gnerd

I have to agree. I have seen the Shoreditch triangle come a long way and having taken my skill set around Europe, there really is no place like home but we aren't exactly silicone valley.

I look forward to some home grown giants over the next few decades.

Pity we didn't acquire Neanderthal genes for their 1600 cc brains, the largest of any primate species found to date. [1]

Edit: Apologies to the downvoter, I should have substantiated that claim. I have added a source.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/society/neanderthal-m...

Spot on. All this will do for the person trying to erase their past is drag up old memories and re-syndicate whatever they are running away from. More eyeballs, more indexing of new pages, more edits to the Wikipedia page, more comments on social media.

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all.

> In Europe, laws generally aren't to be interpreted by the letter.

That's a very general statement and generally untrue (although you are in this case, partially correct). Acts and statutes are always interpreted by the letter, you are perhaps confusing this by making a comparison of these EU statutes with common law or jus commune as that is interpreted by "the spirit of the law" (usually informed by case-law, constitutions etc. depending on the country).

Acts and statutes are not common law (or natural law), and these EU measures are enabled by acts and statutes in each separate EU member state. So they are indeed interpreted to the letter as these acts must be implemented in states with codified constitutions (where one court has supreme interpretation of a constitution and must apply EU law with direct effect, although the big ones haven't done this till recently) and ones without (where there is an indirect effect of law). This is known as the Supremacy Doctrine[1]. The only exception is when the interpretation comes from the European Court of Justice.

The part you are absolutely right about, is that in this specific case, interpretation will not be up to each member state as this amendment was straight from the European Court of Justice. Generally, however, as far as "European law" goes, until we have an actual constitution or become an actual federation, your general statement is untrue most of the time (lets not forget the EU is enabled by treaties and if you don't think the letter matters in a treaty then I have come contracts I'd love you to sign...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_%28European_Union_la...

Well I think in this case the language does fit the task at hand, since the language choice is one of communication (communicating concepts), it's probably a wise choice to go with a ubiquitous one to achieve the goal of delivering a message to the widest possible audience with the least friction possible.

I don't know if English is better or worse than Lithuanian, but none of that probably factored into your decision to speak English here rather than your mother tongue. Like many of the other non-English speakers I see on HN, I don't assume you are saying English is a superior language, rather I assume it is that you see as English is the lingua-fanca of the world currently, you want to lower barriers to understanding your concepts and communicate to the widest audience possible. If that is why they chose JavaScript, then to me, that's a rational choice.

Just because you say welfare is the same as an unconditional basic income system, doesn't mean it is. Did it ever occur to you this movement started in some of the safest welfare based nation states on earth?

The difference is this. It isn't completely different, just different in this one way, UNCONDITIONAL. Your dole is anything but. Unconditional income gives options that the dole does not. It gives extra safety the dole does not.

Here[1] are a couple reasons people are supporting these movements from an Anglo perspective, I assume you have more or less the same type of welfare and obviously we have shared culture, so perhaps some of these apply to Australia and how this differs from what we have now.

[1] http://basicincome.org.uk/reasons-support-basic-income/

In the unconditional part? Some implementations might have a mean test for who gets what (so a lot like welfare in Anglo and/or European countries) but there is an unconditional part that means in the UK, an ASBO isn't going to be used as a custom law against people needing help or in the US, instead of giving rules about what people can or can't buy with food stamps. For me, that is the interesting part. That is the game changer.

I thought minimum wage was around £12k per year. Are you studying and/or only working part time?

> See my other comment, Australia already has it.

No, your other comment just mentioned the dole, which is NOT the same thing at all. Other countries have the dole, in fact, every country listed above in the comment that states they don't have guaranteed basic income, all have wide spread social protections including welfare (and often, quite a bit more wide spread than Australia, whether you see that as a good or a bad thing is up to you).

Sometimes definitions vary from place to place, for instance in Australia you have to vote, it isn't a right you choose to exorcize like the world right is used elsewhere, it is a government mandated obligation, well similarly, in other places, welfare is not considered unconditional income, because well, it isn't. There are barriers to qualification and there are certainly strings attached (some places like the UK, the ASBO system coupled with the welfare system is used like a carrot on a stick with a donkey).

TLDR: This is not about welfare, that exists even in 3rd world countries (although not always to the same degree) it is about unconditional basic income.

Lots of countries have that and I don't think Australia implemented any of those measures first. I think what is being discussed here is guaranteed unconditional income, not the dole.

THe GPIO is not going to help you build a custom H-bridge to drive motors forward and backward with variable speed. You can use the 2 relay switches to make one of those, but it will be noisy and you only get 1 H-bridge out of all that wiring. You can get an add-on board for the Pi but most designs (I have seen) seem to hijack all the GPIO pins, so any sensors you want to add onto your robot will likely have to use USB (which rules out a lot of the cool low power stuff).

There is a place for both systems, they do different things (even though there is some overlap) so for any moderate project (say a little hexapod robot) you are likely to use both. The Pi as a general purpose computer that can do all your nav/ANN/signalling stuff and an Arduino board to receive the signals and actually run your motors/servos (assuming you need more than 1 or 2).

Yep. All of that could happen as far as I can see, which again, is why my comment was specifically talking about automated decision making.

Did you read my comment or just scan the second paragraph and assume I was saying license plates weren't public data? I was talking about automated decision making using collected data, I was not saying license plates were or were not public information (in fact, I have previously made some of the same points you are, that a license plate is public information and that an individual has no expectation of privacy in public).

So if a private company were to automate the collection of license plates and therefore have a trove of information that included times and places a car was and then that system was to grow so that insurance companies used that information so rates could be calculated through Bayesian classification using that data to determine risk, then that would be an automated decision based on that data AND THAT is protected (in theory) by that directive and the laws based on it in the member states.

That was the point of my comment. Automated decisions are protected unless you consent to them.

Weren't modern license plates made the way they are to aid automatic (or human) detection? For instance, traffic cameras, automated scanning from traffic police to make sure your car is insured or even your elderly neighbour writing down a license plate late at night after seeing a car speed away from a possible hit-and-run.

For the EU, Data Protection Directive 95/46 (and the incoming changes from 2012), attempt to offer protection against automatic decisions.

In that document there is the concept of consent and that the consent can only be for the purpose the data was collected for. So should some clever company sell widgets at a loss to collect data and should that data then have an extra purpose in aggregate that does not fall into a protected area (like national security, government functions and all that) and the person did not consent to that reason, then you should (in theory) be able to bubble that argument up to the relevant courts for further inspection.

That's the theory, how well that works in practise... only time will tell.

I think the real interesting thing about this isn't any of these questions but really, much like with the internet, when does an IP become a person (or in this example, when does a license plate become a person)?

Is there a legal distinction? As I understood it, the reason you don't lose points on your license if you get caught by a speed camera in an automated fashion, is because technically, legally, they have to prove it was you in the car (but to charge a fine, they just have to prove it was your car and it violated a traffic law).

So if you think of it in that context, then how can I be sure it was you at all for those "sensitive" situations? If I can't be sure it was you, and the information was public (where you had no expectation of privacy in the first place), then is that information as protected as say, your medical records? (No really, I'm asking).

I don't know. People are unlikely to remember the license plate (unless it strikes an obvious pattern) but a person who was so inclined could write numbers down manually and store them indefinitely a bit like a CPU with no storage mechanism simply would hold the data in volatile memory... unless we plug in a hard drive.

PHP is a tool and as any tool with a low learning curve it can be used by people with or without expertise.

I think we certainly have had PHP built infrastructure that scales, but surely you can see why an order matching system should not be written in PHP.

First of all, by doing it that way, the order matching system was coupled to the website, so now it makes perfect sense why the BitCoin price crashed after the DDoS attacks on MtGox. Because taking the website down meant taking the order matching down with it. No more trading.

From what I am seeing, this is not a case of PHP being evil (although, would you really run mission critical systems with PHP? The execution model doesn't make sense in that world and if you think a set_time_limit(0) on a PHP script is the same as an actual daemon written in a robust language meant for that execution model, then I think we are in extreme disagreement).

For me this is a case of a guy who's confidence was ahead of the reality. I'm sure in his mind a pacemaker running on PHP code is perfectly fine, and perhaps it might actually work for a while but that's just it, it will fail eventually (its a square peg in a round hole after all) and when it does it will be bad. We don't craft critical systems thinking of the best case scenario, we do it thinking of the worst and for my money, whatever happened at MtGox, its the worst case scenario.

PHP in Facebook, yes, NYSE? FUCK NO.

I had a little peak and started seeing a few bugs but then I hit line 1009:

> mail('mark@ookoo.org', 'BLOCK IMPORT ERROR', $e->getMessage()."\n\n".$e);

I haven't done much digging around this issue (so perhaps someone can enlighten me on this) but I was curious at what was at that domain (since it seemed the email was going to Mark Karpeles). When I went to the staff page[1] I could see his company Mutum Sigillum LLC takes care of the administration for that IRC network. That same staff page used his nickname MagicalTux and the corresponding page[2] links to his "Professionnal PHP5 certification"[3] but that lists his name as "Robert Karpeles" and not Mark Karpeles. Does anyone know why this is? Did he change his name between 2006 and now?

[1] http://en.wiki.gg.st/wiki/Staff [2] http://en.wiki.gg.st/wiki/MagicalTux [3] http://www.expertrating.com/transcript.asp?transcriptid=1005...

Edit: After more digging and looking at his test scores and code, I have come to the conclusion that this guy's skill level is not what he thinks it is. Here is my favourite: http://code.ohloh.net/file?fid=it28K0-Hdeyw2F2XDguAEU0ZSKI&c...

Notice his fix to stop local file inclusion vulnerabilities in PHP, apparently he has never heard of a null byte.

I'm not sure it would count as a robbery as usually in English jurisdictions the term robbery implies force (through violence or threat of violence).

Well that's tough titties, because they have told you who you can't rob or murder on your private property.... anyone and everyone.

If your license plate was protected, it wouldn't be stuck on the outside of your car in high contrast letters made specifically to be captured by automated means. At least that's how it seems to me.

Well I was thinking there is no DB for them to draw from because it was a private run camera, not because the facial recognition DB doesn't exist (because technically it does exist for anyone who has ever got a biometric passport in Europe so you don't have to go through old style passport checks).

Remember, at that "gas station", you were on private property. Do you want the government telling you what cameras you can have on your property? How do you know the other cars around you didn't have dash-cams with OCR?

If I pin a name tag to myself, I won't get all up in arms if someone takes a picture of me and I certainly won't make the distinction if their camera is equipped with OCR software or not. If I don't want that information out there, I won't put it out there. If I am regulated to put it out there, then that's that really.

There may have been someone writing everyone license plate down too, I wouldn't care (but that's me). If I saw them trying to break into my car to get my license or registration, then that is a different matter altogether.

I think the line is usually defined as you have no expectation of privacy in public, at least that was the justification for the CCTV in the UK (and other English Common Law jurisdictions).

I don't think you should destroy anything, there are other ways to go about expressing disdain that don't lead to laws being broken.

It might be cultural but I wouldn't be freaked out by the petrol station camera. If they are scanning faces, then it is only to locate the head of a moving subject, there is no facial DB consisting of every citizen for them to draw from and if they are scanning license plates then there is obviously enough people pulling a runner to justify investment in newer, more expensive tools for an old problem, sounds fair enough to me. Isn't that the point of having a license number? A publicly visible identification number for a specific vehicle?

For me there is a difference in picking information up (in an automatic fashion) that people throw away willy nilly and getting information that is protected.

I find it interesting in a thread about failure you are going to use an example of highly improbable success to highlight what you call vision.

That is a cool anecdote and all but it smells like confirmation bias. I'm sure the one guy who won the lottery yesterday had a vision too. Maybe I'll have a vision tomorrow when I play a slot machine or maybe I'll have whatever-its-called when you dump a bunch of money on a long shot and it doesn't come through (were there no visionaries to see the social graph for myspace and friendster?). There's a line somewhere where a can-do attitude becomes naive and the other side of it is where practical sensibilities become choking to fresh ideas, right now I feel we are in a place where having a go is a good thing but it won't always be that way (at least in our industry).

Well it's a little deeper than that isn't it? There is a lot more common ground than just the language, like 4 of those countries are CommonWealth realms with the Queen as the head of state, so there's a big distinction right there. They also have similar military structures or processes since WW2, a history of major collaborations (like the Manhattan project between Canada, UK and US).

I feel like on any given day I could fall into any one of those two camps.

What were the difficulties in getting charities taking the bread? I mean, were they logistical problems? Were they worried about some increased risk or was it simply a case of bad admin?

I was just picking a country that seemed to me to be as good a country as any, with their own methods of law, their own values etc. who has remained productive as a nation.

I think I may be learning I might not have the same definition of "western" as some people. I had always imagined Western as referring to Western Europe and the US but now I think there is a colloquial phrasing that uses western as a synonym for modern. If that is the case I think this next century is about to get really confusing...

> On the topic of men in prison, the US does indeed have a rape culture. I thought it was clear from context that I'm using the term the way western feminists do, but I guess I should have been explicit.

I am afraid it wasn't clear. I do not have all the same cultural references and opinions you do. I saw the phrase "the US does not have a rape culture" and I thought, that sounded a little finger pointy. That's all, I suppose that drives an urge in me to point the finger back. Glass houses and all that. I can agree with some of what you say, especially when you said you meant "modern", not "western" as I think we have different definitions for the latter.

Perhaps my opinion is driven from a colonial history of my country and your country has less of that. Anyway, I have a feeling if we went further down this rabbit hole we would end up seeing eye to eye on many things, I'll draw this one up to a simple cultural misunderstanding, not of you in India, but of you and I. So with that, I won't take up any more of your time.

Agreed. But I am talking from a "Wealth of Nations" perspective rather than a per-capita basis. The brand, "China" is not poor and is only getting richer, not saying anything else than that. There are certainly poor people in China and will be for some time to come.