AP reports that drivers in The Netherlands will, from 2012, be charged by distance driven rather than paying an annual road tax and a tax on newly purchased cars. The base rate will be set yearly, with a higher tariff at peak times increasing until a 2018 review of the scheme. Overall, it’s projected that the cost of driving will reduce for 6 out of 10 drivers as a result of the GPS-tracking scheme. As with the London Congestion Zone charging, it will be interesting to see how this plays out and whether it reduces pollution and congestion, and ultimately whether more people move to public transport, which will be exempt from the system.
“Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine … Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.”
The Huffington Post reveals yet another appalling story from America’s abysmal health insurance system, where insurance companies deny cover to people who take HIV-prevention drugs after rape or sexual assault. It’s yet another awful story from a disgusting system. Full article here.
“The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”
Clive Thompson’s short post on Wired.com argues that far from hindering our writing skills, the advent of the Internet has instead resulted in an explosion of prose. While it’s a different type of writing from that of just a few decades ago, people are putting pen to paper – or keyboard to screen – more than ever in recent memory. Via @librarythingtim on Twitter.
Chimamanda Adichie tells the fascinating story of the formation of her cultural perspective. Her TED talk shows that there is not just one story that defines a given people – but rather, a multitude of overlapping facets.
Video on YouTube, here. Via @missrouge (Tara Hunt) on Twitter.
As third parties have integrated Twitter into their ecosystems, I’ve found myself using it more and more as a central status feed which automatically pushes to my other profiles. However, while I want the ability to easily cross-post, increasingly I don’t want the same status updates to appear on every site – partly to reduce volume, but largely for reasons of audience relevance. For example, it’s unlikely that anyone outside of my Twitter followers are interested in my fail whale tweets, while there are some updates which are aimed exclusively (or in some cases, definitely not!) at my professional network. With the launch of LinkedIn integration today (see Mashable) I’ve decided to finally start streaming my tweets accordingly, via use of the following hashtags:
As such, I’ll be able to more finely control which tweets appear on which sites, reduce updates which are irrelevant to some audiences, and highlight information where it really fits. Naturally, for anyone who still wishes to see every tweet I make, that’s available on Twitter – just follow @grintoul
“Using tissue grown in a laboratory, researchers have engineered fully functional replacement penises. The organs were made for rabbits, but the technique may one day be useful for people … Oddly, the procedure seemed to make the rabbits hornier than usual … ‘Most control rabbits did not attempt copulation after introduction to their female partners,’ wrote the researchers. ‘All rabbits with bioengineered neocorpora attempted copulation within one minute of introduction.’ ”
My mental image of the result of human trials is disturbing yet hilarious Full article on Wired.com is here, via @WiredUK on Twitter.
People who don’t understand technology really shouldn’t be the key decision-makers about it. As The Guardian reported this morning, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch has asserted in his latest ill-informed tirade again the evil Internet that not only is he going to erect pay walls around all his online properties, he’s also going to stop search engines from indexing them. Now, I may be going out on a [very thick, sturdy, unlikely-to-snap] limb here, but I’d agree with TechCrunch that a fairly great whack of visits to the Wall Street Journal, The Times and other sites results from a Google search. And (logic, part 2) if you block a fairly great whack of users from finding your site in the first place, they ain’t gonna be subscribing to it. Hiding your entire site from the Internet? Well, that’s just pie in the Sky…
Before I write it, I can tell you this post is going to sound cold and heartless – but I’m going to say it anyway: Jacqui Janes is doing nothing for her son’s memory other than belittling it. Calling in The Sun to make a political point and dragging his name through the papers for days on end won’t leave people remembering him for the good things; instead, while they will on some level remember him as a soldier who died tragically, they’ll likely remember Jamie Janes in the most part as the man whose death was savagely manipulated by a tabloid to attack a government it wants to oust. While The Sun should doubtless take responsibility for its despicable tactics, Mrs Janes should surely realise – in some moment of clarity – that the paper doesn’t have her or her son’s best interests at heart, but rather circulation figures and callous headlines.
“It’s not that IE6 is out-dated and substandard (although it is), but that large organisations have needed to lock users in to using an approved Web browser … So why do they do that? There can be many reasons, but the largest, and most difficult to dispute is actually of our own creation. We (the Web developers of the world) built expensive, bespoke Web applications for large enterprises and (naturally) ensured that they worked on the most popular browser of the time.”
Phil Hawksworth makes some really valid points in his frank, well-considered post on Internet Explorer 6, arguing that web developers who locked companies in need to take some responsibility. While it’s poorly implemented and showing its age, many users simply don’t have the option of upgrading to more standards-compliant browsers. Read more here.
Facebook has just announced its acquisition of FriendFeed, the two year old lifestreaming site, and tech websites are awash with opinions on what it means for the future. Most sites seem to dryly list all the FriendFeed features they can think of without giving context or showing insight (CNET News was particularly disappointing) but Mashable has a concise, well thought-out overview which points to three key reasons for the buy. First, the incredible team and their history of innovation; second, product direction and alignment, which seem to match considerably; and third, possible value for money – despite financial details remaining unpublished. It’ll be interesting to watch the results of this purchase evolve.
The BBC reports on a bullshit proposal by the Government to give higher grades to school students from poorer backgrounds. I’m aware that I’m about to sound like a raging Tory (I’m not) but I can barely articulate how much this idea outrages me Not only is it grossly unfair and unethical to even think of giving poorer students better marks than their peers for the same work, but it diminishes the meaning of the grading system across the board and could only serve to demotivate hard-working pupils who are punished for not being poor. It’s yet another example, hot on the tail of university grade inflation and a two-tier loan system, of an awful policy which ignores the root and instead tries to patch over fuck-ups in education policy. The Government should stop trying to treat the symptom and instead look at the cause – underfunding, figure-fiddling, and a ridiculous university policy which says that 50% of the population should be forced into higher education, regardless of whether they are capable or whether the course they study has any meaning or place in a university.
The BBC reports on fascinating developments in the development of DNA-based computers. In this case, they used molecules to represent facts and rules rather than the simple true/false state of binary computing. By feeding the DNA computer a molecular rule (‘all men are mortal’) and a fact (‘Socrates is a man’), the DNA system correctly deduced the answer to ‘Is Socrates mortal?’. Amazingly, the answer was then encoded in the green light given off by a fluorescent molecule. The light was bound to a second molecule which kept the light covered, until a correct answer released an enzyme which allowed the light to shine. Absolutely incredible stuff.
Ars Technica reports on Tahoe-LAFS, an innovative cross between P2P, cloud computing and storage. The idea is that networks of computers could be used for distributed yet secure storage of files, with applications such as dynamic excess capacity. At a high level, it works like this: Files are split into ten parts, AES encrypted and distributed across nodes in a network in a peer-to-peer fashion. When a user wishes to reassemble a file, Tahoe uses error correction to ensure data integrity and has a high level of fault tolerance in the process, able to reassemble a file from only three of the original ten pieces. As Ars Technica notes, the key current limitation is that it is distributed but not decentralised, as it relies on a central ‘introducer’ node to add new connections to the grid; however, this issue should be fixed in a future version. Overall, it will interesting to see what applications Tahoe ends up being used for – especially given the fantastic news that it’s open-source, compatible across at least 5 flavours of OS, and can be incorporated into a wide range of clients, protocols and frontends.
Read the Ars Technica article here. Tahoe site here.
The Washington Post reports on the lobbying force of the families of 9/11 victims, and their wide range of views – from the relative who says that inmates have it easy (“They’re in the Caribbean on a beach, getting three meals a day”) to those ardently in favour of trying detainees in US courts; and from those who believe they don’t deserve a trial, to those who passionately oppose the death penalty. While I can’t begin to understand the anger and pain and hurt the families feel, however, I really can’t understand how any democracy can base constitutional decisions and its justice system on current raw emotion and conference calls with families. Until Guantanamo detainees are tried in a fair and impartial court, they are innocent in the eyes of the law; and as such, their inalienable human rights and access to justice should be the same as those of anyone else.
Read “Victims’ Families United in Tragedy, Divided in Views”, here.
Wired has a somewhat amusing, somewhat unnerving article on the stupidity of US Feds at the recent DefCon hacker convention. Law enforcement attended to keep abreast of the latest hacking trends and exploitable vulnerabilities, some undercover and some manning a Meet-the-Feds stand (no, really). While taking basic security precautions would evidently be a sensible move given the setting, it appears they neglected to consider the basic lessons of an insecure technology. Walking past an RFID scanner placed in full view on a table, they may have exposed the unique codes on ID cards which could potentially allow a malicious hacker to deduce a variety of sensitive information – such as the agency they work for, or even door codes and computer entry keys. Scarily stupid.
Read the full story on the Wired ‘Threat Level’ blog, here.
“For Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, a sociologist at Madrid’s Cumpletense University who specializes in ETA, the answer to why ETA continues its violent fight is more chilling … ‘They have no theory of violence anymore. For the past three or four years, it’s been purely reactionary. It’s all they know how to do.’ “
The Basque separatist group this week marked its fiftieth anniversary with two bombs. Time takes a look at what continues to motivate a terrorist group which has, by all accounts, lost any realistic hope of achieving its aims through bloodshed. Full article here.
Ryan Singel reports on Yahoo’s continuing slide towards Internet oblivion. The brand, which at the turn of the decade symbolised the information age, is rapidly muddling towards insignificance through indirection. Despite owning some of the Internet’s most promising properties, the company has decided not to focus on its products; and regardless of the fact that its search engine was once king, it will instead “grind to a halt for ten years, replaced by Microsoft’s often-revamped and newly branded Bing.” Yahoo are clinging desperately to the content portal model which spectacularly failed AOL, mistakenly thinking that users will visit the site for content inferior to that freely available elsewhere on the web.
This is the personal blog of Guy Rintoul, a 25 year old living and working in Newcastle, UK. For a longer bio, links to other profiles and contact info, click here.
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Full article on Wired.com is 
Not only is it grossly unfair and unethical to even think of giving poorer students better marks than their peers for the same work, but it diminishes the meaning of the grading system across the board and could only serve to demotivate hard-working pupils who are punished for not being poor. It’s yet another example, hot on the tail of university grade inflation and a two-tier loan system, of an awful policy which ignores the root and instead tries to patch over fuck-ups in education policy. The Government should stop trying to treat the symptom and instead look at the cause – underfunding, figure-fiddling, and a ridiculous university policy which says that 50% of the population should be forced into higher education, regardless of whether they are capable or whether the course they study has any meaning or place in a university.
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