PaperRound w/e 24-25/11/2007

Don't forget the Weekend PaperRound !

Or is it it just crap?

Is modern art a left-wing conspiracy? | spiked

Ask a right winger who is in charge of the arts in Britain and they are likely to tell you that the arts are run by a liberal-left conspiracy - that the BBC, National Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Arts Council are all staffed by pinkos who generate propaganda in service of leftie causes. advertisement advertise on spiked But is all modern art left-wing, as they suggest?

Lessons for Mr Darling

Mashable: Skype Encryption Too Tough For Ze Police

German police cannot decipher the encryption used by Skype, and they’re complaining about it. How can they monitor all those bad guys if Skype encrypts the damn data? It’s so unfair. “The encryption with Skype telephone software … creates grave difficulties for us,” said Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany’s Federal Police Office (BKA). Well, the thing about encryption is that it should create problems for those trying to decipher the message. That’s the whole idea. But, the German authorities aren’t really talking to Skype about this; in fact, since using spyware to collect information from a person’s computer is illegal in Germany, this is probably just pressure to legalize this practice.

Talking Cats

This has been around for a while but I hadn’t seen it until my son linked to it.

It’s very sweet. Ah!


UPDATE:

The fairer sex

Women Drug, Starve Boy

In interviews with investigators, each woman blamed the other
for leading the abuse, according the sheriff's office documents.
Suzette Stevenson, right, said that Jamie Lynn Martin didn't like
the boy because of his mixed race. Martin, left, countered in her
interview that Stevenson would keep the boy out of school
because she feared his teachers would notice injuries he
sustained due to their abuse.

Domestic partners Suzette Stevenson, 45, and Jamie Lynn Martin, 26, have been charged with aggravated child abuse after a 7-year-old boy illegally in their care escaped from the two women after they allegedly drugged him and left him in a car as they shopped for a Florida timeshare.

The boy, who is not a biological child to either woman, was allegedly tied by his wrists and made to stand in an upright position for hours at a time, forced to drink shampoo, was burned with cigarettes and had to urinate and defecate in a closet, according the Baker County Sheriff's Office documents.

The boy was born in 2000 in California. After his mother became involved in drugs, he was taken away from the mother and given to his father, Baker County Sheriff Joey Dobson told ABC News. The father, who allegedly did not want to care for the child, gave him to an aunt, who was in a relationship with Stevenson. Dobson said that Stevenson then purchased an illegal birth certificate for the boy after his aunt, her domestic partner, died. "It's not legally sound at all in any way shape or form," he said. Stevenson then came to Baker County, Fla., in September 2005 to meet Martin, whom she had developed a relationship with over the Internet, Dobson said.

End of the line

Meet the women who won't have babies - because they're not eco friendly

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35. "Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population." While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future. Sarah Irving (above) said "I realised then that a baby would pollute the planet - and that never having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do."

Good job your mother took a different view. Have you considered the ultimate environmentalist gesture - suicide? And let's hope you never need care and attention from someone else's son or daughter in the future. Of course, logically, they could legitimately have one child between them which wouldn't even be enough to replace them both. A 50% reduction! On second thoughts perhaps it's best if they don't breed.

Free web development tools for Mac using Safari 3.

Safari and TextWrangler

I found TextWrangler to be the best code editor I have ever used. Yet I still needed a good debugger. I searched for over a week, but found nothing. At this time I had the Safari 3 beta, I’ve used the debug menu in Safari 2, but there wasn’t much in there besides a console. Well one day I was going through macdailynews.com, and like I always do, I opened up all the articles I wanted to read first by tabbing them. I do this by command (the key on an Apple keyboard) clicking on the links. Well I accidentally control clicked one, which I do sometimes. This of course opened the contextual menu. I noticed at the bottom there was a new menu item called Inspect Element. I clicked on this with curiosity. Suddenly the Web page went semitransparent black, except where the link under the mouse was. Also a new window popped up showing the structure of the link and even the CSS code going with it. I had found my debugger. Using the inspector, you can see every document that the Web page is using at the time. The inspector can also show all the errors visually and give you the reason for it. Another great feature is the speed inspector. This allows you to see visually how fast every file was downloaded and rendered.

Pretty impressive. You'll need a bit of Terminal tweaking to make the debugger active. Even if you don't use it for web development the Safari Inspect Element function is cool.

And the answer = more money

Scotsman - 'End free universities and spend cash on educating the illiterate instead'

Students should be forced to pay fees to attend Scottish universities, with public money diverted to help eradicate illiteracy and innumeracy, one of Scotland's most influential education figures says today. Andrew Cubie, architect of the graduate endowment scheme, questions whether it is "ethically acceptable" to have free tertiary education when one Scot in five cannot read or write.

It might be an idea to try and ensure that the money that is being spent already on educating children from the age of five actually produces at the very least a minimum standard of literacy and numeracy for all. What has money got to do with it? It isn't lack of funds that causes children to spend 11 or 12 years in a full-time education system only to emerge devoid of the most basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic, it's piss-poor teaching.

Keeping up the standards

Good to see the left/liberals are maintaining a high standard of political debate on the blogosphere. Of course, I don't give a fuck about abusing politicians but then I'm not always wittering on about how awful the right is and how their cheap tabloid tactics are damaging the entire future of political blogging. Both sides heartily deserve each other as far as I'm concerned.

Dohrect debits

Looking for a voice:

So why do HMRC need to keep personal banking details anyway ?

Erm, that might be so they can make child benefit payments direct to your, erm, bank account. Doh!

Arise Sir Plus

NHS on course for large surplus

A clampdown on spending within the NHS has turned a massive deficit into an even bigger surplus in just two years. As much as £1.8bn, about 2% of the budget, will be left unspent this year, the Department of Health says - prompting charges of "boom and bust". The NHS was ordered to balance the books after running up a £547m deficit in the financial year 2005/06. Ministers have said that any surplus there is will be put back into patient care next year. Over the past two years, the NHS has been under extreme financial pressure, with many trusts cutting jobs and making other savings in order to break even.

What a way to run a health service. God knows what damage has been done as NHS managers took the pruning shears to their services in order to 'balance the books'. But why this obsession with eradicating what was in effect a tiny deficit of less than half a percent? As David Stout, the director of the NHS Confederation PCT Network - representing the primary care trusts who spend NHS money - said, "the surplus was not necessarily a cause for concern. In the context of the overall NHS budget this is not a huge surplus." If that applies to a £1.6 billion surplus it must apply even more strongly to a deficit less than one third that figure. Even now the books aren't 'balanced', with some trusts in deficit and others in surplus. How simply totting these pluses and minuses up to try and arrive at zero overall signifies good financial planning is beyond me.

Health Minister Ben Bradshaw said: "It is excellent news that the NHS continues to be in healthy surplus. "This means more flexibility for health services and better care for patients." Quite how this works he didn't explain.

John Appleby, chief economist at the King's Fund, said that a surplus of that size was not necessarily a healthy sign, as the money could have been spent on services. He said: "If the NHS does end up with a significant underspend at the end of the financial year, that will be a real loss to patients".

Well, you don't need a degree in economics to work that one out, do you?

Meanwhile back in the real world:

Paramedics were forced to treat patients in the back of the vehicles as they waited near the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital...Norfolk's two other general hospitals, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn and the James Paget Hospital in Gorleston were also on the top level of alert - meaning all contingency measures were exhausted. And a spokesman for Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge said it had also faced similar problems - which is termed "black alert".

Brown nose out of joint

Brown loses it in The Mail | spiked

The UK government is in crisis, accused of betraying, endangering and ripping off the public. Just like old times again, ain’t it?  But this time the beleaguered New Labour government has done something more than misplacing the personal and banking details of 15m UK families on two discs. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has lost the CD-thin support of the media and the public that cheered him into Downing Street a few months ago amid optimistic talk of new beginnings and dramatic change, even a ‘revolution’.

His share price has collapsed almost as dramatically as that of Northern Rock, the troubled mortgage lender. Brown has gone from boom to bust in a matter of weeks. Now there is talk of Brown sinking into dark moods, bullying everybody, barricading himself within his inner circle, while younger guns like Ed Balls and David Miliband already begin jostling for position to succeed him as leader.

There have even been the first signs of a Blair-lash, as some serious observers start to appear almost nostalgic for the days of Tony. One anonymous Brownite cabinet minister has reportedly been wondering aloud whether Labour isn’t starting to look like the Tories in the doomed last days of John Major’s government, veering from one crisis to another.