Remember when the internet was in its infancy? We all had to put up with little 468 x 90 banner ads everywhere you looked – and sometimes we clicked them because we didn’t know better. As time went on we grew smarter, we were able to tell the bad adverts from the good, and the…
Politics
The Sharing Economy
The ‘Sharing Economy’ is disrupting established industries and sending huge, powerful incumbents into a tizzy. Uber and AirBnB have shaken the taxi and hotel sectors, shifting power, control and profits from the RadioCabs and Hiltons of this world and into the hands of ordinary citizens armed with nothing more than a smartphone and a mobile data…
An Open Letter to Michael Gove from a Teacher
This is going viral, originally from TES: Dear Michael Gove, You will never read this, but I feel compelled to put it out there in the faint hope that more people will realise the repercussions of your latest initiative. I am proud to work at a small school, on a small estate, in the…
How Governments have Tried to Block TOR
TOR (The Onion Router) is a second Internet running inside the existing Internet. It allows people from countries with strict regimes to bypass blocking and monitoring software. This is a video from the guys behind TOR claiming lots of things about how Governments are using Internet surveillance and censorship to execute totalitarian control of their…
The Stupidity of Gateshead Council: Explained!
This morning, commuters have awoken to find new road markings on my beloved B6317 approach to Blaydon roundabout. And these ones make much more sense. Instead of having two lanes, one which ends abruptly, with no signage – not even a warning that there IS a new road layout!! – and the other which helpfully…
The Stupidity of Gateshead Council
This month a local authority in the north-east of England have executed a nonsensical, short-sighted strategy to drive their tax-paying customers to frustrated anarchy. If you can make any sense of this please let me know in the comments at the bottom. Men In Road For as long as I’ve known there has been…
Solving the English Drought Without a Hosepipe Ban
The South of England, in the UK (hello foreigners), is experiencing its second “dry winter”, which isn’t good for water levels in reservoirs and, ultimately, people. The Government is mulling the idea of hosepipe bans and reinstating the Bathe With a Friend Act of 1975, but these actions aren’t tackling the underlying problem. Graeme, my…
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
This week the guy in charge of The Bank of England, Mervyn King, said that inflation was significantly closer to the 2% target this month, having dropped from 4.2% in December 2011 to 3.6% in January 2012. While this looks like great progress in making the economy a lot more stable, it is fraught with…