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?

[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.

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.)

[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.

[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?

[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.