Quotulatiousness

May 24, 2012

Unsupport your unfavourite Premier League team

Filed under: Britain, Football, Soccer — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

Duleep Allirajah explains why he’s a “90-minute Quisling”:

Years ago, long before Google came to the salvation of lazy football writers who couldn’t be bothered with microfiche searches, the term ‘unsupport’ was coined in the football magazine, When Saturday Comes.

It meant, as the name suggests, the exact opposite of supporting a team. You wished defeat on another team, hated that team with a passion. So, for example, in the last day of the Premiership season, many neutrals wanted Manchester City to win the title. This was not through any great love for the oil-rich upstarts in blue, but because they were unsupporting Manchester United. In the Premiership era, Manchester United are simultaneously the best supported and, at the same time, the most unsupported club in the land. Unsupporting is the football equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion: all the time United are successful, hatred of the side occurs as an equal and opposite reaction.

You can tell a lot about people by the team they hate. Take Manchester United unsupporters. They assume two forms. In the blue half of Manchester or on Merseyside, the Anyone But United (ABU) sentiment is an expression of bitter local rivalry. But throughout the rest of the country, ABU represents an increasing disenchantment with modern football. Manchester United is essentially a proxy for the gentrification and commercialisation of the game. When fans sing ‘Stand up if you hate Man U’, it’s not simply green-eyed envy of United’s success, it’s also a howl of protest against the corporate takeover of football. United embodies everything the traditionalists hate about the Premier League: the hype, the desecration of 3pm kick-offs, the relentless merchandising, the prawn-sandwich munching ‘plastic fans’, and the absentee foreign owners

The constant appearance of Manchester United and Chelsea at or near the top of the English Premier League have always seemed to me to be a good argument in favour of a salary cap in the NFL style: otherwise richer clubs will always be able to buy their way to a higher season finish than poorer teams.

On the other hand, the NFL could learn from the EPL with their promotion/relegation system (I say that in full knowledge that my beloved Vikings would have been relegated after the 2011 season if such a scheme was implemented). Of course, structurally the NFL and EPL have many differences preventing the adoption of the other sport’s practices, but as (I think) Gregg Easterbrook pointed out, Ohio State … sorry, The Ohio State University’s football team could have beaten both of Ohio’s professional teams for much of the last decade.

Next step in Dragon/ISS drill: close fly-by

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Lewis Page at The Register on the successful Dragon fly-by of the ISS:

It’s another moment of truth for upstart space startup SpaceX as once again the company attempts to do something that has only ever been accomplished to date by major government space agencies: docking one spacecraft to another in orbit and transferring cargo.

Having launched its new Dragon spacecraft on Tuesday — on only its second flight — SpaceX is now seeking to bring the ship to a docking with the International Space Station on Friday. Many boxes must be ticked before this can happen, however: but today the first was checked off as the Dragon made a close pass within 1.5 miles of the station, and ‘nauts aboard the orbiting outpost confirmed that their remote-control console was able to command the new ship. This was done by ordering the Dragon to illuminate its strobe lights as it flew by the Station.

In fact the station’s crew — the Dragon tests were handled by André Kuipers of the ESA and NASA’s Don Pettit — couldn’t see that the lights were on owing to bright sunlight illuminating the still quite distant Dragon. However telemetry confirmed that the capsule had received the radio command from the ISS and activated its lights, and viewers of NASA TV were treated to video of the Dragon as it gradually overhauled the station from beneath, passing above South Africa and the Indian Ocean as it did so.

A Greek exit is an existential threat to the Euro

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Greece — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

John Kay explains why it’s not just a simple cut-and-run for Greece or the rest of the Euro:

When countries joined the single currency, a relatively simple piece of domestic legislation converted contracts in drachmas, pesetas, markkas and Deutschmarks into contracts in euros at a prescribed exchange rate. But you cannot simply reverse that process when countries leave the single currency. You have to prescribe which contracts are now to be fulfilled in drachmas and which remain in euros or converted into Deutschmarks. That determination is politically fraught, technically complex and subject to long legal challenges.

About two years ago some large businesses and wealthy individuals began seriously to ask, “if the euros were to unwind, in which currency would my asset or contract be denominated?” The issue is not whether the euro coins in your pocket carry an Athenian owl or German imperial eagle. The issue is the status of bank deposits and loans, residential mortgages and commercial contracts, as well as wages and prices. The drain of funds from Greek banks is an indication that ordinary people are now thinking in these terms.

Europe’s hapless politicians, having asserted that exit from the single currency was impossible, must now claim that exit would be relatively easy. Only then can they plausibly threaten the Greek electorate with expulsion if they vote the wrong way. But exit was never impossible, never easy and even when it was publicly unthinkable central banks would have been negligent not to have put in place contingency plans.

That is why even though Greece is a small part of the eurozone, a Greek exit is an existential threat to it. Once a path to exit has been defined, business and individuals will have a template for understanding the consequences of further unwinding.

Losing big to (potentially) win small

Filed under: Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

ESR on what might be the “beginning of the end” for patent warfare:

It’s all over the net today. As I repeatedly predicted, the patent claims in the Oracle-vs.-Java lawsuit over Android have completely fizzled. Oracle’s only shred of hope at this point is that Judge Alsup will rule that APIs can be copyrighted, and given the extent of cluefulness Alsup has displayed (he mentioned in court having done some programming himself) this seems rather unlikely.

Copyright damages, if any, will almost certainly be limited to statutory levels. There is no longer a plausible scenario in which Oracle gets a slice of Android’s profits or an injunction against Android devices shipping.

This makes Oracle’s lawsuit a spectacular failure. The $300,000 they might get for statutory damages is nothing compared to the huge amounts of money they’ve sunk into this trial, and they’re not even likely to get that. In effect, Oracle has burned up millions of dollars in lawyers’ fees to look like a laughingstock.

Of course, even if this is the beginning of the end, there will be lots of lawyers encouraging their clients to go down this route, as even if it’s not successful, it can be a very lucrative journey for the lawyers.

Giving up Canadian sovereignty: RCMP “to ease Canadians into the idea”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Under proposed new rules, US law enforcement could pursue suspects across the Canadian border and exercise police powers on Canadian soil:

According to an article in Embassy Magazine, the Harper government is moving forward on several initiatives that could give U.S. FBI and DEA agents the ability to pursue suspects across the land border and into Canada.

But, according to a RCMP officer, they’re doing it in “baby steps.”

“We recognized early that this approach would raise concerns about sovereignty, of privacy, and civil liberties of Canadians,” RCMP Chief Superintendent Joe Oliver, the Mounties’ director general for border integrity, told the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence on May 14.

“We said ‘Let’s take baby steps, let’s start with two agencies to test the concept, let’s demonstrate to Canadians and Americans that such an approach might work.”

Apparently the problem of suspected criminals fleeing into Canada has become so frequent that Stephen Harper has been persuaded to allow US officials to ignore the international boundary while in pursuit. Or perhaps it’ll only be used in “hot pursuit”. Or — rather more likely — any time a US official decides to exercise the rule. Oh, and the article also mentions that aerial surveillance of Canadian territory is also on the table. One has to assume that drone strikes will soon follow.

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