Wonderful self refferential quotation

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You can't go anywhere in London these days without being caught on CCTV camera. Buses, Trains, shops streets and buildings all sport these eyes. They don't provide any active security, a camera can't intervene in a mugging, but the proponents argue that they are useful at solving crimes. It looks as though the statistics tell another story.

London has spent £200 million installing 10,000 CCTV cameras, and yet the proportion of crimes solved is going down, not up -- and some boroughs with the more cameras have the worse crime-solving rates.

• There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totalling about £200million.

• Hackney has the most cameras - 1,484 - and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent.

• Wandsworth has 993 cameras, Tower Hamlets, 824, Greenwich, 747 and Lewisham 730, but police in all four boroughs fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.

• By contrast, boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have fewer than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.

• Police in Sutton have one of the highest clear-ups with 25 per cent.

• Brent police have the highest clear-up rate, with 25.9 per cent of crimes solved in 2006-07, even though the borough has only 164 cameras.

Link Via Boing Boing

20092007004

CD Woes

I have been having more trouble with my MacBook Pro of late. It has recently stopped burning CD/DVD's with a sense error message. Fortunately and somewhat surprisingly a cd lens cleaner circa 1992 came to the rescue, and now everything seems to be burning just fine.

Now if I could figure out why sometimes when I close the lid it reboots.

Senator Sues God

The maverick Nebraska senator Ernie Chambers has filed suit against god, to order the Almighty and his followers to stop making terrorist threats.

Chambers, in a fit of alliteration, also accuses God of causing "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like."

Likewise the suit accuses God of having his chroniclers "disseminate in written form, said admissions, throughout the Earth in order to inspire fear, dread, anxiety, terror and uncertainty, in order to coerce obedience to Defendant's will."

Chambers, who has represented Omaha, Nebraska since 1970, asked the Douglas County district court for summary judgment or to set a quick hearing date "if the Court deems such a hearing not to be a futile act."

The senator also wants the court to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting God from issuing plagues and terrorist threats. It's unclear how this could work since God is usually understood to be all powerful.

Chambers does admit that God is omnipresent and omniscient, however. Since God is everywhere, the Nebraska court has jurisdiction, Chambers argues, and since God is all-knowing, Chambers need not serve him with a notice of the lawsuit.

I particularly like his attempt to serve the papers on god...

The lawsuit indicates that Chambers attempted to make God appear in order to serve him by saying "Come out, come out, wherever you are," but the Almight declined, like many defendants, to make it easy for a plaintiff to serve him with court papers.

I think this shows both the absurdity of frivolous lawsuits, Chambers Intention, and the nonsense of a God.

Link - Wired Thanks Caitlin

Hoxton hotel art

Is gatwick really a london airport?

Seems closer to brighton at 7am

Invisible Tetris

This is almost superhuman. The speed with which he plays the game is amazing, but the real crunch comes at the end when the blocks become invisible and he still plays at an insane speed. This sort of cognitive ability is fascinating, and shows on one level what the brain is capable of with sufficient training. If someone had posed the scenario which he accomplishes I would not have believed i possible, apparently it is. There is a good discussion about the video over here. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo[/youtube]

Tokyo Trains

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GAjkBwOyY0[/youtube] I may have been closer than I thought...

World Premiere of Neil's Latest Work

Katana Vs Bullets

Couple of nice videos showing a Katana splitting bullets. The first with a 9mm Hand Gun. The results aren't particularly surprising, given the material differences, but the high speed footage is fun to watch. The second ups the ante with a .50cal machine gun.

BBC Headline...

Ninja return ends in Congo chaos

Made the editors day I imagine.

Thanks Dom.

Beautiful Ride

Got up extra early this morning to meet a friend in town for breakfast and had an absolutely beautiful ride. The weather was cool with clear blue skies and no breeze, ideal for riding hard. The park looked great with a low mist slowly clearing and plenty of deer scampering about. It was also nice to miss the school run, the number of people that drive their kids to school is amazing, and makes a huge difference to the traffic in many areas.

Assisted GPS saves GPS on N95

I love my Nokia N95 but the GPS performance has generally been barely acceptable. The latest V12 firmware changes all that with assisted GPS. The time to acquire a fix has gone from 5 minutes+ to less than 20 seconds, and often in under 10 seconds.

Here is a short explanation of how A-GPS works.

What is AGPS? Assisted GPS describes a system where outside sources, such as an assistance server and reference network, help a GPS receiver perform the tasks required to make range measurements and position solutions. The assistance server has the ability to access information from the reference network and also has computing power far beyond that of the GPS receiver. The assistance server communicates with the GPS receiver via a wireless link. With assistance from the network, the receiver can operate more quickly and efficiently than it would unassisted, because a set of tasks that it would normally handle is shared with the assistance server. The resulting AGPS system, consisting of the integrated GPS receiver and network components, boosts performance beyond that of the same receiver in a stand-alone mode.

Wordpress 2.2.3

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.2.3, never a process I enjoy. It is one area that I think Wordpress could improve.

Google Adds Search to Reader

At last, the inexplicably msising search function has finally arrived in Google's otherwise excellent feed reader.

Jet lagged to beyond time and space

Yep, its 3:30am at least it is here and my body refuses to cooperate, bad body...

Is Apple the New Microsoft

Good editorial in PC World on the increasingly monopolistic position that apple holds in the online media world.

The core complaint about Microsoft in the 1990s was that its Windows market share gave it monopoly power, which it abused in multiple ways. Attorneys General and others zeroed in on the "bundling" of the Internet Explorer Web browser, which they claimed was forced on users because Microsoft offered it as part of Windows.
People love iPods (including me; my family of four has purchased 12 iPods in the past few years). But iPods come bundled with iTunes. Want to buy music from Apple? Guess what? You must install iTunes. Want an Apple cell phone from AT&T? Yep! ITunes is required even if you want only to make phone calls. Want to buy ringtones for your Apple phone? ITunes.
Apple not only "bundles" iTunes with multiple products, it forces you to use it. At least with Internet Explorer, you could always just download a competitor and ignore IE.

He also points out the absurd pricing of the ringtones for the Iphone

That same shock rippled through the iPhone enthusiast community yesterday when Jobs announced with a straight face that iPhone ringtones based on iTunes songs would cost the full price of the song, plus 99 cents extra. What? The full song costs 99 cents! How on Earth can Apple seriously charge the same amount again for the ability to hear just 30 seconds of the song -- the same length as the free iTunes "samples"?
Apple fully understands the power of monopoly pricing. The company has sold the 8GB iPhone for two prices in its short, three months of existence: $599 and, now, $399. When the iPhone was the only way to get the whole multitouch, big-screen, Wi-Fi iPod experience -- when the product had no alternatives -- the price was $599. One analyst estimated Apple's cost to build an iPhone is $245.83. I don't know if that's true but, if so, more than half the user cost was profit. That's theater soda pricing. But as soon as Apple introduced an alternative to the iPhone -- the iPod Touch -- Apple dropped the price by one-third.

Read the article over at PCWorld for his surprising conclusion.

Link

Dramatic increase in Paramilitary policing and its damaging effects

Radley Balko at the Cato institute has put together an incredibly thorough paper on the increased use of paramilitary police units such as SWAT teams across the USA. This increase in the use of military style units to police the civilian population have resulted in dozens of deaths and injuries to innocent civilians over the past 20 years.

The trend for paramilitary policing began in the 1960’s with the intention of being used in high risk situations such as when hostages are involved or armed robbery. However in the 1980’s the war on drugs changed all this. New laws allowed the pentagon to share its weapons and training with civilian law enforcement. Millions of dollars in military hardware was given to police departments, this wasn’t restricted to large high crime urban areas.

In a 1997 60 Minutessegment on the trend toward militarization, the CBS news magazine profiled the Sheriff’s Department of Marion County, Florida, a rural, agricultural area known for its horse farms. Courtesy of the various Pentagon giveaway programs, the county sheriff proudly showed reporter Lesley Stahl the department’s 23 military helicopters, two C-12 luxury executive aircraft (often called the “Rolls Royce with wings”), a motor home, several trucks and trailers, a tank, and a “bomb robot.” This, in addition to an arsenal of military-grade assault weapons.

The results of this military give away combined with military tactics and training lead to predictable results when combined with an expanded role serving drug warrants on non-violent offenders lead to predictable results.

Salvador Hernandez.

On August 2, 1996, police storm the home of 62-year-old Salvator Hernandez on a drug raid. The raid is part of a broader raid that morning involving 47 police officers and federal agents.

Hernandez, who is nearly deaf, is making breakfast for himself and his friend, 54-year old Bortolo Pineda.

According to police, as they entered the home, Hernandez took the knife he was using to make breakfast and “lunged” at them with a “menacing” look on his face. According to Pineda, Hernandez didn’t hear the police shouts, and had turned to get some sausage from the refrigerator. Police opened fire, and hit Hernandez in the chest five times, killing him.

Hernandez was a farmworker described by friends and his employer as a “good man,” and a “good worker.” He had no criminal record, and in fact had been a police officer in Mexico before coming to America. He was a grandfather of 21 and a great-grandfather of one. There were no drugs on his person or in his system.

Just days later, a grand jury would clear the raiding officers of all charges, ruling that they had reason to believe their lives were in danger.

Salem police pointedly refused to apologize for Hernandez’s death.

There is a fantastic Google map mashup showing the various incidents and their outcomes available on the cato site.

Full Paper & Map

Ecto 3 Test post

Using the new alpha of Ecto3a20 to post this. Looks promising....

Ecto Alpha