At the risk of arousing any short-tempered teenager present at Slashdot into a brief, indignant rage followed by a momentary fit of existential angst followed by a sudden burst of inane remarks about the latest fusion garage band to explode onto YouTube this week, the youngsters have always wanted to natter and chatter about nothing that matters.
Yes, kids have always liked to talk bollocks... This isn't a revelation and it's not restricted to youngsters either, a bunch of 20 something blokes at the pub results in inane chatter (called "banter" in En_GB), middle aged mothers doing yoga is more about sharing celeb gossip than contortion, octogenarians sitting around talking about how much better it was back in their day and how kids have it so much better now, in fact, they have this conversation several times a day.
Talking bollocks is almost universal, every social group, gender, age, ethnicity, hair colour, so on and so forth does it. Given the rest of your post you are a prime candidate for the prestigious Bollocks Talker of the Year award, I dont think you could have sounded more like "old man yelling at cloud" if you tried.
Note that the basic technology of the "assault weapon" is rather more than a century old as well.
Well, not quite. The modern assault weapon really started with the M1 Garand in the late 30's but it wasn't until the Soviet SVT38 rifle which combined a gas operated self loading system with a detachable magazine, even though they were introduced in 1938, they were complex so few were available in 1941 when the Nazi's invaded. These are classified (by Brits at least) as "Self Loading Rifles" as they use rifle calibre rounds and were semi-automatic. The first true assault rifle as we know it was the StG 44 introduced by the Germans in 1943, in fact that's where we get the name "assault rifle", its Sturmgewehr translated. The StG 44 was the first rifle to use a smaller rifle round with selectable, fully automatic fire and a large detachable magazine whilst being man portable and having controllable recoil (we had things like the Bren gun and BAR before, but these were too heavy to be issued to every soldier). So the Assault rifle is only about 70 years old, SLR's a bit younger, but still not quite 100.
Revolvers and volley guns have been around since the late 1600's, but the revolver as we know it was invented by Samuel Colt in the 1830's. Prior to then they were too unreliable, complex and expensive.
The problem with the US isn't the availability of guns, its the attitude towards guns. The idea that guns are not dangerous, that guns don't kill and guns don't need to be secured and handled properly that is the problem and guns numbers and violence will not decrease until the US admits this attitude is wrong.
You forgot
8) A society awash with guns and too many people who value them above others' lives.
Funny how it's only the US which specializes in gun massacres. Must be more of that American exceptionalism.
This.
The problem is the love affair and lack of responsibility with the gun. Someone doesn't even need to buy or own their own gun to go on a rampage, they could just borrow someones, even without their permission as a lot of gun owners leave them loaded and lying around in the open (or at best, in an unlocked drawer). Until that attitude changes, dead kids are inevitable.
Canada and France have many more guns than the UK. France has 31 (per 100 people), Canada has 30 and the UK has 7, however Canada and France do not have significantly more mass shootings than the UK.
... or we could just make guns harder to buy. And stop encouraging copycats by not making mass shooters and their deeds part of the 24 hour news cycle. Also offer psych treatment for free and have employment policies that don't destroy families.
You know, the way most civilised countries handle it. But, nooooo, we need our guns and our crappy private insurance system... because freedom.
Sadly, making guns harder to buy wont help. That's treating the symptom, not the cause.
What needs to happen is for guns and violence to stop being glorified in American culture. This means admitting the NRA is wrong and the 2nd Amendment does not mean "lasseiz-fair guns for all". It means people changing their attitudes and treating guns as dangerous objects that must be handled with care and precision instead of toys and problem solvers. Gun control will come as a consequence of this change, not a cause of it.
The reason gun control works in Australia and the UK (sorry gun nuts, it does work) is because the Australian and British people saw it was the right thing to do after incidents like Port Arthur (AUS) and Dunblane (UK). We can still own guns here for recreational purposes, but few, if any own them for defensive purposes as they're just not needed in our society. France and Canada have a lot of guns in private hands, but few mass shootings because the French and Canadian attitudes are one of safety and responsibility.
Until the US changes its attitudes on guns and starts laying the blame at the feet of organisations like the NRA instead of deifying them, dead kids are the price you're going to have to pay.
"The United States came 40th in the global rankings"
How does this sit with the USA #1 crowd? I like to read those OECD comparison charts and it seems the US has been continually falling over the last few decades across every type of political leadership. Can this be fixed?
They don't pay attention to FAKE OECD rankings. Fox News doesn't report FAKE NEWS... so they'll never know. To them Europe is a socialist hell hole gripped by constant violence because people dont have guns and aren't shooting people. China is a place where people are poor and starving. South America is all drug lords, Australia rides Kangaroos (yep, every Thursday, come naked), Thais and Filipinos are all prostitutes, mexicans are taking jobs and the Middle east are all towel-headed terrorists.
For the humour impaired, this is sarcasm. Most Brits and Aussies, we love Americans like brothers... Brothers that live very far away.
Just wait until the mass of Chinese can afford to eat 3 meals a day. Then we'll see what the stats say.
I know you're joking, but...
Chinese people usually eat more than 3 meals a day, they tend to eat smaller meals less often than Gwailo.
Food isn't a big issue in china, they've been feeding their people quite well now for a while (hence Chinese are getting taller). The problem is luxuries, it's a communist country with a rising middle class, so the middle class are wanting more luxuries, cars, clothing, electronics and brands.
Explain how any "tampering" would go undetected for more than, say, 30 seconds, and why any evidence of failure to operate properly could not cause an immediate reversion to the existing system?
Because no-one checks.
You've clearly never met an MP. The barely ever check on what they've voted, if it were changed by subterfuge it could go undetected for months. Many don't even check their own email, they have staff to do that. I know one Western Australian Minister who doesn't even use a computer, staff print his emails, he writes a response in pen and the staff write the reply as the Hon. T**** *****n, so keeping a changed vote secret simply means going to the staffer who monitors their communications.
And then just think of the costs, every detected error will need to be investigated, the vote declared invalid and re-held. Its not like government is a highly efficient creature to begin with.
If you cant imagine how difficult it is to secure an electronic system from abuse, it is because you are insufficiently imaginative.
There are signs all over my local ER telling you to turn off your phone so good luck with that.
Do you think people comply?
We cant even get people to stop using their phones whilst driving when its both proven to be extremely dangerous and large fines/loss of license is levied against it.
One of the chief complains about electronic voting systems is an inability to audit the system to ensure that it truly is accurate and fair.
No. This is nonsense.
It is trivial to design a voting system that is fair and can be audited for accuracy. It is also easy to design a system with secret ballots. It is only hard to design a voting system that has BOTH.
Since this is an open ballot, with full transparency of who voted for what, accurate vote counting is not an issue.
It is difficult to make an electronic system that is near invulnerable to tampering. That is the main complaint.
Given how competent Australian Government IT projects have been in the past this will likely be outsourced to the cheapest bidder who will then run millions over budget in cost over-runs (Govt contracts are license to bill), fail to deliver any milestones on time and when the money tap is finally closed off, turn tail and run leaving the Govt with an incomplete and useless system (QLD health, anyone)?
NXP pretty much owns NFC so its a standard where you pay one company...
Apple previously has only allowed reading from a NFC chip and restricted the ability to write/respond to Apple pay
If apple opens this up then why would banks use or sign up for "Apple pay" ? (spoiler they wont)
You've got that the wrong way around. Apple is buying products from the banks. Apple pay is a wrapper for a credit card, so it's someone else's banking product, Apple is just being a(nother) middleman.
Is the game mocking mass shootings, or glorifying them, or something in between?
Whatever it's doing, it sure looks clumsy and tasteless from here.
You think? What about the complete disparity between people getting angry about a game involving school shootings, while also having absolutely no willpower to actually do anything about real school shootings?
Thoughts and prayers man, thoughts and prayers.
Thoughts and prayers are easy whilst admitting the US love affair with guns is dangerous and killing people is hard. But that s'OK, have some more thoughts and prayers.
and when you go to an store that does not take cash>
Modded funny and rightfully so.
A store you walk into and does not take cash has to be very specialised indeed. Pretty much the kind of business that doesn't really have stock on hand. In Australia, certain types of stores (supermarkets in particular) are obliged to accept cash, otherwise it's optional but you're going to find more cardless stores than cashless ones.
The last place I shopped at that was cashless preferred payment by bank transfer (faster payments here in the UK) and gave you a 5% discount for doing so over card payments.
So only a fool goes cashless. I couldn't manage it here in the UK, how else do I pay for parking, a drink, something to eat and any other small item and there are still a few businesses that do not have card machines.
Even if Tommy Robinson were a bigot, since when has that been illegal?
What do you mean by "if"?
Of course he's a bigot, sadly, as you pointed out that is not illegal. Even Piers Morgan has called him a bigoted lunatic on national TV.
Ultimately, what landed Tommy Robinson in court was contempt of court. His first infraction was trying to film defendants outside of the Canterbury Crown Court. In the UK, defendants are granted safety from the media so that the outcome of the trial cannot be influenced by the media, so that the jury cannot be influenced or coerced by external sources (See: Lindsey Chamberlain for why this is necessary). Tommy Robinson is granted the same protections. He was bought up in front of a judge for Contempt of Court where he was given a suspended sentence (basically, if he kept his nose clean there'd be no jail time). He was arrested for Breach of the Peace and as such, violating the terms of his suspended sentence.
Realistically, Tommy Robinson was only given a suspended sentence because he's a political hot potato. Anyone else would have been jailed, contempt of court is a serious charge here in the UK. He was given special consideration and then took advantage of it. There's nothing about thought crime here, he committed an actual crime, given a second chance and did it again.
So their modest income is now trackable by the government, if not now, very soon. It’s only a matter of time until even the oldest profession in the world is monitored by governments for taxes due.
Erm... it already is.
Prostitution is not illegal here in the UK. We don't have ancient puritan hangups that force it underground permitting pimps to hold girls in virtual slavery.
The downside of this is that it's income that must be declared and taxed. Not sure about VAT (sales tax).
...that some enterprising busker does not put the reader at waist height in a crowded area and gain hundreds of "taps" from unsuspecting passersby.
Yep,
Headline says "London Launches World's First Contactless Payment Scheme For Street Performers" but what they really mean is "Thousands of Londoners are about to have their cards compromised". Glad I've disabled contactless on all of my cards (as in a hard disable, using a Stanley knife to cut the induction loop whilst keeping the chip intact)
This is a good lesson to you younger Slashdotters out there: racism makes you stupid.
Except that "muslim" isn't a race.
Who's stupid again?
Sigh, thinking you can fool us into believing your bigotry isn't bigotry by arguing over what kind of bigotry it is does not work.
So the answer to "Who's stupid again?" is you. Trying to argue that you're not a cunt by saying you're a different kind of cunt still means you are a cunt.
I was born and raised in USSR, well known for its research institutes. Roughly 50% of folks in science were female, partly because the Soviet government aimed to treat men and women equally, and there was absolutely zero bias again women in lab coats. Except in leadership positions obviously - these rightfully belong to the Party.
Russia (and Europe in General) haven't had a systemic enforcement of gender roles for a long time now (that is a nice way of saying, "haven't had systemic sexism"). Even in more capitalist parts of Europe there are few, if any systemic barriers for women in science and tech. This isn't the case in most of Asia where traditional gender roles are still a thing.
I.E. having a female leader is seen as something very worrying to many Americans. For those of us in the UK, having Theresa May as PM is as normal as David Cameron or Tony Blair... OK I think she's bloody useless, but that's because she's spineless, indecisive and letting rebels run the party, not because she's female.
PNG (Papua New Guinea) was an Australian Mandate for a long time. The country was on a slow and steady pathway to development and independence (keep in mind cannibalism was still practiced widely there until the 20th century).
Then in the 70s, a bunch of do-gooder Australians hijacked the process in the midst of other native independence campaigns worldwide, and dumped independence on PNG even though they were still unprepared. It resulted in things like ministers and senior bureaucrats without a high school education being selected.
So, PNG still has a long way to go, though they would have been in a better place if they were an Australian Mandate. I guess banning Facebook and focusing people on work and productivity is probably a good move.
And other such lies... Are you a member of Reclaim Australia, Patriots Front or other such FB Racist groups (yes, I'm calling a spade a spade, they're racists)?
PNG was a former Dutch colony until after WWII where the UN became involved for a number of years before a highly suspect vote joined PNG to Indonesia (which many Papuans rejected, so there is resistance to Indonesian control to this day). Australia never "owned" or "mandated" PNG, in fact we were barely involved beyond supporting the Dutch via the UN in their bid to create a Papuan national identity (towards an independent PNG).
If we were talking about the same games, sure. But, for vast majority of games, iOS games are not Steam games.
Not really.
The games do not have to be the same in order to compete for the same Quid/Euro/Dollar.
They occupy the same market. If this were permitted... and works as promised (which is something I doubt, we've been promised streaming games before and every time they've failed to deliver) then some people will spend more money on Steam rather than on App Store games simply because the PC game can offer a better product.
I don't understand any of the logic here. Steam already exists as a smartphone app which allows me to access the Steam store, purchase games, and even remotely install them on my PC, so obviously the "store within a store" reasoning is already moot. Steam Link is just a thing that would let me stream the video/audio of a game playing on my PC to another device, in this case my iPhone/iPad. Arguing that Steam Link on its own somehow constitutes competing with the App Store is nonsense; I could do the same thing with any other remote desktop app, and in either case the playable library is going to be very limited by the lack of control options on a smartphone, more or less forcing me to use an external input device anyway. I am still required to be on the same local network and still have to run these games on my PC in order to stream them, so the only real function of the Steam Link app is extending my PC's display to a mobile screen.
If it works, it means less revenue from Apple selling you games through their app store.
Sure, Steam is free. But the whole point of Steam is that it's a store. Some products are free, but the vast majority of the products in the store require payment. If you're looking for good examples, you might want to try GIMP, or other free software tools. They are completely free, and don't even ask for your money. There's a small donate link on the top of their page, but you don't even see it unless you go looking for it.
Well that was my point. Steam isn't using your personal data to make money, they're making money by selling you games and by selling their services to game makers. They're open and honest about what they're doing and how they're doing it. Pretty much the polar opposite of Facebook.
My point about the GDPR is that everything has been updating their policies in reaction to its enforcement, Steam has had a single popup saying "we're already complaint" with an OK to get rid of the dialog box, not an "I accept" button that everyone else has been featuring.
Also, if you buy games that use steam via physical media, you still don't need to provide any payment details to Steam.
Shouldn't they ALSO be held accountable for showing up at a house and killing someone who WASN'T ARMED? Isn't that manslaughter? I hate the double-standard.
Who's saying that?
Granted I'm not an American, I'm an Australian who lives in the UK, but even though the incident was not instigated by the police, if it happened over here the cops would definitely be stood down pending an investigation. Any officer who shot someone without determining if they were a threat or not based on an anonymous 999 call (our 911) would likely be drummed out of the force, maybe have charges (negligence and manslaughter) bought against them. The best case scenario would be a low level desk job for the rest of their lives.
However, the person making the anonymous 999 call would be seeing murder charges (in the UK, manslaughter == unintentional killing, murder == intentional killing).
However the UK is safe enough that most of our officers don't even carry a firearm. Currently there is a push by regional forces to get more officers to go for PFO (Police Firearm Officers) training because we don't have enough outside the major cities.
A reasonable person would expect they would verify claims before acting on them.
The law doesn't operate with an incontrovertible definition of "reasonable". SWAT teams operate on the notion of safety of bystanders first. They can only maximize their safety by killing the threat. The perpetrator doesn't get shot only when they do not present a threat to either the police or bystanders/hostages.
Doesn't seem like SWAT is doing a very good job of that. I think they need to start looking at how other first world nations handle hostage crisises and how most of them end without bloodshed. Going in guns blazing without properly ascertaining who the target is, what their capabilities are, how many hostages/victims are involved, what the targets situational awareness is and many other factors just ends up with innocent people killed or in the case of a properly organised criminal, dead cops.
This in no way excuses the so-called "Swatter" but that doesn't mean the police do not need a serious procedural overhaul. Both were culpable and the Swatter needs to see the inside of a prison.
I recently saw a comparison of US police budgets to UK ones. Obviously the UK budgets were dwarfed by US ones, but I have to question how much of that money simply goes into arming them like a Junta.
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of arousing any short-tempered teenager present at Slashdot into a brief, indignant rage followed by a momentary fit of existential angst followed by a sudden burst of inane remarks about the latest fusion garage band to explode onto YouTube this week, the youngsters have always wanted to natter and chatter about nothing that matters.
Yes, kids have always liked to talk bollocks... This isn't a revelation and it's not restricted to youngsters either, a bunch of 20 something blokes at the pub results in inane chatter (called "banter" in En_GB), middle aged mothers doing yoga is more about sharing celeb gossip than contortion, octogenarians sitting around talking about how much better it was back in their day and how kids have it so much better now, in fact, they have this conversation several times a day.
Talking bollocks is almost universal, every social group, gender, age, ethnicity, hair colour, so on and so forth does it. Given the rest of your post you are a prime candidate for the prestigious Bollocks Talker of the Year award, I dont think you could have sounded more like "old man yelling at cloud" if you tried.
Note that the basic technology of the "assault weapon" is rather more than a century old as well.
Well, not quite. The modern assault weapon really started with the M1 Garand in the late 30's but it wasn't until the Soviet SVT38 rifle which combined a gas operated self loading system with a detachable magazine, even though they were introduced in 1938, they were complex so few were available in 1941 when the Nazi's invaded. These are classified (by Brits at least) as "Self Loading Rifles" as they use rifle calibre rounds and were semi-automatic. The first true assault rifle as we know it was the StG 44 introduced by the Germans in 1943, in fact that's where we get the name "assault rifle", its Sturmgewehr translated. The StG 44 was the first rifle to use a smaller rifle round with selectable, fully automatic fire and a large detachable magazine whilst being man portable and having controllable recoil (we had things like the Bren gun and BAR before, but these were too heavy to be issued to every soldier). So the Assault rifle is only about 70 years old, SLR's a bit younger, but still not quite 100.
Revolvers and volley guns have been around since the late 1600's, but the revolver as we know it was invented by Samuel Colt in the 1830's. Prior to then they were too unreliable, complex and expensive.
The problem with the US isn't the availability of guns, its the attitude towards guns. The idea that guns are not dangerous, that guns don't kill and guns don't need to be secured and handled properly that is the problem and guns numbers and violence will not decrease until the US admits this attitude is wrong.
You forgot
8) A society awash with guns and too many people who value them above others' lives.
Funny how it's only the US which specializes in gun massacres. Must be more of that American exceptionalism.
This. The problem is the love affair and lack of responsibility with the gun. Someone doesn't even need to buy or own their own gun to go on a rampage, they could just borrow someones, even without their permission as a lot of gun owners leave them loaded and lying around in the open (or at best, in an unlocked drawer). Until that attitude changes, dead kids are inevitable.
Canada and France have many more guns than the UK. France has 31 (per 100 people), Canada has 30 and the UK has 7, however Canada and France do not have significantly more mass shootings than the UK.
... or we could just make guns harder to buy. And stop encouraging copycats by not making mass shooters and their deeds part of the 24 hour news cycle. Also offer psych treatment for free and have employment policies that don't destroy families.
You know, the way most civilised countries handle it. But, nooooo, we need our guns and our crappy private insurance system... because freedom.
Sadly, making guns harder to buy wont help. That's treating the symptom, not the cause.
What needs to happen is for guns and violence to stop being glorified in American culture. This means admitting the NRA is wrong and the 2nd Amendment does not mean "lasseiz-fair guns for all". It means people changing their attitudes and treating guns as dangerous objects that must be handled with care and precision instead of toys and problem solvers. Gun control will come as a consequence of this change, not a cause of it.
The reason gun control works in Australia and the UK (sorry gun nuts, it does work) is because the Australian and British people saw it was the right thing to do after incidents like Port Arthur (AUS) and Dunblane (UK). We can still own guns here for recreational purposes, but few, if any own them for defensive purposes as they're just not needed in our society. France and Canada have a lot of guns in private hands, but few mass shootings because the French and Canadian attitudes are one of safety and responsibility.
Until the US changes its attitudes on guns and starts laying the blame at the feet of organisations like the NRA instead of deifying them, dead kids are the price you're going to have to pay.
"The United States came 40th in the global rankings"
How does this sit with the USA #1 crowd? I like to read those OECD comparison charts and it seems the US has been continually falling over the last few decades across every type of political leadership. Can this be fixed?
They don't pay attention to FAKE OECD rankings. Fox News doesn't report FAKE NEWS... so they'll never know. To them Europe is a socialist hell hole gripped by constant violence because people dont have guns and aren't shooting people. China is a place where people are poor and starving. South America is all drug lords, Australia rides Kangaroos (yep, every Thursday, come naked), Thais and Filipinos are all prostitutes, mexicans are taking jobs and the Middle east are all towel-headed terrorists.
For the humour impaired, this is sarcasm. Most Brits and Aussies, we love Americans like brothers... Brothers that live very far away.
Just wait until the mass of Chinese can afford to eat 3 meals a day. Then we'll see what the stats say.
I know you're joking, but...
Chinese people usually eat more than 3 meals a day, they tend to eat smaller meals less often than Gwailo.
Food isn't a big issue in china, they've been feeding their people quite well now for a while (hence Chinese are getting taller). The problem is luxuries, it's a communist country with a rising middle class, so the middle class are wanting more luxuries, cars, clothing, electronics and brands.
Explain how any "tampering" would go undetected for more than, say, 30 seconds, and why any evidence of failure to operate properly could not cause an immediate reversion to the existing system?
Because no-one checks.
You've clearly never met an MP. The barely ever check on what they've voted, if it were changed by subterfuge it could go undetected for months. Many don't even check their own email, they have staff to do that. I know one Western Australian Minister who doesn't even use a computer, staff print his emails, he writes a response in pen and the staff write the reply as the Hon. T**** *****n, so keeping a changed vote secret simply means going to the staffer who monitors their communications.
And then just think of the costs, every detected error will need to be investigated, the vote declared invalid and re-held. Its not like government is a highly efficient creature to begin with.
If you cant imagine how difficult it is to secure an electronic system from abuse, it is because you are insufficiently imaginative.
There are signs all over my local ER telling you to turn off your phone so good luck with that.
Do you think people comply? We cant even get people to stop using their phones whilst driving when its both proven to be extremely dangerous and large fines/loss of license is levied against it.
One of the chief complains about electronic voting systems is an inability to audit the system to ensure that it truly is accurate and fair.
No. This is nonsense.
It is trivial to design a voting system that is fair and can be audited for accuracy. It is also easy to design a system with secret ballots. It is only hard to design a voting system that has BOTH.
Since this is an open ballot, with full transparency of who voted for what, accurate vote counting is not an issue.
It is difficult to make an electronic system that is near invulnerable to tampering. That is the main complaint.
Given how competent Australian Government IT projects have been in the past this will likely be outsourced to the cheapest bidder who will then run millions over budget in cost over-runs (Govt contracts are license to bill), fail to deliver any milestones on time and when the money tap is finally closed off, turn tail and run leaving the Govt with an incomplete and useless system (QLD health, anyone)?
NXP pretty much owns NFC so its a standard where you pay one company...
Apple previously has only allowed reading from a NFC chip and restricted the ability to write/respond to Apple pay
If apple opens this up then why would banks use or sign up for "Apple pay" ? (spoiler they wont)
You've got that the wrong way around. Apple is buying products from the banks. Apple pay is a wrapper for a credit card, so it's someone else's banking product, Apple is just being a(nother) middleman.
my Android phone from 2014 has that.
No, No, No, No, don't you see. Apple will "innovate" by making a system that is completely incompatible with other NFC systems.
Is the game mocking mass shootings, or glorifying them, or something in between?
Whatever it's doing, it sure looks clumsy and tasteless from here.
You think? What about the complete disparity between people getting angry about a game involving school shootings, while also having absolutely no willpower to actually do anything about real school shootings?
Thoughts and prayers man, thoughts and prayers.
Thoughts and prayers are easy whilst admitting the US love affair with guns is dangerous and killing people is hard. But that s'OK, have some more thoughts and prayers.
and when you go to an store that does not take cash>
Modded funny and rightfully so.
A store you walk into and does not take cash has to be very specialised indeed. Pretty much the kind of business that doesn't really have stock on hand. In Australia, certain types of stores (supermarkets in particular) are obliged to accept cash, otherwise it's optional but you're going to find more cardless stores than cashless ones.
The last place I shopped at that was cashless preferred payment by bank transfer (faster payments here in the UK) and gave you a 5% discount for doing so over card payments.
So only a fool goes cashless. I couldn't manage it here in the UK, how else do I pay for parking, a drink, something to eat and any other small item and there are still a few businesses that do not have card machines.
Even if Tommy Robinson were a bigot, since when has that been illegal?
What do you mean by "if"?
Of course he's a bigot, sadly, as you pointed out that is not illegal. Even Piers Morgan has called him a bigoted lunatic on national TV.
Ultimately, what landed Tommy Robinson in court was contempt of court. His first infraction was trying to film defendants outside of the Canterbury Crown Court. In the UK, defendants are granted safety from the media so that the outcome of the trial cannot be influenced by the media, so that the jury cannot be influenced or coerced by external sources (See: Lindsey Chamberlain for why this is necessary). Tommy Robinson is granted the same protections. He was bought up in front of a judge for Contempt of Court where he was given a suspended sentence (basically, if he kept his nose clean there'd be no jail time). He was arrested for Breach of the Peace and as such, violating the terms of his suspended sentence.
Realistically, Tommy Robinson was only given a suspended sentence because he's a political hot potato. Anyone else would have been jailed, contempt of court is a serious charge here in the UK. He was given special consideration and then took advantage of it. There's nothing about thought crime here, he committed an actual crime, given a second chance and did it again.
So their modest income is now trackable by the government, if not now, very soon. It’s only a matter of time until even the oldest profession in the world is monitored by governments for taxes due.
Erm... it already is.
Prostitution is not illegal here in the UK. We don't have ancient puritan hangups that force it underground permitting pimps to hold girls in virtual slavery.
The downside of this is that it's income that must be declared and taxed. Not sure about VAT (sales tax).
...that some enterprising busker does not put the reader at waist height in a crowded area and gain hundreds of "taps" from unsuspecting passersby.
Yep,
Headline says "London Launches World's First Contactless Payment Scheme For Street Performers" but what they really mean is "Thousands of Londoners are about to have their cards compromised". Glad I've disabled contactless on all of my cards (as in a hard disable, using a Stanley knife to cut the induction loop whilst keeping the chip intact)
This is a good lesson to you younger Slashdotters out there: racism makes you stupid.
Except that "muslim" isn't a race.
Who's stupid again?
Sigh, thinking you can fool us into believing your bigotry isn't bigotry by arguing over what kind of bigotry it is does not work.
So the answer to "Who's stupid again?" is you. Trying to argue that you're not a cunt by saying you're a different kind of cunt still means you are a cunt.
I was born and raised in USSR, well known for its research institutes. Roughly 50% of folks in science were female, partly because the Soviet government aimed to treat men and women equally, and there was absolutely zero bias again women in lab coats. Except in leadership positions obviously - these rightfully belong to the Party.
Russia (and Europe in General) haven't had a systemic enforcement of gender roles for a long time now (that is a nice way of saying, "haven't had systemic sexism"). Even in more capitalist parts of Europe there are few, if any systemic barriers for women in science and tech. This isn't the case in most of Asia where traditional gender roles are still a thing.
I.E. having a female leader is seen as something very worrying to many Americans. For those of us in the UK, having Theresa May as PM is as normal as David Cameron or Tony Blair... OK I think she's bloody useless, but that's because she's spineless, indecisive and letting rebels run the party, not because she's female.
PNG (Papua New Guinea) was an Australian Mandate for a long time. The country was on a slow and steady pathway to development and independence (keep in mind cannibalism was still practiced widely there until the 20th century). Then in the 70s, a bunch of do-gooder Australians hijacked the process in the midst of other native independence campaigns worldwide, and dumped independence on PNG even though they were still unprepared. It resulted in things like ministers and senior bureaucrats without a high school education being selected. So, PNG still has a long way to go, though they would have been in a better place if they were an Australian Mandate. I guess banning Facebook and focusing people on work and productivity is probably a good move.
And other such lies... Are you a member of Reclaim Australia, Patriots Front or other such FB Racist groups (yes, I'm calling a spade a spade, they're racists)?
PNG was a former Dutch colony until after WWII where the UN became involved for a number of years before a highly suspect vote joined PNG to Indonesia (which many Papuans rejected, so there is resistance to Indonesian control to this day). Australia never "owned" or "mandated" PNG, in fact we were barely involved beyond supporting the Dutch via the UN in their bid to create a Papuan national identity (towards an independent PNG).
If we were talking about the same games, sure. But, for vast majority of games, iOS games are not Steam games.
Not really. The games do not have to be the same in order to compete for the same Quid/Euro/Dollar.
They occupy the same market. If this were permitted... and works as promised (which is something I doubt, we've been promised streaming games before and every time they've failed to deliver) then some people will spend more money on Steam rather than on App Store games simply because the PC game can offer a better product.
I don't understand any of the logic here. Steam already exists as a smartphone app which allows me to access the Steam store, purchase games, and even remotely install them on my PC, so obviously the "store within a store" reasoning is already moot. Steam Link is just a thing that would let me stream the video/audio of a game playing on my PC to another device, in this case my iPhone/iPad. Arguing that Steam Link on its own somehow constitutes competing with the App Store is nonsense; I could do the same thing with any other remote desktop app, and in either case the playable library is going to be very limited by the lack of control options on a smartphone, more or less forcing me to use an external input device anyway. I am still required to be on the same local network and still have to run these games on my PC in order to stream them, so the only real function of the Steam Link app is extending my PC's display to a mobile screen.
If it works, it means less revenue from Apple selling you games through their app store.
Sure, Steam is free. But the whole point of Steam is that it's a store. Some products are free, but the vast majority of the products in the store require payment. If you're looking for good examples, you might want to try GIMP, or other free software tools. They are completely free, and don't even ask for your money. There's a small donate link on the top of their page, but you don't even see it unless you go looking for it.
Well that was my point. Steam isn't using your personal data to make money, they're making money by selling you games and by selling their services to game makers. They're open and honest about what they're doing and how they're doing it. Pretty much the polar opposite of Facebook.
My point about the GDPR is that everything has been updating their policies in reaction to its enforcement, Steam has had a single popup saying "we're already complaint" with an OK to get rid of the dialog box, not an "I accept" button that everyone else has been featuring.
Also, if you buy games that use steam via physical media, you still don't need to provide any payment details to Steam.
Shouldn't they ALSO be held accountable for showing up at a house and killing someone who WASN'T ARMED? Isn't that manslaughter? I hate the double-standard.
Who's saying that?
Granted I'm not an American, I'm an Australian who lives in the UK, but even though the incident was not instigated by the police, if it happened over here the cops would definitely be stood down pending an investigation. Any officer who shot someone without determining if they were a threat or not based on an anonymous 999 call (our 911) would likely be drummed out of the force, maybe have charges (negligence and manslaughter) bought against them. The best case scenario would be a low level desk job for the rest of their lives.
However, the person making the anonymous 999 call would be seeing murder charges (in the UK, manslaughter == unintentional killing, murder == intentional killing).
However the UK is safe enough that most of our officers don't even carry a firearm. Currently there is a push by regional forces to get more officers to go for PFO (Police Firearm Officers) training because we don't have enough outside the major cities.
A reasonable person would expect they would verify claims before acting on them.
The law doesn't operate with an incontrovertible definition of "reasonable". SWAT teams operate on the notion of safety of bystanders first. They can only maximize their safety by killing the threat. The perpetrator doesn't get shot only when they do not present a threat to either the police or bystanders/hostages.
Doesn't seem like SWAT is doing a very good job of that. I think they need to start looking at how other first world nations handle hostage crisises and how most of them end without bloodshed. Going in guns blazing without properly ascertaining who the target is, what their capabilities are, how many hostages/victims are involved, what the targets situational awareness is and many other factors just ends up with innocent people killed or in the case of a properly organised criminal, dead cops.
This in no way excuses the so-called "Swatter" but that doesn't mean the police do not need a serious procedural overhaul. Both were culpable and the Swatter needs to see the inside of a prison.
I recently saw a comparison of US police budgets to UK ones. Obviously the UK budgets were dwarfed by US ones, but I have to question how much of that money simply goes into arming them like a Junta.
When you trust a porn site more to keep their word than all tech giants...
Why not, they've got nothing to hide... Just look at the videos on their site for proof of that.