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Comment Re:Should be interesting RE- Nato (Score 1) 375

it will mean England finally gets their own parliament as well, kinda stupid that Scotland has power over England but not vice versa.

Regardless of Scottish independence, England can create their own parliament, and keep Westminster's power restricted to union-wide matters. Why didn't that happen yet? Correct me if I am wrong but I believe Scotland has never opposed an England parliament.

Comment Re:Should be interesting RE- Nato (Score 1) 375

Not really - what all of those sources say is that Scotland's accession won't be automatic like Salmond suggests. Spain's government says they will have to go through the long, due process which current EU candidates are undergoing, which is only fair and obvious, and the current Spain's foreign minister can't comment on what they will do or refrain from doing at certain, hypothetical, point in the future, which is common sense. Any other comment could the be seen as interfering with Scotland's vote, and Spain's government may be completely different from the current one when and if Scotland applies to join the EU. As much as I despise the current Spanish government, those comments (which are more like a "no comment" answer) are the only acceptable comments.

And it's not like Spain has the political weight to cause a shitstorm in the EU. If any state were to veto Scotland, that would be other, more influential state, such as France, which also has secessionist movements. But I really doubt it. They're not really comparable cases.

Comment Re: What about... (Score 1) 155

Happy, contented people don't buy a lot of useless crap (like cigarettes for example).

That's right. But by "living longer and better-quality lives" I don't mean "Happy, contented" - I mean non-smoking. Non-smokers can still be materialistic, impulse buyers, and, because their life span and life quality are, in average, superior, they can buy more useless crap.

Comment Re:Flash panic (Score 1) 161

even purely observational academic studies need ethical approval and informed consent.

In what jurisdiction?

That's interesting, because a lot of "purely observational academic studies" have been done with no informed consent at all.

Examples: - Robert Levine's experiments linking a city population's average walking speed with their degree of helpfulness and their health (actually, this is not merely observational - parts of those experiments involved getting people to pick up dropped pens, return lost letters, etc). That was done in many parts of the world including the USA.

- In a car, sitting at a red light. Wait for it to go green, and deliberately fail to move off. Measure how long it takes for drivers behind to honk. Then do the same thing on a car with a foreign plate and compare results. They did that one in Western Europe, if I remember correctly. Unfortunately I can't find a link to that one, but I think I also read about that one on Quirkology.

Neither of those experiments (and many more, those two are just off the top of my head) were done with informed consent. That would have rendered them completely useless, obviously, due to bias.

Comment Re:Well, duh... (Score 1) 210

However they probably (for understandable reasons) don't want to do that kind of case-by-case decision making.

Regardless of how understandable their reasons are, if they aren't making the decisions case-by-case, then they are blatantly refusing to honour the ruling. However, I don't think that's what they are doing. I want to think they're simply employing the wrong people to make those decisions.

Anyway, I agree the ruling was a mess, but for another reason. The biggest problem I see is the failure to consider other search engines. They can probably force Bing to honour the ruling, because MS, like Google, has a corporate presence in the EU, but what about all the other, current and future, search engines?

The thing with the original case was that it was about information of a kind that doesn't belong in a newspaper at all. It was not a news piece, not an analysis piece, not an opinion piece. It was part of an excerpt of a government-issued journal. Those journals are available online. At the time the notice was published (the 90s in Spain), many if not most people didn't have access to the internet or didn't even know they could find the government journals online, so it may have made sense to publish portions of them on the newspapers. Today, it doesn't make sense to keep that information on the newspapers online. If they don't delete it (no, that would NOT be censorship - the information can still be found online, on the government's site), they should at least mark it as non-searchable in robots.txt.

Comment Re:Problem for Ireland (Score 1) 185

Getting the euro in the first place was a mistake for some in the Euro-periphery, but getting out of it now and re-adopting a floating currency (otherwise, what's the point in getting out) is about the worst possible course of action: you can't do overnight, and people will try to withdraw/send overseas all of their money as soon as possible. Assuming the banks have that much money (which is debatable), massive capital flight and black market are not exactly great solutions to any economy. Governments could try to prevent that with "corralito"-like measures but we all know how well that worked in Argentina.

Then there is debt inflation, legal nightmares and a few thousand more reasons not to quit the euro; those are just the most obvious.
Technology

Submission + - HTML5 App Builder with Modernizr, jQuery and Kinvey (kinvey.com)

An anonymous reader writes: This post explores a tool I've been hacking on that helps you get started quickly building HTML5 apps and includes Kinvey's latest Javascript library. The tool can be useful to anyone building HTML5 apps and doesn’t require the use of Kinvey.

You can find the GitHub repo here and see a screencast of installing the tool and creating an HTML5 project at the bottom of the post.

It started over the weekend when a customer contacted us regarding HTML5 support. I exchanged some messages with him about his application needs and provided him with a beta version of the Kinvey JavaScript library. Then on Monday, I was talking with Dave W. from our team and we came up with the idea for this tool.

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