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If you were to give people the power to fly helicopters over your home at 04:00 am, to discharge firearms in your direction, to handcuff you, to electrocute you, to arrest and detain you, to “kettle” you, to exceed vehicle speed limits, to wrap duct tape around your wrists and ankles, to walk into your home or business and  ransack it, removing anything they wish, to surveil your data without your consent or knowledge, to take your children away from you should you fall foul of the latest theories regarding parenting, and so on and so forth, then just how trustworthy and accountable would you expect such people to be?

How trustworthy and accountable indeed

A single example less than compelling? Try some of these:

http://delicious.com/rlancefield/police

Twitter is like, totally down.

Charles Nesson, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School:

“the idea of imposing law on the global ocean of free bits that has flooded into cyberspace is a gross and harmful over-extension of the power of the state and authority of the law.”

Source: Judge rejects fair use as Tanenbaum P2P trial begins

Nancy Gertner, judge for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts:

[Judge Gertner] then concluded by telling the RIAA lawyers that they were “basically bankrupting people, and it’s terribly critical that you stop it.”

Source: How Harvard Law threw down the gauntlet to the RIAA

UPDATE: So much for the encouraging sentiments. The trial didn’t go well. The Register was less than impressed with Charles Nesson’s tactics.

Kick me again, RIAA. Please!

Does our government like us? Henry Porter has his doubts (they’re my doubts too).

The left, at least as we see it in government, gives the impression of not really liking the British people and so finds every possible pretext to chivvy, nudge, monitor, watch and criminalise its behaviour. How else do we explain the 3,500 new criminal offences that have been brought in by Labour or the expensive programmes of surveillance and data capture, which have done nothing to alleviate child poverty or address the wealth gap but a great deal to extend state power?

Source: www.guardian.co.uk The left must think beyond the state

From: Activate 09 summit hears calls for more free data access

It is “totally unacceptable” for Ordnance Survey not to provide maps suitable for the digital economy, said former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson at the Guardian’s Activate 09 summit - part-sponsored by Ordnance Survey - last week.

Thank you Mr Watson.

(There may be other ways of doing this, but FWIW…) If you’ve ever wanted to reduce workspace clutter by merging two terminal instances, you can do this easily by creating a tabbed view within one of the instances (SHIFT+CTRL+T) and dragging the tab (or tabs) you wish to merge to the other instance. Simple eh?

Can’t confirm if this works in KDE, but I suspect it does

To understand what’s really behind the furore over MPs’ expenses, it’s necessary to understand that it’s not primarily about whether or not it’s right to claim for moat-cleaning, or even about whether or not claiming for non-existent mortgage payments is fraud. It’s about a conspiracy (sic) to hide the workings of parliament from the people it serves, from the people who fund it. Tin-foil hat stuff? Have a read of the following. It explains the background to this whole sorry saga.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/15/mps-expenses-heather-brooke-foi

EDIT: After alluding to it in the title above, I neglected to mention the following jaw-dropping quote in the article above from the head of the House of Commons Fees Office, Andrew Walker: “Transparency will damage democracy.” Given the sustained assault on civil rights and personal liberty that members of parliament have been responsible for over the last decade or so, that they and their officers can display indignation over what they perceive as an invasion of MPs’ privacy, is quite stunning hypocrisy and arrogance.

Glyn Moody on the just-announced fine imposed by the European Commission on Intel:

These fines arise, after all, from the abuse of monopoly power. And there are no greater abuses than those associated with intellectual monopolies – patents and copyrights. The more that the European Commission punishes such monopolies, the sooner, it seems to me, it will be forced to confront the worst monopolies – those actually backed by its constituent governments. If it wants to make the European markets truly fair, and to promote competition, it should not just be hitting big, bad companies that bully competitors, but the big, bad system that has such bullying at its heart.

Double-punch for Wintel Duopoly - and Beyond

UPDATE: a perfect illustration of the type of monopoly tolerated and facilitated by governments, legislation and regulatory frameworks: the ultimate form of legal extortion