FFS
I rarely click on Ian Parker Joseph’s twitter links, he is after all the main reason I felt I couldn’t join the UKLP. He does a great job of illustrating why it’s good that he is no longer the leader today.
This was his tweet :
An idiot, earlier
Good god! Could that be true ? That would be dynamite. Worth a click for once.
Idiotarians
Well no, of course, it isn’t true at all. It’s not even hyperbole, it’s just bullshit. Pure and simple. I can’t be arsed to fisk Ian’s godawful post in its entirety, so lets just pull out the relevant parts. Ian says :
Over the past week, as the result of being passed some high level academic reports in the field of technology and ICT reasearch, I have been doing my homework, researching the claims made in the documents, and looking for corroborating EU documentation.
OMG! So far so shadowy. He was passed some “high level academic reports”, bloody hell! No. He wasn’t. The report that he refers to is in fact on line here which of course just adds to the hilarity when Ian promises to email anyone a copy, and subsequently ‘makes it available’ in a download. How fucking generous of him.
For whatever reason he decides that he doesn’t want you to know that this is a freely available document. Presumably he feels it adds to his mystique. To everyone else, not linking to source is just plain fucking rude.
Citation needed
Enter one Ian Dent, allegedly of Cambridge University, although if that’s true they seriously need to sack the fucker. Ian is quoting from the linked document “Beyond Broadband – The True Cost Of Digital Britain” by the aforesaid Dent.
Here is the money quote from Dent’s ‘report ‘(his emphasis)
In computing terms (where the concept originated), an ‘attribute’ can be defined as: ‘a specification that defines a property of an object, element, or file . . ‘ An ‘object’ in this [computing] context can be defined as: a collection of co-operating objects . . . capable of receiving messages, processing data and sending messages to other objects and can be viewed as an independent ‘machine’ with a distinct role or responsibility . .
This is how each person will become defined within Grid profiling – as an object – a ‘Biological Economic Device’.
Wow, Just Fucking Wow
So Dent here goes from a straightforward definition of a computer science term (a definition which, incidentally, he hasn’t referenced) to suggesting that a phrase he has just made up based on it is how we will all become defined by the EU.
No.
I would recommend against reading Dent’s eleven pages of poorly referenced and clearly delusional word salad, – which contains more than the average Daily Mail’s worth of ‘scare quotes’ – in it’s entirety. It will probably actually make you stupider. But this is just stupid. And for someone who is supposedly a Cambridge academic it is practically unforgivable. No citation, no reference. Not true.
Ian, however is prepared to report this as though it were some kind of hard, verifiable fact, rather than just some paranoid phrase that Dent coins on page 17 of his ridiculous screed.
Since Dent doesn’t cite any document that supports his delusion, perhaps the redoubtable IanPJ can help us out, since he states
(documents are there.. if you can find them)
Wow! Links to them ? No.
Seriously people, do better
I have no love for the EU, it’s a crawling horror of a bureaucracy, largely unelected and almost completely unaccountable, but for fuck’s sake people, shout them down for real things that they actually do, rather than just making shit up.
Sad fucks.
Filed under: Irrational Behaviour, Liars and Thieves, Libertarianism, Uncategorized | Tagged: Idiots |
Blind Cyclists' Union 
For all his short-sighted rantings, the aptly named ‘blind’steve is nevertheless correct about the purpose of the discussion document ‘Beyond Broadband’; the true cost of Digital Britain by Cambridge researcher, Ian Dent.
This document, produced by Ian Dent, has been orchestrated so as to stimulate the beginnings of a much needed public debate – to raise questions about decisions currently being made over our future, solely by ICT experts and the European Commission with NO active public debate in a common language.
These are technical, complex and largely ‘un-soundbite-able’ issues. So a few references may help readers to investigate for themselves in a more measured and balanced way:
The European Commission on the use of RFID technologies as part of a vision for an ‘Internet of Things’:
“Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a technology that allows automatic identification of objects, animals or people by incorporating a small electronic chip on its “host”. Data is stored on this chip and can then be “read” by wireless devices, called RFID readers.
The concept is similar to traditional barcodes. A barcode represents information in a condensed format (usually lines) that takes little space and can be read by a machine.
Compared to barcodes, RFID tags are “smarter”: the information on the micro-chip can be read automatically, at a distance, by another wireless machine. This means RFID is easier to use and more efficient than barcodes: there is no need to pass each individual object/animal/person in front of a scanner to retrieve the information contained in each tag”.
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/rfid/about_rfid/index_en.htm
http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/what-is-the-internet-of-things
and . . the ‘public sector information market’:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemlongdetail.cfm?item_id=4891
Well, that barely passes the Turing Test, but nice of you to stop by.
“This document, produced by Ian Dent, has been orchestrated so as to stimulate the beginnings of a much needed public debate”
Bollocks. The way it is framed, and the absolutely appalling way in which it is referenced, your busy swapping between UK and US styles of quotation that makes most of it look like ‘scare quotes’, and your complete misunderstanding of computer science terms of art contribute nothing to any such debate other than confusion.
Take IanPJ for instance, who claims to be trying to track down the EU document that he erroneously believes your quoted text “An ‘object’ in this [computing] context .. ” to be drawn from.
The poor sod is convinced that because it’s a quote in a report about the EU that the relevant, sinister documentation must be buried deep within the EU. Had you referenced it, you could have saved him the ghastly heartache of this fruitless search, because it is taken directly from the Wikipedia article on Object Oriented Computing that can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
That part is double quoted, though unreferenced, and the rest of the time you seem to be using single quotes almost at random.
The phrase ‘Biological Economic Device’ appears to be your coinage, but you’ve put it in single quotes and bold for emphasis. Writing like this encourages the unwary to believe that everything you say is attributable to the EU, when in fact most of it is not.
As an academic is simply impossible that you are not aware of the proper conventions for quoting, referencing and footnoting, so one can only assume that your failure to use them properly here is a purposeful distortion.
So no Ian, your report contributes nothing to any such debate, and I would also point out that the privacy and social implications of technology are being widely debated every single day. You managed to use Google to do most of your research, so how did you miss that ?
[…] Human beings NOT classified by the EU as ‘biological economic devices’ […]