More Zonkyness

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  • UK Election: Let’s Get This Farce Over With!

    One of the tedious things about the UK election system is that we do not know when the election is coming, so before the date of the election is known we have a kind of “phoney election” where the politicians all go head to head being even more critical with each other than they usually are. And of course generating even more hot air than usual.

    And then the election gets announced and all the tediousness goes into overdrive.

    What for ?

    Because of the election system in the UK, there are only a handful of seats (the “marginals”) where the result makes a bit of difference. If like most people you live in a parliamentary seat which is to a greater or lesser degree “safe”, your vote is effectively pointless and all the politicians making noise in your face about how bad the other politicians are, are just wasting of your time.

    It seems that there are just 60 seats that are marginal enough to make a difference – 60 out of 646, roughly 9%. So only 9% of the population have a vote that counts! At least if we all vote more or less the way we usually do. Basically the political establishment counts on the majority of us acting like sheep.

    The funny thing is that if politicians were honest and actually admitted that the voters in “safe” seats didn’t count, the normally safe seats would be up for grabs. So our electoral system accidentally rewards dishonesty! Kind of puts the expenses scandals into a new light doesn’t it ?

    Of course even if you are one of the lucky few living in one of the 60 marginals, the election process takes far too long – who needs many weeks in order to make up their minds ? Most of us already know who we would vote for in the next election, so delaying it just allows the politicians to puff up their feathers.

    Just remember we can always ignore the “big three” (Labour, Conservative, ad Liberal) and go for the independents and we might have a chance of getting some proper electoral reform rather than just a bit of tinkering around the edges.

  • iPhone: What’s Missing (5) – Multitasking

    I am in two minds about the need for multitasking on the iPhone. I can see that it would be useful for applications such as music streamers such as the one for LastFM or Spotify (personally I prefer LastFM), but having multiple GUI programs running on a machine as small (in terms of hardware resources) as the iPhone could be problematic.

    It could also make the iPhone less stable.

    But there is a demand for running lightweight background tasks in a way with a only a small risk of interfering with the currently running GUI application.

    It would be easy to allow too – just allow the iPhone application to fork a helper daemon with some means of controlling it. After all under that pretty skin, the iPhone is just an computer running OSX as anyone who has jailbroken it has probably found out.

  • Freebie Holidays for MPs ?

    The BBC have tonight announced that numerous MPs have been accepting free trips for “research” (funny how the trips are always to fun sunny places though) and not declaring their interest. The MPs will undoubtedly claim that they need to make foreign trips to further their knowledge of far flung corners of the world.

    Perhaps.

    As someone who works in the public sector, if I were to get a free trip to say Barcelona on a jolly to look at some sort of IT trade fair paid for by an IT supplier, I would be very rightly likely to get sacked when discovered. Why should it be different for MPs ?

    Being fair (although I’m not inclined to be fair to MPs at the moment), these MPs may well be genuine in accepting trips to learn more about places such as the Maldives, Cyprus, Gibraltar, and many other places. But it looks bad.

    And not declaring the trip, and not declaring an interest when tabling a question has all the smell of rampant corruption.

    Given the current climate of distrust in MPs, they should stop accepting these free trips.

    Perhaps parliament should establish a yearly budget for research trips and allow MPs to fund trips out of this budget and when it is gone, no more trips to the sun. That at least will be much less likely to smell of corruption.

  • US Health Care Reform Passes – Good Or Bad News ?

    So a short while ago the Democrats pushed through their health care reform package through.

    Good or bad news ?

    Well, it seems that the share prices of health care companies went up at the news. Now this could be a glitch or perhaps the market investors know something we do not. Does this indicate that the reforms are still going to allow companies to make excessive profits – or even that their profits will grow ?

    Of course for the uninsured in the US, this will at least mean they get some form of decent health care which is definitely good news.

    But if the US does not take any action on the costs of their health care system, they will sooner or later be faced with a bill they cannot pay. The US currently spends twice the amount in terms of GDP per capita that their competitors do. And I doubt that the reform bill is going to make a bit of difference to the cost of health care.

  • Can We Stop Calling It 3D ? It’s Stereoscopic

    The world seems to have gone 3D mad with films like Avitar, 3D TVs, 3D laptops, etc; fair enough you may think but what is this 3D they are talking about ?

    Well it’s not 3D at all. What they are all talking about is a stereoscopic effect where two different images in two dimensions presented to different eyes give the impression of a three dimensional scene. Just film a scene with two different cameras a little distance apart and you too can produce an illusion of three dimensions. But walk around the back of Scarlett Johansson or Brad Pitt and you will soon see why it is not 3D at all.

    That is not to say it is bad – just deceptively named. Call it “stereoscopic” and I’ll be happy.