Sure but it's not merely violent crime I'm talking about, even things like burglary of empty homes has decreased. The only real increases have been sexual offences and most of these are because of mass revelations of historic abuse in the 70s/80s such that much of the increase is actual down to historic crimes, rather than recent crimes.

"Yes, that means punishing the victim. Whereas the victim here is a facilitator for the culprit. It's like leaving your car unlocked and open on the main road and someone using it for a bank heist. I don't know about yours, in my country, if that's your car you're due for facilitating a crime."

I actually agree that some victims should be left to suffer the consequences - god only knows there's been enough TV and newspaper articles aimed at every age range now that means anyone who is victim of a phishing scam deserves what they get.

But I have to ask, what the fuck kind of backwards country do you live in whereby you're guilty of facilitating a crime just because you did something stupid like left your car wide open? It's one thing to suggest the person not be covered by insurance (which is normally what happens in just about every sane country I'm aware of the laws of) but to hold them partially responsible for a further crime committed with their vehicle? what the fuck? Unless there's proof of intent that they did so with the intention of helping facilitate the crime (but then it's not stupidity is it? it's malice) then I don't think this is the case in just about any western nation.

That's the sort of twisted logic that implies a girl who wears a short skirt and gets raped is guilty of facilitating a rape, and someone who runs a Tor node should sign a sex offenders register if someone transits something dodgy across it. The only places I'm aware of such things happening are nations with really backwards laws like some parts of India, tribal areas of Pakistan, and some African nations.

It's one thing to not compensate someone who suffered financially for their own stupidity to ensure that there's a cost to such stupidity to act as a deterrent, but to hold people liable for other people's crimes just because they were stupid? That's really not a thing I hope to see in any country I ever have to transit through.

Interestingly since the UK changed governments to an austerity oriented government in 2010 and since the police saw large reductions in funding crime in the UK has actually dropped to the lowest point it's ever been in recorded history such that the UK is now one of the lowest crime countries in Europe (just over 10 years on from it being the highest).

Now, it's not that the cuts were the cause of this - it was trending in that direction anyway, but it's pretty clear that the cuts didn't stop or reverse the trend - a reduction in funding did not translate to a reduction in policing effectiveness.

British copyright law really isn't that weird, perhaps the most weird things about it are the desperate attempts by police to take down piracy websites using fraud laws because it's the closest thing they could find - a tactic which has only netted them mixed success at best. British copyright law is actually fairly typical because it's based on the Berne convention like that of most countries. The Premier League is clearly arguing that Fair Dealing does not exist under UK law, which is patently false.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Posting short snippets of a match on Twitter could arguably fall under any of the fair dealing exemptions, though at least 3 of them it seems to clearly fall under - i.e. criticism, review, and reporting of current events. The argument that such posts are for research are tenuous, but not impossible to make, but the argument that they fall under criticism, review, and reporting of current events seem to be pretty bulletproof.

Provided there is no commercial gain in the posting, and provided people stick to small snippets of just the goals then it seems pretty clear that the Premier League is outright lying and should simply be told to go fuck itself. Fair Dealing also requires that the original work already be available to the public in the first place, but that's also a given given that the whole fucking point in such football matches is that they're a public performance - the guys on the pitch aren't playing for shits and giggles like kids in a schoolyard, they're playing to make money and entertain, that is after all why they have stadiums and cameras around them that also then make a fortune broadcasting the event across the globe to millions of people, so the Premier League clearly can't use that argument either.

Given that the reason people post goals in the first place is to say "What an amazing goal!" or "What a shit goal!", given that the performances are clearly available to the public to start with (anyone can pay to see one live or on TV), and providing no commercial motive then I don't see how the Premier League could ever possibly argue that this isn't a legitimate use of the criticism or review clauses against the performance in question.

Sure, but my point is that by the time it's a year into it's lifecycle the X1 will have been patched with all the things it was lacking such that it can do everything the 360 did and then some, whilst being actually less of a pain in terms of DRM.

If all you use your 360 for is offline gaming and viewing media then the X1 will do all that too, so the only real thing that matters about it is whether it has any games you want, if not then there's really no big deal.

Personally I'm a bit of a console whore as I have a PS4 and a Wii U as well (on top of the 2x 360s and my Wii and PS3). I actually like all of them, probably less excited by the PS4's games line up right now - The Order just isn't my thing, and frankly despite the Wii U's deficiency of games the games it does have are actually excellent such that it's still got more excellent games - i.e. those deserving a review ranking of 95%+ than the PS4 and X1 combined even though the PS4 and X1 have more games overall. I've found actually owning the consoles that you get a completely different picture of them than that painted by fanboys and the press.

Well it depends what you class as a technology issue - I'd say that trying to make an application portable but not copyable is quite a technological challenge. That doesn't mean it's politically ideal but I can see why they're going down that route. This isn't really like PCs where companies try to bolt DRM onto an open architecture, this is about an architecture that is explicitly closed, being kept closed, because sometimes that's the intention - no one's pretending consoles are these great open devices, if you're staunchly anti-DRM then consoles never were and never will be for you but that doesn't mean there isn't a market for them and it doesn't change the fact that the market exists in part because of that DRM - there is a market for systems that are closed and fairly cheat free as a result.

"At the end of the day, the Xbone is a very anti-consumer piece of technology, and I simply will not buy one."

I'd argue it's actually less anti-consumer than some of the older consoles, certainly they've done away with things like online passes and shit this generation. I don't really understand why you have so much love for the 360, but so much hate for the X1 when the X1 is an all round improvement in terms of freedoms. The X1's DRM is actually a big improvement for the consumer on the 360s - cross profile content sharing works far better for example.

Microsoft made a lot of mistakes early on with the X1, but there was a complete reversal since the announcements and it's release (hell, you can even buy a Kinectless version now so all the NSA is spying on you through it nonsense is long dead), it's now a much more consumer friendly system than the 360 was and as consoles go, though consoles in general aren't exactly consumer friendly, so it's not exactly a high bar it has to surpass anyway.

"Why DLNA, in this day and age? It's garbage, with a "lowest common denominator" approach to media files, with only 8.3 filenames and very few supported formats."

What the fuck? have you created a DOS 5.0 DLNA server or something? What you describe isn't the reality of any DLNA server or client I've used including that bundled with Windows and the client bundled with even my cheapest TV.

It's not just MS, both MS and Sony decided to race unfinished products to market opting to finish them post-release. Microsoft currently seems to be ahead as it has DLNA support, 3D Bluray and so forth just about ready to go, whilst the PS4 still doesn't even do the most basic things, like play MP3s or audio CDs.

Speak for yourself, I have 4 different DLNA enabled TVs, a DLNA enabled Bluray player, a 360, a PS3 as well as an iPad, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S3, and a Nexus 7.

DLNA works fine with all of it, it's always been painless and effortless to get working. I guess if you had problems you must've been doing something very wrong or maybe using some shitty cheap devices that only bothered to implement half assed support as all I ever had to do was give Windows Media player access to the library, enable DLNA streaming and every other device/application then just worked with it. I've even used it on Windows 7 and Windows 8, so it's not like I've found problems with different OS'.

I care about DLNA because it's awesome and effortless - it literally just works without any effort with just about every common device that supports it.

Sigh, what a pathetically ignorant post.

It's not as straightforward as just implementing the ability to read FAT, it's about making sure people can't just copy downloaded games onto a USB drive and make multiple copies and pirate games that trivially whilst making sure they can use USB storage for games if they want to take them to their friends. It's about making sure you can't trivially manipulate a game copied to a USB device to cheat and so on and so forth.

Like it not, the reason there is so much more investment in console games by publishers is because it gives them access to a platform that is much freer from piracy and cheating (yes it exists, but most people don't chip their consoles because it often prevents online access and gets your online profile banned etc. meaning it's far more costly for cheaters/pirates to engage in that meaning there's less of it overall - though that is changing with Steam taking over most of the PC gaming world).

Microsoft has to protect that, else it loses everything that separates the console world from the PC world. Whether you agree with DRM or you're an open source everything hippy it matters not, the point is fundamentally that there's far more that Microsoft has to consider than just implementing the ability to read/write from a USB drive so to just say "Oh all they need to do is implement support for FAT" is completely wrong and shows a painful lack of understanding about the console market.

You seem entirely oblivious to the fact the 360 was in the exact same situation - worse, the 360 even had it's own bespoke memory cards originally. Support for USB devices came far later on on the 360. They haven't removed anything because the X1 is a completely new system with a completely new architecture requiring completely new software, it's not a simple in-place upgrade of the 360.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those that thinks that degrees are essential, or an indicator of inherent knowledge or skill - I did crap at Computing A-Level for example because I was already doing sockets programming in C at home, whilst they were managing to stretch out the teach of what was little more than "Hello World!" in Pascal over about 3 months at college so I just simply wasn't motivated enough to succeed. So I'm exactly with you on that one. Part the reason I did a second degree was because I went back to have another pop at the subjects I'd previously not done great in and hadn't had much professional experience with but wanted to improve my knowledge of some more - specifically pure maths topics like number theory.

But I think in this case the point is that this guy actually went to a Uni - something he just wouldn't do if that wasn't his thing and he didn't go to a stand out one. I didn't go to Cambridge because I wouldn't have gotten in at the time, this guy had no reason not to go to Cambridge, because regardless of his grades Cambridge would've looked at his supposed IQ of 197 and given him a place as that's the exact sort of thing that intrigues Cambridge far more than grades (because it plays to their PR view if nothing else - "Look we netted the most intelligent person in history!"). In fact, chances are Cambridge would've even sought him out explicitly upon news of perhaps the greatest IQ ever known reaching them. Unless of course it never actually did, because the whole thing is fabricated.

Cambridge is also the sort of place that would've challenged him, it's the sort of place that gets geniuses that are unmotivated because they're not challenged because it has a whole massive long history of working with such people and turning them into the greats.

So I get that people like you and me wouldn't have such an easy ride yet still do perfectly well in the real world (I've done far better career wise than every single better graded pupil at the schools I went to for example), but if this kid is as gifted as he claims then that alone would've made the big players like Cambridge notice. Apparently though the only ones that notices were the University of Sussex. It's possible even MIT or similar would've taken him given that he apparently went outside of his home country of Ireland anyway, but rather than ending up at a top 10 world university, he ended up at one that slips outside even the top 100 - there are 16 more highly ranked universities than Sussex in the UK alone. Again, the amount of universities that would be clamouring to take in the most intelligent person ever as measured by IQ would be far higher than just the UK's 16th best university even if Cambridge or Oxford missed him.

You're right:

From http://www.irishtimes.com/cult...

"I was coming home from school and encountered a house surrounded by black cars. Mom was on the couch, crying; Dad was not too happy. A lot of men in suits were wanting to yell at me for what I had done but were a little surprised when out of my schoolbag I pulled an extradition waiver â" which calmed the conversation down. If they signed this [the extradition waiver] then I would show them where the holes are in their network. We ended up doing a deal â" which happens in most hacking incidents you never hear about.â"

and:

"The showâ(TM)s creator, Nick Santora, introduced him as a man who âoehas saved the world several times over, things he canâ(TM)t even tell us aboutâ."

or:

"One of Scorpionâ(TM)s executive producers told Comic-Con, âoeWalter personally caught the Boston bombers by writing an algorithm that tracked motion on all the cameras within a two-mile radius of the blast. That kind of thing makes for a really compelling episode of television. He also stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening.â"

It's so full of weasel words it's unbelievable. An algorithm that tracks motion? what you mean checking if one frame is different to the next? that's tracking motion, hardly rocket science, any CS101 student could do it. Helped stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening? Well so have I, by not becoming an incompetent nuclear engineer that goes on to produce a flawed reactor design I assure you have also done exactly this. Things we can't be told about? Oh well, I'll assume they just don't exist then or I might as well just mention that I'm personally better than this guy because I saved not only the world numerous times, but the entire universe, I just can't tell you how.

Which is a shame because it sounds like the show may be a bit like Numb3rs, the sort of show that might interest me, but with this insurmountable pile of tosh and bullshit that's apparently surrounding it I'm going to steer VERY clear. This guy is obviously an egotistical self-publicist and a serial liar, and the guys writing about him are obviously absurdly naive and have failed to realise that they could've made up these exact same stories without getting him involved.

Everything he says is something many people could say and it would hold as much validity, there's literally nothing about this guy that's actually in any way verifiable - the incidents he claims to have been involved in, the things he claims to have done, absolutely none of it is verifiable. A genius that got a bog standard degree at a run of the mill UK university? - Christ, it's not like his "intelligence" even got him into Cambridge early, or even at all. It says he graduated in the late 90s, so if he was 13 in 1988 then that implies he only followed the same path of literally millions of other teens the same year he did. Why if he was such a genius wasn't he doing his A-Levels or degree early like real actual genius kids consistently manage to do? Even my fucking cousin got an A-Level at 14 because she was ahead of her years and yet she wasn't exactly exceptional - a few others in her school did too. I have two degrees, one of which I studied for whilst working full time, this means my academic achievements at very least are well ahead of this guy and I'm not exactly stand out either.

I can find not a single shred of evidence that this guy is anything other than mediocre at best.

Wow I knew Russia was shit but I had no idea that it was so shit that it didn't even invent it's own country and had to rely on the Ukraine to do that.

But wait, if Russia was born in the Ukraine, then shouldn't the Ukrainians be ruling you guys rather than vice versa? Perhaps you should hand your country back to them if it's theirs.

I don't really understand what type of warped mentality your grand dictator Vladolf Putler has bred into you to think that it's okay for you to tell the US and other countries to keep out of your business, but not okay for others to tell you to keep the fuck out of the Ukraine, but I have to ask, do you really not see the irony in that?

P.S. I just turned on Russia Today and the Keiser report was on and they were ranting about the US for blaming everything, if you don't care about the US why is the US the only thing your state sponsored propaganda channel rants on about?

"So on the US/UK side, how is that Iraqi thing working out? Or Libya? Or all the military interventions in Latin America? Or Iran?"

What does it matter? wrongdoings by either of those countries doesn't magically make Russia right or what it does acceptable.

But regardless, how are things working out? Iraq's a fuck up, Libya is at least in control of it's own destiny and not ruled by dictatorship, I don't think anything interesting has happened in Latin America for many decades now, and Iran is growing up and becoming a more positive contributor to the world after successful sanctions and a subsequent change of leadership.

"How about shooting down of that Iranian passenger jet going to Dubai in 1988 by US military ship? 290 dead, but of course US does not even acknowledge wrongdoing."

Why do you go back to 1988? In 1988 the soviet union, KGB, and stasi still existed. If you want to go back that far then Russia with the USSR looks even worse again, it had even just come to the end of it's own misguided war in Afghanistan. Even China was just about to commit the Tianamen square massacre. I don't really know what your point is, that somehow a single wrongdoing by the US in 1988 justifies Russian wrongdoing now? Why not compare like for like? is that convenient for your pro-Russian views? None of it makes what the US did right, but nothing the US did wrong makes what Russia is doing in the here and now right either.

"Putin isn't doing anything more than the US has always been doing."

Yes he is, the US has always given territory back in modern history, it's not outright annexed foreign states in breach of international nuclear agreements. Similarly the US hasn't been marking houses of minorities. This is really the point - anything the US has done wrong still pales in comparison to the things Putin and his cronies are doing, especially in modern times. I absolutely hate the NSA's spying programs and think they're wholly unacceptable, but I'd rather be victim of the NSA doing that than have my home country annexed.

"Seriously, apply your standard to everyone equally for a change."

No I am, that's exactly the point. You however are not, you're cherry picking historical events to try and justify even worse modern events.

"You must be under influence of something. If you weren't, you would know that if it weren't for Putin, you'd have your soldiers in the middle of a civil war in Syria, or worse."

Or maybe unlike you I'm just educated? Whilst Putin's folks were already in Syria training the Syrians and helping defend their military port there the West gave not a fuck what Putin thought and quite rightly so. What actually stopped Obama's intended assault on Syria was the fact that the British people opposed it, the British parliament hence voted against it, and Obama was left isolated. It's a shame the Russian people weren't as mature about Ukraine and couldn't make Putin similarly back off from the idea. Unlike Russia (whose soldiers are in the middle of a few civil wars - Georgia, Ukraine, Syria) we, the UK, are not in the middle of a civil war in Syria precisely because we didn't want to be and so voted against it. I personally wrote to my MP to get him to vote against Syrian action and he did.

"Get your head out of your ass to get a better perspective on events around the world."

I have, which is why I know what I'm on about, whereas you seem to be parroting "OMG 1988 IRANIAN AIRLINER, THAT MAKES MASS MURDER BY PUTIN OKAY FOREVER!". Which is one of the most stupid arguments ever.

If you read my posting history back over the years you'll see I'm a staunch critic of the US and my own country, the UK where it's justified. It's just a shame there aren't more Russians like me that can't criticise their own country when it matters and only attack others when it's right to do so. Whilst there are a few, most of them seem caught up in Putin's populist nationalism, as it seems, do you.

He isn't me. But it's pretty obvious you're making a fool of yourself by further proving my point, obviously other people think so too and in your blindness to the fact you're just making it worse.

Keep posting, keep proving my point, please. It's funny to watch, just like the show.