In the UK, frequent traffic jams on motorways are causing the Government to consider implementing the American idea of having dedicated lanes for cars carrying two or more persons (with fines for lone drivers caught in the wrong lane). Friends of the Earth is concerned that the scheme will be used as a reason to widen roads to create the new lanes.
There is an alternative, being tried in a country, which on occassion has seen traffic come to a grinding halt on motorway stretches up to 100 km long in the summer vacations. And where traffic jams on the motorways in the heavily populated parts of the country are common.
In Germany, a pilot traffic-forecasting scheme sponsored by the EU in Nordrhein-Westfalen, (covering 2250 km of Autobahn in the area roughly surrounding the line connecting Köln (Cologne), Essen and Bielefeld), offers 30 minute and 60 minute forecasts on the web of where traffic jams are going to occur.
It has been so successful, that some 300 000 people per day use it to plan their trips, which in turn has been enough, to make the forecasts measurably less reliable. The operators, worried that 3G mobile phones will mean even more people using the service and lowering its accuracy further, are now considering making less detailed information available on their web site, to force drivers to use more varied strategies for avoiding the jams.
A new nuclear reactor in a Sydney suburb, which will be commisioned in 2006, is to get a steel safety-net to stop small aircraft being crashed into the reactor.
The net has been criticized by Green Peace, because it is only able to stop a plane the size of Cessna, and not a Jumbo jet. In response, Craig Pearce, from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), has said that based on scientific tests it is unlikely a large aircraft could achieve such an angle to hit the reactor.
Sounds a bit like a spin-control attempt to blind the listener with science doesn’t it? If a terrorist wants to release contaminents from a reactor, he’s going to put the plane at any angle he wants, to hit near enough to the reactor to damage it. He doesn’t even need a direct hit on the reactor itself. On the other hand, at least the Aussies are thinking about the possible impact of terrorism on nuclear installations – Europe is crammed full of elderly nuclear reactors built long before the Al Qaida terrorists were born, and there seems to be precious little being done to protect them against attack.
OpenOffice.org have just taken a major step for Mac OS X users, by releasing their first update to OpenOffice.org, their freeware competitor to Microsoft’s Office suite, in roughly a year. You can download OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 for OS X from here. So far, so excellent.
Unfortunately, in their effort to provide a user-friendly installation, they have hardcoded into the installation procedure, that a freeware font converter, fondu , should attempt to convert all installed Mac fonts to True Type format. As I appear to have at least one problem font that can’t be converted, fondu hangs and prevents the installation completing.
I don’t have time at the moment to research whether a work-around for the problem has been reported (I couldn’t find an obvious posting on the OOo site last night and I need the font in question), so I will for now be staying with my favourite office software for the Mac, NeoOffice/J. This excellent software is modestly described by the developer, Patrick Luby, as a prototype, intended for software engineers and not yet complete enough for regular users. It is a Java front-end for OOo 1.0.3 for the Mac, which don’t require X11 (a Unix user interface, which the current official OOo for OS X needs) and allows me to not worry at all about converting my fonts – I have access to all my Mac fonts (and all my installed printers), even the problem cases which fondu can’t convert. It is completely stable, easy to install and I don’t understand why OOo haven’t taken it as an interim solution until they have ported OOo to Aqua – something which at the moment isn’t scheduled to happen until 2006.
Highly recommended! With any luck, Patrick will find time to re-package NeoOffice/J to include the latest OOo release and then I will be completely happy 
There are some things which I am happy to consider lost to history. For example, this passage describes a 16th century papal feast:
They serve wine that a woolen rag wouldn’t deign to lap up (as Juvenal puts it), which, if you’re insane enough to drink it, will make you vinegary, watery, corrupted, dropsical, sour; either chilled, or tepid, with a bad color and taste…. And don’t think you’ll be drinking from vessels of silver or glass; there’s the fear of theft with the former, and of breakage with the latter. You’ll be drinking from a wooden cup, black, ancient, fetid, with dregs caked on its bottom, which the lords have used as a pissoir. And you won’t get your own cup: so whether you want your wine mixed with water or pure, you’ll get what everyone else wants, and wherever you bite down some louse-ridden beard or a slobbering lip or rotten teeth have gone just before. Meanwhile the king is receiving toasts in vintage wine so fragrant that it fills the whole palace….
Cheese will come your way only rarely; if it does, it will be full of worms, perforated, squalid, harder than a stone. Fetid butter and rancid lard are your condiments. You’ll only get eggs when they already have chicks inside; your bread and apples are rotten or green, and if you didn’t eat them they’d go to the pigs….
Found in The New York Review of Books, reviewing the book Feast: A History of Grand Eating
The IEEE approved IEEE Standard 802.16-2004, more commonly known as the WiMax standard, on Thursday this week.
WiMax is a standard that will give similar funcionality to computer users, as we have today with Wireless LAN (WLAN) – but instead of having a range limited to typically 20 – 50 meters (maybe a kilometer or so using special directional antennas), and a speed limit under ideal conditions of 54 MB/s (millions of bits per second), WiMax will enable ranges of up to a kilometer or more at more speeds higher than the broadband connections that you can order from your local telecom company (max speed is 75 MB/s). The maximum range using directional antennas is expected to be about 50 km.
Industry pundits are predicting that within a few years, the technology will be used to provide broadband access to remote areas.
I don’t consider that we live in a remote area – Schmitten is around 30 km from the center of Frankfurt, but we have been waiting for at least 5 years for the technologically challenged T-Com, our national telecom provider, to connect us to the internet using DSL. I’m keeping my fingers crossed – the new WiMax standard has the backing of some major players, including Alcatel, AT&T and Intel, so maybe it won’t be too long before we can bypass T-Com and their last mile of cable and move into the twentyfirst century at last.
You can now tour the Gulags where Stalin incarcerated people who opposed his government. The weather is so perishingly cold that you can only visit in June and July each year. The price is a bargain £400 for a 12-day trip.
I wonder how long we will have to wait to visit America’s Gulag? Talking of which, The Guardian reports that the Iraq war will cost each American over $3400 – the annual cost of the war would be enough to provide health care for more than half of the 43 million US citizens who lack medical insurance.
The British seem to have a better deal – the Queen’s annual running costs amount to the equivalent of two bottles of milk (61 pence) per Briton per day.
Posted in Iraq, Odd news |
When Paul McCartney performed in St. Petersburg last Sunday, it looked like it was going to rain, so the organizers dispersed the clouds by having them sprayed with dry ice at a cost of $40,000.
Apparently this in not the first time the Russians have practiced weather modification – the clouds were also dispersed for St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary celebrations. Usually, however, weather modification is carried out to cause rain, not to prevent it.
Given the amount of high-tech electronic navigation equipment in modern airliners, you do wonder how this can happen.
Intel has produced a a surfboard with integrated WLAN laptop, which will allow surfers to check their emails, surf the web, and even record footage of themselves catching the best waves.
The laptop doesn’t sound in the least bit usable, at least not unless your name is Duncan Scott, but it should generate a fair amount of publicity for Intel.
The opinions of the music / film industry and the paying customers on DRM (Digital Rights Management), or copy protection, are diametrically opposed to each other. Microsoft has been an active developer of DRM technology and wants to incorporate it into its next generation operating system. So it was interesting to see that Cory Doctorow of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) held a talk this week at Microsoft on why DRM is bad for everyone. Its quite a long transcript, but very readable.
Mind you, the recording industry wouldn’t put people’s backs up so much if they implemented DRM in an intelligent manner – here’s an example of what I mean:
A couple of months ago, a somewhat stressed and distracted relative sent me 2 DVDs of “The Office” (a BBC TV series). Unfortunately, she ordered them from amazon.com, and not amazon.co.uk. When I got the DVDs, I couldn’t play them because they were DRM-protected and only usable on a DVD player built for the American market. It didn’t take long to fix the problem by downloading a firmware crack to remove the region check on the DVD player, but why should a DVD sold in America stop me from seeing the recording in Europe, where the TV series has long been aired? Crazy. DRM is allegedly implemented to stop films being seen in regions where they have not yet been released, so the DVD should have been coded to allow playing in both the US and Europe.
