Re: Support for MAtt Taylor
Signed!
4162 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
My mum, in her 70s now, uses Facebook, but she doesn't realise how it works. That means she thinks anything that shows up on her wall is aimed at her directly,like email, so she responds to it. Worse yet, she doesn't realise the essentially public nature of anything posted, and so lets everyone know when she is going on holiday - or, more galling, that I am going away. Nothing I say seems to get through, so, even though I don't have an active Facebook account,* all sorts of people know my movements.
*I know all this because Mrs IP does have an account, and sees a fair amount of the gibberish mum pollutes the interwebs with.
Nice article.I sit on a Research Ethics Committee, and we are getting an increasing number of applications from researchers wanting to mine health-related data. So many come along with proposals that have not considered how easy it can be to reconstruct "anonymous" data so that the PII can be derived. I'll use those entropy figures the next time someone comes up and says "but there is no way our data can reveal the subject!"
"Maybe I'm being cold hearted ..."
I was tempted to say "No maybe about it", but as I read further, it became clear that you are not. You believe in community and people helping each other - good on you. However, as the first reply to you says, there are a lot of people who don't have friends, or language skills, or any support at all. You aren't cold-hearted - you just don't have experience of just how isolated a lot of people are.
I thought people bought iThings because "they just work", which I don't really have a problem with. However, if the user needs to change default settings in order to send SMS, then "it doesn't just work". If the default messaging system is Apple's proprietary thing, and it borks messages sent to other things unless settings are played with (which many buyers have expressed a desire not to do by buying something that "just works"), then it starts to look as if Apple have been as spiteful as people claim they are, and that it is a form of lock-in due to difficulty in changing platforms.
I don't think it is anything to do with the "radiation" in most NIMBY minds - it is purely that they might have something industrial in their eyeline, which will (through some unknown mechanism*) bring property prices down.
*In reality, prices are likely to go up if there is decent mobile coverage.
Yep - I've lived in four places in the last few years, all well-populated and with large numbers of well-paid people living there (near Sheffield, Kenilworth, both sides of the Tay near Dundee), and I haven't had a decent mobile signal in any of them. In all of them except Kenilworth I was up a hill, yet going into the garden was the only way to get decent contact with the mast. Data is generally something that my phone has the capability to do under very specific circumstances (such as being in the middle of a city. However, when I go abroad in Europe, I rarely have any problems - and I tend not to holiday in cities. The coverage in Britain is fairly shit.
" I love ebooks for travelling, but for reading at home it doesn't come close to going to the library of books, browsing and selecting one."
I finally unpacked the boxes of books yesterday that had been in storage for the last four years while we moved around (I had kept some with me during the last three moves, but it has been mainly ebooks during that time). I now have something like 12 metres of fiction* lining the walls of my study again, and it feels far better than I ever though it would! I had to keep popping back in the the room just to look at the loveliness of my library, and deciding what I'm going to read over the next few weeks!
*Factual and text-books still have to be unpacked.
"If the term of copyright was more reasonable (a maximum of 20 years) then there would be less of a need for this act." Well said, Duncan. It is the utterly ridiculous term of protection that is the root of the problem in copyright. 20-25 years is enough, not up to six or seven times that period.
Good street art makes an area look better. At least some of Banksy's stuff falls into that category, so I have very little problem. Inane "tagging" - the human equivalent of dogs pissing up a tree-trunk - and really poor pictures make an area look worse - much worse. Kids drawing on the pavement is so far beneath anyone's notice that I would suspect the shouty person is not entirely well.
... of getting lots of downvotes, I take a positive message away from this - Australia has medical records that the true owner of the information (the patient) has access to, and some control over. That is a mere pipe-dream here in the UK.
Stupid, and probably avoidable mistakes have been made (perhaps by the owners who wanted to link their health data with their government data!), but the fact that there is a system, and it works (for certain values of working) is impressive. Would anyone care to guess a) how late, and b) how over budget such a scheme would go in the UK before it was scrapped?
No, but you might have your friends and family investigated, job prospects ruined, financial history scarred, have a baby with an undercover copper etc. Have a look at what people who wanted the police to actually do their jobs have undergone, e.g. Stephen Lawrence's family, and tell me that the information isn't misused - and they are only the cases we know about.
"Does anyone know what the principle of Padfield v MAFF is?"
The case is an important one in public law - full citation, if you want to look it up, is Padfield v. MAFF [1968] A.C. 997. The House of Lords stated that a decision-making power must be exercised so as to promote, and not run counter to, the legislation conferring that power. The case also answered the question "who decides, and who oversees: "necessary and proportionate"?" - the courts, who must look at the entire statute and interpret the intent before they can decide whether the power was exercised in a way that runs counter to the legislation.
The court ignored the fact that it is incredibly difficult to get them to allow an application for judicial review to proceed ...
I'm not sure what the big fuss is about. It is not uncommon for women in several professions to freeze eggs in their early- to mid-20s so they can be implanted later. Women going into the law and medicine are particularly well-represented in this activity, at least in the UK. The biggest problem is that eggs, being very large cells, have quite a large failure rate when it comes to being viable on thawing - embryos are much easier, but have additional legal problems unless anonymous donor sperm are used (which carries its own set of emotional risks later in life).
Requirements such as helmets for motorcyclists and seat-belts for drivers are genuinely nanny state measures, since they decrease the risk of injury to only the individual. There is no change in the risk to a third party at all (though some say there my be an increased risk from the individual in control feeling safer). This, to my mind, is illegitimate use of power by the state - by all means ensure that risks to a third party are minimised, but don't interfere in the choice of individuals to put themselves at risk if they choose.
N.B. Since starting driving many years ago, I have never driven without a seatbelt. I have even added seatbelts to cars that didn't actually have them when I bought them. My point is entirely about the wrongness of personal protection legislation.
You shouldn't need tools or someone with additional knowledge to change a battery! Let me put it this way - would you buy a TV with a remote that needs tools or a skilled person to change the battery? What about a torch (flashlight for the Leftpondians)? Probably not, so why let mobile phome manufacturers off the hook for really crappy design?
I'm keeping my naturally aspirated Subaru Legacy as long as I can. The flat torque-curve and ability to pull away in anything up to high ratio 3rd gear has got me out of a lot of situations that could have become anxiety-provoking over the last eight or nine years ...
Do either of those avoid the requirement to initially open an Adobe DRMed ebook bought from Kobo in the Adobe reader on first reading? It is a constant irritation that I have to do that prior to stripping the DRM via the Apprentice Alf plugin for Calibre and turning the file into an epub. I'd much rather have nothing to do with Adobe at all.
My parents actually used to buy Izal for use in our home! I used to think it was normal, and that the tissue stuff that wadded up your bum crack or split so that you wiped your arse on your middle finger was the cheap stuff! I also liked the disinfectant smell of Izal...
I got my last phone from Phones4U, after vowing never again to go into a Carphone Whorehouse. I was very pleased with the knowledge of the staff in that branch (Coventry), and the way they assessed my knowledge and treated me appropriately. I was looking forward to dealing with P4U, though a different branch, again in a month or so when my current contract runs out, but it looks as if it is not to be.
The problem with EE/Voda/O2/etc shops is it makes it more difficult to compare deals. P4U made it easy to try phone/contract combos at the same time. It looks like the next phone will be from Tesco ...
My reasoning was the same when I finally went for an e-book reader. I wanted something that would use the maximum number of formats, especially epub from sources other than the book-sellers, so anything by B&N, Amazon etc was out. I went for a JetBook - great until it broke my fall down a flight of stairs two years ago. A replacement JetBook was a bit expensive, so a Kobo Touch was acquired from eBay. Apart from the regular "guess what functionality the latest update is going to inexplicably alter" amusement, it is a brilliant piece of kit that just keeps going, and battery life is excellent - at least a week at a time. Every now and again I think that a Kobo Glo might be worth acquiring for the odd occasion a backlight would be useful (wanting to read in bed after Mrs IP has gone to sleep, mainly), but I doubt it will happen this side of the Touch failing somehow. Whatever, it will be e-ink that replaces it - I cannot understand why someone would use a LED screen regularly to read.
Given that Wall Street* investment banks come across as terminally conservative, risk-averse, and ready to panic at the drop of a share-price, I don't regard then as "adult" in any sense. Chicken-Little would have made an excellent investment banker (or stockbroker) ...
* and all the others
You have rental cars with a manual? I've rented over a dozen cars in the last few years, and not one has had the manual in it - something that pisses me off no end. Also, sit in the car and spend time ensuring that you know how the basics work, and you'll get a knock on the window from the one of the staff asking if you know what you are doing.
" ... many people from the 80's may recall that wierd feeing when you realise you have sat in the wrong car (Vauxhall Cavalier was mine)"
Yep - Vauxhall Chevette and Ford Fiesta here! There is no elegant way of extracting yourself from that:
"Why won't the ignition switch work?" [usually less worn than door-lock] (Rock steering wheel back and forth a few times. Peer under column.)
"Shit! Lock must be broken!" (Reach for door handle to get out.)
"Hold on. Where have those furry dice/womens' shoes/deodorant trees come from?" (Odd sense of reality fading. Vague suspicions of alternative universes become more concrete.)
"Eerrrmm - I don't remember parking this close to that wall/lamp-post/identical model of car with familiar number plate ..." (Sudden bowel-loosening realisation that you are, in actual fact, in *someone else's car*. Intimate appreciation of the meaning of the phrase "Feeling the colour draining out your face").
"Right. Don't panic. No-one knows what you've done. Pretend you have found *the thing* you were looking for. *Calmly* get out of the car." (Heart pounding loud enough to set the suspension resonating. Cold sweat forming all over.)
"Now, relock the door." (Shit! It isn't as easy.)
"No - on the button!" (Reopen door in as unsuspicious way as possible, do the combination of handle and button.)
"Now, walk back the way you came so that it is obvious you 'just wanted to get something from the car'." (Resist temptation to whistle whilst walking round corner. Wait what seems like five minutes, not looking suspicious at all.)
"Take off your jacket/jumper so no-one will recognise you as you walk back to your own car and drive off ... very ... carefully." (Try to forget the utter hideousness of it all until some bastard on El Reg reminds you of it ...)