MikeK It is not just Rasmussen, every poll has her trouncing the GOP. Unless she drops dead before election day Hillary will run, the GOP is split apart between the establishment and Tea Party, and their most electable candidate Christie is dangerously overweight and hit by sleaze allegations. She will walk the nomination against a token liberal, and although the general will be tighter the prospect of electing the first woman president plus the continued Dem advantage with minorities will see the Clintons return to the White House, although as Speedy says no other Dem has much of a chance
Mr Dancer, the idea that they will conquer everything on their silly map including retaking the ancient Islamic province of al-Andalus is so barking it hardly needs contradicting. The only reason the Middle Ages was subject to the rapid advance of the caliphate was because of deep divisions and a complete lack of discipline and organisation. When that changed under Charles Martel at Poitiers the Islamic invasion was stopped in it's tracks and slowly rolled back.
Never mind Spain, I see from their map they intend to take the Crimea and a chunk of southern Russia as well. Good luck with taking on Uncle Vladimir for that one. Any such efforts in that direction are more likely to result in a lot of areas on that map not currently in Russia ending up in Russia! Given the opportunity, I suspect the third Rome would like nothing more than to occupy the territory of the its orthodox motherland, the Second Rome.
Do ISIS really want Uncle Vladimir being crowned as Byzantine emperor in Hagia Sophia (an explicit aim of the Romanovs and one Britain fought the Crimean war to prevent)?
Just publishing that map gives the Russians an excuse to get far more involved in Syria and Iraq.
Well it was for preserving the balance of power in europe so that no single country or alliance could dominate the continent, that and the route to India. The story from the end of Napoleon to Germany's creation was a straight battle between the 2 big victors of that war, Britain and Russia, a cold war that lasted 45 years from 1825 till 1870. Russia was still Britain's enemy number one till the eve of the first world war.
Web browsing is not private. If I look at my own company's web logs, I can see who (down to IP address) has been accessing the site, and usually from which previous site or the particular Google search they used. Access to certain web sites is clearly something potentially of interest to the intelligence services, so, yes, combining those two factors, I do think that, subject again to proper safeguards and oversight, they should be able to track web metadata.
Edit: Incidentally, it's probably more Google than GCHQ that you should be worried about in respect of web privacy.
An IP address is anonymous to you but not to GCHQ - that's the crucial difference.
And can't we be worried about both Google and GCHQ? HMG should be clamping down on both.
AIUI a private user IP address is anonymous unless you can be bothered or have the authority to get the ISP to tell you who was using it at the time concerned. And if you have the authority you won't do so without good reason as budgets are not unlimited.
Basically in simple terms your privacy is inversely proportional to how much you annoy people online.
Actually, your IP address is a lot less anonymous than you think.
Of course, governments can turn up to BT or Virgin or whoever, and say "who did you assign this IP address to on a given day and time".
But for a mildly able criminal, there are ways. In the banks of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., there will be stored sessions - the following IP was associated with the following session, and the following user logged in using that IP. If you have an IP address you want to check, and you have access to the server logs at a couple of these big companies (or at CDNs like Akamai) you can usually work backwards and find out roughly who an IP came from.
You can often get it down to town level just by going to places like...
As technical administrator, I once did a quick and lazy dump of all the IP addresses of the people accessing PB.
The most common IP addresses were: the Houses of Parliament, the Conservative Party, News Corporation, and DMGT. Plus there were a surprisingly large number of hits from multinationals like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Barclays,
I kept meaning to match up usernames and IPs, particularly to work out who was posting from CCO, but never got around to it.
Thanks for the comments re: my maps (election-data is my blog). There was a glitch in the coding last week which unfortunately led to some misleading data being churned out. It's been rectified now. The piece I did with Rob Ford for The Times today has one of the interactive maps with it, and there'll be more where that came from.
I'm happy to do custom maps for the Euro results if anyone has a particular map they'd like to see, or an area they'd like to focus on. I've had a lot of requests for the data overlaid on to parliamentary constituencies, which is easily done, for example.
Thanks again, and I will try to post on here more often as the election nears.
Smarmeron Good quip, but this proposal is a poll tax in the making, terrible idea!
Rather than tinkering with the details of how money is pilfered from us it'd make a pleasant change if the govt focused on taking less and spending less.
If you want to see a radically lower level of tax and spend, you ought to support the proposals: along with the "how your money is spent" document, it would be a reminder of how much is paid over.
Yes; transparency is the best way to get the low tax message over and I've always favoured, as a start, printing a breakdown of taxes on invoices/receipts etc. I'm also instinctively in favour of this on a tax simplification level too.
We have this transparency already with Income tax for employees and every receipt I get shows VAT
In reality PAYE means we have just about the lowest income tax rates in the world at zero percent, because to all intents and purposes income tax and employees NI are actually levied on employers. What employees have never had they will never miss.
An economist will tell you that the real burden of both employers' and employees' national insurance falls on the employee, amongst whom there is a wider and lot more effective competition.
Constantinople was colloquially shortened to stan-pol by the Greeks of Asia minor. Istanbul is just a Turkish variation of this, so reaĺly still Constantinople. This was a majority Greek city as late as the Great war.
I realise there was major geopolitical rivalry between us and Czarist Russia in the 19th Century, just pointing out that this took our eye off the ball. The frogs have always been the real enemy...
Robert, why were you surprised at the large number of hits from multinationals like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Barclays? Thanks to invaluable contributions of a small group of very informed posters, this site became an absolute must read when it came to the Banking crisis as it unfolded.
Web browsing is not private. If I look at my own company's web logs, I can see who (down to IP address) has been accessing the site, and usually from which previous site or the particular Google search they used. Access to certain web sites is clearly something potentially of interest to the intelligence services, so, yes, combining those two factors, I do think that, subject again to proper safeguards and oversight, they should be able to track web metadata.
Edit: Incidentally, it's probably more Google than GCHQ that you should be worried about in respect of web privacy.
An IP address is anonymous to you but not to GCHQ - that's the crucial difference.
And can't we be worried about both Google and GCHQ? HMG should be clamping down on both.
AIUI a private user IP address is anonymous unless you can be bothered or have the authority to get the ISP to tell you who was using it at the time concerned. And if you have the authority you won't do so without good reason as budgets are not unlimited.
Basically in simple terms your privacy is inversely proportional to how much you annoy people online.
Actually, your IP address is a lot less anonymous than you think.
Of course, governments can turn up to BT or Virgin or whoever, and say "who did you assign this IP address to on a given day and time".
But for a mildly able criminal, there are ways. In the banks of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., there will be stored sessions - the following IP was associated with the following session, and the following user logged in using that IP. If you have an IP address you want to check, and you have access to the server logs at a couple of these big companies (or at CDNs like Akamai) you can usually work backwards and find out roughly who an IP came from.
As technical administrator, I once did a quick and lazy dump of all the IP addresses of the people accessing PB.
The most common IP addresses were: the Houses of Parliament, the Conservative Party, News Corporation, and DMGT. Plus there were a surprisingly large number of hits from multinationals like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Barclays,
I kept meaning to match up usernames and IPs, particularly to work out who was posting from CCO, but never got around to it.
Comments
Sun Politics @Sun_Politics 4s
YouGov/Sun poll tonight - Labour lead reduced to two points: CON 35%, LAB 37%, LD 8%, UKIP 12%
*MOE
The story from the end of Napoleon to Germany's creation was a straight battle between the 2 big victors of that war, Britain and Russia, a cold war that lasted 45 years from 1825 till 1870.
Russia was still Britain's enemy number one till the eve of the first world war.
Labour lead 2% in tonight's @ComResPolls/@Independent poll: Lab 32(-3) Con 30(0) Ukip 18(+4) Lib 7(-1)
I'm happy to do custom maps for the Euro results if anyone has a particular map they'd like to see, or an area they'd like to focus on. I've had a lot of requests for the data overlaid on to parliamentary constituencies, which is easily done, for example.
Thanks again, and I will try to post on here more often as the election nears.
Ian (www.election-data.blogspot.co.uk)
Can someone with the info stick them all in a list in one post so that we can ogle, compare, comment and confuse ourselves.
Thanks in anticipation.
Ashcroft - Con lead 2
YouGov - Lab lead 2
ComRes - Lab lead 2
Populus - Lab lead 4
Average - Lab lead 1.5
Good day for Con - especially when you add in the ComRes marginals poll as well.
I realise there was major geopolitical rivalry between us and Czarist Russia in the 19th Century, just pointing out that this took our eye off the ball. The frogs have always been the real enemy...