Categories
Politics

Don’t Call It Hacking

News of the World (album)
I'm Seeing A Whole New Meaning In This Now

Calling it “hacking” makes it sound difficult and technical, when basically what the News Of The World did was phone voicemail boxes that, like most, had easily-guessed PINs. It was spying. It was intrusion. It was burglary. It invaded the lives of innocent people every bit as violently and recklessly as breaking into into their homes and ransacking their bedrooms. Where they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, they find a stranger there, manipulating their lives for money.

‘Hacking’ once meant something very different; it was a morally neutral or actually positive word, simply meaning skilled use of computers. Ironically there was even a hacker code of ethics – a concept these debased editors would have to look up.

This has added a great deal more fuel to an already raging debate over libel and privacy law. That reform is desperately needed is, as the “superinjunction” debacle showed, beyond question, but such difficult decisions would be better not made in the context of newspapers carrying out criminal acts. Laws made in anger and haste are likely to be bad for all journalism and all freedom of speech, not just Murdoch’s papers and their like.

And it should be remarked that other British tabloids are quite capable of doing breathtaking violence to basic moral concepts. Look at today’s Daily Express. In the light of a study that failed to find a link between salt and early death, they label all people who discouraged eating salt as ‘fascist’.

That’s what the Daily Express thinks fascists are. Not people who overthrow democracy, who rule by fear, who murder all opposition. People who say you shouldn’t eat too much salt.

Evil is infantile.

(Updated 22:00)

Categories
Humour Technology

Mac Fixin’ Again

Circuit City

Some laptops are a lot easier to fix than others. My Toughbook can basically be maintained with a bicycle spanner. At the opposite end, I once had such a hard time taking apart an Acer that I didn’t bother to put it back together again.

Apple’s are in the middle, though some are better than others. The last couple of MacBooks are far better than past models – they actually let you take your own hard drive out, without needing power tools! The Intel iBooks are fairly OK, except that all the connectors inside seem to snake into one bizarre nexus. The iBook G3 on the other hand, though actually my favourite from the outside (it’s the weird curvy one from about 2000), has about 650 screws – no two of which are the same.

But the iBook G4 (1.33GHz) is my poorly-designed nemesis. It’s notorious because the Wi-Fi card has a tendency to come loose, crashing the thing. I fixed one almost exactly a year ago, for my musician friend Niceol. And guess what? It came loose again. As I said at the time:

To help prevent the Wi-Fi card working loose again I needed something to pad out the clamp holding it, make the grip tighter. So I found a nice pale grey piece of card, cut neatly rounded corners, got a pen and wrote “iPad”.

Because Apple design is all about attention to detail.

Seems my design was underpowered. So I replaced the soft card with a thicker piece of plastic. On which, naturally, I scrawled “iPad 2”.

Categories
Humour Technology

Now There’s An Idea…

I came across this while looking for a copyright-free illustration for the last post. It’s from the July 1934 issue of Popular Mechanics, and shows a camera that can be attached to a gun, and “worked by the gun’s trigger”.

Wait. Does that mean if you want to take a photograph, you have to fire the gun? Because that sounds… kinda risky.

“Smile! Oh damn sorry I forgot damn damn damn someone call an ambulance.”

And since when could you identify someone from a picture of them running away from you and your gun? This is really only useful if you want a lot of pictures of people who look very, very surprised.

But you’ve got to love the 1930s. So many more things were possible, because they hadn’t figured out what a bad idea they were yet. Camera guns, aqua-cars, fascism.

Categories
Politics

Who Deserves To Die?

One of the most indefensible consequences of the property orgy and subsequent bailout deal is that innocent people will be made to pay with their lives. It’s one example among very many, but from today people in Roscommon who are severely injured are going to be sent to Galway.

Those of us who live in Galway know that emergency services here are already overwhelmed. We also know that we have some of the worst traffic congestion in the country.

Let’s state this in as simple a way as possible, so that even our elected representatives can understand it. Because of the closure of Roscommon accident and emergency, someone is going to die.

But it will not be a member of a bank’s board of directors, to take a random example. They have an alternative. While all this is happening, a commercial organisation calling itself Beacon Hospitals thinks it timely to advertise that they offer an emergency service. Their slogan?

“Because You Deserve Better.”

Categories
Humour Politics

Independence Is Overrated Anyway

It would also be a unique opportunity to design the busiest flag in world history

Today the USA celebrates the anniversary of independence from Britain. Though I wonder would they have bothered if they’d known that, 235 years later, Britain would be pretty much dependent on them. It’s funny to watch that pair, singing together at the UN, fighting their wars hand-in-hand. You know I think those two should make up. They’re obviously right for each other.

Just one or two tricky details to sort out. The UK couldn’t just become the 51st state. It may be small in area, but at 62 million it would make up one sixth of the combined population. As the House of Representatives allocates seats proportionally it would inevitably form a huge voting bloc there, while at the same time being ludicrously under-represented in the Senate.

It would be far better for the constituent countries of the UK to join individually, with England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland becoming the 51st, 52nd, 53rd and 54th states of the USA respectively. This still leaves England as the largest state by far though – 52 million people as opposed to California’s 37 – so perhaps it could be further divided. North and South England maybe, like the Dakotas and Carolinas. Or separate it into Greater London, and Little England.

But then there’s another issue – the United States is a republic, whereas the United Kingdom is anything but. This is a rather fundamental constitutional difference; it’s not a Union unless the whole thing is governed by a single Head of State. Let’s begin though by ruling out the option of Americans voting to become a monarchy. Not because they wouldn’t consider it, but because I’m worried they might. For the UK to finally be converted into a full democracy, its royal family will need to be deposed. That doesn’t mean they have to be rounded up and executed of course. Though it does seem like the ideal opportunity.

Categories
Cosmography

Announcing I.Doubt.It

T-shirts available. Seriously

How’d you like the new masthead? From now on it’s “I.Doubt.It” all the way. Micro Cosmopolitan – the name of my old newspaper column – is done with.

This comes as some relief. What was I thinking? To make it worse, it was originally written as one word – Microcosmopolitan. How did I expect anyone to remember a seven-syllable word I’d made up?

It was that way until the City Tribune had a redesign, and put my column into a single, well, column. They had to break up my title because it didn’t fit! I admit that did make it easier to read, but then I worried that as I wrote about information technology, people would think I was under the impression that “Micro” was still a hip and cool word for a personal computer. Ouch.

I suppose I was fond of it, the word I’d originally coined to describe Galway City. But as the column became more about global issues it grew less and less relevant. I kept it for a transitional period to help readers of the newspaper version find their way here. They will have by now I guess, six months and 200 posts on.

Yep, I just noticed. By sheer coincidence, the last post was number 200. Wow.

Categories
Humour Technology

The Cinema Conspiracy

Caroline Munro was definitely bustier too

Have you noticed how quickly special effects become dated now? CGI that was revolutionary when a movie came out seems crappy even before it reaches TV. Golum, once character animation perfected, already looks fake. And when I finally saw Beowulf I couldn’t believe it ever impressed anyone, it looks like it was made in someone’s bedroom. Parts of it especially. I’m not going to bother ever seeing Avatar. At this point it’s going to be about as impressive as Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

There’s something wrong here. Look how long earlier generations of special effects lasted. As a child I was wowed by the stop motion work of Ray Harryhausen in films like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the original Clash of the Titans, or – well, about every film I wanted to see. But so were my parents and even grandparents when he did King Kong Mighty Joe Young¹. OK, show it to a child now and they will actually yawn between the frames, but that work lasted for generations rather than weeks.

So things are getting better faster than they used to, and by a sad but inescapable logic that means they get worse faster too. I accept that, I just don’t think it’s sufficient to explain what’s going on.

When the film is released for TV the effects sequences included will actually be reduced in quality from the versions you saw in the cinema. Same again when the DVD comes out. And it doesn’t look worse in HD because the picture is better. How the hell did they ever trick us into believing that? It looks worse because it is worse.

They do the same with old TV programmes too. When I was a kid, Thunderbirds did not have the visible strings I notice now, I’d swear to it. Or Space 1999… Oh all right. But the rest, they had to downgrade.

Why? Because CGI progress isn’t fast enough to meet public expectations. We go to the cinema expecting every new film to be an astonishing quantum leap forward, and that’s just not possible. Look at Pixar’s films. Yes they’re brilliant – but they started brilliant. So the only way to keep blowing our minds is to keep reducing our expectations.

Just like governments do with recessions.

 

  1. Argh, stupid mistake. Stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien did King Kong. Harryhausen learned under him on several films, including the less iconic giant gorilla feature.
Categories
Humour

Watching Paint Dry

Colouring pencils
None of These

Speaking of warships, I’m painting the garden wall today (bear with me) out at my mother’s place. According to the label this is supposed to be a very dark, slightly bluish grey. Slate, in other words. In fact my mother chose it to match the tiles on the roof. Which are also meant to look like slate. On the wall though, it’s coming out the dullest middle grey you ever did see.

Battleship grey. The tension is resolved. Thank you.

It said this colour was called “Merlin”. That seems to make no sense at all, but I was actually there when the name was chosen, in the chemical plant’s creative department. In my head.

“OK, grey. We need another name for another shade of grey. Brainstorm time.”

“Overcast!”

“Decay!”

“Boredom!”

“Depression!”

“Despair!”

“Razors!”

“Come on, there must be some positives. A happy memory from childhood maybe.”

“Woodlice!”

“Did anyone here have a normal childhood?”

“We work in the creative department of a chemical plant.”

“Gandalf! Gandalf the Grey!”

“Brilliant!”

Then the legal department finds that the licensing would cost millions and changes it to Merlin.

I’m just hoping it gets darker as it dries. Otherwise I’ve spent a lot of effort painting a cement wall to look pretty much like a cement wall.

Categories
Humour Technology

Great Soluble Sailboats!

Looks good, but kick it and it'll crumple like a rotten tea-chest

This sexy three-hulled stealth job is one of the US Navy’s new breed of “littoral” vessels, designed to be able to move fast and hit hard even when close to shore. Amazing piece of technology. One problem: It’s dissolving out from under them.

Unlike most warships, this one has a hull made out of aluminium. Great stuff, nice and light. You can make a much faster ship from that, and it’s still torpedo-proof. Mostly. But not all military equipment is made of aluminium of course. A lot of it is steel.

So you’ve got a lot of aluminium and a lot of what is basically iron bolted onto it. Now add a saline solution like, oh, I don’t know – the sea? – and what you have isn’t so much a ship anymore, more what’s known as “a battery”.

The electrical action between the two different metals is corroding away the body of the ship. What makes this all the more stupid – according to the makers at least – is it’s the Navy’s fault because they decided not to spring for the “Cathodic Protection System” meant to prevent their ship eating itself. To save costs.

Not having a self-eating ship would, you might think, be the better long-term saving.

When a friend posted this on Facebook I wasn’t the only one to initially misread that as “Catholic Protection System”. I thought, the rhythm method? I wouldn’t rely on that. Someone else though pointed out that it might mean a St. Christopher’s medal – these are supposed to protect travellers, so perhaps they should attach a whole bunch of them.

To which someone else replied that if the medals were made of zinc, that might actually help.

Categories
Humour

Pause For Thought

So it is no more. From today forth, the editors of the Oxford University Press will no longer insist that you should put a comma before the conjunction when you’re listing things, for example: First, second, and third. We say a fond farewell to this venerable institution, a noble oddity now consigned to history’s scrapheap. Except in the US of course, where they will amused to find that the rule they use every day has been declared incorrect by some committee in England.

Alas, the story was apocryphal; the OUP has not changed its editorial rule. The misunderstanding arose because they have chosen not to use their own ‘Oxford comma’ in press releases. These conform instead to the usual rule in the UK, which is to use no comma there. They’ll keep using it in their books.

So no panic. Not that there should have been one anyway, but bad teaching can leave people stressed and anxious when they’re not sure if they’re being ‘correct’ or not.

What is correct? It’s simple. Use a comma when it feels right.

Yes that is a clear, disciplined rule. Note that I say “feels right”, not “at random”. Punctuation is used to convey the pacing of speech, the delivery, the emphasis. Punctuate just as you would pause in spoken language – to express feeling and to clarify meaning. Put in a comma when it helps avoid confusion. There is a notable difference between “I’d like you to meet my wife, my lover and my best friend” and “I’d like you to meet my wife, my lover, and my best friend”.

It must be admitted that the ‘Oxford’ comma is a tricky case – simply because some readers expect one there while others don’t. In Ireland, the UK, Australia, Canada, or just about anywhere else they speak English, putting one in seems like pausing before the last item for emphasis. Readers in America however expect it so its presence conveys nothing special and leaving it out just makes the list read oddly. So bear your audience in mind – as always.

With online media of course you have no idea where your audience is, so you might as well relax. If you really want a loose general rule, using a comma here is probably confusing less often than not using one. But whatever you do, don’t follow any rule to the point where it becomes madness – like this example which, I am assured, is actually from the Canadian Press Stylebook:

“Put commas between elements of a series but not before the final and, or or nor unless that avoids confusion.”

Seriously, someone did that for a bet.