“I’m going to impose a fine to remind him chivalry is not dead and when somebody is in distress you leave them to it.” Said Sheriff Kenneth Hogg.

Is that a Sheriff’s job now, to punish people who don’t act in a way that the Sheriff deems proper? And what does he mean by ‘leave them to it’? If someone is genuinely in distress you should go to their aid surely?

Now I might disagree, but the law is the law, and I look forward to the Scottish Courts retroactively seeking to prosecute Nick Ut for his unchivalrous acts of photography.

It’s an almost textbook example of optimization theory - assume there’s two ice cream booths on a beach [0..1] with a uniform distribution of guests, now the optimal for the beach guests would having them at 1/4 and 3/4, but then each could steal customers by moving towards the center. End result you got two booths right next to each other in the middle, each serving half the guests. As long as any other booths can’t enter (winner takes it all-system) that situation is stable. Any disturbance like the guest moving over to one side of the beach because it got better sun in the afternoon and the dividing line will move, again leaving half on each side. If you want clearer objective proof that having 40% of the votes it useless in the US, this is it. The politicians must redefine their politics so they’re fighting for the majority, rather than stay true to anything.

Democracy in action.

Pic from Vaguely Artistic.

So students oppose a law to ban off licence sales to under 21s. Is anyone surprised? It would have been news if they’d supported it. This is based on the SNP’s ‘consultation paper’ that says:

We propose further action to end the promotion and loss-leading of alcoholic drinks in licensed premises.

We propose action to introduce minimum retail pricing.

We propose to raise the minimum legal purchase age to 21 for off-sales.

We propose that a fee should be applied to some alcohol retailers to help offset the costs of dealing with the adverse consequences of alcohol.

Now it would seem obvious that raising the prices in off licences is going to do absolutely nothing to deter the hardened drinkers, students who will happily pay £3+ for a pint or anyone else really. And since they cannot enforce the law as it stands, what difference does it make increasing the age to 21, especially when it would only be for the purchase of drink not the consumption (i.e. somebody else can buy it).

And via Mr Euginedes, here is another non-story about evil alcohol.

The Orkney Brewery fears Skull Splitter could be withdrawn from sale following a report commissioned by alcohol watchdog the Portman Group…

…because…

…it was highlighted in a report by management consultancy PIPC on the grounds its name could imply violence and also the impact the strength may have on the drinker.

Who are these people? The Portman Group? The PIPC? I’ve no idea what’s going on but I’m beginning to worry that they (whoever they are) are targeting my beer. I’m not happy.

Pic from An Pu Ruo.

Officials have also warned members of the public to steer clear of the blast zone, and watch the spectacle through a live internet broadcast as there are no safe viewing areas nearby.

No safe areas, eh? No change there then. And as you can tell from the screaming kids in the video, no bugger heeded that warning.

The [EU] Commission adopted a proposal to extend the term of protection for performers and sound recordings to 95 years. …The extended term will enable performers to earn money for a longer period of time and in any event throughout their lifetime. The income from copyright remuneration is important for performers, as they often do not have other regular salaried income. From the EU ‘Terms of Protection’ Commission Proposal.

Firstly, they currently have 50 years to milk their work for all it’s worth, what are they going to do with another 45. Secondly, how many 115 year old musicians are there out there that had a hit when they were under twenty and did nowt else for the rest of their lives, because if your aim is to fund musicians’ twilight years, that is the only kind of person that will benefit. And finally, what other group of pensioners has a ‘regular salaried income’. Ever heard of a pension?

The aim of the proposal is to bring performers’ protection more in line with that already given to authors - 70 years after their death.

If you want parity, why not reduce the copyright term for authors to 50 years then? Why would a person need ‘protection’ after they are dead?

I quit reading after that. Ars Technica has further issues.

Pic from Antoon. Sorry, was struggling to think of something to illustrate this, and all I could come up with was a farty, old pop star who has enough money already.

Obviously the Times ramps up the salacious angle referring to ‘lovers’ and ‘check bedrooms for evidence’ and such. Though the councils are just looking for evidence of more than one person living in the house, regardless of the relationship. But even then I’m incredulous at the brass neck of these nosy bastards. What kind of person chooses to do that for a living? And I mean ‘chooses’. Nobody can be so unemployable that they can’t get a job at McDonalds and have to go for that Council Snoop position or lose their benefits.

Civil Servants my arse.

Image from SingSong.

I believe with these things I’m supposed to ‘tag’ someone else but no-one I know is wanky enough to have their own blog, so I’ll just post it here on it’s own. If you do wish to take part you can download a clean list in text or html.

I’ve added in an extra rule, where you can highlight books that you didn’t like. Also, it appears there are supposed to be 100 books, but one seems to have gotten lost on the way.

Basically the rules are thus.

Below is a list of classic books and you are supposed to look at the list and:

1. Bold those you have read.
2. Italicise those you intend to read.
3. [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4. Underline those you HATE.
5. Reprint this list on your own blog.

Here is my list:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien]
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - God
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9. [His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman]
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. [Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger]
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis]
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41. [Animal Farm - George Orwell]
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I watched Margaret Atwood on ‘Martians and Us’ last night and Handmaid’s Tale sounded fascinating.)
    
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (For some reason I thought I’d read this, but when I thought about it I realised I hadn’t. Getting old.)
49. [Atonement - Ian McEwan]
50. Fire and Hemlock - Dianna Wynne-Jones
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. [Brave New World - Aldous Huxley]
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. [Dracula - Bram Stoker]
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - A. S. Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
98. [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl]
99. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

As a piece of art, it is patently shit. And as a supposed political attack it is also shit. Cowboys are great, if someone wanted to paint me as a lone gunslinger I’d be mightily chuffed. However I would hope that they would do a better job. In fact I reckon I’ll give it a go.

There we go. I may call it “But the Emperor, he is naked!”. Wot you reckon?

Pics stolen from Miguel Andrade and Shaun Curry.

Imagine an application that can accurately track all your computing activities. Imagine that data was uploaded into ‘the cloud’. Imagine that data was all collated to give you reports on what you spend your time on and infer when you are most productive and when you are most distracted. Imagine your boss had full access to that data. Imagine you could use it at home and it would tell you that ‘last week you spent over one hour “researching” Alan Partridge quotes’ (I did and that is definitely not the worst of it).

It looks like Rescue Time could be that application. And they even have a Linux hack so I could use it at home.

Despite the privacy issues, I am still tempted to give it a go.

Picture from Titimo

Via Read Write Web