If there's a case to answer, then it's because YOU did something illegal.
Only by suing YOU and making YOU pay will YOU ever learn that YOU can't go around forcing YOUR will on everyone else.
I get your problems with this - I have the same thing when I hear about ambulance-chasers suing our health service, or the police because their feelings were hurt after they robbed someone and got treated roughly. However, it's how we establish precedent and the boundaries to which we are all accountable.
My personal "rule of thumb" is 1 ethernet for every power outlet. Then, make sure you put power outlets in each corner of a room. Since it's usually not worth putting in single outlets, put double. That means at least dual network points in each corner of each room. In our living room, the TV corner has four power outlets, and... you guessed it... 4 ethernets too.
I'm not sure about kitchens and bathrooms and the like. In the case of kitchens, you could just plumb in some cables and leave them coiled up underneath the units - that way you can put them where you want them later. I put a pair behind where my fridge is (must to my wife's bemusement). I'd put a pair behind every appliance if we had more in there (again - one for every power outlet would probably do it).
I actually kitted out our current place with Cat5e - it's much easier to squeeze into weird spaces, and you don't need to worry about cable radii and the like. However, if I had my time again, it'd be cat6. Truthfully though, it's still going to be a lot of years before home kit goes above 1Gbps. However you do it, wired is *so* much better than wireless (and I have fairly good wireless).
In some places I have also plumbed in some 40A 12V cable. I have an old PC power supply in the loft that connects to all the "drops" (and powers the broadband router, the switch and some other bits in the loft). I use these drops for light duty jobs, such as LED lighting (which is homebrew, but actually not dissimilar to bought stuff), and I'm also using it for a Laundrino, some USB charge points, etc. I wouldn't flood wire with this stuff, but maybe decide some useful looking places and put it there. It's a bit niche, but it's a good way to avoid countless wallwarts and such like. It's possible you could solar-back the 12V supply, so it'll cost you nothing to run during the day. You could go really elaborate and have it charge batteries for the night time (another geek project, and because it's all low voltage is a lot less dangerous and less regulated than the mains equivalent). I'd recommend that all your 12V stuff be "optional" though - as it makes selling your house easier that way.
Something else I considered, but couldn't do because it was way too intrusive for me was to put all high voltage into earthed steel conduits. Some claim that the EMI from mains causes them headaches and nausea. I'm not sure about that, but it sure does get into my electronics tinkering about on the dining room table - and that sometimes gives me a headache. If I could put cables into conduits without having to tear my house to pieces or empty my bank account into the local DIY shop, I would.
Lastly, do the world (but mostly yourself) a favour and insulate everything you can - walls, floors, pipes (hot and cold), and seal up as many draughts as you can. I'd recommend putting some bathroom sealant or silicon between floorboards, even if you're going to cover up the floor with a carpet or whatever too.
We already have this - it's called the Advanced Driver test (see http://www.iam.org.uk/). You can get insurance discounts if you've passed one. I'm told one of the tests they make you do in the exam is to drive as fast as you can down a windy single track road. The thing is, it's a test of your safe driving, not so much how fast you can go.
If you have a Farnell account, you can get a Pi in two days (or at least, that's what I did).
I went to the site, and it says "business users click here" - I did, and it asked me for my Farnell account number, and then left me with an item in my basket with an estimated 3 week delivery time. I actually got it 48 hours later.
Failing that, buying as a consumer, as you say, gets it pretty quickly too - faster than RS by the sounds of things.
If you don't like the exchange's rules, don't play there. I know this might sound scary, but look outside your own borders. A lot of International exchanges (the LSE being one of them) take a dim view of order/cancel/order/cancel flows that have no hope of ever being filled. In the US, it seems anything goes, but elsewhere, there are at least codes of conduct, and you get a very stern call from an exchange if you don't play along (and get fined or banned if you don't pick up your game). Very occasionally, the regulator steps in and fines people too.
Places like the LSE aren't saints, mind you. They too allow some things you and I might think look a bit shonky to go on. You may not want to trade there either, but they at least have rules and they do at least make sure you stick to them. I'm sure if you look hard enough you'll find an exchange that has the sort of rules you like the look of.
Don't put it in china because the million-strong robot army will put (say) half a million Chinese out of work. China's almost leap-frogging itself here. If a handful of the factories start putting vast swathes of Chinese out of work, then you'll have the same problems the west has. That is, only a small percentage of the population will be bright and educated enough to work in the human-only jobs, and the rest will all have been displaced by machines. The many will be supported by the few, and the very few will sit atop vast fortunes. Then you'll see Africa as "the new China".
Before, I was worried that the big, faceless government might be snooping on me, so I resisted the proposed laws and changes. However, now ASIC is asking, I can see that actually it's far more important and far less dangerous. I'll be supporting this move, as I'm sure will all my fellow non-Australians.
I'm really hoping that the likes of Fosters will ask for all pubs to log who drinks what beers, how often and with whom. I'm sure that'll be for an equally important reason, and so obviously supportable.
I don't get the "occupy thingiverse" thing. Sure, the Replicator 2 is a closed source bit of hardware, so they're not publishing the drawings for the parts, so you can't just go ahead and make your own in your own machine shop. As far as I can see, that just means "either buy it, or don't". If you choose not to buy it, then maybe check out the Ultimaker (I own one, and I like it a lot).
The thingverse angle is what confuses me. I've read and re-read the legal terms, and can't see anything wrong with them. Here's a exerpt:
3.2 License. You hereby grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Company and its affiliates and partners, an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform, prepare derivative works of, incorporate into other works, and otherwise use your User Content, and to grant sublicenses of the foregoing, solely for the purposes of including your User Content in the Site and Services. You agree to irrevocably waive (and cause to be waived) any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to your User Content.
That looks to me like a pretty standard web site license - that is, "we can do what we want with your content to make our sites work". I can't see how this allows Makerbot Industries to "steal" anything from you.
There is one thing which I can understand in all this though. If you've made a modification to the Replicator and submitted it to Thingiverse, then you've effectively made that Creative Commons. If that modification ends up in a product without attribution, then you may have a legal claim against the manufacturer. However, all they'd need to do is ship the product with a sheet of paper saying "the widget is a derivative of a design by Joe Bloggs" and then they've attributed and they're in the clear. If this happens with the Replicator 2, then I can imagine you might be a bit peeved, but I'm not sure they'll have done anything wrong.
So as a thingiverse contributor, I'd like to understand where does this "they can steal my stuff" thing come from?
I'm trying to do the exact same thing - I bought a big monitor to connect to my laptop for working from home. The rest of it's life it's just in the way, so I figured it could just run XBMC. So far, no particular joy though - you need a fast SD card to make it workable, and my particular one isn't supported by the raspbmc project yet (although it is supported by the Pi itself). On a slower card, it's just awful to use.
The Pi really is a great little gadget - and for £30 quid, you can have a dozen of them easily (once supply is available!).
In the TV ad, they say that the bar will (when opened) send a signal to a satellite, the satellite will then send a signal to Nestle who'll dispatch (what look like) militarised special forces people in helicopters and sliding down abseil ropes to hand you a suitcase full of money.
Now I must admit, I do like the odd kit-kat (and also a kwik-krap), but I think I'll be abstaining for a few weeks until some other poor sap gets the "prize".
Yeah, I'd like to have seen it do something like maybe pack a box, you know, put the foam in, put the item in, put in the next bit of foam and close the box. That might have been a nice practical demonstration.
Unfortunately, I didn't get the sound, so didn't hear if this was talked about. It looks to me like you programmed it by manipulating it to do what you wanted. That's pretty cool, because it means "anyone" can do it (rather than just a programmer). Also, I guess it makes it more predictable in the case of a problem - you just go over and push it out of the way and it stops (rather than carrying on and tearing your arm off). Giving it a name, some eyes and making it a nice red colour obviously means they're aiming for "normal" people, rather than hard-nosed production line managers.
If this thing was pretty cheap (say 10-20K), then I could see it getting some sales. If it's more like $100K, then maybe not so much. However, it looks to me like the start of a "universal" robot that doesn't need expensive retooling every time you want to make a minor change to your product.
Quite seriously, I wondered about making a cluster of Pis to replace a desktop PC I have running in the loft. It really just runs some web servers, PHP, Mysql and a few other fiddly things. I wondered if I could potentially even dynamically boot up Pis to cover load (ie. spin up some extra web servers when load increases). My big problem is the DB though - I mainly use Drupal, so don't have separate read and write DB handles, so I can't scale MySQL horizontally. Also, the ethernet isn't very fast, so the interconnects probably wouldn't work very well either. I thought about maybe using Beaglebones or Pandaboards. Whilst that have faster CPUs, they still only have 100MB networking, so probably a little less than ideal. After working through all that, I don't suppose I'd save that much power (or space?) from the desktop.
Assuming this tracking law gets in (which it seems it will eventually, as this isn't the first try for such a thing), then would it actually be a good time for everyone (inside the UK and International) to rent a virtual server some place (in the UK) and run an honest-to-goodness Tor exit node?
For us Brits, there's a risk of prosecution (although it's unclear to what extent). I'm sure "it's a Tor node, it's entirely public, and I personally didn't actually download all that stuff" might be enough defence to avoid life-changing legal action. IANAL, and I really have no clue what I'm talking about here.
However, for International folks, the worst than can really happen is that they shut down your VPS. You can then just go rent another one and be up and running in minutes.
Assuming this vaguely makes sense (particularly for non-UK residents), then we could conceivably have a "flood" of Tor-originated traffic to all manner of questionable web content flowing through our Royal pipework and into the ISP data logs, and into the Great Decentralised Central Government Database of Everything. I'm probably barking up the wrong dog here, but it seems interesting none the less.
Years ago, a buddy of mine and I went to Canada on holiday. Flight prices were lowest if we flew via the US. He joked with me on arrival at Heathrow airport that he's "the one that always gets searched" (the US section of the airport always had extra security theatre over the rest of International). Unfortunately, he was right. He got searched (ie. empty pockets, pat down, someone looking in his bag) three times between arriving at the airport and getting on the plane. He also got searched going through the airport in the US (in both directions). All this in addition to xray-ing his bag and walking through the metal detector (which he didn't set off).
Just looking at Heathrow, I concluded that at least two of the three searches must have been incompetent. Surely there's only a need to search him once, unless the first guy was incompetent and missed something.
The other curious thing I realised was that should I ever become so-inclined to want to carry some sort of contraband onto an aeroplane, all I need to do is go to the airport with this guy. I didn't get searched (or even spoken to - much less questioned or ID'ed or whatever) at all in any airport (apart from the usual xray/metal detector). I could have happily carried the contraband while my buddy ran diversion for me.
Then of course, there's Sandwich. Since Pfizer are moving out of there, "the government" wants to turn the area into a science park. Of course, who "the government" is in this case is up for grabs, I doubt it involves the same people that want the silicon roundabout to grow.
For what it's worth, I doubt this will succeed for many of the reasons our American cousins point out (mostly about our laws and regulations). If the UK could guarantee your company could operate unmolested for (say) 5-10 years then you might get some traction. Of course, every fraudster, paedo and banker would be in on the act, but it would foster the kind of tech-focus they want.
The trouble is that we brits want all the success, but we don't want to give anything up to get it. As workers, we don't mind working hard, but don't want to work 80 hour weeks, and we don't want to have to stay late so we don't see our families. As for the government, they want all the riches and successes that super-successful startups could bring, but they don't want to keep the big companies out of the way, they don't want to soften the law for startups and under no circumstances would they ever consider reducing the tax or regulatory burden for small companies.
Besides all that, the Shoreditch/Hoxton area of London has way, way, way too much culture to ever become the cultural vacuum that is silicon valley.
After our recent out-sourced data-mining operation, our world-class Data Research team have concluded that "innovation" is not an overused word, phrase or best-practice.
I really like ghostery (for Firefox) because it removes all the personally tracking aspects of the Internet. You're not immune from Google/FB/MS/Yahoo's all-seeing eyes, but it stops advertisers talking to each other more than they reasonably should. Of course, showing you ads is a form of tracking, but if you start with the premise that sites should be able to advertise, then Ghostery gives you a nice compromise as they can do that, but they can't tell everyone about what you're looking at.
These days, I use Ghostery and Adblock, and I'm ruthlessly adding filters to adblock for various site's own in-house advertising. But that's another matter;-)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a delicious irony about the guy trying to sue the US government into giving him the cable he wants from NZ to the USA.
Either way, I say good luck to him. IMHO, he might be an idiot, but he's not as bad as he's been treated.
If there's a case to answer, then it's because YOU did something illegal.
Only by suing YOU and making YOU pay will YOU ever learn that YOU can't go around forcing YOUR will on everyone else.
I get your problems with this - I have the same thing when I hear about ambulance-chasers suing our health service, or the police because their feelings were hurt after they robbed someone and got treated roughly. However, it's how we establish precedent and the boundaries to which we are all accountable.
My personal "rule of thumb" is 1 ethernet for every power outlet. Then, make sure you put power outlets in each corner of a room. Since it's usually not worth putting in single outlets, put double. That means at least dual network points in each corner of each room. In our living room, the TV corner has four power outlets, and... you guessed it... 4 ethernets too.
I'm not sure about kitchens and bathrooms and the like. In the case of kitchens, you could just plumb in some cables and leave them coiled up underneath the units - that way you can put them where you want them later. I put a pair behind where my fridge is (must to my wife's bemusement). I'd put a pair behind every appliance if we had more in there (again - one for every power outlet would probably do it).
I actually kitted out our current place with Cat5e - it's much easier to squeeze into weird spaces, and you don't need to worry about cable radii and the like. However, if I had my time again, it'd be cat6. Truthfully though, it's still going to be a lot of years before home kit goes above 1Gbps. However you do it, wired is *so* much better than wireless (and I have fairly good wireless).
In some places I have also plumbed in some 40A 12V cable. I have an old PC power supply in the loft that connects to all the "drops" (and powers the broadband router, the switch and some other bits in the loft). I use these drops for light duty jobs, such as LED lighting (which is homebrew, but actually not dissimilar to bought stuff), and I'm also using it for a Laundrino, some USB charge points, etc. I wouldn't flood wire with this stuff, but maybe decide some useful looking places and put it there. It's a bit niche, but it's a good way to avoid countless wallwarts and such like. It's possible you could solar-back the 12V supply, so it'll cost you nothing to run during the day. You could go really elaborate and have it charge batteries for the night time (another geek project, and because it's all low voltage is a lot less dangerous and less regulated than the mains equivalent). I'd recommend that all your 12V stuff be "optional" though - as it makes selling your house easier that way.
Something else I considered, but couldn't do because it was way too intrusive for me was to put all high voltage into earthed steel conduits. Some claim that the EMI from mains causes them headaches and nausea. I'm not sure about that, but it sure does get into my electronics tinkering about on the dining room table - and that sometimes gives me a headache. If I could put cables into conduits without having to tear my house to pieces or empty my bank account into the local DIY shop, I would.
Lastly, do the world (but mostly yourself) a favour and insulate everything you can - walls, floors, pipes (hot and cold), and seal up as many draughts as you can. I'd recommend putting some bathroom sealant or silicon between floorboards, even if you're going to cover up the floor with a carpet or whatever too.
We already have this - it's called the Advanced Driver test (see http://www.iam.org.uk/). You can get insurance discounts if you've passed one. I'm told one of the tests they make you do in the exam is to drive as fast as you can down a windy single track road. The thing is, it's a test of your safe driving, not so much how fast you can go.
In the mane, the article is quite good, but it does rather brush over some of the finer details.
I'm here all week ;-)
If you have a Farnell account, you can get a Pi in two days (or at least, that's what I did).
I went to the site, and it says "business users click here" - I did, and it asked me for my Farnell account number, and then left me with an item in my basket with an estimated 3 week delivery time. I actually got it 48 hours later.
Failing that, buying as a consumer, as you say, gets it pretty quickly too - faster than RS by the sounds of things.
It already is manufactured on a greater scale than trying to farm spiders: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16554357 (warning: potential goat pr0n)
How it'll really pan out in electronics for fibre optics remains to be seen though ;-)
If you don't like the exchange's rules, don't play there. I know this might sound scary, but look outside your own borders. A lot of International exchanges (the LSE being one of them) take a dim view of order/cancel/order/cancel flows that have no hope of ever being filled. In the US, it seems anything goes, but elsewhere, there are at least codes of conduct, and you get a very stern call from an exchange if you don't play along (and get fined or banned if you don't pick up your game). Very occasionally, the regulator steps in and fines people too.
Places like the LSE aren't saints, mind you. They too allow some things you and I might think look a bit shonky to go on. You may not want to trade there either, but they at least have rules and they do at least make sure you stick to them. I'm sure if you look hard enough you'll find an exchange that has the sort of rules you like the look of.
Don't put it in china because the million-strong robot army will put (say) half a million Chinese out of work. China's almost leap-frogging itself here. If a handful of the factories start putting vast swathes of Chinese out of work, then you'll have the same problems the west has. That is, only a small percentage of the population will be bright and educated enough to work in the human-only jobs, and the rest will all have been displaced by machines. The many will be supported by the few, and the very few will sit atop vast fortunes. Then you'll see Africa as "the new China".
Before, I was worried that the big, faceless government might be snooping on me, so I resisted the proposed laws and changes. However, now ASIC is asking, I can see that actually it's far more important and far less dangerous. I'll be supporting this move, as I'm sure will all my fellow non-Australians.
I'm really hoping that the likes of Fosters will ask for all pubs to log who drinks what beers, how often and with whom. I'm sure that'll be for an equally important reason, and so obviously supportable.
This is so easy...
function patent_validator(patent) {
if(patent->application->status == 'new') then
if(patent->type == 'software') then
patent->reject();
else
patent->length = 10 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60;
fi
else
patent->length = 1 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60;
fi
return patent;
}
I don't get the "occupy thingiverse" thing. Sure, the Replicator 2 is a closed source bit of hardware, so they're not publishing the drawings for the parts, so you can't just go ahead and make your own in your own machine shop. As far as I can see, that just means "either buy it, or don't". If you choose not to buy it, then maybe check out the Ultimaker (I own one, and I like it a lot).
The thingverse angle is what confuses me. I've read and re-read the legal terms, and can't see anything wrong with them. Here's a exerpt:
3.2 License. You hereby grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Company and its affiliates and partners, an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform, prepare derivative works of, incorporate into other works, and otherwise use your User Content, and to grant sublicenses of the foregoing, solely for the purposes of including your User Content in the Site and Services. You agree to irrevocably waive (and cause to be waived) any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to your User Content.
That looks to me like a pretty standard web site license - that is, "we can do what we want with your content to make our sites work". I can't see how this allows Makerbot Industries to "steal" anything from you.
There is one thing which I can understand in all this though. If you've made a modification to the Replicator and submitted it to Thingiverse, then you've effectively made that Creative Commons. If that modification ends up in a product without attribution, then you may have a legal claim against the manufacturer. However, all they'd need to do is ship the product with a sheet of paper saying "the widget is a derivative of a design by Joe Bloggs" and then they've attributed and they're in the clear. If this happens with the Replicator 2, then I can imagine you might be a bit peeved, but I'm not sure they'll have done anything wrong.
So as a thingiverse contributor, I'd like to understand where does this "they can steal my stuff" thing come from?
I'm trying to do the exact same thing - I bought a big monitor to connect to my laptop for working from home. The rest of it's life it's just in the way, so I figured it could just run XBMC. So far, no particular joy though - you need a fast SD card to make it workable, and my particular one isn't supported by the raspbmc project yet (although it is supported by the Pi itself). On a slower card, it's just awful to use.
The Pi really is a great little gadget - and for £30 quid, you can have a dozen of them easily (once supply is available!).
In the TV ad, they say that the bar will (when opened) send a signal to a satellite, the satellite will then send a signal to Nestle who'll dispatch (what look like) militarised special forces people in helicopters and sliding down abseil ropes to hand you a suitcase full of money.
Now I must admit, I do like the odd kit-kat (and also a kwik-krap), but I think I'll be abstaining for a few weeks until some other poor sap gets the "prize".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk2Lfgh1c4Q
Yeah, I'd like to have seen it do something like maybe pack a box, you know, put the foam in, put the item in, put in the next bit of foam and close the box. That might have been a nice practical demonstration.
Unfortunately, I didn't get the sound, so didn't hear if this was talked about. It looks to me like you programmed it by manipulating it to do what you wanted. That's pretty cool, because it means "anyone" can do it (rather than just a programmer). Also, I guess it makes it more predictable in the case of a problem - you just go over and push it out of the way and it stops (rather than carrying on and tearing your arm off). Giving it a name, some eyes and making it a nice red colour obviously means they're aiming for "normal" people, rather than hard-nosed production line managers.
If this thing was pretty cheap (say 10-20K), then I could see it getting some sales. If it's more like $100K, then maybe not so much. However, it looks to me like the start of a "universal" robot that doesn't need expensive retooling every time you want to make a minor change to your product.
No - the purpose of aircraft carriers is to make sure there are a few second hand ones around so that I can buy one when I win the lottery.
Quite seriously, I wondered about making a cluster of Pis to replace a desktop PC I have running in the loft. It really just runs some web servers, PHP, Mysql and a few other fiddly things. I wondered if I could potentially even dynamically boot up Pis to cover load (ie. spin up some extra web servers when load increases). My big problem is the DB though - I mainly use Drupal, so don't have separate read and write DB handles, so I can't scale MySQL horizontally. Also, the ethernet isn't very fast, so the interconnects probably wouldn't work very well either. I thought about maybe using Beaglebones or Pandaboards. Whilst that have faster CPUs, they still only have 100MB networking, so probably a little less than ideal. After working through all that, I don't suppose I'd save that much power (or space?) from the desktop.
I read Carnival of Souls. It was alright, I guess.
Sue me.
So here's a serious question...
Assuming this tracking law gets in (which it seems it will eventually, as this isn't the first try for such a thing), then would it actually be a good time for everyone (inside the UK and International) to rent a virtual server some place (in the UK) and run an honest-to-goodness Tor exit node?
For us Brits, there's a risk of prosecution (although it's unclear to what extent). I'm sure "it's a Tor node, it's entirely public, and I personally didn't actually download all that stuff" might be enough defence to avoid life-changing legal action. IANAL, and I really have no clue what I'm talking about here.
However, for International folks, the worst than can really happen is that they shut down your VPS. You can then just go rent another one and be up and running in minutes.
Assuming this vaguely makes sense (particularly for non-UK residents), then we could conceivably have a "flood" of Tor-originated traffic to all manner of questionable web content flowing through our Royal pipework and into the ISP data logs, and into the Great Decentralised Central Government Database of Everything. I'm probably barking up the wrong dog here, but it seems interesting none the less.
I'll just interject with an anecdote...
Years ago, a buddy of mine and I went to Canada on holiday. Flight prices were lowest if we flew via the US. He joked with me on arrival at Heathrow airport that he's "the one that always gets searched" (the US section of the airport always had extra security theatre over the rest of International). Unfortunately, he was right. He got searched (ie. empty pockets, pat down, someone looking in his bag) three times between arriving at the airport and getting on the plane. He also got searched going through the airport in the US (in both directions). All this in addition to xray-ing his bag and walking through the metal detector (which he didn't set off).
Just looking at Heathrow, I concluded that at least two of the three searches must have been incompetent. Surely there's only a need to search him once, unless the first guy was incompetent and missed something.
The other curious thing I realised was that should I ever become so-inclined to want to carry some sort of contraband onto an aeroplane, all I need to do is go to the airport with this guy. I didn't get searched (or even spoken to - much less questioned or ID'ed or whatever) at all in any airport (apart from the usual xray/metal detector). I could have happily carried the contraband while my buddy ran diversion for me.
As my English teacher used to say "why use rhetorical questions?"
Not sure about the phone, but Sharepod (http://www.getsharepod.com/) does a nice job of getting music off an iPod.
Then of course, there's Sandwich. Since Pfizer are moving out of there, "the government" wants to turn the area into a science park. Of course, who "the government" is in this case is up for grabs, I doubt it involves the same people that want the silicon roundabout to grow.
For what it's worth, I doubt this will succeed for many of the reasons our American cousins point out (mostly about our laws and regulations). If the UK could guarantee your company could operate unmolested for (say) 5-10 years then you might get some traction. Of course, every fraudster, paedo and banker would be in on the act, but it would foster the kind of tech-focus they want.
The trouble is that we brits want all the success, but we don't want to give anything up to get it. As workers, we don't mind working hard, but don't want to work 80 hour weeks, and we don't want to have to stay late so we don't see our families. As for the government, they want all the riches and successes that super-successful startups could bring, but they don't want to keep the big companies out of the way, they don't want to soften the law for startups and under no circumstances would they ever consider reducing the tax or regulatory burden for small companies.
Besides all that, the Shoreditch/Hoxton area of London has way, way, way too much culture to ever become the cultural vacuum that is silicon valley.
After our recent out-sourced data-mining operation, our world-class Data Research team have concluded that "innovation" is not an overused word, phrase or best-practice.
I really like ghostery (for Firefox) because it removes all the personally tracking aspects of the Internet. You're not immune from Google/FB/MS/Yahoo's all-seeing eyes, but it stops advertisers talking to each other more than they reasonably should. Of course, showing you ads is a form of tracking, but if you start with the premise that sites should be able to advertise, then Ghostery gives you a nice compromise as they can do that, but they can't tell everyone about what you're looking at.
These days, I use Ghostery and Adblock, and I'm ruthlessly adding filters to adblock for various site's own in-house advertising. But that's another matter ;-)