The lowly seer

Coventry council cave in to bad publicity

2009-05-21T08:57:00.002Z

Mr & Mrs Rowley now to be allowed meals on wheels

The pressure from the media was probably simply too great for them. While the newspapers played their part, BBC West Midlands have been magnificent in getting this council's bizarre decisions reversed.

The big worry is, how may more elderly and/or vulnerable people are being neglected by the very people paid (in some cases, handsomely) to serve the community?

Coventry Council's shame part 2

2009-05-15T08:35:00.003Z

Perhaps it's a little unfair to complain of the council's penny-pinching, they can afford to be generous elsewhere.
Next chief executive may earn £200K/year
So the current incumbent, Stella Manzies, has to make do on a measly £145,770? Not much for instituting a regime that denies meals-on-wheels to vulnerable pensioners, is it?
It's laughable when the deputy council leader claims it's because what the market demands - it's the likes of him that are making the market.

It all meshes with the society we've become, in which the rich get richer at the expense of the poor. The great banking rip-off and the MP's expenses scandal are all symptoms of the same disease.

Coventry Council's shame

2009-05-14T10:30:00.002Z

Recently making the local and national news has been this story of how an elderly and partially disabled couple were denied meals on wheels by Coventry Council despite being unable to cook for themselves.
Coventry Evening Telegraph story

Daily Mail story

Daily Telegraph story

They were also featured on the BBC TV local news programme.

The denial, presumably part of the Conservative Council's penny-pinching (are you reading this, David Cameron?), comes despite them raising their charges to £4.10 per meal, which for 2 pensioners for 2 meals a day, would cost a staggering £16.40. What the social worker who made the assessment did offer was a shopping service at a princely rate of £20 an hour. One might accuse the council of not merely neglecting the vulnerable, but actually seeking to rip them off, perhaps.

The storm of publicity seems to have shamed the council into a rethink, though they're still capable of delivering insults: they've phoned Mrs Rowley to offer to send someone round to teach her how to lift stuff out of the oven. Presumably they have a cure for rheumatoid arthritis?

Still, full marks for former Labour councillor, Brian Patton, who brought this whole episode to the attention of the press.

Buddhist Heart (of England)

2009-04-20T14:20:00.004Z

Another new website I've created, BuddhistHeart. It's the site for the Heart of England HQ of SGI-UK, covering Birmingham, Coventry, the Black Country, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. We'll be using to publish details of local events and some background information on the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin.
If you want to get in touch with your local district, there's an interactive map to let you locate the nearest one.

Connective Unconscious

2008-10-25T19:02:00.002Z

Started a new blog, Connective Unconscious, to house some speculative thoughts relating Mahayana Buddhism and the physical world, with maybe a bit of information theory thrown in. The 1st post on the blog explains it's name.

From the 'Animatrix'

2008-09-11T22:13:00.002Z

"To an artificial mind, all reality is virtual".

Currently working on...

2008-08-07T11:21:00.006Z

Activ8 Money Payday Loans, a payday loan lender striving to be the UK's most trusted payday loan provider. Activ8 Money specialises in helping people with bad credit ratings borrow money and rebuild their ratings.
It's a major project and, as with any, financial application, high security is paramount. As such, there's little I can reveal in terms of the technical side.

A tale of two festivals

2008-07-28T21:29:00.008Z

Leamington Peace Festival, 14th-15th June. I was helping out on the SGI's stall some of the time but also managed to take some time out to catch bands, including Kangaroo Moon, whom I hadn't seen for donkey's years, and the truly impressive Misty's Big Adventure.

Warwick Folk Festival was 26th-27th July, I only really caught the 'parade' of the morris dancers, many of whom these days seem to eschew the traditional plain whites and bells.

Control & culture

2008-07-09T06:54:00.004Z

Listening to Radio4 yesterday, during a phone-in on knife crime, a listener attributed it in part to our highly competitive culture, one in which you're either a winner or a loser. She gave 'The Weakest Link' a mention, something that in the past I would have scoffed at, but there's so much of our television like that now, think more of the Apprentice or Big Brother. Become rich and famous - or a nobody.

As aspiration's grown, inspiration, it seems to me has declined. Virtually all popular music around now seems to be weak copies of the styles of the previous 3 or 4 decades and much of visual art seems predicated on the major dealers conferring wealth and status in return for headline-grabbing mock outrage, and the Hollywood mainstream is now unspeakably bland.

The rebellion's also disappeared - in the 60s or 70s, Anne Robinson or Alan Sugar would've been told to get f**ked, metaphorically if not literally, the world's now well and truly back under the thumb of wealth and power.

By contrast it was great to watch an interview with Werner Herzog, a film-maker not deliberately obscure, but someone who's so motivated by his dreams he's a complete misfit in this day and age. His first notable film, 'Even Dwarves Started Small', he produced and directed himself, and even financed. At 20K it was a pretty tiny budget even then, yet almost impossibly huge coming out of his own pocket. A last important message from the great man - digital film cameras are so cheap now, if you want to make a film there's no excuse for not doing so. But how few people will actually do so (as opposed to a clip of yourself dancing around your bedroom on Youtube in the hope of getting talent-spotted)?

At last I caught up with Anton Corbijn's film, 'Control'. Like many others I found it didn't really engage me until quite near the end, and from what he said in the notes on the DVD, I think it'd been loads better if he'd stuck to his original plan and done it as flashback rather than documentary. In fact I reckon he could've reduced the 'now' content to the last tragic hour or so of Ian Curtis's life.

Other seem to think that Curtis was suffering from depression when he killed himself, but it struck me that it was much more unresolvable inner conflicts. An impossible choice between his wife and girlfriend, a love of what he was doing with Joy Division against the shallowness of fame, the debilitating side-effects of his medication against the potentially lethal fits from epilepsy if he stopped taking it, and more besides. In fact, some reckon there's a psychological element to epilepsy, anger. Another creature of his time, so few these days would have the integrity to even find those conflicts as a root of suffering.

And a tie-in - the night before he died he watched Herzog's 'Stroszek' on TV.

A new low in warfare?

2008-04-13T11:34:00.002Z

Wars of the last 100 years have frequently pushed the boundaries of brutality and depravity - think of the Western Front in WW1, the appalling viciousness of the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Front of WW2 or more recently the random amputations meted out to civilians in Sierra Leone's 'rebel' uprising - but if Carla Del Ponte's allegations of human organ trafficking in Kosovo are true then warfare has plumbed new depths.

In the book, Del Ponte writes that her investigators visited a house in the remote mountainous region outside Burrel, Albania, which was allegedly being used as an impromptu clinic for the butchering of 300 young Serbs captured by the Kosovo Liberation Army and transported in lorries across the border from Kosovo to Albania.
According to witnesses - including one who said he had driven some of the organs to Tirana airport, and a team of unnamed journalists who investigated the allegations - the victims had their kidneys removed before being killed later and having other organs taken.
"Prisoners were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source pleaded, terrified, to be killed immediately," Del Ponte writes.
The "house-clinic" was visited by UN officials from Kosovo and tribunal investigators. "The team was shocked by what they saw," said Chuck Sudetic, a former tribunal official who is joint author of the book. "They found gauze and vials of medicines, including a muscle relaxer used during surgery."

And it wasn't only captured Serbs:

The victims were said to include Albanians and trafficked women from Russia and eastern Europe forced to work as prostitutes.

del Ponte's allegations have met with strenuous denials. They may be false (I really hope they are) but it's not too hard to imagine any diplomats involved in the region wanting to scotch the rumours, Kosovo's a powder keg.

The current economic crisis coupled with soaring demand from resources of every kind may soon threaten to drive the world to further mass warfare. This may prove to be one resource, one which becomes plentiful during war, the profiteers will be unable to resist.

The only way forward

2008-04-05T10:49:00.002Z

While reading this chunk of President Ikeda's 2007 Peace Proposal, I was struck by just how so many of our current problems stem from this same cause:

At the heart of the nuclear issue is a potential for destructiveness inherent in human life. It is a function of this destructiveness to shred our sense of human solidarity, sowing the seeds of mistrust and suspicion, conflict and hatred. Buddhism characterizes this as the life-state or "world" of anger, which, when it becomes undirected and unrestrained, is a rogue and renegade force, disrupting and destroying all in its path.
...

This same world of anger is at the heart of many of the issues confronting contemporary civilization, with its high degree of capitalist and technological development. It is necessary to reposition economic values within the various hierarchies of values integral to the processes of life, to train and tame the capitalist system. The key to this is a human awakening, a process of individuals and humanity reclaiming their rightful place.

Over the last 20-30 years we've had politicians preaching their "you can't buck the market" ideology, which while it's increased global wealth, has done so to the detriment of society. The wealth has not been distributed even slightly fairly leading to resentment and despair. Human values have been replaced by market prices. A hubristic war to capure Iraq's oil has left us with an increased terrorism threat, unprecedented levels of surveillance and a serious drain on the world's economy.
The attitude that we're ruled by some sort of natural law that dictates the economy and hence politics, is bogus and was carefully engineered to create this sort of society. I doubt its priests ever foresaw the dreary negativity that sprang up in its wake.
The solution isn't at the global political level, it's failed us so many times and will fail again. Contrast the high-mindedness of the Russian revolution on 1917 with its Stalinist outcome.

It's only by individuals making the change in themselves that evenually society can be turned round, in SGI parlance, "the Human Revolution".

Music biz re-entry

2008-04-03T14:35:00.005Z

Years ago I used to run my own record label as well as play in bands and act as sound man / photographer / web designer for others. I haven't done anything in the music biz for over 6.5 years. So now I'm getting back in with an online web services system aimed at the smaller / semi-pro / serious amateur end of the biz, flirtwithdanger.com.

Exactly what sort of services? Not prepared to say yet, but it's quite unique and will get properly announced as soon as I have the first couple of clients online.

A neurologist finds nirvana 3

2008-03-29T22:31:00.003Z

Another possible impact: strong AI. I've long believed such a thing was a non-starter, that machines do not think and cannot think. By contrast, the weak AI position, a mere simulation of thinking is being / will be achieved.

A primary point is true understanding and Searle's "Chinese room" analogy illustrates this beautifully. He imagined himself in an otherwise sealed room with two slots with which to communicate with the outside world. Through one cards would be fed in on which were written questions in Chinese, a language he didn't understand. Using a huge manual which contained all the permissable combinations of pictograms, he'd look up the answer, write it out and pass it through the out slot. At no point would he ever understand the meaning of the questions. This is precisely the mechanistic way in which computers work.

It strikes me in light of Dr Taylor's video, the problem lies with computers only simulating left-brain functions. Interestingly, where subjects such as pattern recognition, a right-brain function are attempted, serial mode computers (the ones in everyday use) work poorly. Much more effective are "neural nets", devices with a parallel architecture, much closer to the brain's.
Even thornier than understanding is the question of consciousness, a word which doesn't even have an agreed scientific definition. A common viewpoint is to claim it's the same as self-awareness. So could this be solved by linking up an otherwise intelligent computer to a video camera pointing at a mirror? Obviously not, though it's far more difficult to say precisely why not.

Again I think it comes down to simulating left side functionality only; but more interestingly, when Dr Taylor's left brain stopped working, she experienced awareness of her own body in a way we're not used to. Even more, it seems as though she experienced a non-standard sensory input from the rest of the world too.

Could this be the missing element of consciousness? A sense we're normally unaware of, normally filtered out of our everyday expience but somehow forming a base level of consciousness?

One interesting pro-strong AI analogy was developed by Jaron Lanier. Imagine a person having a neuron within their brain replaced by an equivalent electronic circuit. And then another, and another until their whole brain was replaced. Is there some point at which they would stop being conscious? Its a powerful argument, but I think from the foregoing we can assume there is something going on on the right side which wouldn't work electronically, so yes, at some point we would see breakdown / loss of functionality.

A neurologist finds nirvana 2

2008-03-28T23:12:00.002Z

An interesting point raised in Dr Taylor's video concerns the right hemisphere's feeling of oneness with everyone, and indeed, everything versus the left's individuality and separateness. This was a dimension of the personality highlighted by Arthur Koestler as individuality against integration. It's all too easy to blame individuality for all the world's ills, yet when you think of the worst serial killers such as Dr Harold Shipman or Fred West, killing for their own perverse gratification, their crimes almost fade into insignificance when compared to those such as Hitler or Stalin, who, however misguided, believed their actions were for the greater good of humanity (or at least a part of it, the german people or the international proletariat, or whatever).

For all that, Koestler saw the problem as a lack of integration within the brain. However he saw the problem as being between the rational neocortex, the archaeocortex and the brain stem, evolutionarily new areas versus old ones, with the emotional limbic system in the domain of the old, divorced from the rationality of the new. It takes a sophisticated creature to be able to build a nuclear weapon but a primitive one to want to.
Dr Taylor's video suggests the integration problem may be lateral rather than vertical. Our individualistic left brain isn't even aware of the right brain's "mind".

Koestler's solution (as I've mentioned in a previous post) lay in hope that one day a pill might be invented that would fix the problem; I believe a non-chemical solution was found some 2500 years ago by Shakyamuni Buddha. His solution according to the Lotus Sutra was "hard to understand and hard to believe in", hardly surprising given the hemispherical split! Enlightenment, then, has a neurological aspect.

Anothe manifestation could be found in the current problem of nihilism and despair, and perhaps, depression. An article I read recently claimed depression to be an illness of the modern industrial age, predicated on the concurrent rise of individualism. I'm only partially convinced, the fact that it's never mentioned in mediaeval manuscripts is hardly proof it didn't exist. But it probably was less prevalent, minds absorbed in mother church, myth and legend, the sorts of things that are almost anathema to our rational minds. That there is a severe loss of this within our lives is without doubt, think of the popularity of science fiction, horror films, fantasy and especially Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, whose natural setting I'd guess at being early mediaeval, the time of Charlemagne, but a setting rich in myth.
This excessive reliance on individualism, in which, inevitably, many fail and many are even born into endemic failure has led to what might be considered as mass mental illness - addictions, tribalism, gang warfare and suchlike.

This is not to say our modern industrial society is not without benefits - prosperity, physical health, longevity, education and science immediately spring to mind. The challenge is not to abandon it but to re-integrate it with the rich, built-in complexity inherent within our lives.
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A neurologist finds Nirvana

2008-03-26T21:48:00.005Z

This is quite an astonishing film clip and Jill Bolte Taylor's exuberance could lead to accusations of flakiness in some quarters were she not a neuranatomist.

I'll note some of my immediate thoughts, reading the transcript, though I'll have to take time to reflect on what is some of the richest material I've come across. I've no idea of any religious convictions Dr. Taylor might have but her insights are very closely related to Buddhism, almost spookily.

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. ...
My left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities.

Buddhist thought long ago came to an understanding of the human mind in many ways, one of which is the '9 Consciousnesses'. The first 6 of these are the senses and their integration into a whole, which it seems is the work of the right hemisphere. The seventh is about making value judgments and decisions, left hemisphere stuff. There are two further consciousnesses that don't fit in with this model in any obvious way, the alaya consciousness, the karmic storehouse, and the Buddha consciousness. This is, possibly to be expected though as they're not simply within this individual physical setup, the 8th extending over multiple lifetimes and the ninth being in some ways 'ours' but also part of the entire universe.

And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy. Energy.

Not Buddhism, but this reminds me so much of the world of physics. With Einstein's Special Relativity and it's famous equation, E=mc2, solidity dropped out the picture, particles becoming patterns of energy. When you touch a tabletop, say, it feels solid enough yet the atoms of your fingertips and the atoms of the table are for the most part space - the solidity is an illusion created by the mutual repellence of the electron shells of those atoms. To go further, the physicist's view of the universe I would summarise as a thin skein of energy stretched across the hugeness of space-time, not spread evenly, but rather patterned so as to form wave-particles, and they themselves working within larger agglomerations, perhaps patterns upon patterns. The currently (I'm not a physicist; as an outsider this one seems to be forever in and out of fashion :)) most promising front on finding a "theory of everything" is string theory, which sees fundamental particles as tiny vibrating energy patterns snaking through 11 dimensions.
The right hemisphere's view might seem illusory but in fact it's the opposite - it's closer to the true reality. The peculiar thing here is that while it's always been believed we could never perceive this reality, this experience indicates we're feeling it all the time but it gets filtered out by our left brain.

And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and -- total silence.

And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Within our version of Buddhism we don't meditate, but the similarity here to the claims of meditators is astonishing, that it's an exercise to do precisely that, to silence the mind's chatter to see what's beyond.

Euphoria was beautiful -- and then my left hemisphere comes online and it says "Hey! you've got to pay attention, we've got to get help," and I'm thinking, "I got to get help, I gotta focus."

The drawback - without the left brain we simply can't survive. It's vital to everyday functioning, the most basic things such as getting food. This is the problem to my mind with Theravada Buddhism, that you can't achieve Nirvana without extinguishing earthly life. Mahayana Buddhism, by contrast, aims not for extinction but to become boddhisatvas, ones who choose instead to remain in the world, to use enlightenment to help oneself and others.

Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expensive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana, I found Nirvana. I remember thinking there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

One's Buddha nature is often described as enormous, in fact universe-sized.

"And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives.

Our belief, that differs from the Theravada Buddhist view of enlightenment, is that one's Buddha nature is something that everyone posesses and has posessed from the beginning of time, rather than something to be attained over many, many lifetimes. Moreover that if a huge number of people changed their lives thus then the whole of our society would be changed enormously for the better, an aim we refer to as kosen rufu. Regrettably, it's not that easy to tap into our bigger selves, for most people it takes many years of practice and the overcoming of a lot of suffering, but still something we're capable of reaching within one single lifetime (and, hey, what better things have you got to do with this life?).

Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you.

This comes back to the heart of the matter, two realities, in Nichiren's Buddhism called myo and ho. Myo is the mystical, transcendent reality in which everything is possible, and ho the physical manifestation. Whereas most religions take the idealist view that only the spiritual world matters and materialism only the material world, Buddhism defines life as precisely the point at which these two come together.

1968

2008-03-23T22:35:00.003Z

New interest seems to have been aroused by the 40th anniversary, though I don't remember anything much for its 20th or 30th. I was only a teenager at the time and never really understood much about what was happening in London, Paris and Prague. I remember seeing violence on the tv, though it was, of course, skewed coverage; wicked students attacking poor innocent coppers. Plus ca change.
The most important aspect of it was probably the emergence of the New Left. Stalinism had long lost it's appeal for anyone outside the USSR's nomenklatura with Kruschev's revelations and the crushing of the Hungarian uprising. Still this made little impact on the reporting of the time, as Tariq Ali's article shows, branding the demonstrators as "agents of Moscow". Dinosaurs then, dinosaurs now. They probably hadn't moved on since the Zinoviev letter.
What also seems so interesting is the crossing of two different strands of thought within popular culture - hippy peace and love against leftist revolution. This also reflects in a couple of songs of the time, the beatles's soppy "Revolution" against the Stones's inspirational "Street Fighting Man". Skin deep in retrospect as Lennon turned out to be much more the revolutionary as "Power to the People" and "Working Class Hero" attest, compared to the Stones's new aristocracy lifestyle. But they were hardly unique in that respect, we were left with a legacy of Hippy Capitalism.
The 2 strands had fallen apart by the time I left school and the longhair culture had moved much much to the insipid West Coast stuff; I'm thinking Crosby Stills & Nash here (I'll let Neil Young off for his excellent song "Ohio" at minimum). As the Young Trotskyite it left me somewhat alienated, I didn't fit in the hippy (or rather "freak" thing as it became known in the uk) and the other alternative, skinheadism was way too right wing for me, though latter-day fans, too young to have known the real thing, might deny that.
One of the most charming things of the 60s would have to be Thatcherite hatred of it, not just Norman Tebbit's vilification but the right's general blame of everything that's gone wrong on the period's permissiveness. This nonsense is still being put about after 18 years of Conservative rule and 7 of its clone, New Labour. While most such quotes seem plain silly, Nicholas Sarkozy's is just bizarre.

"May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relaivism on us all," Sarkozy declared. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics."
He even blamed the legacy of May '68 for greedy and seedy business practices. The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses". So the 60s generation is held responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, Northern Rock, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the "free market", a culture strangled by brazen opportunism.

They might also reflect on how so much of today's "intellectual property", one of the west's few sources of income now manufacturing has fled was created then, and how the counter-culture has fuelled the new digital economy.

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Phorm fallout increases

2008-03-18T09:22:00.002Z

FIPR says it's illegal under RIPA - BBC. Tim Berners-Lee says it's plain wrong - BBC. BT has to admit to cover-up - The Register.
Phorm's share price has dropped like a stone since the story broke - The Register.
Quite simply, BT, Virgin and Carphone Warehouse have made a serious mistake and should at least back out rather than try to defend the indefensible.

Strangely nothing from the governemnt's Information Commissioner.

The real face of war

2008-03-17T13:49:00.002Z

Catching one of Channel4's documentaries on Iraq last night, Iraq's Lost Generation, I was profoundly moved by the children in hospital in Amman, all severely injured in the sectarian strife, all refugees waiting for operations in an overstretched facility. It was impressive just how cheerful they were in spite of having lost family members in addition to the awfulness of their plight. In particular, the little girl, Hanan was utterly marvelllous despite looking to be severely burnt all over (her photo's in the linked page's header) from a suicide bomber whose actions had also killed several of her family. She was bright and cheerful all the way through and only burst into tears when the surgeon who was treating her announced her next operation would be delayed for a year.

No child should have to suffer like that. Ever.

My compassion was only tempered by feelings of anger toward the architects of this war, the neo-cons in Washington, greedy for Iraq's oil, happy to give lucrative restoration projects to their friends in big business. Probably also concerned with the instability of Saddam's regime and his recent move to trade oil in Euros rather than dollars. Anger towards their crony, Blair and his dossiers of lies. Even more anger toward the big publishers, Murdoch in particular, whose media made the war possible, and the cowardly, snivelling teams of journalists that work for him - have they no conscience at all?

There's also another bunch of victims who are seldom thought of as such - last year 6,526 US Army veterans took their own lives compared to 3,863 actually killed in the 5 years of war, and ironically this comes from one of Murdoch's own publications, The Times.

Your ISP could soon be spying on you

2008-03-07T09:24:00.002Z

BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse have announced plans to feed information about which websites you visit to a company called Phorm who in turn will supply targetted advertising to any sites you visit that take their advertising from them. BT have already surreptitiously trialled profiling as revealed in this Register article.

In June 2007, Reg reader Stephen noticed his Firefox 2.0.0.4 installations making suspicious unauthorised connections to the domain dns.sysip.net every time he visted any website. Naturally worried his machines had contracted some kind of digital infection, Stephen performed a series of exhaustive malware scans, which all came back clean.

He wasn't the only BT subscriber to notice that his browser was making the mysterious contacts around July last year, as this thread archived at Thinkbroadband.com shows.

"I spent all weekend wiping my disks clean and reinstalling from backups (four PCs seemed to be affected). I spent a further two days researching and installing all kinds of anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-rootkit utilities. But even after all that I still have this problem!" Stephen told us at the time.

Having failed to trace the source of the dodgy redirect in his own network, he contacted BT to suggest one of their DNS servers may have been hijacked. BT dismissed the idea, yet the browser requests were still making an unauthorised stop off at dns.sysip.net.

Worried that his business' financial data might be being monitored, Stephen continued to investigate. A Whois search for dns.sysip.net revealed the domain was registered by Ahmet Can, an employee of a new online advertising company called 121Media. The address is now registered through a third party private domaining agency. 121Media rebranded itself as - you guessed it - Phorm in May 2007.

Phorm's provenence is even more questionable (Register article):

Phorm is run by Kent Ertegrul, a serial entrepreneur whose past ventures include selling joyrides on Russian fighter jets. Previously, his most notable foray online was as the founder of PeopleOnPage, an ad network that operated earlier in the decade and which was blacklisted as spyware by the likes of Symantec and F-Secure.

I fear few people using the ISPs in question will ever realise what's going on, let alone complain, and the revenue stream will make it virtually impossible for other ISPs to avoid signing up too. In short, soon you will have little choice.
What you can do is to set your browser to refuse cookies from www.webwise.net, a form of opting-out rather than opting-in. Also, use Firefox as your browser and install the Adblock Plus add-in to get rid of not just this, but loads of other unwanted junk (when I check the server stats on any of my sites, I'm always amazed at the number of people still using Internet Explorer).

The BBC for once has a rather good article (their technology stuff is usually rather naive IMHO) addressing these concerns. As with the interviewer, I was also susprised by their claims that a "respected" organisation, Privacy Intenational, had praised their system. Personally, I'd never heard of them before, and it raises the eyebrow still further when it's mentioned that the consulting was done through a commercial enterprise that they'd only just recently set up.

As a broader concern, it annoys me more what big business is allowed to get away with, disengenuously using the lack of knowledge of the general public. For another example, the built-in DRM layer in Windows Vista. It's something the big studios asked for and does the consumer no earthly good while wasting a whole load of their computer's power.

These are legitimate businesses, yet their actions seem only one step removed from the criminals making viruses and trojans.

Optimism & pessimism

2008-03-01T11:10:00.001Z

Seems just lately the news is full of murders. Moving onto the bigger, international picture things look even worse, intractable wars in the middle east and a hugely imbalanced global economy that seems to be constantly threatening to come crashing down.
It looks to me like the age in which the 3 poisons - greed, anger and ignorance - have truly taken hold. To be fair, it's probably seemed that way in many a previous time.
By contast the technology is soaring ahead and as a consequence we now have something akin to a global mindset. On the whole, people are wealthier than any other time in history.
What's missing is the attitude that can realise the benfits of our material wealth. In the uk in particular, the intellect is denigrated (in france, 'intellectuelle' is a compliment, here almost an insult) in favour of supposed pragmatism. Idealism is regarded as a sin of youth, something you grow out of into a dull, unrewarding middle age. No surprise then so many people suffer a mid life crisis.
The only solution I know is surprise, surprise, buddhism, to awaken the 3 buddha qualities of wisdom, courage and compassion that are inherent in all our lives.
We have the possibility of a true golden age just around the corner. We only have to believe in it and to choose it.
------------------

New business venture

2008-02-10T15:31:00.000Z

It's been difficult to find time to post on this blog as I'm heavily engaged in setting up a new internet business, dir3ct. It's intended to provide services for internet traders and our first offerings are a shopping cart package and a "back-office" system, Epic, which provides things like purchase orders and picking lists. We host them for you too, so all you need at your end is a browser.

It'll most likely appeal to the trader who has a mix of sales from ebay and from their own website. The great thing about Epic is that it'll typically cut 3-4 out hours of donkey work for the trader that has, say, 100 transactions a day. Use our shopping cart too, and you get further benefits from the way they tightly integrate.

Not all the bits and pieces of the site are up and working yet, we're aiming to have everything ready for the start of April.

We also supply hosting separately, for any sort of legal site except porn due its high bandwidth requirements.

Turkeys, roosting

2008-02-02T11:32:00.000Z

Microsoft $44.6bn bid for Yahoo

The only real shock about it is how much they're paying, but then again share prices are all about perception rather than genuine value. As Keynes put it, it's like a beauty contest in which you're voting not for the most beautiful entrant but the one the other judges are most likely to pick. It should make the share price of the combined company soar, at least in the short term.

The reality is that neither company are great performers in the internet world. Microsoft have long been playing catch-up... and failing, whereas Yahoo seem stuck in the late 1990's.

Yahoo were simply eclipsed by Google with its attitude of providing web users with free, relevant search, putting providing a service first. The relevance point is critical, before, with any of the search engines, query on, say, "Pizza in Coventry" and your first 20 results would most likely be 10 "me-too" porn sites, 7 dismal American rock bands, 2 obscure academic papers and 1 actual pizza parlour, and even then probably in Coventry, Connecticut rather than Coventry, UK. Yahoo do have a structured directory too, which is excellent, but there's a better one at the Open Directory.

Microsoft seem to have always been playing catch-up, after all, Windows hit the market long after the Mac OS and only with XP did it start to come close in terms of ease of use. Their business strategy however, could scarcely be faulted (as being the world's wealthiest company attests), lock-in consumers and regularly produce ever more bloated products. Perhaps the wheels are starting to come off with Vista though, like many techies, I will never use it. Apart from it requiring a pretty hunky machine to be able to run its eye-candy, I'm not going to have an OS on board that has a DRM layer at base, slowing everything down. If the big US copyright holders want me to run it, and that's who it's for, they can buy the PC for me.

For all its marketplace dominance, Microsoft have rarely been innovators, the only truly original product of theirs I can think of is ASP.

Which brings us back to this takeover deal, 2 huge businesses who've slid behind in the internet revolution, trying to cling to their position by a merger of muscle, altogether reminiscent of that other gigantic deal, the Time-Warner takeover of AOL.

Some are touting it as the emergence of a serious competitor to Google, but I doubt it. I hope a competitor does arise, but it's far more likely to come from another audacious start-up as they once were.

It's not only technology and business, it's about being part of the whole culture of the net.

My favourite Christmas poem

2007-12-23T20:49:00.000Z

Many years ago when I was a nipper, my granddad would recite this when he'd had a few.

It was Christmas Day in the workhouse,
The season of good cheer,
The paupers they were merry,
Their bellies full of beer.

The arrogant workhouse master
As he strolled along the halls,
Wished them all a merry Christmas,
The paupers answered, 'balls'!

This made the master angry,
And he swore by all the gods,
He'd take away their Christmas pudding
The dirty rotten sods.

Then out spake one old pauper,
With a face as bold as brass,
Said, you can take your Christmas pudding,
And shove it up your arse.

Every child should have a grandfather who can come out with gems of folkloric wisdom such as this.

Merry Xmas to all my readers

2007-12-20T22:12:00.001Z

I just wanna say I love you all! [blows kisses] Thankyou so much for being such loyal readers and, dare I say it, friends!

Well really it was just an excuse to indulge in a bit of Photoshop manipulation and compositing, not to mention red wine and Led Zeppelin CDs.

I usually send out some digital artwork for Christmas, the theory being it's good P.R.

Who knows?

Computers & culture

2007-12-16T22:32:00.001Z

Since the beginning of recorded music, the sound of human song has changed with each new generation of people. There's no confusing a 1930s song with a 1940s song, or a 1950s song with a 1960s song. The pattern sticks until roughly the end of the 1980s. It's not easy to tell whether a song came from 1990 or 2000.

This might sound like an extraordinary claim, but you can test it yourself. Listen to random clips from the many sources of songs available on the Internet and don't peek at the year they were produced. You'll discover that it's harder to date songs from the last two decades than songs from previous decades...

If you accept that there has been a recent decrease in stylistic variety in human song, the next question is "Why?" There are plenty of possibilities: Maybe the Internet makes too much information available, so everyone has the same influences to absorb—and songs lose flavor and take on a generic quality. To be more cynical, it could be a sign of cultural decline.

Another explanation, which is the one I suspect, is that the change since the mid-1980s corresponds with the appearance of digital editing tools for music.

Reading an article by Jaron Lanier in which he mentioned that each decade has turned out a distinctive music up until the 1990s / 2000s, when popular music started to become indistinguishable, it occurred to me that while I couldn't disagree with this, I doubted the cause to which he ascribed it, probably that computer based production tools are enforcing a particular sound, particularly in the accuracy of sticking to the beat. Computers have pervaded all cultural fields, not just music, yet there seems to be quite the opposite happening elsewhere. For example, photoshop has opened up vast new possibilities with say, photographic montage, and has by no means rigidified uses. His other suggested cause, that the internet has exposed everyone to the same influences doesn't hit home for me either, that would if anything, widen an individual's input stream.

I think it's more what's happened to popular music within our society. It's long been, as part of the teenager marketing phenomonen, a means to fame and fortune for the record companies and their insiders. The distinctive musical forms of the last century have largely happened outside the industry, later to be adopted by it. Think blues, hippy, punk or techno. It's an industry now on the defensive and at the same time youth culture has become consumerist and money_worshipping. The creativity's dead.

The revolution starts tomorrow: until then you're stuck with the back-catalogue.

------------------

3ix v RBN

2007-12-02T20:24:00.000Z

Received a couple of e-mails today from 3ix tech support. Seems they weren't ignoring me after all.

We have checked your issue and banned the source for the script on our server.

...

This is due to some specific accounts i.e. some accounts have incorrect permissions given to the files and folders.Because of this some malicious scripts are added to the files.We have banned such IPs on server and changed Firewall rules.

I'd already found a way of preventing the malicious script tampering with my pages, but I'd prefer not to post it here as they may use the info to make their script cleverer.

I now have a dead laptop to contend with. It was a dual-boot XP / Ubuntu, but with XP suffering so many faults plus nervousness about it possibly having been trojanned by RBN's nasties, I decided to reinstall XP completely. This wiped out my Ubuntu partition but didn't remove the GRUB boot loader which now fails because Ubuntu's gone. The solution it seems is to get into the recovery utility from the XP setup CD and fix the MBR (I'd never heard of it before last night either). But the laptop being a Vaio, you don't get a CD, everything's preloaded onto the hard drive including Sony's proprietary extensions, which while mainly bloatware are essential for the thing to run properly. So tomorrow, see if I can borrow an XP setup CD...

Under attack

2007-11-29T15:57:00.000Z

I've had to take my own website, factorxsystems.com, down. It had become infected with a nasty little piece of javascript that hooked up to a Russian site, x-victory.ru. Don't worry, this blog's hosted by google! Do a search on x-victory.ru and it looks like it's being run by the Russian Business Network as a means of infecting pc's to recruit them for its network of zombies, poised to deluge others the world over with spam, or to be used in co-ordinated DDOS attacks. You can find out more about this nefarious criminal organisation here and at CastleCops

At first I thought I'd been sloppy in my coding and security, but I couldn't find where they'd got in. After some digging, it seems there are loads of other sites hosted on the same server who are all infected. I found who they were by means of my IP neighbors. Don't look at any of those other sites unless you have a good, up-to-date antivirus and preferably a firewall (use it to exclude addresses 58.65.239.114 and 85.255.114.170). This could well mean the server is infected by a rootkit.

I e-mailed the hosting company, 3ix's support people whose response was that I was at fault. Dig around enough and you can see people have been complaining to 3ix about this for at least the last 2 weeks.

It's bad enough having RBN around, far worse when people in the business make their life so easy.

Terroryst Plotte Foyled

2007-11-04T21:09:00.000Z

Nov 5th, 1605.

A terrorist plot to blow up the House of Lords was discovered today minutes before it could be executed and the entire country thrown into chaos. The plotters, mad Catholic fundamentalists, were planning to mount a coup in its wake, reverting this country to a mediaeval theocracy. They had assembled the largest ever cache of the advanced explosive, gunpowder.

The serjeant-at-arms, Sir William Bastarde, said today the terrorists were caught at the very last moment and marks a major achievement for the security forces, who were doing a good job under very difficult circumstances. The insurgents were being held in the maximum security prison at the Tower of London. He denied they were being tortured and were merely undergoing standard 'robust' interrogation techniques such as the rack, hot irons and being broken on the wheel.

Sir William said the terrorists, led by Robert Catesby and Guy 'Guido' Fawkes, would be tried and then executed. The government would press for the maximum penalty, hanging, drawing and quartering, and he deplored 'namby pamby liberals' who would like them to get off with a beheading.

Make no mistake, this plot has been hatched in Rome by the Catholofascist Vatican. A spokesman for the Pope today said that the Pope deplored terrorism and condemned wholeheartedly anyone involved in such bombings.

Burma directory set up

2007-10-11T17:53:00.001Z

Burma Activists Resource and Campaign Area

The protests have been largely suppressed and, as a result, everything about Burma has dropped from the front page (less said about the UK tabloids the better), but a small number of us are trying to keep the issue current. Setting up the website, a directory of a whole load of other info available on the net is just a small step but it's better than nothing. The intention is to open up this site for the usage of other activists but it's early days yet.

The generals haven't won. The people of Burma have lost another battle but when the Vietnamese won their war against the Americans they lost every significant battle.

Sanctions

2007-10-05T09:01:00.000Z

It appears Than Shwe has offered to meet Burma's legitimate and imprisoned leader, Aung San Suu Kyi provided, amongst other things, she drops her calls for sanctions.
BBC story
This has to be the final nail in the coffin for those who claim sanctions wouldn't work. It hits the generals where it hurts most - in the pocket.
The problem is it has to be concerted action, the US and EU have moved forwards (even though they do nothing about Chevron and Total's continuing presence), but it's true that even a total pull-out would allow others to increase their commitment there, and it's why we need to see the rest shift their position, principally China, Thailand, India, Japan and Singapore.

And to any people who're foolish enough to believe Burma's a faraway small country of no significance to yourselves, every country that isn't already a dictatorship has military governors waiting in the wings, ready to take over should they decide a national emergency became dire enough and they must be watching this with great interest. With the attack on the monks, the illegal regime turned a very sharp corner, distancing themselves from the population much further than ever.

They mustn't be allowed to get away with it.

2007-10-04T14:36:00.000Z

Bloggers on strike today.

Unofficial 2008 Olympics logo

2007-10-03T12:30:00.000Z

I think this one expresses more what we feel about it.

Swift

2007-10-03T12:17:00.000Z

Another target:

Swift is a financial services co-operative company owned and controlled by many of the world’s largest banks, including Citibank, HSBC and ABN Amro. Swift hosts an electronic network that banks use to make transfers to each other. Following the imposition of financial sanctions by the United States government in August 2003 the regime faced a crisis, unable to use dollars in financial transactions. Swift came to their aid, making four Burmese banks part of its network. The regime is now able to avoid US financial sanctions by making financial transfers in Euros using Swift’s network.

Jaap Kamp
Chairman, Swift
C/O ABN AMRO Bank N.V.
Head Office
Gustav Mahlerlaan 10
1082 PP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Leonard H Schrank
Chief Executive Officer
Swift
Avenue Adèle 1
B-1310 La Hulpe
Belgium
Fax: 00 32 2 655 32 26
Email: kara.condon@swift.com

Managing Director
Swift
7th floor, The Corn Exchange
55 Mark Lane
London EC3R 7NE
Fax: 020 7762 2222

You can also let Swift know what you think of their support for the generals here. Frankly I don't think you can get your bank to stop using them, swift is too much part of the banking infrastructure, but do they and their users want so much publicity for what, in global banking terms, is a pittance?

Reprisals

2007-10-02T10:15:00.000Z

News coming out of Burma is slowing to a trickle now the armed forces have closed down communications. We could always be sure the reprisals would be horrific but I've just found this:

The undertakers from “Yay-Way” cemetry, reported that the SPDC cremates all the corpses as well as those injured protesters who are still alive.

Another graphic for the collection:

Meantime UN envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, is getting the runaround from the generals:

Yesterday, Mr Gambari was stalled for a day and forced to fill in his time visiting a remote corner of Burma courtesy of the military as tensions remained following 12 days of demonstrations that represented the most concerted challenge to the junta's rule since 1988.
...
Yesterday he travelled further north by Burmese military helicopter to the town of Lashio, in Shan state near the Chinese border, to an obscure government-sponsored workshop.

With China and Russia's vetoes in place, they can comfortably humiliate him. No doubt if he does get to see Than Shwe, he'll get only the usual drivel out of him, like their foreign minister, Nyan Win told the UN General Assembly:

"Recent events make clear that there are elements within and outside the country who wish to derail the ongoing process [toward democracy] so that they can take advantage of the chaos that would follow"

Guardian report

With apologies to the Sex Pistols

2007-10-01T20:37:00.000Z

Please don't give the Burmese generals your tourist dollars.

Burma sinking

2007-10-01T18:46:00.000Z

... in the news. It's no longer front page, I guess the media assume it's dead for another dozen years or so. Please don't let it drop off the screen, continue hassling your MP and companies that trade / invest there.

Interestingly the BBC has bought Lonely Planet. Perhaps they may take a more moral stance than the Wheelers over their guide to 'Myanmar'. At least being in the UK it'll be easier to lobby them.

Meantime another blog to check out:
Burmese Bloggers without Borders

Burmese junta split?

2007-09-29T16:24:00.001Z

Check out this report in the Scotsman. It's claimed that General Maung Aye is having talks with Aung San Suu Kyi.
Of course, there may be no truth in it, communications have been largely cut making reporting pretty difficult. But it's not as though they don't have previous form, many's the general basking in power and wealth (well, skulking in their lair in Pyinmana) one day, only to find himself in chokey the next. Rather than a united front, they're riven with cliques.
Pretty odd bunch too, who put their faith in astrologers, fortune tellers and conjurors.

C'mon China, do summat!

2007-09-29T15:41:00.000Z

The Chinese government is key to the situation in Burma. They can turn the screw on the junta. Ideally they should offer the generals a safe refuge out of Burma and lean on them to leave.
If the Chinese choose to allow the generals to enact vicious reprisals we, as consumers, should boycott the 2008 Olympics and pressure our own governments to withdraw from it. Sorry it's another boycott, but what other power do we Western consumers have?
It's not as though they don't already have problems with junta, they allow narco armies to operate in remote areas as a counter weight to tribal militias, which in turn, leads to southern China being inundated with heroin.

Ooh look what I found I on teh internets

2007-09-28T20:49:00.000Z

Sums it up nicely.
:)

Army mutiny?

2007-09-28T15:44:00.000Z

Check out the Newsdesk link:

Reports from Rangoon suggest soldiers are mutinying. It is unclear the numbers involved. Reports cite heavy shooting in the former Burmese capital.

The organisation Helfen ohne Grenzen (Help without Frontiers) is reporting that "Soldiers from LID (Light Infantry Divison) #66 have turned their weapons against other government troops and possibly police in North Okkalappa township in Rangoon and are defending the protesters. At present unsure how many soldiers involved."

Soldiers in Mandalay, where unrest has spread to as we reported this morning, are also reported to have refused orders to act against protesters.

Some reports claim that many soldiers remained in their barracks. More recent reports now maintain that soldiers from LID #99 now being sent there to confront them

and

Military sources in Rangoon are claiming that the regime's number two, General Maung Aye (right), has staged a coup against Than Shwe, and that his troops are now guarding Aung San Suu Kyi's home.

It must be galling for even the most hardened troops to be forced to attack monks, given their position of respect in Burmese society, and must cause a tremendous internal conflict for them. I hope their rebellion succeeds, if not the reprisals taken against them will probably be horrific.

Lonely Planet's PR wallahs respond

2007-09-28T12:57:00.000Z

Having e-mailed them to let them know I'd be joining the boycott of their products while they continue to produce their guidebook to Burma, I received a response by e-mail trying to vindicate their stance. I won't reproduce it verbatim as that might infringe copyright.

1. Their main claim is that they're providing information to allow 'travellers' (LP don't cater to 'tourists' :) ) to make an informed choice about whether or not to visit Burma. Herein lies the transformation of the last 3 decades or so, LP originally started with a readership that could be considered the tail end of the hippie era, now in common with the rest of society they've become consumers, irrespective of them liking to think of themselves as 'backpackers' or 'alternative'. Today's backpacker is basically a tourist doing it on the cheap (and you'd know how cheap, if like me, you've run a cafe in Thailand and 6 backpackers have spent an entire evening huddled around a single bottle of Coke so as to be able to watch the film we were screening on our TV for free).
So the presence of one of the world's most repressive regimes, comes down to just another factor along with cost, climate, beaches, availability of drugs, etc. If any of their consumers was really that concerned about human rights they'd be perfectly well aware of the horrific nature of the Burmese government.
What if LP had been around in the 1930s, would they have produced a guidebook for Nazi Germany too?

2. They claim that to do otherwise would be banning books and stifling information. Sorry, can't have it both ways - if we the public are no more than consumers and it all comes down to choice, they can hardly complain if a section of that public choose not to buy their books. Is it really stifling information, do their books tell you anything you need to know about the political situation there you can't get from the net or the newspapers?

3. They claim their guidebooks allow tourists to spend money so as to go to the locals rather than the military regime. The regime is primarily a kleptocracy, enriching itself at the expense of the Burmese population, which is why I believe in this case sanctions can have an effect: starve them of cash and they lose their reason to retain power. You have to change your tourist currency for Burmese kyats at some point (presumably you can change some on the black market, be a tad suspicious if you didn't change any at all officially) which puts hard currency their way, the kyat being utterly worthless on the international markets.
Don't forget the generals have to pay for the bullets their troops use on monks and protesters, although AFAIK some of their near neighbours have treated them rather generously in this respect. Also don't forget at least some of the tourist infrastructure that you'll use was built with forced labour.

4. They encourage their tourists to speak out on what they've seen and contact their Burmese embassy. Has any backpacker told you anything you didn't know or couldn't find out through the other media? And while I doubt contacting their embassies will have any effect, I'd still encourage anyone to have a go, but does anyone really think the fact that you've put hard currency in the generals' back pockets mean your opinions will carry more weight?

But I think the overall point is that treating people as consumers, as our society does to such a great extent, means influencing choices. Most backpackers are not stupid, they know full well Burma is a brutally repressive society, but they can feel vindicated in their choice to go there, not only in that a supposedly responsible corporate like Lonely Planet publishes a guidebook but more than that, reassures them their choice is vindicated by maybe spreading on the info about what they've seen.

I'd suggest that people should rather respect Aung San Suu Kyi's request and not go to Burma. May I also suggest that you do Lonely Planet the service of letting them know they're out of order by boycotting their products.

Burma Campaign's rather telling graphic.

Burma, get your news

2007-09-27T21:32:00.000Z

Some links:

BurmaNet News
The Irrawaddy
Bangkok-based blog with some articles & photos
Mizzima News
Petition to the PM to support the Burmese people
Reporters Sans Frontieres (in English), some articles
Ko Htike - a Burmese guy collating material from 10 sources within Burma
Petition to the PM to boycott the 2008 Olympics in Beijing
Burma Campaign UK
Boycott Lonely Planet Campaign
Protest to Total Oil
Burma Campaign's list of businesses trading / investing in Burma
ITUC Global Action
TUC demonstration
Article on Chevron Oil in Burma
The Buddhist Channel
Newsdesk Special
Burma-Myanmar Genocide 2007 (warning: some shocking pictures)

If you find any other good news sources or campaigns, please use the comments thingy to let me know.

Russia and China

2007-09-27T08:07:00.001Z

Both oppose even strongly worded criticism of Burma in the UN, relying on cold-war blather about 'sovreignty'. Wonder why it is that the governments with even less legitimacy than Bush during his first term of office would rather ordinary people suffer than a bunch of kleptocratic generals are packed off to an exile well-funded by their criminal exploits and no doubt securely stashed in Swiss bank accounts? Perhaps because they could be next-door neighbours soon?

Certainly they can't in any way go back to justifying their attitude as "anti-imperialist", what is Than Shwe's clique other than a mere proxy for China, Russia, India, France and others to plunder Burma's natural wealth and use it's people for forced labour (while getting their own substantial rake-off)?
------------------

Burmese monks shot

2007-09-26T10:40:00.000Z

According to reports, monks have been beaten with clubs and 11 shot, 1 dead.

The clampdown has started

2007-09-26T09:22:00.000Z

Riot police attack monks in Burma

Shocked but not surprised.

At least President Bush has spoken out strongly, though will the tough new sanctions include Chevron, he's always seemed to pander to the US's oil industry? You can see a list of companies dealing with the illegal regime at The Burma Campaign's Dirty List. At least he's making some noise, last night on Newsnight, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband merely repeated mantra-like that he'd been advised by the Foreign Office that no major UK company has investment in Burma. Of course whenever a politician hedges like this, it's a fair bet they're not giving you the entire picture - if you consult the Dirty List there are a large number of UK companies, both major (e.g. Rolls-Royce) and minor trading there. On the other hand, he is pressing the EU to take it up in a more robust fashion, and the list reveals a number of French companies with significant dealings.

In reality, the west's influence is rather limited (though that's no excuse for inaction, of course). The big player is China. While the 'Communist' government can be rather thick-skinned where business is concerned, it certainly doesn't like to lose face and appears rather vulnerable over the 2008 olympics. How about a "Boycott Beijing if there's Bloodshed in Burma" campaign?

Special mention must go to the travel guide company, Lonely Planet. They still produce a Burma guide and try to get away with it by fudging it that backpackers should leave it to their own conscience, and even claiming that contact with ordinary Burmese people would be beneficial. This advice while patently slimy is borderline hypocritical given their stance of backpackers being so much holier than tourists. Their Thailand guide, I'm told, advises people not to buy from beach sellers, who're among the poorest of Thai people, so as not to encourage them.

Boycotting the olympics is not really an issue for me as I can't be bothered to watch people jumping over sticks and running round in circles in stadia so plastered with corporate branding as to be reduced to a gluttonfest, but I'll certainly never buy a Lonely Planet book again and would urge you, dear reader, to do likewise.

Reasons to be cheerful

2007-09-23T15:55:00.000Z

Can only hope it's the beginning of the end for the world's vilest regime, the SLORC (or whatever they call themselves now) in Burma.
BBC story
Opposition's growing, not receding. We can only hope they don't end it in major bloodshed like they have before.
It would help if their major backers in China and Japan persuaded them to give up power peacefully. After all, these robbers have probably salted away enough in their Swiss bank accounts to live out the rest of their days comfortably.

A thought that came to me today while chanting

2007-09-22T21:05:00.001Z

"A galaxy of possibilities"
------------------

Northern Rock

2007-09-21T08:06:00.001Z

Recriminations go on over this fiasco, but without resolve, as both sides of the argument are valid - on the one hand to bail them out is a reward for bad risk-taking, on the other it would be sheer stupidity to allow a crash whose contagion risks bringing down the entire economy.

Alan Bond, when in difficulties said that if you owe the banks $1000 you have a problem whereas if you owe them $1,000,000 they have a problem. Same situation, roles reversed.

On the wider scale, we have an entire economy based on debt, consumer debt estimated at over £1000 million, a huge raft of mortgages based on ever-increasing house prices and behind the scenes, an indebtedness of the big financial institutions to one another made ever more impervious through repackaging and derivative dealing.

The capitalist economy is a cyclical one, of building up huge amounts of false value then shrugging it off. Sadly the Keynsian concern of economists to iron out the peaks and troughs has been replaced by the 'history is bunk' blindness of the Friedmanites.

Disentangling this mess will no doubt be far harder than stacking it up.

Rock the casbah

2007-09-15T20:54:00.001Z

The banking crisis is starting to get panicky now, particularly with everyone queuing up to get their money out of Northern Rock. We can only hope it doesn't presage a full scale run on the banks, a symptom / cause of the 1929 crash.

Of course, if you revert the politico-economic system to that of the 1920's, you hit Marx's saying about those who fail to understand history. Incidentally, do economists never study economic history?

The 30s saw a depression that was only mitigated by government spending, particularly the New Deal in the USA, but only fully conquered by the outbreak of world war 2.

What a coincidence then, according to Whitehouse / Pentagon insiders, Bush plans to attack Iran next year, his last year in office.

For all that they call themselves 'neo-cons', they're tired old men peddling tired old ideas. Trouble is, they're dangerously close to the big red button.

Ashoka

2007-09-02T20:54:00.001Z

Very surprised by a tv programme on Indian history the other night, covering the period from Alexander's conquest of the Persian empire through to and largely about the kingdom of Ashoka.

Though the name would be familiar to anyone who's studied even a little about Buddhism, I hadn't realised just how advanced his political ideology was. He forged his kingdom through a terrible war and, horrified by the death and misery created, proceded to run his kingdom on largely Buddhist principles, embracing such ideas as non-violence, respect for the environment, religious tolerance and animal welfare.

As such, he was ahead of much thinking today and, while the 2000+ years since have seen great material and technological progress, in other areas, we've fallen way behind.

Some may object that 'real world' politics requires a more hard-headed attitude, let's not forget they've brought us global warming, failed imperialist wars in Iraq and Vietnam and a world that despite being wealthier than ever has widescale hunger, epidemics and illiteracy.

------------------

Not enough fivers

2007-06-21T08:45:00.000Z

Just seen a report in the paper that Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, has criticised the high st banks for not putting enough fivers in circulation. This gels with experience - several occasions recently I've had to accept a whole load of coins in my change as the shop or pub didn't have any £5 notes.

I hope things will change, I really don't want to see a situation like travelling in India in the 80s and 90s, you had to cling on to small denomination notes as no-one ever seemed to have change.

------------------

Mediaeval village exhibition at Kenilworth Castle

2007-06-04T21:58:00.000Z

Ideal place to play with the new camera. :)

30 years on

2007-06-03T20:02:00.000Z

Last night the bbc had a documentary on punk rock. It was great to see all the old clips, especially the sex pistols being interviewed by Bill Grundy, while at the time the swearing on prime time tv seemed so juvenile, now it seems really quite iconoclastic.
Tonight there's one on Bob Marley playing in 1977.
This was the sort of music we all wanted to see at the time but the official media wouldn't touch it with an extemely long barge pole (I suppose the grundy incident made that a certainty). Kinda strange it's now achieved acceptability, the context has changed and the 'threat' has dissipated. Perhaps the lack of anything original coming out of the music industry helps explain it. But then again punk and reggae came from industry outsidersn the biz itself was if anything even more clueless then.
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Bob Soloway arrested

2007-06-03T08:36:00.000Z

One of the most annoying and prolific spammers ever has been arrested.

This guy owns a business called NIM, NPR and many other names and his trademark spam was the one beginning:

email advertise like this to 8,000,000 people this week for free..

http://www.emailadvertisinginc.com/

Though it wasn't just annoyance, this guy has screwed up lives and businesses:

The false headers he put on emails led many people to have their legitimate email addresses or domains blacklisted by anti-spam groups.

The authorities are seeking a USD772,000 fine which is probably chickenfeed to him. A fairer punishment I think would be to fine him every last cent he made from his vile business.

Sod's law

2007-06-01T17:16:00.000Z

One of the main applications of sod's law is in designing computer sdystems: if you don't allow for a situation, however unlikely it is, it becomes almost a certainty to occur. In fact some would say the more vehemently it's rejected during design meetings the shorter the timescale in which it will happen.
It strikes me there's a similarity to the strong anthropic principle, albeit in a perverse way. It states that the universe requires an observer to exist. As I prefer to think of it, it's possible many universes have existed, but lacking an observer, they mattered not a monkey's.
Both this principle and sod's law bind external material reality to consdciousness.
Would this therefore imply a universe without observers would also lack misfortune?
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Politicians

2007-05-30T17:57:00.000Z

Newsnight last night interviewed the 6 contenders for the deputy PM job. The most amusing question was would they had voted the the War Against Iraq had they known what they know now? The replies were uniform and predictable. Each blamed the 'false intelligence' but would still have gone for it. Reading between the lines, I interpreted it as 'yes, I would keep my snout in the trough'. No-one in the real world believed the 45 minutes claim, hard on the heels of the dodgy dossier.
We can only guess at Blair's orders from Bush, but we can guess the other half of the deal was that the uk would share in the pillage, between the grab for oil, the reconstruction contracts and Iraqis having to pay for the cost of the west's attack on them.
Only a fool amongst politicians who crave a seat at the top table would speak out against the war.
I just wish they wouldn't pretend to be motivated by conscience, it's as sickening as it is transparent.
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Moscow riot cops

2007-05-29T07:31:00.000Z

Why do they wear their badges backwards?

There... I've corrected the photo by flipping it horizontally.

I just hope it embarrasses the bejasus out of them, obviously their actions don't.

Software stuff

2007-05-27T20:44:00.000Z

Spent the afternoon installing ubuntu on my laptop (kept windows xp purely so I can run photoshop and illustrator). Well, what else is there to do on a wet Sunday afternoon in a dismal outer suburb of Cov? The basics of the install are dead easy though I don't have apache, php or java running yet. I think the real difficulties with it are 'cultural'- you have to get used to the ubuntu way of doing things, which is a bit different to other linux distros I've used in the past. I think the big difference compared to indows though is it has the feel of solidity about it, I don't feel I'm on the edge of a crash or infection from a nasty lurling on the interweb.

For the last month or so I've been working on version 2 of simplyallstuff's 'backend', the order processing system. It's the 1st thing I've written in Java SE1.5 and I'm very impressed with generics. They increase java's typesafe aspect, which considering the other language I use mostly is PHP (totally non-typesafe) I really appreciate. It means for one thing that if a chunk of code compiles there's a far greater chance of it working correctly 1st time. I suppose the holy grail of programming languages would be one in which coding was so unambiguous and so restricted to the rules of formal logic that if it was valid it would also be logically valid too. We're still decades away from it, at least, but generics are a welcome step along the way.
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The dalek tunnel

2007-05-26T19:46:00.000Z

How could I have failed to include this in my post on the mismatch between old and new in Cov's architecture. This monstrosity is in a class of it's own.

It links the Council House with an annexe across the road. The Council House is not as old as it looks, it was built in 1911, mock-gothic like the Houses of Parliament.

Thailand crisis?

2007-05-25T17:21:00.000Z

The king made a public speech on Thursday night, which is rare enough to be news in itself, directed toward the judges who may be called upon to give a verdict on the dissolution of the 2 main parties by the (separate consitutional judges). Thai Rak Thai and the Democrats are both facing serious corruption allegations, though it'd be TRT that's the main cause of concern. TRT was Shinawatra Thaksin's party and presumably he still leads it form the uk where he's now based and poised to take over manchester city.

In the king's speech, he takes great pains to point out how he's not allowd to interfere in constitutional affairs but urges the judges to consider carefully what the effect of their judgments might be. At first I thought it was just the usual Thai 'face'; thing, demonstrations look bad. But for the king to speak out like this could mean he fears something more serious, perhaps a 2nd coup?

Whatever they decide will lead to trouble or damage, not only to you but me as well.

It was widely speculated that the last one had at least his tacit approval - could this mean something's being plotted in which he has no influence.

As many people as might support thaksin, the king's popularity is far, far greater than any thai politician's. But what would happen if it was an army faction that the king openly opposed? It could go as far as civil war, but I think that possibility's remote.

More likely some face-saving solution will be found and in a year or two, thailand will go back to democracy under yet another constitution. The endemic corruption that killed the last one will probably still be hanging round though.

BBC report

All change

2007-05-24T17:28:00.000Z

Getting the dslr will, I think, force bigger changes on my photography than was first apparent.

Firstly, much of my equipment is obsolete, not just my big old hammerhead flash but also little items such as my cable release. Most filters are now unnecessary apart from a UV to protect the lens and a polariser for shooting near water and suchlike.

A bigger change comes with processing where I need to rethink the workflow. Critical stuff is best done as .nef files (nikon equivalent of RAW) so I think it'll be a matter of downloading them, converting them to .dng while doing any gross fixes like correcting colour casts then delete any unwanted ones. Remaining ones can then have a working copy made, a smaller .psd and the .dng's backed up and deleted. Subjective changes (e.g. cropping) will be made from the working copy and saved as still smaller versions, probably .jpg's.

One thing that strikes me as slightly tragic is that I or others apart from a few diehards or photographty students, will never get that great delight of seeing a print come up in the developing tray. Your first one is really almost magical.

Moreover I'm not happy about the inherent obsolescence of equipment now. In a few years time, the D80 will be worthless. Compare that to Nikon's legendary F2, which came out in the late 60s IIRC and yet still had professionals using it widely until just a few years ago.

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The death of culture

2007-05-21T17:05:00.000Z

Saturday's FA Cup final was by common consent one of the dullest in living memory. The excuse being given is that both sides were tired, being in so many competitions this season. The thing is it felt almost inevitable it would be between Chelsea and Man Utd, being the only clubs with the financial clout to get there. We're now waiting to see which of the takeovers by big international capital will allow other clubs to compete.

The truly remarkable thing was the New Wembley with a plethora of celebrities and prices to make most of us flinch, £1 for a packet of crisps and £8 for a burger. As so many lamented, football is no longer the game of the cloth-capped working man.

There's nothing really new here though, the seeds were sown with the sell off of tv rights to sky, pay per view putting it out of reach of many of the poor.

It's not just football. Many of our pubs are now identikit chain outlets, there's little if anything new coming through in popular music, virtually all fashions seen on the streets are rehashes of the past and most of television has got dulled down to the point it'd make a goat vomit.

Big capital wants to reduce risk. Culture needs it.

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Blogging from a blackberry

2007-05-21T11:55:00.000Z

Wow, this technology....... :)

New toy

2007-05-19T12:16:00.000Z

Bought myself a Nikon D-80 body as part of starting to upgrade my equipment for providing a full set of digital services. Tried it out today in the centre of Coventry.

I've long been wanting to get a shot of this shop.

The Old Schoolhouse - it's disgraceful how this venerable building has been allowed to decay:

My other great bugbear is modern architecture in Coventry. I'm not against modern architecture, far from it. It's just that nearly we get here is awful and at best hopelessly incongruous amongst what's left of a mediaeval city. Take for example this beautiful walkway going through Lady Herbert's Gardens which includes a couple of gates from the old city wall.

A new version of fusion?

2007-05-06T17:32:00.000Z

The usual 'hot' one has had umpteen billions pured into it and so far has produced nothing valuable. Dr Robert Bussard's work by comparison looks rather interesting and yet's starved of funds. Picked up on it originally in u75, best description seems to be here.

When energized, the cube of electromagnets creates a magnetic sphere into which electrons are injected. The magnetic field squeezes the electrons into a dense ball at the reactor’s core, creating a highly negatively charged area.

To begin the reaction, boron-11 nuclei and protons are injected into the cube. Because of their positive charge, they accelerate to the center of the electron ball. Most of them sail through the center of the core and on toward the opposite side of the reactor. But the negative charge of the electron ball pulls them back to the center. The process repeats, perhaps thousands of times, until the boron nucleus and a proton collide with enough force to fuse.

That fusion turns boron-11 into highly energetic carbon-12, which promptly splits into a helium nucleus and a beryllium nucleus. The beryllium then splits into two more helium nuclei.

The great thing is that the only "pollution" from the process is helium, great for blimps and party tricks that make you talk like Donald Duck. There are high-energy neutrons given off which rot the equipment meaning it has to be replaced occasionally, but nothing like the radiation and dirty isotopes produced from fission. And the inputs are hydrogen and boron, both dirt-cheap to source.
More here, though this bunch seem mainly concerned with the spaceflight applications.

While Bussard's far from the fruitcakes that seem to infest the cheap energy scene, it seems perverse that such a promising area is unfunded. If you follow the second link far enough, you find they had a very promising device on a mere $2m funding, which got cut, in Bussard's words:

It was not a cutoff of OUR funding, but the entire Navy Energy Program was cut to zero in FY 2006, and we were a part of this cut. The funds were clearly needed for the more important War in Iraq.

While it's so far been a US Navy project, there doesn't seem much chance of the private sector taking up on it:

As for energy companies "stampeding" to support us -- It is clear that a view like this is ignorant of the reality of energy companies. There is only one thing the oil cvompanies want, and that is to sell oil, and more oil. So long as the fields pump, the oil companies will squeeze. They have NO, absolutely NO interest in anything new, ins spite of all their foolish ads in magazines for wind mills and solar-PV roofs. It is all just show and tell. I know these guys, and there is no way they would support anything that might get in the way of oil. The only way to stop oil, from their view, is when it does run out. And then they''ll go for deeper drilling, new fields, Gulf geopressure gas, LNG, etc, etc, and keep raising the price, until finally foolish solar and windmills become competitive.

It's the ultimate sadness of the human race in the 21st century that while we have a major crisis in terms of depletion of oil and global warming, efforts instead go into wars to control the oil-bearing countries and to prop up existing business and governmental hierarchies rather than to genuinely find solutions. Our energy / pollution crisis may look bleak but there are plenty of possible solutions on the horizon, but first and foremost we have to sort out our own society.

SimplyAllStuff's gone live

2007-04-19T14:57:00.000Z

My most major client of recent years has at last gone live amid much blood, sweat and tears, it's at
Simply All Stuff
All database-driven, XHTML / CSS and really quite tasty even if I do say so myself. A couple of highlights:

custom car mats has a framework into which I can add other non-standard products they arise
vehicle to product finder makes selecting maintenance products for a car pretty easy using AJAX, it was derived from a vast amount of manufacturer's data

Botnets overwhelming the net

2007-01-25T23:16:00.000Z

BBC story . Slight hyperbole, IMHO, but only slight. The problem yet again is Windows's poor security.
If you're going to use it with an internet connection, you owe it to the rest of the world to implement basic security. Use a decent anti-virus package, AVG is one such and free for home use and a firewall, I use Sygate Personal (I think the one that comes with XP is near useless). Spyware detectors are also worthwhile, Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy are the ones I use. Stop using Internet Explorer, which is riddled with security holes and switch to Firefox or Opera.
Better still, if you're geek enough, ditch Windows for Linux (Ubuntu is rather tasty) or, wealthy enough, a Mac with OS X.
Perhaps Vista (sorry but every time I hear the name I can't help but think of packet curries) will plug the security problems but frankly I don't have great hopes, having found a serious nasty in the production release of IE7 - if you have a paragraph or perhaps even a sentence of italicised text, any other text to the right of it usually disappears.
Added to that I'd have to spend a good few quid upgrading my main pc to run it... so thankyou Microsoft, you've finally convinced me to buy a second-hand iMac instead.

Another apology...

2007-01-25T22:50:00.000Z

I've just converted my blogs to the new version of blogger and found several pages of comments awaiting publication or rejection. I've now published them all apart from the spammers... so sorry, I haven't been ignoring you all, at least not deliberately anyway.

Apologies

2007-01-13T16:46:00.001Z

Apologies for not posting for a while, but apart from Xmas / New Year, my time has been heavily taken up by my main client project, internet retailer SimplyAllStuff.

Litvinenko

2006-12-02T19:42:00.000Z

The most talked about news story in the UK right now has to be the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

The big question is by whom and why. Before he died, his associates in the UK were quick to point the finger at Putin, though it's worth pointing out that those associates use Tim Bell, Thatcher's former PR man as their spokesperson, which on discovering this immediately made me feel sceptical about the case.

Why would Putin, through the security apparatus, the FSB, poison him? It's turned an obscure, former KGB officer into an international cause celebre. Moreover, why use Polonium-210, which, to judge from this incident is by no means reliable (he was given a 50-50 chance of survival at one stage), has to be used fairly quickly, having a half-life of 138 days, and according to today's news, expensive, estimating the cost of his dose at a staggering £20m. If they did want to bump him off, the best method would surely be to knife him in some secluded area and take his wallet, which would point the finger of suspicion at Britain's legion and vicious muggers. Of course, it could be that the intention was to kill him in as spectacular a fashion as possible, but I'm sure the likes of the FSB can think of much more horrific methods.

Another body of thought is that it was carried out by people who wanted to discredit Putin. How would they get hold of polonium-210? Russia makes the isotope in a single nuclear plant, in small, carefully-monitored amounts. It wouldn't be the easiest substance to obtain. It's also difficult to see how any such group could imagine it would blacken Putin's reputation any darker than it is at present, a leader of the oligarchs (translation: a set of capitalists who gained their positions of welath and power either from their former connections in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or from bribery and/or extreme violence) and commander of Russian forces in the war against Chechnya, one so vicious as to make even the US's destruction of Fallujah look like a vicar's tea party.

There remains the possibility of an accident, perhaps Litvinenko had been dealing in stolen materials? There can't much of a market for polonium, its applications are very limited and it's not used in weaponry. Though this phrase in the wiki article struck me as intriguing:

Russian secret services allegedly use polonium for smudging currency bills so that they can trace them

Some currency skullduggery been going on?

I don't doubt MI5 and the government know a great deal more than they're letting on, but as usual it'll probably be blocked to the public for 50 years or so. I'm midnded of Trotsky's saying that state secrets aren't mainly to be hidden from other states but rather from that state's subject population.

Towards an anti-reductionalist software culture

2006-11-28T23:37:00.000Z

Interesting short article from Jaron Lanier.

A description of my particular utopian thinking will have to wait for another month's column, but I believe the most beautiful possibilities come from treating people as mysterious wells of meaning and using technology to find new ways to connect people to each other.

Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, if not the pioneer, has frequently blasted the way software deisgn has developed, and in this article particularly chides mechanistic assumptions, that simply because the internet is coming to have a huge amount of information / computing power behind it, it will inherently outperform human mental activity at some stage.

Such arrogant attitudes can lead to software in some cases performing worse - one of his previous bugbears was a feature of Microsoft Word (sometimes wrongly) making assumptions about what you want, a feature that in a previous article he reckoned an engineer there told him couldn't be turned off. Often in such cases, simpler tools become preferable.

We all want to see a new generation of software come along, but it will need to work with humans, rather than trying to replace us.

The genuinely radical ideas in computer science come when people work honestly within the boundaries of what we don't know.

CSP technology

2006-11-27T21:32:00.000Z

The most interesting possibility to sort out all the world's energy problems - Concentrated Solar Power.
Story

Two German scientists, Dr Gerhard Knies and Dr Franz Trieb, calculate that covering just 0.5% of the world's hot deserts with a technology called concentrated solar power (CSP) would provide the world's entire electricity needs, with the technology also providing desalinated water to desert regions as a valuable byproduct, as well as air conditioning for nearby cities.

As well as the above advantages, it releases no carbon and plants can be grown in the relatively shaded areas under the mirrors, taking up otherwise useless land.

Wiki's article shows several different designs.

The technology's certainly not new, but where's the political will to move towards this highly advantageous energy generation? There's a recognition that fossil fuels are dangerous and running out. There's equally plenty of goodwill toward the nuclear industry in the UK government despite its many drawbacks - uneconomic, waste-producing and dependent on 'conventional' generation for backup. There's even a certain amount of support for windfarms though it appears rather lukewarm in the face of protest from well-heeled nimby's.

Yet you'd never know CSP even existed.

My desktop

2006-11-25T14:20:00.000Z

Courtesy of the BBC.

Security

2006-11-10T20:35:00.000Z

Two recents items of rather bad news on the net. Firstly, spam is on the rise again but now the senders are often victims themselves, from home PC's that have been infected by trojans that then use the machines as 'zombies', sending out e-mails at the behest of a remote controller - story. Most people will have noticed a huge increase in dross supposedly giving stock tips on the sly, "pump n' dump" operations. Typically the owners of a dodgy small listed business will pay a spamming operation to send out this blatantly obvious rubbish in the hope of engineering a price rise.

A couple of days ago this paedophile got jailed for 10 years for blackmailing young girls by a similar exploit, using a trojan to take remote control over their PC's, a harrowing experience for the victims. However, attempts to make out the perpetrator as a criminal genius don't wash, this is script kiddie level stuff. In fact, Windows XP even runs a service to make remote control of the desktop relatively easily.

While most people find Windows a very easy OS to use, I think it's actually a very difficult one to run securely. The usual pro-Microsoft claim is that malware writers target Windows purely because of its ubiquity; this article from the Register exposes the falsity of this claim.

Like some people I still use Windows because several applications I use heavily are only available under it. If you are going to stick with Windows, at least beef up your security with internet software form other vendors:

the worst culprit IMHO is Outlook / Outlook Express, use Thunderbird instead, or better still a webmail service like googlemail.
Internet Explorer contains some awful security holes. Firefox or Opera are vastly superior. If you insist on using IE, at least go into the security options and disallow ActiveX controls completely; very few sites use them and they're a real security hazard.
get a firewall. Unfortunately the one I use, Sygate Personal Firewall, is no longer free. The one that comes with XP is very poor indeed and has no user controls to let you bar specific services or sites.

It isn't just about safeguarding yourself, it's also doing your bit for the rest of the online community and not becoming a tool of the spammers and other villains.

Teenage kicks

2006-11-02T22:41:00.000Z

Seems the UK's youth are the worst behaved in Europe.

As the new IPPR report puts it: "Commentators fear that British youth is on the verge of mental breakdown, at risk from anti-social behaviour, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse. ... Today's parents are richer than ever before and young people have access to an extraordinary range of activities and opportunities undreamt of even a generation ago... And yet the mental well-being of our adolescents is among the worst in Europe: one in 10 teenage girls has self-harmed. Child obesity is increasing.

Story. Where is the problem coming from? It's probably complex but one sentence in the report stood out for me:

Our youngsters are more consumerist in their outlook than the Americans

See the "Crime, insanity and a nice new pair of trainers" post in the June 2006 archive of this blog.

The internet reduces rape?

2006-10-31T22:51:00.000Z

Personally I'm rather unsure that you can find any definite link between the media and violent crime. This paper (warning: .pdf), “Pornography, Rape, and the Internet” by Todd Kendall of the Department of Economics, Clemson University, Sept. 2006, comes up as a bit of a surprise.

Specifically, the results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in internet access is associated with a decline in reported rape victimization of around 7.3%. While admitting that data quality, omitted variables, functional form assumptions, and other confounding factors could potentially cause bias, I support this claim with six separate pieces of evidence. When considered as a whole, the empirical case is more compelling.

First, I use a simple differences-in-differences approach to show that states that adopted the internet quickly saw larger declines in rape incidence than other states (while no similar effect is evident for homicide).
Second, I show that this effect is most concentrated among states with a high ratio of male to female population, suggesting that men are substituting pornography for rape most when potential mates are in low supply.
Thirdly, I use regression analysis with fixed state and year effects to show a negative
correlation between internet access and rape, even controlling for a wide variety of otherfactors.
Fourth, I show that a similar analysis evidences neither a statistical nor economically significant effect of internet usage on any other violent or property crime for which reliable state-level data is available.
Fifth, using data on arrests, I am able to separate the effects of internet access on rape across different age groups. I find a significant negative effect of internet access on rape arrest rates among men ages 15-19 – a group for whom pornography was most restricted before the internet, while the estimated effects on arrest rates for other age groups are statistically insignificant and smaller in magnitude. Again, by contrast, I show that no similar pattern exists for homicide arrests.
Finally, I also provide evidence on the correlations between internet adoption and several other measures of sexuality, including teen birth rates, prostitution arrests, marriage and divorce rates, and HIV transmission.

The results generally imply that internet usage has had significant effects on sexual behavior more generally, and thus they lend credibility to the claim that the internet may impact sexual assault to the degree claimed.

I've always thought the link between porn and rape was rather dubious, rapists always seem to be motivated by extreme misogyny rather than lust.
On the other hand, with physical violence, I can't help but feel the glamourisation in films and TV does have some influence does have some influence over young people, it's difficult ever to prove anything on this score either way.

An economist talks sense

2006-10-29T13:03:00.001Z

Economics, all too often, seems to consist of either statements of the blindingly obvious or pure fiction to justify the greed of the wealthy. At long last an important economist, Sir Nicholas Stern (I presume he's important, he's got a "Sir", but then again so has Mark Thatcher) has realised climate change could cost dearly - story.

Climate change could end up costing the global economy up to £3.68 trillion ($6.98 trillion) unless drastic action is taken, a key report is set to warn. Economist Sir Nicholas Stern will also warn that failure to act would turn 200 million people into refugees as their homes could by hit by drought or flood. An international plan to tackle climate change is needed to prevent a global recession, the UK review will say.

There are still climate change deniers out there, despite even President Bush making an uncomfortable retreat on the subject, as well as realising the War Against Iraq isn't going to be won any time soon.

Meantime, we have car factories churning out far more than can sell until the money men are forced to pull the plug on them, creating rustbelt cities like the one I live in, while windfarm operators are hitting a major supply problem for gear that they can't install anyway as they're blocked by nimby's who don't want the view of their second home in the sticks ruined. And, coincidentally, often just happen to be rather wealthy and hence influential. Their second homes also help to make property unaffordable for the locals, so they're hardly keeping their quaint villages pristine.

At the root of it is an idiocy that was taught in economics and quite possibly still is: that nature is a free resource.

Remote control

2006-10-26T20:41:00.000Z

While aerial drones are commonplace above battlefields, robot warfare becoming increasingly extended on the ground, too.

By 2015, the US Department of Defense plans that one third of its fighting strength will be composed of robots, part of a $127bn (£68bn) project known as Future Combat Systems (FCS), a transformation that is part of the largest technology project in American history.The US army has already developed around 20 remotely controlled Unmanned Ground Systems that can be controlled by a laptop from around a mile away, and the US Navy and US Air Force are working on a similar number of systems with varying ranges.

Story
The reason behind investing in robots is not only in controlling the fallout from bringing body bags home, not so importnat anyway with the US and UK having a largely tame press and the attacks on al-Jazeera, is that it continues the ditancing of soldier from victim.

The rifle is superior to the sword not only in requiring less skill and physical force, but in terms of the distance between soldier and victim. The soldier need never look into the eyes of his victim. Modern warfare has taken this far further. Remember the cockpit camera clips from Gulf War I showing a bunker being taken out by a missile? All seemed very clean and clinical, more like a video game than a war, until it was found one of those bunkers contained civilians sheltering from the air attacks.

Distancing the combatants allows more brutality. The large-scale murder of civilians, political enemies and then racial extermination by Nazi troops in areas of the Soviet Union was causing emotional and mental breakdown among the troops charged with carrying it out, which led to the first true mechanisation of slaughter, the extermination camp. Few troops rebel against immoral orders, but it's unlikely robots ever would.

And who then controls the robots? The President of the USA? (certainly not the British Prime Minister!). The President is just a figurehead of something far larger, the days often referred to as the military-industrial complex, itself a machine run by giant corporates. Who, in turn, runs the corporates? They're again like machines, run on their own internal logic. Supposedly, their one mission is to make money for their shareholders, yet how often, as in the case of Enron, have they ripped their own shareholders off?

In Newton's age, the universe was thought of as running like clockwork, and the superior man, understanding how the clockwork ran, would come to rise to the top. Instead we've already elevated the clockwork to the realms of power.

We need a new age of enlightenment to give back power to humanity. And maybe need to learn hacking in order to survive the battlefield robots long enough to face down the soft machines.

James Clavell

2006-10-21T14:42:00.000Z

Currently reading James Clavell's Gai-jin, and a mighty slog it is too, despite having plenty of reading time, with travelling from the far-flung edge of Coventry to Leamington each day and being a rather faster than average reader. It's my third of his, having got through Tai-pan and Shogun previously. The thing I like about Clavell's books is the great 'sense of place' - no other fiction I've read set in the Far East really captures what it's like. Peculiarly, in the case of the Japanese, he writes very powerfully from their (then) point of view, capturing their repulsion to Western barbarians, yet he himself was a Japanese prisoner of war during WWII so you'd hardly expect him to write sympathetically on their score in any manner.

The cultural differences between orientals and westerners in these books is indeed striking. While the westerners were vastly ahead technologically, they seemed incapable of dressing sensibly for the climate and scorned any manner of cleanliness.

The difference in attitudes towards sex is striking: the Chinese and Japanese had simply never been inflicted with the Christian abhorrence, most striking amongst the British, I suppose as an overhang of the puritanical 17th century. There's a rather amusing passage in Shogun, where the main character, John Blackthorne, responds angrily when offered a maid for 'pillowing' for the night. The lady of the household and a samurai guard are rather nonplussed and wonder between them whether he'd prefer a boy, or a 'dog or a duck, like the garlic eaters' (Koreans). I believe this change still exists at some basic level, try finding a sensible debate on prostitution in Britain, for example. On a left-leaning notice board I use, many people assert that all prostitutes must be slaves of people traffickers or victims of child abuse. The orient has changed, however, and the middle classes of most countries mimic British attitudes of the 1930s attitudes while working-class people often show the liberal tendecies of the forbears. In Thailand, several of my friends are ladyboys, most from the poor north-east of the country, and never had a problem with their parents, while one from a comfortable Bankok suburb was beaten by hers every time they caught her wearing feminine clothes or makeup.

Another thing I like about Clavell's stories - every major character is plotting against everyone else. This leads to rather interesting storylines with plenty of twists and turns. While characters may be aligned with the principles of a movement or country, they aim to secure whatever personal advantage they can within it.

The historical setting of Gai-jin is particularly interesting. The Americans had forced a trading agreement allowing a foreign enclave in Yokohama in Japan against a fiercely nationalistic attitude of the Japanese Shogunate. More sensible members of the body wanted to acquire western weaponry to enable them to remove the same westerners militarily, while within the samurai class, some, known as shi-shi, were carrying out guerrilla operations to bring down the Shogunate, restore the power of the emporer and expel the foreigners there and then. The latter was, of course, rather foolish for as skilled as the samurai were with swords and bows, the westerners had repeating rifles and naval cannon.

Moreover, the samurai had another hatred, their own mercantile class, to whom they were heavily indebted and bore the seeds of their social decline. While the samurai were keen to get guns, the merchants were equally interested in the far more sophisticated western finance techniques.

The westerners just wanted to trade, though on unfair terms and their main commodities going out to the Far east were drugs and guns. Which are now havily infecting our own inner cities. As the Japanese characters of these books would no doubt say, 'Karma, neh?'

1 down, 31 to go

2006-10-20T20:11:00.000Z

On Tuesday, I lost the first of my adult teeth, upper left premolar. I've been horrified at the thought of an extraction ever since I had two out at the age of eight, one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. There was the sickly sweet smell of the gas coming through the rubber mask, the rubber bung between my teeth, being woken up by a nurse slapping my face, to be led, feeling somewhat confused and nauseous to a washbasin to deal with my mouthful of blood.

The tooth involved had been seen by another dentist in July. It had been causing me severe pain, for which he successfully prescribed a week's worth of antibiotics. However, despite being infected, his examination led him to conclude there was nothing physically wrong with the tooth. He looked at the X-ray, reckoned it was too blurred to make out and somehow came up with another, mysteriously his assistant had taken only the one shot. Not long after the filling in the centre fell out, and more recently it became somewhat loose.

I saw another dentist as soon as was practical and his examination, by contrast, told him the tooth had split vertically even before he checked the X-ray, and as such, unsalvageable, it had to come out. I explained to him my fears of extraction and he reassured me dentistry had come on a bit since then. Well, you'd hope so, most businesses have in the last 44 years.

As it was the extraction was a pretty smooth job. The strange thing was it culminated in me hearing / feeling a 'crunch', which I somehow knew, yet my previous extractions had nbeen under nitrous oxide induced sleep. A memory from a previous lifetime? No idea, but it was definitely no surprise.

I went back to work that afternoon, diligently coding the huge, XHTML / PHP e-commerce system I'm working on with a bloody cotton wool plug rammed into the gap.

Apart from a little soreness of the gums, there's no physical problem now, but I can't help but feel there's a piece of me missing.

US court tries to destroy Spamhaus

2006-10-15T11:33:00.000Z

Getting too much spam in your inbox? You'd have loads more if not for the noble efforts of Spamhaus, a volunteer who tracks down and exposes spammers, and provides ISPs and the like with lists of the worst to block.
However an alleged spammer, e360insight, brought a court action against Spamhaus on the basis of loss of trade. Spamhaus has refused to defend itself in the court claiming that being a British organisation, a US court has no jurisdiction, moreover admitting its jurisdiction would result in every spammer, his brother and his brother's dog bringing similar suits.
If there are two institutions that seem incapable of understanding anything to do with the net, they are print-based journalists and courts. The judge has slapped a $11.7m fine on Spamhaus, which can only be a deliberate attempt to destroy the body, and more recently, tried to get ICANN to de-register their domain.
e360insight claims to be a legitimate opt-in marketer (but so do most spammers), while Spamhaus contends it has actual examples of their spam in its honeytraps. While I can't say for definite who's in the right, I think you can guess which of them I'd trust.

Royal mail and junk mail

2006-10-14T13:03:00.000Z

The Royal Mail is to remove its limits on unaddressed advertising dross - story. Well, thanks, guys, we simply weren't getting enough through nuisance phone calls and spam, as it was. At least the electronic stuff doesn't leave solid waste:

The LGA chair, Lord Bruce-Lockhart, pushed the issue back into the headlines with a letter to the Royal Mail chief executive, Adam Crozier, expressing concern that the rising cost of disposing of more and more junk mail would leave council tax-payers facing bigger bills. He also noted that the rising tide of junk mail hurt the environment. The LGA said 78,000 tonnes of junk mail reached landfill sites each year.

So with higher costs of disposal and hence council tax bills, you could well find you have to pay for it! And what excuse do they come out with?

"If Royal Mail did not deliver any of this mail then it would simply be posted by other operators."

Hmmm, taken a few lessons from the arms dealers, have we?

If the Royal Mail is concerned about its financial position, how about cutting out waste like changing the name to Consignia and back again, or disciplining posties who advise householders how to avoid this rubbish?

Integration

2006-10-14T12:26:00.000Z

Had a chat with the driver while waiting for the bus to go out, both of us were appalled at the litter, smoking, vandalism and other anti-social behaviour that the buses, for reasons neither of us could fathom, seem to attract. The big difference between us - he's Pakistani by birth and (otherwise) loves Britain. Why is there such a bad attitude problem with so many Brits? He reckoned it was a law and order problem, yet we outstrip other European countries in both this area and with our humungous prison population.
Just a few minutes later, I read in the paper that a recent poll found 57% of Brits want Muslims to make more effort to integrate. Perhaps they need to drop a few sweet wrappers, smash up the odd bus shelter or inflict violence on random passers-by?

The great veil debate has forced me into an uncomfortable position: for once I found myself having to agree with Jack Straw, whom I regard as one of the most odious ministers of the whole lot who served under Blair. I find veils creepy. Moreover, there seem to be more in Britain than I can ever remember seeing in most Muslim countries I've been to. When I lived in Krabi, reckoned to have something like a 70% Muslim population, I don't think I ever saw one. In fact hardly any women there went around wearing the headscarf. It's wrong to ban them like in France, but I think any woman who takes up the veil must realise it will isolate her from a hell of a lot of people and will (as in the case of an American woman who was refused a driving licence with a veiled photo and more recently, a British teacher suspended as her veil impeded communication with her pupils) reduce her rights. But no British Muslim woman will ever have her rights reduced to those of women in the more extreme Islamic states from where this fashion was imported.

More on emailadvertisinginc

2006-10-08T20:25:00.000Z

This blog gets plenty of hits from people searching for that spammer, so I'm guessing he's one of the most prolific doing the rounds at present. According to this site, the culprit is called Bob Soloway (it's a huge page, but pretty comprehensive). There's more info on Spamhaus's ROKSO project.

God save the queen

2006-10-08T18:09:00.000Z

Before yesterday's match against Macedonia, I couldn't help but wonder why on earth I, an athiest republican, would want to sing a song to demand a god I don't believe in to save a monarchy I don't believe in from the Jacobite Rebellion which finished in 1745?

If not enough of us sing this song before each football match, will God ressurect the rebellion? Or is it that we need God to sort out the Scots who aren't fighting us anyway because the British Army's too busy fighting for the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan? And if you were omnipotent creator of the universe, would you honestly bother checking out that crap draw, or for that matter, any team that Steve McLaren managed?

Obituary

2006-10-08T17:22:00.000Z

Found out on Friday night that one of my friends on Samui, Leigh Phillips, had died.

I met Leigh when I was running my internet cafe in Soi The Club (a.k.a. Soi Starbuck) in Chaweng. He owned Samui's only gay go-go bar on the opposite side of the soi and he and his staff became regular customers, Leigh for our excellent coffee and his staff to e-mail farang boyfriends and download gay porn (which soon taught me gay porn sites are awful for having malware built-in). I was also frequently fixing his laptop, on which his then boyfriend would vent his rage whenever they had an argument.
At that stage there was quite a pleasant ex-pat community, mainly Brits, along our street. Nearly everyone went bust, the Bali bombing, SARS, bird flu, etc. meant only big business with deep pockets could survive.

Leigh went on to manage the Samui Mermaid (one of my websites BTW), a cut-price hotel at Big Buddha beach, which whenever I subsequently visited Samui, would stay at. We had some good drinking sessions, particularly at Teng's Cabaret until it closed.

Back in the UK, he'd been a sax player in various jazz bands and had played all the major venues like Ronnie Scott's, and had run a garage flogging luxury cars.

He died of liver failure from drinking too much, all too easy to do in a hot country like Thailand. Interestingly, while he was openly gay, he never had a problem drinking down one of the locals run by a couple of Millwall skinheads. Had they been back in London, quite possibly their attitudes would have been different. It's amazing the effect living uin the Far East has and has had on Brits from cold, dull, WASP Britain.

Why hasn't this made national news?

2006-10-08T09:55:00.000Z

TWO Pendle men have appeared before Pennine magistrates accused of having "a master plan" after what is believed to be a record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs was found in Colne.
...
Mrs Christiana Buchanan, who appeared for the prosecution in Jackson's case, alleged the pair had "some kind of masterplan".
She said a search of Jackson's home had uncovered rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit.

link

Compare that to the Islamic fundie scares, which are mostly not credible or entirely lacking evidence, yet cause front-page headlines and/or disruption of the airports, while this only got as far as the local paper and urban75.

E2A This is the only other link I could find.

Complete control

2006-10-05T21:09:00.000Z

This new invention from Raytheon offers some very nasty possibilities of controlling people:

Their findings: "This technology is capable of rapidly heating a person's skin to achieve a pain threshold that has been demonstrated by AFRL human subject testing to be very effective at repelling people, without burning the skin or causing other secondary effects." The device, it adds, "is an alternative to lethal force."
The human testing showed that the beams will penetrate even tiny openings and cracks in any physical barrier, including clothes, walls and shields. It is as though it wraps around corners to affect any piece of exposed body - the fingers or face, say, of those trying to hide.
What is clear is that this weapon ushers in a new era of paralysing weapons for urban warfare and, potentially, a techno-politics of border exclusion and crowd control. Raytheon insists that although pain is produced instantaneously, it will cause no damage, apparently on the assumption that targets will move away at once.

Add this to the widescale CCTV coverage we have in this country, and now a linked speaker system to bark out orders, and you have the possibility of the UK evolving into Airstrip One sometime soon.

Of course, CCTV is far from unpopular given the twin threats of terrorism and street crime, leaving the majority of us as though crushed in a huge vice. Effectively they're all on the same side: intimidation. A battle for the minds and not the hearts.

There are counterbalances to the technological threats:

"Non-lethal weapons are still being reviewed by the medical group ... Basically my point to them was [that] we need to start using that here in the US on Americans. And if we start using that here on Americans ... the first thing they will do is cry out that you have hurt them medically in a way that is pejorative."

The litigious nature of the US public, so often derided over here, could well be beneficial, as soon as someone gets a hit of microwave pain-infliction you can bet Raytheon and the US Govt will be in the dock. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if you have an army of ambulance-chaser lawyers camped out just beyond the range of these devices, clipboard in hand.

The other development that could link the control technologies together would be the new biometric ID cards the government is trying to foist on us. Here again we're safeguarded by their IT development strategy, handing out huge amounts of public money to massive contractors who seldom satisfactorily complete the projects, just think of the hopelessly expensive messes of the NHS Lorenzo system, the Child Protection Agency's hopless start in life and the poor families devastated by having to pay back incorrectly-calculated tax credits, just for starters.

Non-governmental intimidation is far less high-tech, such as the death sentence against Salman Rushdie, the riots over the Danish cartoons by people who'd never seen them, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the play Sanctuary being forced off stage by Sikhs, attacks and death-threats against anyone named on Redwatch (which, peculiarly, the govt claim to be unable to do anything about) and the twisted logic of the extreme violence of some animal rights protestors. But I guess they don't featherbed high-tech industries.

A bit of sense

2006-09-30T18:04:00.000Z

Yet another West v Muslims article, but this one by Hanif Kureishi seems to me to be far more on-target.

Clearly most Muslims are not fundamentalists and most people in the west are not obese cokeheads. Our notions of "east" and "west" are screens on to which we can project our fantasies. If we can say the east envies the west while wanting to distance itself from it - "they" refuse to integrate; why don't they want to be like us if they want to live here? - we can say that the self-disgust of the west conveys a profound confusion about the way we view ourselves now.

It's in the nature of conservatism to look for simple answers, and as such the Muslim world and mid-Western USA have both turned toward fundamentalism. Meanwhile the rest of the West appears rudderless, and in the case of many people, actually is.
I think Kureishi inadvertently also hits on why Nichiren Buddhism has spread so slowly here:

In the past few years there has been much religion-lite, the New Age as well as versions of Buddhism or kabala. These are attempts to fill what Salman Rushdie calls a "God-sized hole". But these substitutes are the tofu of belief; they are not anything like the real thing. They do not terrify with their authority and they are not sufficiently irrational to inspire true faith. They do not punish enough. We are left to do that to ourselves.

While I'd thorouhghly reject any notion that we're "religion-lite" or nothing like the "real thing" - all other Buddhist sects are based on Shakyamuni's provisional teachings or have failed to grasp the true significance of the Lotus Sutra - we don't have a god with a big stick, nor his representative on earth with a less metaphorical big stick, so those searching for authority won't find it in true Buddhism. And the last sentence is accurate enough - Nichiren Buddhism aims to make you the author of your own story, as we term it "taking responsibility for your own life".

One thing the article fails to pick up adequately is the link between Radical Islam and anti-colonialism. The history of the 20th century is often regarded as one of industrial scale bloodshed. Perhaps a more accurate reading is one of imperialism and anti-imperialism. Post-WW2, many nationalist movements, particularly China and Vietnam, used communism as a binding belief. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this can hardly be a rallying point and so the middle east has instead turned towards Islamic fundamentalism. I was particularly struck in a recent TV programme on Palestinian suicide bombers, how often their remaining families praised the bomber as a nationalist rather than a Muslim.

And there's also the irony that the tool used to defeat the Soviet Union has morphed into the West's own nemesis.

Stick it!

2006-09-25T21:34:00.000Z

After all the ballyhoo about Royal Mail's new digital stamp service, you get a slightly unpleasant surprise when you try to import names and addresses into it. The only options it allows are:

Microsoft Address Book
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Exchange

Even if you're a Windows fanatic, address books are scarcely the most convenient way to feed it. Moreover, the worst piece of Windows software is debatable, but for most people who know their computers, Outlook would have to score pretty highly. I don't think I've allowed it on any of my Windows boxes since about 1998, when I realised what a security headache it represented, let alone just how mind-bogglingly difficult those same save and export options were.

If you use a Mac, or linux or any other operating system, there's simply nothing there for you at all. Why no ldap (an open standard) import? Or how about a .csv (comma separated variable) import that everyone could use? Or get dead trendy with XML?

So how did they come to select such a dud set of options? Has Tony Blair flogged the Royal Mail to Micros**t on the sly? For those still buying sticky-back stamps down the post office, will Bill Gates's silhouette be replacing the Queen's?

Sucess, maybe?

2006-09-24T10:44:00.000Z

No dross from emailadvertisinginc for nearly a week now. Maybe Telstra sorted their man in Oz out? It wasn't just me, that IP address was already on CBL (combined block list).

Afghanistan

2006-09-24T10:29:00.000Z

Brits may be rather puzzled by what's going on in Afghanistan from the mixed reporting of how successful the mission is and how badly it's going. In fact, it might be interesting to find out why exactly why British troops are there. Eliminating the Taliban? They seem to be growing. Cracking down on opium production? Bumper harvest this year. Supporting democracy? The current regime's influence ends at Kabul's boundaries. Safeguarding the pipeline? No-one's attacked it.

On the military side, this article from some US extreme conservative site is quite revealing. On the US bombing campaign:

Of course, all this is accompanied by claims of many dead Taliban, who are conveniently interchangeable with dead locals who weren’t Taliban. Bombing from the air is the best way to drive up the body count, because you don’t even have to count bodies; you just make estimates based on the claimed effectiveness of your weapons, and feed them to ever-gullible reporters. By the time Operation Mountain Thrust is done thrusting into mountains, we should have killed the Taliban several times over.

Sorry, I haven't got the answers as to what British troops are supposed to be doing there. Other than Bush ordered it.

How much will Vista cost you?

2006-09-21T20:12:00.000Z

Microsoft have commissioned a research company to produce a report claiming the release of Vista will create 100,000 new jobs in Europe. Story. The bit I found interesting was:

This says for every €1 (70p) spent on Vista, another €13.31 will be spent on other things. That includes €7.35 on hardware, €3.43 on software and €2.53 on services.

I usually take the reports they have commissioned (e.g. total cost of ownerships for windows works out less than for linux) with the same level of interest as those the tobacco companies come out with saying that smoking doesn't cause lung disease, "scientific" bodies funded by oil companies claiming there's no such thing as global warming or brewers claiming British drinkers prefer weak, foul-tasting lagers.

In this case I found the numbers interesting. If the business edition of Vista will be priced at USD299, I calculate your expenditure to upgrade works out to a total of USD4278.69. I couldn't find any announcement of British prices for Vista. The U.S. Dollar on the exchanges currently equates to 52p, however tech companies usually work on parity when pricing products for the British market (i.e. they replace the $ mark with a £). Let's split the difference and call it 79p, which works out at a staggering price tag of GBP3380!

For an operating system with really nice graphics and "enhanced security" (e.g. DRM on your .mp3 files).

Police visit

2006-09-20T22:21:00.000Z

A statement for me to sign regarding my deceased (distant) relative, Charlene Downes. Just to say I hadn't seen her since the date she disappeared (in fact I've never seen her), they need it from anyone even vaguely connected since her body's never been found. Trial's expected for next February.

There's more info on a previous posting if you're wondering what this is about.

Coup in Bangkok

2006-09-19T20:05:00.000Z

Looks like PM Thaksin, in New York to address the UN, is now ex-PM. Seems a well-plotted and managed army coup with the backing of the police has taken over the reins of govt., led by a Lt. Gen. Sondhi.
Thai Visa thread
Nation newspaper

A couple of Thaksin's top men have been arrested, and with tomorrow having been declared a bank holiday, perhaps the army will weed out more of his supporters. In his two terms of office, Thaksin's filled the higher levels with relatives and cronies, including some of the generals, which I guess he'd hoped would insulate him against this very situation.

Thailand's been undergoing a constitutional crisis since this April when non-stop demonstrations temporarily ousted him, new elections were boycotted by the opposition parties, and further elections had been scheduled for October though many of the election officials had been accused of partiality. The constitution's now suspended; many had had high hopes for it, that it would take Thailand away from the frequent military takeovers that bedevilled it over the last 30-odd years. But for all that, Thaksin's corruption had to some extent already subverted it - think Berlusconi on steroids.

I hope it doesn't cause bloodshed, the main danger of this being from a counter-coup, of which there seems no signs so far. Another determining factor may be the attitude of the king, while he doesn't tend to get publicly involved in such affairs, he no doubt pulls many strings behind the scenes. Sondhi seems to be in well with him.

The army has taken the main institutions of Bangkok whereas most of Thaksin's support is based in the north and the north-east. I haven't come across any reports of any action outside the capital, but any public reaction to the coup could well be in those provinces.

Thaksin has done some good, particularly his version of the NHS, the 30-baht scheme - far from perfect, but vastly better than anything the country's poor could have previously expected. Let's just hope the positive aspects are preserved and the army hands back control to a democratically elected civilian govt soon.

Meantime I'm trying to get in touch with my mates in the country, particularly one who lives just north of the govt. building / palace area.

Shouldn't laugh but...

2006-09-19T12:17:00.000Z

When I saw this photo of some guys in Basra burning the pope's effigy, I couldn't help but splutter with laughter. Great likeness that, dudes.

J. G. Ballard

2006-09-18T19:52:00.000Z

Interviewed on the South Bank Show last night, he's reckoned by some to be the one of greatest living British novelist. He started by writing SF of an unusual nature, surrealist scenarios exploring how the human mind might change, usually revert to earlier forms, in a radically different setting.

A turning point came with the Atrocity Exhibition, a collection of individual mini-stories that form a collective whole (sort of), yet is meant to be read at random, not forming in any way a single narrative from beginning to end. Themes of violence and celebrity worship recur as do images such as the human spine. Must admit I found the notes more readable than the text itself.

His works since then perhaps could be called 'present fiction' rather than science fiction, set in the here-and-now or perhaps just a few years on, usually stories of suburban middle classes or stressed out executives exploding into rioting, attempting to find meaning in a barren existence. The settings are the most soulless of places - West London residential areas, airports, shopping malls, motorways or the concrete sprawl of the Mediterranean coastline.

It's not just an emptiness of place, but also a lack of belief, the death of myth and religion. If nothing else they've been edged out (even shoulder-barged...) by all-permeating advertising. We have only our imaginations left, perversely, as our only way of hanging on to any sort of reality.

As many have noted, those that believe in nothing are often all to ready to believe in anything.

The programme spent perhaps too much time over his most famous and outrageous work, Crash. Where as other writers explore our relationships with machines in the form of cyborgs, this novel and the much vilified Cronenbourg film, uses instead a small cult who fetishise brains being splatted over crumpled dashboards.

If nothing else he tackles far more interesting areas than the majority of comfortable, smug, well-off British writers, often these days recruited from the Oxbridge elites; best quote of the programme - "The great thing about sci-fi is that no-one lives in Hampstead."

Daddy long legs

2006-09-17T18:42:00.000Z

We're inundated with the flying version here. I've never come across them in such numbers anywhere on earth like the Wyken and Walsgrave areas of Cov. A few geckos would sort 'em out if only the climate were warm enough.

When I lived in Thailand you'd sometimes get an invasion of flying ants and a mound of little wings would pile under a gecko, who'd be chomping his/her way through them as quickly as possible. I always liked having geckos as house guests as long as it wasn't the big, armour-plated buggers (in Thai too-kay as opposed to jing johk), who're reputed to take the odd finger off overly inquisitive humans.

E2A, the term "daddy long legs" applies to several types of insect, looks like the ones we've got here are properly known as crane flies.

A bit more on Islam

2006-09-16T23:03:00.000Z

Without doubt, of all the countries I've travelled in, it's the Muslim ones that've been the friendliest. Particularly Egypt and Turkey. Egypt's gotta be amongst the poorest countries on earth, but going round there on the cheap, people you meet always want to take care of you.

And Turkey! First night there I met up with a couple of blokes on the bus going in from Greece and as soon as we got ourselves sorted at the grim dive near Aya Sofia (Istanbul, that is) we hit the first beer bar we could find. There a local lawyer called Shefiq tried to turn us on to Islam. He was so drunk he could hardly stand. He had a tomato in his hand and was demanding of us:
"Who make this? Who make this, eh?"
But that was 1984 and the world was a much friendlier place then, no matter what Orwell predicted.

Pope, Islam, controversy

2006-09-16T14:17:00.000Z

Biggest news item this week has to be the Pope causing controversy and demonstrations throughout the Muslim world by quoting a mediaeval Byzantine king that badmouths Islam.

Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached

Pot calling the kettle black or what? How much violence has the Catholic church been involved in? The Crusades, Conquistadores, Inquisition and a plethora of European wars against Protestantism readily come to mind.

He's not exactly a newcomer to attacking other religions, a few years back he called Buddhism "spiritual masturbation". To explain, unlike Christianity, Buddhism needs no external entities, you find enlightenment purely within yourself. Things such as chants, mandalas or meditation are tools to help you in that process rather than an end in themselves.

Meanwhile, can't Muslims take a more sensible approach to perceived insults? Fareena Alam, editor of Q-News certainly can:

The media are giving the supposed "anger of the Muslim nation" too much coverage. Such insults are as old as Islam itself. The Prophet dealt with them with dignity. We must stop over-reacting ... A Muslim who truly lives according to the moral code of Islam - of justice, neighbourliness and compassion - will know that it is our greatest weapon against misrepresentation. Perhaps the Pope was 'merely quoting' the 14th-century emperor. Perhaps he did so because he actually shares this belief. If so, he is more ill-informed than we thought. I refuse to let such provocations shape the global faith agenda.

Full article.

It strikes me there are a good few Islamic clerics out there who regard stirring up riots as a good career move. That can't explain the Pope's actions though, he's already got the top job.