I think Larry's solution to the problem of flagging Perl 6-ness in a program is pretty clean for modules and included libraries (ie defining a 'module' as a 'package with strict turned on'), but I would be very unhappy about a "use Perl 6" pragma. The problem is that by putting a specific Perl version number in a pragma like that you are tying the features being invoked to the particular version of Perl, which is going to look a bit dumb when we move up to Perl 7.
I know this isn't really any different than requiring a particular version of a library, but it just seems ugly to me. Still, very much looking forward to reading the rest of the Revelations of Larry. --
Dunx
Your chances of installation are slim, too. If you live in/near London you stand a fair chance, or actually in another city (Manchester, Leeds, Brum) but most suburban areas are out, and anything rural is just a pipe dream.
But even if you nominally have service in your area, that may not help... Apparently, during times when copper prices have been high BT (or the GPO as it was at the time) went around using steel wiring. So if you're unlucky, you may be within a stone's throw of an exchange and still not have high enough line quality for DSL.
Anyway, BT are capable of screwing up even the best situation. A friend got an installation date from BT for ADSL. They ran a line test beforehand and it passed. Hooray! Installation day arrived, and the bloke hooked up the cable modem and it didn't work. It seemed that someone had done some work between the line test and the installation date itself which buggered up the ability of the line to carry DSL. Can they fix it? Is the Pope a Shi'ite Muslim?
I am extremely glad that I have not had to deal with BT since dumping their phone service for cable years ago, but I am even more glad that I will not have to fight with that hopeless bunch to get DSL installed since I don't live there anymore. Maybe they'll have figured out the difference between customers and experimental test subjects by the time I get back, but I doubt it. --
Dunx
OK, so he's a complete [expletive deleted], but at least Chris Tarrant makes UK Millionaire mildly engaging to watch. Will Celador be using him as their global front man, I wonder? --
Dunx
A better counter-example is Paul Erdosz (there are a number of accents on the surname since it's a Hungarian name; apologies for omitting them). He was a mathematician who was phenomenally creative in any number of mathematical fields right up to his death in his 80s.
Maybe part of the reason for his continuing creativity was that he always worked cooperatively. He is named as co-author on literally thousands of papers, to the point where mathematicians talk of someone's Erdosz number in the same way that film buffs talk of a Bacon number: how many hops it takes to get from a particular mathematician to Erdosz through mutual publication. --
Dunx
OK, first of all an apology for not really explaining myself properly in my post. Secondly, I should have checked back sooner so more of the people who replied would see this clarification.
I didn't fully explain the situation I was in at the time I was putting together these compilation tapes. Basically, I was travelling prior to starting a new job: most of my stuff, including all my CDs, were on a boat being shipped to the States. I was staying with my family waiting for paperwork to filter through INS and the US Embassy in London so I could go there too.
So the stuff I wanted to record was MP3s played on my laptop, these having been ripped from my CD collection before it all got packed away. I did not have access to any hifi equipment with external inputs and certainly did not want to spend several hundred pounds on putting one together, so what I was looking to buy was a pretty basic radio cassette player (a boom box would have done, although I hate the styling on those things) so that I could take the headphone output from the laptop and record it onto tape. Buying anything costing much more than fifty quid would have been overkill in the extreme for a handful of tapes, since I wouldn't be able to bring it with me (regardless of bulk, the voltage would be wrong). In all seriousness, high quality recording was not a requirement since I would have been listening to my music mostly on planes.
So really I was looking for the kind of simple, relatively cheap device which everyone made fifteen or even ten years ago, and now no bugger does. Even on three hundred pound boom boxes there is no external input of any kind, which is why I do not believe the reasons for this omission are cost-based. Similarly, I looked idly at a number of self-contained micro and midi systems and none of those had external inputs either where they always used to.
My point was that audio equipment has already gone the way of reduced functionality driven (probably) by the demands of the entertainment industry descibed in the article.
I'll try to be a bit more complete in my postings in future. Sorry. --
Dunx
The entertainment industry have already insinuated content control protocols into consmuer devices for recording digital media
(MiniDisc players, for instance, have a digital input but no output as observed in a story here a few weeks ago), but they've also conspired to remove analogue recording from many devices.
I was looking for a stereo cassette
recorder the other week to make up some compilation tapes to play on my Walkman but I couldn't find one with an external microphone socket.
Not a single one, in any shop. That is not a cost issue,
that is a matter of stopping people from recording anything which isn't already on a CD. That's a bit poor for demo tapes and the like.
In the end I worked round it by burning CDs for each side of the tape and then recording from those, but it was a bloody kludgy way to have to do it. --
Dunx
Well, fair enough. I honestly can't comment on pricing models or sales techniques since I was never exposed to them.
I certainly would not claim that Oracle is a perfect company - as I say, I am a former employee, and there were a number of reasons why I chose to leave. I shall not burden the readership with all of these, but certainly misgivings about technological direction played a (small) part.
I just don't see Oracle ever using embrace/extend that's all, and (FUDdish sales tactics aside) there is a tendency to compete more on performance and features than Microsoft will do. --
Dunx
I think the key point here is heterogeneity: Oracle wants customer's money, that's obvious, but they do accept that they will have to work with other company's products. Microsoft do not accept that, and always seek to disable (or make suboptimal in some pernicious way) solutions involving other people's technologies.
To take an example: Oracle Designer, a product I used to be involved with, supports multiple database platforms for input and output of database schemas. Granted that the backend database for Designer must be Oracle, but the point is that Oracle as a corporate entity understands the point of interoperability.
Further, Oracle has made an effort to contribute to standards: UML is the one I know most about, but SQL is another obvious candidate. Microsoft's contributions to such standardisation efforts can be characterised as being half-hearted at best, deliberately disruptive at worst.
In other words, Oracle is a different kind of animal to Microsoft - dangerous to competitors yes, but not an all-consuming monster. --
Dunx
Culturally, I rank Oracle alongside Microsoft. No, thanks!
I'm curious as to your reasoning here - Oracle is undoubtedly an aggressive company, but any ambitions of world domination are much more narrowly focussed than those of Microsoft.
More relevant to the topic under discussion, many people have mentioned MS SQL Server as a cheaper alternative to Oracle RDBMS; Oracle port their database to any number of platforms, including Linux. Microsoft will never, ever do that.
--
Dunx
Well, I've blown my cover in another post so I might as well mention it here where it's also relevant: the application I was involved with was Oracle Designer and related tools. It's a pretty complicated beastie, but is capable of supporting many concurrent users allowing them all to share model data and not lose any of it. --
Dunx
I'm curious which bits you're having problems with since I was involved with the development of Designer until quite recently, and early versions of the multi-platform database generation/reverse engineering component in particular.
Since I no longer work for the company I obviously have no influence on fixing any bugs, but I might be able to help. Might be best off line, though, if you want to mail me. --
Dunx
First of all, I need to declare an interest: I used to work for Oracle, developing a particular multi-user application which used an Oracle RDBMS backend.
In all the time I was developing applications on Oracle I never saw the database die. It never lost data through anything but bugs in the client application, and we only found one real bug in the server code in all that time (which was not data threatening, and was fixed before production release of the database as far as I recall).
Even if the application had not been an internal Oracle development, I don't see how it could have been developed on another company's database engine simply because Oracle's in-database features were so powerful. It would have been impossible to ensure data integrity across multiple user sessions doing the kind of complex transactions which this application required if there had not been available triggers, stored procedures, and lots of other things which I do not understand but knew were necessary.
I've done some client application development using other databases, and it's never been as secure an experience. Access (not really comparible, but my only other major database client development stint) lost data all the time, and MS SQL Server (albeit an older version) lacked many data integrity features which were essential.
Right at the moment, if you're building big systems (either due to data size or sheer complexity) Oracle is way to go.
I love the idea of micropayments in an abstract sense, but can't see how they'd work for the user. The questions are: What is the user experience? Where do you put the pay box?
The models would seem to be:
ask the user to pay before viewing the content. Effectively, this is a subscription model. It's feasible if your users know they're going to get something good, but really is only practical for established sites (or porn, it seems). Up front payment for individuals will very rarely work.
ask the user to pay after viewing. This is the approach most compatible with how the Net works today (particularly in terms of random linkage), but is probably least likely to produce a decent revenue stream. The site developer will get very direct feedback about how good their stuff is this week, though.
ask the user to pay after seeing a teaser. A lot of consultancies operate this way, but I don't know how well this would work on web page content; it might annoy a lot of people.
The basic problem, though, is that most of the stuff on the Net is currently free at point of use, and getting people to change their habits after all this time will be very very difficult indeed. Look how successful Slate was when they tried it.
My favourite approach would probably post-payment, but with a user-entered amount. Enthusiastic readers can really display their enthusiasm then.
Failing that, there's always merchandising - but you need a very specific kind of site for that. It works for Sluggy, but I doubt it would be quite as effective for Pigeon Racer's Monthly.
My experiences of online banking have been mixed to say the least...
Barclays are currently on the third version of their client: initially it was a Windows executable, then a Windows-specific java applet (which took an age to load, particularly on the modem I had at the time), and they're currently using a standard-ish web interface which works perfectly well under Linux Netscape (albeit with almost unreadably small fonts). It's very frames-based though, so probably wouldn't work on a non-graphical browser.
But are Barclays secure? Not really - they had a particularly bad moment earlier this year when they changed the server security and introduced a horrendous bug which meant that two customers who logged on at the same time would see each other's accounts. That iteration was rolled back, I've only stuck with them because I will will be moving out of the UK banking system soon anyway.
Egg, on the other hand, only support Windows and Macs. Their pages do not work under Netscape 4.7x, presumably because of the same Jvascript problems quoted elsewhere. However, their site is perfectly usable under Netscape 6 PR2 - whether it's really a good idea to use such early software for secure applications is moot, but hey. None of my money has disappeared yet.
Apparently Egg are about to revamp their site. I don't know what will happen then. Their attitude to security is also questionable, but as far as I know their site security hasn't been broken yet.
--
Simon Singh on the Telly
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 1
For UK geeks, Simon Singh is currently presenting his TV series based on The Code Book called The Science of Secrecy on Channel 4 on Thursday nights. You'll just have missed the second programme... --
That was Douglas Adams saying that. The context was pointing out that although the music industry opposes MP3s and Napster, a lot of artists don't like the current system either...
"... just ask the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, or Prince for short."
My one experience with SuSE support was very positive: granted that it was more of an installation issue than what you're talking about (getting my new laptop to suspend cleanly with X running), but they came back with good answers and lots of ideas. Problem solved.
Now, if only Dell hadn't changed the sound chip to one that isn't supported by ALSA yet... --
First of all, it seems obvious that you need some kind of login so that the AI process has a user-specific context to work from (preferences, history, etc). Without that, the workings of the service are likely to be indistinguishable from random behaviour. Or worse - everyone will get the same answers all the time.
Beyond that, in order for this to be an interesting project I would have thought that you need to exploit the information (or at least data) richness of the Internet.
What I would like to see would be a navigation companion. Not merely a history list, but a service which watches what you look at and then goes looking for similar content which it reasons you might be interested in too.
The service would operate in three phases:
tracking - where it would effectively be that dumb history list, albeit more useful because it would build up a network
discovery - this is where running on a server becomes useful: after you've logged out, this companion will run its inductive process across your behaviour, your preferences, and your navigation history to look for things you might be interested in next. Then it goes off to search engines, or crawls itself, or watches web sites you've shown persistent interest in, to find new content which you might want to see.
presentation - next time you come back, there's a little flashing light or other widget saying that there's new content. You read. Start again at phase 1.
Now I confess that I'm not sure how phase (1) would be implemented since this might be better approached as a client side tracker (maybe an application within Mozilla?) but once you've got that data then you have a fair amount of material to work with. --
So, Turing gets a mention, but not the Manchester Mark I. The first mainframe manufacturer Lyons (yes, they of the ice cream and cakes) never opened their doors. Sinclair and Acorn didn't exist either, it seems.
It would be nice if these stories made it clearer that they were histories of American computing. But then nothing exciting ever happens outside of the States does it? Ask Linus, he'll tell you.
Check it out...Looks to be much more playable now.
As you say, it does seem clearer, but not really a lot cleaner - ACs go a less confusing direction, and the combat round is a considerably more sensible length, but there are still (even in the combat rules I browsed) an alarming number of tables. And the level business is still there, I see.
As for some of the really new stuff... I hadn't come across the bracketing rules WRT sneak attacks before (not having played AD&D since 1e), but a lot of the rule changes on things like mobility penalties for wearing heavy armour appear to me to be retrofitting on mechanics form RuneQuest (cf Fatigue).
I think I'd better move away from engaging in any more detailed critique since it's all so long ago, but I think I'll maintain my out-dated allegiance to Chaosium's systems for the moment. --
Well I hope D20 is a mechanically better system than AD&D's ludicrous table-driven approach. I know they only did it to sell Handbooks, but I mean really... I was never greatly fond of the universe, but the mechanics were so damned intrusive.
Levels? Alignments? Saves vs DEX, poisons, whatever? Armour classes? Nonsense, I say. It took too damned long to learn, and was still impenetrable even then.
Give me Call of Cthulhu any day - a better world in any case, but the mechanics actually made sense, since they were all based on %age dice rolls. The flexibility was marvellous - I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to introduce Rice-ian vampires into the mix.
Ah well, back to whistful reminiscence of campaigns past. --
The justification given for this speed limiter is that it will reduce road deaths. The vast majority of road deaths (and serious injuries) are of "soft targets" - pedestrians, cyclists, bikers - who use urban and country roads.
However, I would put money on this system only initially being applied to motorways (freeways in US parlance) - the safest roads in Britain.
If the UK government is serious about reducing raod deaths, they need to enforce and reduce urban and country speed limits, and leave the motorways alone - there was another idea floated by the Reverend Tony to drop the national speed limit for single carriage way roads to 50, to enforce it with speed cameras (almost all speed cameras are on motorways at the mo), and to leave the motorway limit at 70. That would save far more lives and injuries more easily than this cretinous scheme.
(I speak as someone who is assiduous in sticking to urban and single carriageway speed limits)
> don't I remember hearing that they don't even have a formal consitution?
No we don't, and some of us are quite annoyed about it!
You may hear the UK described as constitutional monarchy - this dates from (I think) when William of Orange was installed as King; the 'constitution' said "You can be King, but these are the limits on your powers" In other words, the only constitution in Britain is to do with the Crown, not the people.
We are subjects, not citizens.
Secondly...
> In the US, I could challenge such a bill on a number of > constitutional grounds. I could claim that it violated due process, unreasonable search and > ceisure, freedom of speech, and unnenumerated rights such as privacy. Britain should be in a better position in this regard shortly, when the European Convention on Human Rights is incorporated into our legal system (can't remember when exactly... beginning of next year?)
But that's jam tomorrow - better not to pass such crap encryption legislation in the first place. --
Slashdot Mirror
I know this isn't really any different than requiring a particular version of a library, but it just seems ugly to me. Still, very much looking forward to reading the rest of the Revelations of Larry.
--
Dunx
But even if you nominally have service in your area, that may not help... Apparently, during times when copper prices have been high BT (or the GPO as it was at the time) went around using steel wiring. So if you're unlucky, you may be within a stone's throw of an exchange and still not have high enough line quality for DSL.
Anyway, BT are capable of screwing up even the best situation. A friend got an installation date from BT for ADSL. They ran a line test beforehand and it passed. Hooray! Installation day arrived, and the bloke hooked up the cable modem and it didn't work. It seemed that someone had done some work between the line test and the installation date itself which buggered up the ability of the line to carry DSL. Can they fix it? Is the Pope a Shi'ite Muslim?
I am extremely glad that I have not had to deal with BT since dumping their phone service for cable years ago, but I am even more glad that I will not have to fight with that hopeless bunch to get DSL installed since I don't live there anymore. Maybe they'll have figured out the difference between customers and experimental test subjects by the time I get back, but I doubt it.
--
Dunx
OK, so he's a complete [expletive deleted], but at least Chris Tarrant makes UK Millionaire mildly engaging to watch. Will Celador be using him as their global front man, I wonder?
--
Dunx
Maybe part of the reason for his continuing creativity was that he always worked cooperatively. He is named as co-author on literally thousands of papers, to the point where mathematicians talk of someone's Erdosz number in the same way that film buffs talk of a Bacon number: how many hops it takes to get from a particular mathematician to Erdosz through mutual publication.
--
Dunx
I didn't fully explain the situation I was in at the time I was putting together these compilation tapes. Basically, I was travelling prior to starting a new job: most of my stuff, including all my CDs, were on a boat being shipped to the States. I was staying with my family waiting for paperwork to filter through INS and the US Embassy in London so I could go there too.
So the stuff I wanted to record was MP3s played on my laptop, these having been ripped from my CD collection before it all got packed away. I did not have access to any hifi equipment with external inputs and certainly did not want to spend several hundred pounds on putting one together, so what I was looking to buy was a pretty basic radio cassette player (a boom box would have done, although I hate the styling on those things) so that I could take the headphone output from the laptop and record it onto tape. Buying anything costing much more than fifty quid would have been overkill in the extreme for a handful of tapes, since I wouldn't be able to bring it with me (regardless of bulk, the voltage would be wrong). In all seriousness, high quality recording was not a requirement since I would have been listening to my music mostly on planes.
So really I was looking for the kind of simple, relatively cheap device which everyone made fifteen or even ten years ago, and now no bugger does. Even on three hundred pound boom boxes there is no external input of any kind, which is why I do not believe the reasons for this omission are cost-based. Similarly, I looked idly at a number of self-contained micro and midi systems and none of those had external inputs either where they always used to.
My point was that audio equipment has already gone the way of reduced functionality driven (probably) by the demands of the entertainment industry descibed in the article.
I'll try to be a bit more complete in my postings in future. Sorry.
--
Dunx
I was looking for a stereo cassette recorder the other week to make up some compilation tapes to play on my Walkman but I couldn't find one with an external microphone socket. Not a single one, in any shop. That is not a cost issue, that is a matter of stopping people from recording anything which isn't already on a CD. That's a bit poor for demo tapes and the like.
In the end I worked round it by burning CDs for each side of the tape and then recording from those, but it was a bloody kludgy way to have to do it.
--
Dunx
I certainly would not claim that Oracle is a perfect company - as I say, I am a former employee, and there were a number of reasons why I chose to leave. I shall not burden the readership with all of these, but certainly misgivings about technological direction played a (small) part.
I just don't see Oracle ever using embrace/extend that's all, and (FUDdish sales tactics aside) there is a tendency to compete more on performance and features than Microsoft will do.
--
Dunx
I think the key point here is heterogeneity: Oracle wants customer's money, that's obvious, but they do accept that they will have to work with other company's products. Microsoft do not accept that, and always seek to disable (or make suboptimal in some pernicious way) solutions involving other people's technologies.
To take an example: Oracle Designer, a product I used to be involved with, supports multiple database platforms for input and output of database schemas. Granted that the backend database for Designer must be Oracle, but the point is that Oracle as a corporate entity understands the point of interoperability.
Further, Oracle has made an effort to contribute to standards: UML is the one I know most about, but SQL is another obvious candidate. Microsoft's contributions to such standardisation efforts can be characterised as being half-hearted at best, deliberately disruptive at worst.
In other words, Oracle is a different kind of animal to Microsoft - dangerous to competitors yes, but not an all-consuming monster.
--
Dunx
I'm curious as to your reasoning here - Oracle is undoubtedly an aggressive company, but any ambitions of world domination are much more narrowly focussed than those of Microsoft.
More relevant to the topic under discussion, many people have mentioned MS SQL Server as a cheaper alternative to Oracle RDBMS; Oracle port their database to any number of platforms, including Linux. Microsoft will never, ever do that.
--
Dunx
Well, I've blown my cover in another post so I might as well mention it here where it's also relevant: the application I was involved with was Oracle Designer and related tools. It's a pretty complicated beastie, but is capable of supporting many concurrent users allowing them all to share model data and not lose any of it.
--
Dunx
Since I no longer work for the company I obviously have no influence on fixing any bugs, but I might be able to help. Might be best off line, though, if you want to mail me.
--
Dunx
In all the time I was developing applications on Oracle I never saw the database die. It never lost data through anything but bugs in the client application, and we only found one real bug in the server code in all that time (which was not data threatening, and was fixed before production release of the database as far as I recall).
Even if the application had not been an internal Oracle development, I don't see how it could have been developed on another company's database engine simply because Oracle's in-database features were so powerful. It would have been impossible to ensure data integrity across multiple user sessions doing the kind of complex transactions which this application required if there had not been available triggers, stored procedures, and lots of other things which I do not understand but knew were necessary.
I've done some client application development using other databases, and it's never been as secure an experience. Access (not really comparible, but my only other major database client development stint) lost data all the time, and MS SQL Server (albeit an older version) lacked many data integrity features which were essential.
Right at the moment, if you're building big systems (either due to data size or sheer complexity) Oracle is way to go.
Oh, and hello Gerard.
--
Dunx
Interesting stuff.
For myself, I'm quite happy with my Palm for now because although it can't quite support Perl, I can get it to talk to my Linux box.
--
Dunx
I love the idea of micropayments in an abstract sense, but can't see how they'd work for the user. The questions are: What is the user experience? Where do you put the pay box?
The models would seem to be:
The basic problem, though, is that most of the stuff on the Net is currently free at point of use, and getting people to change their habits after all this time will be very very difficult indeed. Look how successful Slate was when they tried it.
My favourite approach would probably post-payment, but with a user-entered amount. Enthusiastic readers can really display their enthusiasm then.
Failing that, there's always merchandising - but you need a very specific kind of site for that. It works for Sluggy, but I doubt it would be quite as effective for Pigeon Racer's Monthly.
--
Dunx
Barclays are currently on the third version of their client: initially it was a Windows executable, then a Windows-specific java applet (which took an age to load, particularly on the modem I had at the time), and they're currently using a standard-ish web interface which works perfectly well under Linux Netscape (albeit with almost unreadably small fonts). It's very frames-based though, so probably wouldn't work on a non-graphical browser.
But are Barclays secure? Not really - they had a particularly bad moment earlier this year when they changed the server security and introduced a horrendous bug which meant that two customers who logged on at the same time would see each other's accounts. That iteration was rolled back, I've only stuck with them because I will will be moving out of the UK banking system soon anyway.
Egg, on the other hand, only support Windows and Macs. Their pages do not work under Netscape 4.7x, presumably because of the same Jvascript problems quoted elsewhere. However, their site is perfectly usable under Netscape 6 PR2 - whether it's really a good idea to use such early software for secure applications is moot, but hey. None of my money has disappeared yet.
Apparently Egg are about to revamp their site. I don't know what will happen then. Their attitude to security is also questionable, but as far as I know their site security hasn't been broken yet.
--
For UK geeks, Simon Singh is currently presenting his TV series based on The Code Book called The Science of Secrecy on Channel 4 on Thursday nights. You'll just have missed the second programme...
--
--
Now, if only Dell hadn't changed the sound chip to one that isn't supported by ALSA yet...
--
Beyond that, in order for this to be an interesting project I would have thought that you need to exploit the information (or at least data) richness of the Internet.
What I would like to see would be a navigation companion. Not merely a history list, but a service which watches what you look at and then goes looking for similar content which it reasons you might be interested in too.
The service would operate in three phases:
- tracking - where it would effectively be that dumb history list, albeit more useful because it would build up a network
- discovery - this is where running on a server becomes useful: after you've logged out, this companion will run its inductive process across your behaviour, your preferences, and your navigation history to look for things you might be interested in next. Then it goes off to search engines, or crawls itself, or watches web sites you've shown persistent interest in, to find new content which you might want to see.
- presentation - next time you come back, there's a little flashing light or other widget saying that there's new content. You read.
Now I confess that I'm not sure how phase (1) would be implemented since this might be better approached as a client side tracker (maybe an application within Mozilla?) but once you've got that data then you have a fair amount of material to work with.Start again at phase 1.
--
It would be nice if these stories made it clearer that they were histories of American computing. But then nothing exciting ever happens outside of the States does it? Ask Linus, he'll tell you.
--
As you say, it does seem clearer, but not really a lot cleaner - ACs go a less confusing direction, and the combat round is a considerably more sensible length, but there are still (even in the combat rules I browsed) an alarming number of tables. And the level business is still there, I see.
As for some of the really new stuff... I hadn't come across the bracketing rules WRT sneak attacks before (not having played AD&D since 1e), but a lot of the rule changes on things like mobility penalties for wearing heavy armour appear to me to be retrofitting on mechanics form RuneQuest (cf Fatigue).
I think I'd better move away from engaging in any more detailed critique since it's all so long ago, but I think I'll maintain my out-dated allegiance to Chaosium's systems for the moment.
--
Levels? Alignments? Saves vs DEX, poisons, whatever? Armour classes? Nonsense, I say. It took too damned long to learn, and was still impenetrable even then.
Give me Call of Cthulhu any day - a better world in any case, but the mechanics actually made sense, since they were all based on %age dice rolls. The flexibility was marvellous - I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to introduce Rice-ian vampires into the mix.
Ah well, back to whistful reminiscence of campaigns past.
--
However, I would put money on this system only initially being applied to motorways (freeways in US parlance) - the safest roads in Britain.
If the UK government is serious about reducing raod deaths, they need to enforce and reduce urban and country speed limits, and leave the motorways alone - there was another idea floated by the Reverend Tony to drop the national speed limit for single carriage way roads to 50, to enforce it with speed cameras (almost all speed cameras are on motorways at the mo), and to leave the motorway limit at 70. That would save far more lives and injuries more easily than this cretinous scheme.
(I speak as someone who is assiduous in sticking to urban and single carriageway speed limits)
--
And Python Night is on BBC2 on Saturday (9th October). I'm particularly looking forward to Nun Boiling in Bristol.
--
> don't I remember hearing that they don't even have a formal consitution?
No we don't, and some of us are quite annoyed about it!
You may hear the UK described as constitutional monarchy - this dates from (I think) when William of Orange was installed as King; the 'constitution' said "You can be King, but these are the limits on your powers" In other words, the only constitution in Britain is to do with the Crown, not the people.
We are subjects, not citizens.
Secondly...
> In the US, I could challenge such a bill on a number of
> constitutional grounds. I could claim that it violated due process, unreasonable search and
> ceisure, freedom of speech, and unnenumerated rights such as privacy.
Britain should be in a better position in this regard shortly, when the European Convention on Human Rights is incorporated into our legal system (can't remember when exactly... beginning of next year?)
But that's jam tomorrow - better not to pass such crap encryption legislation in the first place.
--