Interesting Links for 14-06-2012

[andrewducker]

• Coventry launches electric bus services
  (tags: uk buses electricity )
• Goodfellas mobster Henry Hill dies aged 69
  (tags: movies mafia )
• The BBC block UK access to some pages produced by BBC Worldwide. What the fucking fuck?
  (tags: uk bbc EpicFail )
• Some interesting discussion/analysis of the new top level domain applications.
  (tags: internet google amazon )
• An editor explains how ebook licensing works, and why you can only buy most ebooks in some countries.
  (tags: publishing ebooks )
• Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?
  (tags: uk media guardian bigotry palestine israel )
• What happens when the DRM on digital projectors kicks in (a terrible tool-chain)
  (tags: drm copyright movies digital )
• 35mm Film is About to Die – Studios Plan to Go With All Digital Projection by 2014
  (tags: digital cinema )
• The govt’s work programmes are pure exploitation: here’s the evidence (anyone got some counter-evidence?)
  (tags: welfare work uk politics )
• Skype to feature massive in-call ads. Microsoft tries to sell this as a _good_ thing.
  (tags: skype microsoft advertising )
• Chinese mindfulness meditation improves brain white matter and mood.
  (tags: psychology emotion brains meditation )
• Windows Phone market share expected to surpass Apple's iOS in 2016 (expected, in this case, by analysts on crack)
  (tags: windows microsoft mobile_phones apple )

Comments

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

They're blocking stories about vacuum trains?

[andrewducker]

Accessing that story in the UK gets you:
"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."

I'm sure there's complication over how to get people from the UK to pay for stuff which isn't covered by the license fee, but just blocking people seems dumb.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

especially since I just read it for free.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Are there adverts on that page?

It might be that it's not so much about preventing UK people from seeing the content, but from being subjected to ads. There's maybe some stuff in the BBC's rules about not ever using ads in the UK.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

35mm Film is About to Die – Studios Plan to Go With All Digital Projection by 2014
This makes me a little sad - my wife and I met while projecting 35mm film at our university film society.

[andrewducker]

In the future, couples will have to meet while working out how to hook up projectors to laptops :->

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Same here.

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

this is the nicest 'how we met' story i've heard of lately.

Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Wow, Robin Shepherd has written a lot of anti-Muslim/pro-Israel stuff.

I feel like the music stopped, and all the people with anti-Muslim opinions and all the people with anti-Jewish opinions sat down, but there weren't enough chairs in one place, so they ended up confusingly scattered across the political spectrum. And now I don't understand the political landscape any more :) (In truth, this is mostly my awareness, not a change in real life :))

Generally left/liberal circles, prominently including the guardian, definitely have an awful anti-Israel sentiment that spills over into anti-Jewish sentiment, which is rather awful.

But also, Israel has done some really really awful things to Palestinians, and if there's a "wipe Israel away" sentiment, that's pretty inevitable. And I don't agree with Hamas' rhetoric, but I'm not sure they can be ignored out of being a problem, and their main complaint is probably widely shared in palestine. (I might agree publishing it uncritically in the guardian is bad, if that's what happened.)

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

A thousand times this.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thank you

Re: Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think the article about the guardian massively overstated the case here. I mean it is "published uncritically" -- in the sense that there's no editorial "beware, here be dragons"... however, what he published does not appear to deserve such editorialising in any case.

The original article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/08/palestinians-reclaiming-our-destiny

On the other hand, the article linked does go some way to mislead, for example, including the Hamas constitutional promise to wipe out Israel without including Ismail Haniyeh's statement that he would be willing to accept a peace based around the 67 borders. So they include a general statement from the party without including the much more conciliatory statement by the author they are criticising.

Then take
“ We do not want more blood. We want help in achieving justice for our people who lost their land and freedom decades ago, and in providing security for a region that has long endured oppression and suffering.“

All lies, of course. Israel has never attempted to wipe out the Palestinians.

I find it hard to believe that even the most pro-Israeli viewpoint could deny that at least some Palestinians lost some land. Weirdly the writer counters instead by refuting an allegation the author does not make (he nowhere claims that the Israeli's tried to wipe out the Palestinians).

So, I guess I risk the accusation of a typical left-liberal bias to Palestine, but I found the article being criticised was much more even-handed than the article crticising it.

Re: Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I was gonna say, "My, but this is pro-Israel pandering worthy of mainstream U.S. media!"

And I'm an American Jew who doesn't think Jews have a god-given right to so much as a clump of dirt.

[hano.livejournal.com]

I'd be very wary of anything written by Robin Shepherd and especially anything published in The Commentator. It's a right wing rag run for and by a bunch of increasingly lunatic libertarians, with an agenda to attack the state at every opportunity. They *hate* the Guardian with a real passion, and love nothing more than discrediting it whenever they can.

[andrewducker]

I'm happy to be wary of them - but I'd much rather have an actual rebuttal of what they said, with evidence, if such a thing is possible. I generally prefer argument based on facts, rather than who the arguer is.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Yes, but a comment piece like that will pick, choose and skews its facts.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

That picture they have at the top of the piece... it doesn't exactly lend itself to a fair discussion of facts.

[zz]

Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?

his argument seems to be that because hamas are suboptimal ranging to evil, their members/leaders shouldn't be allowed a voice ever? wtf?

[andrewducker]

There's a difference between banning people from speaking, and actively giving them a forum for their views.

I'm all for (for instance) Neo-Nazis being allowed to print leaflets. I am not in favour of my local newspaper giving them a page to talk about themselves.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

I think this is very different. Whatever their views, Hamas are more significant than a local neo-Nazi group. They're a major political force that is usually not given a voice in the western world. I'm with Sven's implied point here.

That article is, in itself, wildly biased in the other direction. Separately, via MetaFilter, I read a pretty biased interview with Noam Chomsky on the subject, which made me sad. It's really hard to find objective perspectives on Israel. I do think Judaism and "the Jews" needs to be left out of it on both sides though: Israel is a nation, and dealing with it in any other terms does the issue a disservice.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Is the guardian the MOST bigoted... well, I dunno; the Guardian are often anti-Israeli-government/pro-Palestinian-statehood which doesn't have to be bigotry but that does seem to spill over into being anti-semitic unless policed very very carefully, and I don't think the Guardian are very careful about their policing.

On the other hand many other newspapers spew disgusting bigotry too. The Daily Mail for instance. Comparing one sort of bigotry to another sort is pretty foolish.

[toothycat]

I have one counter-example to the work programme being exploitation - unfortunately, I think it's rather isolated. A friend of mine who used to work in web design has been out of work for a while, and was thinking about retraining, when he was told he had to work at a charity shop stacking shelves or lose his dole. He was unimpressed, of course - but at the last moment he got a phone call telling him they'd found him somewhere more suited to him, and they had. He's still not getting paid, of course, but he's working for a different charity helping them to set up a Unix server, which is something he wouldn't have been able to train himself to do alone. Plus, he actively enjoys having the work to go to, although of course he'd prefer to be paid.
I am depressingly aware that he is probably one of the very few to have been given a position that is actively helping him to gain skills he wants and would not otherwise have been able to learn, but for him, the scheme has worked so far. If he actually gets a job using these skills, it'll have worked properly.
Interestingly, I think it's a pilot scheme being run in Cambridge - it is part of the general work programme, but perhaps they're doing it differently or something. I don't have any more information on that, sorry.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Good for your friend, but what about the person who works setting up Unix servers and who has perhaps been denied that bit of work? If said server runs on Linux or BSD and your friend has a computer is there anything preventing them from downloading a few ISOs and experimenting with installing them, setting up SAMBA, LAMP etc? There are plenty of resources out there for the autodidact.

[toothycat]

It's a very small charity, and there's no money. The boss wants the server set up, but it's not absolutely required for the charity to function. If my friend hadn't been helping them, there would have been nobody else doing it; it would have been one of those jobs left to rot on the backburner.

My friend does not autodidact. It's a shame, but some people simply can't learn that way. He should really have had more help in previous times but for various reasons (not all his fault) has not managed that. This is something I don't think he'd have got any other way.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think doing something voluntary definitely CAN be helpful. The problem seems to be, the government assumes there are millions of unfilled jobs out there that people could get if they just cleaned up their act and tried hard enough. But there doesn't seem any evidence for that: where are these shelf-stacking jobs desperately looking for an employee, but unable to find someone who can do it? It seems massively more likely that there aren't enough jobs (sample evidence: companies are laying people off because there's a depression).

So the policy generally seems to be "trick people into doing one of these schemes as punishment, and hope they give up on getting any benefits or get a job by sheer force of will".

I don't think it's NEVER useful. Just that it seems more harmful than helpful. (And has a lot of secondary bad effects.) Placing people to do charity work that would otherwise go undone is a good start -- it's still possible to cause serious problems, but if it works it's actually providing some positive improvement to society. (A good indication that this is what's happening would be that people who are ALREADY doing volunteer work or unpaid internships, especially ones related to their core skills, were rewarded and praised, rather than villified and punished.) It seems workfare does vary a lot by local region: if some ARE doing it better, that's a good thing (although it's been such a disaster, I'm not sure it's worth saving).