And the usual coercion addicted statists will smile and nod that ‘the children’ are being protected. And once the slope has been created, these are the people who will be working to make it as slippery as possible.

So of course once the notion that protecting ‘the children’ from
...continue It has nothing much to do with ‘porn’]]> The dismal David Cameron wants to block people from accessing ‘porn’ from WiFi in public places and ‘semi-public’ places. Which presumably means all WiFi as almost every WiFi in the world is capable of being picked up in a ‘public’ place, such as the side walk in front of your house.

And the usual coercion addicted statists will smile and nod that ‘the children’ are being protected. And once the slope has been created, these are the people who will be working to make it as slippery as possible.

So of course once the notion that protecting ‘the children’ from stumbling across porn is accepted, next will be protecting them from seeing ‘hate speech’… and then from anything that is held not to be in ‘the public interest’. Held by who? Why by people like them, of course.

It is not about porn, it is about control. It always is.

We want the game to very much evolve over time. It’s quite hard
...continue Kickstarter]]> Kickstarter is a web site that allows business people to pitch their ideas to the general public instead of venture capitalists. In return the general public gets to fund projects in the hope of seeing them come to fruition and other rewards depending on the amount donated to the project. In a video interview, David Braben, who along with Ian Bell wrote the classic space trading computer game Elite, talks about the advantages of making a computer game funded by Kickstarter over using a conventional publisher:

We want the game to very much evolve over time. It’s quite hard to do that in a conventional contractual delivery structure where you end up being beholden to things that are no longer the most important. So you’ve got to have an arrangement that has that level of flexibility, and it’s quite hard to create that. [Kickstarter] seems to be an extremely good solution to do it. We’ve got that direct connection to fans and a lot of the constraints that get in the way just aren’t there.

When David Braben started making computer games in 1984, individuals could make them in their bedrooms, but there was no Internet so publishers were needed to distribute them. Today distribution is easier, but a top computer game needs a large team of programmers and artists, so lots of funding up front which publishers can help with. But, like movie studios, games publishers mostly want predictable money makers and understandably to impose constraints on the game that gets made. Kickstarter means developers can work directly for gamers, or movie fans, or people who want to experiment with home aquaponics.

Kickstarter is an example of something the Internet is particularly good at: disintermediation. I can buy coffee beans very nearly directly from the farmer; I can buy gadgets from some bloke in Hong Kong; I can vote with my wallet for the computer games I want to see made. People with niche interests can find each other anywhere in the world and cater to each others’ needs.

Incidentally, the original Elite taught me all about trade when I was 8. This sequel will have proper celestial mechanics and Newtonian physics too, but still needs funding.

What a shame, as Rothbard so regularly noted, that Friedman didn’t include banking in his list of big businesses that the government should not be giving money and power to.

I say dead. Thanks to their books, but now especially thanks to video and audio, and to the internet that now allows us all to choose what video and audio we will pay attention to, these great men live on.

Dear Samizdata,

Defense Distributed, a libertarian student partnership, is announcing a project they’re calling the Wiki Weapon. This project’s goal is to test and prove a design for a completely printable, one-use ABS plastic .22 handgun, and to take that design from CAD and port it to a .STL file that will then be freely shared across all major file-sharing platforms to the world. DefDist is anticipating a world where 3D printing becomes much more economical and ubiquitous, and the Wiki Weapon will be one step in providing political and personal leverage to the peoples of that world. The
...continue Distributed defence]]> Incoming:

Dear Samizdata,

Defense Distributed, a libertarian student partnership, is announcing a project they’re calling the Wiki Weapon. This project’s goal is to test and prove a design for a completely printable, one-use ABS plastic .22 handgun, and to take that design from CAD and port it to a .STL file that will then be freely shared across all major file-sharing platforms to the world. DefDist is anticipating a world where 3D printing becomes much more economical and ubiquitous, and the Wiki Weapon will be one step in providing political and personal leverage to the peoples of that world. The value of such a file’s existence in the future cannot be overstated.

We ask that you please share the project or its video, located at http://PrintableGun.com and http://Indiegogo.com/wikiwep, with your readers and help spread the word that there are intellectual entrepreneurs dedicated to preserving Liberty in a time of almost unopposed statist planning.

Please find the attached press release for your convenience.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

I am watching the late night rerun of 8 Out Of 10 Cats on the telly, and I have a complaint. Carr has just said that: “It’s true. 68 percent preferred brains to beauty.” No Carr. If you join me in thinking about this, Carr, what you will realise is that 68 percent of people said they preferred brains to beauty.

Time was when we ordinaries just had to put up with media distortions of
...continue Brian Micklethwait versus Jimmy Carr – Laurie Penny versus David Starkey]]> I have just been reminded by a spam commenter that long before denouncing Jimmy Carr was fashionable, I denounced Jimmy Carr, in September 2008. Quote:

I am watching the late night rerun of 8 Out Of 10 Cats on the telly, and I have a complaint. Carr has just said that: “It’s true. 68 percent preferred brains to beauty.” No Carr. If you join me in thinking about this, Carr, what you will realise is that 68 percent of people said they preferred brains to beauty.

Time was when we ordinaries just had to put up with media distortions of this kind, but now, the internet has changed the balance of power. We can now shout back at our tellies, and be heard. The world will never be the same again.

Indeed not. Don’t bother following the link to read the whole thing, because you just did.

More seriously, on a related note to the one sounded by me in para 2 above, here is a posting at Guido’s about how Laurie Penny threw some mud at David Starkey, calling him a racist, and he then threw some more mud back at Ms. Penny. Two short video clips show both bits of mud flying through the air.

This is the first time I have ever see Laurie Penny in action. I definitely prefer her beauty to her brain.

Time was when the original mud thrown by Ms. Penny would have stuck, and Starkey would have been muddied for ever, even in the minds of those who would have sympathised with what he said, on account of the original performance by Starkey on Newsnight that was the basis of Ms. Penny’s accusation not being available for anyone to check, even if they saw it first time around. But the game no longer plays out like that.

As is further illustrated by the fact that, in trying to recover her position with subsequent tweeting following the debate shown in those video clips, Ms. Penny only dug herself deeper into her hole, also exposing her original racism accusation to yet another audience and enabling commenters to clarify the whole spat still further.

The complete video of the event over the weekend is still, alas, stuck behind the Sunday Times paywall. It will surely emerge soon.

“davidaslindsay” wrote:

A perfect illustration of how there is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism.

The Cold War is long gone, so there is no remaining need for Tories to be corralled out of fear into voting for Conservatives and other such Liberal parties

Imagine, just imagine,
...continue Keep the faith, brothers, they will hear us eventually]]> Declare free trade unilaterally, says Tim Worstall in the Telegraph. Good and true are his words, but since you all know that already, allow me to draw your attention to an exchange you may not have seen in the comments that manages to be both entertaining and at the same time slightly sad.

“davidaslindsay” wrote:

A perfect illustration of how there is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism.

The Cold War is long gone, so there is no remaining need for Tories to be corralled out of fear into voting for Conservatives and other such Liberal parties

Imagine, just imagine, if a site not unlike this one in structure, if in nothing else, were to give a platform to people who recognised that there was no patriotism without economic patriotism, set within a broader appreciation of the rural, the provincial, the socially conservative, and the classically (and Classically) Christian, with the consequent pronounced aversion to global capitalism, to American hegemony, to obeisant Zionism, to wars to make the world anew, to wars generally, and so on.

Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it.

“TimWorstall” replied

David, this is a blog.

You have a blog. Thus there already is a blog which reflects such views.

Very democratic place, the internet.

What is both funny and sad about David Lindsay’s cri de coeur is that he does not just have a personal blog but has, or had in 2009, a slot in the Telegraph, a privilege that most bloggers would give their best stripy pyjamas to obtain. Lindsay’s cry of “Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it” makes him sound like a combination of Galileo facing the Inquisition and Captain Kirk trying to get the Fabrini to believe they are on a generation ship in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. Yet he scarcely had to stretch his imagination to conceive of a voice exactly like his being given a platform even beyond the one offered by davidaslindsay.blogspot.com. All he had to do was remember as far back as 2009.

What is the appeal of believing that you are silenced when you are given a megaphone?

Some of it is persecution envy, or to be more accurate, envy of the chance to be heroic. Mr Lindsay is of the nostalgic Right and appears to me to suffer a little from this condition but the phenomenon is most common and strong on the nostalgic Left. How they do hate being the rich, safe, privileged ones. How they love to reminisce about standing up to Thatcher, or at a pinch, their resistance during the grim Bush years. How they would have loved to have been a Freedom Rider. They would have been heroes, honest.

Some of it is a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it. This thought hurts much less than the thought that the world has had ample opportunity to hear your message and heeds it not. Before you laugh at Mr Lindsay – or being realistic, slightly after – remember that (a) in so far as this is a delusion it is one he shares with us (have we not blogs? Seen the libertarian sentiments of the populace lately?) and (b) the belief that the people are being stopped from hearing minority voices by a semi-conscious conspiracy of the mainstream media is only just now ceasing to be true.

We do not quite match the faithfulness in delusion of those communists who have announced the imminence of world revolution every year for close on a century, but many of the bloggers whose writing I love most – Instapundit, Brian Micklethwait, me – have announced the imminent death of the gatekeeper every year for close on a decade. Yet there the decrepit old bastard is each new morning, bleary eyed, swaying on his feet, pretending not to know about the people who slipped past him while he was drunk and incapable the night before – but still manning his old rotten gate most of the time and just damn refusing to die.

Mind you, we were not exactly wrong about the old boy’s morbidity, just premature. He’ll turn up his toes eventually and the patient messengers of every suppressed creed with break through and be heard in all the land, only we’ll be heard most gladly because we are in the right. I hope. I think.

That’s a water feature, somewhat frozen when I photoed it, in La Défense, the big clump of modern architecture in the west of Paris.

The thing that clinched it for it, in favour of the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, was how reviewer after reviewer used phrases like “an
...continue My new Panasonic Lumix FZ150]]> A couple of months ago now, I went ahead and bought that new camera that I had for quite a while been thinking about buying. The circumstance that provoked me into making a decision earlier than I otherwise would have done was a trip, early in February, to Paris. Yes, it was cold:

That’s a water feature, somewhat frozen when I photoed it, in La Défense, the big clump of modern architecture in the west of Paris.

The thing that clinched it for it, in favour of the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, was how reviewer after reviewer used phrases like “an all round winner” and “all round best”, as in best for the sort of camera that I wanted, when writing about it. Such talk suggested to me: excellence in what I knew I wanted (zoom, picture quality, good video recording) together with excellence in other areas that I would only learn about after I had started using the thing. So it is proving.

The other camera I was considering buying was the Canon SX40 HS. I can’t compare my new Lumix with that, and will presumably never know for sure if I made the exact right choice. But I can compare my new Lumix with all the previous cameras I have ever owned, and in particular with my most recent previous camera, a Canon S5 IS. And I can now tell you that I am a very happy snapper. Could I have chosen even better? Perhaps. Have I meanwhile chosen well? It certainly feels that way now.

The x24 zoom supplied by the new Lumix is wonderful, just as I expected it would be. The Canon SX40 HS has x35 zoom, but I reckoned that x24 would suffice for my purposes and so it is proving:

That’s a snap taken last week from Primrose Hill. On a typical London day, the limits of how far your camera can see with clarity are set not by its lens but by the clarity of the air, which is mostly set at: not very. So I am very happy with my new zoom superpower.

Other improvements on my old Canon were not quite so expected. The focussing works much better than on the old Canon, especially at the extremity of the focussing. Simply, far fewer shots now come out blurred.

But just as impressive as the detailed way that I can now photo Big Things far away, is that I am finding it much easier now also to photo Big Things that are much nearer, and which used to be too near. This new camera has a much wider angle of vision, close to. Many have been the times in the past when I have stood in a square or a street, trying to photo the whole of a building opposite, and failing because unable to stand any further away from the building. This new camera is positively panoramic compared to the old one. I can now stand across a mere street and photo a huge Thing only a few dozen yards away, in its wide-angled entirety. For an architecture fan like me, this is a major plus. I expected some improvement in this department, but not the huge improvement I now enjoy.

This is a new Thing that they are constructing in Victoria Street:

I know. Very strange. I will tell you what I think about it, some other time. Or maybe not, I promise nothing. My point here is, my new camera can now see almost everything of it that I can see when standing near it.

The new camera feels nice. Even though somewhat bigger than the old Canon, it feels no heavier. The build is light, but sturdy. The old Canon was made of metal. The new Lumix seems to be made of something discovered while heat-proofing rockets, or some such thing. The clicks when you take your shot have a satisfyingly solid and definite feel to them.

Best of all, when it comes to nice new surprises, the new camera can damn near see in the dark. Again, I was hoping for improvement in this department, but was not expecting what I got. It seems that Lumix (hence that name?) cameras generally have a good reputation for picture quality in low light conditions, which was another reason I went Lumix rather than Canon.

I used to do shots like that with the old Canon, but only because the marginal cost of digital photography is zero. About one in about half a dozen attempts might have seen me getting lucky.

Sometimes the colours look peculiar in these newly reliable, in-the-dark pictures, but this is why God invented Photoshop and why humans have followed with their many copies of Photoshop, of the sort that I use.

I have not yet used my new camera at an indoor and badly lit meeting, to photo badly lit people, notably the speaker. When I do, I expect a big improvement, and a much higher success rate.

In choosing the new Lumix rather than the Canon SX40, I was influenced by price, but not in the way you might expect. It told me something – that is to say, I think it did – that the Lumix was selling for around thirty or forty quid more than the new Canon. There were occasional moments when the Canon was a tiny bit pricier, out there in internet land, but these were only occasional. It would appear that others besides me thought the Lumix to be somewhat better. And since for me, an extra fifty quid was worth what seemed to be that extra ounce of all round quality, I went with the Lumix. I am sure entire papers have been written by academic economists about that single piece of consumer reasoning.

So excellent is the new camera that at no point during the two months during which I have so far owned and used it have I ever hankered for the old Canon S5 IS, for any reason. That’s an important quality with any new kit, I think.

I prefer A4 batteries, such as the old Canon used, to the little plastic brick bespoke battery that the new Lumix uses, because if you run out of puff while out and about, you can simply buy new A4 batteries to tide you over, in the event that you don’t already have an emergency supply with you. But, I bought a spare bespoke battery with the new camera, and that arrangement works fine. I’ve never yet been caught short for power on my wanderings, and do not ever expect to be, unless I have simply neglected to recharge before departing.

I have to faff about with the lens cap on the new Lumix, and would really like an automatic lens cap on it. But it was just the same with the old Canon, and that lens cap tended to come off while the camera was in my bag, which is not at all what you want. So, there’s been an improvement on that front also.

My only other grumble is that the little twiddly screen on the back of the new Lumix is a bit fiddly to get open, the way the one on the old Canon was not, but I’m quickly getting the hang of that, encouraged by the fact that the new screen is bigger and clearer, just as the reviewers said it would be.

I still have the old camera. Any offers? All would be considered, including even: I’ll take it off your hands for nothing and give it to my kid. But even the cheapest new cameras are now better in many ways than my old Canon, and for most this would now be an extravagance at zero. As with most of my previous cameras, I will probably keep it and hope it becomes an antique.

My basic problem with this new camera, far more major than quibbles about its batteries or its screen, is that it is so good that my productivity, so to speak, has rocketed. With the old Canon, about half my pictures were garbage, and a lot of the rest rather poor. Only a few were very good. Now, many more of the snaps I attempt come out really rather well, and many more snaps, such as very distant views, are worth attempting. So, given my previous voracious snapping habits, my successful snap rate has got up prodigiously. This creates a real problem.

Take my recent trip to Paris. While there, I did my usual thing, of taking my camera with me everywhere. And I now have a mass of photos of just about every intriguing thing that I saw. With the new camera, my best photos are not really that much better than my best photos always were. It’s just that I now take many more photos that are good enough to impose upon such persons as Samizdata readers. So, choosing which ones just got hugely harder.

My Paris archive is so overwhelming that I have not known how to start showing it off. I took all the pictures inside ten days, and what with the cold, I didn’t hang about when taking them. Snap snap snap, shiver shiver shiver. I managed to post here a few of the first pictures I took. But when I got home, and took a long look at what I had, on a big screen like we all have at home and such I have only at home, I started fretting about how best to use them, and … just carried on fretting. How to make the most of this photographic treasure trove? Which snaps to go with? In what numbers? To illustrate which opinion exactly. I started picking out good pictures for future display, but soon found that I had the internet equivalent of one of those horror shows of pre-internet legend, when those boring neighbours subject you to an interminably boring evening of holiday snaps.

I guess I will just have to do what I have done in this posting, which is make some kind of start, but without going too mad. Or, maybe I will have to overcome my reluctance to bother with Flickr, reluctance which is based on the fact that, for me, the purpose of photography is to illustrate blog-opinions or blog-reports, and to entertain blog readers, rather than merely to create vast galleries of snaps that few ever look at. But, comments about Flickr and its potential usefulness for someone like me would be very welcome. I believe Flickr has just had a design makeover. Also welcome would be comments about Flickr’s various more recent rivals, such as the similar offering from Google.

Anyway, I’ll end this posting with one of my many, many Paris photographic favourites, seen in a shop window:

This is, as I recently heard the comedian Tim Vine saying, about muggings in multi-story car parks, wrong on so many levels. I would never want to own a thing like this, but owning photos if this and other shop window amusements will supply me with much future fun.

The New Zealand police simply did the FBI’s bidding. The indictment states that, due to various workings of MegaUpload such as the way users
...continue It is becoming normal for websites to disappear]]> One minute Kim Dotcom is running a successful file sharing website, renovating his mansion, driving his luxury cars and sailing on a superyacht surrounded by topless girls. The next, his birthday party is being raided by New Zealand police with helicopters and automatic rifles. Living in New Zealand, hosting his website in Hong Kong, and running the site as a file storage service similar in many ways to DropBox or Microsoft’s SkyDrive did not help him.

The New Zealand police simply did the FBI’s bidding. The indictment states that, due to various workings of MegaUpload such as the way users could get paid for hosting popular files and unpopular files would get deleted, it is not just a file storage service like DropBox. This is not unreasonable.

But it is, perhaps, surprising that the assertions of the FBI are enough to remove a well known web site from the Internet. It turns out they can already do that, even the day after the anti-SOPA protests during which everyone complained that the government would be able to take down websites if this scary new bill passed.

Meanwhile in the UK it looks likely that ISPs will be told to block access to PirateBay.

I’m not necessarily arguing that Dotcom and PirateBay are good guys, although their copying of bits of information is arguably peaceful while states’ reactions are violent.

But there is a trend here I don’t like. There was a time when you could host your web site in the right jurisdiction and it would not be touched. Now governments are learning how to apply various laws to remove them. Forcing ISPs to block access makes life less pleasant for ISPs, and it is likely to be somewhat effective. I expect more websites to disappear, and I expect this to become more commonplace. Eventually it will be normal and no longer newsworthy.

While researching R, I found R-bloggers, and in particular a post about the use of an R-generated image in Facebook’s IPO filing. The image was originally created a couple of years ago by Facebook intern Paul Butler.

But when Paul switched from plotting every friend pair to
...continue R, Facebook, Anglosphere?]]> R is a programming language for statistical analysis and visualisation that I’m taking an interest in for a work project. It’s another open source tool that makes us richer. One way it does that is by being used by Steve McIntyre to plot climate data and replicate (or not) the hockey team’s research.

While researching R, I found R-bloggers, and in particular a post about the use of an R-generated image in Facebook’s IPO filing. The image was originally created a couple of years ago by Facebook intern Paul Butler.

But when Paul switched from plotting every friend pair to instead plotting every city pair with a great-circle line whose transparency was determined by the number of friend-pairs in those cities, something beautiful emerges: a clear image of the world, with friendship bonds flowing between the continents

Paul posted a Facebook page about it and also linked to a high resolution version of the image.

The Anglosphere should be discernable in the image, or at least the original data. Lines from Britain to the USA do look brighter than those from Europe. Many of the lines obscure each other, unfortunately. A 3D version might help.

More map porn can be found on Reddit.

…Well, we’re now playing by big government rules. Congress can set up a fight pit with Hollywood in one corner and Silicon Valley in the other. Who cares what happens. The money will just roll right in.

This is how criminal organizations run protection rackets.
...continue Samizdata quote of the day]]> [W]hile SOPA/PIPA may be stalled for now, a big part of the reason is that tech companies got into the lobbying game, too…That’s right, slowly but surely, Congress is sucking the tech industry into their world, making us play by their rules. We have to pay them off, literally with cash, or we get slaughtered.

This is how criminal organizations run protection rackets. Congress is doing just that, only it’s completely legal.

- TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington on the spanner thrown into the works of SOPA/PIPA (for now)

Investigating Chris Huhne is disproportionate