Cubefield feels very much like the kind of videogames that you might have played in the 80s. Graphically very simply, very easy to understand how to play but also very addictive.
Old school gaming at it’s best.
Talking of old school, Cuban Boy’s Old Skool for Scoundrels is simply fantastic.
Tags: games
Amongst his many talents comedian Dave Gorman, namesake of Dave Gorman the Site Director of Modblog, can balance rocks as demonstrated by his photos at Flickr.com.
I love discovering people I know use Flickr and discovering that people I don’t know but know of and have seen on the telly use Flickr is almost as exciting. So I imagine that if my excitement level went up to eleven like Nigel Tufnel’s amp it would probably have gone from about a 4 to a fraction under 5 when I found Dave Gorman’s Flickr photostream.
Tags: photography
The BBC news website has a good piece of analysis of the glorification of terror law by Nick Assinder titled The politics of terror laws.
The obvious fact that Blair is playing politics with such an important issue just sickens me. Sickens me more that it has me siding with the Conservative party on the issue.
BBC News: MPs back ban on glorifying terror
MPs voted 315 to 277 to reinstate the plan for a new law to stop the glorifying of terrorism into the Terror Bill after last month in which the House of Lords voted to remove the measure form the bill.
Prime Minister Tony Blair said
Weakening our law on terrorism at this time from what is proposed will send the wrong signal out to the outside world and will do no service to those people in our police and law enforcement who are anxious to get on with the job of prosecuting people.
Since when has it been the role of government to send signals when creating legislation? Also in what way is not putting the glorifying terrorism measure into a bill weakening our law on terrorism? Maybe I’m just arguing semantics on this point but until the bill is made law the law on terrorism is unaffected by whatever happens to the bill in it’s passage through parliament.
Mr Blair earlier said the new law was “vital” to defend the UK against people like jailed cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.
Okay so again Abu Hamza is mentioned by the Prime Minister even though he was convicted under existing laws.
We don’t need new laws we need better facility for prosecuting people under the existing laws. Allowing phone tap evidence to be used in court would be an excellent start. Perhaps now Abu Hamza has been imprisoned there will be less fodder for such knee-jerk reactions by the government to tabloid newspaper hysteria.
Interesting problem over at Kottke.org with a massive amount of comments discussing it and arguing the case for each side.
Here’s the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”
Like Jason I initially thought that of course the plane couldn’t take off but then by rereading the problem I understood what is actually happening and realised that the plane would of course take off.
It’s almost a trick question as it seems to imply that the airplane is caused to remain stationary in respect to the ground and the air by the conveyor belt. If that were the case then it could never take off as it is the negative air pressure above the wing generated by the forward motion through the air that causes the lift.
But in fact the airplane would move forward as the conveyor belt only acts to move the wheels of the plane which are only connected to the plane by an axle which allows them to spin freely. They are nearly frictionless and so only a negligible amount of backward motion is actually transmitted to the plane. So no matter how fast the conveyor belt moves only a fraction of that motion is transmitted to the plane and so there is a net forward motion and as the plane moves forward it will pass through the air and gain lift as usual.
Tags: science
A voluntary scheme is to start operation in Yeovil soon that will seen drinkers submit themselves to fingerprint scans and having their photos taken by pubs and clubs.
Avon and Somerset police have joined forces with the local licensees in an effort to make Yeovil a far safer place to drink.
“The aim is to make the town safer on a night out – violent crime has dropped by 16 per cent in the last year but we aim to reduce this further.
If this were any place but Yeovil I’d think this was an unnecessary step in the fight against anti-social behaviour and alcohol related violence.
As seems to be the case with every biometric based system they have chosen to build a database of innocent individuals in order to keep out the troublemakers. It would be just as effective and less of a security concern if they just stored the data of known troublemakers and scanned everyone who entered but only to check against the blacklist of offenders so that innocent revellers could remain anonymous.
Building a database of everyone is just going to increase the chances of false positives and misidentifying someone as a violent troublemaker when they are not. Plus any database that contains biometric data of thousands of people is going to be a target of identity thieves.
Tags: computer security, biometrics, security
Prime minister Tony Blair says it beggars belief that members of his party would be considering to rebel against the government in the parliamentary vote on anti-terror legislation.
The Guardian: Anti-terror rebels ‘beggar belief’, says Blair
Tony Blair today used the Labour party’s conference platform to attack rebel MPs who plan to derail the government’s anti-terrorism legislation ahead of a raft of key votes due to take place in parliament next week.
Mr Blair attacked dissenters in the party, saying that it “beggars belief” that “some of our own” would try and remove references to glorification of terrorism in the parliamentary bill now making its way through parliament.
“It simply beggars belief that we send such a signal at such a time,” he told delegates. “And I profoundly disagree with the view of those who want to water down the laws against terrorism that these laws infringe our civil liberties. Yes, freedom of speech is an ancient British liberty. But it should be exercised with responsibility because if it isn’t, another ancient liberty – the right to life – is put at risk.”
I wrote briefly about the issue of the opposition to the anti-terror legislation when writing about the jailing of Abu Hamza. Frankly I think it ‘beggars belief’ that a Labour government would be pushing to introduce even more draconian laws than we currently have and infringing people’s civil liberties all in their ‘war on terror’.
This is the role of parliament isn’t it to debate proposed legislation and weigh the benefits against the costs. Is new legislation really necessary? Are we at far greater risk than we were during the height of the IRA’s campaigns of violence?
JG Ballard was right in the future car crashes will be the new porn.
The Islamist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has been jailed for seven years after he was found guilty of preaching murder as a religious duty.
But oddly the Government saw this as a vindication of their belief that new laws are needed.
Gordon Brown said the sentence showed there would be no tolerance for “preachers of hate”. But he added: “It shows why we need laws against the glorifying of terrorism and why we need to stop extremist Muslim clerics trying to enter the country.”
Now I’m not opposed in principle to the introduction of laws against the glorifying of terrorism but to use a case where someone was convicted under existing laws seems like political opportunism.
The terrorism bill failed not just because the opposition were just trying to defeat the government but because the clauses dealing with glorification of terrorism were ambiguous and badly constructed.
Tags: terrorism