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The 2012 London Olympic Games could be hit by electricity blackouts as energy supplies fall off, according to a poll of scientists and other eminent folk in this story by the BBC. Well, pole vaulting and javelin throwing have not been done in the dark before, but I guess it might have a certain novelty.

Seriously though, how should one take these jeremiads about impending shortages to electricity generation? This excerpt from the BBC story makes it clear that many analysts believe that solutions must embrace technologies including nuclear power:

All 140 respondents to the survey said that the best way to ensure energy security for the future lay in a diversified mix of electricity generation, including renewables, coal, gas and nuclear

This story of a few days ago suggests the opposition Tories might, in their quixotic desire to appear Green, ditch the nuclear option. This seems rather ironic given that some figures in the environmentalist movement have started to embrace nuclear energy as a way to cut carbon emissions (while not being blind to the problems of nuclear waste disposal and the large capital outlays involved in building nuclear powers stations).

I am an agnostic on nuke energy. If it can, in a free market, hold its own compared with other energy sources, fine. But given the vital importance of electricity to our modern, information-age economy, it is madness to tempt disaster by shutting down options now.

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Those who have a superstitious aversion to nuclear power on the grounds that "the waste will be radioactive for thousands of years, man!" really ought to learn to ask, 'what?' and, 'how much?'

Medical (and industrial) use of radioisotopes is happily accepted (or at least ignored) by the same people. Medicine is good. Industry is hidden in a black shade of ignorance. But power stations are bad. Like the Bomb.

This rather misses that medical materials can be very dangerous. Those "thousands of years" for power waste also indicate lower specific activity. Is a long period of mild, static, buried, danger really a thing to have nightmares about, when really fearful stuff is to be found loose at the end of the street?

Perhaps this story will lead to better public understanding:

The Oxfordshire-based company was transporting part of a piece of cancer treatment equipment, which had been decommissioned at Cookridge Hospital in Leeds, to the Sellafield complex on 11 March, 2002.

But a "plug" was left off a specially built 2.5 tonne container to carry the contaminated material on a lorry.

Mark Harris, prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive, said: "Through pure good fortune no-one involved in the removal, containment and transfer of the source may have been directly exposed to the radiation beam.

"The risk of such exposure was undoubtedly present - at Cookridge, during the journey and at Sellafield."

He said detected radiation at Sellafield was between 100 to 1,000 times above what would normally be considered a very high dose rate.

Mr Harris said it was beyond the capabilities of normal hand-held monitoring equipment.

Even discounting the doom-mongering approache of HSE prosecutors, this is a pretty alarming incident. But the chance of its changing public attitudes, or even inspiring curiosity about risk, is close to zero. We may get a small addition to the towering mass of safty-anxiety, but a sense of proportion? Never.

PS. Remarkable don't you think, that the BBC story I cite is illustrated with, not a picture of a container lorry or a piece of radiotherapy equipment, but a glowering shot of Sellafield. The place where the danger was discovered and made safe is made the villain. The 'Sellafield baa-d' habit of mind - look, it even has the capitalist word "sell" embedded in it, what could be more damning? - cannot be eradicated by what RCD calls "pesky facts".

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Seeing as Perry is dabbling in the kingdom of Animalia, I feel I should wade in with my own weighty observations. As it is summer in Australia, cockroaches are making their presence felt in even the most salubrious of households. This must be so - I live in a shared-house dump and they are everywhere.

Tonight, as I was in the shower, I noticed three large brown cockroaches (not the more numerous but less offensive small types) scurrying about the bathroom. This convinced me to abandon my do-not-kill-if-not-necessary morals and I thus plunged the three big brown blighters into the tiles with a - erm - plunger. You know - that rubber implement you use to unblock the drains. Well, it was the first thing that fell to hand. Anyway, this did the trick and happily broke the cockroaches perfectly in half. Fine - let them dry out a bit, sweep them up in a few days and be done with it. I am a student living in a shared house; cut me some slack.

I leave the bathroom after performing my twice-daily cleansing rituals - it is summer in Australia, after all - to attend to this and that. I return two and a half hours later to find the upper part of each cockroach still wiggling its (remaining) legs lamely; unsurprisingly, for it's stuck on its back and missing half a body. The lower part - sadly disconnected from the mothership - was not returning calls.

Am I the only one who thinks this an amazing natural phenomenon?

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Techie and futurism magazine Wired has a delightful article about how the toy company Lego is harnessing the best minds of the computer software industry to make its toys even cooler and intricate than before. I used to love playing with the stuff back when I was a small boy and generations of kids have had fun playing the brightly coloured building blocks, fashioning them in to planes, cars and houses, rather as an earlier generation used to play with Meccano kits. In its way, it helped probably fire enthusiasm for a whole generation of engineers and builders.

And the kicker is that Lego is Danish. If you have children or friends with youngsters, perform a nice gesture and buy them a pack.

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The Japanese are working on a robot that can operate as a butler. Hmm. If they can create a character that can talk like Stephen Fry portraying Jeeves, make the perfect gin and tonic and do my ironing, I might consider one. Second thoughts: I'd probably be irritated as hell with the thing after a while.

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Like those in most developed countries, British telecommunications regulators several years ago introduced something called 'mobile number portability', which simply means that if you change from one mobile phone operator to another, you are able to transfer your number to the new network. Legally, this is basically a statement that phone numbers are the property of telephone company’s customers and not the companies themselves, and I find this entirely reasonable. As items of property, telephone numbers are now transferable and tradeable in a way they were not before. Certainly it means that when your contract is up you can shop around for any deal on the market, change to that deal, and then not have to tell all your friends and acquaintances that your number has changed.

As it happens, a few months back I took advantage of this. I switched over from Orange (whose customer service had been questionable, and whose network has poor coverage at my workplace) to O2 (formally BT Cellnet, and but who have managed to transform themselves into a surprisingly good business since being divested by BT). Normally what one does in such circumstances is get a new handset and sign a new 12 month contract. (British networks seem to be trying to lengthen this 12 month upgrade cycle at the moment – many of the cheapest deals now seem to be offered on 18 month contracts, and there are plenty of post-pay deals out there that provide substantially cheaper calls if you don’t take a new handset). Coming from Australia (which typically used 18 month contracts when I got my first mobile phone in 1999 and switched to 24 month contracts in around 2001) I was struck by the shorter contracts and higher prices.

However, my circumstances were that I wanted a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile. The best selection of these devices in the UK seemed to be the XDA range offered by O2 from HTC of Taiwan. (Also, a friend had one of these and it was really cool). So I got an XDA IIi with a mobile contract with O2. There was a hefty up front cost for this, but it was still substantially cheaper than buying a Pocket PC without a mobile contract. The XDA works fine as a phone, but it is big and bulky. (Most people want to want their mobile phone to be stylish, but the XDA is a device for people who want everything including the kitchen sink in their phones, but who do not care about being uncool). My plan was to transfer the phone number from my old phone over to the new O2 SIM, and then to use the O2 SIM, which I could transfer between the XDA and the old phone (a perfectly fine Motorola v500) as need be.

So, after I had worked out the Orange contract I did all this. The next problem was that very irritatingly (like most UK mobile phones, even those you get on a contract) the v500 was “locked”, meaning that it could only be used with one network. UK mobile networks do this, principally because they want to add an extra little hassle to leaving the network, and because they want you to pay their extortionate roaming rates rather than a local SIM in some other country. As a consequence, a large (and perfectly legal) unlocking business has sprung up in the UK to unlock phones like mine. Rather than using one of these businesses I paid to download some unlocking software and an unlock code over the internet, and did the job myself. This greatly relieved one of my female workmates, who saw me talking into a PDA and assured me that if I kept doing this there was no way I would ever find a girlfriend.

So, anyway, that was all resolved. One further reason that I wanted to get the v500 unlocked was that it is quad band GSM, whereas the XDA is only tri band. Although both phones will work in the US, the v500 will therefore likely provide better coverage. And as I got all this done immediately prior to a trip to the US, this was important to me.

Another thing that is interesting about number portability is that despite the fact that it has been in existence for several years, most people seem unaware of its existence.

When I have mentioned to friends that I have changed mobile networks, several have then asked me for my new number. When I extol to virtues of being able to shop around and keep my number, people using prepay have said to me that this is great, but that it doesn’t apply to prepay numbers. They are of course wrong. Carriers are legally obliged to transfer your number to another carrier if you ask them to, and although I don’t think they are obliged to allow new customers to bring their new numbers with them (or perhaps they are – I must check), most will, including those offering prepay plans.

And when I think about it some more, there is another fact that suggests that number portability is not well understood, which is that most networks offer much better deals to new customers coming to the network from somewhere else than to existing customers at the end of a contract who simply wish to upgrade a phone. This has made it almost necessary to switch networks at the end of a contract. Number portability was perfectly efficient one would expect the deals in both cases to be the same. As it happens, I think that it may be getting more efficient, as the difference between the offers in the two cases has been getting smaller. Ian addition, once a mobile carrier figures out that you are really serious about leaving, they tend to start offering the “new customer” offers to existing customers as well. But they seem to try not to publicise this. If you don’t explicitly tell them that you know the rules of the game, they are not eager to tell them to you.

Of course, it is in the interests of the large four mobile operators with most of the market already to not want to publicise portability very much. The four operators have most of the people in the UK between them as customers, relatively fat margins, and are probably likely to lose more than they gain if the customers who have until now stuck around start moving from network to network. For each customer they gain they will lose another, and their marketing costs will likely go up for little net gain. As the four UK GSM operators have nearly identical market shares to each other, there aren’t smaller operators to chip away at the market share of big operators in the way there are in some other countries.

This lack of enthusiasm can be seen in the way in which the large mobile operators have implemented number portability. The law requires that when asked to move a number to a new network, the process should take no more than a week. So, when you apply to have a number switched over, the process always takes exactly a week. This is usually not a problem – if you have had to give a month’s notice to terminate a previous agreement then you can incorporate the week it takes to switch the number into this – but in some countries a number can be switched over in a couple of hours.

However, what are known as Virtual Mobile Network Operators (VNMOs) are becoming more common. These operators buy airtime wholesale on the four main networks and then sell it at the retail level, and provide billing, support etc to the customer directly. The best known of these is Richard Branson’s Virgin Mobile, which is in the process of selling itself to cable operator Telewest Broadband. The Carphone Warehouse, Britain (and Europe’s) largest retailer of mobile phones, also operates a substantial VMNO prepay business under a variety of brand names. (Fresh, Mobile World, and TalkTalk, in case you were wondering). Supermarket chain Tesco markets mobile services to its large customer base. And, quite interestingly, British Telecom markets mobile services (reselling time from Vodafone) to its many fixed line customers under the “BT Mobile” brand.

One would think that these businesses would be extremely aggressive about advertising the fact that customers who switch to them from other networks do not need to change their numbers. They have relatively little to lose, and lots to win. However, they haven’t really done this. They have FAQs on their websites that mention that customers coming from other networks do not need to change their numbers, but nobody has run a big advertising campaign along the lines of “Come to us and save money. You can keep your number” which would to me seem obvious. This may be because they are relatively small companies that mostly sell relatively low value prepay products to people who want a mobile phone now and want it to work immediately without any hassle, or it may be (particularly in the case of BT) due to their general cluelessness as marketing organisations or it may be (in the case of the Carphone Warehouse) that most of their revenues come from selling phones for the four big networks as an agent and they are therefore walking a very fine line between selling their own mobile services and annoying their biggest customers. (They show now such reticence in selling fixed line services in competition to BT).

But I think things are changing. After five years of rubbing their wounds of the late 1990s and slowly paying down their debt, the telecoms companies another wave of mergers has been underway this year. The has been lots of talk of “triple plays” and “quadruple plays”, in which a consumer will supposedly want to buy fixed and mobile telephone services, pay television and broadband internet from the same company, or at least in which companies will use the fact that they sell one of these things to a customer to try to sell the others. In that vein, we have seen Rupert Murdoch’s satellite television company BSkyB purchase the small but technically advanced ISP and telephone company Easynet, we have seen the Carphone Warehouse purchase British Gas’ telecommunications subsidiary OneTel and merge it with its own existing services to become the largest telecommunications provider in the UK besides BT and the four mobile companies, and the abovementioned merger between Telewest (which has also merged with NTL to form a single cable television company for the entire United Kingdom) and Virgin mobile. Even prior to the coming merger, Virgin Mobile has recently been adding higher value, post-pay services to its traditional pre pay only product mix.

Not all these players are substantial mobile players at the moment, but inevitably they are going to offer services of this ilk (setting up a VMNO is not difficult if you have the other resources and infrastructure these companies have) but these players are generally substantially capitalised and with large marketing budgets and substantial existing customer relationships. Inevitably some of these companies are going to attempt to raid the mid-market post pay customers of the existing networks. It has to happen soon.

And for this as well as a lot of other technical reasons that I might go into in another post some time soon, the existing mobile networks to me look extremely vulnerable. In the short to medium term they will remain important as providers of wholesale services, but they have long tried to see themselves as more than that. However, I am not sure that they are.

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It might be expected that free-marketeers should be loyal fans of Microsoft, and the "left" worshippers of open source. I checked out the websites of the main UK think tanks and had a look at what software they're running on. The results may be surprising.

The open source Apache web server software, running on a variety of non-Microsoft operating systems, is widely used by the free-market think tanks. It is used by the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Civitas, Globalisation Institute, Global Growth, Institute of Economic Affairs, Libertarian Alliance, Social Affairs Unit, Taxpayers' Alliance, and (across in Brussels) the Centre for the New Europe. Policy Exchange is running server software called Zeus on Linux – again a non-Microsoft setup. The notable exception is Reform which uses Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Reform is nevertheless an extremely effective, worthy think tank!).

Conversely, on the "left" of the political spectrum, people seem much keener on Microsoft Windows Server. The Institute for Public Policy Research, Demos, the Fabian Society, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the New Economics Foundation, and Forum for the Future are all host their sites using Microsoft software. A notable exception is the Work Foundation, which boasts Microsoft sponsorship on its website, but uses an open source server called Jetty running on Linux.

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"It was ironic that an aircraft funded by a Labour government was used by the wealthy to get out of Britain as fast as possible to avoid paying tax."

A comment I heard yesterday on a BBC travel programme about the supersonic plane Concorde.

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Linux has been growing in popularity, now enjoying a higher market share than Mac OS. However, I fear that in all the hype and hysteria, the dangers have not had enough attention. We face a real possibility that the future of the creativity will be a barren world: a "tragedy of the digital commons" in which no one will create any content.

The truth is that Linux is one of the biggest threats to human creativity worldwide Some of you will find that statement remarkable, but it is true. As Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has said, "Linux is cancer." Ken Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has said that: "Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."

Moreover, because it is uncontrolled by a single entity, and because the source code is freely available and open to modification by anyone, it is a key way that pirated content can find its way onto the internet. Put a copy-protected CD into a Windows machine, and the copy protection kicks in. (OK you can get round it at the moment by doing things like pressing Shift while you put the CD in, but that's just teething troubles.) But put a copy-protected CD into Linux and it just ignores the copy protection. The software on Linux to rip CDs does not check whether publishers want their CDs copied. It will be easy to legislate against Microsoft's and Apple's tools that allow copying, but Linux is just too uncontrolled.

Fortunately, the US Congress is waking up the the threat of the tragedy of the digital commons. A new bill introduced to the US House Judiciary Committee before Christmas would ban the "analog hole". In other words, any equipment that can play music or films, like a DVD player or CD player, would be banned from having analogue outputs that could be used to pirate the content. Any outputs would have to use a "rights signaling system". Of course, certain professionals need access to analogue outputs and of course they would be allowed to have them.

That's the hardware side. But we will not succeed in fighting the evil of piracy unless we also deal with the software side. At the moment it is too easy to write software that can pirate content. Linux is just an anarchy and we need to ensure that all computer motherboards sold prevent Linux from being installed. We need a licensing scheme, headed by the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, for all programming tools so that only trusted individuals may use them, and that inappropriate use of them is communicated via the internet to the government. To put it simply, either Linux dies - or the whole of human creativity will become a stagnant swamp. Anyone who disagrees with this is a communist.

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"No possible good can ever come of a Patent Law, however admirably it may be framed."
- The Economist, 1851

Many people can imagine a world full of innovation that does not have patents. But when they think of pharmaceuticals, this seems like an exception. Pharmaceuticals are relatively simple to produce but have high research and development costs. So it’s obvious, surely, that there have to be patents in pharmaceuticals.

This exception, however, may not be as necessary as people think. Two economists have researched the history of chemcial and pharmaceutical innovation. Michele Boldrin (Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota) and David K. Levine (Armen Alchian Professor of Economics at UCLA and co-editor of Econometrica) argue (PDF) that it is not the case empirically that patents increase pharmaceutical innovation. Among the examples they give, they point to Italy. In Italy there were no patents on pharmaceuticals until 1978. Bear in mind that countries like India and even African nations are told they need patent protection in order to develop economically. Yet between 1961 and 1980, 9.28% of the world’s new molecular entities (NMEs) came from Italy. NMEs are the most important advances in pharmaceuticals as they represent leaps rather than just gradual progression. The authors suggest that after patents were introduced, Italy actually became less innovative, not more.

The example of Italy will be puzzling to many because it is totally contrary to everything the pharmaceutical industry says. Interestingly, before Italy introduced patents, its pharmaceutical industry contained lots of players: patents quickly reduced the number of companies involved. No wonder Big Pharma likes patents: they restrict competition.

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Many people sympathetic to the free market are not at all sympathetic to open source. I used to be one of these people. It seemed to me that open source was doomed to failure: it cuts against the idea that innovation is more likely to occur when people exclusively own something. Yet the success of Wikipedia, Firefox, Thunderbird, and now the newer, more user-friendly versions of Linux means the old skeptical economic model is difficult to keep up. The open source world has upped its game, producing high-quality products that often beat closed source and more traditionally-designed products. Some will no doubt put their fingers in their ears, close their eyes and deny the reality. But it seems to me that when the economic model does not fit reality, it is time for a new model.

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The Register carries a scary story I have not seen reported elsewhere. Kieren McCarthy's piece suggests that the independence of the internet may be one more casualty of the 'war on terror':

on 28 July 2005 at a special board meeting [...] consciously and for the first time, ICANN used a US government-provided reason to turn over Kazakhstan's internet ownership to a government owned and run association without requiring consent from the existing owners. The previous owners, KazNIC, had been created from the country's Internet community.

ICANN then immediately used that "precedent" to hand ownership of Iraq's internet over to another government-run body, without accounting for any objections that the existing owners might have.

Previously it had always been the case that ICANN would take no action (and only ICANN, through IANA, can actually change ownership of a ccTLD) unless both sides were in complete agreement. Now, ICANN had set itself up as the de facto world authority on who should run different parts of the Internet. The Iraq situation is more complicated than briefly outlined above (of which more later), but in a little under two hours, the ICANN Board set aside a process that had held since the very earliest days of the Internet. Not only that but it provided governments with instant, unassailable control over what happens under their designated area of the internet.

You have to read the whole thing, but the burden is that, far from preserving the net from the dictator's club at the UN - a posture applauded by Samizdatistas here - the US has provided the political mechanism for its nationalisation. And that merely in order to do a couple of favours for client regimes.

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As I sit in the Coffee&Co café in Bratislava (a town I am rather fond of visiting) taking advantage of its offer of free wireless broadband (ah, no more OWLS for me)...

...I am yet again struck by what changes are being wrought by the internet, and what amazing possibilities it opens up.

Although I studied Russian many years ago when the Cold War was steering me in certain directions, that knowledge has long since been flushed by my brain. Yet the other night just before I left London for Slovakia, I was exchanging e-mails with a chap in Moscow, translating (or more accurately transliterating) my Latin script English into Cyrillic Russian via a free on-line system and similarly translating his replies into English.

The results were rather crude and took a bit of smarts to interpret but we were able to conclude our business most satisfactorily. It really did bring home to me that even though we are only at the very start of the communications revolution (and revolution it is), the ways the internet will change everything are incalculable. The social, scientific, economic and political implications are so far reaching that I am sure the world twenty years from now will be hard to recognise.

Perhaps that is just stating the obvious but for me at least it is the very fact I am now so blasé about all the things the internet makes possible for me that makes it is useful to sometimes stand back and marvel at what an astonishing thing it is. Of course just as we take electric light as a given and only appreciate it when the power goes out, I might be unusually appreciative because at the moment I do not have my usual 24/7 broadband access and there is nothing like withdrawal to make you value getting a 'fix'.

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That was the question sung by Dr. Alban, the one hit wunderkind, who, if my poor memory serves me, washed up on the shores of Sweden in the mid-1990s. However, a more interesting answer to this conundrum has been posed by Dr. Paul Davies, an Australian astrobiologist. Davies argues that the primary quality of life is the ability to replicate information, and that this process can be viewed as a quantum phenomenon.

Viewed this way, the problem of life's origin is switched from hardware to software. The game of life is about replicating information. Throw in variation and selection, and the great Darwinian experiment can begin. The bits of information have to be physically embodied in matter somehow, but the actual stuff of life is of secondary importance. There is no reason to suppose the original information was attached to anything like the highly customised and evolved molecules found in today's living cells.

Therefore, the origins of life are no longer reserved for chemical structures or the complexities of single-celled organisms. Life is defined as a process for the replication of information and is not limited to one particular source.

All it takes to get life started is a quantum replicator - a process that clones bits of information attached to quantum systems by allowing them to interact with other quantum systems in a specific way. The actual system could be anything at all - the spin of an electron, a meta-stable atomic state, or a molecule that can flip between two conformations. The uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanics provides an in-built mechanism for generating variations.

The leading question from this speculation is why did replication shift towards larger and more complex structures. We are a sturdier and more stable foundation for data storage! No wonder many think that our mind children, with better memory capacity, will replace us.

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All hail the Bugatti Veyron, the world's most expensive car that you can drive on a road, as opposed to a circuit. From nothing to 250mph in less than a minute. The audio system alone costs $30,000. Have you got $350,000 to spare? Then go for it. That will cover the deposit if you want to place an order.

And all hail to Jeremy Clarkson for featuring this mighty vehicle on Top Gear. It is this evening's repeat, of the show first shown on December 11th, which I am now listening to.

Clarkson also wrote in the Times - on November 27th, but I doubt (see below) if any faster car has appeared since then – about the Bugatti Veyron, and the struggle to make it go as fast as it does:

Somehow they had to find an extra 30kph, and there was no point in looking to the engine for answers because each extra 1kph increase in speed requires an extra 8bhp from the power plant. An extra 30kph then would need an extra 240bhp. That was not possible.

The extra speed had to come from changing small things on the body. They started by fitting smaller door mirrors, which upped the top speed a bit but at too high a price. It turned out that the bigger ones had been keeping the nose of the car on the ground. Without them the stability was gone.

In other words, the door mirrors were generating downforce. That gives you an idea of how much of a bastard the air can be at this speed.

Volkswagen, the parent company, decided to make this Bugatti wonder car as a mere "engineering exercise", and they are apparently taking an enormous loss on each one that they sell. Clarkson reckons this is a car Concorde, and that what with "everyone twittering on about global warming", they might never again make another such.

Having, almost three months ago now, tracked down the latest Rolls Royce, this is my current must-photo car.

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This afternoon I was in Newport in South Wales. I had half an hour or so to kill before my train back to London was to depart, so I went to a nearby pub and ordered a pint of ale. Due to the general lousy state of WiFi hotspot provision in Britain, I was not able to connect my laptop to the internet. However, I also had my PDA with me. The PDA in question is branded as an O2 XDA IIi, but the device is in fact made by a company named High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) of Taiwan, and is known generically as the HTC Alpine, as well as being rebranded by a variety of other companies under a variety of other names. It runs Windows Mobile 2003SE, which includes stripped down versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Excel, and a variety of other applications. The device also functions as a GSM cellphone, and in what is I think is the way of the future, the device has several different wireless technologies built into it - 802.11b (WiFi), Bliuetooth, and at that moment most importantly. GPRS, the usual packet switched data overlay of the GSM cellphone system.

What did this all mean? Well, it meant that I could connect my PDA to the internet via a GPRS cellular connection and check my e-mail and browse a few blogs. The limitations of this were that I was using a rather limited browser and I had a slow connection - in practice probably only around 20kbps. This means that I didn't want to view too many separate pages - each takes a while to load and as one is paying by the megabyte, one also doesn't want to download too much in the was of fancy graphics. Being asked to browse through six pages to read one article is something of an imposition. Lots of popups and flash animation is also bad. Relatively straightforward HTML is best.

After a quick trip to Samizdata, I went to Instapundit to see what was up. I scrolled down, and came to the observation that Time Magazine's choices as "People of the Year" were lame, and a link to a Michelle Malkin piece that had more to say about it. That wasn't terribly helpful in itself, because I didn't know who Time Magazine had chosen, but I followed the link.

Michelle didn't say precisely who the award had gone to either, but there was a comment about philanthopists, rock stars, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Okay, so at this point my guess (which ultimately turned out to be correct) was that the award had been given jointly to Bono of U2, as well as Bill and Melinda Gates for charitable efforts in the third world.

Actually I find the (joint) award of Man of the Year to Bill Gates is kind of interesting. I have long thought that it was an absurd oversight that Time had never given the "Man of the Year" award to Gates. I am no fan of Microsoft's products, but even I have to concede that that the man's career is an extraordinary one, and even that the argument that he was the most significant man of the 1990s is quite a strong one. One man came from nowhere and in 20 did a considerable job of seizing control of one of the most important industries in human history. That Time missed this and failed to give him the award at any time in the 1980s or 1990s was really lame. (Time almost got off to a good start in recognising the PC revolution with "Man of the Year announcements". They apparently intended to give it to Steve Jobs in 1982, but ultimately lamed out by giving it nebulously to "The Computer" instead after discovering that Jobs had a difficult personality. (Laming out is something they have been doing for a while).

Malkin does make some observations on this, stating that she thinks that Time's vaguely blah leftist politics are in play here, and that they wouldn't have given it to Gates in the 1990s when he was doing something significant because that was filthy capitalism of which they do not approve, and that they would now rather give it to him and his wife now that she has civilized him and he is doing something "worthy". Although Time does have a bit of a history of rewarding starry eyed "one world" stuff, and that certainly explains the Bono thing here, I am not sure it does explain the Gates award.

In truth, I think that Time is almost trying to apologise for not giving the award to Gates before.

It is a bit hard to give it to Gates for anything he has done for the world of technology lately. Microsoft makes all its money from two products, Windows and Office, and Microsoft has not produced significantly new version of Office since 1997 or Windows since 2000. (Yes, there have been three subsequent versions of Office and one of Windows, but the changes are superficial and cosmetic) . Microsoft has spent a lot of money trying to break into other markets, but has probably lost money in aggregate by doing so. Declaring Gates "Man of the Year" now in a sort of lame shared way is like giving Winston Churchill the Nobel Prize for literature: we want to reward the man in some way so how do we go about it?

In truth I don't think it was so much Time actively thinking that Gates was not worthy of the award in 1995 as their being too stupid to fully appreciate the significance of what was happening at the time, and they now feel really embarassed looking back.

Now, all this went through my mind in the pub in Newport. But, I still wasn't aware exactly who the "People of the Year" award had strictly been awarded to. More links. There was a link to Tim Blair, but all we got from him was agreement that Time's choices were lame. These sorts of links are fine when you have a big screen and a fast connection - you can open six links rapidly and you will eventually get to the information - but on a PDA under GPRS each takes too long.

But, there was one obvious way to find out, wasn't there. Yes, that's right. If I went straight to www.time.com, then they would undoubtedly have something on their award on their site.

But, as it happened, the only thing I got from time.com was this message, telling me that I needed to upgrade my browser.
After that, the Time server refused to render anything else. Of course it was impossible to do because there is no updated browser for Windows Mobile 2003. So I could not read the Time website. Period.

Presumably the Time Server observed that I was using a variant of Internet Explorer that it did not recognise, concluded that it was an "old browser" and thus shut me out. Time has decided that it will provide service only for people with a "minimum browser" level, and as it seems a browser that it deems too old, it rejects it. However, it also ends up rejecting browsers that are just different and unexpected.

This is a lousy way of designing a website and a lousy way of looking at the internet. Ultimately you shouldn't design for a particular browser. There are such things as web standards and standard forms of HTML, and you should design your website in such a way that it will render on any browser that supports a minimum version of these standards. There is no problem adding special features for advanced or late version browsers that won't appear on more limited browsers, but these should be added over the top of a page that supports standards. If a browser that supports these standards is not available, you should render something more basic. Even if you do this, you should render something. A browser that cannot support the advanced features might not then show the whole page, but it will render something. And you should not assume that a user can download a new browser. That depends what the user is doing and where and how he is doing it.

If you have only ever used Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows, it is easy to believe that the World Wide Web is consists of nothing more than this. If you are more openminded, it is still easy to think that the World Wide Web consists of nothing more than IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari (Konquerer anyone?) running on Windows, the Macintosh and Linux. (That is, it is easy to assume that the World Wide Web exists only in a PC ecosystem). A few years ago this was fairly true. But the internet's ecosystem is evolving rapidly. :Lots of people (such as myself) are accessing the internet on mobile devices. People are ripping pieces off websits and looking at the results through RSS readers. A few years ago the internet basically was the World Wide Web, but this is changing. Many of the most interesting things are now happening off the web, but the web as it exists remains a tremendous data repository and indexing system for those applications.

People accessing data on websites using non-standard methods and developing new ways of accessing and viewing are often the most sophisticated users and the most high-value users, and are often the people making purchasing decisions and selling equipment and services for people at other places on the chain. Shutting them out of your site is foolish. What's worse, if you do this, they will think you are lame and will tell this to all their friends and customers.

It is not necassary to cater directly to these users, although it is nice if you do. (If I go to Google, it checks my operating system as well as my browser, and gives me a version of the search engine customised for a PDA. Unlike Time, the BBC are exemplary in this way, also). All you have to do is adhere to standards, and not make assumptions about what they are doing. And you really, really, really, shouldn't look them out if they are not doing that. If you provide relatively dumb data and relatively dumb formatting, you allow your readers and your customers to be smart. Many people, more than you think, have perfectly good reasons for not doing what you expect them to.

Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and Tim Blair are right. Time are really, really lame.

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"No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense." - Lord Salisbury (1877)

Hardcore computer geeks often rail against "HTML e-mails". These are the e-mails that use fonts and let you use bold, italic and different sized lettering. It is time to ignore the hardcore geeks and say yes to progress.

In the days of the traditional typewriter, we all wrote plain text documents. There was no italic or bold, but you could do underlining by going back and using the underscore character over text you had already typed (which is more than you can do with plain text e-mails). Then the word processors came. At first, they didn't let you use fonts, but that functionality was quickly added. Nowadays, if you look at a typewriter-written document, or a document from the early word processors, you probably think: "how primitive".

Progress has been a good thing. Proportional fonts, where the letter i character does not use the same width as the letter w, help make our documents look nice. Bold and font sizes let us make our documents easier to read. Colour is wonderful for headlines. No one would argue that we should go back to the old days of the typewriter.

In the early days of the web, there was a debate between geeks about what the web should look like. There were some people, the "ultra-geeks", who thought that websites should be about content and that it was wrong for webmasters to "force" readers to view the content in a particular way. Instead, the fonts and sizes used should be set by the visitor in their own web browser. Fortunately, everyone ignored the ultra-geeks, and the "DTP geeks" won (the geeks who thought that web pages should look like they've been desktop published).

Just as progress has been good for word processing and web pages, progress is good for e-mail. Geeks will give you a long list of charges against HTML e-mail. Ignore them, go into the Preferences window of your e-mail program, and tell it to compose HTML e-mail.

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100 years ago, Albert Einstein formulated the equation E=MCSquared, that expresses Einstein's theory that as one accelerates an object, it not only gets faster, but gets heavier. I must admit it is not very often that I come across the anniversary of a theory like this. We normally mark dates of births, deaths, battles, elections or great reforms. Theories don't quite have the same resonance. I don't imagine that there will be grand parades marking Einstein's achievement.

I have read a bit about this incredible man and his life, and to this day I'll frankly admit to finding it pretty hard to get my head around some of the ideas of relativity. (Physics was never one of my stronger subjects, something I intend to fix at nightschool. Never too late to learn). But there can be no doubt at all about the impact this man has had on the subsequent 100 years, in terms of our understanding of the universe and of course in fields such as nuclear power, both in its benign and not-so-benign forms.

And Einstein of course is incredibly famous not least for personifying the "eccentric genius" with his mass of scruffy hair, wild-eyed expressions and casual manner. How often are scientists in the movies, television and theatre portrayed in this way (assuming that scientists are portrayed at all). More recently, the late great Richard Feynman continued the tradition for iconoclastic irreverence, famously deflating science establishment in a marvellous collection of books about science and public policy.

For those interested in Einstein's contemporaries in the science community in America, I can strongly recommend this book by Ed Regis.

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Well it all seems a bit quiet around here. I guess all the other Samizdatistas have lives, at the weekend anyway. Today, even I have had enough of a life to have nothing much that I want to say here. (I was watching rugby internationals on my television.)

However, regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor does have a question:

Does anyone know of a good reliable (not Garmin preferably!) GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine and is also waterproof with a long battery life? None on the market seem to have this capability.

This question up at Julian's blog, Camera Anguish, for the last ten days. And do you know how many answers the so-called blogosphere – this mighty engine of knowledge, this magnificent organ of enlightenment, this aggregator extraordinaire of wisdom – has managed to supply? 0. This is not how things should be and I want to change it.

So, does anyone? Know of a good reliable GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine, and is also waterproof, and with a long battery life? Samizdata commenters are often rather good at discussing technology matters, so go to work, people.

I personally do not. I would need to be surer than I am now about things like what "GPS" stands for to be able to comment knowledgeably. Something to do with satellite navigation? My life seems to work okay without such knowledge. But surely others among us can do better. So get thinking, please, about those personal, reliable, waterproof, etc., GPSs.

But remember, not Garmin.

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If you thought that going to the gym allowed you to burn off that stress and get away from the office, think again. A new hi-tech gym means you can type away on a keyboard and do an aerobic workout at the same time. Not quite sure this is going to work when it comes to pumping the weights, though.

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I recall how, a few months back, during all the fuss about Making Poverty History by having a singsong, well dressed and articulate Africans were to be seen on our television screens explaining, throughout the week in question, that, actually, just chucking money at Africa would not really solve the problem. In fact, some of them said, it could well make things worse by making it less necessary for the governments that hoovered up most of the money to earn their money, so to speak, by taxing their own misgoverned and hence impoverished people. (I use the word "earn" in a very relative sort of sense here.)

Last night, the same thing happened again. Kofi Annan had been enthusing about that now quite famous hundred dollar laptop. And once again, well dressed and articulate Africans was summoned to the studios, and they said that, actually, if you are looking for a way to spend a hundred dollars on an African child, you could do a whole lot better than spend in on a laptop computer.

Victor Keegan also waxes enthusiastic about the hundred dollar laptop in the Guardian today, being understandably reluctant to enthuse about the other hot topic at the big UN shindig in Tunis where the hundred dollar laptop was being promoted, which is the UN plan to take over the internet.

But until the UN puts its own house in order by controlling member states imposing censorship on the web, such as China and Tunisia, it won't have the moral authority - let alone the management skills - to do the job itself.

Quite so, although I do not like that "until". My attitude to the internet is simple. It ain't bust. Don't unfix it by putting the UN in charge of it, ever. However, as it says here (you need to scroll past the woes of Sony):

The battle for control of the Net ended peacefully before the fight even began, but some are still unhappy with the outcome.

Me included. What they mean is that lots of people wanted more done on this front. I wanted less than they have already done, which is that they have set up a completely powerless talking shop to discuss "internet governance". And if you believe that the plan is for this talking shop to do nothing but talk for ever and be completely powerless for ever, then you will believe anything.

Although the hundred dollar laptop could not possibly be as big a catastrophe as the UN's planned strangulation of the internet, it could nevertheless waste a lot of money and cause a lot of grief. Imagine not having had any food for two days and being presented with one of these contraptions, as will surely happen to many wretched Africans if this boondoggle goes ahead.

As Tim Worstall explained at the ASI blog over a month ago, a posting that Kofi Annan has clearly not read but should have, that hundred dollar price assumes huge production runs, and also assumes that the various governments who are supposed to pay for these things will also bear the further costs of explaining to people how they work and of mending them when they go wrong. Worse, if these devices are to supply the internet connections that they are supposed to, these governments may have to contrive communicational infrastructure that does not now exist,. As Worstall points out, the kind of people now getting most enthusiastic about this gadget are also the kind of people who are most opposed to the idea of making aid conditional on things like that being done more sensibly.

Even at a hundred dollars, as the well dressed Africans were pointing out last night, these thing are absolutely not a bargain for an African child. Schooling for a year would make more sense. Better food would be nice.

On the face of it, making a kind of global Volkswagen of laptops is appealing. But the more usual method for making cheap stuff is for it to be made expensively first, and checked out by rich organisations and rich people, and then gradually - or, as often happens, not so gradually - cheapened. This is what is happening anyway with computers, and even more spectacularly with mobile phones, which already are hundred dollar portable computers with communication built in, if you think about it. Keegan mentions the success of cheap mobile phones in Africa, but does not seem to have absorbed the lesson of that success, which is that mobile phones are, it turns out, a whole lot easier to use in Africa than laptops. Ah yes, but those mobiles are being used to do business, not being given to the kiddies.

You get the feeling that Kofi Annan is really only trying to make the UN look necessary and useful, instead of a big pointless coagulation of corruption and foolishness which he is now unwilling or unable to clean up. Here, he reckons, is his chance to say that "Business isn't supplying this, but hey! – we can!". The truth is that they can probably not do this but that bad old big business maybe soon will and in many ways already is doing it. If it ever does make sense for Africa's children all to have laptops, this will surely not be until the price of them goes down to something nearer to ten dollars than a hundred. My guess is they will all have mobiles long before then.

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Scientists eh? First they tell you all the things you have to do to stay in perfect health and be immortal. Then they tell you that that very things they have been recommending for the last three decades are what will kill you.

The latest health fad to get the treatment? Decaf coffee:

The US study looked at 187 people, a third of whom drank three to six cups of caffeinated coffee a day, while a second group drank the same amount of decaffeinated coffee, and the rest had no coffee.

Researchers measured the level of caffeine in people's blood, as well as a number of heart-health indicators, including blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol levels over the course of the three month study.

At the end of the study, the group drinking decaffeinated coffee had experienced an 18% rise in their fatty acids in the blood, which can drive the production of bad 'LDL' cholesterol.

Bad cholesterol. Bad!

There has only ever been one good reason to drink decaffeinated coffee, which is that you like it.

My nutritional recommendation just now is: Walkers Marmite Flavoured Potato Crisps. Mmmmm. (I get mine from the new Sainsbury's in Wilton Road, Victoria.) As it says on the packets:

Same great taste . . . now better for you.

We have been reducing the levels of saturated fat in our crisps so that now they contain 30% less saturated fat than in 2003.

This is because we carefully blend our vegetable oil with a special sunflower oil to produce a better crisp with all the same great taste.

Indeed.

In related news, I note with alarm that Alex Singleton appears to have eaten nothing since November 6th. Has he died of starvation? Perhaps. But Singleton Diet commenter Paul Coulam expresses a different fear:

Do the lack of blog entries indicate that you have fallen off the wagon and are lying in your bed, curtains closed, with crisp bags and pizza boxes scattered all over the floor and chocolate smeared all round your mouth?

So is it famine, or feast, or something else again, such as a moderate diet of marmite flavoured crisps, washed down with not too many cups per day of decaffeinated coffee?