when I signed for ashleymadison.com

What do you mean "best people" and "best universities"?

Why do you assume the best people come from the best universities?

Did you come from the "best" university?

If not, does that mean you're not the "best"? So you don't deserve a job?

If yes, then no one else but your peers from the "Best" universities deserve to be hired?

You make a lot of assumptions: a "best" university, everyone else is not the "best", even the idea of "best" ... this makes for a meaningless argument.

You're arguing that only the "top" people should have jobs, which is utterly laughable, because (a) good look measuring, and (b) that would ultimately mean only one person deserves a job.

This is a big part of the meritocracy myth that drives inequity. And you buy it hook line and sinker.

I like and agree with your posts, thanks for carrying water on this one.

The reason why Silicon Valley is struggling is very clear: look at the rage in this thread. These are the same people who think diversity is bad because minorities are too stupid to be a part of technology. They're still humping the meritocracy myth.

If you are angry, it means you are smart enough to know they are right, but too worried about your identity to do anything about it. And it is easy for you to do nothing because it doesn't affect you. But, it's not about making you look bad, it's about helping other people who don't have the advantages you were born with.

Realizing you're acting in a way that makes life harder for strangers doesn't make you a bad person, it is what makes you wise.

A better headline would be, "Are plastic roads the future?"

This isn't going to make any difference.

The EU "Right to Privacy" and indeed all the human rights encoded in the relevant document are so riddled with exceptions that you can drive a bus through them. The fact that any government lost at all is amazing and surely the result of incompetent lawyering. From the text:

There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

The national security exception by itself seems enough to allow nearly anything, but then they add public safety and economic well being on top! In fact every reason a government might have for engaging in surveillance is covered, which cannot be an accident.

But anyway, GCHQ is not about to suddenly discover that it cares about these things. It's been obvious since the start that the 5 Eyes agencies perceive themselves as being entirely outside ordinary democratic constraints, unfortunately, that perception is largely true as senior ministers think real life is like an episode of 24 and gives them essentially blanket immunity to do whatever they like.

Yes, I had the same experience the few times I've used Uber. The drivers always seem happy. They don't feel like they're being exploited and often feel it was an upgrade on what they were previously doing. The flexibility comes up a lot too.

Whilst it's just anecdotes, that would still seem to be a serious problem for the "Uber is exploiting the poor proles" camp.

In America we plug things into other people's sockets all the time, and I think it's even an electrical code violation to make the socket unavailable.

While I'm sure they have the right to ask you to leave if they don't want you using their power, they can't have you arrested for it. It's even the same for a gun in most states, you can be asked to leave and arrested for not leaving after police show up, but not arrested for the gun itself. Granted, the gun example is not true in all jurisdictions, I Am Not A Lawyer etc.

Unless you're hurting someone or breaking something, the only punishment for violating one of these "rules" should be being asked to leave, and then being detained or removed if you refuse to do so or if go back after they told you not to come back on their property. Pretty simple stuff really, granted some areas have hard to deal with people; in a lot of the USA everyone is pretty friendly minus large metropolitan areas where they try to fix this by adding more rules.

I think that is what happened, from the wording of the summary he didn't get arrested until he started acting crazy about it; thus getting arrested for "unacceptable behaviour".

I do it all the time on Swiss trains. Then again, if they put a socket above every seat (on modern trains at least), I somehow expect they won't mind.

Yes, how did the BBC ever dare to compete with Commodore, Apple, etc back in the 1980's. What imperialists!

Signed /A guy who learned programming on a BBC Micro