Glasses Wearers Can Do Things

 General  No Responses »
Oct 102007
 

I recently saw a TV ad for laser eye correction surgery which used clips of people doing all sorts of exciting things … riding bikes on rough terrain, paragliding, swimming, etc. The whole implication was that as soon as one gets the surgery, one can suddenly take part in all sorts of exciting activities that were not possible before.

Eye surgery is not something I want to condemn … undoubtedly it can correct eyes to the point where glasses are unnecessary. Personally I am too squeamish to go for it, but I can see the attraction. But I do object to the idea that people who wear glasses are somehow excluded from exciting and active activities because of their glasses. Glasses do not somehow make an active life impossible or even difficult.

Admittedly ball games can be a little tricky without a bit of preparation (such as plastic lenses), but taking off the glasses does not suddenly empower anyone.

It may be that some wearers of glasses do not agree with this, but perhaps most of those are people who have had glasses inflicted on them half-way through their lives; those who have worn glasses all our lives do not think this way.

Alcohol Fueled Violence

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Oct 062007
 

There is no such thing as alcohol-fueled violence; there is only idiot-fueled violence. Claims about how alcohol fuels violence are regularly heard on TV and radio, and in one small sense they are right. Violence can be found in areas where a large amount of alcohol is consumed. But take a closer look …

It is not everyone who goes out drinking on a Saturday night who ends up involved in violence, or even everyone who drinks far more too much who ends up in violence. If that were the case, the level of violence in certain streets would be probably two orders of magnitude worse than it is (i.e. 2 fights would be 200 fights; 10 fights would be 1000 fights). It is only a tiny minority of idiots who cause problems with violence.

These idiots may blame the alcohol, or they may even only become idiots when they have consumed large quantities of alcohol. Either way, the alcohol is not the problem, it is the idiots themselves.

Most of those who complain about the violence want to fight it by doing something about alcohol sales … make it more expensive, stop selling to people who’ve had a few, etc. But why should the majority who drink be punished because of the idiots ? That is not to say that the violence should not be tackled in some way … and the majority of drinkers would be happy to see something done about it. After all we have more interest in seeing something done than those who prefer to stay at home.

One simple idea is to ‘tag’ those who get involved in violence (both sides … one person may be obviously to blame but I’ve seen myself people who go around trying to provoke a violent response) with an electronic tag, and give them on the first occasion a month’s ban from all drinking centres. For a second offense, it becomes two months, then four, and so on, doubling each time. This would be in addition to any other punishment the law may enforce … a prosecution is (and should be) difficult to get a result from, but a simple curfew could be given without so much evidence.

To enforce the curfew, give each doorman a tag detector so they can easily scan people going into a pub or bar, and prevent them.

Don’t punish the drinkers; punish the idiots.

The BBC TV License

 Politics  No Responses »
Sep 292007
 

One of the things that periodically surfaces to my attention is the debate over the TV license that those in the UK pay. This funds the BBC including TV, radio and Internet activities (there are ‘fringe’ activities which are not funded by the license fee such as the BBC’s World Service. The notion of a tax on watching television is archaic and unfair to commercial broadcasters. However it should stay.

Why?

The first reason for keeping the license fee is that the BBC actually does quite a good job. Not all of it’s activities please everyone, but that is impossible goal to achieve and it is not something that the BBC should be trying to do anyway. Look at BBC News. This is the largest news organisation in the world with a well deserved reputation for probity and honest reporting … in any “big” news event, the UK population tends to switch to the BBC for news.

There are those who criticise the BBC News for impartiality … the one who makes the biggest noise is Israel who claim the BBC is anti-Israeli. Of course Israel views any kind of criticism of Israeli government actions as anti-semitic, so we can probably discount this criticism. In fact the BBC probably is not doing its job properly if it does not get criticised by Israel.

The BBC also produces a large range of original drama, documentary and entertainment programmes of high quality. In recent TV awards, the BBC was awarded 9 out of 20 awards. That sounds like the result a quality organisation would get.

There are those who say that having a well funded public broadcasting organisation is unfair to commercial broadcasters. They are right. So what? Life is unfair, get over it.

A far more subtle point is how the BBC could well be improving the quality of commercial broadcasting by existing. Thus those who only watch commercial TV (I have trouble believing anyone in the UK can actually stick to this!) are actually benefiting from the BBC without watching the BBC! It is hard to justify this claim especially if we are talking about the quality, but we can sort of see the effect on something that most people find irritating … the frequency of ad breaks on commercial channels.

When you watch American TV imports you can often see the pauses where advert breaks would have occurred had you seen the programme in the US; however over here we seem to have settled on having rather fewer breaks. Why? Well there is little commercial reason for doing so, except that if people get too irritated by ad breaks they can switch over to the BBC. So it seems that the existence of the BBC may have resulted in fewer ad breaks on commercial TV in the UK … which I’m sure most would agree is a good thing.

So we have decided that the BBC is good, but what about the license fee ? Well, the license fee is bad but it works … the BBC gets a fairly big chunk of money from it. Any change would risk how much money the BBC gets, and why break something that is not broken ?

An Open Letter To Apple/Steve Jobs Regarding Closed iPods (Encrypted Firmware, etc.)

 Computing  No Responses »
Sep 212007
 

Well this is not so much a letter as just a rant because I’m very doubtful that anyone from Apple never mind Steve Jobs is likely to read this. But it is good to get a good rant off your chest and out there (which basically explains this whole site … it is not for you … it is for me). Especially after a few glasses of port!

I currently own an iPod video and have been thinking about buying a Macbook, but I have been doing some rethinking after the announcment of the iPod Classic. It seems that Apple have encrypted the iPod Classic firmware again (the Nano 2g firmware is also encrypted) and have added a hash to iTunes just to make things a little more difficult for those who like to do “unusual” things with their iPods.

I am a Rockbox user (I haven’t even used the normal firmware on my iPod except when I’ve booted it by mistake) mostly because most of my CDs have been encoded in OGG format and I really did not want to re-encode them in any other format because of how long it would take. So Apple have made money out of me because I purchased an iPod; I’m beginning to regret that because Apple seems to be determined to be the kind of business that I don’t want to fund.

First of all there is the encryption of the firmware. I am sure that Apple is aware that hackers have produced not only alternative firmwares but also a utility to patch the default firmware to make interesting changes. So why the encryption ? Obviously to make things difficult for the hackers. In some situations smaller companies may be forced to do something similar because larger companies want to “protect their intellectual property rights”, but Apple is in a dominant position in the portable music player music market … they are the ones who will be dictating the contract terms.

Secondly Apple changed iTunes in an attempt to lock out other music managers. The fact that this protection has been hacked and is no longer a problem is irrelevant … Apple showed their colours by making it difficult to use anything other than iTunes.

A few years ago when it was trendy, Apple embraced the open source model by releasing some of their operating system as open source. Despite apparently trying to improve their operating system by incorporating a open source filesystem (ZFS), they seem to be rapidly retreating from this position. Or at least giving the appearance of doing so. So perhaps their earlier embracement of open source was just a marketing move … something you might expect from Microsoft.

Apple is giving the impression of trying to become a company as user-hostile as Microsoft.

Northern Rock Bank Run

 Politics  No Responses »
Sep 162007
 

The fact that the Northern Rock is undergoing the beginning of a “bank run” will not be surprise to anyone reading this; it is all over the news at the moment. It is understandable that people want to take their money out of Northern Rock; in some way perhaps people are remembering the bank crashes during the 19th century when many people lost all their savings. But we live in a very different society these days.

In a way bank runs are a self-fulfilling prophecy; an unsupported bank will crash during a bank run even it is otherwise healthy. No bank keeps enough cash in the till to pay out to all their savers; they need that money to lend to others so that a saver earns interest! The only hope an unsupported bank has is that the panic will fizzle out before they run out of money.

But the Northern Rock is not in that position as the Bank of England is standing behind them as the “lender of last resort”. What people don’t realise is because the Bank of England is always available as the lender of last resort, other banks who are being cautious may not lend Northern Rock money when without that lendor of last resort, they could well do. And the Bank of England is not going to lend money to a lost concern.

There are two things that make the panic amongst Northern Rock customer more than a little silly. Firstly it seems there is full government protection for depositors with less than £35,000 in their account (something that should be trumpetet a bit louder). Secondly Northern Rock has not used the ‘lender of last resort’ facility as yet … they arranged the facility just in case.

The funny thing is that people are busy trying to read something into the fact that the apparent average age of the person queueing is in the “grey zone”. Use some sense people! Most young people have to work … which kinds of limits the amount of time one has to queue outside a bank, and those who don’t work don’t tend to have much in the way of savings.

There are a couple of opposition politicians who have made a speach about the problems. They are busy throwing rocks at the government and the banking sector for alleged failures … now is not the time for that sort of thing. Politicians throwing rocks is to be expected of course, but now is not the time to do anything to undermine public confidence. Of course you can expect politicians to do anything for their own advantage rather than put the public good first. Are you listening David Cameron and Vincent Cable ? If the current situation gets any worse, you will have to carry some of the blame.

By all means come back to this subject later when things have settled down a bit.

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