Do it. Management isn't so bad: it's just the managers that are the problem (and you have to go an awful long way up the tree before you're free of those).
I've dropped back from full time management to part-time management, part-time coding because I missed the rather more straightforward life and I wasn't getting job satisfaction from management. Possibly that was related to the amount of meddling I had to put up with on "my" projects from other managers. If you get a good employer though the satisfaction in creating something by running a team is equal to solving a neat coding puzzle. Plus you get way more money...
Don't do the MBA though unless the jobs you're going for require one. Definitely don't do an MBA if you want to start on your own account. All MBAs seem to teach is how to talk to other MBAs; failed projects always seem to have an MBA running them. The only valid qualification for a good manager is experience, and you aren't going to get that writing case studies on yellow fat marketing.
The queen has a number of other powers as well: she invites a member of parliament to form a government, she also dissolves parliament to call an election. Moreover the House of Lords contains both people there simply because they were born into the right family, and people who are there simply because they occupy high rank within the Church of England. As a British republican I find those facts hard to square with my notion of what a republic is.
I agree that, with the exception of the hereditary rump in the Lords, none of these things actively interfere particularly with the democratic process, but the potential is there. It would be better to have rid of the lot.
That's a very good point for common events, but the average user will almost never see an antiphishing message, so the "autopilot" effect shouldn't be an issue.
You don't need an autopilot effect. You just need the user to believe that they are protected. (My son said he'd turned on antiphishing, so this message from paypal must be genuine.)
Wouldn't it be hard to make enough reasonable looking URLs?
Phishers don't seem to rely on reasonable-looking URLs. I've been getting variations on the same "paypal suspension notice" scam for the last three or four months. In every case the URL is obfuscated in the HTML, sometimes by trying to hack the statusbar in javascript, sometimes by throwing gibberish before the real URL. But the actual URL the browser goes to is not reasonable looking: it's either an IP address or a domain name of some poorly secured site (eg, http://www.example.com/php-admin/examples/%20/www. paypal.com/complaints.php). Now, I can read a URL and figure out that doesn't below to Paypal, but I doubt my Dad could. At the moment it's actual webhosts that are used, but move to blacklisting and you'll find all those spambots suddenly start responding on port 80.
Phishing, like spamming, is a numbers game. They can send out millions of these things and even if they only get a handful of usernames and passwords still turn a profit. If innovations like Firefox's antiphishing scheme can reduce that to a loss then we can put these people out of business. But given the lag between a phishing site going live and being blacklisted, all you'll do is reduce the profit a little bit.
The only way to defeat phishing is through education and law enforcement. Educate users to verify a site themselves and never submit a password if requested to do so: always go to the site by typing in the address of your bank, paypal, yourself. And law enforcement authorities need to treat this as what it is: a particularly nasty form of automated fraud. Phishing (like spamming) has to have a payoff: follow the money and you'll find the perpetrator.
>> 2). Weak antiphishing: there was none before, now he's complaining it's weak. Get lost.
Weak antiphishing is worse than no antiphishing. If a user gets used to seeing antiphishing messages pop up every time they do something stupid, then when one doesn't appear they're going to assume everything is okay.
This might be acceptable if you were talking about a tiny percentage of transactions, but Firefox can't guarantee that.
The Firefox phishing protection is host based, which means that someone has to submit a site and then it has to be verified before being added to a database. Worse, connection to the live blacklist is optional, so you may be browsing with an antique blacklist.
All that will happen is that the scammers will spread their phishing sites more widely: there are hordes of compromised PCs out there, you can't track them all.
A heuristic approach would be better: at the moment all the phishing mail I get seems to use a hole in php. Better surely to have mandatorily updated list of rules in the antiphishing engine:
Alert if apparent domain in #text of tag does not match href attribute Alert if URL contains a space Alert if URL is IP address with no dots
I'm not saying a tax patent doesn't serve the inventor's purpose; I'm saying that if the law is changed it *cannot* serve the inventor's (or anybody's) purpose and therefore it is no longer an invention. If one step became illegal for example, it wouldn't matter if you could apply the steps elsewhere. Since the patent has to be useful in order to be valid, it loses its validity; and since the environment the patent is claimed for is inherently unstable tax patents (and indeed any patent which is based on law) should not be granted.
Obviously they do get granted, but hey, the US's IP regime is completely broken. That's not even news.
That's a logical fallacy. Your better horse buggy whip would still make the horse move faster, even if no-one used it. The invention would still be valid because it could still be shown to work.
The effect of changing a tax law is to change the fundamental environment the patent operates in. For a sensible patent, on a physical invention such as a better gasoline engine, it would be as though the laws of physics suddenly changed and petrol stopped combusting.
...is that the patents are based on something that may not remain the same for the life of the patent.
If I patent a tax avoidance scheme that involves, say, investing in a rainforest planting scheme to get a tax break (grossly simplified example) and that tax break is removed in the next budget then the patent is no longer valid.
One of the principles of patent law is that a patent is a disclosure: in exchange for protection on your invention you provide instructions on how to implement the invention. If it's not implementable the patent is invalid - this is where those perpetual motion machines that slip through from time to time get knobbled.
As a patent examiner cannot be certain that the "model" of the patent will work for the term of the patent they shouldn't grant it.
Or, of course, the next US administration could implement an intellectual property regime that doesn't look like an unseemly land grab, and then spend all its time in the WTO trying to persuade the rest of us to follow suit.
A teensy bit; it seems to me more likely that the warning is there for people who treat product liability like a lottery with better odds.
Tale of two pairs of boots
on
School Bans 'Tag'
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I bought some Italian motorcycle boots today. The label tells me that motorcycling is an "ultra-hazardous activity" and that the boots won't protect me from all possible injuries (up to and including death). This is mildly patronising, but I can understand why the manufacturer would want to place a limit on their liability.
I bought some American snowboard boots last year. The label told me the same as above. It also told me that, if fitted with an avalnche transponder the product will not actually stop an avalanche.
One is patronising. The other is just plain stupid.
It turned out to be "hoist by". I wasn't even right about that. A quick check on the tubes shows that a petard was a siege weapon like a giant slingshot, so you'd be hoisted up by it if you were stood in the wrong place (think Tom & Jerry, but with more monks).
That's a good point. As a counter it would be interesting to see what happened to pre-1943 diagnoses of conditions that are no longer accepted as valid. This is a point made intriguingly in Fombonne, The Prevalence of Autism, JAMA. 2003;289:87-89.
By contrast, a recent reanalysis of this dataset indicated that during 1987 to 1994, diagnostic substitution occurred; thus, while the prevalence of autism increased from 5.8 to 14.9 per 10 000, the prevalence for mental retardation decreased from 28.8 to 19.5 per 10 000. These trends then cancel each other.14 According to the authors, new federal legislation (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act15) mandating that states provide early intervention programs for toddlers with developmental delays played a role in the increasing use of the diagnosis of autism. Moreover, in the last 15 years evidence has accumulated for the effectiveness of early intensive behavioral interventions for autism,16 and most families could not support their high costs outside the public service delivery system. Thus, there is good evidence to support that higher prevalence rates reflect changes in diagnostic practices, improved identification and availability of services, and other similar factors.
He does conclude by saying that a growth in autism cannot be ruled out, but that the existing data is weak. So basing a paper around the existing data, especially when your paper contains statements such as "50,000% increase!!! OMG!!!! and TV is bad!1!!" is sensationalist at best.
Jeroz, I tend to agree with you. In the case of MMR the right policy decision would have been to split the vaccines up. I'm not sure I'm happy with the science (and I do put my money where my mouth is, my son was MMR vaccinated, right at the peak of the scare) but the alternative is more measles, which is worse. It was a policy decision that got us the MMR in the first place: the theory being that they could guarantee greater vaccine coverage by combining the jabs rather than asking people to bring their babies back over and over. But the MMR-autism issue stopped people bringing kids in at all with the inevitable public health consequences.
As to the study. It's a correlation not a cause. The authors also appear to show a strong correlation between rainfall and autism, which they use as a proxy for staying indoors (so you can watch more TV), but could also indicate a relationship between any kind of rain borne toxin and autism. Or umbrellas. Or just not living in California.
At one point the authors pooh-pooh the idea that its simply new diagnostic techniques, then go on to point out a 46,800% increase in diagnosed cases in one school district. Myself, I would be tempted to look at the data as a near 500x growth rate to me suggests either something was under-reported to begin with or a new reporting regime was brought in. I've not yet seen any study of: requirements for reporting of autism; changes in the definition of autism; changes in schools funding for special needs kids which would make schools more likely to reporta autism. They also don't distinguish between autism and "high-functioning" aspergers in whic much of the growth seems to have take place.
Or indeed the father, as I note you were absent (no doubt for very good reasons) during those first four years.
Bettelheim came up with Refrigerator Mother because he was a Freudian. Not because he did a double blind test of autistic children, evaluated their parents emotional behaviour, then published a paper with statistical tables so that all can see. He came up with Refridgerator Mother because Freud said the relationship with the mother was of prime importance. Freudianism is at best a good literary theory, as science it's trash.
Maybe autism is to do with parenting and not to do with any other factor. My point is that that work has yet to be done, and in the void it's important not grasp at any half-formed theory because lives are at stake. And I don't think it's political correctness that has caused science (if you can call medicine science) to shy away from looking at parenting and autism again; more the fact that as a profession they were taken for a spectacular ride and damaged thousands of lives as a result.
It didn't fall foul of "modern political correctness". It fell foul of any demonstrable science to back up the theory. And along the way thousands of mothers of autistic children were stigmatised.
The truth about autism is we just don't know what causes it. We have some ideas, but they're not even at the hypothesis stage. The scientists don't know, and parents are very genuinely afraid. In this situation its easy for pseudoscience to flourish. Witness what happened with the triple MMR vaccine in my country, the UK. We now have children dying of measles because their parents were more afraid of a tiny statistical possibility of developing autism.
And who would I be not the mention the avant-garde grammar in that first sentence? Do try to re-read your work before you post it Steve, otherwise Slashdot will end up as illiterate as Hexus.
Quoting Emerson wouldn't actually be a bad policy: arabic culture values verbal proficiency very highly, possibly above all other art forms (perhaps understable given the occasional bans on Music and the restrictions placed on visual art), and poets are generally revered. If you want people to stop planting IEDs under your Hummers then a few words of poetry would go a long way further than spraying wiley pete over a Fallujah suburb.
But you are of course right: it's just sad that the military in Iraq don't seem to have picked up enough of the local language to ask these simple questions and understand the response. Perhaps the fact that we're all encamped in flown in outposts of the US or Britain, with no contact with the local population other than on patrol has something to do with it. It's too late now, a US soldier who tried to mingle with the local population would end up on a jihadist website being beheaded lickety split, but it might be worth at least trying to act like liberators in future wars.
I just hope the US military language schools have already switched to Fari and Korean...
Dang, beaten to it again. I was planning to engineer my food at a molecular level this evening my heating it until the proteins became denatured and the carbohydrates broke down from long chain sugars into simpler ones.
Now I'll just have to eat it raw again or face a DMCA takedown...
>> Still, why have Europe's former Asian colonies done so much better?
I would say because they are different sorts of colonies. Our Asian possessions tended to be fairly organised nation states before we got there, and our colonialism was more about the control of trade and overseeing the local administration than the wholesale resource stripping we indulged in in Africa. That's not to say that we didn't rip the locals off for what we could, we just couldn't get away with as much as we could in Africa. In Asia therefore we allowed stored wealth to build up: we couldn't treat the people simply as machinery to extract raw materials as we did in Africa (the Belgian Congo being the most notorious example). When the empires were gone therefore there was an economy still running. In Africa we extracted it all and stuck the cash back home, where our no-longer-subjects wcouldn't get their hands on it.
In Africa we imposed nations and borders on the local tribes (sometime squishing antagonists into a single state, sometimes cutting tribes in two) and administered directly. Under the wonderful White Man's Burden we basically gave ourselves largesse to treat the locals as we wanted as we were civilising them along the way.
As to the period of time between decolonisation and now: actually it's just over 26 years since the last European decolonisation (Zimbabwe). The peak year was 1960, which is more than 40 years ago, but there are plenty of examples of decolonisation leading up to the late 70s. I think the point you're making is that forty years should be plenty time to get your nation up and running. I would have thought the experience of the United States, which took nearly 100 years to settle its internal politics and free a sizeable percentage of its population would have shown that politics runs a bit slower than expectations.
And the CPS didn't. Read the rest of my comment and you'll see that the CPS dropped the prosecution as being not in the public interest, presumably for more or less the reasons you describe (although see below). The CPS does not arrest people: the police arrest them and the CPS decides whether to prosecute.
The police are discouraged from showing too much discretion: in this case a sensible copper would have simply pointed out the facts of the law and moved on to something else more important, but not all policemen are sensible, somew are worried that if they show too much discretion they will be reprimanded fot it.
Even if she had been prosecuted I believe assault can still be tried by jury in which case a jury of her peers would have injected some rationality to the process.
I don't know where you get this notion that laws are expected to be enforced on a "reasonable man theory". This is entirely true in some civil law (libel springs to mind, while patent law requires an expert in the field). Criminal law on the other hand is a system of absolutes, exactly as you claim it is not: if you do this, then you have broken the law.
Within those laws there are tests for reasonableness, but that's not the same thing as the reasonable man straw man you put up. I imagine you think (and correct me if I'm wrong) that you expect the reasonable man evaluation of a case like this to say "well they were obviously winding her up and the outcome was completely unbalanced so she shouldn't be arrested". Instead what the test for reasonableness in assault looks for is whether the contact was reasonable: this is the way that the assault law can distinguish between behaviour in the office and on the rugby field (to give extremes). It would obviously be unreasonable if I were to pull you to the floor so my colleagues could sit on you while we were discussing the quarterly sales figures; on a rugby field it would be perfectly reasonable. Punching somebody (outside a boxing ring) is always regarded as unreasonable.
If there is a worrying trend in British law it is not the tendency to blame the victim rather than the aggressor, which is a rightwing fantasy, but to remove the checks and balances required to inject exactly the kind of reasonableness you and the grandparent desire. Instead we have non-judicial ASBOs, a diminution of jury trial, the ending of the double jeopardy rule and the proposed lifting of the right to silence. And all of these things have been done in the name of cracking down on bad guys and speeding up conviction, not in the name of ensuring that terrified grandmothers (as in this case) are not harrassed by the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Do it. Management isn't so bad: it's just the managers that are the problem (and you have to go an awful long way up the tree before you're free of those).
I've dropped back from full time management to part-time management, part-time coding because I missed the rather more straightforward life and I wasn't getting job satisfaction from management. Possibly that was related to the amount of meddling I had to put up with on "my" projects from other managers. If you get a good employer though the satisfaction in creating something by running a team is equal to solving a neat coding puzzle. Plus you get way more money...
Don't do the MBA though unless the jobs you're going for require one. Definitely don't do an MBA if you want to start on your own account. All MBAs seem to teach is how to talk to other MBAs; failed projects always seem to have an MBA running them. The only valid qualification for a good manager is experience, and you aren't going to get that writing case studies on yellow fat marketing.
The queen has a number of other powers as well: she invites a member of parliament to form a government, she also dissolves parliament to call an election. Moreover the House of Lords contains both people there simply because they were born into the right family, and people who are there simply because they occupy high rank within the Church of England. As a British republican I find those facts hard to square with my notion of what a republic is.
I agree that, with the exception of the hereditary rump in the Lords, none of these things actively interfere particularly with the democratic process, but the potential is there. It would be better to have rid of the lot.
You don't need an autopilot effect. You just need the user to believe that they are protected. (My son said he'd turned on antiphishing, so this message from paypal must be genuine.)
Wouldn't it be hard to make enough reasonable looking URLs?
Phishers don't seem to rely on reasonable-looking URLs. I've been getting variations on the same "paypal suspension notice" scam for the last three or four months. In every case the URL is obfuscated in the HTML, sometimes by trying to hack the statusbar in javascript, sometimes by throwing gibberish before the real URL. But the actual URL the browser goes to is not reasonable looking: it's either an IP address or a domain name of some poorly secured site (eg, http://www.example.com/php-admin/examples/%20/www. paypal.com/complaints.php). Now, I can read a URL and figure out that doesn't below to Paypal, but I doubt my Dad could. At the moment it's actual webhosts that are used, but move to blacklisting and you'll find all those spambots suddenly start responding on port 80.
Phishing, like spamming, is a numbers game. They can send out millions of these things and even if they only get a handful of usernames and passwords still turn a profit. If innovations like Firefox's antiphishing scheme can reduce that to a loss then we can put these people out of business. But given the lag between a phishing site going live and being blacklisted, all you'll do is reduce the profit a little bit.
The only way to defeat phishing is through education and law enforcement. Educate users to verify a site themselves and never submit a password if requested to do so: always go to the site by typing in the address of your bank, paypal, yourself. And law enforcement authorities need to treat this as what it is: a particularly nasty form of automated fraud. Phishing (like spamming) has to have a payoff: follow the money and you'll find the perpetrator.
>> 2). Weak antiphishing: there was none before, now he's complaining it's weak. Get lost.
Weak antiphishing is worse than no antiphishing. If a user gets used to seeing antiphishing messages pop up every time they do something stupid, then when one doesn't appear they're going to assume everything is okay.
This might be acceptable if you were talking about a tiny percentage of transactions, but Firefox can't guarantee that.
The Firefox phishing protection is host based, which means that someone has to submit a site and then it has to be verified before being added to a database. Worse, connection to the live blacklist is optional, so you may be browsing with an antique blacklist.
All that will happen is that the scammers will spread their phishing sites more widely: there are hordes of compromised PCs out there, you can't track them all.
A heuristic approach would be better: at the moment all the phishing mail I get seems to use a hole in php. Better surely to have mandatorily updated list of rules in the antiphishing engine:
Alert if apparent domain in #text of tag does not match href attribute
Alert if URL contains a space
Alert if URL is IP address with no dots
&c&c
That's a stronger argument, but still wrong. In order to be patentable an invention has to be useful. You're right, you don't patent outcomes; but your method has to produce an outcome. Regard: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/i ndex.html#patent
h tml/1303-1/US06994072-20060207.html (A something something FOR doing something).
Also note the phrasing of the typical patent: http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/patog/week06/OG/
The UK patent office guide is much clearer: http://www.patent.gov.uk/whatis/whatis-patent.htm (it also excludes most of the things that cause so much fun on Slashdot)
I'm not saying a tax patent doesn't serve the inventor's purpose; I'm saying that if the law is changed it *cannot* serve the inventor's (or anybody's) purpose and therefore it is no longer an invention. If one step became illegal for example, it wouldn't matter if you could apply the steps elsewhere. Since the patent has to be useful in order to be valid, it loses its validity; and since the environment the patent is claimed for is inherently unstable tax patents (and indeed any patent which is based on law) should not be granted.
Obviously they do get granted, but hey, the US's IP regime is completely broken. That's not even news.
That's a logical fallacy. Your better horse buggy whip would still make the horse move faster, even if no-one used it. The invention would still be valid because it could still be shown to work.
The effect of changing a tax law is to change the fundamental environment the patent operates in. For a sensible patent, on a physical invention such as a better gasoline engine, it would be as though the laws of physics suddenly changed and petrol stopped combusting.
...is that the patents are based on something that may not remain the same for the life of the patent.
If I patent a tax avoidance scheme that involves, say, investing in a rainforest planting scheme to get a tax break (grossly simplified example) and that tax break is removed in the next budget then the patent is no longer valid.
One of the principles of patent law is that a patent is a disclosure: in exchange for protection on your invention you provide instructions on how to implement the invention. If it's not implementable the patent is invalid - this is where those perpetual motion machines that slip through from time to time get knobbled.
As a patent examiner cannot be certain that the "model" of the patent will work for the term of the patent they shouldn't grant it.
Or, of course, the next US administration could implement an intellectual property regime that doesn't look like an unseemly land grab, and then spend all its time in the WTO trying to persuade the rest of us to follow suit.
TFA actually starts a page before the one linked: here http://tinyurl.co.uk/v1qw
It isn't any more interesting if you actually read it in order though
For sure it will.
A teensy bit; it seems to me more likely that the warning is there for people who treat product liability like a lottery with better odds.
I bought some Italian motorcycle boots today. The label tells me that motorcycling is an "ultra-hazardous activity" and that the boots won't protect me from all possible injuries (up to and including death). This is mildly patronising, but I can understand why the manufacturer would want to place a limit on their liability.
I bought some American snowboard boots last year. The label told me the same as above. It also told me that, if fitted with an avalnche transponder the product will not actually stop an avalanche.
One is patronising. The other is just plain stupid.
It turned out to be "hoist by". I wasn't even right about that. A quick check on the tubes shows that a petard was a siege weapon like a giant slingshot, so you'd be hoisted up by it if you were stood in the wrong place (think Tom & Jerry, but with more monks).
He does conclude by saying that a growth in autism cannot be ruled out, but that the existing data is weak. So basing a paper around the existing data, especially when your paper contains statements such as "50,000% increase!!! OMG!!!! and TV is bad!1!!" is sensationalist at best.
Jeroz, I tend to agree with you. In the case of MMR the right policy decision would have been to split the vaccines up. I'm not sure I'm happy with the science (and I do put my money where my mouth is, my son was MMR vaccinated, right at the peak of the scare) but the alternative is more measles, which is worse. It was a policy decision that got us the MMR in the first place: the theory being that they could guarantee greater vaccine coverage by combining the jabs rather than asking people to bring their babies back over and over. But the MMR-autism issue stopped people bringing kids in at all with the inevitable public health consequences.
As to the study. It's a correlation not a cause. The authors also appear to show a strong correlation between rainfall and autism, which they use as a proxy for staying indoors (so you can watch more TV), but could also indicate a relationship between any kind of rain borne toxin and autism. Or umbrellas. Or just not living in California.
At one point the authors pooh-pooh the idea that its simply new diagnostic techniques, then go on to point out a 46,800% increase in diagnosed cases in one school district. Myself, I would be tempted to look at the data as a near 500x growth rate to me suggests either something was under-reported to begin with or a new reporting regime was brought in. I've not yet seen any study of: requirements for reporting of autism; changes in the definition of autism; changes in schools funding for special needs kids which would make schools more likely to reporta autism. They also don't distinguish between autism and "high-functioning" aspergers in whic much of the growth seems to have take place.
Bettelheim came up with Refrigerator Mother because he was a Freudian. Not because he did a double blind test of autistic children, evaluated their parents emotional behaviour, then published a paper with statistical tables so that all can see. He came up with Refridgerator Mother because Freud said the relationship with the mother was of prime importance. Freudianism is at best a good literary theory, as science it's trash.
Maybe autism is to do with parenting and not to do with any other factor. My point is that that work has yet to be done, and in the void it's important not grasp at any half-formed theory because lives are at stake. And I don't think it's political correctness that has caused science (if you can call medicine science) to shy away from looking at parenting and autism again; more the fact that as a profession they were taken for a spectacular ride and damaged thousands of lives as a result.
It didn't fall foul of "modern political correctness". It fell foul of any demonstrable science to back up the theory. And along the way thousands of mothers of autistic children were stigmatised.
The truth about autism is we just don't know what causes it. We have some ideas, but they're not even at the hypothesis stage. The scientists don't know, and parents are very genuinely afraid. In this situation its easy for pseudoscience to flourish. Witness what happened with the triple MMR vaccine in my country, the UK. We now have children dying of measles because their parents were more afraid of a tiny statistical possibility of developing autism.
petards are made to be hoisted from
And who would I be not the mention the avant-garde grammar in that first sentence? Do try to re-read your work before you post it Steve, otherwise Slashdot will end up as illiterate as Hexus.
Quoting Emerson wouldn't actually be a bad policy: arabic culture values verbal proficiency very highly, possibly above all other art forms (perhaps understable given the occasional bans on Music and the restrictions placed on visual art), and poets are generally revered. If you want people to stop planting IEDs under your Hummers then a few words of poetry would go a long way further than spraying wiley pete over a Fallujah suburb.
But you are of course right: it's just sad that the military in Iraq don't seem to have picked up enough of the local language to ask these simple questions and understand the response. Perhaps the fact that we're all encamped in flown in outposts of the US or Britain, with no contact with the local population other than on patrol has something to do with it. It's too late now, a US soldier who tried to mingle with the local population would end up on a jihadist website being beheaded lickety split, but it might be worth at least trying to act like liberators in future wars.
I just hope the US military language schools have already switched to Fari and Korean...
*tumbleweed blows majestically across the prairie*
Dang, beaten to it again. I was planning to engineer my food at a molecular level this evening my heating it until the proteins became denatured and the carbohydrates broke down from long chain sugars into simpler ones. Now I'll just have to eat it raw again or face a DMCA takedown...
>> Still, why have Europe's former Asian colonies done so much better?
I would say because they are different sorts of colonies. Our Asian possessions tended to be fairly organised nation states before we got there, and our colonialism was more about the control of trade and overseeing the local administration than the wholesale resource stripping we indulged in in Africa. That's not to say that we didn't rip the locals off for what we could, we just couldn't get away with as much as we could in Africa. In Asia therefore we allowed stored wealth to build up: we couldn't treat the people simply as machinery to extract raw materials as we did in Africa (the Belgian Congo being the most notorious example). When the empires were gone therefore there was an economy still running. In Africa we extracted it all and stuck the cash back home, where our no-longer-subjects wcouldn't get their hands on it.
In Africa we imposed nations and borders on the local tribes (sometime squishing antagonists into a single state, sometimes cutting tribes in two) and administered directly. Under the wonderful White Man's Burden we basically gave ourselves largesse to treat the locals as we wanted as we were civilising them along the way.
As to the period of time between decolonisation and now: actually it's just over 26 years since the last European decolonisation (Zimbabwe). The peak year was 1960, which is more than 40 years ago, but there are plenty of examples of decolonisation leading up to the late 70s. I think the point you're making is that forty years should be plenty time to get your nation up and running. I would have thought the experience of the United States, which took nearly 100 years to settle its internal politics and free a sizeable percentage of its population would have shown that politics runs a bit slower than expectations.
And underneath that is a picture of the ITN journalist the US army shot while travelling in a big bus with PRESS on the side.
And Americans wonder why we expect them to fight our wars for them: all things considered we're much safer stood behind your field of fire.
Duke Nukem Forever runs great on Pink
And the CPS didn't. Read the rest of my comment and you'll see that the CPS dropped the prosecution as being not in the public interest, presumably for more or less the reasons you describe (although see below). The CPS does not arrest people: the police arrest them and the CPS decides whether to prosecute.
The police are discouraged from showing too much discretion: in this case a sensible copper would have simply pointed out the facts of the law and moved on to something else more important, but not all policemen are sensible, somew are worried that if they show too much discretion they will be reprimanded fot it.
Even if she had been prosecuted I believe assault can still be tried by jury in which case a jury of her peers would have injected some rationality to the process.
I don't know where you get this notion that laws are expected to be enforced on a "reasonable man theory". This is entirely true in some civil law (libel springs to mind, while patent law requires an expert in the field). Criminal law on the other hand is a system of absolutes, exactly as you claim it is not: if you do this, then you have broken the law.
Within those laws there are tests for reasonableness, but that's not the same thing as the reasonable man straw man you put up. I imagine you think (and correct me if I'm wrong) that you expect the reasonable man evaluation of a case like this to say "well they were obviously winding her up and the outcome was completely unbalanced so she shouldn't be arrested". Instead what the test for reasonableness in assault looks for is whether the contact was reasonable: this is the way that the assault law can distinguish between behaviour in the office and on the rugby field (to give extremes). It would obviously be unreasonable if I were to pull you to the floor so my colleagues could sit on you while we were discussing the quarterly sales figures; on a rugby field it would be perfectly reasonable. Punching somebody (outside a boxing ring) is always regarded as unreasonable.
If there is a worrying trend in British law it is not the tendency to blame the victim rather than the aggressor, which is a rightwing fantasy, but to remove the checks and balances required to inject exactly the kind of reasonableness you and the grandparent desire. Instead we have non-judicial ASBOs, a diminution of jury trial, the ending of the double jeopardy rule and the proposed lifting of the right to silence. And all of these things have been done in the name of cracking down on bad guys and speeding up conviction, not in the name of ensuring that terrified grandmothers (as in this case) are not harrassed by the law.