If we are getting to the stage that autonomous vehicles can drive themselves – probably safer than most human drivers – do we need to think about whether a human driver is necessary at all? Although there are people who enjoy driving, not everyone does and even those who do may not enjoy it all the time.
Why bother with a driving license if you can get a robot driver to do all your driving for you?
Ralph Miliband, Ed Miliband, and the Daily Mail. No prizes for guessing who the villain is; even blue-rinsed Conservative party card carrying reactionaries are beginning to think that the Daily Mail is on a sticky wicket with their latest story. But that part can all be best summed up with :-
The Daily Mail have somehow decided that Ralph was an evil person, hated Britain, and so Ed Miliband is an inappropriate person to lead the country. Which is bizarre on several levels, but rather than concentrating on whether Ed is suitable or not, or looking into the Daily Mail’s deranged reasoning, let’s have a look at poor old Ralph.
After all, Ralph is dead so he is hardly in a position to defend himself, so someone should do it for him. The Mail picked up on something he wrote shortly after arriving in Britain (after encountering anti-semitism: “The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world …”. Whilst it may be a little extreme, it is understandable coming from a Jewish refugee arriving in London in the middle of war fever, and not being aware of the Battle of Cable Street.
And of course Ralph was a prominent Marxist which is the sort of thing that will cause any Daily Mail editor to start frothing at the mouth. As a Marxist, Ralph was probably not too keen on the monarchy, and the British establishment. But hating the way that Britain is governed is not the same as hating Britain.
What the Daily Mail would rather have you overlook is that Ralph fought for this country during the war. And at the end of the war, he chose to stay in this country rather than return to Belgium, or take up any number of opportunities in the USA. Sure he was a Marxist and if he had managed a worker’s revolution and liquidated the whole of the Daily Mail, I would be the first to call him evil.
Let’s be honest, if we have to pick one of the Daily Mail or Ralph to label as “evil”, then the only answer is the Daily Mail.
I know … we’re all supposed to use graphical music players these days. I tried … honest, but I just couldn’t find one I liked well enough. This one had a habit of crashing randomly, that one was too database driven, this one was worried too much about a good interface for streaming music, that one liked play lists too much.
What I need in an audio player is :-
Note the lack of any fancy graphical interface or the requirement to plugin extras such as a link to last.fm such features are fine, but for me unnecessary.
So I found moc (Wikipedia link because the official website was broken when I wrote this) … an “command-line” (actually text screen based) music player with extensive configuration options. This is not so much a review as a discovery of the configuration options …
The first thing to find out is what file moc uses for configuration. Simple: ~/.moc/config. By making changes to this, and restarting moc I was able to make gradual improvements. The ordering of the options below is in the order of my discoveries which was greatly assisted by reading the example configuration in /usr/share/doc/moc/examples/config.example.gz
First, I wanted moc to start off by automatically changing to a specific directory :-
MusicDir = /media/ibox/albums StartInMusicDir = yes
Next, turn off the use of mmap() as it is apparently slow on NFS and my music files are on an NFS server :-
UseMmap = no
The end result is a simple player that works in a terminal window.
Who decides whether or not to hold a public inquiry? The government of course, and they usually make their decision on the cost of a public inquiry.
But it is rather convenient when a public inquiry delves into embarrassing subjects such as :-
Never mind the fact there has been no public inquiry into political corruption after the MPs expenses scandal. Which all goes to show that we cannot trust the government to investigate themselves. Or the police: Look at how hard people have had to work at getting at the truth behind the Hillsborough disaster.
Or in other words, we cannot trust the government to determine whether public inquiries should be held, nor the scope of those inquires. Whilst the government usually does reasonable work in setting up public inquiries, and the reason for refusing to establish public inquiries is down to cost, it is not unreasonable to plan for the worst case scenario where a future government may refuse to establish an inquiry to conceal their own bad deeds.
As such the decision of what public inquiries should proceed should be in hands of a third party. An independent third party with no past or present politicians, senior policepersons, etc. Essentially a panel of the powerless.
As some people know, the Linux device for generating random numbers (/dev/random) blocks when there isn’t sufficient entropy to safely generate random numbers. But people will still persist on advising using /dev/urandom as an alternative :-
“To sum up, under both Linux and FreeBSD, you should use /dev/urandom, not /dev/random.”
“Just go ahead and use /dev/urandom as is”
“Oracle wants us to move /dev/random and link /dev/urandom”
“You can remove /dev/random and link that to /dev/urandom to help prevent blocking”
Now it is true that /dev/urandom is usually good enough, but to advise people to use /dev/urandom without considering whether it is sufficient or not is irresponsible. True random numbers can be very important for cryptography, and without knowing it, we use cryptography every day; such as when we browse the web, make ssh connections, check PGP keys, etc. Using a weak random number generator can weaken the cryptographic process fatally.