Interesting Links for 4-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• Google made my son cry - please take note if your children use gmail
  (tags: google email web usa law children)
• How to avoid getting hit by a train‬‏ (video)
  (tags: video train funny)
• Portugal shows that drug decriminalisation works
  (tags: drugs addiction decriminalization law portugal)
• What if history...was only a thousand years long!
  (tags: history weird)
• Question for the internets - why is the scoring system in tennis so fucked up?
  (tags: tennis games scoring wtf)
• Web Intents: a different way of hooking different websites together.
  (tags: web intents awesome)
• Lack of drug standardisation and regulation leads to more deaths.
  (tags: drugs law EpicFail)
• Perky 'Canada' Has Own Government, Laws
  (tags: canada funny)
• The independent notices that Scotland has separate legal, health and education systems (and apparently its own government!)
  (tags: scotland government uk)
• Labour being nationalist fuckwits when it comes to business.
  (tags: business labour globalization)

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

The independent notices that Scotland has separate legal, health and education systems (and apparently its own government!)

I'll take "What is the West Loathian question?" for $1000 please.

[andrewducker]

I'll take "What problem has parliament been resolutely ignoring for the past 14 years?" please.

[steer.livejournal.com]

14 or 34 years?

[andrewducker]

Not quite so pressing in 1978, as it didn't go through.

Now we have devolved powers it makes more of a difference...

[steer.livejournal.com]

Scotland has had some devolved powers since at least 1975;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Government_%28Scotland%29_Act_1973

Hence the 1977 question about West Lothian.

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

From which : "...pointing out the absurdity of a Member of Parliament for West Lothian being able to vote on matters affecting the English town of Blackburn, Lancashire but not Blackburn, West Lothian in his own constituency"

[andrewducker]

Yes - but that's not 34 years ago, which was your original statement - I assumed you were referring to the devolution bill in 1978 (which was 33 years ago, but at least closer).

I hadn't realised that the West Lothian Question was dated 77 - for some reason I thought it was actually older than that.

[steer.livejournal.com]

The 34 years ago referred to the asking of the question -- perhaps before then it had not occurred to people?

No I did not know the date -- had to check Wikipedia.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

I guess 13 for google+ is a good idea - Kirsty still doesn't have any social network accounts as I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet!

[andrewducker]

It's not just for Google+ though - it's _all_ Google services. So if Kirsty used GMail and they found out she was under 13 (when she was) then she'd lose all of her email (like the kid in the article).

[steer.livejournal.com]

A friend's 6 year old had her first "friends cull" already. Apparently the kids game "Club Penguin" is targetted at 6-14 year olds and has an in-game social network. She reached the in-game limit of 100 friends in her friends list and couldn't make new friends. She deleted existing friends in alphabetical order to make room. It's a bold solution.

It's also slightly boggling to think of six year olds with a 100 friend online social network.

[andrewducker]

I occasionally consider a facebook cull, but what I really want is a way of separating "People who I am happy to be connceted to" from "People whose everyday updates I am interested in." Fortunately Google+ gives you that :->

Have you managed to get on yet? I tried mentioning you in a couple of posts, but I believe they've closed that loophole now.

[steer.livejournal.com]

what I really want is a way of separating "People who I am happy to be connceted to" from "People whose everyday updates I am interested in." Fortunately Google+ gives you that :->

Friends -> Manage Friends List -> Create List

Create a list "Everyday updates" and add to it all people you wish to see updates from every day.

From Home you will then be able to access "Everyday updates" on a pulldown from "Most recent". This will show the most recent updates only from the friends you wish to read. I think you can avoid the extra "click" by grabbing the link you get from the pulldown but I've not tried it.


Have you managed to get on yet? I tried mentioning you in a couple of posts, but I believe they've closed that loophole now.

Thanks for trying though. Still no invite. Guess I shall have to be patient. My own fault for having an unused google mail account (it's purely a repository) and not linking my google reader to other peoples.

[andrewducker]

I'll have a play with the pulldown later. Not as slick as LJ (or as G+), but sounds like an improvement. Of course, I suspect that's not going to filter through to the Android app. I'll see what I can get out of it though.

My Google Reader isn't linked to anyone else, so far as I know. I must have just gotten lucky. I did get my name in on the invite page fairly sharpish, but so did a lot of other people.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I'll have a play with the pulldown later.

Hope it solves the problem for you.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

We didn't get on through mentions - we got on through someone inviting the other person to 'hang out' - worked when I invited Rachel too

[nmg.livejournal.com]

So *that's* what Club Penguin is! At the weekend I went shopping in Saino's for the first time in months, and couldn't work out what all the Club Penguin-branded plush dress-up penguins were about...

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Club penguin is a Disney cartoon which they have managed to merchandise and capture the tween market with.

[arkhamrefugee.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I agree with the commentary in the Google article. People were flipping out because Google, being a US company, was adhering to US law with its TOS. It's not as though Google were coming over to the UK to demand that local ISPs not allow 13-year-old children onto their service. The bulk of Google's servers are located on US soil, which makes them liable to US law.

I am sorry for this child that he is likely going to wind up losing two years of his online life because he got caught in a ToS snafu. However, screeching on the Internet about how dare the US expect US companies to enforce US law when they are based in the US is, well, rather silly.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I agree. I think that Google could do more (by, for instance, allowing parents to authorise their children insofar as the law allows), but they have to obey the law.

I linked to it more as a warning to parents than anything else.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Dodgy territory, especially in the US. Facebook is 13 for an account, Google ToS also says 13. I guess it's age of responsibility and all that. Kirsty has had an email account since she was born(Geeky mother) but it's an associate account on BT which means the Primary account can access and see the mailbox. Having gone through a bad MSN experience when she was 10, I am pretty strict with what she is doing online and who she is talking to, I also on occasion scan her history and check MSN chat logs. Many parents don't. If Google allow a child under 13, EVEN WITH PARENTAL PERMISSION have a gmail account and something untoward happens - worst case internet predator, I guess Google would be open to be sued in the litigious society. bear in mind a gmail account will automatically give chat functions.
I'm all for strict rules and if she asked now K could get a Facebook account, but before this I coudl say no as she was too young according to FBs own rules

[andrewducker]

I wonder how long it will be until she asks - and how long until it's just normal for her classmates.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Google can, and apparently do, allow parents to authorise their children.

You just *have to do that*.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. Why on earth haven't they done it then? That's very confusing!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Caveat: I'm just coming to this this morning, and I haven't done it.

It's shown up repeatedly in the comments to Abi and Martin's article, which suggests that it's possible. However, it's not at all clear that they've returned and read those comments yet - neither of them have posted in hours, and a number of trolls have yet to be deleted. It's possible they haven't found it yet.

(Now I'm tempted to create a new account with a fake age and get it locked, to see what the unlock options are like!)

[andrewducker]

Take screenshots and write a post on it!

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

Apparently, things like marking the account for deletion, or not letting them export anything , go beyond 'enforcing the law'.

[arkhamrefugee.livejournal.com]

In your opinion. In the opinion of Google, whose servers those are, it is in line with what they think is good policy enforcement. It is not like Google is denying this kid a tool that everyone else has. As far as I am aware, NOBODY gets to export their Gmail messages without using an IMAP mail client.

And the ToS wasn't exactly vague on their policy. So people whining about getting thrashed because they didn't read the ToS on an Internet service they get for free is rather asinine.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

There are a ton of ways to export your information without using an IMAP/POP client. There are none, however, to export information *from a locked account that you cannot log into*.

[arkhamrefugee.livejournal.com]

Which I think would be rather obvious.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Wow. There are a lot of people being total dicks over on that Google article's comments.

[andrewducker]

Yup.

I pretty much reflexively don't read comments on most sites nowadays. Hacker News is an exception, and here on LJ things tend to be better, because users curate their comments. But open places like newspapers are just cesspools, and places where people aren't used to dealing with a lot of comments don't tend to fare well either.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

I understand the impulse to be a dick to someone who's being histrionic over a simple issue that can be easily fixed if they'd just bother to do it.

I'm not proud of it, mind, but I understand it and I believe the character flaw to be pretty wide spread among humans.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Also, in all fairness, I think the dickitude is 1)pretty low key and 2)generally aimed at the attitude that blames Google for this problem while accepting no responsibility for violating the ToS in the first place.

It comes out even more clearly when a technical solution is suggested (change the birthdate) and then they just flat out say stupid things to explain why they shouldn't have to do that ("We're teaching OUR son NOT to lie" is the (slightly paraphrased) explanation, which conveniently ignores the fact that they had to lie to get the account in the first place.)

[marrog.livejournal.com]

The tone of that Independent article is... interesting. I'm not sure that the weaseling is actually intentional, mind you.

Thameslink contract

[doubtingmichael.livejournal.com]

According to Siemens, the contract will create 2000 jobs in the UK (see http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=55337 for instance), though many of them "in the supply chain" (which I suspect means a lot of them would have been created for Bombardier too). Still, it's something you would have thought would figure into a news story such as this one, if not into the Labour cabinet's thinking.

Re: Thameslink contract

[andrewducker]

Well, exactly. It's not like they're going to important thousands of germans to do the work.

And frankly, the government spends a lot of time selling UK companies around the world. They are not going to want to get into a shouting war where foreign governments start banning UK companies from contracts.