Nej's Natterings

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

We don't need no education

How bloody stupid is Gordon Brown? Very, is the answer.

Today he said that those schools that fail to achieve high enough GCSE pass marks will be closed down, or taken over by interim management, or taken over by other schools.

Let's think about this. If they are taken over, then what good will that do, really? It is generally the kids' attitude to education that is the problem, and that in turn stems from the parents. The teachers probably try the best, or maybe they gave up trying. Bringing in new blood could make a temporary difference, but I doubt it would last.

Closing the school altogether is daft. Then the disaffected youth from these schools simply move to other schools and bring the standards down there, too.

Neither of these things gets to the root cause of the problem. Some youngsters simply do not care about getting an education. And, as mentioned above, their parents are basically the ones to blame for this.

I don't have an actual solution for this, for once, but it seems glaringly obvious to me that if you get kids to want to learn, then they will learn and then this problem has gone away. Kids aren't stupid. What they need is a reason to learn. A reason to aspire to something better. Frankly, a benefits culture does not promote this to start with, but even better would be a way to make them want to learn.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Cursed

I think I have done something to upset the God of Internet Shopping. Every major appliance I attempt to purchase from the internet somehow fails to arrive. Last time, it was www.appliancedeals.co.uk with my new fridge. This time, it was www.xomy.com with my new TV. I shall tell you my tale of woe...

As I mentioned last week, I recently purchased a Sony Playstation3, which is brilliant. However, my poor 3 year-old plasma TV is not high definition. So, naturally, I wanted to get one of those, too. After much research I decided upon a Samsung model. Further research ensued to decide where to buy it from. Keeping my Appliance Deals nightmare in mind, I didn't simply go for the cheapest retailer. Instead, I kept an eye on service, too, reading reviews of the websites and so on. In the end, I settled on Xomy for two reasons. First, I liked their website. Second, they had free next-day delivery. This suited me fine, so at the beginning of the week I arranged to have Friday off. I then ordered the TV on Wednesday evening, for a next working day delivery of Friday. Only it wasn't free delivery. It seems they've recently changed from free to £5 but haven't quite updated all of their website yet. Still, £5 is cheap for next-day deilvery so I wasn't too put off. I also ordered a new stand on Wednesday morning from www.standland.co.uk (excellent serice - highly recommended), which duly arrived at Ele's office on Thursday.

So, Friday morning I woke up all excited, and then settled down to tackle the ironing mountain, which whilst not quite of Everestian proportions, was a good Kilimanjaro at least.

The hours dragged past, and my set showed no sign of arriving. At half past three, Ele came home from work and decided to call them. And, suprise suprise, it wasn't coming. A system crash at the couriers apparantly. I am saying nothing as to whether that is true or not. The man (apparantly very pleasant and apologetic) then said that he guaranteed it would be there on Saturday morning, between 9am and midday.

Ok, that I can live with, but it's still annoying to have wasted a day of my holiday entitlement. So, on Saturday morning I work up all excited, and watched the hours start to drag by again. By eleven, I had decided it wasn't coming today either. We managed to get a list of the couriers that Xomy use and by calling them all discovered the one that was to deliver my new toy. They informed us it was down as a next-day delivery, not a weekend delivey, which meant Monday. At that point we told them to send it back to Xomy.

I'm not taking another day off work to wait for something that may or may not arrive. Indeed, I probably can't take a day off with no notice at all anyway. I could call in sick, but that would be dishonest. Besides, I've got things to do at work (like write blogs, ahem). The next few Saturdays are all booked up for me, so I'm afraid it was game over for Xomy.com. I sent them an email telling them to cancel the order. They've not replied as yet, and I've no idea if City Link tried to deliver it today or not. Under the Distance Selling regulations I can cancel if they don't deliver on the agreed day, so I wonder if I then cancel but it gets delivered anyway if I can keep it under the unsolicited goods clauses? Hmm...

Anyway, I then decided to just buy one from Comet. It was £70 more expensive (if you used their reserve-and-collect system. If you just walk into the store it's about £250 more!) but I could go and get it that day from the shop. So, we did. And it was very straightforward. Plus we got a £20 gift card with it, so that makes it only £50 more, really.

And now it's all set up on the nice new stand and looks fabulous. Motorstorm is just amazing.

The moral of the story is, do not buy anything from www.xomy.com if you want guaranteed next day delivery, because they may well not do as they "guarantee" they will.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Still here

Hmm, it appears to have been a little while since I blogged. This is because I've been busy. Such is life. Here is a quick recap of important events in the past few weeks:

Jess has gone away for a week to Bude in Cornwall on an adventure week with her school during half-term. She left on Saturday at 9:15, so at 9:00 we got in the car, drove to the school and found nobody there. Brief panic set in... what if it was 8:15 and she'd missed the coach? So we drove home again and read the letter again and found out she left on Sunday, not Saturday. Whoops. Still, better a day early than a day late!

I've bought a Playstation 3 and it's brilliant. And I'm ordering a new HD TV to go with it tommorow. We're selling our current one to a co-worker of Ele's. She didn't want to sell it (neither did I), but realistically there's nowhere to put it in our house, so selling it was the sensible thing. It cost us about £3000 when we bought it 3 years ago, and we're getting £350 for it which is initially a depressing thought. But then the new one is only costing £700 (how much they've dropped in price is astonishing) so after the £350 we're getting for the old one it's only costing £350 for the new one, which makes it all very cheap. At least, that's how I've justified it.

Joe will soon be 2. I really can't believe that. On one hand it seems that we've not had him long enough for him to be 2, and on the other hand I can't really remember life without him. I think the point here is that kids addle your brain. We're having a party for him but it looks like hardly anyone can come, largely because we only sent out invitations about 2 weeks before the date. Still, makes the party cheaper for us to throw.

Work is a bit rubbish. I'm working on some reasonably interesting things, but having to access everything from another office and it's so s-l-o-w to get anything done. It's really frustrating and unproductive when everything you change then requires a 10 minute wait to see if it worked or not. Plus there's hardly anyone left now which makes it a bit depressing. Still, we're having a lunchtime curry next week. Always a good thing!


Normal ranting will resume shortly.

Friday, October 05, 2007

What a joke

A lady from Minnesota has been fined $222,000 for making 24 songs available to download over the internet. That's $9,250 per song. The Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) wanted to pursue her for 1702 songs. That would have been $15,743,500 at that rate. And the jury could have gone up to $150,000 per song. That would have been $255,300,000 according to my abacus. Let's make that point again. She could have been fined over two hundred and fifty million dollars - over a quarter of a billion dollars. For having some songs publically accessible on her computer.

Let's look at this from a couple of different angles.

First point is that they don't actually have any concrete evidence it was this lady who made them available. And they don't have any evidence that anyone actually downloaded them either.

Second point is that each song must have a nominal value of about $1 retail value. A CD typically contains, say, 12 songs and costs about $12. So $1 per song. For a fine of $9250 per song, that would allege that each song was uploaded 9250 times to make the fine correct. Assume each song is about 3MB in size. This gives a total upload of 650GB of data. That's a lot. And as the RIAA wanted 1702 songs, that would work out to be 45 terabytes of data uploaded. And given the typical upload stream is only about 512Mb/s (megabits, not megabytes, remembering that broadband upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds) we have to do some horrible maths to work out how long it would have taken. In a minute, you could upload 30MB. In an hour, 1800MB. In a day, 43GB. In a week, 301GB. In a month, 1.2TB. At that rate, it'd take about 3 years to upload that amount of data, if it ran solidly at max throughput 24/7. I rather imagine her ISP would have cut her off before then... So, either my maths are wrong, or the fine is grossly disproportinate.

But - get this - they don't have to prove that any songs were actually transferred to allege that copyright infringement took place. That they were made available is enough. That, frankly, is staggeringly wrong. Firstly, it should be those downloading them that are breaking the law, as they are knowingly copying something that is under copyright. Secondly, this leaves literally everybody in the entire world liable for this charge. If, say, I went over to see my brother and borrowed a CD that I then copy, he is liable for up to a $150,000 fine per track on that CD. If I go to his house, borrow a CD without even asking because I see it there, he is still liable for it as he made it available by not locking it in a safe or something.

The likes of Blockbuster, Lovefilm, and even my local library share out movies and CDs. They even charge for it! Ms Thomas was not profiting from this, but these other companies are. Therefore we can expect Blockbuster to now be sued for not only making copyrighted material available to share but also for profiting from this illegal enterprise. The fine on that one would have to encompass all money that ever existed or ever will exist. Ok, I know they have rental licensed copies, but that doesn't take away the fact that they are making them available for people to copy.

This is a ridiculous outcome and has set an extremely dangerous precendent.