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“The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.” – Art Spander

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“In future all content will be paid for either by people’s attention spans or their personal data.” – Peter Bazalgette

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“Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people.” – Seth Finkelstein

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“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” – Plato

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“An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books.” – Samuel Butler

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“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.” – George Bernard Shaw

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‘On [the robot's] world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.’”

‘Odd,’ said Arthur, ‘I thought you said it was a democracy.

‘‘I did,’ said Ford, ‘It is.’

‘So,’ said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, ‘why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?’

‘It honestly doesn’t occur to them,’ said Ford. ‘They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.’

‘You mean they actually vote for the lizards?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ford with a shrug, ‘of course.’

‘But,’ said Arthur, going for the big one again, ‘why?’

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,’ said Ford, ‘the wrong lizard might get in.”

- Douglas Adams

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“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” – Ellen Goodman

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“[This Labour government] has hyperactively produced more Home Office legislation than all the other governments in our history combined, accumulating a vast arsenal of new legal powers and creating more than three thousand additional criminal offences.” – Dominic Raab, The Assault on Liberty

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“I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.” – W. C. Fields

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“It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism – that we live in fear and under a police state.”  – Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5

Full article in the Telegraph.

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“Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.” – John F. Kennedy

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“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage

PutPeopleFirst

PutPeopleFirst

Be there.

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“The content filtering being contemplated is dumb. It makes some of the previous schemes look inspired by comparison.

That said, it is not sensible to stay out of the trials. If we do that, then the government will sign up a couple of pissant ISP’s from some small regional location. They will run the trials there and then say voila, it worked, perfect results, no slowdown. Then it will be legislated and enforced. That’s stupid.

There is no benefit standing on the outside pissing in. At the moment, the whole industry, tech experts and consumers are telling the minister that the whole concept is crazy, but he can ignore you because there are no real world stats.

iiNet will participate in the trials. It will be a farce. For every customer that has a page invalidly blocked, and for every child that gets access to something naughty when the minister promised it will be safe, we will be directing their complaint to the minister’s office.

There is no point sticking our heads in the sand on this. I want real data that demonstrates why this is dumb, even to someone as slow as this minister.” – Michael Malone, iiNet CEO on Australian Government Internet Censorship