Aquarionics

Room in the handbasket

So, We have on the one hand Oh My God as Blanket calmly ignores the desires of thousands of citizens and moves the ID cards in under a new name and department, that of immigration control.

I’m agreeing with Stuart on this one, they did the consultation, and they ignored us. In fact, even if it was merely a “What sort of things should we consider?” as Nick suggests in the comments, then they have ignored it. They have, as far as I have seen, completely failed to address most of the points brought up by the opponants of such a scheme.

Nick’s counterargument that the government are not obligied to listen to us is well noted, and whilst I agree with the points, I don’t like them. In fact, I really don’t like the idea that any government can produce ideals to make us vote for them, and the only thing we have to hold them to it is four years later. I realise that not all the election promises can suceed, real life gets in the way. And the fact that most of the country will still vote for this particuler set of clowns because they won’t even consider the other options.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, The US Government has found a loophole allowing them to build a floating death-camp with execution, and no appeal or jury. I think I’ll go back to watching West Wing DVDs, then I can live in a happy world where the people in charge of a country actually give a flying fuck about the opinions of everyone.

Guilty until proven dead

Huntley found guilty

Okay, that wasn’t a suprise. The man was going to be found guilty from the second he stepped into the courtroom, from the first photo in the Sun, from the first day of the trial. I doubt even if he had presented conclusive evidence to the contary, he’d have been given manslaughter instead. That isn’t the problem – the jury found him guilty, and that is accepted.

The scary thing is the “For The Children” attitude that appears to have sprung up today. Huntley had been questioned – and occasionally arrested – a number of times over his life for sexual advances towards underage girls. The prosecution had been hinting at this all though the trial, trying to pin sexual assault to the case, but because Huntley was only on trial for the murder of the girls, previous convictions were not allowed to be brought into consideration. He wasn’t being tried for them again.

He is now.

Trial by Media. Apparently every person who ever gets a job in – or near – a school must never ever have been so much as questioned over such a crime. Huntley, admittedly, possibly shouldn’t have been working in that school. A couple of questionings is one thing, but the 10 accusations over the past seven years raises some kind of flag. But should it? If I stand up and say “Hah! Joe Bloggs likes little girls!”, does that mean that Joe Bloggs can never work near children again? Even if it’s proven that Bloggs has never seen any female below the age of 40? Even if apologies are made, statements withdrawn, lies retracted. Is there allowed to be smoke without fire?

But the most worrying thing is that they – they, in this case, being the General Public – want tabs kept on anyone who is so much as linked with such a crime. This isn’t innocent until proven guilty, nor even guilty until proven innocent, this is guilty for being accused, and having this accusation follow you for the rest of your life.

Because, obviously, you can not reform criminals.

Bring me that horizon

In brief then:

• Am back from con. It was fun. Report later.
• UK Media is back in “Qualifications” peanut-galleryery. Report later.
• Doom 3 Rocks. Report later.
• Sid Meier’s Pirates remake looks like it will rock. Report later.
• Sims 2 has gone gold, and is on target for September release. Report later.

Lazyweb - Digital Guardian

I spend a couple of hours every day sitting on trains. Soon, I’ll be spending 4 hours a day sitting on buses. Ideally, I’d like to read a newspaper or something while I’m doing this, but I hate fiddling around with broadsheets on the standing-room-only commuter cattle-pens into London. The solution to this appears to be the Digital Guardian, but it’s useless to me since it requires a web connection to read. You can’t just download a PDF of the entire newspaper (though you can get PDFs of every seperate page & story) and take it away.

So, has anyone heard of any inititives to automatically grab each page PDF of today’s Guardian (With my subscription details, naturally) automatically? Stiching them together isn’t really important.

Hunting the hunters

I don’t care about fox hunting.

That is, I can see the benefits of stopping it, but I can see advantages to its continued existence. I am happy upon this fence, I can see my house from here.

I don’t understand why its such a huge issue, though. I don’t understand why it’s an issue that is worth perverting the course of parliament for it, which is what the Commons say they will do if the Lords decides to try to block it. It’s a party promise, yes, but why do we care enough about it to knock aside the due process? From the outside, it looks like the sole reason for all of this is that the Lords is overriding a law the Commons want, which is their job ffs. The House Of Lords is there – albeit stuffed full of various party’s cronies at the moment – to stop the Commons enacting law after law just to get them reelected.

This is not to say that the people who broke into the Commons aren’t morons, however, but I do find it slightly amusing that when Batman did something similar earlier this week there wasn’t nearly this much vitriol being splashed around.

Bu... Wha... The... *Argh*

Apparently, our Home Office minister has thought of the perfect way to ensure people aren’t fox-hunting when the ban finally comes into effect.

He’s going to put CCTV cameras in the hedgerows.

I’m not kidding.

I’ve no idea what I can say to that.

Godwination

[On abortion] The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales wrote: “That way lies eugenics, and we know from German history where that leads.” [BBC News]

The catholic church have now compared abortionists with Nazis. Thus has Godwin’s Law been evoked, and the entire thing can be forgotten. (via ρ)

Two points

First, does whoever comes second in the “Who will be the next Dr Who?” competition become the next Pope?

Second, if Pope John Paul II ends up on a life support machine with the Catholic Church debating whether or not to leave it on? I will swear myself off all news sources for a month.

I’ll have to.

Deathlist

The headline from the Deathlist site for today reads:

Pope Springs to the Eternal

Voting for the BBC

From the BBC’s statement on Dr Who:

“We leave it to the discretion of parents to ultimately decide what is suitable for their children.”

So, the BBC to run the country then?

Get better elections, part two

In every place where it matters to me, nothing changed.

No matter

Blitz

It’s been brought to my attention that people may not be aware that I no longer work in London.

I no longer work in London, at a place just outside Kings Cross.

I no longer have a 90% chance of being in a train, just before 9am today, that was around the Kings Cross area.

I have never been so glad of that fact than I was today. Everyone I know of in London has been accounted for as safe, for which I am grateful. I remember the days of the IRA bombings, when each bombing meant a fear that something near my dad’s office had happened.

Today is a bad day to be in London. Today is a good day to do exactly what you were going to do anyway. Sit back, enjoy where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing. Living, if nothing else. Many people today aren’t.

This is not a cause to unite under. We don’t need another one. This is a cause to ignore. We couldn’t have stopped this without losing too much. I can say this from my happy glass house of not having anything terrible happen to someone I know over today’s tragedy – You’d be amazed how many people turn into rabid right-wing reactionaries in the aftermath of a crisis – but terror was their intent. Here they won’t get the people, after the IRA and such we don’t respond well to threats of violence, I’m just hoping out glorious leaders don’t do anything stupid right now.

Oh, and Tony Blair got the reaction right. It’s mildly unfair to critise the man on everything he does wrong without occasionally noting that he isn’t a complete muppet.

Talking of which, tonight I intend to get LoneCat to watch Smiletime.

Guardian Post

The new shape Guardian has launched, and I’m actually impressed. It looks cool, it’s well designed, and while they’ve dropped a couple of things I liked (Doonesbury and Pass Notes, both from G2), they seem to be replacing them with Good Stuff.

To celebrate the new edition, The PDF edition of the paper at Digital Guardian is free until the 26^th, so you can see what it looks like, though that doesn’t help show how much easier the thing is to read on the bus…

Darkened

Ronnie Barker has died and the world is a darker place.

The world today

Another day, another super-virus. Clever Scientists, in the name of Global Understanding – which has capital letters, so must be both good and true, have recreated the Spanish Flu virus which killed an estimated 50,000,000 people in 1918, in the hopes that it might help folks understand what caused it, and how we can combat it. To further this cause, they’ve uploaded the details to our own internets, in case some backyard biologist can rustle some up and solve it. Hopefully before we catch it from them and it, you know, kills another few million.

Iraq. Still no win yet.

Christmas is coming. I am, apparently, living in a country where I can buy mince pies, advent calendars (I intend to buy three. One so I can count down to November 5th, another to count down to the day Advent starts, and a third to count down to Christmas), but not neither pumpkins nor fireworks. It’s also reminded me that if I intend to start this multipart story for Advent I really should be writing it now. Only 80 days to go…

The Conservative party are entertaining us once again with their autumnal show at the seaside. It never ceases to amaze me how we employ such multi-talented people, to spend their year governing the entire country and still have time to rehearse and perform these exquisite examples of the traditional English farce every autumn. This year, the Tories are once again riffing on the theme of an out-dated and moribund political party desperately searching for a leader to rail against a dangerous and politically dodging and weaving opponent. It’s not an original theme for the troupe – they performed a similar show a little while ago, and again before that – but they’ve spiced it up to pantomime levels this year with a host of overplayed stereotypes each dodging the actual problem. A fine show, though I was beginning to find some of the characters a little two dimensional towards the end, a little more realism would have been nice.
I didn’t see a box-office number, but if you can get tickets I’m told it’s playing all week.

We have a black archbishop, who is advocating gay priests and female ones. America will get him fired shortly.

Which? magazine (UK Consumers Association organ) did a study on computer reliability. Apple won. Film at 11.

Cillit Bang are hastily backing down after their marketing campaign hit a virus checker last week. A representative of their advertising company was posting comments in weblogs from the perspective of their (fictional) spokesperson. This is not really a good thing in itself, but when they followed up one of Tom Coates’ heartfelt essays on his search for his father with one of these advertising tricks, they were justifiably shouted at. They are – or employ – morons. Avoid them. (Full disclosure: I met Tom in a bar once. I also met Bobbie Johnson – who wrote the story for the Guardian – at another, different bar once. Both were UK-Bloggers gatherings, so it’s not much of a coincidence, really).

Years, Drugs, Webs

So, Three hundred and sixty five days.

Fifty two weeks, at thirty five pounds on bus tickets a week, four and a half hours every working day is… No, I’d better not think about it.

Today is my first anniversary working for EM, and therefore ranks as my longest continuous employment since I had a paper-round. Yay the new economy.

There is a new design for Aquarionics on its way, BTW. Maybe even new content, or something. The design is stuck in limbo since I redesigned it in PSP and then my trial ran out, so I’m waiting until I can justify buying the full product. Or I could use that as an excuse to leap to Photoshop etc.

I bought the new Barenaked Ladies album – Everything to Everyone – last week (Via iTunes. Yes, DRM isn’t ideal, but until we can convince the record industry that there are more honest people in the world than people who will get something for free if they can. While we’re at it, can we convince me too?). It contains a couple of ‘future classic’ type tracks I can see myself listening to for a long time, and there is a track whose first lines are “You’ve never seen as many monkeys in the Daily Mail”, Which even out of context (It’s a song about postcards of chimpanzees) makes me laugh. I’m a sad person.

We have, once again, returned to the classic, battered battlegrounds of the War On Drugz. Every so often the needle of popular culture appears to drift from “liberal” to “conservative”, and the further into time we get the faster the metronome appears to be ticking. Anyway, some of the Popular Press (Who, in a rare display of Actual Humour, refer to broadsheets as the Unpopular Press) have decided that some of the white powder coating the fashion industry must be blown away (possibly in the hope that they can sniff it as it goes past.) and… and… in the great traditions of journalists everywhere, when someone says it better than I do I’m going to use their words instead. From The Friday Thing 2005-09-23 (Which if you don’t read, you should, it’s well worth every penny):

The point being – God, what *is* the point? The point being that
millions of people take recreational drugs in this country and
it’s madness to think of them as criminals. OK, so Moss happens
to work in a particularly stupid-money tiny-talent industry in
which coke-taking is practically compulsory, but frankly, even if
she’d been less lucky in life and had never made it further than
the customer service counter at TKMaxx in Croydon, she’d probably
still burn holes in her pretty little nose of a weekend. Only it
would cost her an awful lot more and would be cut full of chalk
and paracetamol. The point being, for the love of Belushi, in the
name of all that is holy and legally-permissable – it is a little
bit of coke. An inconsequential smudge of bullshit-dust. It is
not important.

Waging a deeply cynical tabloid war on celebrities who take drugs
is a waste of time, and investigating and prosecuting anyone who
take drugs is a waste of time and money. Furthermore, the fact
that Ian Blair took time out from devising futuristic Supercops
to get personally involved in publicly chastising druggy Moss is
madness, particularly as it means that now, if he’s not going to
appear like a hypocritical superloon, he’ll have to make it his
personal business to investigate Doherty, Deayton, Williams,
Walliams, every other catwalk model alive, 90% of all TV
presenters and pop stars, Russell Grant, Prince Harry… the list
is endless. He’s certainly going to have his work cut out for
him. He’ll probably have to bring in the TA to help out.

It’s very simple. Prohibition doesn’t work. The pros and cons of
various drugs don’t and shouldn’t come into it. The fact is,
people take drugs. They always have and they always will. The
least we can do as a society is educate people as to the risks
and ensure that if they do take them, at least they’re getting
stuff of a certain purity, and in relative safety.

Something like that anyway. The next weeks episode (Which would have been the first of October, I appear to have deleted the email and since I’m composing this from (looks out the window) somewhere between Henlow and Shefford (while bopping along quietly to Barenaked Ladies still) I don’t have a connection to teh interwebs) [Next week’s episode of TFT] had a rant on the subject of the government’s stated desire to have an “adult debate” on the subject of drugs whilst simultaneously refusing to budge from… well…

“Lets have a Proper Discussion on drugs. Okay?”
“Sure. I don’t agree with everything you say, not all drugs are the spawn of saran, you know.”
“How dare you publicise drug use like that! I can have you arrested, you know.”
“What? I thought you wanted a discussion on drugs?”
“We do”
“But if we even mention something that isn’t inline with your views, you say you will arrest us”
“Well yes, it is illegal, after all.”
“But not all drugs are utterly evil!”
“Yes they are”
“No they’re not!”
“Yes they are.”
“This isn’t even a proper discussion! A discussion is a series of statements made to establish a consensus or logical conclusion, this is just contradiction!”
“No it isn’t”
“Yes it is!”
“No it isn’t”
“Yes it IS!”

etc.

(Yes, I should have resisted the Python humour harder, Sosume.)

What else? Oh, yes. Web 2.0. Argh. Words cannot express how much I find this entire 2.0 thing incredibly annoying. The web is a series of evolving technologies, and the integrated web-app Gmail type thing that characterises Web 2.0 hype is just one new use of a reasonably new technology. It’s not that AJAX and DOM Scripting aren’t cool things, it’s just they are not immediately better than what we have. The ability to “access your information from anywhere” has the downside of not applying when you don’t have a net connection. In a world where “going to work” consists of going from network connection to another this may seem less important, but the world isn’t that globally connected yet, as can be gathered from my Henlow/Shefford statement above (As an update, I’ve now reached Shefford). From here I can’t access GMail, flickr, Mint or whatever. I could, I suppose, connect by connecting to my mobile via bluetooth, and then over 3G to the internet, but when I’m paying per kilobyte for my connection I’d quite frankly prefer optimised and compressed text-based communication. XML surrounds data with metadata, which makes it a good general transport protocol, but not a wonderfully bandwidth-conservative one. While in this bandwidth limited state, I get to view the world from the 1997 perspective of all styles and all images turned off, no sparkly effects or anything. I’d use Lynx if it didn’t feel silly doing so on a Powerbook.

This entry, btw, is part of a new initiative to get me to update more often. It consists of writing Journal on the way from Hitchin to Bedford and Frontier (Of which you know nothing) on the way back.

Explanations as to Frontier will be forthcoming soonish.

Balance in all things.

On the plus side of the news, Anne Rice will never again write another vampire novel.

On the minus side, she doesn’t appear to have abandoned the notion of people you can kill and then they’ll be back a couple of days later.

Anne Rice is novelising the bible

Simplicity

So yeah, new year, newish design. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a start. And the new new design is trapped in PSP until I get a new 30 day trial :-D

Simplicity

I like simplicity. It appeals to my sense of design, and the light grey with some of the most delicate shading I could make visible is nothing if not simple. The boxes and curves design is lifted from previous designs, but where there they were gradiented and filled here they are lightly hinted at rather than rigidly defined. The construction marks on the logo I like too :-)

Complexity

It’s a long way from the new design, which is slightly more heavy on the photographic backgrounds than I usually do, and is therefore something of a departure. Changes are good.

Smart

Today I spent a long time in a car, and a slightly shorter time in an actual meeting with actual clients. For this I am wearing a suit, and am reminded – as I am always reminded – that I need a new suit at some point. I don’t wear suits very often, and part of the reason for that is my enjoyment of the reaction of people who haven’t seen it before. I hate with a passion, however, the shiny clompy shoes, because the shiny clompy shoes are clompy – and I don’t like being clompy – and the shiny clompy shoes go clomp-clomp-clomp all the way home until they wear though my socks and make the backs of my ankles bleed. Which, you know, hurts.

Tech

I suspect that, with all the lack-of-updatingness and the cheese-sandwichingness (though currently it’s a bacon sandwich. Mmm, bacon) I’ve lost most of the geeky percentage of my audience. Though the geeky percentage probably didn’t notice the not-updatingness because they all use RSS readers, and the rest all use friends lists. Why do I bother with the designing of actual web pages again?

Anyway.

Current things that I have been mucking around with include “DOM Scripting” (as well I might), which I will get around to mentioning in a bit, Scripting in computer games (Both Civilization 4 and Vampire The Masquerade use Python as their primary game scripting language, which I find interesting, and have on my list of Things To Write An Article About) and Visual Studio Express.

Open Sorcery types, you can switch off now, because I don’t need your next reaction.

So, I have downloaded Visual Studio Express which is what happens when Microsoft miss the point. Amateur coders are mostly nowadays developing in things like Python, Perl, PHP and if they have had their brains fiddled with, GCC and Java. Lots on Linux. This is, indeed, partly because Visual Studio costs TEN MILLION DOLLARS per license.

Actually, it doesn’t, but as a non-professional developer it might as well do, as the high licensing puts something of a boot-strapping problem in front of learning to dev for Win32, or even Win64. So, Visual Studio Express you can download for Free (as in Beer). Well, you can download a demo for free (as in beer), but you do have to register for free (as in, be spammed for eternity) and have a Passport account (as in “submit to the almighty Gates empire”. Much like you have to do for OpenSolaris) (Except different empire, obviously) (Yeash, you guys are pedantic). So yeah, I’m downloading VC++ (Because I want to design a Half life 2 mod about killing lawnchairs) (Incidentally, Valve’s Developer docs are all in a Wiki, isn’t that interesting?) (Yes, too many brackets, Sosumi) and it’s taking an eternity, though not as long as XCode did. I mean, what do you have to put into an IDE to make it 800mb?

Oh, right. OS X. Chrome, naturally.

So yeah, updates as and when. Also about the Mysterious Project Breakfast, assuming I get around to that too.

Sushi

Bedford has a sushi restaurant. I swear the things follow me around. I am, of course, doomed, but I am doomed with expensive raw fish, and that somehow makes it all worth while.

Dead Ken(nedy)

Charles Kennedy, leader of the UK Liberal Democrats Governmental party, has, shortly after some people accused him of not being a good leader, admitted to having a drinking problem. His chances are not looking terribly rosy.

(From The Friday Thing Dead Kennedy Pool):
When Charles finally goes, the nearest prediction will win its predictor a bottle of Talisker 18 Year Old Single Malt Whisky. And the country will win a second opposition party with an actual leader. Everyone’s a winner.

(Thats three times I’ve attempted to spell “Kennedy” as “Khennedy”, which is your fault, Jason)

Tuesday, Ten AM.

Shortly afterwards all the people who said they wouldn’t run against him in a leadership election will, in fact, run against him in a leadership election “In the interests of the party”.

Wednesday, Thirteen Fifteen, Sir Malcolm Rifkind will announce that he’s actually really been a spy for the Liberal Democrats all along, will enter – and win – the leadership election, and then all three major parties will be basically Tory. This will set off a chain of Heath Robinson events which will naturally lead to the collapse of the entire political system across the world, leading to the rise and rule of a little known previously almost silent group called the “Bloggers” who will alternate between demanding that everyone be nice to everyone else and being so emo their hair cuts itself, their first action will demand that every person in the entire universe gets a weblog or other online journal and the resulting influx of new accounts at LiveJournal will mean that Six Apart become the single source of money in the entire world, except for Sun, who they buy servers from. Sun will open source world government, leading to rule by whoever argues most consistently on the mailing list, which will eventually lead to the population of the world being run by the commentators on Slashdot, leading to great leaps forward in technological research, the population of Space, a new version of Doom, and a world famine as no money is spent on any food that doesn’t go into either kool aid or cookies. We all die, and it’s all Charlie’s fault for telling us about his drinking problem.

Selfish bastard.

Twirly

I have a love-hate relationship with the Radio 4 UK Theme.

The Radio 4 UK Theme is, for those evil non-uk people and also students who will never have heard it, a collection of traditional themes and tunes interleaved and played by an orchestra. It is, in fact, probably the original mashup. Like so many quintessential examples of British culture, it was composed by someone not native to this green and pleasant land, a Mr Fritz Spiegl, and it is played every morning at half past five to mark the return to the airwaves of Radio 4 – the long lost BBC Home Service – after its place is taken overnight by the tattered remains of the World Service.

I have, as I mentioned, a love-hate relationship with the Radio 4 UK Theme. This is because from October 2004 to December 2005 while I was spending five hours a day commuting (And yes, I shall shut up about it soon) the UK Theme was the thing that would always be playing at half past five to lull me into a false sense of awakening. So, on the one hand, it is a wonderful thing in the abstract, a great piece of music, part of our cultural heritage, its loss will be a damning indictment on the state of the country, etcetera, etcetera.

On the second hand, I shall be quite happy if I never hear the dratted thing ever again in my lifetime.

The thing that worries me slightly is that it will be replaced, we are told, by a ‘pacy news briefing’ which, to my mind, is the very last thing anybody needs at Oh-dark 30. Not least because it comes between the glacial news briefing of the World Service and the normal speed news briefing of the standard Radio 4 News. This means that the effect of this will be to replace: ”[news] [music to wake up to] [news] [Farming Today] [Today Program]” with ”[news] [more news] [news for farmers] [Yet still more news]” which isn’t really any use at all.

So, they are campaigning. Mike Flowers, who used to have some Pops is leading the charge to Save the theme by getting people to sign petitions! for the WIN! Because that will change EVERYTHING!

Also, they’re going to release it as a single, so that even if they do replace it, you can put the CD on instead. Yay technology.

A Quote

‘Mr Winvoe?’ he said, after whistling into it. ‘Ah. Good. Tell me, how much do we have in our vaults at the moment? Oh, approximately. To the nearest million, say.’ He held the tube away from his ear for a moment, and then spoke into it again. ‘Well, be a good chap and check anyway, will you?’

He hung up the tube and placed his hands flat on the desk in front of him.

[...]

‘Yes, Mr Winvoe? Really? Indeed? I myself have frequently found loose change under sofa cushions, it’s amazing how it mou … No, no, I wasn’t being … Yes, I did have some reason to … No, no blame attaches to you in any … No, I could hardly see how it … Yes, go and have a rest, what a good idea. Thank you.’

[Terry Pratchett, Hogfather]

Free Friday

So, there is this weekly current affairs newsletter called “The Friday Thing”, an opinionated, left leaning, overtly political newsletter that has shown a tendancy to make my friday afternoons more enjoyable. It blasts those who deserve to be blasted, defends those who should be defended, and tears bloody great strips off of those whose foolishness deserves such.

It used to cost 15 pounds for fifty two issues, but now it is free.

So read it

(The website doesn’t appear to have noticed the new freeness of it as I type, but the email I got assures me it’s true)

Constipated Detectives

Governments have sacrificed principles and ignored human rights in the name of the “war on terror”, says a leading rights group in its annual report. [BBC News]

From the constipated detective department.

Two Quotes

All you’re doing is hurting whatever causes you claim to be supporting by pissing everyone the fuck off. What, do you think that eventually we’ll all be flying in hospital dressing gowns with no sharp objects (potential weapons), electronic equipment (makeshift tasers), liquids (apparently, might explode), pants (modifiable into garroting equipment), books (paper cuts are bad!) or small children (they could be encouraged to scream at a frequency that jams radio transmissions, thus allowing someone to take control of the plane), and you’ll be able to open a competing airline that doesn’t do all this shit but runs the risk of blowing the fuck up? Because there are better business models.
Cadhla on Terrorism

Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud. You re almost certainly going to be okay. And in the unlikely event you’re not, do you really want to spend your last days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape? That s not a life worth living, is it?
John McCain on Terrorism

(Last one was stolen from Senji)

Freedom of Cycling

So. I was checking my comics this morning (Or the important ones right now, which are Narbonic, Schlock, QC & S*P) when I saw on the latter an advert for FreeMesa.org, an organisation devoted to small groups of people in various local areas who give things they don’t want to each other instead of chucking them out.

Golly, I thought, first tea still unfinished, that sounds familiar. Isn’t that what Freecycle do?

You may not be familiar with Freecycle, but that is, basically, what they do. Or, actually, that is What Freecycle Is. A Freecycle List is a list on Yahoo Groups where people give things to each other. Upon a little research I discovered that Freecycle itself is a trademark of a non-profit organisation with corporate sponsorship.

And by “Research”, I mean “I read their web site”. This is the modern meaning of the word, as far as I can tell.

So The Freecycle Network is an organisation which is basically a directory of mailing lists hosted on someone else’s technology with volunteers running them about people giving things away for free. What could anyone possibly object to enough so go so far as to set up a rival? All they can do is have the name.

Oh. Right.

Freecycle, who have seen what is happening with the verb to google (look at the link very carefully for bonus irony points) have decided to Take Action, and said

In legalese, the use of the term ‘Freecycle’ denotes a gifting service which is officially approved by the nonprofit organization ‘The Freecycle Network,’ and one that the public can expect to adhere to certain standards. The Freecycle Network must approve any e-mail list or web site that uses the term ‘Freecycle’ in its name and provides any sort of exchange service. (A relevant point for us to note internally is that we have to demonstrate a “concerted” effort.

Cite, plus bonus ‘How you should talk bout FC’ stuff

Grist have a good story on the Freecycle group turning into arseholes. Note that up until recently the Freecycle home page talked about freecycling.

I’m torn on this. On the one side, I can see the group wants to protect its trademark. On the other, it’s basically saying “That thing about the process being ‘freecycling’? Yeah, we’ll sue you for that now”. Also, whereas Google is a huge corporate entity now, I’m not entirely sure why Freecycle – a movement devoted to giving things away for free and using other people’s (freely given) resources to do so – is becoming one.

Antinews

An inquiry has been ordered by Met Police chief Sir Ian Blair after a Muslim constable was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy in London. [ BBC News ]

This.

Isn’t.

News.

The policemen – to all evidence available – asked politely if they could avoid placing him on guard at a place where he’d prefer not to work. They said that they would avoid it. At no point did he – apparently – say “I will not”, and at no point did they even place him at the place he didn’t want to work. There is no reason to suggest this was ever anything more than a policemen expressing his preference, and the higher powers, on this occasion, being able to work within the officer’s preference.

In the above, I have completely – and deliberately – ignored all specific political circumstances, because they should be ignored. This isn’t a political issue, it’s an employment issue, and at no level is it actually news.

No2ID and Godwin

Do you know why Godwin’s law exists?

You don’t know what Godwin’s law is, do you? Ah well, kids of today, et cetera.

Godwin’s law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” (via Wikipedia). On Usenet, this is traditionally taken to mean that the person who starts referring to their opposition, their arguments or their mother as Hitler, a Nazi, or worse than both or either has in doing so automatically lost the argument. Godwin on why:

But the Nazi-comparison meme popped up elsewhere as well – in general discussions of law in misc.legal, for example, or in the EFF conference on the Well. Stone libertarians were ready to label any government regulation as incipient Nazism. And, invariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical (Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope). (‘Meme, Counter-meme’ – Wired Oct 1994 – Mike Godwin)

As far as bad people go, Hitler was a monumental fuckhead, as many wise historians (and Eddie Izzard) have said. He is responsible for the deaths of an unimaginable number of people across a broad swathe of cultures and groupings. He is going, will go, has gone down in history as being one of the single worst people ever to lead a country.

And so we get to the point. No2ID, a lobbying organisation set up to oppose the government’s plan for a national ID database, published an advert in national newspapers (I know it went in the Guardian, but am not sure where else), basically comparing Tony Blair to Hitler, and this annoys me.

It annoys me because there are a great number of problems with the proposed ID cards bill, starting with the fact that no large government computer project in the last decade has actually worked, working though the right to privacy aspect, pointing out that the bill states we are responsible for the information being correct but cannot change it and a thousand other good, logical reasons why this braindead piece of cobbled together attack upon our personal liberties needs to be – at the very least – put on hold until the problems are fixed, and possibly even scrapped altogether.

The advert as published makes the people objecting to ID cards look like rabid, mouth frothing lunatics. Blair is, for all his faults, not as bad as Hitler. Of all the ways that Blair and Hitler can be compared, in fact, ID cards are one of the least effective (Yes, the National Socialists implemented an ID card system. We had one too. Implementing an ID card system does not make you the bad guys, it’s the reasons why you’re doing it and what you will use it for that do that.

The public in general are under reacting, true. They either don’t see the problem, don’t believe there’s anything we can do, or have swallowed the “it’ll stop terrorists” line.

But the effect of the advert is to make our side retreat to the same safe ground of hyperbole that the anti-terrorist stuff inhabits, a place where we can safely be sidelined as a collection of over dramatic, overreacting freaks.

Swinging on Roundabouts

In the United States of Advertising:

A new chorus of critics says it’s time to lower the drinking age
[...] The final drawback is pretty straightforward: It makes little sense that America considers an 18-year-old mature enough to marry, to sign a contract, to vote and to fight and die for his country, but not mature enough to decide whether or not to have a beer.

Meanwhile, in Great Blairton:

Change drinking laws for binging Brits, says think-tank
[...] Young people should be banned from drinking until they reach 21 or be forced to carry a card that records their alcohol intake, an influential journal claims.

Evolution

Police send ‘spy drone’ into the skies
Britain’s first remote control police aircraft, dubbed the “spy drone”, took to the skies today.
The unmanned CCTV drone, which measures