There’s a rather strange story in last night’s Evening Times:
SCOTLAND’s hooligans could be named and shamed in special leaflets dished out to their neighbours.
This will apparently cut crime, because hooligans’ neighbours will discover that they’re living next to hooligans. I suspect that this might not come as a surprise to them.
How much is mobile video worth? In the UK, Apple reckons it’s £1.89 per clip; presumably it’ll be the same for TV downloads if the UK store follows its American counterpart. That seems awfully steep.
Let’s take Desperate Housewives as an example; it’s one of the shows US customers can buy via iTunes. There are 23 episodes in season 1, so at £1.89 per episode that works out as £43.47. The same season is available as a six-disc DVD with an RRP of £44, but in practice it sells for much cheaper: Amazon.co.uk is currently flogging it for £29.99. And of course, DVD is much better quality than any digital download, plus you get various special features, fancy packaging and so on. With downloads, you’re paying a hefty price for convenience when you’re ultimately getting an inferior product.
For now, iTunes UK’s video content seems to be music-only. So how does that compare? If iTunes sells U2′s “U2 Go Home” live videos, that’s 19 tracks – £35.91. Buy it on DVD and you get those tracks plus bonus stuff for £19.99 (RRP) or £16.99 (street price). I don’t see any sign of video bundles on iTunes yet, but such multi-buy pricing will be essential if Apple doesn’t want people to feel ripped off.
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber notes:
$1.99 for each TV show, in only 320×240 resolution, doesn’t seem like a good deal to me. I already get these shows with my cable TV; paying for them again in a crummy low-res format strikes me as a bad deal — like if you had to pay for songs you already own on CD. Of course, I think ringtones sound like a bad deal, too, but people buy billions of them.
I’m inclined to agree. Apple will no doubt sell videos to lots of people, but I won’t be one of them.
By the way, I very much doubt the video pricing was dictated by Apple. The days of record companies seeing videos as a promotional tool rather than a source of revenue are long gone, and any video clip sales need the record labels’ approval. Had Apple pitched them any cheaper, I doubt they’d have been granted the necessary licenses.
Back in June, I blogged about my coffee machine death toll: I’d killed three coffee makers in 2005, and didn’t hold out much hope for the fourth one. Sure enough, it burned out today – the same fault that knackered the last three. It’s clearly a design fault, but this time I will win because I have the receipt. Or at least, I think I have. It’s definitely somewhere. I think.
Writing in today’s Guardian, Tim Dowling sums up the rather pathetic story of the window fitter who’s reported a duff witch doctor to trading standards. As the Daily Record reports:
A JILTED boyfriend has reported a witchdoctor to trading standards after he failed to conjure up a reunion with his lover.
Window fitter Kevin Bird, 46, says he was duped out of £1500 by African “psychic” Mansor Barry after visiting him five times in just over a month.
Kevin was also told to hand over underwear and a urine sample to help him contact spirits – but he remained single.
Now trading standards have been called in to investigate.
Kevin said: “This man is preying on vulnerable people.
“I want others to know what I’ve been through so they don’t make the same foolish mistake.”
As Dowling points out:
Like anyone who makes a purchase in the Alternative aisle of a supermarket, Bird entered into a contract whereby he agreed to believe in something that was patently bollocks.
Gaaah. 8MB broadband is all well and good, but if your ISP’s DNS servers are a goddamn pile of crap (as Bulldog’s seem to be) then you’ll quickly get sick of page delays. Anyone know of a decent alternative DNS I could use? I was using BT’s ones but they’re slow as crap too. Gaaaah, again.
One of the books I’ve recently helped with (I was the copy editor) has just gone on sale: Music Makes Your Child Smarter, by Philip Sheppard. It was fun to edit, and should be fun to read too :)
So does music make your child smarter? Yes, provided you don’t fall for the Beethoven Effect bullshit [which the book merrily takes an axe to]. Playing Beethoven won’t turn a foetus into the next Bill Gates, but there do seem to be definite benefits from musical activities in terms of a child’s development – particularly before the age of seven.
The Mail on Sunday (my favourite paper, heh) describes it as “A fantastic self-help guide for parents – I very strongly recommend it to everyone.” As for Mr Sheppard, here’s the bio:
Philip Sheppard is Professor of ’Cello at the Royal Academy of Music, London; he is also a Senior Lecturer in ‘Principles Of Education’ and designed the Academy’s ‘Music In The Community’ course. He is a guest lecturer at the Royal College Of Music and patron of the Oxford ’Cello School. Philip directs education projects at the Harlem Center in New York and has appeared as a guest presenter on BBC4’s Proms coverage. He has played at Glastonbury and recorded with artists including Scott Walker and David Bowie. He has three young children.
Originally published in PC Plus, November 2005
Of all the threats facing humans, viruses are the most dangerous. The prospect of Avian Flu jumping species is truly terrifying, but if that doesn’t get us there’s always MRSA and other “superbugs”. Worse still, developments in computer science could lead to new forms of virus infection: not from biological viruses, but from computer viruses.
Today’s computer viruses can only affect us by damaging our data, but as bytes and biology come together the prospect of hybrid machines – computers that integrate with the human body – grows nearer. The potential is incredible, but so is the potential for disaster.
Transhumanists believe that in the not-too distant future we’ll upload our consciousnesses to giant neural networks and live forever; cynics believe that the Transhumanists will last about ten minutes before a passing virus powers them off permanently. It’ll be several decades before we’ll discover which group’s right, but while the risk of computer viruses infecting humans is currently zero, new frontiers in computer science are creating the potential for all kinds of unpleasantness.
PC viruses haven’t been able to cross over to humans for one very simple reason: we’re not made of the same stuff as our silicon servants. However, as the lines between man and machine blur, the potential for viruses to do real damage to humans increases.
There are two key vectors for virus infection: Human Computer Interfaces and bio-molecular computers. The field of interfaces is a wide one, ranging from replacement parts (hearts, muscles, eyes and so on) to new ways of communicating; some pundits believe that within our lifetimes, we’ll go online by sticking a jack plug into the back of our necks.
Sticking computers into people only becomes a problem once those computers are networked, especially if they’re networked to the Internet. If you can locate something you can attack it, and while the prospect of implants causing Dr Strangelove-style tics is an amusing one, if the implanted device is there for live-saving reasons then any infection or hacking attempt could be catastrophic. In the case of the much-mooted jack plug in the back of your neck, a virus could drive you daft.
The risk of hacked implants is already here: Reading professor Kevin Warwick concealed the IP address of his arm implant during recent experiments where he controlled a robot arm on the other side of the world. The professor was concerned that if people could find the IP address of his implant, they’d try to hack it. Warwick is a big fan of networking humans and computers together, but warns: “We’re looking at software viruses and biological viruses becoming one and the same. The security problems (will) be much, much greater.”
He might be right, particularly as scientists turn to organic rather than silicon computers – machines that one day could live inside our bodies. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s based on science fact: after all, computers are simply arrays of switches, and as the human brain shows, you can end up with very complex computational devices made from little more than meat.
In 2003, Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science unveiled a biological computing device. It didn’t look like a PC – it was a litre of salt solution – but it contained three trillion DNA computers, which taken together could perform 66 billion operations per second. As Udi Shapiro of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science told CNN, “the ultimate application would be a ‘doctor in a cell,’ where a bio-molecular computer operates in the body.”
Bio-molecular computers are specifically designed to interface with living material – our cells, our nerve endings and so on – and their potential is stunning; as Shapiro explained to CNN, such machines could identify problems in our bodies and synthesise the appropriate drugs to solve the problem. If on the other hand they became compromised, we’d be in deep trouble.
The good news is that such machines are decades away, and even when they do arrive it’ll take more than a socially awkward teenager with a virus writing kit to infect them. Compromising the micro-machines would take a massive amount of scientific expertise, equipment and money, which would be beyond the reach of anyone bar governments and well-funded terrorist groups. It’s ironic: for years, we’ve spoken of terrorists as “the enemy within”; thanks to computing science, that’s exactly what they may become.
So are we safe in the short term? Possibly not. While viruses that can infect humans are a long way off, viruses that can *affect* humans aren’t hard to imagine – or to engineer. As we automate everything from medicine to motorways the potential damage from a rogue virus increases. For example, the government’s very interested in a satellite system that could automatically adjust the speed of every car on the road. Imagine the chaos – and carnage – if someone got a virus into that.
Today, it’s Google Reader: essentially GMail for RSS and Atom feeds. It’s quite nifty.
My mum needs to get some decorating done in her house, so she asked a decorator to give her a quote. It’s not a big job: a couple of ceilings, a hallway and two rooms. The quote for that little lot? £160 for paint, and a further £1,600 for labour. You could build the pyramids for less.
The problem is the Itsawoman Supplement, which is charged by an awful lot of tradesmen. The formula is simple:
* Work out how big the job is
* Work out how many days it will take you/your team
* If the customer is a man, multiply the time by your daily rate. That’s the price.
* If the customer is a woman, double the time, multiply it by your daily rate, double that, and then add a bit on. That’s the price.
It’s sexism, pure and simple, but unfortunately it’s very common. A plasterer tried the same thing with my wife a few months back: the price he’d agreed with me was around £600 (it was a fair bit of work) but when I wasn’t around and Liz asked for the final price, it had miraculously jumped to £1,000. Liz chased him halfway up the street and I think he was genuinely afraid for his life. Hopefully he’s learned a valuable lesson, but somehow I doubt it.
*sigh*
Sorry, meant to add a bit. To demonstrate how insane this is, let’s say you ripped your CD collection using Windows Media Player 18 months ago, and didn’t realise that by default it used WMA and added copy protection to your files. Now, you’ve got an iPod, so you download a utility to convert the protected WMAs to MP3 or AAC instead. Boom. You’ve broken the law.
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