Running Great Britain? There's an App For That! 165
judgecorp writes "Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron will get a personalised iPad app to help him run the country. The 'government dashboard' will include health waiting list figures, crime statistics, economic statistics and a real-time news feed. Cameron is a committed Apple user — but British members of Parliament have only been allowed iPads in the House of Commons since March 2011."
Tory party is a collection of special interests... (Score:1, Interesting)
...doing the minimum possible for the voting public to get enough votes to gain the power needed to further those interests.
Which tool the Tory party's current spokespuppet uses to pretend to be interested in the country is completely irrelevant.
Custom-developed app (Score:5, Interesting)
"Cabinet Office developers are currently building the customised iPad app so the Prime Minister can remain abreast of government business . . . is expected to be ready by March."
I'd love to work for the government contractor that got that contract. As if the MPs expenses scandal wasn't bad enough, now we're bankrolling the Prime Minister's iTunes account.
"The app will essentially act as a government dashboard, providing the Prime Minister with all the latest information from across Whitehall – including the latest NHS waiting-list figures, crime statistics, unemployment numbers, and a wide variety of other data – at a glance."
I just hope that we, the taxpayers who are paying for this development work, will get a version of the app that we can use ourselves. It's fine if they scrub out the sensitive internal government data that it's (hopefully) tracking, but a sanitised version appropriate for public consumption would still be quite useful. I'd be interested to know things like crime and unemployment statistics, which can then be used to judge how well the Conservative government is actually doing.
Re:Obama's Ipad (Score:4, Interesting)
This whole app sounds like a modern rip-off of Salvador Allende's star-trek-ish [wikipedia.org] proto-internet, Cybersyn [guardian.co.uk]
Re:Why is a native client needed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Tory party is a collection of special interests (Score:5, Interesting)
Politicians are hypocritical! Shock horror.
I'm in Scotland and we've got the Nationals in 'power' at the moment (we get Education, Health, Income Tax, Law and some others, but money and legislation on Power, Defence, Foreign Policy etc. comes from Westminster). There will be an Independence referendum in the next year or so and I'm still undecided myself which way I'll vote. There are pros and cons for each side. The biggest Pro would be finally kicking the Tories out of Scotland.
Sure, they got that bit of the Borders, but there's about 10 people living there and half of them are English. Ofcourse, then we're left with Labour as our most right-wing party of note, since our National Party are about as left as the Liberals.
The biggest Con would be keeping our economy working. Especially with the way Europe is at the moment (and no amount of increased trade with Norway will counter that).
What I'm scared of is that I don't know enough to make an informed choice. And that people in general have lost faith in politics in a broad sense because they feel they don't know enough, and don't CARE enough to find out. They just trust that each party is pretty much the same as the other ones and just vote for the person that shouts the loudest at them.
Here in Scotland we have Holyrood, who defer to Westminster for certain issues, who defer to the EU on top of that. I know here we have three systems to worry about, and three Elections to vote in. We vote in MSPs, MPs and MEPs. Each parliament is so monolithic and entwined in their own red tape that the general population don't know what each one of them *really* does, and who controls what and are so fatigued by it that voter turnout for the last Scottish Election was 50%. Half the people in Scotland didn't turn up to vote.
It's 2am here. I'm rambling. Hopefully some of it made sense :P
Re:Why is a native client needed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Having stats like this available is great, but the problem is the figures don't match reality. As a contractor that worked on a system to log crime for the UK police force for several years, it became apparent that one of the goals of the system was to allow "adjustment" of what is a serious crime or a minor offence.
Want to change the crime rate? Simply update the category for various offences until the target rate is achieved, report to media. Everybody wins ;-)
Peace,
Andy.
Re:Been there... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me get this straight. Your (I am assuming that is your site?) criticism of Cybersyn was that it was too ambitious to work, but then the only example of it in action you can come up with is when it *did* work?
Also, the idea that you can't control anything that features a time lag is absolutely laughable. Talk to an engineer for fucks sake. Or better still, take a ride in an aeroplane that has a functioning autopilot and notice how you aren't tossed around like you are in a washing machine...