it good design in PHP.
"Oh, he's just a moron. Sorry, is the author just confused about what objects are and what the purpose of == is? Because the only one confused here seems to be him!"
No he's saying lack of consistency is bad design. It is.
"Total fail. The claim here is that Sorting is nondeterministic. This is laughably false (as he unwittingly admits after the semi-colon!). Maybe he just doesn't know what that term means? You'll also note the type conversion which, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he missed. It seems dynamic languages confuse him quite a bit."
No, it seems the importance of the mathematical property of transitivity confuses you. For someone that claims to be from an academic background you obviously never studied a moment of mathematics, especially as related to computability. If you had, you'd understand the point made here, which you don't.
"How would this bad?"
How would it be bad? Well it just doesn't work. You can fairly argue that you shouldn't do this, but if you shouldn't do it then it shouldn't fail silently, it should fail loudly. It's another bit of poor design that allows a developer to accidentally write broken code without ever knowing about it. Other languages either implement things more sanely, or fail loudly. Bad design.
"Again, how is this bad?"
Well what's the rationale behind it? A language just doing arbitrary things that may or may not make sense is bad design. Again, they should do something that makes sense, or if they can't do something that makes sense then fail loudly so it can be fixed.
""123""0123" returns false. I see you also didn't bother to check even single-line examples, eh? (On the author: Again, wasn't he paying attention to himself earlier?)"
You've got a few like this, where you "fact checked". You'd look less like a ranting lunatic if when you did your fact checking you checked the version of PHP available at the time the article was written. It's not a living document. A number of things have been fixed off the back of that article and the fact this is true only goes to prove he was right in the first place.
"Despite the craziness above, and the explicit rejection of Perlâ(TM)s pairs of string and numeric operators, PHP doe
Right but that's my point isn't it?
You all have that right in America, to go out and arm yourself, but you're not are you? In contrast, countries like the UK with strong gun control laws have actually become more liberal without any hint of an armed uprising - this government has actually decreased surveillance powers (through changes to RIPA) and ended up blocking secret courts and so forth There's still a hell of a long way to go but the point is this - the trend is reversing here without easy access to guns, if guns bring freedom why is America in such an unstoppable downward spiral? why is the UK in reverse back towards a more liberal culture?
If guns are necessary for freedom how did the Libyans break rise up against Gaddaffi? the Syrian's against Assad? none of these societies allowed people to be armed but it didn't stop them.
So at the end of the day, the cry of guns and freedom is complete nonsense. Gun control law has nothing to do with freedom as you have some of the lax gun controls in the world coupled with a population more easily able to afford them and with easy access to them but it's not helped you in the slightest has it? You can gain greater freedom without widespread gun ownership, and widespread gun ownership doesn't in any way give you freedom, so why even make that argument? It's obviously wrong and we have the case studies to prove it.
It's not necessarily the case that when someone is convicted of something, that they actually did something illegal in practice.
Otherwise there'd be no such concept of a mistrial. You wouldn't have say, a 4% rate of innocents getting killed on death row. Just because someone has been convicted something does not inherently mean they did something illegal.
In this particular case the judge was a member of a music industry lobby group. In any sane legal jurisdiction the case would've been thrown out on this as a clear conflict of interest whether or not the judge actually let that sway his decision or not. It wasn't however because of the apparent corruption in the Swedish legal system. The fact this didn't happen suggests there's a very high chance that these guys did indeed do nothing illegal, but the powers that be wanted them convicted of something regardless.
You only have to look at the nonsense surrounding the Assange case "Oh we can't interview in a foreign country (even though we've done exactly that before), he just has to come here!" to see that the Swedish justice system has been subverted by American interests.
At the end of the day I'm not the one making extraordinary claims, my claims are well grounded, my claims are backed up by well thought through and justified articles like the fractal article.
On the other side of the discussion we have you, a crackpot who seems to rail against established fact, who rails against well written articles on the topic but who still cannot prove any of what he claims. You say pick a section, okay, I said you can have the whole article to make things easier for you, as that meant you could pick anything but despite me making it easier for you you're still using this as an excuse, so I pick the "Operators" section.
Of course this is already a section that you've been proven wrong on time and time again, but let's see you continue to be wrong. More than anything I'm just intrigued to see how you spin it now that I'm playing the game the way you want it to be played and still get it wrong.
Go for it, I'm waiting.
Why oh why do people like you insist on linking that Daily Mail article? It's such a pathetic act of desperation. Ignoring the fact The Daily Mail was wrong in the first place in it's interpretation of the stats (which is basically par for the course of ever Daily Mail article referencing stats) and giving you the benefit of doubt for the moment, that article is from 2001, that's more than 10 years old. Violent crime in the UK has been in free fall over this period and year on year keeps finding itself at the lowest point it's ever been in recorded history.
" But, disarming the public never makes the public any safer. It only makes it safer for GOVERNMENT TO OPPRESS THE PEOPLE!!"
Well again you're wrong, and demonstrably so, but ignoring that for the moment the flip side of your argument is that you're implying that arming people makes the public more free. Are you saying that with a straight face given the revelations by Snowden that you're the most invasively surveilled and profiled state on the planet? with secret courts? detention without trial? summary executions? Are you really actually serious?
Compare that to countries like Egypt, Libya, and Syria where gun ownership was banned by the dictators but they still managed to rise up and free themselves and you'll surely begin to realise how stupid your argument actually is.