I don't know what the particular issue is in this case but I've read about what happens with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in England: apparently most of the requests are from male journalists/writers looking for salacious details of sex crimes against women, and the authorities are constantly using the mental health of family members as an argument for refusing to disclose material. Obviously there are also a few journalists using the FOI system to investigate serious political matters such as human rights and one wouldn't want those serious investigations to be hampered but there is a big problem with (what most people would call) abuse of the system. There _might_ perhaps be a similar issue with this court reporting database.
England has a genuinely independent judiciary. Judges and court staff do not usually attempt to hide from journalists stuff that journalists ought to be investigating. On the other hand, if it's something like an inquest into the death of a well-known person which would only attract the worst kind of journalist they sometimes do quite a good job of scheduling the "public" hearing in such a way that only family members find out about it in time.
A world government could perhaps make lots of legal records public while making it illegal for journalists to use that material for entertainment purpose but we don't have a world government: if the authorities in one country were to provide easy access to all the details of every rape and murder in that country then so-called "tech" companies in another country would use that data for entertainment purposes. I'm not sure what to do about that, apart, obviously, from establishing a world government (which arguably we need anyway in order to handle pollution and other things that are a "tragedy of the commons" but I don't see it happening any time soon).
I should clarify that I was talking about the FOI requests submitted to a particular authority: I think it was the National Archives or some subsection thereof. If you're talking about all FOI requests submitted to all authorities then probably most of them don't relate in any way to criminal cases. I think we don't really need precise numbers to observe that public access to judicial data can be abused, which is all I wanted to say, really. I wrote too many words.
Yes, the word "lost" is ambiguous, but I didn't even notice the ambiguity until you pointed it out. I think the presence of the word "found" in the same sentence lead me to assume the "unknown location" sense rather than the "destroyed" sense.
Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.
Yes, you can give control to the House of Representatives. The House should have way more control over government agencies, it's the people's house. The people deserve to have control.
Let me know if you find it because the Presidency is no different than a monarch. Might be more believable if the Presidency didn't have a pardon power and wasn't elected in an extremely undemocratic fashion.
No, the Senate, Presidency, and Legislative branches are for the wealthy. The constitution was literally written so a minority of rich people would have the most control over the government. Having state legislatures (who also happened to decide who can vote + how) choose senators, requiring the senate to pass bills written by the house, judges that are chosen by senators. House of reps only serve for 2 years compared to 6 or 4 or lifetime appointments.
The 17th amendment is a little over 100 years old.
People need to stop treating the US constitution as this "mythical" thing rather than the reality of it being a very undemocratic document that is highly resistant to change.
Luckily the house can be expanded with a simple majority IN the house, one way to truly combat this.
The more you ask around the more you will find the real divide in the US is the same as it always has been. There are those that believe a more powerful government will solve all the problems and those that just want the government to leave them alone to solve their own problems.
Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions describes the difference well.
You make a really good point I think, if the government just leaves us alone then we can solve all of our own problems with the friendly assistance of ma bell/standard oil/google/facebook.
Yes, but they didn't develop it. ISP email required you to configure IMAP or more likely POP in an email application and did nothing to combat spam. Google came along and offered gmail, easy sign up, no configuration, used your web browser so no other applications to install, spam largely filtered out, just worked.
The app to install wasn't really an issue given any OS with a default desktop came with an email app.
What brought the popularity of gmail was the huge space provided which at the time felt infinite. I still remember the counter that was showing the size increasing seemingly indefinitely.
Yes, that too. I think the initial sell was a 1GB mailbox. Which was an enormous limit at the time. And another thing the ISPs missed. Most had small limits, "mailbox full" was a common thing and you had to download/delete mail all the time which was annoying.
> used your web browser so no other applications to install
I see this as a downside. Native email clients are much faster and a far better UX than a Web inbox. It's also pretty much required if you juggle multiple accounts.
This is the likely direction things are going. The US government can decide that EU officials are out of favor, and then those officials are locked out of Office/Gsuite.
Getting away from American tech has become an actual national security issue.
Ideally you would still have private enterprise create alternatives, but it’s easy to imagine that email, social media will simply be built for citizens by their government.
There seem to be many layoffs, and the hype say that AI has made coders redundant. Who knows? Perhaps you won’t have to depend on the many people who would happily take lower pay for the chance to contribute to their nation.
There’s more incentives than pure profit - Government seems capable enough to attract people when it comes to cyber weapons.
Governments aren’t currently making these tools, because until last year, private enterprise was good enough. It still is, minus the dependency on America and its political climate.
Personally - The issue isn’t engineer availability or salary, but committee based decision making.
The neat thing about the state is that it can act directly off the incentives of the people. The state can supply such service in a private manner, given enough support from the populace.
That’s a fascinating publication history but does in the end demonstrate my original point: once the french government got word of it they banned the book, whereas in the US, once it got a publisher, it basically proliferated unchecked, probably on account of the strong norms around freedom of speech.
If corporate IT can read the CEO's emails despite commercial reasons I think we the people can see what our servants are doing with our equipment on our time.
Peanuts are an order of magnitude cheaper. Sometimes, if you buy a packet of "mixed nuts", you find the first three ingredients are three different types of peanut.
From what I've read, TCPKeepAlive can be a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, sending a packet every now and then can dissuade a middle box from dropping the connection. On the other hand, if the connection is temporarily not working and would have started working again a few minutes later the attempt to send an unnecessary packet could cause the connection to break permanently when it wouldn't otherwise have broken. I suppose that next time I have a recurring problem I should try both.
You need to be 15 years and 9 months to apply for a provisional driving licence, but 17 to drive a car, in most cases, though I think there's an exception for some disabled people. You need to be 13 to give consent for processing of personal data. The age of criminal responsibility is 10 in England and Wales, but higher in Scotland, I think. It used to be 16 for getting married, with parents' consent (or without, in Scotland), but I think that's been raised. You can leave school on the last Friday of June in the school year (Sep-Aug) in which you turn 16, or something like that. There are lots of different age limits. I think the real answer to "Why 16?" is basically "Why not?".
England has a genuinely independent judiciary. Judges and court staff do not usually attempt to hide from journalists stuff that journalists ought to be investigating. On the other hand, if it's something like an inquest into the death of a well-known person which would only attract the worst kind of journalist they sometimes do quite a good job of scheduling the "public" hearing in such a way that only family members find out about it in time.
A world government could perhaps make lots of legal records public while making it illegal for journalists to use that material for entertainment purpose but we don't have a world government: if the authorities in one country were to provide easy access to all the details of every rape and murder in that country then so-called "tech" companies in another country would use that data for entertainment purposes. I'm not sure what to do about that, apart, obviously, from establishing a world government (which arguably we need anyway in order to handle pollution and other things that are a "tragedy of the commons" but I don't see it happening any time soon).
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