Interesting Links for 15-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• The Things (Peter Watts short story about The Thing)
  (tags: short_story scifi PeterWatts)
• Getting to Crazy - Is the mainstream waking up to the truth about the Republicans?
  (tags: politics usa republicans economics)
• Mozilla demos BrowserID. The latest attempt to get rid of passwords and store identity in the browser.
  (tags: security browser authentication mozilla firefox identity browserid)
• In other evil Tory news: Poor to be banned from bringing spouses to the UK from overseas. Right of appeal also to be dropped.
  I mean, really. Are they suggesting these things just to get them blocked?
  (tags: conservatives immigration politics evil uk)
• Award winning author abandons writing to be a teacher, explains why.
  (tags: writing teaching stress life business)
• Gene found that produces higher levels of food cravings in Europeans
  (tags: food genetics)
• Gamers With Disabilities Battle Indifferent Industry
  (tags: disabilities gaming computer_games)
• More information about the brain's network connections revealed
  (tags: brain psychology neuroscience)

Comments

[fearmeforiampink]

I did find it amusing that Delicious suggested 'evil' as one of the tags for that story.

[andrewducker]

You can blame me for that. If you look at the people who have it on Delicious I'm the only one to tag it with that:
http://www.delicious.com/url/6042de2428f1118c601d6935386c8cd5

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

The UKBA is running a consultation on the proposed family migration policy changes if anyone fancies going "no" at them.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Re: evil Toryness. When I married minnesattva in 2006, I had to show that I earned enough to support her (I had to prove I had a minimum £15,000 p.a.) and we both had to do without any form of state benefit for the two years until she got her indefinite leave to remain. It may be that rules were different for Commonwealth citizens before but aren't going to be now, or something, but the 'new, harsh' rules described in that article are far less harsh than what we had to go through. (We also had to go through the 'rigorous' stuff about proving that we knew each other before marrying).

Also, the way you've worded it sounds like appeals for marriage visas are being dropped - the appeals that are being dropped are actually for visitor visas.

The raising of the probation period is a bastardly thing, though, and should be fought.

[andrewducker]

Okay, so not as evil as I thought.

I still object to the dropping of appeals though - the whole point of appeals is to apply scrutiny to decisions that may well be wrong. If a percentage of people are winning their appeal that tells me that the initial decisions _are_ sometimes wrong, and thus an appeal process is necessary.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Oh absolutely. Appeals processes should be sacrosanct.

And you know my opinion - we should have basically open borders, and put the money we currently spend on keeping people out into helping people who are here integrate instead (ESOL classes and so on).

But the main point seems to be a non-story - or at worst, some kind of harmonisation of Commonwealth immigration rules to be closer to non-Commonwealth ones.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Getting to Crazy - Is the mainstream waking up to the truth about the Republicans?

In a word, no - that article is by Paul Krugman who has been aware as any reasonable person how cracked the far right (aka the Republican Party) has been for a long time. He's sadly far from mainstream.