For one thing the sheer power of data processing has allowed governments to dictate a million and one new rules in every business which needs massive changes to processes and processing power for businesses to meet, for example in banking those changes [...]]]> Everywhere you go the answer seems to be Yes. But is it?

For one thing the sheer power of data processing has allowed governments to dictate a million and one new rules in every business which needs massive changes to processes and processing power for businesses to meet, for example in banking those changes costs millions for each bank just to implement. Who pays for that? Not the government who wants all this you can be sure. Now look at your shopping bill, VAT and tax added straight on by computers, Age checks, maximum amounts in a purchase, a million and one stupid legislative changes that are all being forced on the manufacturers and suppliers to meet everything from diversity quotas to enforced purchasing quotas. Most easily circumvented by the public. All this red tape is only made possible by computers.

I’m not so sure that computers are the boon we make them out to be for businesses. Of course, you now cannot do certain businesses without them and many businesses actual get real benefit from them with all the Just In Time delivery and stock control capabilities. Even the smallest business today needs computers to run but at that level it is a valued tool not a burden.

However, this is what made me ask the question. I’m an avid reader, not as much as some though (Ivan), and like to read all different types but exclude biographies, history and romance.

So, I’m online looking at some books and one of them has a Kindle option. To my surprise I find that the Kindle option is £1.10 more than the dead tree version. I was amazed. How can Amazon justify that?

If people are making profits all the way down the line in both versions then we have to think of the supply chain. There are a lot more people in the chain with dead tree books but it works out cheaper? Makes no sense. Someone not in the paper chain is making a killing. So who could it be? Rather than go into the details of what is in the paper chain, mainly because I can’t remember them all and do you count the lumberjacks?, let us instead have a look at who is in the Kindle download chain. Author, publisher, the Kindle production system and finally Amazon. Short and sweet. I would imagine Amazon is also the Kindle production System. The author will probably get the same pittance but the publisher and Amazon seem to be making a killing here. Seems to me they may very well kill the idea of the Ebooks right there.

Oh well. I prefer the dead tree version anyway. It also helps share out the take.

Western governments are now looking at installing internet kill switches for themselves.

Well, no sooner than the government starts to [...]]]> After the censorship in Egypt and the ongoing censorship in many countries our politicians have seen a way to shut up those pesky sites that keep questioning what they do and posting their failings.

Western governments are now looking at installing internet kill switches for themselves.

Well, no sooner than the government starts to move than people a lot smarter start to move and so we have, long before the government is beyond arranging the chairs for the meeting, some suggestions and ways around the internet kill switch.

Innovation is alive and well.

It seems China is starting to look at moving away from coal fired power stations to new cleaner energy using Thorium in a TMSR (Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor). Plans are in place for a reactor to be up and running in 20 years.

Even though government systems have always been rubbish, poorly specified and managed by too many rules it seems that they have been designed with the [...]]]> It seems that the government is unable to steal enough from the poor public and the corporations to keep its IT funding in the way they have become accustomed.

Even though government systems have always been rubbish, poorly specified and managed by too many rules it seems that they have been designed with the money is no object philosophy. That surprises me as anyone that has ever had to use government system knows how pathetic they are in performing the task they are used for. Now it seems that they will just have to be ‘good enough’ solutions. Amazingly enough, the same standard that most non government projects work to. They don’t want to spend any unnecessary funds because they have to go out and earn it and they know it doesn’t grow on trees like government funding.

Now although non government systems are developed ‘good enough’ they also seem to work great. Any issues are fixed and, usually, the service is much better although in my experience the bigger the company the worse the service gets and the staff has less flexibility to deal with the issues.

I dread to this what service we can expect from the DWP, DVLA, HMRC, Plod, the NHS, among others when they have to use what they are thinking are sub standard systems. Not what they want.

Evolution continues, species die out and other species are born. The speed this happens is so slow that even a [...]]]> What many do not realise is that evolution did not stop when the human species created our great society and started to control this planets resources and modify the direction of their own evolution.

Evolution continues, species die out and other species are born. The speed this happens is so slow that even a politician could keep up but nevertheless it continues. Our planet changes as it always has, from a molten rock to one large continent to the world as we know it and eventually on to a dry and arid end as the sun expands. All, currently, beyond the control and, to be honest, even the understanding of the common man.

We understand the concept of cause and effect. We know if we give people money for nothing then we offer a tempting route for those that have no aspirations or abilities. Sure a socialist state is a good idea but only if we all worked towards it. It requires those that can work to work for those that can’t and it requires certain moral traits that are missing from our species. We are not ants or the Borg (yet). It will never work while we are the independent thinkers that we are and so we adjust and tweak every aspect of our fellow mans lives to meet ideals that can never be achieved because we all dig our heels in when we are forced to work to keep others who can rob us and beat us up without punishment and live at a higher standard than we can despite us being the ones doing the hard work.

Eventually we snap. It takes a while but when we do it is a doozy. Not only do we take out the deserving of our wrath but also those who do not. Suspicious people like curtain twitchers or that odd guy down the road. But that is the way we work. A cleansing of the species. We will then set up a new order and, for a while anyway, we will have freedom and people will prosper. The weak, as always, will suffer. Then along will come another group who will want to control, for the good of the people, for the children and just add a few rules, who can object to that?

On the plus side we are now at the stage where our advances are not lost. Our medical and scientific knowledge is retained and thus we do not lose too much. Even the poor nowadays do not live in the squalor they once did. Our poor have electricity and running water although others do not yet. Our government’s attempts to stifle knowledge they do not like is wasted and knowledge goes on. I believe that in 100 years time people will look at the global warming swindle and laugh at our gullibility. How we even considered such a thing and the governments of our last 50 years will be known as the stupid, useless and most ineffectual since time began.

The only reason they won’t be hamstrung by socialist agendas is that by then, unless our lot screw it up too much before they are hung for the traitors they are, is that we are scientifically removing disease and genetic abnormalities such that there will be few deserving people requiring support and with machines doing the bulk of the manual work we won’t really have many expenses for basic living.

Of course there are alternatives. There is no guarantee that the human race will survive. Most of us are too dumb to survive on the planet now if it wasn’t for the infrastructure that greater minds have built up for our advancement. We have taken that and whilst living in a lifestyle that only 60 years ago was not even available to Kings and great leaders we have corrupted our evolution with whingy whiney ideas and thinking.

If we don’t take control and bring our species back on track we can be sure that Nature will show no mercy. Nature will not keep our homes heated while windmills vainly try and generate a fraction of the power our society needs to survive never mind grow and prosper. Nature that for thousands of years of trying to eradicate us, not because of malice but because that is how nature works, will find us totally unprepared and helpless. Nature can also claim us in other ways, we all know there are others of our species that would kill us in a heartbeat because we will not bow down to their sky fairy and their spiritual leader allegedly said a millennia ago those that do not must die. Nature has other ways to claim us and relegate us into the dustbin of history. To be some alien creatures fossil collection in their version of a history museum.

What we can control we have controlled for years, not perfectly, and were working on the rest and yet despite the fact they are clearly still a threat we are now looking at relaxing our guard and relying on some miracle to provide the protection we have performed ourselves in the past.

If you look back, IMO the best years for people in the West, were the 60s and the 70s, little government and a period of rapid medical and intellectual development. The 90s was the peak of our society but the cracks were widening. Since then we have become servants to our masters in government and little, if any real progress is being made in our society. Oh! Except we are enlightened enough to have a black leader of the Western world. If he can really be called a leader that is. Of course the seeds of socialism were sprouting even back in the 70s but they were not powerful enough to have reached most people although the welfare state and the NHS were being introduced in Great Britain. People felt good about themselves and human nature being what it was we were happy to reach out and feed the starving of the world. We want to help people it is in our nature. Although only in times of plenty do we see beyond family, neighbours and close friends. The latter part of last century was a time of plenty and we reached out to bring those who don’t have electricity and running water up to our minimum level. It was a start and was done with good intentions but where it all goes wrong is that there are always those that want more, always some to take advantage of a generous nature and always those that think we need to be controlled to do what they want. Those that think we should be punished for the lives and progress of our great great grandparents because they had different, olde worldy, morals and the balls to go out and do something instead of just existing like animals.

Thus we don’t end up doing what most of us want but end up doing what we have been pressed, and when that doesn’t work, forced into doing what a minority of do gooders want to do. It starts voluntarily and then becomes compulsory. Governed by self serving fools that care not for the damage they do to us as long as it furthers their chosen goals, and they personally benefit. No elected leaders ever did that in the past they all strove to get the most out of their country and they had rigid moral codes they worked to. Caught fiddling the books and they fell on their swords. Not our bunch of crooks though.

So instead of striving and reaching for the stars, still well out of our reach, and dragging the lowest on our planet up with us our, self styled, intellectual elite decide that the easiest way to gain control and provide equality, as we all clearly want, is to stop all of us accessing the gains of an advanced society. Make electrickery unaffordable and ration medicines and travel, except for them of course, and tax everything to death to make it work. Inevitable leading to disease, starvation and death but what the Hell. The rest of the world is already like that so it is our turn.

As the wheel turns and we move closer to this scenario. Let us gain hope that when we rise and the shackles are thrown off that before we get to the utopia of the 60s again, we have developed space travel where those with the balls can go and make a new civilisation leaving the dregs on Earth if they do not want to leave. Let’s see how they do without those forced to work for them. Although I am unlikely to be there I would love to see that chicken come home to roost. I was kind of hoping it would be this time around while I was around but our politicians have seen to that.

And this time, the planet of the future, make it such that your basic laws are defined in such a way they cannot be changed on a whim by scraping away at them as whingey whiney liberal socialists have done in America.

This leaves me awaiting calls I hope never happen but inevitably must where I must do my bit to make my children and their children’s lives worth living. In the meantime I’ll read the blogs and watch the world being led down the rabbit hole by government until the bulk of the population wake up. It’ll be when they realise that despite working 60 hours a week they are still hungry and cold and that Government is not the solution but the problem. Welcome to your socialist dream world. When you rise up remember that you allowed it to happen by inaction and, let’s face it, generally being stupid.

Boy, this was going to be a post on that large fox found in Maidstone, UK and how actions have consequences and it just kind of exploded. For my two loyal readers who got so far I thank you.

Another scientist who seems to have landed on the gravy train is Professor Peter Robinson. After becoming lost in his own home town and relying on Sat Nav to get about from, probably, his shrink or accountant to his home he noticed he was losing his temper and decided that simple devices such [...]]]>

Another scientist who seems to have landed on the gravy train is Professor Peter Robinson. After becoming lost in his own home town and relying on Sat Nav to get about from, probably, his shrink or accountant to his home he noticed he was losing his temper and decided that simple devices such as Sat Nav and, soon, iPods needed to be aware of his moods.

He then developed a system that monitors his facial expression and voice tone to handle the way he feels with a 70% success rate in identifying his emotions. From the sound of things that probably isn’t too much of a range if he gets frustrated with a Sat nav in his own town. Wait till he gets out and about on our poor roads and it’ll be a 100% success rate.

So what is the point of having a machine recognise your emotions? I just cannot see any reason why we would want it. OK. The system knows you are annoyed. So what? It still needs to give you the directions and tell you when to turn. Does the system really need to know you are getting annoyed. Will it respond when you swear at it, as I have done to mine, with a sullen silence or even give you the wrong directions. I would smash it to bits if it dares say that until I apologise it won’t give me any more directions.

It all sounds like progress but how long will it be before this is fitted to every car, inside every house and in every office where when you get annoyed it stops the car until you have calmed down. It’ll report you for getting annoyed with the bureaucrat in the local council and report you for racisms because you become irate as the Indian call centre, although staffed with Indian Tony’s, Mike’s and Sue’s, need you to spell Smith Drive and you don’t understand their instructions at £1 a minute.

It’s bad enough we have all these cumbersome emotions without giving an electronic device them as well.

Are any of these scientists actively doing something to progress the human race? I’m beginning to think that all they are doing is lining their own pockets and kissing up to the government. Let us never give machines too much intelligence nor emotions thank you very much.

Tilting at windmills. Yet they class this as a success as they don’t generate the electrickery in their country.

Being green still means the same as it did all them years ago. Niave and easily led.

and the wheel continues to [...]]]> Here is the way our lords and masters plan for the future.

Tilting at windmills. Yet they class this as a success as they don’t generate the electrickery in their country.

Being green still means the same as it did all them years ago. Niave and easily led.

and the wheel continues to turn.

Of course it starts slowly and with something that no right minded [...]]]> One of the areas where we have people shouting for more and more censorship is on the web. Censorship is one of these things where we seem happy to put in place blocks to stop people doing what they want to do.

Of course it starts slowly and with something that no right minded person can disagree with like child porn. Then the definition of what is classed illegal is slipped to include violent porn and now it is proposed that just straight ordinary porn is to be censored. Some puritan somewhere almost broke into a smile. He/She/It must be booked in for a flogging.

Of course anyone who is net savvy, and that includes all the kids that this is trying to protect, are going to find a way around it. In fact I’m going to add a new open router to my house and let anyone connect. (As was inadvertantly done a few weeks ago. Ooops)

From what I understand parents are accessing porn and letting their kids see it. This proposed legislation will make porn opt in and is supposed to stop that. But if the parents already access it then they will opt in and the kids can then access it so what will be the difference?

You don’t know? It will be they will have a database of all those that access porn on ther PC’s.

Next it will be smoking sites, drinking sites and then, political sites that are against the current government. Opt in for blogs and non approved sites and get added to a watch list. Of course there will be some that you can’t opt in to such as Wikileaks. For those lying b4$^4rds protection our protection of course. Funny how this should be put on the table so quickly but clearly is just a coincidence.

On the positive side the tools the *cough* free West have will enable us to get around the censorship in China the free UK.

It has long been known that politicians listen to science and facts when it suits them and ignores the science and [...]]]> It seems yet again that being a politician means you know everything about everything. Much more than the average human being and certainly much more than these boring old fuddy duddy scientists.

It has long been known that politicians listen to science and facts when it suits them and ignores the science and facts when it doesn’t. The best example of this is the global warming swindle when politicians chose the facts that suit them to squeeze us all for more tax.

Now it seems that they are not even going to pretend to listen to scientists and scientific policy where scientists are no longer toeing the party line and rubber stamping the politicians pre defined policies. Instead policy is being decided without any scientific input. Until they get some tame scientists that is. Someone who will be happy to just accept the cash and a nice grant for being a nodding dog. Must be plenty of them who could double with the global warming nodding dogs.

Science is about theory and facts. Not about fudging facts to meet theories. Where did these *cough* ‘scientists’ get their scientific credentials from? Politicians of course always automatically know what is best for us. Their skills and training honed on the battlefield of innuendo and lies.

When will these meddling do gooders just leave us to get on with our lives? This is a continuation of the slope we have been on since, imo our species peak in 1999, it can only end badly.