British Prime Minister Promises Default On Porn Blocking 311
judgecorp writes "David Cameron, the British Prime Minister has promised that the UK's ISPs will be required to provide connections with 'porn blocking' filters switched on by default.. The public promise comes despite opposition from ISPs, and the near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work. Last week also saw the leak of a letter from the Department for Education which effectively told ISPs to lie — to implement their preferred 'active choice' system, and simply call it 'default-on'."
This wont end cleanly (Score:5, Insightful)
Just wait until someone hacks the list of people with "show porn" checked and joins it to the table of politician names.
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If they genuinely want to do this without being assholes about it, they should put a couple of different types of content under it. That way it would not be a "List of people who want to see porn on the internet", but a "List of people who do not want censors to decide what they can't and cannot see". At least that would be a more socially acceptable excuse.
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Re:This wont end cleanly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This wont end cleanly (Score:5, Insightful)
As all content transfer moves to the internet, the government has now effectively made itself responsible for it.
This isn't a "porn filter", this is a filter for all communications the govt decides it doesn't like. Including porn.
Questions:
(1) Are you going to block playboy.com ?
(2) Can I get playboy vi Amazon.com, Apple Store, Google Play, then? With a prepaid credit card? Why not?
When all this material moves to these sites, are you going to block them ? block tumblr, imgur, etc?
Why not block google.com?
Why am I being expected to out-source my morality to the ISPs webfilter?
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The government isn't deciding what is classed as pornography. They are fobbing the task off onto the private sector - the ISPs assume the role (Or contract it to a specialist list provider). That way you pay for it stealthily via your monthly bill rather than the cash-strapped government having to justify hireing an army of censors.
Re:This wont end cleanly (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, they certainly won't allow sex with 14-year-olds, like Romeo and Juliet.
Re:This wont end cleanly (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they should add religious content to the list of things they're going to block; maybe then people would start seeing the problem with such censorship.
Re:This wont end cleanly (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they should add religious content to the list of things they're going to block; maybe then people would start seeing the problem with such censorship.
I'm seeing a pattern here, it goes like this:
1. The government does something dodgy.
2. People claim it's going to far but don't actually do anything about it. People claim that the government only has to go a tiny bit further then everyone will wake up and realize it's not acceptable. I.e. your comment '..then people would start seeing the problem..'
3. People forget all about it and lose another tiny bit of freedom forever.
4. GOTO 1
The GOTO is conclusive proof that the whole scheme reeks of evil.
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while (stupid==stupid) do
{ insert stupid shit here }
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Agreed, let's also have wikileaks blocked by default and indeed anything else which shows our politicians to be less then lilly-white. Ignorance is bliss.
Welcome to blissful North Korea.
Re:This wont end cleanly (Score:5, Insightful)
This wont end cleanly
This won't END.
FTFY
www.conservatives.com (Score:5, Funny)
This site is sure to get blocked, there are pictures of cocks all over the place.
Re:www.conservatives.com (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm just seeing arseholes. I reckon it's my Tivo's fault.
The crucial point (Score:2, Interesting)
The crucial point is that if no porn is available, the boys will just wank off the photos of clothed models and celebrities as they did before the Internet was widely available, and it's hard to find any valid argument why wanking off the photos of clothed people is inherently better than wanking off the photos of nude ones. It certainly didn't do me any good not to have porn available when I most needed it back in the 80ies.
Re:The crucial point (Score:5, Interesting)
The crucial point is that if no porn is available, the boys will just wank off the photos of clothed models and celebrities as they did before the Internet was widely available, and it's hard to find any valid argument why wanking off the photos of clothed people is inherently better than wanking off the photos of nude ones. It certainly didn't do me any good not to have porn available when I most needed it back in the 80ies.
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing. Anyway, before the internet came along, people just passed top-shelf magazines around the playground, no clothed people required.
I'm waiting for the big ISPs' lists of people who have opted out of filtering to be leaked and the press to publish a list of MPs who have asked the ISP to let them watch porn through the internet connection that they put on their expenses... :)
(Also: please will people write to their MPs and tell them to oppose this shit?)
Re:The crucial point (Score:4, Insightful)
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing.
My thoughts exactly. When you are old enough to want to see it you are old enough to see it IMHO. We need to discover another continent again so we can ship off the all the Puritans to it again.
Re:The crucial point (Score:4, Insightful)
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing.
My thoughts exactly. When you are old enough to want to see it you are old enough to see it IMHO. We need to discover another continent again so we can ship off the all the Puritans to it again.
I suggest an inflatable continent. We can slash it once we're done and let them all sink...
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Porn censor sounds about as useful as telephone sanitizer, which gives me an idea.... we need to buid a few big space ships, but, we will only need fuel for one....
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Every now and again a few people get together behind the dream of launching a self-sufficient ship and declaring independence. As far as I know, none has ever been able to raise the money for it - though Blueseed gave it a good go with their business plan. They wanted to station lots of cheap workers just outside of US territorial waters so they could commute by ferry to the mainland to work, but avoid the requirements for a full HB-1 visa (as they aren't residents), employer-provided healthcare coverage,
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If you can save just $1/h, times 20 employees (typical small business doing something like packing boxes), times a typical 40-hour work week, that's $800/wk, or £38,400 a year. More usefully, no healthcare coverage - that saves a lot too, and avoids the very high turnover issue that comes from just hireing twice as many part-time employees (The Walmart approach).
Sure, it might mean your employees are reduced to sleeping five-to-a-room until the eventual depression and suicide - but in this economy, th
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And there in lies the problem with any kind of opt-out system when applied to something like this. Were the list to be opt-in and it were to leak then all you'd really be able to say about it is "here's a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, want to try and l
Re:The crucial point (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of bad arguments though. The standard approach is to swiftly change the topic: Whenever the block is being discussed, rapidly turn the conversation towards child pornography or (second choice) graphically violent pornography. It's much easier to win support for blocking those. The trick is to simply ignore the existance of regular non-child pornography as much as possible.
For example, look at how Cameron announced the block officially: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-pornography-prime-minister-calls-for-action [www.gov.uk]
There's some general fluff by way of introduction in the first section that can be ignored - that's just padding about the value of the internet in a somewhat pathetic attempt to reassure people he does value free speech really. But when it comes down to the meat of the argument, approximately half of the length of the speech is about child pornography. Why? There is already a national filter for this. It's already illegal. Nothing is changing in that area beside granting the IWF permission to investigate rather than just act on reports, and a demand that google needs to do something. It's in there because it presses the 'outrage button' - after a long talk about the evils of child porn, something loathed by all, the reader is in a moral-crusadin' mood and ready to condemn just about anything given half a chance.
It's quite fun to figure out what he actually saying. It's a true political speech: Riddled with contradictions and a few outright lies. My personal favorite is 'This has never been a debate about companies or government censoring the internet but about filters to protect children at the home network level,' followed later by 'And, in a really big step forward, all the ISPs have rewired their technology so that once your filters are installed, they will cover any device connected to your home internet account.' I'm not sure if this is an attempt at doubletalk, or simply that his speechwriter doesn't actually know the definitions of 'internet,' 'home network level' or 'install.' Or 'rewire.'
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There are lots of bad arguments though. The standard approach is to swiftly change the topic: Whenever the block is being discussed, rapidly turn the conversation towards child pornography or (second choice) graphically violent pornography.
Herein lies half the problem with the discussions with the public that have been had over this. The politicians seem to (intentionally or not) confuse several issues:
1. Kids accidentally stumbling across porn
2. Kids intentionally looking at porn
3. Adults looking at kiddie porn (or faux kiddie porn)
4. Adults committing child abuses
(And similar arguments for violence, rape and murder... and yet we still get to see plenty of violent stuff on TV and in the papers that is probably more extreme than the faux-rap
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It's a matter of degrees. Doing so occasionally isn't a problem. Doing so constantly is.
But in neither case does it make any sense to censor the net, as there's plenty of material out there that they can't censor.
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Re:The crucial point (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The crucial point (Score:5, Funny)
The crucial point is that if no porn is available, the boys will just wank off the photos of clothed models and celebrities as they did before the Internet was widely available
Wouldn't Rule 34 imply that the whole Internet would have to be filtered out under this scheme?
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It certainly didn't do me any good not to have porn available when I most needed it back in the 80ies.
It might have done. You hear apocryphal stories of people who can't get aroused by partners who won't do the things porn actresses do.
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The crucial point is that this is Britain - which together with US is the homeland of sexual puritanism coupled with extreme deviance when it comes to violence.
I don't think the rest of the world has anything to fear from this particular twist. They're just following their voters and their culture. This is a very democratic move on which most people clearly agree. He wouldn't be pushing for it this aggressively otherwise. He has voters to please after all.
Well, except maybe other countries that inherited th
Block all? No. Block a lot? Yes (Score:2)
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it's adult content. not just illegal content. everytime it's mentioned it's slapped on with a sauce of filtering for illegal content, but "adult content filter" is really any porno filter.
bet you 100000 bucks that The Sun will not be blocked though!
Re:Block all? No. Block a lot? Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is the UK we're talking about... so exactly WHAT sun do they see any way?
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It's a tabloid newspaper that has pictures of topless models with usually larger than averaged sized breasts on page three.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_3 [wikipedia.org]
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And since one person's idea of porn may not fit with another.
Most teenage boys would have no issues jacking off to hot women in swimsuits; yet we publish magazines in grocery stores with this content, let alone online.
As a society we love sex and porn; we just dont want teenagers expressing any interest at all, and to ignore that Victoria's Secret store in the mall while they shop.
Re:Block all? No. Block a lot? Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
The not unreasonable assumption is that if a child can find porn, then an ISP can automate the process of finding it and blocking it. To the layperson, the idea that all these clever people can come up with a way to search the internet and classify content and even rate the quality of that content but are suddenly flummoxed by coming up with a way of reliably blocking porn that kids can find sounds more like "well, we don't want to block porn, so we'll tell you it's impossible and tell you that you don't understand the internet".
Ok, this will sound pretty cynical, but imho the current crop of politicians don't care if legislation is difficult or even impossible. And they know how difficult this task is, in fact, the more difficult, the better. All they really care about is whether a new law means that they can funnel money through parliament to one of their mates.
This sort of thing is perfect for that. A never-ending task whereby they can pay some private company run by one of their cronies an obscene amount of cash to continually search the web looking for new porn to block.
Everyone wins except the taxpayer.
Re:Block all? No. Block a lot? Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
The not unreasonable assumption is that if a child can find porn, then an ISP can automate the process of finding it and blocking it.
That there is the problem. You see, the assumption is unreasonable - you can understand why the assumption would be made, but it's still wrong non the less.
The difficulty comes with specificity [wikipedia.org], when you search for something you also get a lot of false positives. For example: You search for a pornstar and also find the facebook page of some poor schmuck with the same name. Another example would be you search for some porn term and get a wikipedia page. When searching this is not a problem, false positives have little real cost, since we just skip over them.
Now lets consider the filtering scenario. Lets say you search for Joe Bloggs' facebook page, trouble is there is also a Joe Bloggs who stars in certain adult entertainments and the system gets confused. Suddenly the facebook page of our upstanding member of society has been filtered, and worse all of his friends are now flagged as having looked for 'bad things'.
You see, the key difference between search and filtering is that of the involvement of human decision. Search uses a flawed heuristic to give us a set of things to look at first with ultimately a human deciding and making up for the flaws in the search algorithm. Filtering uses said flawed heuristic and then sticks another flawed decision boundary on top, and there is no human presence to counteract it's mistakes
Re:Block all? No. Block a lot? Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
The not unreasonable assumption is that if a child can find porn, then an ISP can automate the process of finding it and blocking it. To the layperson, the idea that all these clever people can come up with a way to search the internet and classify content and even rate the quality of that content but are suddenly flummoxed by coming up with a way of reliably blocking porn that kids can find sounds more like "well, we don't want to block porn, so we'll tell you it's impossible and tell you that you don't understand the internet".
Fuck off moron. Install nanny ware for your kid if you're a concerned parent. You don't parent the fucking nation. Retard.
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(nothing short of a brain that _understands_ the content, and also has a taste in art).
... and not even that.
I daresay that for any pair of human beings, you could find a work which one classified as porn, and the other did not.
Therefore almost all VPN services are blocked... (Score:5, Informative)
Still, three cheers for the first enterprising foreign VPN company to offer free VPN services (ad-supported?). I anticipate approximately every single teen male in the UK becoming aware of it within a week of its launch.
Also, the earlier Firehose articles were more complete (but that's Slashdot editors for ya): BBC News [bbc.co.uk] giving a good amount of political commentary, and technological implementation of the blocking by Twitter [guardian.co.uk].
Cameron cracks down. (Score:2)
AAISP already implemented it..but.. (Score:2)
If you choose to have censored internet access you can't sign up and are told to choose another ISP.
I love those guys.
But why is the ISP reading my traffic? (Score:3)
AND What parents are letting their children use the internet unsupervised?
Re:But why is the ISP reading my traffic? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be us. It's no big deal.
Mine is a new teenager. She's been on the internet unsupervised for a good three years. Sit down for this bit: we also let her loose on the BBC's website when she was a toddler, all the time we were in the room next door doing boring household chores. Lock us up and throw away the key.
We check in on her from time to time. We're mostly greeted with grunts and "can't you see I'm busy chatting to my friends?". We ask about things she's doing. Mum checks her Facebook. I ask questions; questions like "how many accounts do you have on Facebook?". I'm not stupid, even if her mother is.
Facebook:
Here's an issue. Teenage daughter likes buying clothes with her friends, bringing them all back to my house, trying them all on like some fashion parade, and posting photos and videos on Facebook. I get it. It's what teenage girls do.
These posts attract men aged 25-45 from an area of the world spanning the middle east to indonesia. They all tell her how pretty she is. How sickening is that? What should a parent do? Maybe Glorious Leader Dave can help?
We've educated her to block these people and explain that there are a few nasty people out there. Wrapping her in cotton wool until she's 18 is not something we've chosen to do.
Unsupervised? Yes. As a well rounded and balanced person, she has earned that right.
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Monitoring at the ISP level won't work and they know it. Google defaults to HTTPS for a lot of traffic, for example. That is why they are going after Google directly.
Everyone in the UK should be using a VPN by now anyway.
Phew! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now little Timmy won't be bothered by all those nasty websites he has no interest in.
Well, at least not until he comes across some of those sites that slip by the filters - as they inevitably do - or he learns how to turn the filter off (as children eventually will).
And it's not as if he will be missing anything important. Oh sure, filters have been shown to be over-zealous in their protection, often blocking non-porn sites as well but why would he be interested in reading Wikipedia or the National Geographic or any of these other disgusting websites anyway? Do they have any redeeming value at all? And even if they do, is it worth the risk that young Timmy might see a nipple?
Besides, sex is unnatural, and so is the human body. Nobody should see it naked. It's been that way since the beginning of time; children never witnessed nudity or sex until they were eighteen and in no way should we question this belief. Its not as if this sort of repression causes any problems. Anyway, the youth of today must be inculcated from the start with the idea that it is okay for the government to tell us what to read and what to do, for the good of the nation. A strong government should lead its people in thought and action!
I for one am glad the government of Great Britain is moving in this direction and can only hope the governments of the other nations of the world follow suit. Its just one step towards bringing our world back to a more civilized level of discourse, where things like sex, violence and alternate religions are removed from view. It's for the good of our children after all.
(By the way, just out of scientific curiousity, have instructions on how to disable this feature been issued yet? I only ask to make sure I don't accidentally turn it of, of course).
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The "pop-up dialog" will say:
Do you wish to block porn? [yes] [no] [cancel *hehe*]
Everyone will click yes out of habit, except little Johny. He likes to live dangerously and he'll click no.
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Filters are becoming more sophisticated. Originally they were known to filter a lot of sites that had innocuous content on them, but they are quite configurable these days and only getting better.
I don't have an issue with putting filters on "public" networks and machines that are publically accessible. You don't know who will be using the machine, and it should be illegal to show porn to young kids... they don't need that stuff in their minds. Everybody deserves a little bit of a childhood. Not to mention
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Insightful)
OP is ridiculously wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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The ISPs want to label it some active choice plus garbage, but that's what it is.
No, they want to call it active choice because you will have to take an active choice to enable the filtering (i.e., it would be off by default):
the prime minister would like to be able to refer to your solutions are "default-on" as people will have to make a choice not to have the filters (by unticking the box)
In other words, what they're saying without actually saying it, is telling the ISPs to default the filters to on, which is not what the ISPs want to do.
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That "near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work" means that it can't block every pornographic image out there. That's a lot like complaining that speed cameras "don't work" because people still speed on other lengths of road, or that aeroplanes "don't work" because occasionally they crash, or that firewalls "don't work" because sometimes attacks come through port 80. You'd be stupid to have a firewall installed, right?
I think the comparison is unfair. Speed cameras so catch some people. Mo
Please, somebody think of the children! (Score:5, Insightful)
it is easier, cheaper, quicker and garners more positive publicity for the politicians involved to get the ISP to block something (anything, does not really matter what, as long as something is blocked) than it is to actually tackle the underlying problem and catch the child abusers.
However, as politicians we need censorship options to go alongside our surveillance capability... we use the surveillance ability to keep an eye on the people we are afraid of (in the UK, that apparently means the Government is afraid of about 65 million people... quite a way behind the US though, who have a list of 300 million or so people that scare the politicians). We then need the censorship mechanisms so that we can keep information about our surveillance system out of the public domain, and we then need the surveillance system again to watch the people who are trying to circumvent the censorship equipment (oh, good... we are already watching those people, because they are on our "people to be feared" list!).
On a more serious note, Claire Lilley at the NSPCC [nspcc.org.uk] pointed out that "In every single child abuse image there is a victim, a child who has been abused". This is true, if you check the circumstances of the photograph. But I am 100% sure than a 5 minute search of Youtube would turn up a ton of clips from movies, from which you could grab stills that look like child abuse and that a third party viewer would categorize as child abuse, even though no children were abused in the production of said image.
I am all for stamping our Child Abuse, preferably in a process that involves stamping out the penis and testicles of any men involved in said abuse, but blocking sites that some unaccountable quango group deep in the bowels of the British government thinks should be blocked is not the way to go about it... unless of course, the porn blocking is simply a convenient excuse behind which the real purpose of the system is being hidden.
Damn, I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Somebody pass me my kool-aid, quick!
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Claire Lilley at the NSPCC [nspcc.org.uk] pointed out that "In every single child abuse image there is a victim, a child who has been abused"
Interesting. So she doesn't class cartoon images as child porn then? Maybe she should tell the government.
A complete waste of time and money (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst I have no problem with Cameron's intention to prevent undesirable material from falling into the hands of younger users, I have major issues with the fact that he seems to be pushing ahead with this despite advice from people who actually know how the Internet works. Fundamentally, he doesn't seem to understand that the Internet is merely a network - it transfers packets of data from A to B, much the same as the postal service. It does not (and should not) care what is in those packets.
Ultimately any proposal to deploy blocking technology is doomed to fail - blocking certain DNS queries will simply lead people to use an alternative DNS server, or to share IP addresses of questionable sites. If ISPs start to filter HTTP, then people will move to a different protocol. Where does this end up? The Great Firewall of (not-so-great) Britain? Martial law? Ultimately his proposals will end in failure - the Internet community will develop new methods to access material much faster than the government can block them.
If people really understood the full implications of what is being proposed here, they wouldn't want it. Packets on a network should be afforded the same protection as mail in transit - i.e. it requires a court order to open them. This process is transparent and well-understood - it is not left to shadowy, non-elected, non-accountable organisations to decide what gets through and what is dropped. We do not need a censored Internet - it is used for so much more than browsing the web, and these other applications will suffer with this sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach taken by Cameron.
Personally, I believe the best approach to managing access to this kind of material and staying safe online is through education - something which each and every parent should discuss with their child, in the same way that they teach them to cross the road.
Incomplete summary (Score:2)
In addition, the prime minister said possessing online pornography depicting rape would become illegal in England and Wales - in line with Scotland.
Both right and wrong move (Score:2)
Re:Both right and wrong move (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure you understand how the internet works. You see, you send a *request* for something, and the reply contains that information. You don't turn the computer on and it just starts streaming porn to your desktop*. There are already inexpensive packages you can install on your machine to filter most pornographic sites which reach your computer.
*for all I know, there's an inexpensive package for that, too.
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for all I know, there's an inexpensive package for that, too.
Windows XP, no service packs, no virus scanner.
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(and, yes, pornography does cause really serious problems to a LOT of people)
Oh, I'm sure.
(which it would be right in public places, by the way)
Really? I don't like hats, so nobody should be allowed to wear them in public places. Seeing someone wearing a hate inflicts extreme mental anguish upon me.
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So, why, for goodness sake, is it so bad that I have the right of opting out of porn?
You're already quite capable of that without any government intervention.
Besides, you said that the censorship would be okay if the content being censored was able to be seen in public, and that's what I responded to.
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BTW, I don't see a simulated rape with explicit sex being something that should be allowed in public places. It is plain barbaric, just like when they hang people from cranes in Iran.
That's your opinion. You said in your original post that you're against censorship that is applied by default, but now you say that it's okay if it's a public place and you don't like the content in question (or deem it "barbaric"). This is all completely subjective and I don't see this going anywhere good.
Gonna have to ask my son how to get around this. (Score:3)
He should know.
Only the beginning (Score:2)
Countries to avoid at all costs (Score:2)
UK and AUS. Even with the NSA shit the US can't hold a candle to those two.
And who is to decide? (Score:2)
I have a greater issue with 'almost' ( simulated ) sex on TV than I do with with full, hardcore sex. If you're going to start, then do it right. The fake humping is obviously fake and painful to watch.
Yeah, like that's ever going to happen.
In the mean-time, I'll just ask the little pre-teen wankers down the road to show me how to get to the good stuff. Wait a sec, wasn't all this to prevent them from getting to these sites?
Strengthens the TOR userbase (Score:3)
Every time some government gets really stupid, they push more people into finding ways around it. IMO, it would be good to see more people using TOR - which at the moment seems to be filled with idiots, but could serve a much better purpose providing political safety.
All hail GLD (Score:5, Informative)
Forget that he left his own child at a pub whilst out drinking. Forget that he failed to introduce plain cigarette packets. Forget that he failed to introduce minimum alcohol pricing. Forget that he failed to fix unemployment.
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave.
Forget he was a member of the Bullingdon Club. Forget heâ€(TM)s a u-turning dishonest clueless toff. Forget that the UK population did not vote him into power.
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave.
Nitpick in language. (Score:3)
It would be more correct to say "They would like to see content which they see as harmful and offensive". To say that they just want to "Ban harmful and offensive content" conceedes to them that this content is harmful and offiensive, as if there is some sort of universally agreed upon standard by which this can be measured and determined, when the fact is, its entirely subjective.
Are people trying to get flouride removed from water trying to get something they believe is harmful removed from water? Yes, thats true. However, it is not correct to say they are actually trying to get something harmful removed; that statement would be untrue.
The thing is, its important not to use the characterization of the point of view you are arguing against. Its like, if you are against a bill thats being called "Tax Reform" you can't argue against it and call it "Tax Reform", you are already losing the battle by implicitly ceeding a point that you don't agree with - that it's reform.
And then.. (Score:2)
Hate speech next, not what you'd consider to be hate speech, but what the gov't drones or worse, some company the hired to do the list, considers to be hate speech.
Don't like the way the Israeli's are treating the Palestinians? There's a good chance that many websites discussing Palestine will be flagged as anti-Semite and blocked (never mind that Palestinians are also Semites).
Won't happen? It's already happening, GiffGaff, a mobile phone + data service blocked sites (www.gilad.co.uk and wikipedia psilocyb
porn (Score:2)
They simply cannot do that (Score:2)
DirectGov petition (Score:2)
Stupid and profitable (Score:2)
Denial of service attacks? (Score:2)
No, of course not. I mean, if such possibility existed, even remotely, they wouldn't do it, right? It is not like people have a history of exploiting this kind of dumb shit.
The only real question left is: how can people be this stupid?
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Re:It will make no difference (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right. Gun laws in Britain make no difference whatsoever, in fact the gun murder rate there is ten times higher than in the USA.
Oh. Wait. No it's not. [wikipedia.org] Actually the USA is number 11 on that list and the UK is number 60. But hey, never let facts get in the way of your preconceptions.
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I love how they even bother to include suicides, anything to pump up the numbers I guess.
Still 3.6 in 100k vs .25 in 100k..... well thats around 14 times higher.... higher than....almost nothing. In 100k, thats not a big difference, almost, not a difference worth talking about. Especially since comparing the US and UK is a total apples vs oranges comparison.
You can't compare some little island nation with national healthcare, working social infrastructure, and no concept of individual liberty (don't even ha
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Speaking of apples-to-oranges comparisons, you've quoted the homicide rate for the USA and the overall gun death rate for the UK. Homicide rates are 3.6 per 100,000 in the USA vs 0.04 per 100,000 in the UK (90 times higher) and the overall gun death rate is 10.3 per 100,000 in the USA vs 0.25 per 100,000 in the UK (41.2 times higher).
10.3 people per 100,000 is not almost nothing. That means that over your 75-year life, you have a 1 in 129 chance of death by being shot. It's not likely as such, but not od
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> And if you actually look at homicides, you get 3.6 versis 0.04 which is more like 90 times. And if
> you look at total, you get 10.4 versus 0.25 which is 40x.
Your right about me picking the wrong numbers, that was unintentional (whoops) I still don't find them compelling because this is again, 40x almost nothing.
However....homicide rate.... good thing to look at, you didn't, that is the gun related one...I find this more frightening and makes me glad to be here in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki [wikipedia.org]
Re:It will make no difference (Score:4, Insightful)
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Other factors? Really? The overall homicide rate in the USA is 4.8 per 100,000, of which 3.6 per 100,000 are perpetrated with guns. In the UK, there are 1.2 homicides per 100,000, of which 0.25 per 100,000 are perpetrated with guns. The difference in gun homicide rate is 3.35, the difference in overall homicide rate is 3.6.
So, basically, take all the homicides committed with guns away, and the USA and the UK have pretty comparable homicide rates (1.2 vs 0.95 per 100,000). Coincidence?
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That's right. Gun laws in Britain make no difference whatsoever, in fact the gun murder rate there is ten times higher than in the USA.
Oh. Wait. No it's not. [wikipedia.org] Actually the USA is number 11 on that list and the UK is number 60. But hey, never let facts get in the way of your preconceptions.
Those numbers would be a lot more meaningful except that Britain's murder rate was much, much lower than the US's even before they passed restrictive gun laws. In fact, since the UK has clamped down and the US has been relaxing restrictions, the gap has actually closed considerably (note that I'm not claiming that the changes in gun laws caused the closure of the gap; there's evidence that they are correlated, but the evidence is somewhat equivocal). The murder rate in the UK has risen slightly* while that
Gun laws (Score:3)
Sheesh... Just had to hit one of my hot buttons, didn't you?
Gun laws in Britain make no difference because you chaps are less violent than the USA PERIOD. Seriously, we still kill more of each other with non-firearms [wikipedia.org](4.8*32.3% [fbi.gov]=1.6) than you do total(1.2).
For that matter, if you go back in history, you'll find that we've actually closed much of the gap over the years since you guys effectively banned handguns. Heck, if we could end the spike in black male [fbi.gov] murder [fbi.gov], we'd be a lot closer to you still.
I mainta
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The activity in question here is sex. Not just child abuse, rape, and other already-illegal acts. This legislation would – by default – block access to porn. All of it. Are you seriously suggesting that the solution to children accessing porn on the internet is to somehow stop all porn from being made?
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It's not just a comedy play and a movie anymore.
Surely, the British will be blocking all the violence too, right? Because seeing people killed is much more proper than seeing people made, no?
It's a good story if you expect people to go off and die for your political aspirations.
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No no no no no no. Can't block good clean violence. No problem with nice, clean violence, as long as there's no sex.
Re:Bitcoin (Score:4, Funny)
I don't even see the hashes anymore (Score:5, Funny)
It's just blonde, brunette, redhead...
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Even worse is Dubai where woman was raped and then slammed into prison for extra-marital sex [bbc.co.uk]. She only go out when the Norwegians kicked up a fuss. I know that I am supposed to respect other cultural values, but some I find very hard.
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