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