andrewducker

Looks to me like Gen X and Gen Y have pretty much the same feelings on same sex relationships.

While, Gen X had "not wrong at all" at a lower number in the 80s, that makes some logical sense to me. As a Gen X person, in the 80s is when we were in our teens and also the height of the AIDS epidemic - so we were being told on TV every single night that male on male gay sex was a death sentence - in which case we probably all said that it was "sometimes ok" rather than "always ok" because we were thinking about unprotected male sex.

As we became adults and realized that not every gay person we knew was dying young then our opinions changed to "always ok" - because we weren't thinking "shit, you just came out to me, I hope you don't die!"

Ouch. I said on facebook that I'd previous thought oversight by the Queen was a reasonable final check-and-balance, but this level of non-transparency is making me think it'd be better to do away with the monarchy after all.

Yeah, I'd like my final check/balance to be a lot more transparent than that!

Yeah. I'd feel a bit happier if she vetoed "going to war for no reason" instead of "not going to war for no reason"[1]. But even if I'd trusted her to do the right thing, I'm increasingly less sanguine that I'd automatically trust Charles, William, William Jr, etc.

[1] I'm haunted by the idea that maybe there really was a good reason to blow up Iraq that really did have to be secret[2]. But I can only really judge policy based on what I know -- you can accept a small amount of "just this once, trust us, we know something you don't", but only if someone has actually built up reasons to trust them.

[2] I guess "oil". And blowing up Saddam Hussein was arguably a good thing, even if it left a mess afterwards. But I can't say "maintaining my oil-rich lifestyle is worth randomly invading any country I don't like".

The article lists a load of laws that were presented to the Queen for her approval, but it does state (below all the rather excitable "won't somebody think of teh democracy!" rhetoric) that there's no evidence she substantively interfered, just that the bills were presented to her for her preliminary consent. Except, that is, in one case (the Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill 1999) where she said no on the instructions of the government. And I'm not sure what else she was supposed to do - if she'd refused to follow that recommendation then wouldn't that have been an even more serious breach of democracy?

Yes, it's all pretty untransparent and ideally I'd like to see this sort of thing happen more openly, but I don't think it's really the Queen's fault. For various historical reasons which may or may not be sensible these days, certain constitutional powers (appointment of bishops, declaration of war, etc) are reserved to the Sovereign. But in recent centuries those powers have been effectively devolved to the government, with the Sovereign basically just rubber-stamping the decision recommended by the duly-elected (or duly-cobbled-together-in-shady-backroom-deals) cabinet of the day.

So in this case I'm inclined to view it less as the Queen secretly muscling in on the legislative process, and much more that the government wanted to kill a potentially awkward private member's bill and used a sneaky constitutional loophole to get it done. I find that far more worrying from a democratic point of view.

Technically, of course, the Sovereign has the right to veto a bill after it's been passed by Parliament, by withholding Royal Assent. But the last time this happened was when, on the advice of her government, Queen Anne refused assent to the Scottish Militia Bill 1708. It wasn't a particularly common occurrence even then, though.

Charles, on the other hand, is a bit of a worry - and I say that as someone who's otherwise mostly in favour of the constitutional monarchy we currently have.

I'm not using that piece as a reason to get rid of the monarchy (I have fairly obvious reasons for that) - but for further disestablishing them. As a tourist attraction I have no major objection to them, just their having any influence on the government.

Oh, quite. But I think if we're going to disestablish the monarchy then we need to be careful about it. Ideally, I'd like us to do it in a way that didn't merely transfer more executive power to a dozen multi-millionaires but at least required serious Parliamentary oversight in a way that couldn't be easily circumvented.

Doh! Good point, I skimmed the article and assumed it wasn't specious rhetoric, but I may well have been too hasty. "The Queen rubber stamped the decision of the government to veto X" is an argument for transferring powers from the queen to the prime minister that I've heard before and been skeptical of.

Assuming she didn't threaten to veto stuff on her own decision, the problem is presumably a veto held (sort of) by the prime minister without any real constitutional sanction or transparancy, not the queen's involvement.

Assuming she didn't threaten to veto stuff on her own decision
My understanding is that she keeps out of the political side of things, and that a general rule is that she's not supposed to be put in a position where she has to make a choice - hence all that constitutional tap-dancing by the party leaders in 2010 before she was "activated". As far as we know (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) all that happened with the other bills on the list was that the PM said "Ma'am, we suspect this might be one of those bills we have to show you first" and she's said "yep, looks fine to me, go for it".

Whether we can rely on Charles following the same process is unclear - certainly he's made comments recently about being a "visionary" monarch who gets more involved in the legislative process, which is a tad concerning. Hopefully he can be persuaded otherwise when the time comes.

As a civil servant who's worked on primary legislation, I found this story rather bizarre.

The need to get the Queen's/Prince Charles's consent on bills that directly touch their interest is a part of the legislative process that's well know to anyone who's worked on a Bill (it's explicitly mentioned in the Cabinet Office Guide to Legislation, a public document) and is seen as purely a formal exercise. Worry about whether or not it will be approved forms no more part of our risk analysis than worrying about whether Royal Assent will be granted at the end. I and anyone I've spoken to has always seen it as purely a formality (and I suppose a chance for her to express views if the Government proposed something that would abolish democracy/was accidentally badly thought through with unintended consequences, due to, for example, the legal status of the royal family which no-one had noticed).

Amazon may be close to the only game in town if you wish to buy circular physical media, but the real consumer want is for music. There are many other options for music, mostly online. The market for buying physical disks is shrinking, since online is more convenient.

As far as I know there are only two places where one can buy DRM-free music files, from a decent range of labels both major and minor, and without having to pay a buy-in-bulk subscription fee or install a special piece of proprietary software. Amazon is one of those, and the other, 7digital, is majority-owned by HMV.

There are, of course, other options if one wants to stream music, like Spotify, and there's iTunes if you don't mind installing a massive piece of bloatware (and you run an OS it will run on), but if you want to actually own your own copy of something, those are your only choices.

Ah, fair enough. I knew that at one time they were the majority owner, but I'm glad to see that 7digital will continue, because I don't like to be given only the choice of Amazon or iTunes.

Oh, and google sells music too, as well as owning the Youtube streaming.

As far as I've been able to tell, you can't get a copy of your files from Google Play -- you have to access them through 'the cloud' at all times, which makes them, to my mind, just an overexpensive streaming option. I may be wrong there though -- their FAQ is (or was when I read it) ambiguously worded.

http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1233029&topic=2450455&ctx=topic indicates that you can download the files from them.

I'm tempted to buy a track and see what my options are!

Fair enough -- that information wasn't in any of the FAQ-type stuff I saw, but it does sound like it's not a purely cloud thing.

(Amazon's music management seems much better than Google's one, though, in that they let you download an unlimited number of times, which has been very useful for me recently after a massive hard drive problem).

Tone argument article links to a PDF which is missing, further googling suggests it is in press but not actually published yet. Yet another article based on as-yet unpublished data where it is impossible to properly judge the experiment, I would really like people to stop doing this.

But! But! It validates my assumptions! Surely that's good enough?