The New Cold War

 Computing, General, Politics, Security  No Responses »
Jan 272014
 

I’m old enough enough to remember the tail end of the real cold war between the West and the old Soviet Union when we were waving nuclear missiles at each other. And threatening each other with nuclear annihilation.

So it is a bit of an exaggeration to speak of a new cold war when the threat is nowhere near as apocalyptic. But if you take a look at how the old cold war was fought – with espionage, and signals intelligence – you begin to realise we do have a new cold war. Intelligence agencies around the world are cooperating in fighting against a new enemy.

Us.

Oh, they’ll defend themselves by saying that it’s not the normal man or woman in the street they are worried about, but but the terrorists in our midst they are targeting. But to do that they have to spy on us.

They’ll say that they are not spying on the people in their own country; just on those sneaky foreigners. But when GCHQ spies on US citizens, they pass the information they obtain to the NSA; and the NSA passes information on their spying activities to GCHQ.

Which means that what little protection we have against our own intelligence agencies spying on us is effectively meaningless.

What Should Be The Age Of Consent?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 172013
 

Today there has been a bit of a “discussion” on the age of consent thanks to a suggestion from Professor John Aston that we should perhaps consider lowering the age of consent to 15 in the light of just how many young people indulge in illegal acts. The government in a classic demonstration of wooly thinking has ruled this out.

But there’s no harm in having the discussion … and I’d be perfectly happy if the age of consent were raised to 18, or even 30!

The trouble with a simplistic age of consent barrier is that it criminalises consensual sexual activity between two teenagers; to the extent that they could find themselves on the sex offenders register. As adults we could brand the behaviour of such teenagers as irresponsible, and immature, but criminal? That seems a bit extreme.

Simply lowering the age of consent to puberty – when a child becomes an adult in physical terms – is also wrong as it leaves those teenagers open to exploitation by sexual predators.

What seems sensible is to adopt measures similar to Sweden’s where an age of consent is a fuzzier thing. Let us pick an age – such as 18 – as the age of consent, but where either participant is under that age of consent, then the act is only criminal where the other party is more than 2 years older.

One other thing that struck me about the discussion in the media today – there is a wide assumption that the only sexual predators hunting young people are men. Yet there are female abusers, and by casual assumptions we are making it harder for the victims of female abusers to come forward.

Remembrance Sunday Thoughts

 General, History, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 102013
 

Today (at least it is when I’m writing this) is Remembrance Sunday in the UK; traditionally a day to commemorate the sacrifice of ordinary men in the two world wars.

I did not watch the ceremony at The Cenotaph, or attend any of the more local ceremonies, although I have in the past. But one thing that is a noticeable change since my childhood – there is a much greater emphasis on the sacrifices made by our armed forces in all wars up to and including the present.

Fair enough; I don’t have a problem with commemorating the war dead from any war, but the the armed forces already have a day – Armed Forces Day – and Remembrance Sunday is special. It is special because it remembers the two world wars when ordinary men were called to service in their droves; whereas other wars involved soldiers, sailors, and airmen who had chosen to be shot at for a living.

Before WWI, there was nothing like Remembrance Sunday despite all the wars that the UK fought before – nothing for the Boer War, the Crimean War, the Napoleonic Wars, and nothing before. There were war memorials constructed – as a resident of Portsmouth, I can visit an unusually large number, but as for national ceremonies … excluding the burial of heros such as Nelson, they had to wait until after WWI.

Perhaps we need to move the Armed Forces Day to next to Remembrance Sunday to more clearly distinguish between the two days.

Perhaps we also need to make the commemorations somewhat less military in nature – encourage those whose relatives served in the two world wars to attend in place of them. After all the number of world war veterans is dwindling; it won’t be too long before none of them are left, and it would be a great shame to leave Remembrance Sunday to the politicians and the present-day military.

 

It’s Not Human Trafficking; It’s Slave Trading

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 022013
 

Why on earth have we got this new name – Human Trafficking – for the very old crime of slavery and slave trading? Is it some kind of attempt at putting a trendy new gloss on it? It’s not a crime that should have a trendy new gloss; even ignoring the fact that it is the kind of crime that shouldn’t be glamorised in any way, there’s a very good legal reason why we should carry on calling it slavery and slave trading.

Back in the 19th century, the British unilaterally declared that slavery and slave trading would be treated the same as piracy and set about (with the assistance of the US) eliminating the African slave trade. Under the principle of jus cogens they set about hanging slavers, confiscating their assets, and freeing slaves claiming that they had a universal right to punish those who took part in the crime of slavery.

In other words, some crimes are so heinous that anyone is allowed to prosecute offenders no matter where or when the offenses took place.

By keeping the old name for the crime, we retain it’s classification as a crime subject to universal jurisdiction. This opens the possibility of setting up a court – such as the ICC – to prosecute slavers wherever in the world they are, and the possibility of empowering law enforcement units to bring slavers to justice wherever they happen to be.

And after all, the fight against slavery isn’t going too well with more slaves today than there has ever been.

So Apparently I’m An Exceptionally Dull Weirdo …

 Computing, General, Media, Politics  No Responses »
Oct 252013
 

Apparently this idiot thinks that all coders are exceptionally dull weirdos. I’ll quite happily admit to being a weirdo, but as to exceptionally dull … I only seem that way to the exceptionally thick, or prejudiced.

Concentrating for the moment about this journalist’s (in the loosest possible sense of the word) insult to a good number of people, we can probably deduce the following :-

  1. He doesn’t know many developers socially. If he accidentally encounters one in a social setting one of the following occurs :-
    1. The developer denies all knowledge of computers because of the prejudice of idiots like him. This is a bit of self defence we geeks learned in the past and used in the past. So we can also assume he’s a bit of a dinosaur (like me).
    2. Once he learns someone is a developer, he will climb the walls to get out of the way.
    3. He converses in his own specialised area, and anyone who runs away is classified as an exceptionally dull weirdo.
  2. If he thinks that coding is mechanistic, he is totally clueless about programming, and thinks that anyone can simply start writing code immediately. As a little hint, the majority of the time spent programming is thinking; simply grinding out code is a relatively small part of the job.
  3. Lumping coding in with car mechanics, or plumbing in a derogatory manner indicates this guy is one of those fools who think that anything technical is a low-status activity. Hope his plumber tells him to fix it himself when his next water leak occurs, or charges him double!

Now onto the main point of his ill educated rant on the subject of teaching “coding” to school children. Hopefully the government plans to teach “programming” rather than “coding”, but does he have a point? Perhaps, although it’s a bit difficult to take an idiot like this seriously.

It really depends on exactly what and how it is being taught.

If the plan is to turn out vast swarms of fully fledged developers, everyone is going to be disappointed; apart from anything else, if we were going to turn out fully fledged developers it would have a catastrophic effect on every other subject being taught. After all, it would take so much teaching time away from other subjects, there wouldn’t be enough time for Maths, English, History, etc.

But if the intention is to teach programming in a fun way (say with Logo and robots), with the intention of giving students a better idea of how computers work and how they are instructed, it could well be a good thing.

Not everyone needs to code he claims. Actually most people may find themselves coding in ways that may not be thought of as programming – setting up formula in a spreadsheet, setting up a database, automating a task in a word processor. Although none of these are “true” programming, they do share some elements with it – not least to think about the task in hand, dividing it up into sub-tasks, and setting about telling the computer how to do those tasks in a way that the computer will understand.

Does everyone need this? Perhaps not, but they will find using computers much more effective if they have a better idea of what is going on.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries