'Clinton News Network' same as it's always been.

Thanks for the offer. I think our local councillor here is already taking them on, and we'll certainly be offering to help. We've probably already got enough resources for this if they're interested in actually reading evidence.

As for the other place where my family and some old friends are, unfortunately I'm told their local council have made it pretty clear that they have no interest in reviewing the situation or changing policy in the near future, so it seems for now that battle has been lost. Until something tragic happens, presumably. :-(

It was those fat French* who demanded that Microsoft deliver an OS without a web browser at all, wasn't it?

* I'll assume Gerard Depardieu represents all French people, just like McDonalds represents all American cuisine and heavy drinking represents all Irish.

Money, being literally coins of precious metal, had intrinsic worth. Said government or bank could go to hell or lose a war, and you still have the value.

In that way, it started as merely another form of trade, a convenience to hold value from one sale until you found what you wanted to buy.

If the US went belly up, you have numbers on paper. When Kuwait was invaded, they were on a gold standard, but good luck going down to the Kuwaiti government requesting gold for paper, with a Saddam guy there.

- which is an extremely important right of people, the right not to be enslaved and kept in any particular country against their own will, the right to freedom of association, of private property, liberty and life.

From a US perspective, perhaps. But truth is not a defense in Europe, even for public figures (who thus use censorship to protect their power by preventing criticism.)

The legal power to silence criticism is at the core of the absolutist nature of the First Amendment. Government doesn't get to decide what kinds of criticism are permitted, by them, the people in power with police behind them.

Well that's why you have to stop Europe from demanding worldwide compliance, so dictatorships can't use it as precedence.

It's the wrong kind of precidence, showing governments with the power to censor.

France did try building a Grand mur de la France once, of course, but then the Germans just went around it. Google search results are already filtered in France as needed to comply with French law, but France seems to be upset here that the Germans (or French with a VPN) are getting around it. Somehow, I don't think they'll learn this time, either.

And that is exactly what a lot of us are afraid of.

It is notable that a couple of the local authorities who first tried these changes have since reverted. It's hard to know the real reasons for that decision given all the factors involved, but allegedly the safety implications turned out not to be as favourable as expected.

The trouble is these decisions at local authority level are always partly motivated by political concerns (often with a NIMBY element) and always have one eye on the money jar.

The actual study this is all based on has quite a few significant limitations, many of which the original authors did acknowledge right on page 1. I set out a some of them in another post in this discussion. Unfortunately, newspaper headlines and biased councillors both have a way of only highlighting the over-simplified conclusion and not all the caveats that go with it.

Of course you should slow down if you can't see properly. No-one is suggesting otherwise.

On the other hand, forcing people to do so makes formerly cycle-friendly streets cycle-hostile, so now people who might have to come home late are driving instead, undoing years of work to promote cycling as an alternative mode of transport.

Or, we could just have sensible, cycle-friendly levels of street lighting to encourage the sustainable, environmentally tolerable, high capacity modes of transport that we actually need.

Sure, you can get dramatically more powerful cycle lights, but most bike shops don't routinely carry them around here and hardly anyone actually has them. So at a minimum, this adjustment for changing street lighting seems to require everyone to buy much more expensive bike lights. At a time when people not buying bike lights at all is a significant safety problem that comes up every year here, I'm not sure that policy is realistic.

I'm pretty sure this was arrogance, but not malice, on MS's part: they really want to shift the IE userbase to Edge and drop IE support in some future release. Can you blame them? But in their arrogance they didn't remember (or didn't care) that quite a large portion of Windows users don't run IE in the first place.

We have looked this up before. If your external windows are overlooking public space and someone's reasonable lighting is partially lighting that space as well, then unless it's obviously excessive it is unlikely there is anything enforceable that can be done, any more than you have an enforceable right to demand council-operated street lighting around your home all be turned off because you don't like it. I'm not even sure there should be anything enforceable that can be done in that situation, but that's just my personal opinion. I'm just pointing out that for lighting under council control, there may be extra steps they can take to moderate the impact anyway.

The Chrome UI has annoted me from the start, and I trust Google about as far as I can throw their corporate HQ, but Chrome still has some neat tech.

Anyone know? Is there a chromium fork with a different UI, as Pale Moon is to FF?