At a time when we’re told by the industry that the average gamers are pushing 30 rather than 13 how is it that a pair of bare naked breasts and the thought of hardcore sex got more people riled up about Grand Theft Auto than the fact that is one of the most reprehensively violent games out there?
Category: Uncategorized
Categories
Our only ally is incompetence
Now that the House of Lords have stopped their opposition to the National Identity Card having forced the Government to make some meaningless concessions it looks like nothing can prevent the bill being passed. Chicken Yoghurt asserts that our list of allies has grown very thin and our only hope is that this massive IT project goes as badly wrong as all previous huge government IT projects.
As Longrider says over at Europhobia: “incompetence is now our most valuable ally“. We must now hope that the procurement and implementation of the National Identity Register is as cack-handed, expensive and late as the rest of the technocratic turds this Government has to seen fit to foist on us in its rudderless quest for a subjugated Utopia.
In that, at least, the odds are in our favour. We democrats grudgingly placed our faith in the hands of the unelected Lords. We must now, reluctantly yet with hope, put it in the hands of big business.
Can a Home Office that apparently cannot do their accounts properly be trusted with the massive funds needed for procurment and implementation of a National Identity Card System.
Tom of Blairwatch and Charlie Stross have done the maths on the time needed for the registration of the entire adult population of Britain and have calculated given the number of people divided by the number of regional registration centres each registration needs to completed in an unworkably short 72 seconds.
Given the technical problems people are predicting perhaps Perfect.co.uk is truly prescient with these two pieces of news from the future, more news from the future.
I forsee the biggest practical problem will be the failures due to the use of biometric data as a way of preventing a person getting multiple cards for different fake identities. I wrote about this a couple of years ago in my analysis of the national identity card scheme in the subsection Is biometrics a silver bullet?
Tags: ID cards
This is pretty cool. Fine example of a WW II Enigma cipher machine in a very good condition and a great history; full functional on eBay. 100% Original!!!
Categories
Videogame videos
A half hour Google Video of Will Wright talking about ‘Spore’, which looks to be an outstandingly wonderfully deep videogame. Could this be one of the greatest video game ever?
The description of greatest videogame has been used for almost all of the many Legend of Zelda games that have been produced over the years. Fans of the series have decided that it is time for it to cross over into the realm of the movie.
Categories
So this is how democracy dies.
Not only a common misquote of the line from the Revenge of the Sith
So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause
it’s a genuine sentiment expressed by critics, such as Henry Porter of The Observer, of the Government’s Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.
The ‘reform’ in the title allows ministers to make laws without the scrutiny of parliament and, in some cases, to delegate that power to unelected officials. In every word, dot and comma, it bears the imprint of New Labour’s authoritarian paternity.
Rather than the thunderous applause that accompanies the death of liberty in the Star Wars Empire the death of democracy seems to be with a thunderous silence as the bill has slipped under the radar of the British public.
If ever there were a piece of legislation to ensure the United Kingdom’s traversal through the event horizon of the Panopticon Singularity it is the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.
I’m probably far too paranoid and could possibly even be wrong given the almost impenetrable legalese used in parliamentary bills about the implications of the bill. However it would seem to me that this bill sets the ideal stage from which to modify not only existing legislation but legislation yet to be passed due to various obstacles being placed in the government’s way such as the current situation with the Identity Card bill. The government can make any necessary concessions to ensure the bill gets passed and then modify any legislation introduced by such a bill back to a form they would have liked in the first place but that parliament didn’t approve of.
According to Murky.org the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill was discussed on Law in Action on BBC Radio 4. From Murky’s transcript of the programme comes the following quote from Cambridge Professor of Law, John Spencer QC plus a comment from Murky.
It is unbelievably dangerous. It means potentially marginalising parliament. It moves us a big step toward the elected dictatorship every five years, it’s a step toward a system under which the only break that we have on our ministers is the fact that there’s a general election every five years. (He seems to overlook the fact that even this may not be guaranteed, as, if I recall correctly, the five years is set by the parliament act, which is itself changable by the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act – Murk)
As if I don’t already have enough paranoid nightmares at the moment.
Categories
DRM a load of CRAP
ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind suggests that CRAP or Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection, is a catchier phrase than DRM – Digital Rights Management. Why does he think this technology is crap? See the video of his explanation.
BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow wrote an angry letter to American Airlines following a security check that he believed exceeded sense and decency.
This has now been hilariously remixed with the premise of the forthcoming Samuel L. Jackson movie Snakes on a Plane in the following Metafilter thread.
Tags: security
UMN News: Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study
American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.
My first thought bizarrely to this was I wonder how atheists would rank against other American bogeymen such as the French, communists or even terrorists. Why is it that atheists are seen as a threat to the American way of life?
Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.
This is probably the answer to my question and I believe that the study’s respondents have been misled or misinformed. Lack of belief in deities does not mean that one is lacking in morals. I believe that you don’t need religious doctrine to tell you how to lead a moral life.
Categories
The Hutchison Effect (Antigravity)
An experiment in antigravity and this here is an experiment in embedding Google Video content in this site.
Categories
Neverending Zombie Carnage
Paul Robertson is an artist who produces work that harks back to the days of 8-bit graphics videogames.
Tags: art