Once upon a time, when the forces of authority had trouble keeping the peace, some people who broke the law were declared outlaws – that is to say, the were put beyond the protection of the law. Nowadays, the protections offered by the law – even to those in the act of breaking it – [...]
What would be the reaction of the American driver to being forced to drive at the speed limit? How frustrating, for example, would they find it to discover that some college students had set up what amounted to a rolling road block along a four-lane motorway? And how fantastic would the whole thing look on [...]
This story is very, very good. I’ll leave the link until the end. Let’s start, not with the punch-line, but with a spokeswoman for Southampton City Council: Occasionally things go wrong no matter how hard we try to get things right. Read that again. It seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Keep that in mind, if you [...]
The Cambridge Exam board has created new A-level exams. I left school before the modular system had really taken root, though it was in full swing for science subjects at the time, and certainly before the sixth form was split into two more or less entirely self-contained years with more subjects studied in the first [...]
A French company is offering DRM-free music. An interesting shift. This service is priced to directly compete with the Apple iTMS.
There are many reasons that I would think long and hard before having laser eye surgery. However, it seems that with career choices depending on their eye-exams, a third of the US Navy officer academy is opting for the treatment. This has caused the navy problems, since they had relied on the fact that many [...]
The Washington Post has an interesting piece this morning about solutions looking for problems at the tax-payer’s expense. For a country that more than any other in the west is the champion of free market solutions, a surprisingly large amount of money is funnelled into products that “the market” would not otherwise support by congressmen [...]
The BBC is reporting the problems of a young woman whose extensive collection of tattoos threatens to disadvantage her in the workplace. Is there not a contradiction, however, between the desire to, as she put it to the BBC reporter, ‘express’ herself, and the desire not to be judged or treated differently as a result? [...]
The issue of “net-neutrality” is a live one in the US and an issue for the internet everywhere. The basic question is whether all data travelling over the internet should be treated as equal, or whether ISPs should be able to charge providers to guarantee priority for particular data. So, if you are a large [...]
We live in an age that does not spend as much money as our ancestors did making things and spaces beautiful. I do not pretend to understand the economics involved, or why there should have been a shift, but the effort that went in to making the London Underground attractive is quite staggering. Now we [...]