We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
I recently decided that I wanted to upgrade the CPU on my desktop computer. As it happened, the particular CPU I wanted was in short supply in the UK, and as prices here were substantially higher than in the US I decided to buy it from a shop in Seattle via ebay. It was quite possible that I would have to pay British VAT when the CPU was imported into the UK, but even after this I would still save substantial amounts of money.
So I ordered the CPU, and yesterday it arrived. I received a note in my mailbox telling me that some taxes were owing. Oddly, though, the taxes stated on the note came to about 26% of the price rather than the 17.5% VAT rate. I went to the depot, paid the taxes, and picked up the CPU. A sticker had been placed on the package, and this explained the discrepancy between the amount I calculated and the amount I was being charged. In addition to the VAT I was being charged a £8 “clearance fee”. You see, I was not just being charged taxes. I was being charged an additional amount to pay the tax collectors to charge me taxes.
Forgive me for being pissed off by this.
Like those in most developed countries, British telecommunications regulators several years ago introduced something called ‘mobile number portability’, which simply means that if you change from one mobile phone operator to another, you are able to transfer your number to the new network. Legally, this is basically a statement that phone numbers are the property of telephone company’s customers and not the companies themselves, and I find this entirely reasonable. As items of property, telephone numbers are now transferable and tradeable in a way they were not before. Certainly it means that when your contract is up you can shop around for any deal on the market, change to that deal, and then not have to tell all your friends and acquaintances that your number has changed.
As it happens, a few months back I took advantage of this. I switched over from Orange (whose customer service had been questionable, and whose network has poor coverage at my workplace) to O2 (formally BT Cellnet, and but who have managed to transform themselves into a surprisingly good business since being divested by BT). Normally what one does in such circumstances is get a new handset and sign a new 12 month contract. (British networks seem to be trying to lengthen this 12 month upgrade cycle at the moment – many of the cheapest deals now seem to be offered on 18 month contracts, and there are plenty of post-pay deals out there that provide substantially cheaper calls if you don’t take a new handset). Coming from Australia (which typically used 18 month contracts when I got my first mobile phone in 1999 and switched to 24 month contracts in around 2001) I was struck by the shorter contracts and higher prices.
However, my circumstances were that I wanted a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile. The best selection of these devices in the UK seemed to be the XDA range offered by O2 from HTC of Taiwan. (Also, a friend had one of these and it was really cool). So I got an XDA IIi with a mobile contract with O2. There was a hefty up front cost for this, but it was still substantially cheaper than buying a Pocket PC without a mobile contract. The XDA works fine as a phone, but it is big and bulky. (Most people want to want their mobile phone to be stylish, but the XDA is a device for people who want everything including the kitchen sink in their phones, but who do not care about being uncool). My plan was to transfer the phone number from my old phone over to the new O2 SIM, and then to use the O2 SIM, which I could transfer between the XDA and the old phone (a perfectly fine Motorola v500) as need be.
So, after I had worked out the Orange contract I did all this. The next problem was that very irritatingly (like most UK mobile phones, even those you get on a contract) the v500 was “locked”, meaning that it could only be used with one network. UK mobile networks do this, principally because they want to add an extra little hassle to leaving the network, and because they want you to pay their extortionate roaming rates rather than a local SIM in some other country. As a consequence, a large (and perfectly legal) unlocking business has sprung up in the UK to unlock phones like mine. Rather than using one of these businesses I paid to download some unlocking software and an unlock code over the internet, and did the job myself. This greatly relieved one of my female workmates, who saw me talking into a PDA and assured me that if I kept doing this there was no way I would ever find a girlfriend.
So, anyway, that was all resolved. One further reason that I wanted to get the v500 unlocked was that it is quad band GSM, whereas the XDA is only tri band. Although both phones will work in the US, the v500 will therefore likely provide better coverage. And as I got all this done immediately prior to a trip to the US, this was important to me.
Another thing that is interesting about number portability is that despite the fact that it has been in existence for several years, most people seem unaware of its existence. → Continue reading: The inefficiencies of the mobile phone market slowly go away
Almost two years ago, David Carr posted a piece on this blog about statues in Trafalgar Square. In the comments, I made a brief observation that the person I would commemorate with a statue there was mathematician Alan Turing, who is rather inadequately commemorated given that his achievements were that he won the second world war and invented the computer. (Yes I am exaggerating, but not truthfully by all that much).
Yesterday, I received a couple of e-mails and then a phone call from the letters editor of the Evening Standard newspaper here in London. The paper had a couple of days earlier published an article on a plan to put a statue of Nelson Mandela in the square, and they wanted to publish some responses from readers. He thought that my comment (that he had presumably found by Googling) was very interesting, and would I write a short letter to the newspaper saying the same thing?
I was happy to oblige, but I asked that if they publish the letter that they credit this blog as well as me personally. And that is exactly what they did. They published my letter in this evening’s newspaper (slightly edited for space, unfortunately) and credited me as “Michael Jennings, samizdata.net” at the end.
If you are a newspaper editor who wishes to use the blogosphere as a source, this is exactly the right way to go about it. Contact the blogger first, get him to update what he wrote, and always credit the blog and publish its address. We bloggers love being linked to.
I will concede the point on the weapons, however. Unlike some of the other Samizdatistas, I am not particularly into guns. I am partial to a good set of knives, however.
(This came up when I attempted to access this site on an internet terminal in a McDonald’s in Cardiff. The empire is clearly getting a bit lame. Also lame was that I had to use this in the first place. My attempts to find a coffee shop with a free hotspot where I could simply use my laptop had not gone well).
When I arrived home from work yesterday I discovered a package had arrived for me. I suspected that it was a Christmas present from my sister, and this was later confirmed. I opened it, and found this.
Yes, that’s right. It’s a clock that tells the time in binary, using flashing blue LEDs. To tell the truth, it has a nice “dawn of computing” feel about it, harkening back to the days when input devices were more primitive. Of course, they didn’t have blue LEDs back in the dawn of computing (or even in 1990 for that matter) but I will forgive that.
Alas, I can only conclude that my sister knows me too well.
(Actually, it only sort of tells the time in binary. Each vertical row of LEDs gives the binary for one decimal digit of the time. So the time as shown in the photograph is 21:26:25).
This afternoon I was in Newport in South Wales. I had half an hour or so to kill before my train back to London was to depart, so I went to a nearby pub and ordered a pint of ale. Due to the general lousy state of WiFi hotspot provision in Britain, I was not able to connect my laptop to the internet. However, I also had my PDA with me. The PDA in question is branded as an O2 XDA IIi, but the device is in fact made by a company named High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) of Taiwan, and is known generically as the HTC Alpine, as well as being rebranded by a variety of other companies under a variety of other names. It runs Windows Mobile 2003SE, which includes stripped down versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Excel, and a variety of other applications. The device also functions as a GSM cellphone, and in what is I think is the way of the future, the device has several different wireless technologies built into it – 802.11b (WiFi), Bliuetooth, and at that moment most importantly. GPRS, the usual packet switched data overlay of the GSM cellphone system.
What did this all mean? Well, it meant that I could connect my PDA to the internet via a GPRS cellular connection and check my e-mail and browse a few blogs. The limitations of this were that I was using a rather limited browser and I had a slow connection – in practice probably only around 20kbps. This means that I didn’t want to view too many separate pages – each takes a while to load and as one is paying by the megabyte, one also doesn’t want to download too much in the was of fancy graphics. Being asked to browse through six pages to read one article is something of an imposition. Lots of popups and flash animation is also bad. Relatively straightforward HTML is best.
After a quick trip to Samizdata, I went to Instapundit to see what was up. I scrolled down, and came to the observation that Time Magazine’s choices as “People of the Year” were lame, and a link to a Michelle Malkin piece that had more to say about it. That wasn’t terribly helpful in itself, because I didn’t know who Time Magazine had chosen, but I followed the link.
Michelle didn’t say precisely who the award had gone to either, but there was a comment about philanthopists, rock stars, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Okay, so at this point my guess (which ultimately turned out to be correct) was that the award had been given jointly to Bono of U2, as well as Bill and Melinda Gates for charitable efforts in the third world.
Actually I find the (joint) award of Man of the Year to Bill Gates is kind of interesting. I have long thought that it was an absurd oversight that Time had never given the “Man of the Year” award to Gates. I am no fan of Microsoft’s products, but even I have to concede that that the man’s career is an extraordinary one, and even that the argument that he was the most significant man of the 1990s is quite a strong one. One man came from nowhere and in 20 did a considerable job of seizing control of one of the most important industries in human history. That Time missed this and failed to give him the award at any time in the 1980s or 1990s was really lame. (Time almost got off to a good start in recognising the PC revolution with “Man of the Year announcements”. They apparently intended to give it to Steve Jobs in 1982, but ultimately lamed out by giving it nebulously to “The Computer” instead after discovering that Jobs had a difficult personality. (Laming out is something they have been doing for a while).
Malkin does make some observations on this, stating that she thinks that Time’s vaguely blah leftist politics are in play here, and that they wouldn’t have given it to Gates in the 1990s when he was doing something significant because that was filthy capitalism of which they do not approve, and that they would now rather give it to him and his wife now that she has civilized him and he is doing something “worthy”. Although Time does have a bit of a history of rewarding starry eyed “one world” stuff, and that certainly explains the Bono thing here, I am not sure it does explain the Gates award.
In truth, I think that Time is almost trying to apologise for not giving the award to Gates before. → Continue reading: Time is lame in so many ways
It is nice to see that a compatriot of mine is presently making the case for free trade at the WTO summit in Hong Kong, at which the usual bunch of vested interest and anti-globalisation protestors have shown up.
Seriously, that anyone can go to Hong Kong and then attempt to argue that free trade is against the interests of the poor just boggles the mind. But they do.
(link once again via Tim Blair).
I admit to feeling a little uneasy at the sight of a Muslim woman shrouded not simply in a headscarf but a face-concealing, head-to-toe chador, and wonder just how much choice she has had in deciding her lifestyle. I am not hugely sympathetic to a Muslim seeking asylum because he claims to have been discriminated against because of his support for sharia law.
I cannot celebrate such culture in the way that I celebrate Italian National Day in Leichhardt or the Tet festival in Cabramatta or Greek Orthodox Easter or a Seder at Passover or a service of Eritrean Orthodox Church, such as the one I attended a couple of years ago in a borrowed Church of England in London, or lunch with a couple of Palestinian intellectuals.
Some multicultural theorists will squawk and say that I prefer only a soft multiculturalism (if they insist on calling it that) that does not offend western liberal values. They would be spot on. My acceptance ends when the assault on the liberality of society itself begins.
– Andrew West, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald. (Link via Tim Blair)
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
– Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter of MIT, getting down to the really important research. I wonder what they think of lampshades? (Link from Scott Wickstein).
Prior to my trip to New York a couple of weeks ago, I did not publicise my impending arrival. I had a (non blogging related) friend I wanted to catch up with, and my thoughts beyond that were to just largely potter around the city for a few days and enjoy myself, before perhaps driving up the Hudson valley to do some sightseeing and then across to Connecticut to catch up with my friend before spending a couple more days in New York at the end of the trip.
However, after a post from me, and information generally going along the grapevine, word got around that I was in town, and I suddenly found myself with invitations to catch up with a variety of interesting people. As I have reported already, it turned out that Samizdata co-editor Dale Amon was in town, and he immediately offered to show me around some of the indie music clubs and pubs on the lower east side.
Before that though, journalist Taylor Dinerman of The Space Review, often of the Wall Street Journal, and occasional Samizdata contributer, invited Dale and myself (and various other interesting acquantances of his) to join him for dinner at the North West Restaurant at 79th and Columbus, just opposite the Museum of Natural History on the West Side.
Dale Amon. Fine claret. Michael Jennings. Taylor Dinerman.
Of course, when I received this invitation I was up in Connecticut somewhere, and it was something of an effort to drive frantically down the Merritt Parkway in my rented SUV (which I received from the rental car agency upon ordering a “small car” – I love America) , but I made it. And it was a civilized occasion. Over some excellent seafood, conversation ranged from favourite countries (I shocked the people present by admitting that I prefer France to Italy) to what I should do in New York City to whether Pluto is a planet or not, to more discussion about space. And space some more. The question of whether the restaurant should be declared the official United States Samizdata Headquarters was discussed. (I am for it. After a hearty meal we can all go over to the Hayden Planetarium for a show. Great). And somre more space discussion after that. Plans to visit Florida in January to watch the launch of the New Horizons (ake Pluto Express aka Pluto Fast Flyby) probe were discussed. And then the conversation moved on to wine.
As it happens, Taylor enjoys a glass of good red almost as much as I do. He had brought a bottle of aged Bordeaux from his collection to the restaurant, which Taylor had asked the staff of the restaurant (who clearly knew Taylor well) to decant for him earlier in the evening. Taylor’s timing was perfect. The wine had aged beautifully, and it gave me a wonderfully pleasant buzz. Hopefully Taylor can be lured to London sometime and I can serve him something interesting from my collection.
A good thing about going to a restaurant with such people in such a place was that I remembered a mental note of mine. When the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History installed its new specially modified Zeiss Mark IX projector in 1999, I told myself that I must go and see a program when in New York. So on my last day in New York I did. The visualisation of the heavens is indeed wonderful, and the way the projector makes it possible to zoom in and out of the solar system, the galaxy, or even vast numbers of galaxies is stunning, although the show was much too short. (Do they think modern people have tiny attention spans, or is it just a matter of trying to fit as many shows as possible into the day?) I have visions of sitting in the control room and being able to use the system to fly around a model of the whole unvierse – sort of a much better version of Google Earth but with the whole universe – but I suspect it is not like this. The computer power is probably not there to calculate such a model in real time. Or is it? (Certainly it is not needed for the programs shown to the public, which are the same every time).
And the displays in the Rose Centre for Earth and Space outside seem to have made a decision about Pluto. It is not listed as a planet in any of the exhibits, although there is something of a disclaimer pretending that they are not taking a position. Although as far as I can see they are.
Which of the people in this photo is the Samizdata editor?
Ed: The woman is Tayla, a very fine heavy metal guitarist. She lives guitar. The band is The Pink Meat.
I am in New York. I try to visit this great city every now and then, although as it happens I have not been here since 2000. Besides the fact that the skyline of this city has been defiled since then, it is still the same place, although it seems to get richer and cleaner every time I visit.
My first trip here was in 1991. I was 22 years old at the time, and before I went I remember my mother being slightly scared for me. At that point New York had a reputation for being a somewhat rough and dangerous place. It had perhaps deserved that reputation in the 1970s, but by 1991 it was not especially fair. When I walked the streets of Manhattan I quickly discovered that New York was a fabulous city, but my first experience was an odd one. I arrived at Newark Airport, collected my luggage and headed for the bus stop outside. However, my progress was impeded by the fact that the dead body of a large black man was lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of one of the escalators. There were policemen standing nearby, preventing other people from coming too close.
I do not know how this man died. My best guess is that he simply fell while on the escalator and hit his head. Howevever, my mind was filled with visions of airport shootouts. The thought “What is this place, and what the fuck am I doing here?” went through my mind. I cowered a little.
I then got the bus into Manhattan, found the hostel where I was staying, and had a great time. The city was a litttle grimy, and there were one or two rough neighbourhoods, but it was in truth a magnificent place.
Since then the city has got a lot richer and more gentrified, and (at least in Manhattan) the rough neighborhoods do not seem quite so rough as before. On Saturday I wandered into Hell’s Kitchen, famous for being a tough location, recorded in bad movies such as this one.
But of course its proximity to the important locations of midtown means that a certain amount of gentrification may have taken place. That or the long time residents have taken a liking for politically correct lettuce leaves.
Having roughed such a dangerous place, I retired to a nearby restaurant, where I had some Provencale food washed down with an excellent premier cru Burgundy. (Although the food was excellent, the restaurant felt nothing like France. Everything about it was obviously New York, from the size of the portions to the accents to the volume of the diners to the decor). Okay, at that point I got the “kitchen” part. Hell was still eluding me.
If you go a long way uptown, then yes, some places are not quite as gentrified as this. But they are perfectly fine, and in terms of safety New York feels these days more like Tokyo than the dangerous, feared place that people in foreign countries had heard terrible stories about during my childhood.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
