MishMash

China sends man into space, Chines TV decides it's not news

The launch was to have been shown live on national television, but Chinese state television decided it would only show it later. [BBC News]

How bizarre. I mean, I know it's not the first time it's happened, but if I was Chinese I'd be pretty eager to watch it happen in real time.

Privacy? Not black and white.

This is well worth a look. I've had a puzzle in the back of my head for a while about the fact that I simultaneously feel that privacy needs protection, but work at establishing a public identity for myself (this weblog, for instance).

There are a lot of government records that are public: court proceedings, arrest records and property recordings are examples. Public records are one of the cornerstones of democracy. Democracies prefer accountability to enforcement. Rather than trying to enforce every rule and law with absolute certainty, we make information public and make people accountable. Accountability based systems scale better than enforcement systems. Even so, the Internet has upset some long held practices however related to public records. [Phil Windley]

ID cards

Pete W drew my attention to this Grauniad article with the bare facts. The Register offers some discussion.

It's certainly occurred to The Register that the imposition of compulsory biometric registration would create a favourable climate for wide-scale revolt; people will tend to evade because they can't be bothered or because they actively don't want to be tagged, so a large lumpenrevolt would make it difficult to isolate and pick off smaller quantities of liberal refuseniks. [John Lettice]

That's the positive side to it. Elsewhere in the article the notion is raised again that if Blunkett is diverted from his zeal for a straightforward ID card then slow convergence among the various current IDs would allow ID cards to be introduced later by stealth.

As for the idea that Straw and Blunkett are possible successors to Blair? A nauseating idea that I had successfully suppressed until now.

Oliver Letwin begging

"If necessary I would go out on the streets and beg rather than send them to the school next to where I live." [Oliver Letwin, quoted by Sarah Hall in Guardian Unlimited].

"Oliver Letwin has insulted the parents, teachers and pupils of every state school in the country." [Stephen Twigg, Labour junior education minister, quoted by Sarah Hall in Guardian Unlimited]

Fine, but what about the beggars? I humbly suggest that Oliver Letwin hasn't the faintest idea how unpleasant it is to keep yourself alive by begging (I am not claiming that I do, either).

Charities launch arms campaign

A worthy campaign. This is a bit weird, though:

The organisations are calling on the British government, the world's second biggest arms exporter, to set an example by signing up to the treaty, which aims to halt the sale of weapons that could be used to fuel wars or abuse human rights. [Guardian Unlimited]

Ummm, what arms couldn't "be used to fuel wars or abuse human rights"?

Physicists predict Christmas crisis for UK housing market

According to Nature, of all places, the UK housing market is due to crash at the end of the year.

Stealing the common from the goose

Typepad's comment posting isn't working for me at the moment, so this gets an elevated status.

In reply to Dad's comment, reminding me of this, a favourite of my Mother's:

The law arrests the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common;
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

Yes, I should have thought of that. The quote attributed to Aesop happened to come up in an RSS feed of quotes , at the same time as the Michael Moore story came up in the RSS feed from the Guardian.

Jon Udell (following Sam Ruby, the links suggest) calls this manufactured serendipity -- because a lot of information is piped into one place, juxtapositions are thrown up which would pass by unnoticed otherwise.

[Not the best Udell link, but I can't find the one I was looking for].

The relevance of the common/goose poem to the ongoing battle for control (or perhaps, better, battle between control and freedom) on the Internet is striking, and I can't believe I didn't think of it even earlier, given the heavy use of "Commons" language (the Creative Commons project, for example).

The metaphors are limited, of course. Common land has/had a physical extent.

Iraq awards mobile phone licences

According to the BBC, three licenses have just been granted for installing a mobile phone network in Iraq. Interestingly, the network is to be GSM, the European standard, not CDMA, widely used in the States. Which means that some friends of Bush & co. aren't going to do as well out of the Iraq game as they might have hoped.

Michael Moore asks Bush

Some interesting points from Michael Moore over at the Guardian.

Aside from the observation that just about every Amendment can be discarded in the interests of catching terrorists except the right to bear arms, I particularly liked this obervation.

Osama bin Laden has assets totalling at least $30m; he is a multi-millionaire. So why isn't that the way we see this person, as a rich fuck who kills people? Why didn't that become the reason for profiling potential terrorists? Instead of rounding up suspicious Arabs, why don't we say, "Oh my God, a multi-millionaire killed 3,000 people! Round up the multi-millionaires! Throw them all in jail! No charges! No trials! Deport the millionaires!!"

Aesop:

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."

Interesting GM news ...

... from the Gaurdian.

And an update from the BBC.

Update: More from the Guardian.