Freebie Holidays for MPs ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 222010
 

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 ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 222010
 

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

 Film, General, Media  No Responses »
Mar 222010
 

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.

Sexist Jokes

 Humour, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 202010
 

There are five men and a single woman all dangling from a rope, waiting for someone to rescue them. Unfortunately the rope starts to fray and they all decide that someone has to sacrifice themselves to save the others. After some time discussing who should sacrifice themselves, the woman says that as women are used to sacrificing themselves and that men are the better sex, she will sacrifice herself. The men all applaud her, and an hour later the woman is rescued.

Mildly humorous ?

Now try it the other way around :-

There are five women and a single man all dangling from a rope, waiting for someone to rescue them. Unfortunately the rope starts to fray and they all decide that someone has to sacrifice themselves to save the others. After some time discussing who should sacrifice themselves, the man says that as men are used to sacrificing themselves and that women are the better sex, he will sacrifice herself. The women all applaud her, and an hour later the man is rescued.

Still funny ?

It sometimes seems that it is far more acceptable for men to be portrayed as stupid in jokes than women. Is this fair ? If it is wrong to portray women as stupid in jokes, it is wrong to portray men as stupid too; similarly if it is funny to read about stupid men, then it is funny to read about stupid women.

Dealing With An Invisible Window With Enlightenment

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Mar 162010
 

Probably of not much use to most, but useful to me …

On occasions, I have been known to start an application and switch virtual desktops as the application window appears which can sometimes lead to Enlightenment (but the DR16 version) “displaying” the window in a non-visible location. Fortunately there is a convenient and fairly trivial fix for this :-

  1. Open a terminal window
  2. Display a list of windows with the command eesh window_list (or eesh wl for short).
  3. This displays a list of two columns – a window ID and the title of each window. Pick the window ID of the window that is not visible.
  4. Next iconify the window with the command eesh wop iconify ${window_id}.
  5. At this point the icon for the application window should appear in your iconbox and you can uniconify it with the mouse and it should appear on the currently displayed desktop.
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