I think if there's one thing you could never describe Eddie Izzard as, it's "ill-educated". Going to Paris and doing your whole show in French isn't exactly representative of your average Englishman's command of the French language.
The reason why Nokia got to the dominant market position they enjoy today is because their phones were simple and intuitive to use, and looked sort of cute and non-threatening and accessible, but not to the extent that they came over as toy-like. In a world of disgustingly ugly Ericssons with awful interfaces and Motorolas that were just downright embarrassing, they cleaned up because they appealed to the masses.
Now, though, they seem to be forgetting everything that made them popular. Their devices are becoming ever more contrived in both appearance and functionality, and they're blatantly chasing the zeitgeist instead of telling us all what it was.
Meanwhile, the companies that they so thoroughly trounced have really raised their game, and phones like the Sony Ericsson T610 are exactly the sort of thing you might have expected from Nokia before they started producing phones that look like they've melted in an effort to appeal to tha kidz.
This stupid gadget's yet another example of this silliness. Amazingly, it actually uses elements of a UI layout that Nokia had previously binned because users hated it - well, OK, admittely it's been updated, but several years ago they played with a prototype of a device with the buttons in a row down the side, thinking that it would increase speed of text input for SMS messages, but it turned out it was much worse. There's ample detail about it in this book. Here, instead of one row, they've got two, but apart from that, it's pretty much the same idea they've already rejected. Now tell me they aren't going for form over function.
Oh, and it's a crap shape for putting in your pocket. By my reckoning it's about the size of a 3.5" floppy, maybe a bit smaller. Now look at the way you'll have to hold it in your hand - the broadest diagonal will go right across the palm of your hand. Try picking up a floppy and hold it that way and tell me it's comfortable. And in all likelihood you've got big ol' Western hands - how's it going to go down in Japan? Remember how small those original designed-for-Japan Playstation joypads without the analogue bits felt in your mitts?
Nah, I'm not having that. I mean, here I sit with thousands upon thousands of MP3s. A great many of these songs are based on the good old verse-chorus-verse-chorus-twiddlybit-repeatchorust ofade formula, and between them I'm sure just about every chord progression you care to name is represented, but I'm not likely to decide that there's no point listening to any new music just because it's all been done before.
Having said that, you're not wrong about the city thing. As long as you're travelling around Middle America, anyway. There's only so many ways you can arrange a load of shopping malls, fast-food outlets and car parks in a grid pattern before it starts getting a bit tired.
A sports car's not defined by top speed, it's defined by its character. In my book, a Lotus Elan's definitely a sports car even though it's not particularly quick, because it's light and nimble and very capable on a back road or a racetrack. However, a Bentley isn't, even though it goes like hell, because it's enormous and heavy and not really too clever at going round bends.
This thing's just a converted Mazda MX-5. It's a sports car all right.
Edison didn't invent the lightbulb, though. He just came up with the first lightbulb that was practical for mass production due to being longer-lasting than previous efforts.
I'm from the UK. Any time I'm in Canada, I raid Montreal's record shops and come home with as many CDs as I can carry 'cos they're dirt cheap. If you think you're getting ripped off, you don't know you're born.
It's a matter of perception, though, isn't it? You pay more because the quality's higher. They charge you what the market will bear. Same goes for DVDs, which must cost a fraction of what a VHS tape costs to manufacture, but gets sold to you for a fairly hefty premium because it's a nicer product.
That's how you sell any product in any business - charge according to what it's worth to them, not what it costs you to provide it.
Knowing Ian (and I do, or at least I used to), he's missing being able to get a decent pint more than anything...
It's funny, you know, reading Slashdot and seeing someone you know's name up in lights. Ian's something of a geek icon these days, yet to me he's just one of the few decent guys in the AI class, who lived across the road in fourth year, and had a slightly questionable taste in leather jackets.
I can remember bumping into him just outside the shop at Potterrow during exam time in third year, and he was telling me about the thing he was doing for his "large practical", which made up a fair chunk of the course. At the time he seemed more interested in cutting down on the amount of unnecessary transfers of data from servers a long way away by making it available locally, rather than the anonymity aspect of things. Anyway, out of this grew Freenet, and here we are. It's a hell of a sight more than any of the rest of us achieved with our work, I'm sure...
Edinburgh's a much nicer place to spend your days anyway. That wind in the winter would cut you in two, mind.
Of course, you were aware that the Russian for wormwood is "Chernobyl", weren't you? It must've poisoned about a third of the world's surface by the time it had reached its maximum extent...
I saw a Horizon documentary about this on BBC Four a while back during a bout of insomnia. It was absolutely riveting. The whole idea was so bonkers, and completely the opposite of normal engineering thinking. "Well, we're going to blast this thing into space using a series of nuclear explosions, so to take the impact it's going to have to be really big and strong. Let's build a spaceship the size of an ocean liner, then". Gotta love that sort of thinking.
So do what I do. Answer "no" when it asks you if you want to reboot, then shut down at the end of the day as normal, and next time you start up you're patched. Sum total of additional hassle: zero.
Well, unless a virus hits you in the time between downloading the patch and applying it...
Sure, this system and the congestion charging mechanism would be implemented in quite different ways. But both would suffer from the same difficulties, i.e. information overload, false positives, circumvention with impunity by habitual offenders, etc. etc. It just wouldn't be possible to produce a reliable and equable system with either current or near-future technology. Consequently, implementation shouldn't even be contemplated.
I'm not mad enough to live in London - everyday life just shouldn't be such a chore. But I am very familiar with it, and I know how much surveillance takes place at the minute. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I don't like it for a variety of reasons, not least because I don't think it really works. Crime moves elsewhere and since much violence is spur-of-the-moment, the crime prevention aspect is none too clever. Just this Saturday night I stopped a fight right in the town square where I live, a place well covered by CCTV. The guy who was about to beat the daylights out of some hapless-but-irritating tramp hadn't thought about the presence of cameras because he'd been on the sauce, and the cameras weren't going to prevent this guy getting a beating even if they would've helped in securing a conviction of the offender at a later date. Personally I'd rather have no offence at all than offenders in prison. But improving the state of your society and making such attacks less likely is hard. Spying on everybody and frightening them into compliance is easy.
And on the third point, you're missing the gist of what I was trying to say. To summarise: Are these offences so bad that they warrant compulsory and comprehensive surveillance of every driver on the assumption that they are offenders waiting to happen? Anybody can list instances of people they know being injured or killed in car accidents as a result of drivers behaving irresponsibly, but it doesn't justify systematic erosion of your right to move around freely. I've posted elsewhere on this thread about how I'd propose to reduce driving offences, but I'm afraid that a world entirely without risk to its inhabitants is an impossible dream, and there are always going to be tragic accidents which cause public outcry and demands for draconian punishment for transgressors. Just remember: tough cases make bad laws.
And on your final point, again, I am well aware of how much of my everyday comings and goings are recorded. But this is generally not co-ordinated, nor is it done with the express intention of forcing me to comply with (often ill-conceived) laws through fear. Surely you can see the difference between people availing of the opportunity to garner useful information, and law enforcement through surveillance?
I mean, if there were no infectious agents, we'd have no need for an immunity system. Since both Mother Nature and yer average geek are generally quite averse to expending energy needlessly, this would free up resources for other things, some of which might even have positive benefits.
The real solution is to endow people with the means and the motivation to be better drivers. First, credit people with the intelligence to take responsibility for their driving. Then educate them, retest them as often as is necessary to ensure that they are armed with the knowledge required to behave correctly on the roads and the inclination to apply it appropriately.
Once you've got this in place, nobody would have any excuse not to behave as expected. So it would be perfectly reasonable to revoke the right to drive for those who can't comply, and make them reach the required standards again before they get it back.
Stop looking for the authorities to fix the things that are wrong in your society, folks. A better future starts and ends with you.
Firstly, any fool can see how disastrously flawed any implementation of such a device would inevitably be. It simply wouldn't work. The London congestion charging system is a far less complex set-up, operating on a far smaller number of people, and they can't keep on top of the number of fines it's producing, so they're allocating them by lottery based on all the recorded transgressions. How could a system which records everything which everybody does be manageable if they can't make this work?
Secondly, it infringes on such fundamental principles of jurisprudence as the presumption of innocence. When you're being watched all the time, you are by implication a suspected criminal, and the government has decided that you can't be trusted to go about your business in a responsible manner, and so has had to take your right to do so off you. Who wants to live in such a society?
Thirdly, are these offences really that bad?. Convicted murderers eventually get let out of jail and are allowed to go about their business free of surveillance, because they're deemed to have paid their debt to society and so can go on with their lives to the best of their ability. Meanwhile, In this case, ordinary people are denied the basic human right to go about your business without let or hindrance before they've ever done anything wrong. If you can't see the problem with that, and your views are in any way representative of those of the general public, then stop the world 'cos I'm getting off.
The Sunday Times, and to a lesser extent all the other Sunday broadsheets, are just tabloids with long words, repositories for all the scandal-mongering nonsense and poorly-researched, speculative, feature-led pontificating that the dailies can't get away with. People like a leisurely and occasionally thought-provoking read on a Sunday, rather than straight-to-the-point reportage. Standards of journalism in them are really rather poor compared with their daily brethren, and anybody who thinks that the difference between tabloids and broadsheets applies to Sundays as it does to dailies is sadly deluded.
Mostly because they sound us out to test our reaction before deciding whether to implement their madness. Particularly in the summer "silly season" when Parliament's closed and the papers have nothing to talk about and many a column inch going begging. This scheme will never happen because it's completely crackpot, but everyone's a winner when such a story appears, because the government gets to work out exactly how much Big Brother nonsense they can get away with, the papers get a story that shifts units at a time when nothing else is happening to do so, and Joe Public gets to vent his spleen a bit.
Thing is, they've been on in the papers for ages about fitting tracking devices to cars here. There's been mutterings of discontent before, but the proposed schemes haven't been as oppressive as this beauty, which any sane person would object to (if it was actually possible to implement, which, let's face it, it isn't). Now this story will go away and in a couple of months something along these lines, but greatly diluted, will be mooted, and they'll gauge the reaction again then.
It's like the national identity card scheme. A proposal to implement one in the UK is brought forward in the middle of every term of parliament, regular as clockwork, and soon disappears again thanks to public opposition. The complaints are becoming fainter, though, and soon enough it'll be brought in, again in the middle of a parliamentary term when any damage that it does to support for the government can be reversed by a timely tax cut (it's a stone-cold fact that the only things that people in Britain actually care about are taxes and what's on the TV. Anything that happens beyond the bottom of their own garden doesn't matter as long as their taxes aren't paying for it).
It'd be so utterly hopelessly fallible that they'd pull the plug on it in months and we'd never see its like again. We just don't have the technology for this level of snooping, and anybody who thinks about this story for more than five seconds will realise as much and carry on.
For those of you not familiar with The Sun's "journalism, go check out their website for your taste of Great British Journalism. This is the paper which brought you such great headlines as "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster", folks.
Correct me if I'm wrong (somebody will), but I'm pretty sure the same thing's just about to go live on the London Underground. I'm sure plenty of people have seen the yellow circles on the turnstiles - they're there to talk to these cards as far as I know.
Yep., same system where I work. The really clever and handy thing about it is that your one card works for every single one of the company's buildings anywhere in the country (of which there are hundreds), so you don't have to faff about when trying to get access to buildings you might only have to go to once. And once you're in that building, you're still denied access to the juicy bits that you shouldn't be allowed into.
Of course, the downside is that they can track all your comings (but not goings, interestingly - generally you only use your card to get in, and press a button to release the door on your way out, so they've no idea when you're leaving...). But they've shown no inclination to make use of this information, and I don't see what they could use it for besides checking for security breaches anyway, so I'm happy enough.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you turned the mouse pad 90 degrees, they started getting on like they'd been hitting the booze hard...
I think if there's one thing you could never describe Eddie Izzard as, it's "ill-educated". Going to Paris and doing your whole show in French isn't exactly representative of your average Englishman's command of the French language.
The reason why Nokia got to the dominant market position they enjoy today is because their phones were simple and intuitive to use, and looked sort of cute and non-threatening and accessible, but not to the extent that they came over as toy-like. In a world of disgustingly ugly Ericssons with awful interfaces and Motorolas that were just downright embarrassing, they cleaned up because they appealed to the masses.
Now, though, they seem to be forgetting everything that made them popular. Their devices are becoming ever more contrived in both appearance and functionality, and they're blatantly chasing the zeitgeist instead of telling us all what it was.
Meanwhile, the companies that they so thoroughly trounced have really raised their game, and phones like the Sony Ericsson T610 are exactly the sort of thing you might have expected from Nokia before they started producing phones that look like they've melted in an effort to appeal to tha kidz.
This stupid gadget's yet another example of this silliness. Amazingly, it actually uses elements of a UI layout that Nokia had previously binned because users hated it - well, OK, admittely it's been updated, but several years ago they played with a prototype of a device with the buttons in a row down the side, thinking that it would increase speed of text input for SMS messages, but it turned out it was much worse. There's ample detail about it in this book. Here, instead of one row, they've got two, but apart from that, it's pretty much the same idea they've already rejected. Now tell me they aren't going for form over function.
Oh, and it's a crap shape for putting in your pocket. By my reckoning it's about the size of a 3.5" floppy, maybe a bit smaller. Now look at the way you'll have to hold it in your hand - the broadest diagonal will go right across the palm of your hand. Try picking up a floppy and hold it that way and tell me it's comfortable. And in all likelihood you've got big ol' Western hands - how's it going to go down in Japan? Remember how small those original designed-for-Japan Playstation joypads without the analogue bits felt in your mitts?
Ooh, but isn't it pretty?
Well, my music collection's certainly pretty diverse. There's a place for everything, really - some days you want to listen to minimal burbling noises, other days you just can't beat a bit of Motown. No point getting snobbish about it.
Nah, I'm not having that. I mean, here I sit with thousands upon thousands of MP3s. A great many of these songs are based on the good old verse-chorus-verse-chorus-twiddlybit-repeatchorust ofade formula, and between them I'm sure just about every chord progression you care to name is represented, but I'm not likely to decide that there's no point listening to any new music just because it's all been done before.
Having said that, you're not wrong about the city thing. As long as you're travelling around Middle America, anyway. There's only so many ways you can arrange a load of shopping malls, fast-food outlets and car parks in a grid pattern before it starts getting a bit tired.
Five years? Pah. They've a long, long way to go before they match John Coffey's mad mouse resurrection skillz in The Green Mile...
Blimey. I thought Stanley Unwin was dead.
A sports car's not defined by top speed, it's defined by its character. In my book, a Lotus Elan's definitely a sports car even though it's not particularly quick, because it's light and nimble and very capable on a back road or a racetrack. However, a Bentley isn't, even though it goes like hell, because it's enormous and heavy and not really too clever at going round bends.
This thing's just a converted Mazda MX-5. It's a sports car all right.
Edison didn't invent the lightbulb, though. He just came up with the first lightbulb that was practical for mass production due to being longer-lasting than previous efforts.
A fair bit?
I'm from the UK. Any time I'm in Canada, I raid Montreal's record shops and come home with as many CDs as I can carry 'cos they're dirt cheap. If you think you're getting ripped off, you don't know you're born.
It's a matter of perception, though, isn't it? You pay more because the quality's higher. They charge you what the market will bear. Same goes for DVDs, which must cost a fraction of what a VHS tape costs to manufacture, but gets sold to you for a fairly hefty premium because it's a nicer product.
That's how you sell any product in any business - charge according to what it's worth to them, not what it costs you to provide it.
Knowing Ian (and I do, or at least I used to), he's missing being able to get a decent pint more than anything...
It's funny, you know, reading Slashdot and seeing someone you know's name up in lights. Ian's something of a geek icon these days, yet to me he's just one of the few decent guys in the AI class, who lived across the road in fourth year, and had a slightly questionable taste in leather jackets.
I can remember bumping into him just outside the shop at Potterrow during exam time in third year, and he was telling me about the thing he was doing for his "large practical", which made up a fair chunk of the course. At the time he seemed more interested in cutting down on the amount of unnecessary transfers of data from servers a long way away by making it available locally, rather than the anonymity aspect of things. Anyway, out of this grew Freenet, and here we are. It's a hell of a sight more than any of the rest of us achieved with our work, I'm sure...
Edinburgh's a much nicer place to spend your days anyway. That wind in the winter would cut you in two, mind.
Of course, you were aware that the Russian for wormwood is "Chernobyl", weren't you? It must've poisoned about a third of the world's surface by the time it had reached its maximum extent...
I saw a Horizon documentary about this on BBC Four a while back during a bout of insomnia. It was absolutely riveting. The whole idea was so bonkers, and completely the opposite of normal engineering thinking. "Well, we're going to blast this thing into space using a series of nuclear explosions, so to take the impact it's going to have to be really big and strong. Let's build a spaceship the size of an ocean liner, then". Gotta love that sort of thinking.
Check it.
So do what I do. Answer "no" when it asks you if you want to reboot, then shut down at the end of the day as normal, and next time you start up you're patched. Sum total of additional hassle: zero.
Well, unless a virus hits you in the time between downloading the patch and applying it...
Sure, this system and the congestion charging mechanism would be implemented in quite different ways. But both would suffer from the same difficulties, i.e. information overload, false positives, circumvention with impunity by habitual offenders, etc. etc. It just wouldn't be possible to produce a reliable and equable system with either current or near-future technology. Consequently, implementation shouldn't even be contemplated.
I'm not mad enough to live in London - everyday life just shouldn't be such a chore. But I am very familiar with it, and I know how much surveillance takes place at the minute. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I don't like it for a variety of reasons, not least because I don't think it really works. Crime moves elsewhere and since much violence is spur-of-the-moment, the crime prevention aspect is none too clever. Just this Saturday night I stopped a fight right in the town square where I live, a place well covered by CCTV. The guy who was about to beat the daylights out of some hapless-but-irritating tramp hadn't thought about the presence of cameras because he'd been on the sauce, and the cameras weren't going to prevent this guy getting a beating even if they would've helped in securing a conviction of the offender at a later date. Personally I'd rather have no offence at all than offenders in prison. But improving the state of your society and making such attacks less likely is hard. Spying on everybody and frightening them into compliance is easy.
And on the third point, you're missing the gist of what I was trying to say. To summarise: Are these offences so bad that they warrant compulsory and comprehensive surveillance of every driver on the assumption that they are offenders waiting to happen? Anybody can list instances of people they know being injured or killed in car accidents as a result of drivers behaving irresponsibly, but it doesn't justify systematic erosion of your right to move around freely. I've posted elsewhere on this thread about how I'd propose to reduce driving offences, but I'm afraid that a world entirely without risk to its inhabitants is an impossible dream, and there are always going to be tragic accidents which cause public outcry and demands for draconian punishment for transgressors. Just remember: tough cases make bad laws.
And on your final point, again, I am well aware of how much of my everyday comings and goings are recorded. But this is generally not co-ordinated, nor is it done with the express intention of forcing me to comply with (often ill-conceived) laws through fear. Surely you can see the difference between people availing of the opportunity to garner useful information, and law enforcement through surveillance?
I mean, if there were no infectious agents, we'd have no need for an immunity system. Since both Mother Nature and yer average geek are generally quite averse to expending energy needlessly, this would free up resources for other things, some of which might even have positive benefits.
The real solution is to endow people with the means and the motivation to be better drivers. First, credit people with the intelligence to take responsibility for their driving. Then educate them, retest them as often as is necessary to ensure that they are armed with the knowledge required to behave correctly on the roads and the inclination to apply it appropriately.
Once you've got this in place, nobody would have any excuse not to behave as expected. So it would be perfectly reasonable to revoke the right to drive for those who can't comply, and make them reach the required standards again before they get it back.
Stop looking for the authorities to fix the things that are wrong in your society, folks. A better future starts and ends with you.
Oh, for goodness' sake, man.
Firstly, any fool can see how disastrously flawed any implementation of such a device would inevitably be. It simply wouldn't work. The London congestion charging system is a far less complex set-up, operating on a far smaller number of people, and they can't keep on top of the number of fines it's producing, so they're allocating them by lottery based on all the recorded transgressions. How could a system which records everything which everybody does be manageable if they can't make this work?
Secondly, it infringes on such fundamental principles of jurisprudence as the presumption of innocence. When you're being watched all the time, you are by implication a suspected criminal, and the government has decided that you can't be trusted to go about your business in a responsible manner, and so has had to take your right to do so off you. Who wants to live in such a society?
Thirdly, are these offences really that bad?. Convicted murderers eventually get let out of jail and are allowed to go about their business free of surveillance, because they're deemed to have paid their debt to society and so can go on with their lives to the best of their ability. Meanwhile, In this case, ordinary people are denied the basic human right to go about your business without let or hindrance before they've ever done anything wrong. If you can't see the problem with that, and your views are in any way representative of those of the general public, then stop the world 'cos I'm getting off.
The Sunday Times, and to a lesser extent all the other Sunday broadsheets, are just tabloids with long words, repositories for all the scandal-mongering nonsense and poorly-researched, speculative, feature-led pontificating that the dailies can't get away with. People like a leisurely and occasionally thought-provoking read on a Sunday, rather than straight-to-the-point reportage. Standards of journalism in them are really rather poor compared with their daily brethren, and anybody who thinks that the difference between tabloids and broadsheets applies to Sundays as it does to dailies is sadly deluded.
Mostly because they sound us out to test our reaction before deciding whether to implement their madness. Particularly in the summer "silly season" when Parliament's closed and the papers have nothing to talk about and many a column inch going begging. This scheme will never happen because it's completely crackpot, but everyone's a winner when such a story appears, because the government gets to work out exactly how much Big Brother nonsense they can get away with, the papers get a story that shifts units at a time when nothing else is happening to do so, and Joe Public gets to vent his spleen a bit.
Thing is, they've been on in the papers for ages about fitting tracking devices to cars here. There's been mutterings of discontent before, but the proposed schemes haven't been as oppressive as this beauty, which any sane person would object to (if it was actually possible to implement, which, let's face it, it isn't). Now this story will go away and in a couple of months something along these lines, but greatly diluted, will be mooted, and they'll gauge the reaction again then.
It's like the national identity card scheme. A proposal to implement one in the UK is brought forward in the middle of every term of parliament, regular as clockwork, and soon disappears again thanks to public opposition. The complaints are becoming fainter, though, and soon enough it'll be brought in, again in the middle of a parliamentary term when any damage that it does to support for the government can be reversed by a timely tax cut (it's a stone-cold fact that the only things that people in Britain actually care about are taxes and what's on the TV. Anything that happens beyond the bottom of their own garden doesn't matter as long as their taxes aren't paying for it).
It'd be so utterly hopelessly fallible that they'd pull the plug on it in months and we'd never see its like again. We just don't have the technology for this level of snooping, and anybody who thinks about this story for more than five seconds will realise as much and carry on.
For those of you not familiar with The Sun's "journalism, go check out their website for your taste of Great British Journalism. This is the paper which brought you such great headlines as "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster", folks.
Aye, it's all a bit fishy all right. Ask them to explain, and they either clam up, or spin you a load of old tentacles.
Correct me if I'm wrong (somebody will), but I'm pretty sure the same thing's just about to go live on the London Underground. I'm sure plenty of people have seen the yellow circles on the turnstiles - they're there to talk to these cards as far as I know.
Yep., same system where I work. The really clever and handy thing about it is that your one card works for every single one of the company's buildings anywhere in the country (of which there are hundreds), so you don't have to faff about when trying to get access to buildings you might only have to go to once. And once you're in that building, you're still denied access to the juicy bits that you shouldn't be allowed into.
Of course, the downside is that they can track all your comings (but not goings, interestingly - generally you only use your card to get in, and press a button to release the door on your way out, so they've no idea when you're leaving...). But they've shown no inclination to make use of this information, and I don't see what they could use it for besides checking for security breaches anyway, so I'm happy enough.