Live data from Hacker News

BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

theguardian.com

301–310 of 425 posts

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#301

Honestly, a lot of the documentary is a mixture of interviews and CCTV camera footage with a fairly even handed narrative on the top – it, by itself, isn't that shocking and certainly isn't presented in a particularly sensationalist way. I'm amazed by the reaction it has generated. Yes, there's some post-colonial history there and it doesn't look great that it's the BBC that has made it, as opposed to, say, a US or c…

> If you're interested, you can get it (legally) in the UK here And if you happen to be belong to the rest of the ~99.13% world population, you can grab it here: Episode 1 - magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3C378A82CF67A1107523CA6C647077403A1EF74D&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E01+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A…

[deleted]

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#302

Is it just me, or are authoritarian regimes on the rise world-wide?

Democracy can be declining or increasing depending on the yard stick and the region you are looking at.

On average, democracy is declining globally if measured with popular Democracy Index.

More on this The Economist article https://archive.ph/FJfMU

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat disagree. To me, it looks like many countries are trying to diverge from the sphere of influence of the US, and US doesn’t want that happening. When the big media portrays every other country as dangerous, authoritarian, etc., it’s always interesting to seek for motivation behind the claims. As a quick example, Brooklyn is much more dangerous than pretty much anywhere in Moscow. I can’t imagine NYTimes or…

I was curious about that stat on crime rates in Moscow vs Brooklyn but I can’t find any evidence that it is true. In 2022 there were 138 homicides in Brooklyn which comes out to 4.98 homicides per 100k residents. In comparison in Moscow Oblast there were 6.9 homicides per 100k residents (in 2017, which is the latest year I can find information for this stat). So at least by homicides, Moscow seems more dangerous.

Here are some stats to back my claims:

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...

The numbers clearly show that in general Moscow is much safer.

    Index        Brooklyn, NY    Moscow
    Crime Index:    45.75    36.86
    Safety Scale:    54.25    63.14

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#304
post #194
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you perhaps a teen? that's a magnet link, its used to transfer things via bittorrent. we used to put them in the spokes of our bicycles when we'd ride down to the five-and-dime

When I was riding bikes to the store we had dialup and floppies were giving way to CDs. It’s been over a decade since I’ve used BitTorrent and I didn’t know magnet links were still popular. I hate seeding and there was also a lot of malware hidden in public trackers. Once I switched to Usenet I never looked back. P2P file sharing has never been a good experience for me.

There's no malware risk from trackers lol...

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then who is liable if some dangerous substance is discovered within a company's office in Germany? Or if someone gets hurt by a normal object placed in a peculiar position? Assuming the perpetrator is unknown.

There is an investigation (for that we have the police) on how it got there and who is responsible and if something illegal (determined first by the prosecution office and then determined by a court) was going on.

And if the perpetrator cannot be found?

Who pays out for the damages ultimately?

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#306
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer is twofold: China isn't a dictatorship, and you can't reason about all countries using this dictatorship-vs-democracy dichotomy. Can I complain about the man in charge? If I go to social media and I post that I hate the bear, what happens? :-) For comparison purposes, on a daily basis, Klaus Iohannis (the Romanian president) can fill his fridge with meat, as we say in Romanian (I'll let you figure out fr…

The ability to criticize the president is not what's important here, and in fact a focus on that as being some sort of golden metric is also another hurdle in properly understanding China. This is part of the typical "dictatorship-vs-democracy" dichotomy thought that I'm criticizing for not being a good fit for China. Concretely: yes in China there is censorship, and yes you can't just criticize the president. Howeve…

[flagged]

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#307
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People waking up to the fact that the West and the East are equally bad You probably want to define what "East" is in this context. If East is Russia + China, it's trivially easy to prove that the West is better for its own citizens. 1. Economic levels in the West. 2. Respect for citizens' lives in the West. I'm from a country that used to be in the Eastern Bloc, and let me tell you, nobody respects its citizens' l…

I'm Chinese. I'm not commenting on Russia but please keep China out of "trivially easy to prove that the West is better for its own citizens". Chinese citizen have been found to be far more satisfied with their government and their future prospects than for example the US. This "propaganda"-sounding fact is even something found by western institutions such as Harvard, York University and Democracy Perception Index! E…

@FooBarWidget, I take it you're not uighur?

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what I’m asking is: why does the operating system allow the video player to do anything other than what it needs to do to play videos? If the video player suddenly starts trying to access files on its own (anything not explicitly chosen by the user through system file dialog) or trying to access the internet then the user should be prompted to give permission. We have this kind of API permission (capability) syst…

The ux you are describing is a lot worse than what people get with vlc or mplayer. For example, you can open videos from the cli, which means there is no file chooser involved. Also if you have a subtitle file (.srt) with the same name as the video you opened, the subtitles will automatically be added. Both of these are things people want as part of a versatile video player. The level of lockdown you were describing…

The level of lockdown you were describing is what we have on mobile platforms (which incidentally still have lots of malware). Generally speaking, people want more flexibility out of general purpose computers.

I expected this response. I think it's a false equivalence. We don't need to have a proprietary locked-down operating system like iOS in order to give the user full control over the capabilities an application has access to. We just need a standard API for handling these sorts of permissions.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious about that stat on crime rates in Moscow vs Brooklyn but I can’t find any evidence that it is true. In 2022 there were 138 homicides in Brooklyn which comes out to 4.98 homicides per 100k residents. In comparison in Moscow Oblast there were 6.9 homicides per 100k residents (in 2017, which is the latest year I can find information for this stat). So at least by homicides, Moscow seems more dangerous.

Here are some stats to back my claims: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni... The numbers clearly show that in general Moscow is much safer. Index Brooklyn, NY Moscow Crime Index: 45.75 36.86 Safety Scale: 54.25 63.14

These aren't actually stats! You can't take a bunch of opinions and put a number on each one and call the result quantitative! Murders per 100k is a statistic. Violent crime rate is a statistic.

Pick a statistic that is a reasonable representation of danger (I think homicide rate is a reasonable one) and show that Moscow is lower on that statistic than Brooklyn.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#310
post #103

Do India has the issue of "strict laws which are enforced selectively"? Because this reminds me of the traffic light in Grozny, Chechnya that is always red, the people from the regime just ignore it but if someone undesirable doesn't obey the red light(they have no choice, the light is always red) they will face the wrath of the strict traffic code of Chechnya: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/15954560406775562…

Or like the USA's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which everyone violates at least once a day. It's a felony too. But they only enforce it when someone with power or money gets upset about something. Like when weev used wget instead of browser to look at AT&T's public website and was sent to prison for years.
Post reply on HN