Spontaneous Monotony

One of the most common moans by the climate change refuseniks – chief among them America and China – is that living within their environmental means would ‘damage their economy’. So the solution is simple: the EU (and any non-EU countries which want to combat climate change) can make it more economically harmful to not pull their weight.

The solution is simple: if a given country emits more than its fair share of harmful gases, any exports from that country would have massive tariffs imposed on them. 100% of the value of the product would be a starting point. Then, as well as being cheapest in the long run, complying with environmental requirements would also be cheapest in the short term. Any money raised could go towards repairing some of the damage caused by these countries.

It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would help to convince the environmental rogue states to ‘get with the program’.

If any of you have googled for ‘miserable failure’ in the past couple of days you’ll notice that the top result – the biography of George W. Bush – has been removed. A similar changed has been made to the search for ‘liar’, which used to return the biography of our own Supreme Leader.

But Google, in an apparently politically motivated move, has decided to blacklist certain results ‘tweak its algorithm’ to prevent googlebombs. I would believe that if it were actually true – several googlebombs which are not politically problematic for google, such as the ‘french military victories’ one (it returns a spoof 404 page suggesting people search for ‘french military defeats’ instead) are still alive and well.

I wouldn’t honestly care if Google had tweaked their algorithm to stop googlebombing. So what? The problem I have is that Google hasn’t tweaked the algorithm, they’ve just hardcoded the alteration of certain search results for political purposes. When they did this in China, they had the excuse of not having a choice other than not operating. When they do this elsewhere, its time for me to set a new default search engine in my Firefox.

EDIT: Yahoo UK, MSN UK and AllTheWeb all still return an unaltered list of search results. Bye bye Google.

After the storm of media arselicking interest following the launch of Microsoft’s latest assault on consumer rights operating system (complete with ultra-restrictive licence terms¹), here is a software story that will actually benefit the public.

The Greater Paris Regional Council, which runs high schools in the Paris region, will spend around €2.6 million to give new students a USB drive loaded with opensource software.² From the description given, it sounds like it will be a U3/PortableApps.com – type device, with the programs running from and storing all their data on the drive.

The primary motivation given for this is that it is a LOT cheaper than providing all of them with a laptop, but will still reduce the ‘digital divide’ by giving every student access to the software they need for school projects. How many students in Scotland, for example, are disadvantaged at school because they don’t have access to Dreamweaver, or Fireworks, or MS Access at home? Given that no document, spreadsheet or presentation I ever did at school (and nothing since I started university either) required any feature which is not present in OpenOffice.org, why the hell should schools spend money on MS Office licenses when that money could be better spent on teachers, books and other things which pupils actually need.

References

¹ D. Shearer Vista for Lawyers: Survival Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista Licensing

² P. Sayer French students to get open-source software on USB key (Yahoo News, 2nd February 2007)

After the latest round of ‘anti-terrorism’ arrests in Birmingham, the media have predictably focused not on the what has happened (and the content of the alleged plot) but on the reactions on either side. Supporters saying that this is another triumph for police who do a difficult job against a momentous threat, opponents saying that the raid was heavy-handed and unnecessary.

I would prefer to wait until we know something substantial before forming an opinion. If these men are in fact guilty of plotting to kidnap someone then the police will have done their job well. If it is another misguided attack on innocent Muslims based on garbage intelligence, the police will be rightly criticised. But we cannot make such judgements until the suspects are either convicted or released.

For now we can be happy that, for once, dozens of heavily armed police managed to take on sleeping, unarmed men in the dark without shooting any of them.