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London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

theguardian.com

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Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#91

Post by geff82 »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #78
alexro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense to call gay partnership a marriage. Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.

The best thing about this comment is: This opinion doesn't matter any more. Whether officiated by a religious order, the state, or the word of those involved, 'marriage' is just a word, a concept, and has many permutations. The new Marriage is unbounded by anyone else's beliefs. The old Marriage is concerned with law, religion, and society. And sometimes we need to drop down a gear and consider these things, but law,…

Marriage is simply a human need as long as it still takes 20-30 years to raise children. If you do not at least promise your partner to be there until the end of life, there can be no (perceived?) certainity that you are not shooting yourself in the foot by getting children. And because raising kids takes so long, and needs full energy by a couple, society (religion, state, etc) supports being loyal to each other in many ways.

And it is good that way.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#92

Post by astrodust »

scholia wrote: post #15
athenot wrote: post #13

I would understand that in a private place such as Disneyland or in an ultra-orderly city such as Singapore. But for a so-called public park, this is an insult to democracy. Part of what makes public parks interesting is how impromptu activities take place. Enforce existing law to keep people safe; no need for locking everything down.

True, but it's not really a public park....

What the hell is this thing, then? Why is private money involved?

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#93

Post by colanderman »

alexro wrote: post #37
colanderman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure "strictly defined cultural phenomenon" is an oxymoron.

Is it a better way to use different terms for when people get together to have kids and continue the family and when they just 'want' each other?

Plenty of homosexual couples have children, either through adoption, IVF or surrogates, just like heterosexual couples often do.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#94

Post by jsingleton »

Wintamute wrote: post #50
mattgibson wrote: post #7

This article more or less describes what a police state would look like if the Church of England designed it. A controlled, plasticised, corporate Little England, where fun is monitored and must be of an approved nature, freedom of expression is allowed as long as you don't express anything disagreeable, and the public have no democratic rights at all. Yet another small, sad indicator that control over the lives of L…

I find your comment somewhat alarmist, and lacking historical context. The City of London (from which the Temple end of the Garden Bridge starts) is many many hundreds of years older than the UK itself, and has always been privately owned and governed by shadowy, corporate and arcane processes. Traditionally even the Queen is not allowed to enter the City of London without the say-so of the Lord Mayor. This "private…

I would have thought that the City of London Corporation would be opposed to Wi-Fi tracking. Given their negative reaction when they discovered that the street bins were tracking people [0]. The technology in question was Presence Orb [1].

It's a good idea to turn Wi-Fi off when you leave home/work. This also avoids the issue of captive portals with gated internet access capturing your phone and disabling your data connection. I'm looking at you TfL.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/12/city-london-cor...

[1] http://www.presenceorb.com

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#95

Post by hellbanner »

keithpeter wrote: post #19
wolfgke wrote: post #9

That's why Richard Stallman correctly described mobile phones as tracking and surveillance devices: > https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html "Cell phones are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices."

The small educational centre where I teach has recently provided free wifi to users of the building. It is a good connection. You have to give a mobile phone number once to use the system. This morning, I went in with my old Thinkpad on which I have replaced Xubuntu with Slackware/MLED including a complete reformat and encryption of the SSD. The wifi recognised the machine and greeted me by name. I can only assume th…

Why do machines broadcast MAC addresses to networks? to identify themselves? Is it easy to randomize your MAC?

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#96

Post by ethagnawl »

hellbanner wrote: post #95
keithpeter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The small educational centre where I teach has recently provided free wifi to users of the building. It is a good connection. You have to give a mobile phone number once to use the system. This morning, I went in with my old Thinkpad on which I have replaced Xubuntu with Slackware/MLED including a complete reformat and encryption of the SSD. The wifi recognised the machine and greeted me by name. I can only assume th…

Why do machines broadcast MAC addresses to networks? to identify themselves? Is it easy to randomize your MAC?

> Is it easy to randomize your MAC?

It would appear to be: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=2738

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#97

Post by vidarh »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #85
alexro wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem - your abstraction is leaking, whereas the man/woman/kids abstraction of the marriage is not.

Of course the man/woman/kids abstraction leaks - many cultures use marriage to describe the legal union of old people, infertile people, and people who just plain don't want to have kids.

> many cultures use marriage to describe the legal union of old people, infertile people

And in fact some cultures has "weird" forms of marriage that deviates from the man + woman norm explicitly over things like fertility.

E.g. in some parts of Africa, two women marrying (but not, at least in principle, lesbian marriages, though I'm sure this institution have been conveniently used to obscure lesbian relationships) have centuries of history as a means for infertile women to gain heirs by taking a fertile wife who will find a man to get her pregnant, who will have no rights to any children. In these cultures, one of the women will generally be considered a husband, and take on many traditionally male roles (to the extent that in some places such a "female husband" gain access to e.g. take political offices not available to women etc.) [1]

African cultures are full of still extant examples where marriage is treated as a pragmatic means to secure economy, social stability and inheritance to the point where bending gender norms too is seen as a perfectly sensible hack if it furthers those goals.

Given the long history of such varied forms of marriage (including e.g. polygamy too), it would be much more reasonable to claim that marriage historically is about securing a family units financial situation and inheritance, and furthering social stability than having anything to do with "a man and a woman procreating"...

[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#98

Post by vidarh »

alexro wrote: post #55
dspillett wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon > ... > with the original intention to continue the family by having kids. You need to review your history on marriage including, but by no means limited to, what the bible has to say on such matters. The biblical view of marriage is vastly different to simply "a man and a woman wanting to procreate", itself took on and in places redefined millennia of tradition th…

So you talking about gay rights but at the same time you refuse billions of people who lived and live outside of Biblical views to have their own views on the subject?

You mean including the many millions who live in cultures where polygamy is normal? And where "female husbands" are well established (there are millions of women living as "female husbands" with wives - sometimes more than one - in Africa).

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#99

Post by erispoe »

alexro wrote: post #62
dragonwriter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids. This is wrong in so many ways; "marriage" is a concept that exists in many cultures with many different different understandings, and those understandings have historically been fluid over time even within the same culture. Its most consistently a pro…

So why didn't people go out, pick up some orphan kid and give him whatever needed to be 'inherited'?

They did. Ancient Rome and contemporary Japan are two examples relying heavily on adoption to pass on property to the next generation. The biological reality of genitors is only partly relevant to determine family ties.

Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

#100

Post by vidarh »

colanderman wrote: post #93
alexro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a better way to use different terms for when people get together to have kids and continue the family and when they just 'want' each other?

Plenty of homosexual couples have children, either through adoption, IVF or surrogates, just like heterosexual couples often do.

And in fact female-female marriages (though at least in theory not sexual) have a long history in some cultures as a means for infertile women to gain heirs...

It'd be inaccurate to call those gay marriages as some of the cultures they are practised in at the same time have been very oppressive when it comes to homosexuality (though presumably such marriages have been used as a means to hide lesbian relationships), but the fact remains women have been able to marry women with the explicit intent of having shared children for hundreds of years... [1]. And they're not few:

" Kevane (2004) estimates that approximately 5–10 percent of the women in Africa are involved in woman-to-woman marriages. "

[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...

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