No, that's not why people think the two situations are different. The hypothetical financial advisor (a) deprived people of money which they actually did have at some point, and (b) did so on a very large scale, seriously impoverishing the parents. If the financial advisor had stolen a much less meaningful amount, say $50, do you still think prison would be appropriate? I certainly don't. Even more so - if he merely deprived the parents of money they might have made but didn't by not investing quite as well as someone else could have done then I'm not even sure a fine would be an appropriate sanction (in other industries these sorts of practices are sanctioned by poor reviews/bad reputations, not through the law in any way).

They just made this up. See this which was written by an actual lawyer, not a press office: Is viewing a video a criminal offence under terrorism law? (may be paywalled).

The main three parties were all in favour of this. This wasn't just a stitch-up amongst the leadership with the MPs given a free choice - the party machinery was obviously forcing their MPs to vote in favour too. At this point I feel deeply embarassed to be British, as the way our elected representatives have acted makes the rubber-stamp parliaments in third world military dictatorships look better. I don't understand why even the Lib Dems were for this - electorally they have pretty much nothing to lose at this point and it would at least make them look like they had SOME of the principles people thought they had.

I'm not fortunate enough to have a local MP who voted even half-against this. I wrote to her and she wrote me a long, obviously cut and pasted email response (even down to the differing font sizes for different sections of text). Didn't even mention her personal views, just what Ed Miliband (the leader of the Labour party) had as his soundbite of the day.

So what I'd desparately like to know is, who can I vote for at the next election who won't stand for this sort of bullshit. If there is someone who is actually against this, and who has proper credibility (i.e. not the Lib Dems), I'd love to know. I'd rather not vote for the Greens (I am naturally a free market sort of person and would like to see a libertarian conservative type of candidate elected) but if they're the only option, they've got my vote as a result of this.

The current UK system for tuition is really much closer to a graduate tax than "tuition fees". Everyone automatically gets a loan for the fees. The amount you repay is collected through the tax system, based on a percentage of your income above a certain level, after you've graduated. If you never earn above that amount (£25k currently), you never make repayments. If you reach age 65 without repaying the "loan", it gets written off. If you make yourself bankrupt, it doesn't go away. About the only meaningful differences are (1) you still have to pay it even if you move abroad/out of UK tax, (2) you can eventually pay it all off if you earn enough and (3) you can pay the fees at the time if you want to instead.

Compared to the "golden age" which many people think of in terms of UK university education, there's not much difference. Marginal personal tax rates are lower now than they were in the 60s, 70s and early 80s so people may well be better off on graduating than they would have been under the old system if taken in its totality.

The real difference is the fact that students are now expected to cover their own living costs while studying, vs previously receiving grants to cover these. That is a meaningful disincentive to go to university but the constant bluster from student "unions" that student debt is a problem is, I suspect, putting far more people off university under what is basically a relatively fair system.

True if you are talking about the common language definition. But absolutely not true if you are talking about the legal definition. For example, how about this woman who was convicted (although this was later overturned on appeal) of terrorism for possessing books (including poetry she herself had written).

The senior judiciary appear to be pretty horrified by the prospect as well so there is perhaps some hope. See this article by Lord Phillips, who before he retired had been Lord Chief Justice, the Senior Law Lord and the president of the Supreme Court.

I've seen this repeated a few times in this thread (and indeed whenever the intersection between homosexuality and Christianity is raised as a topic), however it is a misunderstanding of the theology of the most common Christian traditions. The dietary laws of the Old Testament are generally viewed in these traditions as forming a part of the Old Covenant which came to an end with Jesus (along with other laws which separated Jews from Gentiles) and were not a part of the New Covenant. This article has more detail on the differences between traditions.

This is apparently an issue particularly in Switzerland where the local banks now won't touch anyone who is even married to a US citizen (even if they are not themselves a US citizen). Many banks and other financial institutions have also closed the existing accounts of US citizens at very short notice and as a consequence US citizens are now excluded from a large part of the financial services market in that country.

Even if you agree with the concept of "global taxation" of foreign resident citizens, FATCA in particular seems to have been pretty counterproductive. Those who are truly evading US taxes and have dual citizenship could presumably bank with one of the local banks who don't share any information and declare themselves not a US citizen (using their second country passport as "proof"). Meanwhile those who play by the rules get stuck with access to at best a limited banking market which will presumably charge them heavily for the privilege of dealing with them.

MS can't even make their own products backwards/forwards-compatible without subtle formatting or processing bugs creeping in - so even with the best will in the world I'm just not sure this is an easily solvable problem.

The other big problem is that LibreOffice Calc in particular is still a long way behind Excel in terms of functionality. Even ignoring VBA, the basic formula support just isn't there. I don't know if this is lack of work, copyright/patent issues or something else but it means I simply can't use Calc for work at the moment. Anyone who needs to interoperate with Excel needs to buy Excel, and that means forcing people to use something else is likely to cause more problems than it solves.

I expect what will actually happen is that we'll end up with a (long) period of "Works best in Internet Explorer"-style hell. People who need to work with government will resort to doing their work in MS products then copying the outputs into LibreOffice, or using PDFs, or other equally time-wasting strategies. Everyone will hate it. And everyone will blame LibreOffice (and by extension, OSS) for it.

You are assuming that MS Office's handling of ODF is the same as LibreOffice's. It isn't.

I'll believe that when I see it. Every IT project of that size was already "exceptional" in terms of trying to deliver some promised huge benefits to someone (service users, taxpayers, etc). If they really meant it they would be banning "transformational" projects of any type in government (whether IT-related or not) and just get on with trying to cut small incremental levels of cost out of how they run the current system each year.

I've been using the Ribbon format for about 3 years now and I STILL hate it. The newer versions of Outlook are the worst - the combination of the ribbon and the way MS couldn't be bothered to reimplement the compact header format really eat up vertical screen space for those of us who prefer the bottom preview pane layout (yes I know I can hide the ribbon but then I lose all the buttons which do what I use all the time, which is mainly the quick search box). On a laptop with only 768 vertical pixels (when I'm not docked) that is a serious headache which leaves me using OWA instead of the full blown outlook usually.

As you point out, the 2003->2007+ switch was therefore a huge opportunity for OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whichever fork is your favourite. The UI is great, easy to understand and the small differences from Office 2003 (like where the cursor ends up mid-editing a formula in Excel) are actually mostly positive incremental steps. You theoretically get the usability benefits of 2007+ (particularly for Excel, where memory/size constraints in 2003 were getting to be a problem for many).

Unfortunately though, interoperability is extremely poor - LibreOffice simply can't handle a big Excel spreadsheet (which is in my experience at least 60% of what most businesses buy Office for), and I've sent docx files from LibreOffice where, when people open them in MS Word, all the line breaks are suddenly gone or other formatting oddities appear. As another example, trying to use LibreOffice's "track changes" equivalent functionality left me with a docx file that Word (and often LibreOffice itself) is unable to open.

I would love to think that if the UK Government does move to LibreOffice they would fund someone to provide decent support who can fix a lot of these issues - that is supposed to be how the model works and fixing these issues would be of huge benefit to everyone. Unfortunately I can't really see that happening. I suspect instead it will end up being a typical government cock-up and massively overspend/under-deliver. I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.

Actually in the UK we do (at least in theory) have an explicit right to a "fair" trial under Article 6 of the ECHR which is incorporated into English law via the Human Rights Act 1998.

Interestingly, digging a bit deeper and looking at the average sentences (in 2009, the most recent year available) for those given immediate custodial sentences (which is not all of those convicted), the statistics say 33.6 months was the average for robbery and 48.7 months for sexual offences (which are statistically the longest sentences on average). Of course the lengthiest of sentences for those offences will have been much longer but as a taxpayer the cost of jailing this guy Vickerman for 5 years for what was, after all, a non-violent crime doesn't sit well with me in context (although admittedly I know nothing about the details of the case). See here, page 40 for the stats.

This brings up an interesting division in how people think about crime. Some (many?) people would say that stealing a penny each from 5 million people is a crime for which a lesser punishment is justified than stealing £50,000 from one individual, despite the monetary amounts involved being the same (and the first scheme being more audacious). The debate over whether harsh penalties for infringement of IP laws are justified (leaving aside the issue of whether the existence or persistence of the IP in question is in itself just) is really another version of that debate. I wonder if perhaps a generational difference in attitudes about this aspect of morality (ie older legislators and executives appear to view infringement so much more seriously than younger people).

I'm actually not so bothered by this as a business practice per se. When e.g. MS does the same thing with CALs etc, the issue is really about lack of competition in certain segments. Noone else has a product as slick as Outlook or Excel otherwise they would take MS's business in a shot. Economists might desscribe this as MS "adding value" (much as I'm personally loath to think of Outlook and Excel doing that...).

Back to the car market and in theory, a competitor with the same cost base may well be able to offer a product which is priced at, or slightly above (to account for marginally reduced total volumes) the weighted average price of the SKUs offered on this model while offering ALL the top-end features - so the market ought to ensure it disappears except for features which are truly unique to one or another manufacturer (which tend to be right at the top end anyway). Seat-heaters don't really qualify for this IMHO.

So the fact that this is happening indicates, to me, that there is an (at least slightly) disfunctional market operating in the car market in the US. That is certainly not down to this practice and is, I suspect, more down to things like import tariffs and regulations making it difficult for new competitors to enter the market.