james holden

The government’s ID card bill was accepted in the commons yesterday with a majority of 31. This gives the government the legal right to introduce ID cards in this country. 20 Labour MPs voted against the bill and there was wirespread objected to it from the other parties.

We are still without any clear justification as to why we need ID cards in the first place, and the costs are still spiralling, even by the government’s own estimations. When the bill was initially introduced, a unit cost of £77 was proposed. This is currently up to £93 with third-party estimates even higher.

As a country, we do not need ID cards. They will not prevent terrorism, nor will they prevent identity fraud. Identity fraud falls into two very different categories; credit card and banking fraud, and benefit fraud. We already have methods in place to combat these problems. If anything, a central database accessible to many so organisations will increase the risk of identity fraud.

The Pledgebank ‘refuse’ pledge to donate £10 to a leval defense fund for those convicted of not carrying their ID cards has now reached over 5,000 signatures taking it past the half way mark.

Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, has written an editorial piece in the Guardian in which he illustrates the dangers of software patents by making a comparison to hypothetical literary patents - using the same example as Patrick Devedjian, who was until recently the French minister for industry. RMS illustrates that if literary patents had existed in the 1800’s, many great literary accomplishments would not have been achieved.

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An amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill will be announced today, which if accepted, will mean that prosecutors may ask for the trial to proceed without a jury. The jury would be replaced by a panel of ‘experts’ in complex fraud cases. I’m somewhat concerned by this move, which I’m quite sure won’t be limited for long to just fraud cases. The whole idea of denying the right to trial by Jury is a big blow to human rights in this country because it can no longer be guaranteed that the decision will be made by a completely unbiased group.

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Well OK, I’m quite sure they’re not exactly new to an awful lot of people, but today I stumbled across ‘Lacuna Coil’ on special sauce. I’m pretty impressed to be honest. They seem to fall somewhere between NIN and Garbage and I like them a lot from my first 30 minutes of listening. Anyone care to add their thoughts?

I’ve rigged up a quick hack to put what song I currently have playing on XMMS at the bottom of every page on this site, using the XMMS songchange plugin and a bit of ssh trickery.

There was just a thunderstorm here this evening, so the air’s nice and clear now after a few days of humid, oppressive air. It got me thinking though, about an old ioniser we used to have when I lived at home. I think I’ll build one this week. All you need is a Cockroft-Walton multipler driver straight off the mains. 25 stages should give about 17kV which will produce a nice effect. I’ll pick the bits up from Maplin tomorrow and build it this week.

They’re dead simple to make. All the capacitors are 100nF polys and the diodes are 1N4007 rectifer types. It’ll cost about a fiver to make, plus a box to put it in. Not all the stages are shown below. An extra 10M resistor across the input might be an idea, to prevent getting a zap from the mains plug.

Well, after a lot of drying out, the keyboard I put through the diswasher (still) works. Well, sort of. Before it went for it’s bath, many of the keys didn’t work - now it’s only a few. Maybe I’ll try it again but take it apart a little further this time.

No2ID have set up a pledge list on pledgebank for people to protest against the national ID card scheme. Once 10,000 people sign up, you pledge to donate £10 to a legal defense fund. Add your name now!

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Aparrently the music publishers think they’re entitled to double (or even triple) royalties for ‘copy protected’ audio CDs that have an extra copy of the music in some DRM’d format for playback on a computer. Heh, that’s funny! They shaft you out of the ability to play full CD quality music on your PC and want more money for it.

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