Technorama

BBC

So many drivers park in the Advance Stop Area (reserved for cyclists), and talk on their mobile phones or texting while driving. Please can we recruit more Traffic Officers, and use the money from fines to pay the salaries.

I am optimistic that our government, lead by Mrs May, will form the best arrangements possible. But what might that look like?

There will be transitional arrangements for EU citizens living in the UK. No one will be kicked out. Those already working here, will likely be entitled to Permanent Residency as per other foreign nationals.

Those EU citizens who wish to visit will be given a regular 90 day tourist visa upon arrival. Those EU citizens wishing to work, will need to apply in regular way, and if there is a skills shortage for doctors, software engineers, fruit pickers, etc they are all welcome. The price will be £40 for a 2 year work visa.

Please promptly bring in regulation. They should be insured, have an MOT and a fare meter.

The age old debate in the mainstream press, the "Housing crisis" or "Generation rent!" is continuing. But why is there a shortage of housing? Or is there indeed a shortage in the first place?

In 1997 Tony Blair at the Labour Party continued the Conservative trend, of getting both parents to work in a household. This meant that a household which earned 30k, now earned 60k, in turn they probably paid out 15k in child care (leaving the young children feeling abandoned, that is another debate). So they were left with 45k income.

The banks in-turn said, well if you now have 45k, that means we can lend you 50% more than when you earned 30k in your household. So mortgage loan limits went up from 135k -> 202k for those income levels. Which in-turn meant those families could offer more. So offers were higher, sale prices were higher, and house price boom, indeed happened! It was the same old houses, nothing had really changed.
-- Who made money out of this? The people who bought properties 5 years before the boom. So don't blame those buying. The banks made money out of interest payments. But it was the baby boomers who were lucky enough to just own at the right time who could really cash in, by releasing equity, or selling to those first time buyers.

Now we have young people stuck renting, or renting from parents. But is that really an issue? Most of Germany is happy to be tenants, they don't want the trouble of being a property owner. It's only UK press that have whipped up this idea that every man and woman need to own!

Foolish people will try mislead, pretending that it was the Right To Buy policy that created this problem, it hasn't, all that did was remove the state from responsibility of the same housing stock. Some of which are now managed by B2L Landlords. The percentage of families renting from local authority or B2L landlords, is actually consistently the same over the Office For National Statistics reports published over the last 40 years

The real problem is that people wish to live alone, and in houses and flats, not just studios. So a 2 bed flat will now be occupied by one person. Where as 20 years ago, a couple would have shared.

So this leaves some young people renting, or living with parents, because they can't afford, as the lower density occupation rates have also impacted prices.

Council planning departments are terribly slow, we need to increase permitted development, to allow also extra floors. We need to have a max 30 day timescale for planning permission. Councils need to allow internal relocation of kitchens to create open plan living and extra bedrooms in ex council flats.

Permission for new build on land and brown field needs to be stream lined. Cut out all the newt studies, and consultations which often cost up to £20M for a block of flats.

Great that something is being done at last to stop antibiotics being over prescribed.

Dell, please test your software before shipping!
Also please introduce robust coding, to check for NULL pointers, before dereferencing your strings in SetFirmwareFilesPath() function

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at AlienLabs.AlienFX.Tools.Classes.CommunicationServiceClass.SetFirmwareFilesPath(String path)
   at AlienLabs.AlienFX.Tools.Classes.CommunicationServiceClassFactory.New(AlienFXDeviceRepository repository)
   at AlienLabs.AlienFX.Controller.LightsZoneController..ctor()
   at AlienLabs.AlienFX.Controller.ControllerMainForm.initializeLightController()
   at AlienLabs.AlienFX.Controller.ControllerMainForm..ctor()
   at AlienLabs.AlienFX.Controller.Program.Main(String[] args)

Please stop protesting, you are resisting too much. Please come to a compromise and stop impacting NHS care so much. A 7 day service is required.

The population knows the MPs don't support the leader, Corbyn. The local party associations are full of people like Mark Sandell in Brighton (party chairman) who want to get rid of capitalism (the most effective way of running an economy. Remember Socialist Gosplan never worked guys).

Even if former minsters now return, its a token gesture. The people of a country won't ever elect a party struck by so much infighting. The MPs should have accepted their leader as he was.

Of course, this is all Ed Miliband's fault, first he ousted his brother as Labour party leader (plunging them into an election loss), and then Ed changed the Labour leader election rules so that the leader wasn't selected by the Parliamentary Labour Party. (This is exactly the same mistake that William Hague made, which let Ian Duncan Smith get voted in by Conservative Party members, although he wasn't popular enough to win an election)

I wonder if Flash breaks the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK and other EU countries though?

http://www.archive.org/details/Screening

"Internet Archive's in-browser video player requires Adobe Flash Player version 7 or higher. It appears that you do not have it installed."

Privacy, and forced adverts are also being pushed by Adobe: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6558979.stm

Firefox already has great Adblock functionality. However it can be much better, because it only has a context menu opton to block images. Many intrustive adverts have an image url which cant be filtered, but they do have a very obvious link URL like secserv.adtech.de -- so there should be a "Hide content linking to adtech.de" etc.

I've emailed Lessig several times in the past, and RMS of FSF about all the proprietary files on his website, like this OSCON 2002 presentation page. It's all a bit of an odd contradiction when you see Lessig is also on the FSF Board. Apparently he also runs Apple Keynote (and presumably Apple Mac OS X) on his MacBook Pro.

I've managed to convert Lessig's proprietary Microsoft Powerpoint presentation into HTML and get it online: OSCON 2002 free culture, and also as an OpenDocument Presentation, and PDF! Sorry if it's not all perfectly formatted, there appeared to be a proprietary Apple QuickTime file embedded into the presentation that I couldn't convert to an open format.

This slide seems pretty fitting for Lessig to take to heart himself: proprietary v. free. Ultimately should decide where his loyalties lie.. with Microsoft and Apple, or with the "Free Software Movement" which he appears to support.

I see the (Fraunhoffer/Thompson patent licence requiring) MP3 file is still there too. Any chance Lessig will put up the Vorbis file I created and emailed all those years ago? I doubt it.., so I've converted that too again.

The problem when someone starts "diluting" the free software and open file formats we use is that it lessens the community, and in effect turns us into a system where we are only aiming to be "proprietary compatible", a proprietary community still tied into the closed formats that we know we should avoid (remember Betamax? great that it lost that battle). I've written about proprietary availability being pointless in the past. (Back in 2005 when I started raising these issues).


to give Lessig a bit of credit, he did finally

CC finally put up all my converted files and converted the ones I couldnt here. People shouldn't need bugging though should they?

Just in Costa Coffee. Saw the till prints German 'B' instead of £ sign. Can people please ensure their kit is UTF8 compatible and tested

It's been a tough time recently. War in Syria and Iraq, Brexit, the migration crisis. A ballooning population. Countries still empoverished by the 2008 financial crisis. How to solve?

Like Sir David Attenborough, I agree the population of the planet going up from 3Bn to 7Bn is a big risk. We need better family planning, and to lift everyone in 3rd world out of poverty.

The Arab Spring, encouraged by the west, was a bad idea. Some countries aren't ready for democracy. Better to have a managed transition to democracy, rather than it brought on by violent revolution.

How to resolve Syria? Multi national stabilisation force. Combined with no fly zone, and intense diplomacy. Removing the violent groups by force.

How to solve migration crisis? Refugees are leaving war torn areas, for safe havens because their own counties are war torn.... They wouldn't have left had their not been a war in their homeland... As above, resolve the civil war, create a safe environment.

Merkel, UK, France and EU was reckless, encouraging Arab Spring violent revolutions, then failing to send buses and a ferry, saying that "anyone who makes it across Mediterranean sea, and up to Germany will be welcome" - but you've just left thousands to drown, send a ferry! EU and Merkel is responsible for all those deaths.

Merkel is now spending money hosting 1M people (those who could afford to pay people traffickers) in Germany. Would the money not have been better spent stabilising Syria? Estimates vary, but the cost is in the region of 30,000 Euros per person. That's 300Bn Euros it will cost, just for the ones already arrived. And Merkel still hasn't sent any stabilising peace keepers to Syria.

Libya is also in a predicament, caused by the same encouraged Arab Spring violent revolutions.

Web developers often make school boy errors, and don't test across sufficient browsers on desktop, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS.

A common mistake is to serve pages with .pdf that are actually HTML pages, but served as PDF mine type. Or likewise a PDF served as an HTML mime type.

The file often fails to load, or looks like monkey text in browser, or gets saved locally with wrong file extension, dumbfounding users.

Please use correct file extensions and mine types :)

Looking at the news, is it really that hard to introduce an IT competency procedure for everyone to follow and report to weekly?

1. No out of date PCs or OS to be used.
2. All updates to be installed weekly.
3. All machines blocked from using Adobe Flash.
4. All staff using 7-zip with passwords for any files shared.
5. No emails of passwords, only communicated over the phone or in person.
6. PGP for all internal email.
7. PGP for all external email where confidential information shared.
8. Weekly logs of any malware, intrusion or human error incidents. Report these to Cabinet Office.
9. Shredders for all paper documents.

I'm struck by how competent and genuine Amber Rudd is in her first interview as Home Secretary on Andrew Marr show. I'd go so far as to say Theresa May may be lining her up as a prodigy for next PM.