January 2012
20 posts
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DWP Benefits Cap Impact Assessment →
If you look at nothing else, scroll to the charts.
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Capped
A small note regarding the “£26k benefits cap”:—
Lots of people seem to be talking as though the benefits being paid are exclusively (or, at the very least, predominantly) to those seeking work. In other words, if they found work then these benefits would go away. This is the justification for capping to an “average” salary — pay too much in benefits to the unemployed, then you’re providing a...
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European court of human rights: which countries... →
The UK was found against for lack of effective investigation on five occasions, not to have offered a fair trial on three occasions, and to have failed its duty on prohibition of torture twice.
See also this.
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BMJ: Does anyone understand the government’s NHS... →
In a Personal View published on bmj.com today, he writes: “I have tried very hard, as have some of my cleverer colleagues, but no matter how hard we try, we always end up concluding that the bill means something quite different from what the secretary of state says it does.”
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Ariel: Learning to make competition-winning ideas →
Nassé and BBC North director Peter Salmon also decided to commission Mega Bits, an idea from runner-ups Chris Tangye and James Parkin in Future Media, which encourages children to write computer code.
Excellent.
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Islington Council admits tree sign 'error' →
A council has warned residents not to attach objects to trees - in a notice attached to a tree.
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Church refuses boy with Down's syndrome Holy... →
In its letter, the diocese said Denum had “limited concentration, doesn’t really access the RE curriculum and does not enjoy going to Mass”.
It said if Denum took his first Holy Communion when he was “better placed to understand” it would “enrich his whole experience”.
Pretty sensible, I would have thought. Faith is (meant to be) a personal thing, and...
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BBC names David Shukman as first science editor →
Definitely a role which needed creating.
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Rodong Sinmun →
North Korea’s official newspaper, featuring such headlines as S. Korean Traitors’ Group to Stop Playing Disgusting Trick, All Koreans to Open Gate to National Reunification, and Russian Organization Discusses Measures for Introducing Immortal Exploits of Great Men.
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BASF to Stop Selling Genetically Modified Products... →
leejarvis:
Hooray, Europe! Lesson to everyone - you can vote with your wallet - if it doesn’t make “business sense” then corporations won’t try and sell you crap!
So BASF is no longer doing the R&D in Europe, but will still import the products. The potato in question, incidentally is used… for…
(wait for it)
…making paper.
It’s difficult to see this as a victory for common sense.
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What is WebID?
WebID is a W3C Incubator Group (soon to be, and possibly by the time you read this already, a W3C Community Group) specifying a mechanism for using X.509 End Entity (or “client”) certificates to identify yourself to online services, and for performing attribute exchange through Linked Data.
WebID works like this:
You generate, or obtain, an X.509 certificate for yourself. It doesn’t really...
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The Rise of the New Groupthink →
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.
While this may be a study of the bleedin’ obvious, the message has yet to sink in for many designing working environments.
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A polite request
Dear The Newspaper Industry,
I pay for your content—in electronic form, no less. I’ve tried a few different ways of doing this, but my present favourite is a Kindle subscription. I receive The News when I wake up in the morning and read it on my commute. Splendid.
What I’m unable to fathom is why the content which is delivered to my device and I have paid actual money for is a subset of...
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Microsoft hustled UK retreat on open standards,... →
The British government withdrew its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft, it has been revealed in a Cabinet Office brief leaked to Computer Weekly.
Bunch of knobbers.
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Home Office: The local labour market effects of... →
The perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, thus contributing to large increases in unemployment, or that immigrants depress wages of existing workers, do not find confirmation in the analysis of data laid out in this report.
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Israel vows to retaliate after credit cards are... →
Israel has said it will respond to cyber-attacks in the same way it responds to violent “terrorist” acts after the credit card details of thousands of its citizens were published online.
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Mac OS X: Adding a new Windows printer
Say you have a printer shared via Windows — and you want to add it as a new printing device in Mac OS X. You head to System Preferences, then either Print & Scan or Print & Fax depending upon your version, press the + button… and fail to find it in any of the sections. The Windows section doesn’t seem to provide anything useful.
There are two ways to do achieve what you want.
One is to...
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Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use →
Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, told BBC Scotland that teachers should follow his advice: “First thing is don’t bother telling anybody else about your social life. Nobody is interested about your social life and it doesn’t help.
“Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.
“There is...
December 2011
26 posts
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The iMessage/stolen phone thing
What Apple needs to do is (conceptually) really bloody simple: when a remote wipe occurs, or a device is activated without having iMessage/FaceTime credentials to hand (i.e., because it’s a factory reset rather than a restore-from-backup), remove the device’s UDID from iMessage’s and FaceTime’s respective databases.
And, er, that’s about it.
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Freedom Online: Joint Action for Free Expression... →
Endorsed by Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Estonia, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, the Republic of Maldives, Mexico, Mongolia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden.
Irony.
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Wait, what? →
#Hitchens: why did the world’s most famous atheist, faced with horrors of cancer, not opt for euthanasia?
— @cristinaod1 (Cristina Odone)
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An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S.... →
If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious...
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A short Linked Data URI design Q&A
URI design for Linked Data is pretty straightforward, but there are a few common practices out there in the real world which I find jarring as somebody who is mainly a data consumer. This is my attempt to briefly talk about why you shouldn’t do those things. I’ll probably update this post over time.
Why should I avoid routinely redirecting [usually a 303] from a published thing URI to a specific...
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Kultivate
I’m presenting today at the Kultivate Linked Data workshop in London.
Should anybody be interested, my slides, notes and example data can all be found here.
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Can I take photos at the school play? →
The ever-excellent Paul Clarke.
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Best. Facebook. Status. Ever. →
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Domesday Reloaded Project opens at Bletchley Park →
The BBC’s Domesday Project has been made into an interactive ‘touchtable’ now on display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
Visitors can zoom in on any part of the UK and see multimedia submitted in both the eighties and in 2011.
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Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 Diary →
Fascinating.
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Testimony to the Leveson Inquiry by Alexander John... →
Between 1999 and 2005 I was the Senior Investigating Officer with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) based in Wilmslow.
Definitely worth reading.
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The Artist Gateway - linking our data to the best... →
Universal Music meets Linked Data. This is very exciting.
(It’ll come as no surprise that there are one or two BBC Audio & Music Interactive alumni involved in this project).
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Dr Petra: A tragic case of medical misconduct →
A journalist colleague then tried to pitch a story critiquing the g-shot , but they were unsuccessful. Over the past three years I sent my blog post questioning the g-shot to any media outlet I spotted giving it publicity. In most cases I heard nothing back. Occasionally a journalist would politely thank me and tell me they’d consider my opinions if they wrote similar pieces in the future.
In...
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Slightly Right of Centre: Notes and thoughts from... →
I am yet to hear a convincing argument as to why lobbyists pushing corporate agendas at the highest level of government should not themselves be subject to some scrutiny. Why are so many corporations so afraid to speak openly and on the record?
Good question.
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Jeremy Hunt supports BBC Orwell statue →
For some time there’s been a campaign to erect a statue of George Orwell outside the BBC’s new Broadcasting House building. Orwell worked at the old BBC Broadcasting House next door during the war – an experience which inspired aspects of his novel 1984, not least the notorious Room 101 where he worked.
I am wholeheartedly in favour of this plan.
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DHS abruptly abandons copyright seizure of hip-hop... →
This case was widely reported as being pretty bizarre when the domain was first seized. It’s no less bizarre now.
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Cameron versus the EU
I don’t find David Cameron particularly trustworthy at the best of times, and he’s shown little credible evidence that he really understands what “Britain’s interests” actually are as far as most people are concerned.
So without being in a position to determine the detail of what’s been rejected, and given that this now appears to be David Cameron’s cabinet in firm disagreement with all of the...
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Translation from PR puff piece into English
UltraViolet service offering digital locker of films and TV planned for UK:
A consortium including Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and Fox are backing the UK launch of a new service that aims to revolutionise home entertainment, and cut piracy, by offering consumers a digital locker of films and TV shows they can watch on any device.
“We’ve finally managed to cut through the tangled rights...
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Mandate
I’ve grown weary of being insulted by members of different societal class who believe they can do and say whatever they like without consequence. While there are some good, honest, hard-working members of this class striving to do the right thing, many seem to be little more than self-serving scroungers attempting to get away with doing as little as possible at the taxpayer’s expense,...
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WSJ: Online Consumers Happy to Be Tracked →
The headline doesn’t quite tally with the content, however:
Consumers are happy to share their personal data with organizations they trust and if they get something in return, but are increasingly concerned about privacy and losing control of that data, according to a global survey of consumer trends.
(My emphasis).
My question: how can people make an informed decision about the trade-offs?
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Google does charts in search results →
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BBC Live: London roadside emergency →
A “live-blog” worth reading.
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Mike Garry: i’ve just stopped a guy from jumping... →
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Carrier IQ
A few days after the Carrier IQ controversy broke with the aid of Trevor Eckhart, there’s been… more controversy and a little more information.
If you’re an iOS device user, things are pretty straightforward. When you buy an iPhone or iPad, what you get is down to Apple, not the carriers. Certainly, Apple lets carriers (via a kind of provisioning profile) dictate certain settings on an iPhone,...
Typical BBC bias
Handily, the Graun have published a transcript of the portion of the One Show which has caused controversy.
This is useful, because without it I would have had to have gone to the trouble of transcribing it myself.
Have you read it? Are you still outraged? How?
You know what Clarkson was doing? He was taking the piss out of the BBC’s famous policy of achieving “balance” by having two polar...
November 2011
57 posts
3 tags
Met police Tasered man carrying toy gun on train →
If this account is accurate, it is incredibly disturbing.
“The police shouted: ‘Sit down.’ So I sat down patiently. They said: ‘Open your briefcase,’ which I did. They saw the toy gun. Then a male police officer opened fire with a gun which jammed.
“So then they jumped at me and used the Taser four times at my chest. That did not have any effect, I felt no...
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An absolutely minimal introduction to certificates
So, what is a certificate anyway?
(Note to reader: I might mean an X.509 certificate, or I might mean a PGP certificate, or I might mean some other kind of certificate which adheres to the same principles; take your pick).
A certificate consists of three things:
A public key, belonging to the holder of the certificate
Some arbitrary information about the holder of the certificate
* A...
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Charities should not exploit young people through... →
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We had no evidence for DEAct, UK government... →