Just a random thought that just occurred to me … who should pay for insurance on the theft of things … cars, the contents of homes, etc. ? We all know that is normally the victims of theft who pay for it, but why should we ?
Why shouldn’t those who are convicted of theft pay for the cost of insurance ? Attach their earnings after they leave prison until they have paid back enough to cover the cost of insurance in proportion to the amount they have stolen.
Well, I have been using a robot vacuum cleaner for a few months now and it’s brilliant. No need to push around a vacuum cleaner once a week; you can set the robot going in the morning just before heading off to work and it gets going.
Of course there are a few “issues” involved :
Lastly, it may be worth thinking more carefully about whether you need a clock and a scheduler on the robot. I do, but have only used it once to make sure it works. It is easy enough to hit the ‘start’ button that scheduling seems unnecessary. Besides it is always an idea to give a room a quick scan to check that the robot isn’t going to try to do something you don’t want.
Now all I need is a robot that will go up and down the stairs!
One of my pet hates is the inappropriate use of the word paedophile. If you look up the proper definition of the word it is someone who is sexually interested in children specifically prepubescent children. That means children who have not been through puberty.
Is that the same as someone who is sexually interested in post-puberty “children” ? No it is not. Yet people assume that anyone who has sex with someone under the age of consent is a paedophile. However wrong it is to have sex with someone under the age of consent, it is a different order of magnitude with a child under the age of puberty.
Even more ridiculously, people have even used paedophile to refer to anyone who expresses an interest in anyone a great deal younger than themselves. The “victims” of such “paedophiles” are well over the age of consent.
By misusing the word paedophile, we trivialise the ofense. Sex with an “adult” under the age of consent may be bad, but it is ridiculous to compare it to abusing a 2 year old.
I doubt anyone will really care, but I am migrating to a new server today so you might notice some disruption as it gets migrated to the server room under the stairs.
Strange as it may seem, I think I am going to miss the old server – a Sun Ultra 60 with 10 disks. It may have been a little on the noisy side, but it was a real server (old Sun workstations are built more like servers than desktop PCs) with a non-Intel architecture. I will even miss the muted growl under the stairs; the new server is so quiet I might not even notice a power failure.
Still the new server should be a little quicker and should eat a little less electricity.
Update: The new server is in and running in the final position. All well so far – excluding the fact that it needs my Eizo monitor rather than my ancient Sony (I really want to use the Eizo where it will be used). And of course I now discover that OpenSolaris has a really useless boot screen that doesn’t show any details. Must find out how to get it to display proper geeky text messages.
Seeing as there is currently a fuss about the possible partial privitisation of the Royal Mail, it is good time to add a little support for the Royal Mail as it is. The introduction of private sector “expertese” may not improve the service for customers – indeed may make things worse. Of course those who champion the private sector claim that it will improve the service which I do not believe will be the case at all.
Speaking in particular on parcels (as I have little interest in letters as most of them seem to be bills or junk mail), the Royal Mail delivers a service that is far better than private sector delivery companies (excluding supermarkets who seem to be able to organise deliveries far better than those whose business is making deliveries). As a single person, I am often during the working week to be found at work!
If you order something from the Internet, you can sometimes ask for it to be delivered to your work address – if you have a co-opertive workplace (and workplace that doesn’t like workers having parcels delivered to work is to put it mildly completely bonkers). But not always.
And of course if you have something delivered to your home address, it will normally be delivered when you are out. I happen to be home at lunchtime which gives an extra window of opportunity for the delivery people to catch me in. And what “company” manages that more than any other ? Yes, the Royal Mail.
As it happens I have one of those little notices saying that some company tried to make a delivery and I was not in. I can ask for it to be redelivered to the same address (when I will almost certainly also be out unless I take an extra day off work), or I can pick it up from the depot. Where are all these depots ? Well they all seem to be in industrial estates miles from anywhere and almost always very difficult to get to with public transport (I don’t drive).
Except of course for the Royal Mail who alternate between my local post office (which is less than 100 metres from my flat) or the local “big” post office, which is somewhat further but far easier to get to than some out of town industrial estate.
If I had the choice when ordering things from the Internet, I would always opt for a Royal Mail delivery even if it were 25% more expensive. But as soon as private sector “expertese” gets to work, I dare say the Royal Mail will start behaving like other delivery companies and having cheap out of town collection depots.