Today is Safer Internet Day - a good time to contemplate how all those holes in Windows XP makes you vulnerable to attack from the internet and how soon Vista will succumb to the same problems. Perhaps you should upgrade to Linux.
If you want to test your online knowledge, the BBC has an amusing Weakest Link Internet type challenge here.
I’m a big supporter of renewable energy and believe that it is the only way the UK will meet its targets and reduce its carbon emissions. These views have been presented a number of times on this blog. But recently I have become a little more sceptical about wind turbines. There have been a series of stories in the MSM that draws on some interesting findings.
First of all, there was a report by Renewable Energy Foundation on the efficiency of wind turbines, which only generate about 28% of their capacity. This especially highlighted the problem of inland wind turbines, including one on the M25 which generated 8% of its capacity.
So build more at sea seems to be what this suggests, and this is certainly what the Government intends to do, with the world’s biggest wind farm to be built off the Kent coast. Of course this has annoyed some of the locals who complain about the eyesore (I think they look impressive personally) and the damage to the local birds (just like buildings!). But even those at sea rarely achieve their optimum output.
Currently there are 30 wind turbines on the Kentish Flats. Interestingly there have been some issues. After just one year of operations, 9 are out of action waiting repair, with the tops of the turbines having to be sheared off and the gear boxes replaced. I hope this isn’t a recurring problem.
One of the problems is of course that not enough has been invested in the past to make current wind turbines as efficient as they could be, but this will hopefully change over time.
After the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) last week the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) are the latest organisation to jump on what’s fast becoming a bandwagon of support for fair use copying rights. Taking a slightly different tack the BPI have suggested that fair use could be allowed via an authorization granted by rights holders rather than through a change in the law. The BPI have already announced that they won’t prosecute anyone for copying music from e.g. a CD to an MP3 player.
Whilst authorization would in a practical sense get rid of the problem there are a number of issues that it doesn’t solve. The first issue is constitutional, as Kay Withers of the IPPR put it “It’s good that the BPI have said they’re not going to prosecute but it should be the government deciding what the consumers and citizens rights are, rather than citizens.” The second issue is the question of whether and how this authorization can be granted retrospectively, I don’t see how changes to the licensing of CDs that have already been sold can be enacted without contacting all rights holders involved which would clearly be a mammoth task. The third issue is ‘future-proofing’, the BPI only speak on issues concerning music but the legality of personal copies of DVDs (and who knows what else in the long term) is also in question. All these problems can be solved by the government enshrining in law the right of UK citizens to make reasonable use of works protected by copyright.
As a bleak side-note - whilst I was writing this post it occurred to me that after the changes brought about by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which made all offences arrestable you could, presumably, be arrested, DNA sampled etc. for carrying an iPod that had music stored on that you’d ripped from your own CDs. Just something to think about.
Via Out-Law.com.
So let me get this right. Network rail has spent £8 billion to upgrade the West Coast mainline; Virgin Trains has spent £600 million on new trains, and all we do is shave 20 minutes off the record set 25 years ago!- That’s £430 million per minute.
So over £19 million per mile has been spent on this upgrade. In comparison, a high speed network like the TGV costs approximately £10 million per mile. A TGV would get you from London to Glasgow in about 2 hours 40 mins. So that’s a considerable improvement in time at half the costs.
Oh dear it looks likes Milliband’s recent attempt to “get down with the nerds kids” has backfired. Guido and co-conspirators have been playing around with Defra’s attempt at a Wiki on an environmental contract - see the results here and here
Although I appreciate Defra’s idea, the execution is wide of the mark. I think it is important that people realise their responsibilities. However the Defra submission is (inevitably) in Government speak (Does anyone else hate the word “stakeholders”!), and outlines no new ideas, listing a number of things the Government has to provide by law anyway (e.g. disposal of waste, recycling etc). This of course raises the question if the Government has to do these things, how do you enforce these responsibilities.
The Mail on Sunday had an interesting article showing that local councils are “bugging” our wheelie bins to determine how much non-recycled waste we are producing. To be fair the information they are collecting is minimal - it calculates how full the bin is, and is the equivalent of someone with a pen and paper marking how full/empty it is (but much more efficient).
The real ‘concern’ is how this information is going to be used. Clearly it is a precursor to a “pay as you throw” scheme where households are charged for not recycling. Although I believe this is inevitable, I’m not convinced it will work (people will just dump their waste elsewhere) and should only be implemented with an equal policy to get producers to reduce packaging - perhaps the “one layer” scheme I blogged here.
Councils’ first policy should be to introduce the fortnightly pick up that Canterbury City Council has implemented - discussed here. The stench of 2 week old rubbish is enough to convince anyone to recycle.
Oh and finally if the Tories are going to criticise the scheme can they come up with something better than:
“Conservative MP Andrew Pelling said burglars could hack into the computer system to see if sudden reductions in waste at individual households meant the owners were on holiday and the property empty.”
Don’t people have to put the bin out to be collected? Isn’t that be a pretty clear sign that they’re away on holiday?!
Apparently Currys are planning to start selling solar panels at 3 of their high street stores (Croydon, Fulham and West Thurrock). The panels will sell for around £1000 each with approximately 9 required to provide 50% of a 3-bedroom house’s electricity needs. By my reckoning that means it’ll take 50 years for a 9 panel installation to pay for itself based on an electricity bill of £350/year. Having said that, there are grants available for microgeneration at the moment and in the current climate energy bills are only likely to go up.
All in all this can only be a good thing but adopters are going to remain concerned environmentalists unless the financials become more favourable.
Via The Register.
I’ve previously covered the difficulties that new windfarm construction schemes can have when faced with (amusingly ill-informed) local objections. In light of that, these alternative designs from the Netherlands seem like a pretty good idea. Personally I like them but then I’ve never had a problem with the standard turbine design. Unfortunately I fear that disguising turbines with a thin veneer of modern art won’t fly so well with the “but it’s not art” Daily Mail crowd.
Yet again the US has outperformed the EU, according to this week’s The Business. But for once it’s not an article criticising the EU for its poor economic growth or its excessively high unemployment. This time the US has beaten the EU at its own raison d’etre: Climate Change.
According to the Business, the US has kept CO2 emissions constant, whilst they have continued to rise in the EU. It puts this down to the high proportional increase in fuel prices in the US which have encouraged innovation and the move towards lower emission technology. Whether this trend will continue remains to be seen.
The situation in the EU is worrying. The EU prides itself on its environmental credentials and often takes the international lead on new regulatory mechanisms to reduce mankinds environmental impact (see the RoHS and WEEE directives). Even though the EU has introduced a market based mechanism to tackle CO2, the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), emissions have continued to rise.
ETS gives businesses carbon permits to cover their CO2 emissions. If businesses reduce their CO2 they can then trade permits with other businesses that emit too much. This is much in line with the polluter pays principle. The scheme is a great initiative on paper: in economist terms it is efficent, and has the advantage of the double dividend: improve the environment and help economic growth. However in pratice the EU has created an overregulated and burdensome mechanism that has so far had little impact on emissions.
The EU’s biggest mistake was giving the permits away for free to each business instead of auctioning them off. Giving them away for free basically transfers permits to a business that are worth millions of euros, and could be seen as a form of state aid. According to the Sunday Telegraph, this allocation has meant that businesses, including Esso and other oil companies, have made millions out of the scheme.
Instead of auctioning the permits, the EU member states formed burdensome National Allocation Plans to distribute the permits to the different sectors in the scheme. However each member state chose to distribute them in a different way. Some basing it on their historic emissions, others on their future emissions. This resulted in some plans giving some businesses more permits than they required. They then sold these to make money.
It looks like the EU will continue to make the same mistakes in the second phase of the scheme which operate from 2008. Last week Germany and France indicated that they will actually increase emissions in the second phase.
So what’s the solution?
Clearly doing nothing is not the answer- although it seems to be working in the case of the US. But the current ETS is not performing as it should and could. Last week the IPPR called for the EU to decide the allocation of permits. This is something that member states are unlikely to agree with: allowing the EU to dictate how much aid each industry gets is certainly something they wont like.
The situation is certainly critical. In 2008 the Kyoto mechanism is supposed to come on line, and we’ll start to see project based credits too, which will certainly complicate matters.
The solution is simply to allow all the allocations to be auctioned off. This is the most efficient method, and will result in the CO2 reductions the EU needs to achieve if it is ever to meet the kyoto agreement.
There have been a couple of stories relating to the levies on blank digital media this week. The levies are used to “compensate” copyright holders for the rights infringements that sales of blank CDs etc. will result in. Having read that you might well wonder “what about the numerous non-infringing uses of blank media?”, I’ve wondered the same thing and come to the conclusion that like a lot of copyright law it’s best for my stress levels not think about it too much. After all we’re guilty until proven innocent, right?
The first story was the news that Europe is planning to put a stop to the levies on MP3 players and other electronics. Of course the devices will have to incorporate DRM to ensure that they’re not used to breach copyright. The worrying aspect of this is that there could be pressure put on the electronics manufacturers to only support DRM crippled files which would be a disaster for independent content producers who are happy to see their work shared.
Second was the news today that Spain are adding levies to blank media. This comes in spite of an EC report claiming that increased use of levies (and the broadening of their use to, for instance, broadband connections) would provoke resentment amongst consumers.
It seems unlikely that the UK will get similar levies any time soon seen as officially we have no fair use rights so all copying is illegal. A levy to compensate copyright holders would be a tacit acknowledgement that the existing law is almost universally ignored.