Exhibit one is the App Store. Apple will only allow you to download applications that they have approved. They could offer all apps, but mark approved or supported apps as such, like Canonical do. Selling their kit in this way maximises vendor lock-in and, in short, acts in a way that would bring bucketloads of opprobium onto MicroSoft.

Exhibit two is my broken iPod. I have an iPod that can be described as bricked (as in so broken it’s about as useful as a brick). I took it to the Apple Store on Regent Street. I know, dear reader, that you might not be familiar with me, but suffice to say that I am currently wearing cords and tweed. I don’t want to make an appointment at the genius bar or, frankly, spend any time in the shiny, white, plastic bubble of sterility that is the Jobsian utopia which, frankly, looks too much like something of which Hugo Drax would approve.

That aside, it turned out that the hard disk on my slightly more than two-year-old iPod had died. They could repair it for £170; a new model, with twice the memory, would cost £180.

Apple, IMHO, must forfeit quite a lot of green credentials for that. No-one is going to repair when they can have new for ten more pounds; that means effectively junking the old iPod because Apple won’t repair it. Forget closed cycle; not only are Apple trying to sell another piece of kit I don’t want, there’s no recycling facility for iPods and similar that have gone to the great Apple Store in the sky.

Apple do like to portray themselves as having a certain je ne sais quoi that puts them ahead of MicroSoft in the evil, corporate monster league. Having such a poor attitude to repair, reuse and recycling doesn’t help matters; it would not surprise me if the aversion to easy repair is as much to do with preventing non-Apple approved people from tinkering with the little box.

I won’t be buying another iPod. If I do buy another mp3 player-type-thing, it might be an Archos. For the time being, a pair of headphones connected to my phone are sufficient. Since buying that iPod, I’ve come over all Linux, so it’s not surprising that I’m not keen on the incredible lockdown Apple uses. Besides that, Apple’s products just aren’t worth it.

xD.

H/T Alex Hochuli.

xD.

I find this all rather unfortunate. I use SpinVox, and the service is really pretty good. From the point of view of the end user, it works. I set it up once, people leave voice mails as normal and what they said is emailed to me. Yes, it makes the odd mistake – whenever my friend Hanif calls, it comes up with ‘this is Honey calling’. If someone’s in a very noisy place when they leave a message, the transcription loses accuracy. For most purposes, and in most situations, it works well. It saves time and it’s a lot easier to sort through voice mails than ‘press one now’ and so on. I’ve found it a lot easier to deal with voice mails as text and I’d rather keep the service.

The BBC piece that started these problems is here and SpinVox have a response at their blog.

xD.

Printed and promoted by Anne Agent on behalf of Can D’Date, both of 29 Acacia Avenue, Dandytown.

I believe that’s a requirement under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendum Act 2000 (PPERA). I know various candidates who, during election time, carry a similar imprint on their blog. I have two questions; is there a similar requirement for tweets and, if so, what would it look like

Mark Park of Lib Dem Voice has a partial answer.

PPERA 143 (6) says

The Secretary of State may, after consulting the Commission, by regulations make provision for and in connection with the imposition of requirements as to the inclusion in material falling within subsection (1)(b) of the following details, namely—

(a) the name and address of the promoter of the material; and

(b) the name and address of any person on behalf of whom the material is being published (and who is not the promoter).

A simple solution would be to allow political parties to set up a website (with a short url!). It could then, in a similar way to sites like bit.ly. You could have li.uk/aaa for an imprint from a Labour candidate, who happened to be assigned ‘aaa’. Whaddya think, Mark?

xD.

De Gray set out a paradigm whereby metabolism causes damage, and damage then causes pathology. In this model, gerontology attempts to intervene in the first step – problematic because of the great complexity of metabolism – and geriatrics intervenes in the first step – problematic because damage has already caused pathology and is at best palliative. He sought to reverse accumulated damage before it became pathological.

Initially, this would allow for an extension of the useful human lifespan by perhaps thirty years. Once that first step was accomplished, refinements in technique would allow, excepting being hit by cars and so on, to continue for arbitrarily long periods, through the possibility of increasingly eficacious treatments before the eficacy of repeated cycles of previous treatments lost eficacy.

You can get a flavour of his speech from this TED talk.

Broadly, I would raise three problems with de Gray’s plan.

Firstly, the scientific. I can’t assess his science, but a number of people there raised fairly substantial problems with his paradigm and with the conclusions he drew from it. That is probably one for the peer reviewed papers.

Secondly, the technological. The very long, four-figure lifespans suggested depended not just on continuing improvements in the (speculative) set of technologies, bit that those improvements happened faster than people died because of a loss of eficacy as described above. The examples de Gray cited in support of his position were the motor car and the aeroplane. Unfortunately for him, the equally plausible alternative of the jet pack was raised: theoretically possible, desirable even, and can be turned into a prototype that can fly for half a minute, but can’t be turned into a production model (because the amount of fuel that can be loaded onto a human is finite and less than what’s needed for useful flight). Another example would be power from nuclear fusion, which has been ten years away for fifty years. It is a prediction based on little more than fiat.

Thirdly, the socio-economic. In answer to a question from yours truly about the cost of the treatments, de Gray was quick to observe, thousand-year life spans would have major effects on world society, meaning that we could throw much of traditional economics out of the window. If we do that, though, we throw political economy out of the window. Thus, de Gray’s assetion that the state would pay for its citizens to have these treatments is distinctly problematic as the state, as we know it, would not necessarily sill exist. Even if we accept that the state still exists in a recognisable form and that it makes economic sense for states to pay for these treatments, it does not follow that they will pay for them. As de Gray thought equality was a major issue, it’s worth going into at slightly greater length.

The basis from which de Grey works is that regenerative medicine is medicine like any other, albeit with remarkable effects. As we know from the current debate in the US, there are plenty of people who see taking money from them to pay for the healthcare of others as morally wrong. There are also plenty of countries that would like to provide comprehensive healthcare, but cannot afford it. De Grey provided no explanation of how we would roll out this treatment when we cannot at the moment give people with economic potential very cheap drugs – say, hydration salts for diarrhea – that would have similar economic benefits to the de Grey treatments but at vastly lower costs per dose. From the point of view of the state, it doesn’t matter whether a day’s work is done by a thirty-year-old or a three hundred and thirty-year-old. Given that states do not have to provide pensions or old age healthcare now, and that the mechanism by which they will be convinced to do so is absent, it seems as reasonable to conclude that arbitrarily long lives will remain the province of the wealthy as to conclude that we will enter this brave, new world. A nightmare scenario would be lots of people having access to these treatments but not making the necessary lifestyle changes. If we kept dropping kids every twenty or thirty years over a thousand year life, we’d very quickly overpopulate the planet.

I hope that de Gray’s science is more thorough than his statecraft.

Of course, if de Gray is right, I look forward to seeing you at the February 2317 meeting of Sceptics in the Pub London – assuming someone hasn’t already booked the room.

xD.

This is, on reflection, no great surprise. By its brevity, Twitter favours those who are time-poor. You need, of course, an internet connection. That makes Twitter ideal for people working away in an office, but less attractive for younger people who are less likely to spend a ten-hour working day at a computer looking for brief social interactions and escapes.

The final point in the argument is a poster I saw today. When someone thinks ‘what a good idea’ to receiving train times by Twitter from First Capital Connect for their commute, you know it’s not for kids.

xD.

I really like a particular idea that Neil has – departments live twittering their own press conferences and so on. That would be a real ‘value-added’.

A little while ago, I put all the regional and departmental RSS feeds that the COI’s News Distribution Service provide onto Twitter. The full list is here; I’m really pleased that Neil has listed me as an unofficial aggregator of government content, and more than a little flattered.

xD.

Assuming estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen African swallow | Use estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen European swallow instead

Yes, that makes sense.

Input interpretation:

So far, so good.

Result:

Ba-dum.
Why did the chicken cross the road?

Result:
to get to the other side

Guess which question yields 42.

Does anyone know why Wolfram Alpha returns images rather than text?

xD.

Interestingly, Facebook are aware of the problem – it seems to be impossible to either send a message or set an update (even via Twitter) that includes fbstarter.com, fbaction.net or kromked.net – but they have opted not to put out a general warning.

xD.

The UKGovWeb Twitterverse from DavePress

TweetyHall – local politicians

Local councils on Twitter from Dorset for You

Tweetminster

Journalists from PR Blogger

The UK Government on Twitter from Neil Williams

xD.