Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2009

Digital Economy Bill should be called Digital Disenfranchisement Bill

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

The proposed British legislation called the “Digital Economy Bill” is going to be very bad news, says Charles Stross:

I’m a self-employed media professional working in the entertainment industry, who earns his living by creating intellectual property and licensing it to publishers. You might think I’d be one of the beneficiaries of this proposed law: but you’d be dead wrong. This is going to cripple the long tail of the creative sector — it plays entirely to the interests of large corporate media organizations and shits on the plate of us ordinary working artists.

Want to write a casual game for the iPhone and sell it for 99 pence? Good luck with that — first you’ll have to cough up £50,000 to get it certified as child-friendly by the BBFC. (It’s not clear whether this applies to Open Source games projects, but I’m not optimistic that it doesn’t.)

Want to publish a piece of shareware over BitTorrent? You’re fucked, mate: all it takes is a malicious accusation and your ISP (who are required to snitch on p2p users on pain of heavy fines) will be ordered to cut off the internet connection to you and everyone else in your household. (A really draconian punishment in an age where it’s increasingly normal to conduct business correspondence via email and to manage bank accounts and gas or electricity bills or tax returns via the web.) Oh, you don’t get the right to confront your accuser in court, either: this is merely an administrative process, no lawyers involved. It’s unlikely that p2p access will survive this bill in any form — even for innocent purposes (distributing Linux .iso images, for example).

As I’ve said before, we’re rapidly moving to a world where it will be difficult to have a normal life without network access . . . this bill will create a new underclass of non-persons, all to benefit the dinosaurs of the media conglomerates. And introduced by a _Labour_ government, no less.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

November 17, 2009

India to purchase “spare” British carrier?

Filed under: Britain, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:23

Ah, it must be a nightmare to be in the Royal Navy’s forward planning department these days. First, they gave up half the fleet now in exchange for guarantees that they’d get two new aircraft carriers in the near future. Then it became known that the government was considering equipping only one of the new ships as an aircraft carrier and converting the second to a helicopter carrier. Now, India’s growing navy appears to have a strong interest in taking one of those under-construction vessels off the Royal Navy’s hands. You can almost hear the gleeful cackling from the Brown government’s financial whizzes:

Yet another scheme by the MoD for cutting costs on the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers has surfaced in the media, with claims now being aired that one of the two ships might be sold to India.

The Guardian reports that India “has recently lodged a firm expression of interest to buy one of the two state-of-the-art 65,000 tonne carriers” and that an unnamed “defence source” has told the paper’s Tim Webb that “selling a carrier is one very serious option”.

As Webb is the Graun’s industrial editor, and glovepuppeting of biz correspondents by big companies is the most common way for such stories to appear, we can probably take it that the tale emanates from someone in the industrial consortium building the ships, led by BAE Systems. This is the more so as the article repeatedly states that contract penalties would make it impossibly expensive for the government to cancel one or both of the ships, which is probably the main message that Webb’s industry informant was trying to push.

British health care becomes more equal

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:41

. . . as even celebrities have to wait their turn for a doctor’s care, screaming in pain for hours:

“The racecourse doctor did a good job at the racecourse and gave me as much morphine as she could, but when I got to the hospital I was basically hysterical with pain and they wouldn’t give me any more painkillers.

“The race was at 2.20, and half past midnight was the first time that I saw a doctor. The leg was broken in two places, and the bone had come out through the skin. I’m usually fairly numb with injuries, but this time I was in so much pain that I was just saying, ‘knock me out, knock me out’. Still they wouldn’t give me any painkillers, and they said they would operate in the morning. There were people coming in with twisted ankles getting treated while I’m screaming next door, and they’re basically telling me to wait my turn.”

After a successful operation the following day, Crosse’s ankle swelled as he had not been told to keep it raised. “They came down and asked me why I didn’t have it up and I said no one had told me to,” Crosse says. “I had a very bad night again without enough painkillers to quieten me.”

After two days, Crosse says, he decided that enough was enough. “I thought, I’m getting out of here whatever happens. They told me they would get me an ambulance [to a hospital in Swindon] but they kept me hanging on all day and at 7pm told me I’d have to wait until the morning. I went on the internet and looked up a private ambulance. Basically I had to book my own ambulance to get out of there.”

I’m sure the government will swiftly move to address the issue Crosse raises here — by banning private bookings of ambulances.

November 16, 2009

Harrier replacement moves to next stage

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:28

The F-35B has been delivered to an American base for testing of its vertical take-off and hover capabilities:

The F-35 “Lightning II” B model will, like other versions of the same aircraft, offer supersonic performance and stealth technology – a combo so far offered in only one aircraft in the world, the famous F-22 Raptor ultrasuperfighter. But the F-35B, unlike its tailhook and normal-runway counterparts, is also equipped with a central lift fan mounted in a shaft through the fuselage and can swivel its jet exhaust downwards too.

This means that an armed and fuelled F-35B should be able to make a very short takeoff run to get airborne and then, having burned fuel and perhaps released weapons, make a vertical landing supported entrirely by engine thrust. This Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing (STOVL) capability has so far been offered in the Western-aligned world only by the famous Harrier, originally developed in Britain and now in service with the RAF, the Royal Navy and the US Marines.

Of course, Britain’s interest is moving toward being purely intellectual . . . the bookies are offering long odds on Britain ever commissioning even one of those two new aircraft carriers, never mind both of them. Back story here, here, and here.

November 13, 2009

British emigration woes

Filed under: Britain, Education, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:02

Jeremy Clarkson enumerates all the places would-be Ex-pats can’t go:

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

[. . .]

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany . . . because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

QotD: Quebec’s anti-royalist protest

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

Do we still have republicans in this country? Proper ones, I mean. Ones who care. I suppose we must, but I can’t imagine where you’d have to go to find them. They probably hold meetings in suburban church halls, rented on timeshare with other dimly remembered groups such as Mosleyites, and Flat-Earthers, and people still furious that the Jacobites got such a raw deal. Odd how republicanism isn’t even an esoteric political position in Britain these days. It’s barely even a political position at all.

Not so in Quebec. There, this week, 100 anti-monarchy protesters clashed with riot police when the Prince of Wales tried to visit a regimental hall. Imagine that. Imagine being that cross with Prince Charles. Not global capitalism, not the Afghanistan war, but him with the ears, who makes those biscuits.

I don’t really know where I am with the French Canadians, to be honest. Obviously one can only have the greatest of admiration for any group of people whose major cultural export throughout 300 years of history has been Céline Dion: The Essential Collection (disc one — disc two is kind of patchy) but still, I couldn’t pretend I know what makes them tick. I can understand, I suppose, how they might, on balance, reckon it’s a bit silly for them and us to still have the same monarch. But to actually riot about it? Baby, as Céline might say, this is getting serious.

Hugo Rifkind, “Protesting against Prince Charles? Bonkers: The people of Quebec must have something better to do”, The Times, 2009-11-13

November 12, 2009

“If the cat wasn’t dead, I’d have killed it by now”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:26

A real-life example of how even adults still play the game of “Telephone”:

Some 1,700 luminaries, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, were in the middle of dinner Tuesday night when smart phones throughout the room began to buzz with the news: “Lady Thatcher has passed away.”

Dinner chatter abruptly veered to expressions of shock and reminiscences of Margaret Thatcher, the 84-year-old former British prime minister, as news of her apparent passing spread like wildfire.

It eventually reached the ears of Harper, or someone close to him. Harper aide Dimitri Soudas, back in Ottawa, was dispatched to confirm the news and start preparing an official statement mourning the death of the Iron Lady, an icon to many in Harper’s Conservative party.

Of course, the rumour wasn’t true . . . the British Labour government hadn’t declared a week of celebrations . . .

Britain’s “choice” on Europe

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

James Delingpole has problems with the headline on his post:

Kenneth Clarke is right about Europe

[. . .]

Look, don’t think it didn’t hurt me writing that headline. Just typing it felt like having my eyelids snipped off by scorpions and my eyeballs chewed by fire ants. But it’s true. Clarke was absolutely right to say, as he did in that maddeningly patronising, brown-suede-shoe-wearing, jazz-endorsing way of his, that Cameron’s allegedly bold new policies on Europe are nothing of the kind.

We’re in. We’re stuck there for the foreseeable future. And if you think Asino the donkey is a waste, wait till you see the extravaganza Brussels is planning for its EU Constitution ratification party.

Think a chorus of white rhinos singing Ode To Joy.

Think schools of blue whales doing synchronised swimming in a fish tank the size of Andorra.

Think of 27 planets being spray painted gold so that they look a bit more like the EU flag.

Think of whatever money-wasting scheme you like. If you don’t, you can be sure that somewhere out there, some bright-eyed Euro Stagiere is busily working on it already.

November 11, 2009

In memorium

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

  • Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
    (Elizabeth’s great uncle)
  • Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
    (Elizabeth’s great grandfather)
  • Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
    (my great uncle)
  • Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
    (Elizabeth’s great uncle)

The Second World War

  • Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
    (my uncle)
  • Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the Defensively Equipped Merchant fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
    (Elizabeth’s father)
  • Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
    (Elizabeth’s uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

November 9, 2009

QotD: Society must be protected

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:03

I think this does not go nearly far enough. Clearly the company behind Red Bull should be closely regulated as it is only a matter of time before someone drinks one and jumps off a building and falls to their death because contrary to their claims, Red Bull does not in fact ‘give you wings’.

In short, as people who are not ‘experts’ are moronic halfwits incapable of telling reality from advertising hype, we must simply turn over all aspects of our life to government approved self-important technocratic prigs qualified ‘experts’ who can determine what we are permitted to see.

We must ‘do it for the children’ of course.

Perry de Havilland, “All your images belong to us”, Samizdata, 2009-11-09

November 4, 2009

Transsexual Jesus

Filed under: Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:53

A play in Glasgow is — all together now — “not intended to incite or offend anyone of any belief system”. In spite of that, some Christians are offended:

About 300 protesters held a candlelit protest outside a Glasgow theatre over the staging of a play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual.

The protest was held outside the Tron Theatre, where Jesus, Queen of Heaven — in which Christ is a transsexual woman — is being staged.

It is part of the Glasgay! arts festival, a celebration of Scotland’s gay, bi-sexual and transsexual culture.

Festival organisers said it had not intended to incite or offend anyone.

Of course, given the parlous state of Christianity in Britain, maybe they really did think that nobody would be offended. Portraying the founder of a different religion in this way might spark a bit more than protest.

November 3, 2009

Being “a bit boring” is part of his shtick

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Colby Cosh looks at “Frygate”:

I realize I’m late to the party, but I didn’t find out until today that the remark which made Stephen Fry melt down was that his tweets were “a bit boring.” Really? Look, we all adore Stephen Fry, especially those of us who are ungainly, neurotic, and a little old-fashioned, so I hope someone will explain to him gently that he is a bit boring — not only his tweets, but just all-around. QI wouldn’t have a premise in the first place if it weren’t somewhat difficult to be interesting; Kingdom was served with rather overgenerous lashings of scenery and mopeyness; and Fry’s impeccable gadget reviews, considered strictly as entertainment, would try the patience of anyone who doesn’t add up the grocery bill in hexadecimal. Being just a little boring — presenting the perpetual risk that he might go on just a little too long about number theory or the battle of Stamford Bridge — is essential to the unostentatious delightfulness of Stephen Fry, just as a soupçon of boringness is essential to the charm of a warm woollen sweater or a newspaper comic strip. (OK, bad example. No newspaper comic strips now being printed possess any charm at all.) Nobody needs Stephen Fry to be a source of unpredictability or chaos. I would argue that any institution whose merits are obvious and whose utility is uncompromised is, by definition, a bit boring. Volvos? Boring! Vin Scully? A little boring at times! Oatmeal cookies? Lovely, if they’re the sort of thing you’re into, but they don’t exactly send anybody’s pulse racing, do they?

October 31, 2009

Bosworth Field located, finally

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06

It may be surprising, but the actual location of Bosworth Field, “one of the four most important battles in English history” was only definitely identifed this year:

Just after midday yesterday, Glenn Foard stood on Ambion Hill in Leicestershire, next to the award-winning Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre, pointed at the distant church spire of Stoke Golding and declared an end to 500 years of arguments over the location.

“It’s over there, two miles away,” he said, beyond and below the church, off to the right a bit and spread over 250 acres of what is now flat farmland, crisscrossed by hedgerows, pasture and autumnal trees.

Mr Foard, a battlefield archaeologist who has led a four-year, £1.3 million investigation into the whereabouts of the fighting, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Leicestershire County Council, is convinced that he has unearthed the proof.

In an unexpected and thrilling development for the archaeologists, that proof is in the form of 22 lead cannon and musket balls that dramatically reshape thinking about late medieval combat.

October 30, 2009

Cory Doctorow on Britain’s ill-advised ‘3 strikes’ move

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Cory Doctorow would have the British government do something other than their idiotic ill-advised move to enforce the “three strikes” rule:

Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.

Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.

A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

October 29, 2009

Another non-surprise development in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

You can’t be a proper Nanny State without properly trained nannies:

Only council-vetted “play rangers” are now allowed to monitor youngsters in two adventure areas in Watford while parents must watch from outside a perimeter fence.

The Watford Borough Council policy has been attacked as insulting and a disgrace by furious relatives who say they are being labelled as potential paedophiles.

Of course, like all such idiotic measures, it’s intended to “protect the children”, so no rational thought is welcome on the subject. All across Britain today, local councils are suddenly wondering if they should adopt the same kind of policy for fear of being held responsible should anything happen.

The Daily Telegraph disclosed on Tuesday how employers will come under pressure to register staff with the Government’s anti-paedophile database even if they have little contact with children

Sir Roger Singleton, the chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, said the scope of the planned database could increase significantly because companies would fear losing business if they did not have their employees vetted.

Last month, he was asked by the Government to look again at the complex definitions of “frequent” and “intensive” contact following concerns that the scheme would lead to state supervision of all relationships between adults and children.

It may not be the intent, but it will almost certainly be the final result.

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