Yes, our useless Home Secretary has done it again. Two days after deciding to ignore her own expert advisors on reducing ecstasy to a class B drug, the second time she ignored her own experts on a drugs issue – the last one was deciding to upgrade cannabis to class B from class C, and in the same week it was revealed that in her despotic push for ID cards she’d neglected to plan or budget for the equipment to read them, she’s now decided that freedom of speech extends exactly as far as it meets her own views and has banned controversial Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the UK on the grounds that he may incite violence or hatred. All because he made a 17 minute film expressing the view that violent muslim extremism can be linked to passages in the Koran.
What’s really stupid about this is that he was in the country two weeks ago anyway. In the House of Commons, no less. Is he suddenly more of a threat to public safety than he was then? I think not.
Jacqui Smith, and by extension Gordon Brown (our unelected PM), has proven yet again how unfit she is to hold public office. Are the two of them that insecure in their views that they won’t allow anyone expressing opposing views into the country? Or are you only allowed free speech now when the government approves of it?
If you’re British I urge you to vote these idiots out of power at the next opportunity. Yes, we have some reservations about the Tory party but can anything really be worse than the slow erosion of liberty the Labour Party have inflicted on us for the past 10 years.
In the course of both my job (programming) and one of my hobbies (also programming) I regularly have to search the net to find the solution to a problem: maybe a bug in a third party tool or how to do a particular algorithm. Increasingly and inevitably the first result in google links to www.experts-exhange.com. Or as we at work call them, Expert Sexchange.
EE for those who don’t know is a forum where you can go and ask a programming related question and have it answered by an ‘expert’. Quite how well qualified these experts are, I don’t know, but what I do know is that to read the solutions to any questions you have to subscribe and to subscribe you have to pay. I can think of few other places like this on the internet. Most other places are free and some, unlike yahoo answers, even get people with a few brain cells posting to them.
One of the internet’s greatest features, if not THE greatest, is the free sharing of knowledge and information. People will willingly share source code and solutions to people they’ve never met and ask nothing in return except that they too can get solutions and answers. It works like barter – one day you’re asking for information, the next you’re giving it. Quid pro quo. Sites like EE kill this mentality by only sharing information with those who can afford to pay for it, keeping those who can’t in the dark. If all places were like this it would be like medieval times where only the very rich (and the clergy) could read or write, when knowledge was exclusively the domain of the wealthy.
So if you subscribe to Expert Sexchange I urge you to stop. Boycott it or whatever until they realise this feudalistic mentality is not what the internet is about!
