Quotulatiousness

March 11, 2011

Another oddity of British law

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:19

I was unaware, until today, that it is possible to get a legal injunction that effectively prevents anyone from knowing that the injunction has been issued: a “super injunction“:

The existence of the draconian injunction — so strict it prevents $PERSON being identified as a $OCCUPATION — was disclosed by John Hemming, a back-bench Liberal Democrat MP, in a question during a business debate at the House on Thursday morning. His comments are protected by parliamentary privilege.

He said: “In a secret hearing $PERSON has obtained a super-injunction preventing him being identified as a $OCCUPATION.

“Will the government have a debate or a statement on freedom of speech and whether there’s one rule for the rich like $PERSON and one rule for the poor?”

Leader of the House Sir George Young said a forthcoming Westminster Hall debate would explore freedom of speech, adding: “I will raise with the appropriate minister the issue he has just raised.”

The terms of the injunction are so strict that the Daily Telegraph cannot reveal the nature of the information that $PERSON is attempting to protect.

Because I am not rich, I’ve chosen to avoid including any information which may fall under the strict terms of the injunction . . . others are not being as careful, so you can find out who the rich wanker is and what occupation he wants to prevent the public from discovering by reading the whole thing.

March 10, 2011

“An opportunity to stop English libel law chilling free speech around the world”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:43

Simon Singh at the Guardian‘s “Comment is Free” site explains just how much the chilling effect of English libel law can obstruct free speech:

. . . it is important to remember that for every case of a scientist or journal who dares to face the ordeal of a libel trial, there are dozens of (or probably hundreds of) others who immediately apologise and retract after a libel threat, or who self-censor in order avoid any risk of libel, which is the so-called chilling effect of libel.

For example, I gave an interview to an Australian medical correspondent at the Melbourne Age about the lack of evidence surrounding homeopathy, but he was unable to quote me in detail because his in-house lawyer was frightened of being sued for libel in London. The only reason this came to light was because the journalist in question wrote a blog describing how tough it was to be a health journalist in Australia when the vulture of English libel law was always circling above.

More worryingly, I recently received an email from an American researcher (whose name I cannot mention) who had worked with a librarian (whose name I cannot mention) to write a paper on the subject of impact factors, the scoring system often used by librarians and others to assess the quality of a research journal. The anonymous researchers cited one journal (whose name I cannot mention) which may be using certain techniques to boost its own impact factor. Impact factors are an important issue, so the paper was sent to a respected British journal (which I shall not name in order to avoid embarrassment) with an international readership. The journal replied: “We regret that we are unable to publish after all because unfortunately it has potential legal implications under UK libel law.”

The anonymous researchers then sent the paper to an American journal (which I shall not name), which also had an international readership and which did agree to publish the paper. Initially, there seemed to be no problem, because the in-house lawyer agreed that the paper did not breach US libel law. However, the lawyer went on to demand that edits were necessary or there would be a serious risk of being sued in London according to English libel law.

The British government is to introduce a new bill to (one hopes) address some of these concerns soon. Let’s hope that they’re paying attention.

March 7, 2011

Your energy consuming future

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Britain is facing a very different future, from the point of energy consumption, according to Steve Holliday, CEO of National Grid:

Because of a six-fold increase in wind generation, which won’t be available when the wind doesn’t blow, “The grid is going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030,” he told BBC’s Radio 4. “We keep thinking that we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It’s going to be much smarter than that.

“We are going to change our own behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply.”

The more of your electricity that is produced from wind power, the more there will be very noticeable peaks and valleys in available electricity. Not only do you need more sources, you need over-capacity in some areas to generate sufficient power to supply to areas which are becalmed.

Under the so-called “smart grid” that the UK is developing, the government-regulated utility will be able to decide when and where power should be delivered, to ensure that it meets the highest social purpose. Governments may, for example, decide that the needs of key industries take precedence over others, or that the needs of industry trump that of residential consumers. Governments would also be able to price power prohibitively if it is used for non-essential purposes.

Perhaps it’s just the libertarian in me that finds the term “highest social purpose” to be very disturbing: just who the hell is going to be making that determination? And on what basis will the new high priests of the lightnings be making that call?

Smart grids are being developed by utilities worldwide to allow the government to control electricity use in the home, down to the individual appliance. Smart grids would monitor the consumption of each appliance and be capable of turning them off if the power is needed elsewhere.

Like the idea that someone at your local electrical board can decide that you don’t really need to run that TV set or that toaster right now? If the control freaks at the utilities manage to foist this off on us, we’ll be techno-peasants who are only allowed to run electrical devices that meet “social purpose” guidelines.

March 3, 2011

Eurofighter Typhoon sets new standard for “bloated expense” and “limited usefulness”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Lewis Page is on record as thinking the Eurofighter Typhoon was a bad bargain, but even he is shocked at just how bad a bargain the plane is:

Probably the most dismal figure we are given is that the RAF will actually put into service just 107 Typhoons. At the moment it has received 70: the last of the 160 planes ordered by the UK will be delivered in 2015. But, we are told, “by 2019” all the Tranche 1 jets (which were still being delivered to the RAF at the start of 2008) will be “retired” — that is, thrown away. We’ll pay for 160 jets (actually we’ll pay for 232), but we’ll only ever get a fleet of 107.

This shows the acquisition cost of the Eurofighter/Typhoon in an even worse light than it had previously appeared, when an RAF fleet of 160 had been expected. It is now acknowledged that the development and production cost to the UK of Eurofighter will be £23bn with planned upgrades.

This means that we UK taxpayers will have shelled out no less than £215m for each of our 107 jets — that’s $350m at today’s rates, rather more than the US taxpayers have been made to pay for each of their 185 Raptor superfighters, almost all of which will be used operationally. And the Raptor has third-generation Stealth: the Eurofighter has no stealth features at all. The Raptor has thrust vectoring for unbeatable manoeuvrability in a dogfight: the Eurofighter doesn’t.

But, for all the expense, at least the RAF has a fine, modern, fully in-service fleet? Well, almost:

The lack of planes actually fit to fly is serious — the NAO reports that of the 70 Eurofighters the RAF currently possesses, just 42 are actually available to flying squadrons. And the lack of flight hours has meant that some flyboys haven’t been able to get into the cockpit at all [. . .]

The RAF currently has eight pilots who are capable of undertaking ground attack missions on Typhoon … The Department plans to have sufficient numbers of trained pilots to conduct a small scale ground attack mission by 2014 and aims to deliver sufficient flying hours to train enough pilots to undertake the full range of planned tasks by 2016.

What a joy it is to think that we paid £119m to upgrade the Tranche 1 planes back in 2008 so that they could do ground attack. In 2016 the RAF will finally have the pilots it needs to use this capability: but by then the Tranche 1s will already be being thrown away – all of them will be gone by 2019, remember.

We paid all that money upgrading the Tranche 1s and now we’ll dispose of them without ever having pilots trained to use the upgrade! The Eurofighter story really just gets better and better.

Happy 25th anniversary to independent Australia

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, Law, Pacific — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:30

I had been labouring under the impression that Australia had been freed from the colonial yoke in 1931, but I was mistaken:

TWENTY-FIVE years ago today, Australia became independent.

You might think this statement absurd. Surely Australia has been independent for a lot longer than that? Let me provide a lawyer’s answer: yes and no. Yes, Australia as a nation became independent at some unknown date after 1931. By 1931 it had the power to exercise independence but chose not to do so for some time. Arguably, having the capacity to exercise independence is enough to be classified as independent, although the parents of 20-something children who show no inclination to leave home may beg to differ.

The Australian states, however, did not gain their independence from Britain at that time. Bizarrely, they remained colonial dependencies of the British crown, despite being constituent parts of an independent nation. This meant state governors were appointed by the Queen on the advice of British ministers and that it was the Queen of the United Kingdom (not the Queen of Australia) who gave royal assent to state bills. When an Australian governor-general once complained to the British government about this anomaly, the response of British diplomats was that it was better to “let sleeping anomalies lie”.

H/T to Roger Henry for the link.

March 2, 2011

QotD: Humour

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Humour, Quotations, WW2 — Nicholas @ 12:02

A German I know will on occasion tell you his father died in the concentration camps. He waits for the concerned and properly sympathetic faces and then adds that he got drunk and fell out of a watchtower. Europeans find that boorish, faintly crass and rather tasteless; the English love it. It’s a proper joke, and a German doing it is double bubble. The surprise is that neither the Europeans or the English realize that it’s not a joke at all, his father really did fall out of a watch tower and it’s poignant and sad because his son never knew him, never met his dad.

A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English, p. 112.

Love it or hate it: Marmite and social media

Filed under: Britain, Food, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Oddly enough, I just picked up a jar of Marmite recently, not having tasted the stuff for literally decades. I love the stuff, but I can understand why others might hate it:

When it comes to evoking passionate debate British brand Marmite has proven controversy can help build buzz and sales. This brown savory spread made from yeast extract has an incredibly distinctive flavor. 15 years ago Marmite’s own “Love It or Hate It” campaign evolved out of a difference of tastes among the creative team at DDB London. One loved the brown, savory spread and one hated it. The campaign’s longevity and fame reflects the fact that even in its country of origin, the brand’s strong taste is “challenging.” (Few Americans can even stand the idea of Marmite and it is questionable whether many Brits would if they had not been introduced to the taste as children.)

[. . .]

The “Love it or Hate It” campaign brought to an end five years of stagnating sales and a weakening brand and led to sustained, penetration-led growth of around 5% each year for the next five years.

When sales once again started to slow in 2002 the campaign idea proved flexible enough to help revive the brand’s fortunes once again. The campaign was enlisted to introduce a new, “squeezy” container and extend usage to sandwiches. Messing with a much loved brand is never easy, but astute brand management involved ardent fans with the relaunch and enlisted another British icon, Paddington Bear, to bring the brand back to growth. In 2010, the brand spoofed the British elections. Love and Hate parties battled it out to either build a shrine to the brand or rename it “Tarmite.”

The fact that people are so passionate about the brand (for or against) means that Marmite’s “Love It or Hate It” campaign is a natural fit with social media. According to Contagious Magazine, some 200,000 fans were already on Facebook as self-declared Marmite lovers long before the official page was launched in 2008.Today the brand has a fully fledged social media presence with over 500,000 people liking the brand and 182,000 liking The Marmite Hate Party (Dedicated to Stop the Spread of Marmite by reducing, and ultimately terminating, its production and consumption).

Damn. Now I’ve gone and made myself hungry . . .

March 1, 2011

Iran already threatening 2012 Olympic boycott

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

They’ve suddenly realized that the truth was staring them right in the face the whole time:

The 2012 London Olympics are more than a year away, but Iran already is threatening to boycott them. According to Bahram Afsharzadeh, secretary general of Iran’s National Olympic Committee, the 2012 Olympic logo secretly spells out the word “Zion,” which makes it “racist.” The Iranians also claim that use of the logo “is a disgracing action and against the Olympics’ valuable mottos.”

February 28, 2011

London’s “congestion charge” didn’t keep pace with traffic after all

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Remember the great fanfare (usually from “urban advocates” and local government bureaucrats) over the stunning success of London’s road pricing scheme? It immediately reduced traffic volumes in the downtown core of London, which also reduced the travel times for those drivers who were willing to pay the usage charges. It looked like a solid win for pay-for-use roads (which do, incidentally, make a great deal of economic sense . . . if they’re not being used as a cash cow to fund other transportation options instead).

Fast forward to today, and we discover that all the gains from introducing the congestion charge have been wasted:

According to Yass’ analysis, based on figures obtained from the Department of Transport and local bodies such as councils and Transport for London, the increase in traffic lights — and perhaps even more so, the increasing trend to prioritise pedestrian movement through junctions by changing lights’ programming — is seriously increasing congestion for wheeled road traffic (buses excepted in some cases, as they too are favoured by the lights).

The report indicates that a large fall in congestion was seen in London following introduction of the capital’s congestion charging scheme introduced by the previous mayor Ken Livingstone. A noticeable proportion of motorists ceased to drive in the charging zone, and vehicle numbers in the zone remain well down on previous levels. Nonetheless, congestion is now back up to its old state:

Monitoring reports of the congestion charging zone show that, after an initial improvement, congestion has been increasing again and is back to pre-charge levels, even though the number of vehicles entering the zone has not increased.

How could this have happened?

According to Yass, the gains achieved by the congestion charge have been wiped out by Mayor Ken’s parallel policy drive to cut down the time it takes to cross the road in London, and in particular to make the streets safer for the disabled. A large number of London’s new traffic lights would seem to have been put in at new pedestrian crossings — “most junctions were already controlled by lights”, writes Yass — and those at junctions now usually have “full pedestrian stages” where all traffic is held stopped in both directions.

February 25, 2011

What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Ever read the fine print of a contract to discover that the actual term of the contract contradicts the claims? Britain’s Office of Fair Trading is looking into this practice:

Companies whose small print changes the basis of consumer deals will face investigation by consumer regulator the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), it has said. According to the OFT, one in five consumers had experienced a contract problem in the last year.

The OFT has set out the criteria it will use to judge whether or not consumer contracts are unfair and should be investigated by it. The crucial factor determining the fairness of contracts will be the consumer’s understanding of what the contract means.

If the small print of terms and conditions alters the contract from what a consumer would understand it to mean from other claims made by a company, that is likely to be harmful and could be unlawful, the OFT said in a paper on unfair contracts.

“Our approach to identifying the potential for harm from a particular contract, before considering whether there is any breach of law, is to assess whether a contract term changes the deal from what consumers understand it to be,” said the OFT’s paper.

“One way in which a contract term can change the deal is where there are surprises buried in the small print,” it said. “Our research found that for 80 per cent of those who had experienced a problem with a consumer contract, the problem came as a surprise.”

February 24, 2011

UK’s largest off-grid housing development

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:37

If you’re really a fan of alternative energy, you might want to keep an eye on this new development in Brighton:

The six apartment buildings, to be built at the mouth of Shoreham port near Brighton, will be linked by wind turbines, and their southern face will be tiled in solar thermal and photovoltaics panels.

Batteries will be charged during the day in order to keep the lights on at night, and the apartments themselves will be heavily insulated in order to keep power use as low as possible.

But resident behaviour will also play a key role, says the developer, Colin Brace of Bohogreen, who has worked on previous low-carbon projects. “We can’t tell people that you only have so much power, and no more. But there are studies showing that if you give people renewable energy they think, oh good, it’s free, and their energy use actually goes up. So an important aspect of the project will be to educate people about their energy use.

“The apartments will be designed to encourage communal living as much as possible,” says Brace, “rather than having everyone in their own rooms using their own sources of power.” There will also be LED lights on the wind turbines which light up red, amber and green to show which block is using power most heavily, in order to foster “a healthy sense of competition between residents to keep their power use low”.

I wouldn’t want to live in a development where the neighbours are pre-selected for their “greener than thou” attitudes, frankly. The LED lights of shame would probably encourage more neighbour nosiness into the lives of the other residents.

Of course, all that healthy greenery comes at a slight premium to ordinary housing:

The apartments in Portzed will be up to 22% more expensive than an “on-grid” development, due to the extra costs of installing high-spec insulation and renewables. At current market rates, that could add £20-24,000 to the final price of a two-bedroom flat. The developers believe however that there is a high demand for this kind of home due to their rarity. The financing for the project is already in place and the project is expected to be financial viable.

February 23, 2011

Now you can’t have “Cornish Pasties” unless they’re from Cornwall

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Food — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Apparently the poor bakers of Cornwall have been driven to the edge by unfair competition. They’ve been fighting the tide of so called “Cornish Pasties” that have never been within hundreds of miles of Cornwall. Now, thanks to the intrepid bureaucrats of Brussels, the Cornish Pasty now has the same kind of name protection as Champagne:

Aficionados of the Cornish pasty will in future be assured that their pasty is the real deal, following a European Commission ruling that only pasties prepared in Cornwall in the traditonal way can be labelled “Cornish”.

Cornish maiden bearing platter of genuine Cornish pasties. Photo: Cornish Pasty AssociationThe announcement that the pasty has been granted “protected geographical indication” (PGI) marks a great day for the Cornish Pasty Association, which for nine years has battled to protect its product from pretenders pumping out non-traditional imitations “inferior in both quality and taste”.

I’ve always been a big fan of “Cornish Pasties”, but I now discover that I’ve apparently been cheated all these years: I’ve never actually eaten a “real” Cornish Pasty in my entire life! (And given that I’ve never been to Cornwall, I may never try one . . .)

February 22, 2011

Former UK Home Secretary shocked to discover the internet awash in porn

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:52

The amusing thing is that she lead a major effort to suppress “extreme porn” while in office:

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has professed herself “shocked” at the availability of porn on the internet after investigating the issue for a radio documentary.

Which raises the question of what exactly she thought she was cracking down on during her time in charge of law and order.

[. . .]

Smith told the Radio Times that during her research for the documentary, she had been “shocked” to discover how much hard-core material was washing around the net. And so much of it for absolutely no cost at all.

She admitted that after the pay-per-view smut scandal had broken, her son had said: “Dad, haven’t you heard of the internet?” Smith was also shocked by a visit to the Erotica exhibition, where confronted by the likes of the Monkey Spanker and artisan-built bondage furniture, “I felt completely innocent.

That Smith was ignorant of the amount of porn available on the internet seems incredible, given that during her time in government Labour cracked down hard on “extreme porn”. Smith’s Home Office also sought to clamp down on extremism on the internet, and to track all the UK’s browsing habits via a vast uber-database, the Interception Modernisation Programme. Surely some her staff might have noticed there’s lots of smut out there as well?

February 21, 2011

RAF cuts pilot training numbers

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:57

I’ve mentioned this before . . . when a big bureaucracy is forced to cut back, the instinct of most bureaucrats is to cut the “frontline”: if they have extensive public contact, cutting back there to cause the greatest disruption to the public is a common (and often effective) way to protest. The public react to the cuts in service and complain to the politicians, and (too often) the politicians soften or even rescind the cutbacks.

Britain’s Royal Air Force is having to cut back from their current numbers, and have chosen a way that will (they hope) cause some public outcry:

Britain is planning massive cuts in its armed forces, and while exact numbers are still being debated, the Royal Air Force (RAF) has gone ahead and dismissed 25 percent of 400 pilot officers currently in training. This means 20 fighter, 30 helicopters and 50 transport student pilots halt their training and become civilians again. Some of the pilot trainees are only weeks away from completing their training. Over a hundred million dollars has already been spent on the training of those dismissed, and the former officers can probably use that training to quickly complete a civilian flying course, so they can get jobs as civilian pilots.

It will also mean that the almost fully trained pilots will displace an equal number of civilian pilot trainees, and the civil aviation scene in Britain is already over-supplied with willing pilots.

February 19, 2011

When “hacker army” is not an exaggeration

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Military, Russia, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

Strategy Page counts noses of the various semi-organized hacker armies out in the wild:

Despite spending over a billion dollars a year defending their government networks, Britain recently complained openly of hackers getting into the communications network of the Foreign Office. The government also warned of increasing attacks on British companies. The recent attacks government and corporations were all targeting specific people and data. While China was not mentioned in these official announcements, British officials have often discussed how investigations of recent hacking efforts tended to lead back to China. There is also a strong suspicion, backed up by hacker chatter, that governments are offering large bounties for information from foreign governments. Not information from China, but from everyone else.

China one of many nations taking advantage of the Internet to encourage, or even organize, patriotic Internet users to obtain hacking services. This enables the government to use (often informally) these thousands of hackers to attack targets (foreign or domestic.) These government organizations arrange training and mentoring to improve the skills of group members. Turkey has over 45,000 of hackers organized this way, Saudi Arabia has over 100,000, Iraq has over 40,000, Russia over 100,000 and China, over 400,000. While many of these Cyber Warriors are rank amateurs, even the least skilled can be given simple tasks. And out of their ranks will emerge more skilled hackers, who can do some real damage. These hacker militias have also led to the use of mercenary hacker groups, who will go looking for specific secrets, for a price. Chinese companies are apparently major users of such services, judging from the pattern of recent hacking activity, and the fact that Chinese firms don’t have to fear prosecution for using such methods.

It was China that really pioneered the militia activity. It all began in the late 1990s, when the Chinese Defense Ministry established the “NET Force.” This was initially a research organization, which was to measure China’s vulnerability to attacks via the Internet. Soon this led to examining the vulnerability of other countries, especially the United States, Japan and South Korea (all nations that were heavy Internet users). NET Force has continued to grow. NET Force was soon joined by an irregular civilian militia; the “Red Hackers Union” (RHU). These are nearly half a million patriotic Chinese programmers, Internet engineers and users who wished to assist the motherland, and put the hurt, via the Internet, on those who threaten or insult China. The RHU began spontaneously in 1999 (after the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia), but the government has assumed some control, without turning the voluntary organization into another bureaucracy. The literal name of the group is “Red Honkers Union,” with Honker meaning “guest” in Chinese. But these were all Internet nerds out to avenge insults to the motherland.

You have to wonder how many script kiddies ever thought they’d end up being government operatives.

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