Alcohol cheaper than water in supermarkets

Dr. Brian Keighley, Chairman of the British Medical Association in Scotland:

"Supermarkets use cheap alcohol to attract customers into their stores, selling it even cheaper than bottled water"

What concerns me is that Dr. Keighley is in a position of great responsibility and he can't even get basic easily checkable facts correct. It's so surprising to me that I wouldn't be shocked if this incorrect fact is actually a calculated lie.

Even Tesco price checker tells me that both Tesco and Asda sell a 2 litre bottle of water is 17p. That's less than 9p per litre. There is no alcohol available, not even in multipacks, that is this cheap. I'm pretty certain other supermarkets offer similar products. Why should I believe anything else they claim?

Postcode based address lookup for your website without PAF

Ecommerce website developers like to make their websites as easy to use as possible. When a user places an order you can make it easier for them if they only have to type their UK postcode and then select their address from a list of relatively few property addresses that are based within any single postcode. In fact, this is what I needed for my website. This technology can also be used for data cleansing and related.

The Royal Mail controls and owns this database of 28 million addresses. It calls it PAF or Postcode Address File. It does resell this database but it is expensive and they make millions from it. There has been pressure on the tax payer subsidised Royal Mail to open up the database but nothing has come to fruition. There are companies that will charge for each individual search. This is often a good service but I hereby offer a PAF alternative for testing which is almost as reliable but for a fraction of the cost.

There was excitement in 2010 that it might be possible to bypass the Royal Mail and use the Ordnance Survey's data it has opened up in its new initiative. OS give you a full list of UK postcodes with its highly accurate latitude and longitude data. They also have opened up street level maps with town and street names. The problem is that although the postcode data is in a pure data format the maps have only been released in a raster format! It's theoretically possible to extract the street data using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) but early experiments by me using Google's open source OCR project Tesseract gives very poor results. I see no reason why OS can't release the data in some open raw data/point/vector format but they haven't. Maybe Royal Mail got to them. I have asked them on Twitter.

Please have a play with my demonstration script using a database which gives PAF-like results without using PAF.

Postcode based address lookup demo.

I expect to be happy to open up how this works and help many people quickly integrate postcode technology on their websites without getting their credit card out.

Please leave me some comments with exactly what you did and what you think. It's completely legal and not tied up in legal contracts. I may consider running it as an API service or releasing the code and database depending on your feedback. Or you might be interested in directly employing for something like this.

CCTV: The UK under surveillance and why privacy matters

First up, civil liberties. The problem with governments is that they have proven themselves to be dangerous organisations. We already know of governments that are dangerous in far away lands. Humans have been around for many, many thousands of years and as recent as the last 60 to 100 years we have seen some of the most famous examples of just how dangerous these organisations can be right in the middle of Europe.

The only prediction I will make about the future is that it is unpredictable. Things change extremely fast and we should have a firm eye on just what governments get up to. There are tools that private individuals can use to maintain individual privacy but with technology changing so far there could be a period where individuals are unable to protect themselves in which case it would be easy for bad people in powerful places to wreak havoc.

Why is individual privacy so important? Anything that erodes absolute freedom is oppression. Sometimes it is needed since without oppressing an individual they will oppress others.

The problem is that people tend to take a negative interest in things that are different to what they are used to and if they get into a position of power then all hell breaks lose. How much wealth someone has. If they have a disease. Their sexuality. What they believe. If there is any information about them or their family or friends that could be leveraged. Human history is basically a story of minorities being abused for no good reason. The ability to live a private life protects people fairly.

Don't forget that we still have major problems with civil liberties. You will be physically abused if you grow a cannabis plant and smoke it in your own home and the government finds out.

We need an attitude that it is completely unacceptable for civil liberties to be eroded. You or someone you know could be the victim next.

What problems could filming innocent people have in the hands of a government? Facial recognition could easily create a database of who was where, doing what, and visiting who. It's a slippery slope that isn't worth the risk.

Shops have CCTV for their own security. Is that a risk to civil liberties? There is some risk but it's far more localised and it would be difficult for them to cause problems to a mass of people. There is a choice not to do business with those businesses. Governments are the primary candidate to wreak havoc with their uniquely enormous power.

Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is unfairly targeted as a poor resource. It's probably one of the best example of what the Internet, software, and people can achieve. The quality of the articles on subjects such as history and science is nothing short of excellent.

As with any resource there are problems with Wikipedia. There are problems with bias, references, and vandalism but I would say certainly less so that newspapers.

Wikipedia changes its problems into its strengths in many places. Article disputes can often be some of the most valuable parts of an entry since you get to see first hand the tension between different opinions on a subject on the discussions tab on most articles.

Common news stories involve celebrities complaining articles are edited with lies. We should thank newspapers for highlighting good practice when it comes to reading articles and to check references. There is no absolute truth in any information yet when used properly, Wikipedia comes very close.

The real reason Wikipedia gets a bad press is because it's the best example out of just how disruptive things can get for journalists and professional writers. They concentrate on its important problems in an attempt to divert attention away from Wikipedia's overall value. The fact it gets criticism comparing it to perfection says a lot.

BTFON, FON, and BTOpenZone hotspots

I recently signed up for a few days of wi-fi internet access through this system while I waited for my home broadband connection to be activated.

Please don't even bother considering connecting to one of these hot spots. It barely works, when it does it won't soon, and to top things off they don't provide details of exactly who is charging you what and do not respond to any support requests.

Save your money. You have been warned.

Wealth and the recovery

People are confused with what wealth is which is one of the problems our economy is in such a mess.

Money definitely isn't wealth since people had wealth before money and money wasn't invented to create wealth but as a catalyst for increasing wealth through practicality.

Today's humans live a vastly more complex life than those from earlier times which seems to have confused people about things such as wealth.

Humans need and therefore seek water, food, safety, and shelter for themselves and their family.

Earth was vastly under utilised by humans but it took incomprehensible generations and numbers of humans to unlock the secrets, the most famous being when humans became the first and only animals so far to create and use fire. Today, humans have unlocked energy within atoms for wealth. Better road building techniques meant more land could be used for growing food. Television meant people could learn more about the world more cheaply. Doctors keep people farming when they may have died from a bad infection. Mobile phones cut fuel usage when people knew when someone wouldn't be in with a text. Water proof fabrics allowed people to pick food in bad weather. Finding coal meant machinery could run more cheaply so children in a family could learn more about our world and maybe become scientists. All examples of wealth. We didn't get wealthier by spending more, we got wealthier and more prosperous precisely because we found ways of spending less on the things we need by rewarding only people who provided our needs in the most efficient ways.

A house is an example of a valuable asset since it provides warmth, shelter, and safety. But a house is a very poor example of wealth creation. Once built it only depreciates since its roof will eventually leak etc.

In the last decade we've had a house price boom the likes of which the world has never seen before. It's still not clear how it will play out (partly because of current government intervention) but some aspects are obvious.

A market bubble is where you can hoard a fortune purely on the basis that other people believe the same. The rapid price increase and subsequent profits as more and more people pile in seem almost infinite as more and more witness success simply by entering the market. It would all be fine if people accepted the losses (bear the cost of negative equity etc.) with the profits but there's a strong tendency right now to privatise profits and socialise the losses.

The problem is our whole economy was strongly corrupted by this despite warnings by some rational people that the government were merely trying to grow GDP numbers in the short term. Whole sections of our economy were dedicated to this method of living. Some people made more money from property than their salary. Indeed many people made it their salary (buy-to-let landlords on interest only mortgages). The government even borrowed too relying on maintained future tax revenues and paid for an extra million students to go to university often to do courses that were of dubious value to society. I don't even need to mention the bloated unproductive state sector which is often a drain on wealth.

A stable society is one where people are rewarded proportionally for their contributions to wealth. A new medicine allowing an ill worker to return to being productive or a supermarket who has cut its costs by using more efficient trucks. Millions of people were making money from being non-productive and even borrowing against the "guaranteed" future income from this method of living. The wrong people were rewarded. I'm happy for people to get rich by selling food cheaper than ever yet Tesco are vilified and a property boom demanded.

Low interest rates (an enabler for the house price boom) were a double-whammy as they made saving money for surviving when the tough times eventually came even more difficult. People can survive recessions a lot easier with savings.

Working and investing in businesses is a good example of creating wealth. Business workers are rewarded for their efficiency in enabling people to eat and buy tools to enable them to build places of safety. Somewhere in the layers of human activity everything has to be reflected in real wealth. By running an economy off bubbling house prices and borrowing against them we are rewarding people for non-productivity.

The UK Labour party promised us they'd put growth as the priority using more borrowed money. It would only be a recovery to what has been before. The recession is the costs we all have to bear to redirect our efforts towards productivity. We can't let the new government do the same.

A tool shop owner who once sold spades for people to grow potatoes was corrupted by short term profits into swapping the limited space he had in his shop to selling tools like steam wallpaper strippers for people lavishly renovating their home paid for by the money profits of the property bubble. It's not that steam wallpaper removers shouldn't exist at all, it's that our economy was corrupted far too much in the direction of such consumerism.

As the short term profits come to an end it dawns on the the tool shop owner that he is stuck with too many items which don't feed people or keep them safe at night. The time he spends clearing out non-productive stock he paid for with his time is his own personal recession. This multiplied over the population is our country's recession. He was corrupted down this path. The owner could borrow more money and market more heavily and eventually sell some steam wallpaper removers but the problem remains but now even worse since he'll be non-wealth-creating even longer plus the interest. He's finding it harder to put food on the table because his customers are finding it hard to do the same because they've been living off something that does not have a basis in actually putting food onto people's tables.

Governments are trying their hardest to prop up the property market to hold on as long as possible to the status quo of high property prices and delay this recession. The tool shop owner can't be productive with his current stock no matter how much he wants it to be.

The government is also trying to get those not responsible for the recession to pay. Those that gained without merit should be the ones to pay. Savers are being punished with low interest rates and their pounds diluted with quantitative easing (otherwise known as printing money).

We need this recession. We don't want a recovery to what went before. Delaying it will only hurt more. We want a transition from an economy based on being rewarded simply for taking out a mortgage (and the parts of the economy that "benefited" from this) to creating wealth which can't happen until people adapt which is exactly what the recession is. A recession will focus people's efforts into feeding and securing their families. The alternative is delaying a worse recession.

Emergence of Sharia law courts in the UK and freedom

You'll find a lot of people complaining about the rise in Islamism in western countries. One aspect in particular gets people hot under the collar and that's Sharia law courts.

The accusation is that Islam is strongly creeping not just into our society but our legal system and that Islamic law is seen as often unjust.

They're "enforcing their rules in our country".

For me freedom includes the freedom to sign away your own rights if your freedoms means so little to you. The TV show Judge Judy in the US was same. You sign a contract to agree to her judgement. Nothing wrong with that. No one has to adhere to any Sharia law arbitration process if they don't want to.

I have no doubt that stories of women being bullied into these courts are true which is why we should concentrate on that problem since it is already illegal.

UK immigration, minimum wage, foreign outsourcing, and benefits

I don't have any problems with immigration specifically but it's becoming a lot clearer that immigration is a symptom of a much bigger problem.

When Labour introduced the minimum wage in 1997 there were warnings of unemployment and inflation by economic liberals. Neither of these worries really came to fruition. But there was another variable which definitely did occur which can be linked (statistically and logically) to the combination of minimum wage and pay for non-productivity (unemployment benefits).

From the early 1990s to the introduction of the minimum wage, unemployment was falling. The introduction of the minimum wage seemed to have no effect on falling unemployment right into Labour's tenure.

UK National Statistics data clearly shows a sharp rise in immigration in 1998 which continued for the next decade.

Net migration to the United Kingdom in thousands.
1991 + 44
1992 - 13
1993 - 1
1994 + 77
1995 + 76
1996 + 55
1997 + 48
1998 + 140 Minimum wage introduced but unemployment still falls
1999 + 163
2000 + 158
2001 + 171 UK unemployment floor at 1.5 million
2002 + 153
2003 + 148
2004 + 245 Peak immigration with unemployment still at 1.5 million
2005 + 206
2006 + 198
2007 + 233
2008 + 163
Source: National Statistics

UK unemployment flatlined at 1.5 million from 2001 to 2006 while yearly immigration rates rocketed again in 2004. It grew from 2006 and hit record highs during the recent recession which hit Britain harder than many countries.

Importantly, economic inactivity (sometimes referred to as real unemployment) has been growing steadily from 2000 and Labour was deficit spending. British-born unemployed could be hidden by paying for education (1.4 million students in 1997 to 2.3 million today, partly paid for by borrowing remember) but jobs were still being filled at the minimum wage rate immigrants.

Employers made it very clear that British-born workers were not worth the minimum wage. The most proactive workers from other countries (often highly educated) were the only ones employers deemed worth the minimum wage which rose ~60% from £3.60 to £5.80. The unemployed are some of the least proactive people corrupted by benefits. The top workers from one country versus bottom of another. There was clearly work to do and people to do it but corruptive benefits and a ban of payment for productivity made it impossible. It was illegal to employ British-born workers at what employers valued them at.

The UK economy used immigrants (and foreign outsourcing e.g. call centres) to adapt to employment restrictions.

I have no problem with immigration and outsourcing but it's obvious what the causes have been. There would not be complaints about immigration if the minimum wage had not been introduced.

Convert video to animated GIF for free and easy

I've often wondered the exact process by which this is done. Firstly, it's much easier to do in Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows 7. The reason being is that all the software is there to be immediately installed and it works immediately. You can either dual boot, use VMWare to run a Linux virtual machine, or even VNC to a Linux box like I do.

Install recordMyDesktop from the terminal

sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop

Drag the area of the screen you wish to record using the small preview of the whole screen. Click record when ready. The video will save as out.ogv

Next you'll need FFMpeg. The easiest way is to install WinFF from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Next run this to split the video into PNG frames. JPEG is too compressed.

ffmpeg -i out.ogv frames/frame%d.png

Now you'll have all the frames.

Run GIMP Image Editor from the menu. Select File > Open as Layers... and hold down the shift key to select the frames you want. You can crop or do any image processing here if need be. Then File > Save as and give a .gif extension to your file. Save as animated GIF. You are done.

Here's one I made earlier of the moment Mrs Duffy is told what Gordon Brown called her.

Rise in National Insurance

Raising National Insurance really is a poor idea. Not only is it an increased tax on employees (justifiable in these times) but effectively a forced pay rise through the employer contribution (employers don't care how their wage bill is distributed only size). Total wage bill goes up (you can't shrink wages to compensate if they're on minimum wage). Shrink the wage bills and tax earning. Private sector taxed jobs is WAY better than discouraging employment by increased wage bills.

An NI rise is a tax on having employees. A tax on dividends fairly ignores a struggling business which is not making a profit. A tax on wages is pretty irrelevant since having a job in the first place is priority right now for most people. Taking a pay cut in real terms to keep your job makes perfect sense outside the public sector.

Cut minimum wage. Cut benefits. Cut National Insurance (or keep it the same for argument's sake). Cut public sector wages to encourage transition to private sector (cutting jobs is last resort). Tax private sector employee income.

Get people working almost no matter what they take home, and definitely don't discourage it.

Apple's iPhone multitasking lies and the gullible

Apple makes big claims about it's new update to the iPhone especially when it comes to multitasking.

The iPhone cannot currently multitask. The Android mobile phone operating system can multitask and there can indeed problems with some applications (depending what they are trying to acheieve and how they do it) depleting the battery very quickly. There is a lot more freedom on the Android format which has advantages and disadvantages.

Apple almost certainly took the decison to not include multitasking because its phone was already power-hungry with its graphics processing running it's basic applications. They could have given the choice (as Android does) and some customers would be happy with the compromise depending on what they were trying to achieve. Apple decided it could make more money by reducing the likelihood of complaints of poor battery life from the majority of their customers that simply want to play a few games and read emails.

Apple's new marketing for its upcoming iPhone OS update states: "Developers will have access to seven multitasking services, which will allow tasks to be performed in the background while preserving performance and battery life."

What Apple is doing, by appealing to the common user seeking slightly more functionality than is currently available, is potentially admirable but their marketing is not. There are plenty of Apple worshipers that actually believe this hype.

How can it possible do more and preserve performance and battery life? It is CPU cycles and radio transceiving that use battery power, not having programs in memory etc. To get the benefit of the CPU (complete a task) you need to use the battery. There is no compromise.

Apple may be trying to nudge developers to write more efficient code. If the claim is that they have created an operating system with a compromise that most of their customers will be happy with that would be fine. They are not. They are lying with their claim.

Fuel duty clarification (congestion or pollution) and road pricing

The UK fuel duty issue is a complex issue. The story starts in the late 1980s when car ownership rocketed. New roads were needed and to be paid for by road users. A policy of fuel price escalation was introduced. Soon there were widespread protests against the building of more new roads. Fuel duty was increased in reaction to congestion and global warming (and general pollution) concerns and kept rising through the 90s and the 00s and is still rising.

Congestion is definitely a problem during peak times and global warming could be a serious problem for the planet, although it could be exaggerated. Fuel duty is proportional to any damage done to the planet. Flat taxes like car tax and show room taxes (emissions being the criteria) are not.

If the problem is congestion then there is a case for some sort of road pricing where lorries could get a rebate for travelling at night (or some similar related concession). Technology is becoming very realistic to manage this is all sorts of ways (e.g. GPS-based road pricing).

The problem is that one of the governments own policies suggests the issue isn't pollution and that's the reduced duty on red diesel which incurrs the exact same cost on the environment.

Red diesel is about £0.54/litre. Diesel for road use is currently £1.20/litre. What the government is clearly telling us (policy speaks louder than words) is the vast majority of fuel duty is paying for your share of use on the roads with less efficient cars paying disproportionaly more of the share in both fixed and variable costs.

By all means have a (large if justified) tax proportional to costs incurred to others, through damange to the planet or to pay for roads, but make it fair.

Clearly the cost of building and maintaining roads is unfairly distributed which is why road pricing should be something we aim for in the next couple of decades. A definite progressive tax on motoring and, to a much lesser extent, potential harm to the environment.

Mobile phone termination charges and Ofcom

Ofcom is forcing mobile phone operators Vodafone, O2, Orange, and T-mobile to reduce charges. This time the media is actually noticing that they will likely simply recoup that loss with reduced subsidies for handsets but there's another reason, more significantly, why it's a waste of money for Ofcom to even exist.

Competition between operators is already fierce. Mobile phones and calls are on the whole extremely cheap. One could argue that there are some charges which are still not of a trivial cost such as international charges but there are other organisations that are already putting extreme pressure on our networks. Nokia is one example of an organisation in a much stronger and fairer position to keep mobile networks competitive.

Nokia's N900 phone already allows calls to be made and received over wi-fi without downloading any software (Skype is integrated into the phone's operating system) and works in a full multi-tasking manner i.e. it does not require you have Skype running in the foreground like the Apple iPhone. International calls cost pennies per minute right down to free if you're calling another skype device.

Wi-fi points are everywhere and they are only growing more and more. A lot of wi-fi points in public still charge a premium price but it's only a matter of time before city dwellers unite and share their bandwidth in an open network. Software could manage it. Hundreds of city visitors using small amounts of bandwidth for voice calls could easily pay for a broadband connection and perhaps you get free calls in other cities for opening yours. "The Open Mobile Network" is coming soon and the existing networks will only have control over the gaps inbetween free calls. The incentive to be competitive is overwhelming. Ofcom should concentrate on helping subscribers break free of contracts if the networks are not delivering their promises.

Mobile networks are terrified. Ofcom did not do this.

Drugs & crime, causation and correlation, & disingenuous media reports.

Individualists state that it is unfair to force non-drug users to pay to try and stop drug users doing what they want to do in their own home.

Many do not accept this and cite crime as a major externality with drug use.

In a recent debate I was told that "17% of violent crime is caused by drugs".

As it turns out the only statistic I could find using Google was that 17% of victims of violent crime "believed the offender to be under the influence of drugs". This was dismissed as being irrelevant and that the original statistic was still true. This was not just a random crazy member of the public; a few searches on Google show this kind of thinking is endemic in the media and government.

There is indeed correlation between drug use and crime. But correlation isn't causation.

The Australian Institute of Criminology explains the problem: "Research suggests that drug use and crime involvement have common origins. Factors such as poor social support systems, difficulty in school, membership of deviant peer groups, early contact with government services and a lack of access to economic support systems are common in the backgrounds of both drug users and criminals."

Drugs and Violence: Causes, Correlates, and Consequences by the US government's National Institute on Drug Use is the most detailed study I could find. It is clear that drug use does not cause crime.

Independent Policy Report: Illicit Drugs and Crime is also clear about it's data and methods to conclude drugs do not cause crime.

I then had a more recent UK related statistic quoted back at me.

"...a massive 90% of all Young Offenders are on cannabis"

I research and found a newspaper article in The Mirror quoting this fact. "Cannabis is fuelling a youth crime wave - with 90 per cent of teen offenders using it."

I still found it unbelievable so I kept searching.

A Daily Mail article from the same time states something completely different: "In some parts of the country that means nine out of ten teenage criminals have been using the drug."

Some parts of the country? What does that mean? It isn't explained.

A Youth Justice Board report from a few months earlier states "90% of young people in custody had used an illegal drug at some point in their life"

Three completely different statistics. I concede that if the Mirror's version is true it doesn't invalidate the other two but I find that unlikely.
Another US government body, the Drug Enforcement Agency, has a very strong quote to prove that drugs do cause crime which was used to counter my argument.

"Crime, violence and drug use go hand in hand. Six times as many homicides are committed by people under the influence of drugs, as by those who are looking for money to buy drugs. Most drug crimes aren't committed by people trying to pay for drugs; they're committed by people on drugs."

No references or studies are given on their fact page containing this quote.

Homicide is the most serious crime and it wouldn't suprise me if many were also drug users. "Six times" sounds like a huge number but it's compared to "homicides committed by...those who are looking for money to buy drugs" which is a very specific claim. Perhaps homicide for money is not so common let alone specifically to buy drugs. More details are needed which the DEA do not give.

Rearranging the last sentence for clarity gives us "Most drug crimes...[are]...committed by people on drugs"

That has to be one of the strangest sentences I have ever read since it switches to talking about "drug crime" and not any type of violent crime. People on drugs are almost certainly committing drug crimes. It's hard to know if it's a mistake or intentionally disceptive and certainly doesn't give me any confidence in the DEA's claims.

David Jones MP, Brian Christley, and Physics

There's good reason to be very afraid of the world we live in. Here's a single specific contribtor to my feelings.

Take a look at this http://davidjonesblog.com/2009/12/04/spinning-in-the-wind/

This guy is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Clwyd West.

He has made a horrible mistake in his analysis that I spotted within 1 minute.

"with an output of 90MW, Rhyl Flats will serve the electricity needs of 60,000 households. However, as my friend Brian Christley observes, you don’t have to be a senior wrangler to work out that that equates to only 1,500 watts per household – insufficient to boil a kettle. And that’s only when the wind is blowing."

A typical house will use about 4Mwh of electricity in a year. This works out to be about 500watts. A typical wind farm generates around 30% of the time (30% of its total theoretical maximum output). Of course 30% of 1,500watts is about 500watts. The fact that this average power statistic is insufficient to boil a whole kettle is completely irrelevant. Not the mention the fact that he seems to be implying a kettle is something insignificant: it's one of the most energy intensive appliances in the whole house by a long way.

So, who's his advisor giving him his figures? A personal called Brian Christley from Abergele who posted his detailed analysis on a web forum.

Brian Christley is a serial letter writer to UK newspapers. For some reason his letters are often printed. He's not an expert on science yet is being quoted by an Member of Parliament.

Brian comes out with such clangers as...

"79% of the electrical power the grid makes available each day isn't used - if this surplus (off-peak free) power could be used..."

"that one unit of wind power saves a unit of fossil fuel...which is technically impossible"

"As fossil fuels have to be burnt before power is generated, if ten million of us don't switch on our kettles tonight, our power station will still burn the same amount of fuel."

"As no power station in Britain has or will ever reduce the amount of fossil fuel it consumes as a direct result of the availability of wind power, all wind is actually doing is duplicating power we have already burnt fossil fuel to produce."

I've no idea what power duplication is but Brian is very fond of it. It has been pointed out to him that Lenz's Law and conversation of energy prohibit this but this advice has been ignored and his lies continue across the internet and in print.

The problem is that if you use bad science to "prove" a point and get caught you devalue any good science you call upon in the future and put science as a whole at risk.

Pirated XBox 360s cut off from Live service is positive news

There are some good things to come from the story that people who have modified their XBox 360 games console to play pirated games have been banned from playing online multiplayer parts of the games they own.

It's a clear case of how a company can protect their intellectual property without needing tax payers to fund policing the system.

I hope this is at least a step towards removing special rights granted to certain parties.

It is inevitable that games will tend more towards requiring online access.

Microsoft should offer a free fast service to replace damaged discs.

Identifying the origin of an unauthorised live pay-per-view TV stream

TV streaming sites are becoming popular. Some people relay the content onto the Internet to the public (sometimes for a charge). PPV organisers have a difficult time dealing with these sites but the problem could be cut off at source.

This method offers no solution to a stream relayed privately. The PPV broadcaster must be posing as an unauthorised viewer.

No solution should cause interference to those that have genuinely paid.

How could this be done?

If each individual transmission of content can be controlled then a unique identifier could be sent to each.

If it's put in the middle of the screen then it would be annoying. It is was permanently placed on the edge of the screen it could be cropped out and any other variation could be obscured with a time delay function.

Another way would be with a subtle change to the entire image such as a brightness, colour, or contrast change, or content such as the timing of switching between cameras.

With 1 million possibilities you might think it would be difficult to trace a source with such a rudimentary method but if each individual PPV stream can be controlled then it's easy using a binary search method.

While observing the unauthorised stream the change is made to each half of the 1 million viewers to identify which 500,000 the source is in. Then it is repeated for the 500,000, 250,00, 125,000... And so on.

With 1 million pay-per-view buys it only takes 20 iterations to identify the origin to cut them off at a moment to cause maximum disruption.

If the origin of video isn't from a PPV source but a broadcasted stream sent to another national market (as happens with many sporting events) then I have no sympathy for any company involved in price discrimination.

Effective copyright control on easily duplicated data

If every song sold was uniquely identifiable then record companies could identify the origin of a copy and sue the original purchaser for breach of contract (the contract being to never allowed the music to be reproduced).

The problem is how to encode data into a song.

Embedment into the file format is not an option since audio reproduction would render it useless so it would have to done audibly but without being a distraction to the music.

Compressed audio formats rely on the fact that human hearing has limitations to what it can and can't distinguish. Subtle audio changes in the music could make each copy indistinguishable to humans but not to computer analysis. Small variations in volume, pitch, instrumental mix, melody, speed, and tone throughout the music track could all encode data in audio with enough variables for data redundancy. There are likely other ways. Musicians may even modify music they may otherwise have recorded to be more suitable for an encoding process.

There would be ways of obscuring the encoded payment data but likely only by degrading the quality of the audio. Offering a degraded quality version for free and charging for the real deal is already an existing sanctioned business model.

The system then of course needs to be policed but there's a potential solution to that too.

I worked on a subscription based website a few years ago and came up with a idea to potentially inhibit this practice. It was never implemented for reasons obvious due to its nature but the idea still stands and may be extremely relevant today.

I asked myself a question: how would you discourage people sharing their login details?

If there was a piece of information that both the customer and the retailer shared but only the customer wouldn't like to be shared publicly then that would certainly discourage them.

If the payment details were visible when logging in to the website then you would definitely think twice before even sharing a subscription with a family member or friend.

It's obvious why it isn't a viable option; instant prosecution for sensitive data breaches.

However, there is now massive pressure on producers of easily duplicated data especially music and movies. A music retailer requires payment for each copy of a song. The unique payment information data for each copy is encoded into the audio. The purchaser of the music wouldn't dare copy it since their payment details would be retrievable. Aside from legal issues, security concerns may be more important than music to potential customers but it is a theoretically sound business model.

In a previous post I mentioned that quality computer generated animations could have the open source treatment to lower costs and even improve quality. There's another advantage to computer generated animations which make them perfect for copyright control by unique encoding. Model data, position, colours, size, angles, and editing could all be varied for each master uniquely encoding a movie to identify the original purchaser. A bond could be paid which is lost if your encoded version is ever found on the Internet.

Open source animation movies

It's not easy to imagine the movie industry surviving without copyright. I have confidence that the end of music copyright is months to years away no matter what laws are passed and that this is morally correct and will have no effect on humans being able to hear quality new music.

Blockbuster movies often require lots of people and expensive equipment for production (filming, special effects) which mean huge budgets unlikely to remain if copyrights are ended.

People love movies and I think there will be more of a debate if the movie industry is seen to struggle because of the visible nature of hundreds of people working on projects. I don't think it's imminent though although the film industry would have you believe it is.

A lot of movie budgets can be made up by some innovation such as auctioning off minor cast roles to fans and making a consumer product's features essential to the plot (rather than just product placement).

It's impossible to imagine what technological advances there will be in movie making but I can foresee one by applying it to computer animated movies: collaborative open source computer animated movies.

Character models, movements, sound effects, and editing can all be done remotely by volunteers or paid skilled staff benefiting from excellent cost savings. This model is already used to make some of the best computer software in the world rivalling that of multi-billion dollar corporations.

There are many movies that make me wish the filmmaker had sought more opinions from common folk. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace had some scenes that caused fans to edit them out in remastered versions. I think Quentin Tarrantino's Inglorious Basterds would have been brilliant with a bit more editing and leaving Hitler out of the finale. My point being that with collaboration we may actually see an improvement in films.

Unemployment of some sort is likely just as some photographers are complaining that Internet stock photo sites are killing their industry. Unemployment is a really bad thing in the short term but in the long term unemployment is an indicator of improvement; that tasks are accomplished more efficiently so talent can be used elsewhere. That is why humans live longer than ever.

Road safety revolution and Euro NCAP

I have previously argued that the only true revolution in road safety will come from insurance companies policing road safety using video, GPS tracking, and ECU tracking devices (I've also since mentioned they are now commonly available). There's plenty of evidence that traditional car safety features based on protecting occupancy have two effects. One effect is risk compensation and the other is increased risk to pedestrians and cyclists.

These devices are currently available but their price and quality not currently attractive enough. Fast and significant progress of this technology is inevitable.

Incidentally, it's not just cars that can carry these devices but cyclists and even pedestrians. Handlebar and helmet video cameras are already popular among mountain bikers keen to show off their skills on YouTube. It won't be long before road safety related footage from these devices is common.

These devices will only be common when their cost is exceeded by their savings on insurance. It dawned on me that this need not and should not be so.

Car safety features must meet strict criteria. The cost this adds to the car's final price is massive. Design costs, manufacturing costs, and testing costs all of questionable value themselves but considering they could be substituted for a tracking device that can only be an improvement.

It's not just laws that cause the needless strict criteria. There is plausible evidence that people select cars that "look safe". An arms race of cars sporting ever "chunkier" designs has been under way for some time.

Cars should either meet Euro NCAP (or whatever the minimal EU safety standard is) standards or meet basic standards (good brakes to protect others!) plus a video tracking system. Policing costs could eventually be lowered too. People should be free to expose themselves to whatever risks they want anyway, although this is a compromise that should be acceptable (transitional policy).

I should note there are more advantages. Safety features are a huge barrier to decreasing the cost of travel. Safety features add significant weight (just look at the progression of the Volkswagen Golf) which means cars need more fuel and stop slower. Being able to stop faster will cause risk compensation but remember you're being tracked!

It is the cost of transport that is important not the price of oil which is based on costs associated with accessing limited oil resources. This would be fast, cheap, and major step forward to boosting transport resources.

I would be happy and confident to play guinea pig.

Consumer justice, protest websites, and Internet guerrilla warfare

Disclaimer: I am definitely not suggesting anyone does the following but with enough unhappy customers it could happen to a company.

I call it email marketing list sabotage.

There is plenty consumers can do even without the help of any government institution.

Very often a notable proportion of business is through email marketing address lists and will likely be increasingly so. Businesses have been effectively forced by email providers into clearly placing an unsubscribe button in the email. Hotmail and Gmail both encourage users to help identify spam by reading and then clicking if it is spam or not. People add an extremely valuable layer when it comes to reconising spam. When a certain threshold of people identify certain characteristics (origin or words) of email as spam it can be used in future.

This is already reasonably effective in controlling spam but could be used as an effective mass expression of satisfaction against a company by the consumer.

1. Create a protest website (could be Facebook)
2. Instruct people to sign up to the company's email newsletter
3. On receipt of a newsletter identify it as spam devaluing their marketing potential.

I believe the Internet could turn out to be more valuable in keeping companies in line than any government agency and this is one example how.

Ryanair versus BBC

Some things never cease to amaze me. The BBC's Panorama programme about Ryanair this week was one of the worst pieces of journalism I've ever seen.

No doubt Ryanair aren't perfect but the criticisms aimed at them by Vivian White were quite unbelievable.

Criticism of Ryanair included offering deals to airports that the airports didn't like (and so the deals weren't done) and buying Boeing instead of Airbus because they got a better deal.

If Ryanair adopted the BBC's business model they would run expensive frilly (free caviar for the people that actually like it) flights to limited destinations with a large flat fee (enough to cover plenty of eye-wateringly salaries of between £90k and £1M) to anyone set to fly that year, charge people even if they use a competitor, send threatening letters to people that don't want to go on any aeroplane at all, and physically enforce all these rules militantly.

You'll get some reasonable arguments involving justifying the BBC as a public service e.g. news, weather, and documentaries and I'm happy to let these arguments roll but it doesn't cost £4,000,000,000 per year to do this. The fact the BBC exists today is bad enough nevermind the brashness of making programmes criticising other companies' legitimate business models.

Footballer's wages and Linux

I was just reading an article in Socialist Worker complaining about capitalism. The same old arguments come up using the extreme example of Bill Gates' wealth as if it's an excellent example of how the free market creates inequality.

It couldn't be further from the truth. There may have been many headlines in recent years of big governments going after Microsoft but people forget that this is minuscule compared to the utterly enormous support the government gives them. The only reason Bill Gates is so rich is precisely because the government grants them special rights on copyright physically enforced by government employees.

This subject is complex but the most obvious argument (and the whole point of those special rights) would be that Microsoft needs these protections because of the truly valuable product they offer to society.

As the years have gone by this argument has been shown to be weak.

It is the true free market (absolutely no special rights) that has produced Ubuntu Linux which provides a complete alternative to all of Microsoft's products, and arguably an improvement. I soley use it.

Not only is it questionable whether property rights can be granted to copies of software but it almost certainly impedes the success of true free market solutions which are of significant value to the world.

Footballer's wages are another example commonly used to show extreme inequality in our society missing the point that one of the main reasons they are so high is because of the success of Sky TV's encryption. This encryption is fast becoming irrelevant as unlicensed TV streaming websites are becoming very popular and the future of the topic back in the hands of the government.

Scrappage scheme hurts the poorest most

As soon as the UK's scrappage scheme was announced with the intent to help alarm bells began to ring in my head. It didn't suprise me that politicians didn't get it as they never do but there was support from academics too who are evidently as dangerous as anyone.

The most valuable lesson I learned in understanding politics was to never judge a government policy by its intentions and to only judge it by its results. No matter where you are on the political spectrum this rule is invaluable yet completely ignored by almost all.

The offer was only available to cars typically worth £250 to £1000 which is what the poorest could only drive. Of course they do not have enough money to buy a new car to take advantage of the scheme. As they would come to change their car they would find artificially high prices for cars usually affordable to them.

In any economic disaster by definition it's the poorest that truly suffer most and they certainly don't need it made any harder.

Was the scrappage scheme was inacted to help the poorest or to simply appease middle-England?

Cyclist deaths by cars. Is a net beneficial effect beneficial?

Government can make choices for everyone for a net beneficial effect.

Some people that would otherwise have made bad choices for themselves may be prevented from bad consequences.

However, this using-force-for-the-greater-good principle can affect the people who actively choose to make good choices for themselves forcing them to accept something less good than they had the right to expect.

Risk compensation, compensating for an increased perception of safety with increased risk taking, is a scientific accepted fact of human behavior. Seat belted drivers drive faster.

As a cyclist I would like nothing more than for car drivers around me to not necessarily be wearing a seat belt. It terrifies me that they forcefully have their money taken from them for not wearing a seat belt.

In effect there is a transfer of safety away from those seeking safety to people less concerned with safety in the name of a net beneficial effect.

Should I be allowed to pursue the maximum safety possible for myself without government reducing my safety by forcing someone, free to take their own risks, to modify their behaviour?

As a cyclist I am of minimal threat to anyone. Although there are cases of pedestrians being killed by cyclists these are truly exceptional unlike the effect of cars on cyclists. It's easy to explain why; if you're on a bike and you crash into a pedestrian, you're in trouble too.

Cycling is a form of transport we should be promoting as it has an impressive compromise between speed, cost, health benefits, and environmental effect.

My post questions using force to gain a net beneficial effect but in the instance of seat belt legislation it is actually questionable whether there is even a net beneficial effect at all as is explained in this study of seat belt law.

Brand power and protection, Rolex et al.

Brands allow proud creators of products to uniquely label, protected by government, their creations for the benefit of the consumer-retailer relationship so that the reputation of excellence cannot be hijacked by an inferior manufacturer.

The high value watch industy is very vocal about the damage counterfeiters cause them. They call upon governments to confiscate, destroy, and prosecute. Counterfeit Rolex watches are one the most famous examples.

There are often complaints of society becoming materialistic, excessive, and wasteful especially with respect to powerful brand named products. It is easy to dismiss these claims by remembering we are all completely free to do as we please with our money. Or are we?

It seems to be that the government do not agree with the traditional use of brands and are actually backing the materialistic and excessive use of brand power and protection.

But Rolex make the best and most expensive watches and have the right to protect their brand, don't they? What about Omega watches featured in Holywood movies?

Casio make the greatest time pieces of all time. This should not be as controversial as it may sound you. Casio make some watches in its Waveceptor brand that are affordable (under £100), always 100% accurate (daily radio time signal updates), waterproof, solar powered, and durable. They also have a calendar, stopwatch, traditional hands and digital displays. This dwarfs the status symbol Rolex watches.

If you claim that Rolex watches are often made of precious materials and it is the workmanship that is the appeal then why are counterfeits even a problem if they have none of this?

Casio do not need brand protection because of the functional excellence of what they produce.

Shouldn't governments do what they always claim they do and reward innovation and not status symbols? Or at the very least not unjustly prop up the ultra-materialistic industries that can't possibly be a priority.

The governments actions can only cause a shift from innovation to brand building in many product areas which is counterproductive but does benefit those that can work the system. No doubt it takes talent to build one of these premium materialistic brands but many things take talent and few justify aid and reward.

Avoid Isaac Anthony Manchester agency. Deposit protection. Private landlords

Both myself and my girlfriend are currently in the middle of trying to get our deposits back on rented properties.

Tenancy deposits have long been a problem. Bad tenants made deposits necessary. Of course bad landlords also exist.

Historically many landlords have made life very difficult for good tennants. Witholding £100 was the de facto landlord practice for cleaning that didn't need doing. An extra £100 for free is good business.

The government acted to intervene by introducing arbritation to rentals in form of deposit schemes run by companies backed by government legislation. In theory the deposits are held by the 3rd party and only released when any disputes are settled.

My own case is slightly more clear cut. My landlord ignored the legislation and kept the deposit for herself. I found out and when she ignored a threat of legal action I submitted a county court claim for the liable fine as written into the legislation.

I have had some terrible experiences with Isaac Anthony Lettings. There are no obvious fines and they know this. Isaac Anthony play the system with ease.

Phone calls, personal visits, legals threats fall on deaf ears and to this day they still hold the deposit with promises of it being released the following week even though it has been at least 14 days since completing all tennant obligations. Following a personal visit I was physically thrown out of their offices and verbally threatened by their lettings manager when I told them their excuses of always saying it was coming on the next payment run was a joke. I received a call from the director who witnessed part of this clearly not happy with his staff assuring me the deposit would be repaid the next day. That did not happen.

My girlfriend speaks English as a 3rd language and asked me to help her. The staff at Isaac Anthony would not speak to me citing data protection even though my girlfriend was clearly next to me and had given permission for me to act on her behalf. It got even more ridiulous. They also even refused to speak when my girlfriend and I spoke through a phone set to loud speaker so we could both hear and speak.

There are claims that the legislation is really targetted at private landlords registering the deposit and not simply for protection. I found that tennants rights are not anywhere near as strong once the deposit has been "protected" and a problem arises compared to if the deposit was not protected at all. Courts cost money and dispute processes take time and they know it.

Private landlords have a history of tax evasion. By forcing landlords to register deposits it is basically equivalent of forcing them to declare an additional income. Revenue and Customs are able to extract information from these companies. Tenants then act to police their landlords by threatening court action for non-compliance with the incentive being the opportunity to sue for the return of their deposit plus three times the deposit.

It's another reason to stick to private landlords and not agencies like Isaac Anthony. Not only do you avoid the extortionate fees but your rights are actually much stronger. It's there to be taken advantage of.

At the time of writing Isaac Anthony do not list who they actual are (Volta Limited) and only display their trading name on their website. Their directors (Anthony Boateng and his wife) list incomplete addresses as officers to Companies House. These are both illegal practices.

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Isaac Anthony have since employed a law company to threaten me with legal action for possible defamation regarding a YouTube video I made. The lawyer they hired appeared suprised by the story of me getting physically thrown out of their offices. I will be making a new YouTube video from outside their offices soon. From my blog I have received several e-mails from other people (landlords and tennants) that also claim to have had problems with Isaac Anthony.

I warned Isaac Anthony that I would write about them on the Internet and get it on Google to which their lettings manager replied "We'll see about that!". Well here we are with my page regularily visible on the first page of results for searches for Isaac Anthony so I guess we did see about that.

Cheap housing on flood plains

Building on flood plains isn't recommended and therefore the land is cheap. I would suggest building ground floor accomodation isn't recommended. It is perfectly feasible to build flood-proof housing. 1st floor flats are perfect example. I can't think of any reasons not to build raised housing on flood plains other than an infrequent inconveinience akin to homes being snowed in and possibly some problems with car parking which can solved in a similar manner.

Combined age and other useless statistics

I hereby ask journalists to stop using ridiculous, incorrect, and ambiguous statistics.

A pet hate of mine is reporting the combined age of a group. This seems to be used to imply something special about a group yet it's a totally ambiguous and cumbersome statistic in most cases. What happened to using averages?

Internet speeds should be measured in megabits per second not megabits which is a unit of size and exactly like quoting speed in miles.

Electronics on standby - when wasting energy isn't wasting energy

The effect humans have on their environment is a valid concern but often hysteria overwhelms rationality.

Televisions and other home electronics have standby modes offering us an easier life.

The media and environmental campaigners will have you believe these devices are examples of how we are needlessly harming our planet. Quite frankly, they don't know what they are talking about.

The amount of electricity we are talking about here is nearly negligible but this isn't the only problem with the argument.

As a reaction, visit your local shops and you'll now see devices which offer to minimise waste by sitting in between the device in standby and the wall socket.

What have they all missed?

All the energy these devices consume ends up as heat dissipated into the room. Is unnecessary heat in a room a bad thing? Is the additional heat generated simply made redundant by the central heating system and therefore a bad thing?

Central heating systems work on a thermostatic basis which means any additional heat generated from another source within the system will simply cause the system to turn off earlier since it reaches its target temperature earlier and save the equivalent amount of fuel in the process.

In addition to this, the devices people are buying are white elephants - they cost a significant amount compared to the electricity saved, not to mention the energy needed to create, package, and ship them.

End music copyright

We need to end music copyright. I have written about this before but following many debates with people I have written a full list of the reasons why we must end music copyright and why downloading unlicensed music should be allowed.

Downloading music is not the same as stealing. One has to concede that although there are similarities it is fundamentally different from stealing. If I steal your car you no longer have your car. If I download music, I have the music and so does the original bearer. I concede that this would mean the original bearer holds something potentially worth less since there are more copies but please read on.

It is perfectly easy to understand that if someone downloads music it does not mean that if they didn't have the means to download it they would have bought it instead.

Record companies and musicians are very violent. They lobby our government to take people from their homes, kidnap them in state prisons, and sanction stealing your property or money in compensation for their alleged possible loss. This is unacceptable.

The ability to upload and download music across the Internet has radically changed the music reproduction industry. Change is change. Change does not necessarily mean that something has to be reversed. The music industry as it stands will likely be damaged but that is no justification to continue as we are. Things change. A lot of people would have jobs digging our roads but no longer do it because mechanical diggers were invented.

Let's be clear about exactly what we mean by music. Only in the last few decades has music also meant something entirely different than its meaning through all of history. Music is the sound of people singing or playing instruments. This has always been true and is still true. Today it also covers the results of audio reproduction.

Governments shouldn't play such a key role in creating so many millionaires. Protecting the music industry is probably the single most blatant action the government does to create huge inequality. Inequality exists elsewhere in society but is not so reliant on government.

Changing copyright law does not in anyway affect the ability of a musician to make an excellent living given they can charge money for live concerts. It's up to you how you get into a secured music venue but buying a ticket is the easiest. I've already covered that musicians can already make a lot more money charging for concerts if they charge the optimum price using an online auction in this post on ticket touts and gig ticket prices.

Music celebrities are rarely good role models. Need I say more? We don't need to make immoral people so powerful.

Intellectual property is a difficult subject. It's a lot easier to justify allowing inventors to reap the rewards of their technological inventions through patents considering what they have given society. It's not so easy to justify it for music which is highly subjective.

There are other ways for musicians to make money. Let's not pretend music is some sacred art and consider placing sponsored adverts into the lyrics. It's how others earn a living.

The vast majority of music is simply a rehash of other music that went before anyway. The lines of who really deserves the rewards for a lot of music are extremely blurred. It's a huge grey area.

It's a strange concept to create enforceable rights simply for the reason that it is a creation of a human. New words, sometimes slang, are creations of people yet we do not create enforceable rights based on these.

Record companies are always clear that the cost of a CD is for the actual content yet have offered no concessions to people who already own the content in another format.

What's really ridiculous is that a lot of these millionaire musicians are still not happy even with the existing laws! They want an extension to the 50-year royalties period to make even more money! Unbelievable.

After all this, music fans are dedicated people and they know they can get the music for free if they want it yet they seem to be happy to give musicians money on a voluntary basis.

Record companies use unfair practices to distort the free market by lobbying government to ban parallel imports. My post on parallel importing of CDs goes into more detail on this travesty.

If there was ever a case for wage controls it would be definitely be for a cap on extortionate wages in an industry that the government created. It would make more sense to me using a moral argument that music copyright should be there to offer musicians and the industry figures at least a guaranteed living wage but this just isn't the argument.

Copyright rules can still be enforced between complicit parties without laws. Musicians and other parties can still agree contracts regulated by 3rd parties to manage disputes and infringements. For example, rival broadcasters could agree to enforce copyright between themselves.

All this keeps the money in the pockets of the people who can spend it to create more justifiable parts of an economy. There is no danger of music being harmed by the end of music copyright. Some people's careers will be ended by this but that starts the story in the middle and these rules should never have been created or enforced in the first place. Some people's careers will be created by the end of music copyright.

Harriet Harman's Equality Bill

I could think of many elaborate ways of critiquing this bill but I'll keep it simple.

Harriet Harmen is trying to solve a problem that can't possibly exist.

Since when are we only ever employed or promoted based on our qualifications? Since when has there ever been two people who are identical? It's possible for two prople to have the same qualifications but impossible for two people to answer interview questions the same way.

Steorn - believing anything and everything

My brother introduced me to the work of an Irish company called Steorn who claim they have discovered a free energy source using magnets.

People often make extraordinary claims and most of us know not to believe them.

This claim is different. There are swarms of people on the Internet (see YouTube discussions) that believe Steorn's claim.

The most fundamental lesson in life is not to believe anything without evidence yet for some reason this rule seems to go out of the window sometimes.

Since when did people decide to ignore that evidence is important?! What's even more shocking is that these believers claim to be part-time scientists.

The main argument given is that Physics has been wrong before and that there could be a problem with the law of conservation of energy. There's a huge problem with this argument.

We have to concede that the law of conservation of energy could be wrong. Currently the law has substantial evidence that it is correct. For us to doubt it we would have to have some evidence that it was incorrect.

Revolutions in our understanding of physics have happened in history and will likely happen again but there is no evidence that a revolution has indeed occurred.

If we're not going to base our beliefs on evidence then we might as well believe anything and everything.

The road to road safety

Just as I predicted in my post on car insurance and road safety the road to road safety has actually begun. You can now buy in-car devices intended to record all movements useful for incident investigation. Bad drivers are going to be a lot more afraid when these become more common.

9/11 conspiracies and teaching rationality

I recently came across a person who explained that a small video clip was the piece of evidence which finally convinced him that the collapse of the World Trade Center was a planned demolition.

The clip in question shows the final minutes of one of the towers. About 10 seconds before the tower begins to collapse the camera clearly shakes. Conspiracy theorists attribute this shaking to explosives being detonated to demolish the tower.

It takes only basic rationality to realise this evidence is completely worthless. It makes the assumption that cameras only shake when explosives go off. Anyone with basic experience of filming video will tell you that a camera on a tripod will pick up vibrations sometimes e.g. someone even carefully moving around the floor where the tripod is set up (especially a camera on high zoom which would exaggerate the shake like the clip in question).

Real evidence would be reports from seismologists yet I know of no such evidence.

Now on to the point of my post. It is almost incomprehensible to me that people could believe such evidence yet they clearly do. They fail to apply the most basic rational logic.

I have read about basic rational concepts such as recognising circumstantial evidence, where the burden of proof lies, straw man arguments, and incomplete evidence etc.

Take a look at this excellent page on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

Many people can naturally apply rational logic without ever having to know the formal names of a fallacy but many seemingly cannot. I find it beneficial to study formal definitions as it can often help identify fallacial arguments more quickly and also point the offender to a formal definition of his mistake.

I was never formally taught these concepts in school yet it is surely something that is invaluable in life. I like the idea of school-leavers having a complete understanding of the formal definitions of fallacies. The Wikipedia link above is an excellent basis for a syllabus! I can think of many school subjects that I feel are less important to people than this one. It would make it more difficult for advertisers to blind us with marketing allowing us to spend our money more efficiently and it would also helps us waste less of our valuable time on believing bogus evidence.

The threat of terrorism by considering road deaths

The accusation that governments are inflating the threat of terrorism to pursuade us to reliquish our freedoms and give them greater power seems seems very credible to me. At the very least politicians have stumbled across this phenomenon to tap into when they feel it suits their good intentions.

The threat of terrorism to the public measured in deaths shows it is a minor problem to our society. For example, the threat of dying on the roads is literally hundreds of times greater.

A lot of people are not convinced by this argument which is why politicians are continually successful in taking away our freedoms. The counter-argument is that just because we have a lot of deaths from one cause doesn't mean we should ignore fewer deaths from another because all lives are equal.

They fail to understand the concepts of prioritisation and limited resources. If £100 could save 10 lives by targeting one cause, it shouldn't be spent on targeting another cause if it only saves 1 life.

I have already provided a solution to cutting road deaths in a previous post. Governments would be allocating their resources a lot more wisley if they subsidised tax cuts on the electronic equipment I described.

Jacqui Smith and drug classification

Not for the first time drug classification is in the news. There exists a classification to aid proportional punishment. Some drugs have greater external effects than others.

The evidence is clear that relative to some other legal and illegal drugs, such as heroin, alcohol, or cocaine, Ecstasy is less of a problem to society.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims that it may send out the wrong message to reclassify it.

Is Jacqui Smith's problem simply the process of reclassification? If it is such a problem, then I am happy for her to keep Ecstasy as class A and promote all existing class A drugs to a new class which could be named A*.

If her problem is that Ecstasy is simply harmful (which it inevitably is) then her logic dictates that all she needs to do is simply have one class and place literally everything in there.

How to cut spam with Viagra

Spam is a good example of the side effects that we all suffer when we try to control the actions of a few making choices in their life that affect no one but themselves.

Spamming needs to be paid for. The more profitable it is then the more will be sent. If we could make spamming less profitable then it would inevitably be reduced.

The business of choice for spammers is selling Viagra.

Deregulation of Viagra would help control spam as no one would risk buying Viagra from a spam e-mail if they could get it in their local shop thus taking a substantial market share away from the spammers.

Cleary something would inevitably take its place but Viagra was self-evidently the most profitable.

High house prices, the economy, the building trade - a simply solution...

...significant liberalisation of planning laws.

When people's livelihoods are at risk, seeing endless masses of green fields out of your window really doesn't matter.

This would create huge amounts of jobs and masses of cheap housing.

What are your real priorities in life?

Banning cheap alcohol

A group of MPs are launching a campaign to ban cheap alcohol being sold in supermarkets.

The idea being if the alcohol is made more expensive then less people will buy it and the problems of alcohol abuse will be lessened.

The logic seems rational however it suffers from one of the most common problems in politics: judging policies by their intentions and not their results.

There is rational logic and historical evidence why this campaign is a very bad idea.

The policy is basically a micro version of Prohibition that occurred in early 20th century America. Not only did prohibition fail in its objectives but it created problems greater than any that may have existed before Prohibition. The problems are well documented.

People still demanded alcohol after the ban. The demand created a set of people that could meet the demand - gangsters. The stories of Al Capone are well known. I'm not suggesting this ban will create a new age of crime because this micro version of Prohibition will only create subtle problems but problems nonetheless and certainly not solutions.

More relevant to the current situation, Prohibition also had some other interesting effects which these MPs should have learned from. Beer was bulky and the most difficult to transport and conceal from the authorities. The increased cost of these weaker drinks made much stronger alcoholic drinks more common place than before Prohibition.

The worrying aspect of this is that today many new illegal drugs other than alcohol are available for people to buy if they are priced out of one market.

One of the benefits of having a competitive retail market is that consumers actually do get these excellent deals (allegedly less than cost in some instances). A lot of casual drinkers benefit by saving money on these drinks.

It will have to be another post another day as to the fascinating but frustrating reason why people ignore these arguments even when presented to them.

More comfortable and cheaper showers

Humans find sudden falls in temperature uncomfortable. Jumping in a swimming pool can be an uncomfortable experience until our body adapts and once again becomes comfortable with the temperature.

When we shower we like to have the water very hot. When we finish showering we often rush to insulate ourselves from the sudden temperature drop with a towel.

This sudden temperature drop at the end of a shower can be avoided by slowly lowering the temperature of the water whilst showering. It is surprising how much you can lower the water temperature by without any discomfort if done slowly enough.

The other advantage is of course a saving of expensive hot water.

I believe a device which slowly lowers the temperature of the water for the duration of the shower would be desirable. The device could simply be a valve which slowly constricts the hot water powered by the water pressure itself.

Many modern shower systems are electronically controlled and such a mode of operation could be incorporated with minimal cost.

How much is a life worth?

How much money should we spend on stopping two criminals trying to kill each other?

Most people would say it is worth some money to intervene as all lives are valuable and no one deserves to die no matter what they have done.

But could that money be be better spent on saving more law-abiding lives elsewhere? There are always worthy causes in need of money.

Is it only about saving the most amount of lives in total indescriminately? Is saving fewer lives but those that have not chosen a high risk criminal career more desirable?

We only have a limited budget so we should consider prioritisation.

These questions have implications for some of today's violent crimes which are mostly between criminals.

Funding broadcasting

The recent argument over the conduct of two of the BBC's highly paid presenters says more about the way the BBC is funded than anything else.

One side argues that the BBC needs to be cutting edge and keep up in a modern television market e.g. pay competitive salaries which inevitably can be millions of pounds. The other side argues that the BBC needs to uphold its traditional values as a national broadcaster.

The BBC can't do everything with a large flat fee. Those that want one side over the other have to fund each other's personal tastes.

If the BBC is so confident that it is worth the licence fee then why do they have to enforce payment with threats rather than a secure subscription system demonstrated by systems like Sky? The truth is they know they are not worth the license fee in a free society.

Perhaps scrapping the BBC is too big a step for you. At least consider seriously slashing it's budget and leave it with enough to do what a national broadcaster traditionally does. The arguments over presenter pay and behavior will be over.

Many people claim that "£139.50 a year for the BBC is worth every penny to me". Great, but there are others that feel equally strongly that it isn't worth £139.50 to them.

Incidently, don't be afraid of losing one of the BBC's unique selling points - advert free television. Broadcasting by definition has always restricted choice some what. The advent of the Internet and other related technologies has given us the age of narrowcasting which is going to bring us new ways of receiving and funding media.

Websites that are funded by the presence of adverts can frustrate. Webmasters understand this and sometimes offer their users the opportunity to pay a small fee (approximately equal to the revenue otherwise generated by the adverts) to rid their individual website experience of adverts.

I can envisage a media center that transmits content and advertisments which has a sliding bar control with two extremes: on one end "100% funded by advertisements" and on the other "100% funded by subscription". Perhaps the full subscription fee is too much but also adverts annoy you - I would recommend placing the slider half way. This has not been possible until now. Television systems which can cache video and apply complex rules are now here. Technology again has enabled this.

The likelihood is that the television licence fee is going to be forced from existence anyway. How are they going to police Internet users legally streaming whatever content they want from around the world as the technology improves?

Censoring reality

Our common sense is aquired from our experiences. We are born with our basic physical awareness still in development. If you have lived to an old age it is likely because you have appreciated the risks of everyday life. Many people are not so lucky. Like any person you will have hurt yourself when you were a child, perhaps had a more serious injury that you learned from in your teenage years, had friends die in accidents, read stories in the newspapers, or saw reports on the television all of which made you reassess how you might make future decisions.

We make choices based on our perspective on reality. What if reality was not as it seemed? How could we make informed decisions? If you incorrectly evaluated the risk of driving a car in a particular manner then you could end up dead; many do.

Our society is keen to censor many things. Censorship isn't always legally based; sometimes things aren't seen because of social reasons e.g. graphic images of death are rarely seen because they can offend. They are indeed often shocking but sometimes we need shocking so we fully appreciate situations.

Why are we so keen to censor reality? Sometimes the truth is difficult but things can only be more difficult if the truth is unknown. The idea of "what you don't know can't hurt you" doesn't apply to risks and accidents. And no one said life would be easy.

Of course it is everyone's individual right to turn away and choose not to see but we should not try to dictate what facts are available.

Similar situation with wars. Without discussing the politics of past or current wars, we should not attempt to censor the reality of the effects the weapons our taxes fund out of respect and for completeness of information.

Rip-off Britain and parallel imports

"Rip-off Britain" has been a popular slogan bounced around the media in the last few years.

CDs and designer clothing seem more expensive here than in other countries. Is it just differing tax systems? Has the free market failed in delivering us the best prices?

It's actually a case of the free market not being allowed to operate.

Businesses always want to make as much money as possible but it's actually the free market that limits how much they make. Businesses can maximise their profits if they can sell to rich people a higher price which they can afford and sell to poor people at the most they'd be able to pay. All businesses want to implement this magic formula. The truth is it's difficult.

If most businesses try it then the poor people will buy at the lower price and simply supply the rich people, take a cut, and still be cheaper.

Difficult, that is, unless you get the government to actually help you.

So what happens with CDs? They are far cheaper in Asia. Why not buy cheap CDs in Asia and sell them back to British people?

It's been tried by CD WOW! who have been taken to court and fined tens of millions of pounds. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) are very powerful. They are the union of all the famous musicians we know. If they can make more money they will. Everyone wants to make money but most people do it fairly. They have convinced our legal system that parallel importing these CDs is wrong.

Granting record companies rights to licence reproduction of music is not enough for the BPI; they want to control it even after it is licenced fairly by a private individual for private use.

This is precisely why we pay more for our CDs than other countries. A similar situation happened with Levi jeans and Tesco a few years ago.

Manufacturers have the ability to sell to whoever they want but they should not be granted rights to dictate what happens to their goods once sold. They can of course not sell to those distributors known to pass on produce to other distributors further down the line but businessmen in the free market always find a way. If people can smuggle drugs under the noses of national armies then it will be far too expensive for Levi to even attempt to control the movements of pairs of jeans.

Official statements by BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor are quite astonishing.

"The vibrancy of British music depends on a fair return on the investments that allow British talent to shine."

If the prices they were selling CDs to Asia wasn't fair then why did they sell them in the first place?

"This decision is an important step in ensuring that British music has a bright future."

Music has always been an amazing creation of humanity long before anything like the BPI existed and is not in the slightest bit of danger of not having a bright future.

Unmarked police

Politicians often make the point that the public need to feel safe by means of a visible presence. The argument is that when a citizen walks along a street at night and sees the fluorescent jacket of a police officer that they feel safer. What about when they stop and turn around and don't see that beacon of safety?

Law-abiding citizens have no real interaction with the police and rely on the relationship between criminals and police.

Citizens fear criminals. Criminals fear law enforcement. Citizens are easily detectable by criminals. Criminals are hard to detect until they commit a crime by which time it's too late to avoid being a victim. Police are the easiest of all to detect whether a crime has been committed or not.

Having visible police officers is no benefit to a citizen when a crime has been comitted but a significant benefit to a criminal considering offending.

Making police officers indistinguishable from normal citizens would have no effect on the relationship between the police and law-abiding citizens but would have a significant effect on the relationship between the police and criminals.

Criminals would be more relunctant to offend since they could not identify those they fear most.

The police already understand this concept with the use of unmarked police cars.

Like unmarked police cars we should have unmarked police officers (not just for special operations).

Bands, MP3s, celebrity, inequality, and live gigs.

Until the mid-20th century music was always live music. The advent of audio reproduction dramatically changed the music business. Police are empowered to break down your door if you do not have permission to have a reproduction of a recording from the band that created the original.

The presence of ticket touts and their profits clearly show that bands are selling their performances too cheap. An electronic auction would find the optimum price a band could charge. The technology is there and it has been tried unsuccessfully. The problem is that the audience hate the idea that bands are milking their fans for literally as much as possible. Music isn't all about making money, is it?

Would we begrudge bands making as much money as possible from live performances if it was their only income? Of course the bands themselves disagree because it's possible they will earn less.

The only necessary laws are those that enable bands to perform their material in venues which allow the organisers to restrict entry to only ticket holders. There's no need to create an industry based on audio reproduction.

This brings me onto inequality. Pop stars are some of the richest people in the country. Are rich pop stars good role models? The government is literally employing the police to create these massively rich people.

It is possible that the incentive to create quality music may diminish if the rewards are lower but that doesn't correlate with history.

Car insurance, technology, road safety, and police

Many motorists now own satellite navigation systems like TomTom. The technology has been available for some years and like clockwork the cost of access to this technology has fallen dramatically.

Easy navigation has been good for the motorist. This same technology is about to fuel a revolution in car insurance and, more importantly, road safety.

Insurers rely on obtaining information about you to quote you an insurance premium. On average, young drivers are bad drivers. Some young drivers are good drivers and it would be profitable to give these people a low competitive quote if they could be distinguised from young bad drivers.

Bad drivers are about to be priced off the roads.

Motorists agree to have satellite navigation track all of their movements in a black box. Imagine how an insurance company could analyse the behaviour of drivers that have crashed and analyse the patterns. Perhaps a common cause of car crashes is a high entry speed to tight corners. It is likely that insurers will be able to form a highly accurate model to determine the cost associated with a specific way a motorists drives. If don't want your insurer knowing your movements you can still buy a traditional insurance policy.

If you had a dangerous near miss with a driver, who would be interested in this information? The police? The Police aren't really interested in bad drivers (I reported someone almost killing me once and nothing happened). There's little incentive for them to be. At most they are certainly not anywhere as interested in bad drivers as much as a bad driver's insurer are. The last thing an insurance company wants to do is incorrectly measure the risk of one of their drivers and have them cause a multi-million pound crash scene for which they are liable to pay. A Policeman doesn't get a bonus if he stops a crash but an insurer would. The potential profits for saving lives are huge. This certainly isn't a case of putting profits before lives!

Perhaps the satellite data is not enough to attribute blame in an insurance dispute. Other technologies have this covered. Digital video cameras with mass storage are getting very cheap. Every good motorist would relish the opportunity to prove they did not cause the crash they were involved in.

The burden bad motorists put on motorists in general is going to be pushed purely on to the bad motorist.

Another implication will be the extinction of speed cameras and the debate around them. We will soon find out which driving charateristics are beneficial to society as a whole. The police will naturally have a reduced role in safety on the roads. No more speeding tickets; only a notification of an automatic increase in your premium if whatever you do in your car has been statistically proven to likely cost your insurer a lot of money.

Lives are going to be saved; not only without the government, but better than the government could ever have dreamed of doing.

Communication databases and criminals

It is extremely easy for two people anywhere in the world to communicate electronically with eachother in total secrecy.

Some criminals do not currently know how to communicate in total secrecy but they soon will. We can be certain that some already are.

Even if GCHQ dedicated all their resources to intercepting a secure channel it would make no difference.

Criminals don't care if the government is intercepting their communications.

Tax payers will because it's expensive to store and analyse junk data.