-
Sheffield Sevenstones – Public funding for private gain?
What a surprise – Sheffield City Council and Yorkshire Forward are planning to chip in £20 millions towards helping kick start the stalled £600 million ‘Sevenstone’ retail quarter in Sheffield City Centre. Don’t get me wrong – this area of the city centre could do with some redevelopment. Whether this project is right and whether
-
iPad – third way or solution looking for a problem?
Well, I guess that as someone with technical credentials I should comment on the unveiling of Apple’s new tablet machine, the iPad. The first thing I will say is that I’m not an Apple fanboi, and so am probably a hard audience to impress. Anyway, here’s what Apple have to say – I like that
-
ACTA – Why is the Government not informing MPs about this Agreement?
Have you heard of ACTA? How about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement? No? Well, you’re probably not alone. After all, here in the UK the Government won’t even put documents regarding the Agreement in to the House of Commons Library. Of course, our New Labour defenders of freedom have lots of reasons for not doing this,
-
Facebook friends limited to 150 by the brain?
As anyone who’s ever heard me rant about the ‘numbers game’ side of networking – especially on sites such as Ecademy, Linked in or Facebook – will testify, I’m a great believer in quality rather than quantity, and until the software on such sites can do more for me than it currently does in terms
-
Burying the bad news – it’s what Terror Alert Statuses are for!
I appreciate that I may be being overly cynical here, and will certainly feel a total idiot if the recent escalation of the UK’s Terror Alert Status actually was based in one of the threats reported here. But that’s part of the problem – unless the threat is carried through or arrests are made we
-
Moral relativism and evil
moralityFirst of all, for anyone unaware of the news stories about the two pre-teen thugs from Edlington who tortured and abused two little boys, here’s a link to the story. Now, I passed a comment online that I regarded the two perpetrators as evil. I didn’t state they should be hung, drawn and quartered, thrown
-
Why this US Supreme Court Ruling affects ALL of us.
Sometimes the stuff that changes the world starts quietly. On September 9th, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, was assassinated in a suicide bombing. A few months previously he’d warned the West that a major terrorist atrocity was on it’s way, and it was thought that the assassination by supporters of the relatively
-
Obscene – selling useless bomb detectors to Iraq
Today is a bad day for anyone who likes the idea of integrity and common decency. Take a look at this news story from the BBC about the ADE-651 bomb detector. This baby sells for up to ,000 a pot and has been sold extensively to Iraq. So extensively, in fact, that the Iraqi authorities
-
The dumbing down of Twitter starts here?
I’ll admit it. Deep within me is a snob. As far as I’m concerned, the online world started heading down hill when you no longer had to know how to install a full TCP/IP stack to use the Internet. Most online discussion forums should, in my opinion, have an intelligence test before you’re allowed to
-
Blippy – how do you feel about sharing your purchases?
I recently commented on whether Web 2.0 had ‘jumped the shark’ in terms of strange applications, and also remarked on whether the biggest threat to online privacy was ourselves. However, I don’t think I was prepared for Blippy – a web site that allows you to share details of products and services that you’ve bought