Super Injunctions, Twitter, and Old Media

 General, Media  No Responses »
May 092011
 

Today there is a lot of fuss about the information on just who has obtained a super injunction to prevent the publication of details of their sordid private life being “published” via a Twitter post. It is probable that the relevant Twitter post is just wrong, but more interesting than that is the reaction of the old media. And an apparent misunderstanding of just what Twitter is.

The old media is complaining that there is effectively two rules – one for them and a quite different one for Twitter users. Well, no it isn’t quite like that. The relevant Twitter user – if he or she is within the jurisdiction of a UK court – is just as guilty of breaching the injunction as an old media company who published the story themselves. In practice, it is not possible to stop a Twitter user publishing before being prevented from doing so – there are just too many Twitter users out there from stopping them.

What will be the effect of this in the medium term? Basically it means that the old media will not be able to make any money at the old meaningless “three people in a bed” story – they will still be able to sell newspapers with real news, but meaningless exposés of someone’s private life with no real public interest will be a lot less likely. With any luck. And good. The news is not made any better by knowing that celebrity X slept with gold-digger Y unless that celebrity is genuinely in public life and making a moral stand on such issues.

The funny thing is that people somehow think that this is a new “problem”. I can remember the Spycatcher issue way back in the day where a publisher was prohibited from publishing the autobiography of a former MI5 agent in England, but the book was widely available elsewhere in the world (including unbelievably in Scotland!). Although the mechanisms were different, the basics are the same – one group of people are not allowed to tell the story, but another are.

Now onto the misunderstanding of Twitter itself. When someone “tweets” some item of news on Twitter, the company itself is not responsible – except to the extent that they are obligated to take it down given appropriate legal action. The person responsible for the content of the tweet is the tweeter themselves. The Twitter company themselves are no more responsible for the content than the newspaper delivery boy is responsible for what is in the newspaper.

Having said that, I believe that super injunctions are wrong. Injunctions to stop a story being published are all very fine, although they are relatively unobtainable for an ordinary person. And yes ordinary people do sometimes appear in news stories. But preventing the fact of an injunction stopping a story being published is wrong.

To The Eastern Road

 Photography  No Responses »
May 082011
 

Some pictures from the “other side” of Portsmouth this time :-

Old Metal 1, 2, &3

Old Metal 1

Old Metal 2

Old Metal 3

And something a little more accessible :-

Sailing

Sailing

Dog Inspects Memorial

Dog Inspects Memorial

Saving Space

 General  No Responses »
May 072011
 

Every so often I have an “episode” where I come up with an idea on how to save space in my flat (which is not overly large). Last time this happened in a serious way, I threw away all my DVD cases (yes it was that long ago) and put the DVDs into a folder. Now I have a stupidly large number of DVDs and BlueRay discs in a couple of those two hundred disc folders you can get. And I don’t have a living room packed with shelves holding nothing but DVDs.

After a week or so of looking at a large pile of recent (and in some cases not so recent – I cleaned my old CD storage unit last week which is currently a display case, and found quite a few oldies) CDs piled up on the stairs waiting to get boxed to go into the spare bedroom, I get another idea … related of course :-

56060

A CD spindle box of course! Or as otherwise known, a cake box. One of those tubular thingies which you could get large stacks of CD-R media in. I happened to still have one lying around, and packed in that large pile of CDs (and a few others). That huge pile is what is about to be thrown out, and that little thing next to it are the CDs themselves.

Now there are disadvantages to this of course – playing the CDs themselves is tricky as you have no easy way of finding a particular one. And looking at the artwork on the case is even trickier. But given I don’t play CDs anymore – they’re all ripped and stored online – and I look at the artwork never, those disadvantages don’t strike me as a reason not to do this.

Of course now I need more empty “cake boxes”! Lots of them.

Making A Core Dump Of A Running Process

 Linux  No Responses »
May 052011
 

For my own future reference …

Today I encountered an interesting little issue where I could not send an ABORT signal to a running process to kill it with a core dump because the process had a limit of 0 for the core dump size. Try as I might, I could not find a way to change that process’s core dump limit.

Turns out there is another way of tackling the problem, which is to use gdb to generate a core image :-

gdb
>attach PID
>gcore /var/tmp/core.PID

There is of course the gcore shell script wrapper for this, but that may not work if the working directory of the process no longer exists.

Grand National Fatalities Analysis

 General  No Responses »
May 022011
 

This is a companion blog entry to the one where I merely published the table of fatality statistics. That article was the raw facts; this one is where I can whitter on about anything I please – ideally backed up with some analysis of the raw statistics.

One of the things that became apparent to me as I worked on the table, was that the Grand National of old was not anywhere near as fatal as one would assume. Over the years, all sorts of things have been tried to make the Grand National safer – removing stone fences (!), removing the ploughed fields, reducing the heights of fences, etc. Yet it doesn’t seem to have made that much difference.

Over the last 20 years, there have been just 7 years without fatalities. In the 35 races for which I have details ran before 1900, “just” 10 had fatalities in. So we have gone from a majority of races (in the earliest supposedly most dangerous era of the Grand National) being fatality free, to a state where the majority of races do have fatalities. So much for making things safer.

Looking more closely, we can average out the fatality rate over time. The average fatality rate over the whole period for which I have figures comes to 1.70%. This compares to an average rate of 2.05% over the last 10 years (2001-2011), and 3.2% for the 10 years before that. So I guess the rate is falling, but it is still well above the average over time. If we go back earlier in time, we have a rate of 2.8% for the years 1950-59 (including the infamous 1954), or a rate of 1.4% for the years 1930-1939.

There is a great deal more that could be done with the figures … not least of which is to chase down the figures for the missing years. However what seems to be the case is that what has happened over time is that the race has been made easier and not safer.

So How Can We Make The Grand National Safer ?

I am totally unqualified to make any sensible suggestions, but someone who just criticised without trying to be helpful is nothing but a whinger, so I will try …

Let me repeat that overall statement – the Grand National has been made easier and not safer over the years. That is of course subject to debate, but let us assume it is true. How does making a race easier, make it less safe ? Well, simply if you make a race easier you make it possible for horses to run faster. When horses have accidents they are more likely to have fatal accidents the faster they are going. By making the race easier, we have let the horses run faster and so make it more likely they will have fatal accidents.

So make the race harder – higher fences, plough some of the track, etc.

Make it easier for horses to give up and disqualify themselves – a horse who has had enough should be given the opportunity to say “No, thanks. I’ll pass on this one”.

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