No, Windows Update, I do not want to restart my computer now. I don’t want to restart it for several hours so please stop asking me every five minutes! And if I go away for five minutes and find out that you have restarted it anyway, ruining the long term test I am running, I will be very cross. Operating systems should do what they’re told, not harbour arrogant illusions that they know best.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Geekism at 2:57 AM EDT

3 Comments »

I was driving in North Devon at the weekend. I thought London was bad for pointless speed cameras, but at least they’re merely pointless*. The ones out West are positively evil.

Consider, if you will, a two lane A-road through the rolling country hills. Going up the steep hills, an extra passing lane is added to let cars past the slow lorries. You’ve been following a convoy of lorries for six miles, so now’s your chance! You put your foot down: you want to pass all the lorries before the end of the passing lane. But what’s this, right at the end of the lane, just at the point where the two lanes merge into one? Aaaargh, it’s a speed camera!

So now, instead of completing the passing maneuvre safely, you’re forced to transfer all your attention to your speedometer. At the same time as looking at your speedo, you have to merge between two large trucks driving much too close together. It’s evil and it’s dangerous. Just when you should be looking out of your car, matching your speed and position so as to smoothly slot between other vehicles, you’re forced to transfer your attention to the secondary matter of precisely what speed you’re travelling at to the nearest mph.

I’ve seen this trick on the A303, and on urban dual carriageways around Taunton. I expect it is employed elsewhere by Devon police.

Speaking of merging, if you’re joining a dual carriageway from a minor side road and there’s a little slip lane, that’s for merging! That means you use it to get up to speed with the other cars travelling at 70 mph. If there are cars coming, stop at the beginning of the slip so you can still use it for that purpose. Don’t drive to the end of the slip road and then stop. That would be foolish, like the fool I saw doing just that on the A303 the other day.

And another thing about merging: if by some cataclysmic spasm of stupidity you find yourself stopped in the middle of the motorway slip road joining the M5, don’t just sit there with your right indicator flashing as cars swerve every which way to avoid hitting you! Pull onto the hard shoulder and use that to accelerate and merge. I know the hard shoulder is just for emergencies, but such a monumental failure to merge properly is an emergency.

(That pun really wasn’t intended, but it’s quite a good one nonetheless, don’t you think?)

* And a bit annoying. (And a bit dangerous when they cause all the otherwise free-flowing traffic to bunch up.)

Posted by Rob Fisher as Driving at 10:33 PM EDT

6 Comments »

While driving in Devon at the weekend, I saw a story on the front page of the North Devon Journal headlined Armed police in raid drama:

Armed police raided a Barnstaple home in the hunt for man with a firearm. Anxious residents of Hughes Avenue, Newport huddled on doorsteps and street corners on Tuesday afternoon as police brought the street to a standstill during the dramatic raid.

Yes, it’s the police protecting us from an armed menace! By running around and being menacing. With guns!

Police said they were acting on intelligence that a man at the property was in possession of a firearm.

Ah, yes: intelligence.

They later confirmed the man they were looking for was not at the address.

Hm. Not so intelligent, then.

During the operation, the police were unwilling to tell residents exactly what was taking place, or why, concentrating their efforts on keeping the area free of traffic and onlookers at a safe distance.

Probably because all that was happening was the police were storming about with guns knocking down people’s doors and making a nuicance of themselves…

Another resident, who has lived in the street for seven years, said: “I was in bed but heard my neighbour and looked out.

“We don’t have any problems down this end of the street but that end of the road is a bit rougher. If I was away and it was just my wife and daughter here I would be panicking a lot.”

Yes, that end of the street is very rough. There are always police about chasing after imaginary dangerous men.

A police spokesman said: The incident is now closed.”

Phew, that’s a relief then. Thank goodness all that happened was the cops got a dodgy tip-off that someone might have a gun. I’d hate to think there really were people in North Devon with guns! Apart from the boys in blue, of course, who need every excuse they can get to play with their toys! I bet the people whose door got busted in and had armed police swarming all over their house had a right giggle afterwards. Tee hee!

Posted by Rob Fisher as News, Self Defense at 10:09 PM EDT

5 Comments »

There’s some excellent discussion going on over at Samizdata lately.

Brendan Halfweeg, wrote this about welfare statism:

Once upon a time there was shame in having to accept charity to feed and house yourself and your family. Almost the opposite exists today, when many entrenched welfare recipients are proud to boast of how much they are getting out of the government. This is the legacy of redistributive welfare regimes, people so perversely corrupted by the system and able to live a comfortable if unfruitful life scrounging on welfare, that they don’t aspire to provide for themself, but rather live with the delusion of entitlement.

He later backs this up with an example:

I happened to catch a snippet of one of those perverse reality programmes the other day called “Wife Swap”, the premise of which is that the matriarchs from two families swap and TV cameras follow them around capturing the ensuing chaos, not exactly Emmy award winning stuff. I was absolutely gobsmacked though when they profiled one of the families and both parents straight faced claimed to have “chosen” to go onto benefits (another perverse, positive spin word meaning welfare, which has undoubtibly negative connotations) to enable them to better raise their five snotty nosed children. They were framing their choice as a legitimate positive option, rather than a refuge of last resort.

This prompts Verity, another Samizdata regular commenter, to ask:

Long-term, professional, if you will, welfare recipients do indeed think that the receipt of the fruits of other people’s labour is one of their “rights”.

I wonder how they justify this thought in their own minds. Do they know that they are eating up other people’s salaries? How can they delude themselves into believing they are entitled to other people’s money - not for providing a service, or goods, but just because?

Someone called Ted suggests an answer:

I also saw this family on television. Even worse, the husband was spending his ‘entitlement’ at the bookies! Couldn’t believe it.

I think in their minds that they truly believe that forces outside their control have placed them in the position they are in. They believe that they have no power to change their situation, that they have no free will and that their situation is pre-determined.

[…]

The danger of this culture embedding itself in government and society is that the producers, those who take the risk to produce ideas, goods and services for exchange, are labelled as the ‘external’ forces mentioned above. Therefore, a tycoon who gained enormous wealth by inventing something new - and who has created wealth for others, by creating employment for them - is labelled as an anti-social profiteer/exploiter.

All of which rather neatly provides justification for taking the producers’ money by force to fund one’s gambling habit. This does happen: think of the fuss that is made whenever some large corporation announces record profits.

The other thing about welfare is that it creates more people who need welfare. For one thing, taking money that would be otherwise invested deflates the economy, in that I am paying taxes instead of employing extra people. For another, you tend to get more of what you reward, so giving the unemployed lots of money gives people an incentive to remain unemployed. This is because economists are correct when they say that people behave rationally. As Midwesterner puts it:

The depressing thing is we can’t really blame them. Intelligence is understanding your surroundings and responding appropriately. That is exactly what the ‘entitled’ are doing.

These people’s choices are the inevitable and entirely predictable consequence of a social care safety net that punishes effort and denies cause and effect.

Meanwhile, for an excellent discussion of the pros and cons of CCTV, see the article pointing to a picture of a CCTV camera in George Orwell Plaza in Spain, and the subsequent discussion fuelled by Euan Gray. I rarely agree with Mr Gray, but he does have a way of putting across a calm and rational counter-argument that brings out the best in the people I do agree with, ad-hominems aside.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 9:50 PM EDT

1 Comment »

Scott Burgess is back and on top form. In the first post back we’ve got everything from the Independent’s commentary contradicting its news to police arresting people under the terrorism act for wearing the wrong T-shirt.

I also rather enjoyed his deconstruction of a Naomi Wolfe article which concludes:

I must admit that I hadn’t read much (if any) of her output before - if this article is a fair indication, it’s not in the least impressive. What’s much more so is the extent to which such an apparent lightweight has been embraced by the Guardianista ilk.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 8:30 PM EDT

2 Comments »

I signed up for Be’s 24 Mb/s ADSL2+ service when they were offering it for £20 a month for life, and I’ve just been told that the service should be connected next Tuesday. It’s all very exciting!

Of course, I’m unlikely to actually get 24Mb/s, because it all depends on line quality. But according to SamKnows I’m 600m from the exchange as the crow flies (which may well not be as the wire runs). That’s closer than many, so it will be interesting to see what speed I do get.

The question is, what am I going to use all that bandwidth for, apart from the obvious?

If you find the service is available in your area, contact me and we’ll come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Geekism at 8:09 PM EDT

5 Comments »

I’ve just watched the first episode of Firefly and already I’m hooked.

It’s essentially a western in space, which sounds like a wierd idea until you think about it: Space being the new frontier, it’s just like the Old West. It’s sparsely populated, and everyone is just trying to make a living however they can. Josh Whedon’s execution of the idea is supremely cool. Most of the people in the world of Firefly, apart from the government types, are hard-edged business people. They don’t take any nonsense and they drive a hard bargain.

The captain of the Firefly class ship Serenity, played by Nathan Fillion is the epitome of this. He’s practically a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. When the doctor taken on board as a passenger tells the captain his moving sob story, the captain is only interested in what the doctor can do for him, since he’s caused a lot of trouble “for me and mine.” He knows when to walk away from a deal that’s too much trouble, avoiding a fight he can’t win, and when to use force to protect himself and his crew. And he says cool stuff like, “the purpose of government is to get in a man’s way” and, “you don’t know me son, so let me explain this to you once. If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me, and you’ll be armed.”

If I have one criticism of what I’ve seen so far, it’s that the guns are drawn a little too often. The real old west was a lot more peaceful than the movies make out because for the most part guns were merely a threat rarely used. But this failing is forgivable in a TV show that needs to be action packed and exciting. And it’s so hard to repress a cowboy whoop when, during a tense hostage scene in which the bad guy cop has his gun to a girl’s head, Captain Reynolds comes running up, sees what’s happening and shoots the bad guy in the face without missing a beat! Yeehah! There’s no soul searching and “what have we done?” nonsense, they just chuck him out of the back of the ship and continue about their day, having done what needed to be done.

The rest of the characters are interesting and diverse. These include the ambassador, a euphemism for the woman who helps smooth the ship’s passage into certain ports by providing her, uh, services to the local men. There’s the always amusing, you-wouldn’t-want-to-get-on-the-wrong-side-of-him security man (”you don’t pay me to talk pretty, Captain” — and he doesn’t). And to soften the mood there’s Kaylee the mechanic who is far too sweet and innocent to be on such a spaceship, although I have a feeling she is yet to show her true mettle.

Top it off with a wonderful bluegrass soundtrack; the way some of the technology, like the space ship looks so rugged and creaky and yet there are glimpses of slick technology like smart paper; the fact that for once there’s no sound in space; and the diverse locations from space to futuristic cities to cattle-ranch outposts, and you’ve got a corker of a show. It’s looking like the best new sci-fi in a very long time.

Which makes it such a shame that Fox saw fit to cancel it. Maybe it was too sophisticated but I think sometimes these studios underestimate their audience. The fact I heard about it first on the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.elite suggests it could have been marketed better. (”Hello! Target demographic over here! Hello?”) There is hope, though, in the form of a movie version called Serenity, which will hopefully be hugely successful and spawn endless spin-offs and sequels.

So what are you waiting for? Go and buy the series and make sure you see the movie when it comes out.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Reviews at 12:07 AM EDT

4 Comments »