Archive for March, 2008
A little bit of politics: replacing the council tax
I know, I know, I’ll be back to posting about Girls Aloud and Macs in a bit. But I was listening to the morning show on Radio Scotland (The Angry Pensioners show - (c) Tony Kiernan) today, and they were talking about the Scottish plans to replace council tax with a local income tax.
Well, that and ranting about dustbins. But I digress.
What I don’t get is, if the aim is to have a fairer tax system - and council tax is manifestly unfair - then why not have a Scottish sales tax? Unlike income tax, clever accounting doesn’t enable you to avoid it altogether; unlike income tax, you can’t dodge it if you work strictly for cash; unlike income tax, it’s directly linked to consumption - so if you don’t spend huge sums of money on stuff, you don’t pay huge wads of tax.
I can appreciate there are logistical issues - how to deal with online shopping is a biggie; you’d need an exemption for tourists, and on things like children’s shoes and other things you don’t pay VAT on - but surely things like the black economy, creative accounting and other things mean a local income tax has more holes in it than a string vest, with the dodgy and the superbly rich more or less evading it while working stiffs pay full whack?
Am I missing something really obvious here?
This month’s edition of Things That Are Good
- This cartoon, which compares the design approach of Apple, Google and everybody else (thanks, Ben).
- The film Once, which is now out on DVD. A lovely wee sweet thing that’s about music and relationships and nothing in particular. And the music’s ace.
- The Office: An American Workplace. Series 3, I think - whatever one ITV2 is currently showing.
- Terminator, the telly series. It’s rubbish, but it’s really good rubbish.
- The book Suckers. It’s an expose of alternative medicine and while it’s preaching to the converted, it’s still fascinating.
- The Wordpress Antileech plugin, which helps identify - and frustrate - site scrapers and sploggers.
- This essay about school, via Graham Linehan. Not sure I agree with all of it, but it’s interesting.
And that’s it for now. What’s keeping you entertained these days?
Baby food bollocks from the department of transport
The Department of Transport (Aviation Security Domestic Branch) has replied to my query about air travel and baby food. I asked why all baby food had to be opened at security when it was potentially dangerous (baby food should be disposed of within two hours tops). The reply says:
The liquids requirements were introduced on 6 November 2006 to comply with EU legislation and apply equally across all EU Member States as well as the USA, Canada and others. Ready-made baby formula is not exempt from airport security checks. Although liquid baby food or sterilised water, sufficient for the journey, may be permitted in quantities greater than 100ml, the accompanying adult will be required to verify each by tasting before they can be taken airside. A small amount may be decanted from bottles for testing purposes.
Unfortunately, that isn’t true. The US rules are here, and in pretty much every other EU country the rules are that baby food “may” be tested - not that it *must* be tested, let alone that all of it must be tested.
The Friday Project goes bust
The Friday Project, blog-book publisher extraordinaire, has gone bust. As Bobbie Johnson writes:
According to my sources, The Friday Project has always operated a fairly predatory approach to the web; offering most of their writers fairly desultory rewards for their work, especially compared to the deals offered some other bloggers). Still, any penny pinching didn’t appear to help the bottom line much… the company’s accounts look rough, with losses of £705,713 last year.
What next? Well, the Telegraph says Harper Collins - a book publishing arm of Darth Murdoch’s NewsCorp Death Star - is buying the company. But what becomes of the bloggers and their books? Not clear - directors Scott Pack and Clare Christian both say they can’t comment on the situation.
The Telegraph story says it’s been in administration for a month, so sorry if this is old news. I hadn’t spotted it before.
What’s wrong with this picture?
This is a Dora Explorer Aquapet. Y’know, for kids.
[Thanks, Andi]
Something spammy this way comes
Thanks to Armin, I’ve discovered that spam links seem to be appearing in hidden links on this blog (they’re visible in the RSS feed).
I’ve found two on this page and zapped them both. The only culprit I can think of is an SEO plugin I installed today, so I’ve deactivated it. Can you let me know if the spam links recur, folks? Thanks.
Update: It doesn’t appear to be the SEO plugin; rather, a bug in the registration system that enables spammers to register and then edit other people’s posts. I’ve deleted a few suss-looking registrations so apologies if I’ve accidentally zapped a perfectly legitimate login.
Return of the son of ID cards
An excellent post by Mr Eugenides:
If you want to know what’s really happening… you watch the hands.
So never mind the cards; it’s all about the database. It’s always been all about the database. Don’t watch the cards. Watch the hands.
Blacksite? Blackshite, more like
I bought the Xbox game Blacksite (no, not at full price - are you mad? Fifteen quid from Amazon Marketplace) to find out whether it really was as bad as the reviews suggested.
It isn’t. It’s worse.
It’s not the bad voice acting, the soulless regurgitation of every first-person shooter cliche, the lazy respawning enemies to keep levels vaguely challenging or the fantastic decision that means your super-tough army type is incapable of opening a door by himself (seriously - you need to wait for a bit for no good reason and then summon a squad member to do it for you); it’s that the makers seriously expect you to pay fifty quid for a game that simply doesn’t work.
I’ve never played a game with so many bugs in it. Dead bodies float in the sky. Driving sections get confused and make you retrace your steps before an exit that wasn’t there before magically appears. Objectives don’t get updated, so you’ve cleared a level but keep being told you need to clear the level. And best of all, the frame rate doesn’t just drop - it dies. In one section you go round a corner and the frame rate drops below zero, with the screen freezing for a full ten seconds before lumbering back into arthritic life at a staggering 1 frame per second. And that’s not even a busy section with stacks of on-screen enemies pushing the console’s processor to the limits: it’s a bit when you’ve killed absolutely everybody and there’s sod-all happening.
There can only be three explanations for this. One, the game was never tested. Two, the game was tested but the testers were idiots. Or three, the publishers really wanted to rub their doughy buttocks in the face of every purchaser, but they didn’t have enough AirMiles - so they decided to make a rubbish game instead.
This is a game that still retails at forty to fifty quid. And publishers wonder why so many gamers rent or pirate games instead of buying them.
iPhone gets proper Exchange integration
Bad news for Blackberry and Windows Mobile, by the looks of it. According to Phil Schiller, big firms wanted the moon on a stick:
Push email. Great calendar integration - pushed to them over the air all day long. Push contacts. Global address lists. Additional VPN types, including Cisco IPsec VPN. Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities. Enterprise-class Wi-Fi, with WPA2/802.1x. Tools to enforce security policies. Tools to help them configure thousands of devices as they deploy iPhones and set them up automatically. And they want the ability to protect that data by remotely wiping it.
“That’s a long list of important features,” Schiller says. “They say if we just did these things, it would really help adoption in the enterprise. And we’re doing all of these things in the next release of the iPhone software.”
There’s something wrong with this swan story
About 200 years ago, I blogged about a Sun story claiming that asylum seekers were coming over here and eating our swans. The short version? It was bollocks. But it’s back! Back! BACK!
Immigrant was cooking swan surrounded by the bodies of slaughtered birds
Blimey.
In a squalid makeshift campsite by a north London waterway, a man was cooking his evening meal - surrounded by the bodies of slaughtered swans.
Mr Gibson did not need to look in the pot to know what it contained: the piles of feathers and stripped carcasses were evidence enough.
And that’s not all. The man was an immigrant!
By the time he had alerted the authorities, the man - believed to be an East European immigrant - had packed up his tent and fled.
Believed by whom? The article doesn’t say, but it does point out that the park is used by, y’know, foreign types. The article also reluctantly notes that by the time the authorities got there, the actual evidence of swan-cooking had magically disappeared.
The article continues:
Several of the campsites were littered with dozens of old car batteries but it was not clear what use these were being put to.
It’s obvious: asylum seekers are coming to our parks and electrocuting our wildlife! Happens in Eastern Europe all the time. My wife went to Poland once and couldn’t sleep at night for the sounds of quacking and zapping.
Far be it for me to suggest that the article’s a load of old bollocks based entirely on hearsay, but…