Power 2010 have decided on the five key issues for their Power Pledge.
- Introduce a proportional voting system. - Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state. - Replace the house of Lords with an elected chamber. - Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws. - Draw up a written constitution.
I am a strong supporter of the reforms to introduce proportional representation and to scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.
I believe that the current first past the post system causes many people to feel disenfranchised because they live in a constituency which has strong leanings one way or another and their vote has no effect. This system all leads to negative voting where people vote for candidates for parties they don't particularly support but which represents the best hope of defeating the party they'd least like to win.
The ID card and National Identity Register should be opposed because of the principle that citizens in a free democracy should be allowed to go about their lives without government intrusion. The project is also so technically flawed that it will inevitably either have to be scrapped because it is unworkable in practice or because it causes one of the very problems than it is designed to combat namely an increase in identity theft.
The House of Lords should be replaced with an elected second chamber but the form of the second chamber needs to debated intelligently before it is implemented. Replacing the Lords is a major undertaking and there will not be an easy transition from the present house to a new wholly elected chamber.
The second book in the Millennium trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson is as good as There Girl with the dragon Tattoo. Dark secrets from Lisbeth Salander's past cause her to be implicated in the murder of a young couple. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is also connected to the case and in trying to prove Salander's innocence uncovers things that powerful people do not wish brought to light.
Larsson has created in Lisbeth Salander a truly remarkable character and in this book has crafted yet another intelligent and gripping thriller around her.
A post on Metafilter reveals that Caltech physicist Sean Carroll recently tweeted that he was meeting up with Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. This was posted to the forums at Lostpedia, prompting immediate spoiler complaints ... so Carroll signs up and drops in to the thread to clear up the confusion, also offering some of his thoughts on the use of time travel in the show and referencing a longer blog post he wrote shortly before the start of the final season.
Qvantamon in a reply to the thread on Metafilter gives a rather homicidal theory of time-travel which addresses the notion of paradoxes.
Painquale, depends on how much you want to split hairs. You cannot alter your past (in the broadest sense - all the history of the universe as it played to cause your current state). Or, alternately, you cannot alter your past (same broad sense).
For example, let's say 50-years-in-the future Painquale is just about to enter a machine that will, in fact, just disintegrate him at the sub-atomic level into pure entropy (his existence is not really a necessary condition). There's a non-null chance (never mind the amount of decimal places) of, right now, 2010, zillions of sub-atomic particles just tunneling all at the same time into the exact same configuration as 50-years-in-the-future painquale (supposing memory/thought process/sentience is a physical phenomenon). With a strong many-worlds interpretation, since that's possible (no matter how infinitesimally improbable), that's necessarily one component of the universe's wave function (that is, one "parallel universe"), so, there's definitely one branch where it just happened. If you ask that particular "time-traveling" Painquale, he'll tell you that he sure is a time traveller, he disappeared from the future and appeared here. Never mind that there's no causal relation between new-Painquale showing up and old Painquale disappearing, in his mind it's solid. He can of course, go ahead and kill present day Painquale, and it won't do shit, as there is no actual causal relation (as I said, that future where he thinks he came from may even have absolute zero chance of existing). Of course, he can decide to disintegrate himself again, and THIS pretericide-Painquale configuration can again also just show up randomly 50 years later, in another infinitesimally improbable branch of this same branch of the universe (again, no causality violation here). Again, no time travel, just particles tunneling around. But 2060 pretericide-Painquale of course has the whole causal relation in his mind. And no one around him will have any idea who he is (aside from being the guy who said he came from the future and killed Painquale), which is exactly his expected outcome of a time travel. Success, for all he cares, and no actual causality laws broken.
This is pretty much how I believe time travel would work if it were more than merely theoretically possible.
I was never happy with the solution for the grandfather paradox that some physicist put forth (I want to say Stephen Hawking because I'm surely I'm vaguely recalling a passage from A Brief History of Time) that somehow the Universe would conspire to prevent you from killing your own grandfather so as to maintain causality.
The discovery of the theory of parallel worlds suggested to me a better solution that you could indeed kill your grandfather (if that was your bag) because the man you'd be taking the life of would be from an alternate reality to the one you'd left.
I think that the notion of 'whatever happened, happened' can be preserved at the same time as that of being able to change one's past like Back to the Future's Marty McFly.
With the rise of the internet nation states have begun to lose control of their citizens and have introduced ever more draconian laws to try and claw some of that control back.
The War on Terror was framed as a Cold War for the 21st Century and a fog of fear was spread over the population but that fog gradually lifted as people realised that they were not at risk from Al Qaeda. Even when a nutcase tried to ignite explosives in his underpants on an aircraft and politicians and the news media spewed rhetoric about this dangerous new tactic of the terrorists and how something had to be done most people soon went back to their lives as if nothing happened.
The powers that be needed a new threat with which to control the people and the Chinese hacking of Google and others provided them the framing to do it.
Western civilisation is now under the peril of being destroyed by China in the form of computer hackers.
Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is "losing" the cyberwar, according to McConnell.
But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.
We do not need as Mike McConnell to 'reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment -- who did it, from where, why and what was the result -- more manageable.'
The 'Google hacking situation' was first and foremost the infiltration of the servers of private industry not an attack on the United States itself. The IT security of American companies is an issue where the US government can be of assistance by offering advice or notifying of specific threats that they've become aware of, but not through monitoring and controlling the internet.
Genius is the act of solving a problem in a way no one has solved it before. It has nothing to do with winning a Nobel prize in physics or certain levels of schooling. It's about using human insight and initiative to find original solutions that matter.
Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem. Sometimes we fail in public, often we fail in private, but people who are doing creative work are constantly failing.
When the lizard brain kicks in and the resistance slows you down, the only correct response is to push back again and again and again with one failure after another. Sooner or later, the lizard will get bored and give up.
Genius is the creation of 5126 prototypes before producing a viable bagless vacuum cleaner. Or to quote Thomas Edison "I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
With all the mysteries that are confounding people in Lost it seems that for many people that THE most important question of Season 6 is:
How did Hurley get out of his car after parking so close to Locke's van?!
To my mind that's an easy one, he got out on the passenger side.
In this parallel timeline his best friend Johnny instead of deserting Hurley when he found out about the lottery win and running off with Starla, the girl Hurley was in love with, instead remains his best friend and becomes his driver.
Hurley is such a nice bloke that he gave his arsehole former boss Randy a job - of course he's going to have given Johnny a job too. And what better job than getting to hang out with your best friend and drive him around all day. Johnny is Turtle to Hurley's Vincent Chase. And Johnny is a pretty skinny guy so would easily be able to get out of the driver side after having parked so close to Locke's car.
When Hurley meets Locke in the car park Johnny had probably just gone off to get some fried chicken or something so the scene looks a little incongruous.
The New York Times have produced an interactive Timeline of the 'Lost' Universe to help us Lost addicts keep straight in our heads the non-linear flow of the events of the previous five seasons.
The subplot involving Dana and her criminal ex-boyfriend continues to annoy me with the stupidity of both the character and the plot. Not only is she endangering national security by allowing this to distract from critical work but she's allowed herself to be blackmailed into becoming part of a criminal conspiracy.
Would her access of an NYPD computer network not be logged and cause questions to be raised? Plus is it likely that CTU would have a legitimate reason for the creation of a keycard to access an NYPD secure warehouse. Then all this is compounded by the fact that she then gives him a secure comlink so that they can communicate. Firstly there is no way that CTU would allow their staff to take equipment like that without having to sign it out and secondly any communications over their network would surely be logged if not actively monitored.
The subplot involving the radiation poisoning of the Russian mobster's son is almost as bad. The doctor informs the elder brother that the patient has received a dose of 400 rems, not necessarily fatal although a slightly higher dose did kill Harry K. Daghlian Jr. and states that a bone marrow transplant is needed. So far so good, but then the doctor talks about administering drugs to flush out the radiation and warning that radiation is transferable through bodily fluids. Complete rubbish unless the guy ingested some of the uranium there is no radiation in him to need flushing out or that could be transferred to anyone else in his bodily fluids.
Jack's impersonation of a German arms dealer was not all that convincing even if he did have a lovely graphical display for his encrypted bank transfer that went via multiple accounts to prevent it being traced.
Encrypting Locations Alpha 4 All Accounts Verified
Good scene with the CTU sniper taking out members of the Russian gang but did they seriously believe that a German arms dealer would come alone to a deal like this.
Matt Wharton is an entrepreneur, photographer, publisher, writer and occasional network engineer. He was also in a former life a cinema manager. Educated at the University of Bath he holds a degree in Electronic and Communication Engineering and is a CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate).
