Posts by Nigel Whitfield. 1049 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
@LucreLout
I keep hearing how "England is weary of the noise" and other such stuff, but only from people on forums. Where are these English people who hate the Scottish so much, or just want them to go away?
I've never met any such person in real life, so I really doubt that "most of England" is happy to end the Union. That sounds to me, often, as a view that echoes around the internet in much the same way as the conviction that Ed M. would be PM was doing last week.
@M7S
I don't find UKIP particularly palatable, but I'd rather we had a proportional system, which would very likely require rather more consensus on a lot of matters - there are quite a few areas where the stated policy of the fish people is not in line with the Cons, after all.
I also tend to the view that you may as well give people rope, and see what they do with it. So what if we have UKIP MPs? If they turn out to be the same quality as the people they send to Brussels, they will be spectacularly ineffective, and very likely a one parliament wonder. They could surprise us and turn out to be diligent constituency representatives - in which case, if people vote for them, what's the problem?
@arrbee:
I think even more than the case of the SDLP, this election has highlighted the problems in the current system, not least because there are more extra parties. But also in the way the election is fought in a tiny number of marginals.
The Labour vote share was, in fact, up by 1.4% over 2010, yet they still lost 27 seats.
The Conservative vote was up by half that, 0.7%, and they gained an extra 24.
In essence, the Labour votes were in the 'wrong' place (as were those of others), while the Tories did better and targeting the seats they needed to win.
In my local seat (Hackney North), the Labour share was up 7% at 62%; also remarkable was that the Greens went up to 14.6%, just 0.1% behind Con. But those increases for the two left of centre parties made no difference.
PR has been something that, certainly, SDLP/LD types have wanted for ages, but I think the raised profile of three extra parties this time round - SNP, Green, UKIP - has opened the eyes of many more people to the flaws in our system.
Well, as I say, the book does raise the issue of security at various stages, so even novice users will be aware of some of the potential risks.
It could probably go further, but how far do you go before it becomes an unwieldy book that still probably wouldn't cover everything? A few years back, I wouldn't have been surprised to see books like this barely even addressing it.
The turnout for 2015 in the UK was 66.1 - a small increase over the previous 2010 general election, where it was 65.1
Possibly worth noting that this still puts us above the turnout level in e-vote equipped Estonia, which was 64.2%.
I have had some young people say to me they would be more likely to vote if they could do it online, but whether that would make a big difference, I don't know.
Across the UK, turnout wasn't evenly balanced - it was 71.1 in Scotland, so was likely below that 66.1 in England.
You could, perhaps, make an argument that part of the difference there was a party articulating a clear vision, while in the rest we had parties mostly picking apart the competition, rather than saying positive things about themselves.
The registration issue may need revisiting too - in some areas, it was a bit of a mess. Perhaps that's not surprising, considering the change to individual registration happened just 10 months before the election.
Well, yes, they are legal in the UK. It's just that lacking any centralised system, we don't have any common way of doing these things. When I leased a computer some years ago, I had documents sent to me using a system called "EchoSign", which I'd never come across before. Other firms use different solutions. By far the most common way of consenting to the loan of a piece of review kit is still for the PR people to email me a document with a request that I sign it and fax it back!
So, while there may be ways of e-signing that are recognised in the UK, they're all relatively rare, as far as end users are concerned. By having a common system, with software freely available for most computers, based on a card that everyone has, you can encourage take-up of such things rather better than we have done here, I'd venture.
@phuzz
That's very true - and it's potentially a big problem. It's one that eVoting could solve, if it was universal (eg a free terminal, and decent rural connectivity), but if that's not solved first, it potentially makes matters worse, not better, by creating a large differential skew in turnout between areas.
There are still plenty of locations with rubbish broadband, mobile not-spots, and the like, and rural poverty. A situation where some people can vote easily online while others are in the situation you describe, of needing transport and a long trip exacerbates unfairness.
This is very much one of those areas where - even if you could solve the core technology problems of e-voting - you still have to address other areas that touch on it, like universal broadband provision, and identity card, if it's to be a fair system
I have wondered if there is also some merit to a "jury service" type of element, where 50 or 100 people are selected to serve say six months in the second chamber.
I'm sure companies would complain, but many already have to cope with army reservists so they could cope with that. It would give ordinary people a greater stake in the system.
I suppose the feeling is that to do so on a large scale would require considerable effort - polling stations have a list of voters and would notice if the same name was used, or the same person came in several times. You could impersonate someone at multiple stations, but you'd be running around a lot.
Online, that can potentially be much easier.
In the absence of ID cards, I suppose each polling card could have a unique code which can only be used once, to sign in to the polling website.
I have to say that's one of the most radical proposals I've heard and at first glance, it seems very interesting. I shall have to think about it more, especially their concept of tradeable votes. What if, for example, MegaEvilCorp offers to buy votes from people whom are desperately poor? Even without such a skewed scenario, there may be potential for mischief,incentiviwsing people in various ways.
Potentially, too, a system in which you use up your votes may be awkward. What's to stop a cynical government proposing something they know will use up lots of "against" votes? They take a gamble on people being really outraged, eg, by a proposal to introduce conscription at the end of university, and lots of young people use up a load of their votes.
Three months later, they announce a proposal to increase tuition fees in order to subsidise pensions. Young people have fewer votes left. Older ones rub their hands with glee and cash in at the polls.
So, while I think it's an idea to explore, it would need safeguards.
It would be a possibility,but not absolutely necessary. Both Ireland and the USA for example have a lower age limit for the role of President (though Ireland may vote to lower theirs from 35 to 21 next month).
So, it would be entirely possible to have a voting age of 16 and a higher age requirement for becoming an MP.
That still leaves 15% without.
One of my friends, for instance, a working class lad from Hackney, couldn't drive, nor had he ever been abroad. Consequently, he had no passport, nor need for one, and no need for a driving licence.
A passport now is £72.50 for your first one. A provisional driving licence is £34, assuming you can apply online. You'll need a passport or a birth certificate. If you don't have one of the latter, then that's an additional £9.25. And it's £43 to get a driving licence by post.
You'll also need the photos, of course, which is likely to set you back another fiver from a photo booth machine.
Even assuming someone does have a birth certificate they can find, you're looking at almost £40 to get the ID that they'll only need to vote. In the worst case, if they don't have a computer to use, and need to get a copy certificate you're looking at a little under £57.
It's easy to look at things like this and think "well, that's not so much," or "I'd spend more than that on a decent dinner" but there really are people who don't drive, and don't have passports and - above all - don't have £40 to spare. But they're still entitled to vote, because we have a universal franchise.
If you're going to require ID to take part in that, it absolutely must be provided free of charge, in my view.
You could do that - as I believe some US states do - by having a specific ID document for people who fall into that 15% who have neither driving licence nor passport. However, while that may be acceptable for voting, there are issues around the more general use of such documents. Essentially, if there's a "poor person's" ID, and other sorts of ID, and you start to allow them to be used in other situations (eg bars checking credentials, say) then you potentially open the way to discrimination.
The point with regard to voting in libraries, or voting in the rain, is not that it's necessarily a bad thing, it's that it runs a very real risk of creating two tiers of voter.
There will be those for whom voting is simple and straightforward, who can do it at their leisure, without even leaving home.
And there will be those for whom it is considerably more effort (and you're assuming there is even a library with internet access near them; the last few years has seen provision scaled back dramatically).
What's a "limited number of polling stations" ? This is the sort of fiddling round the edges that can result in serious problems further down the line. If someone decide to scale back the number dramatically, then that could mean that some rural voters, for example, have to travel a substantial distance to be able to vote. In certain cases, they may be at the mercy of limited - and expensive - public transport.
Is a voting system fair if for some people, it is much harder to exercise their right? That's the sort of thing that, I think, needs to be considered very carefully in any changes.
And, as I think I made fairly clear, even in the country that's held up as the example for this sort of thing, they still don't surpass our levels of turnout. Of the people with whom I spoke, none said "oh yes, I'd be more likely to vote if I could do it electronically."
I set out to see if, given the worries about falling participation, e-voting would be the solution. And I think I did conclude that, not only does it not appear to increase turnout, but a lot of people feel that it would be solving a different problem, rather than the issue of why they may not vote.
Exactly; the Scottish referendum showed that if people think it's an important issue, they will register and they will vote - even without fancy things such as electronic voting systems.
But where so many votes are taken for granted, and most of the parties represent slightly different shades of a post-Thatcher consensus, no wonder a lot of people are disengaged.
It's not helped by hysterical media desperate to maintain the status quo; I heard someone on the radio describe "progressive" as "code for hard left" (admittedly it was Richard Madely, so not one of the great thinker of our time, but still given airtime nevertheless). And you just have to look at the claims like "Stalinism" or "Worst Crisis since the Abidication" thrown around by the Mail to see how much pressure there is on politicians not to differentiate in a significant manner.
Point C is where the Estonia system probably helps quite a lot. You can use the card to sign an electronic document in a legally binding way, for example. That's in itself is something many people might find very useful.
A unique card could also be used to allow access to a third party PKI infrastructure, allowing people to encrypt communications in a way that's verifiable, and pretty secure, too.
On point b, there's also a difference between mandatory issuing and mandatory carrying. The former is ok, I think - though you probably shouldn't have to pay for it - but I'm very strongly against mandatory carrying. That, to many people, would be a big change for the UK. Despite claims that some of the claimed reasons for introducing a card ("terrorism!") will be useless without mandatory carrying, they'll not be much better with.
And, mandatory carry works only when there's a penalty for not doing so. Just as there are people who have been stopped dozens of times for no reason, there will be some who'll still be stopped, until the day they've forgotten their ID card, and can finally be nicked for something.
Yes, you're quite right. The statistics can be pulled apart in all sorts of different ways, and it was very tempting. However, the main thing I wanted to look at was eVoting, and whether or not it has made a difference in places like Estonia. The lower percentage of people participating is what exercises the minds of politicians when they talk about engagement, rather than the absolute numbers, which are only considered important when it suits them.
Plus, I'd already ended up writing twice as much as I told ElReg I would!
That is, essentially, the premise of the "Demarchists" (Democratic Anarchists) in Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. Everyone is constantly polled, via an implant, in a sort of continuous referendum.
The book that covers it in most detail - and probably works fairly well as a standalone, if you've not read the others - is The Prefect.
The additional member system is what you're describing, and is how we elect people to (amongst others) the London Assembly. You get to pick a candidate for your constituency, and you get to pick a party, for the additional seats.
I'm certainly not the only person I know who 'split votes', choosing someone that I know is a good constituency representative from one party, and selecting a different party from the list.
The system is described at Londonist amongst other places.
One of the oddest things about the UK as presently constituted is the number of different electoral systems we have operating side by side.
There's FPTP for most, Supplementary Vote for the Mayor of London (and other Mayors too, I think), and Additional Member for the London Assembly, plus the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament.
Single Transferable Vote is used for for NI Assembly, Scottish & NI local elections and European elections in NI. The rest of the UK uses a Closed Party List system for the European Parliament.
That's five different systems used by UK voters, depending on what you're voting for and where in the country you are, or six if you count Alternative Vote which is used for some internal votes in Parliament.
If you were designing a new country from scratch, you certainly wouldn't end up with something like that.
(Full details of all the systems are here).
That, in theory, is one of the reasons why in Estonia you can vote multiple times (and even replace your vote at the polling booth).
You might have someone standing over you, forcing you to vote one way, but as long as you can get back to the computer, or to the polling booth, later on, you can make your real choice known.
However, it's still imperfect - someone could easily force everyone to e-vote right at the end of the allowable period, and make sure they don't get to the polling station on the day.
Directly comparing is awkward, yes, but you seem to be suggesting FPTP will produce lower turnouts (and we've definitely had some of those).
Look at the graph - we're actually doing about the same as Estonia, a country with both PR and e-voting. So, while there are other countries that do better (and most of them have PR), the poster boy that everyone holds up as being the solution isn't, really, doing any better in terms of participation than we are.
The system proposed wasn't proportional, though, was it? I suspect if it had been PR, many people would have chosen that.
There's actually an interesting piece over on Vice that mentions this; had Cameron actually allowed PR as an option, it might well be doing him favours now, making a Con/UKIP/LibDem alliance more likely to be able to continue governing than under FPTP.
That's one way it could go, certainly, but not the only one, surely?
For example, it might make it easier to wander round the day room of a rest home with a tablet or a PC on a trolley, getting people to wake up long enough to press the right buttons - no need to arrange for the postal votes, or transport to ferry them to the polling station.
While the FTPA means for the moment General Elections are likely to happen in May, not all elections will. If an election were called in the winter, and it snowed, would the skew be different - towards people in cities, and away from the country? That again might favour Labour more than Conservative, but it could also favour the relatively well off, rather than the rural poor.
The resourcing and the maintaining of a system are the aspects that would worry me most. We do tend to penny pinch a lot here. Only yesterday it was reported that the Met still has a ton of Windows XP machines ans it trying to arrange with MS to get at least another year of support, rather than actually replace them.
Given the understanding of tech in government, I suspect voting machines would end up in the same sorry state as Virginia. Or we'd get the situation I suggested where, in order to 'save money' that could be spent on the electronic system, some polling stations would be closed.
Or perhaps someone would come up with the bright idea of sponsoring them. After all, if roundabouts can be sponsored to raise money for local authorities, why not voting machines? Imagine having to sit through "a word from our sponsor" before you actually get to the screen where you can vote.
So glad they got him on board for this
@Alister Indeed, and for a long time, for instance, policemen (and I think the services too) weren't allowed to march in a Pride parade in their uniform, for exactly that reason.
Now, of course, things are somewhat different and many of the diverse tentacles of the state don their uniform and take part in the London Pride parade in organised groups.
It took a few calls to them, explaining the signal problems I had at home, and them checking coverage, and explaining that it's a semi-basement with very thick walls. Eventually they agreed, as long as I was on a 12 month or longer contract, which I wasn't.
Just keep hassling their support people, and explaining patiently.
Actually, it does use your minutes on Three; the page for the service says "We won't charge you a penny extra. Calls and texts come from your monthly price plan or Pay As You Go credit."
That said, it is a useful option. I wasn't allowed a femtocell, because I'm on a 30 day rolling contract and though the signal in my home is rubbish enough to warrant one, they said they would only let me have one if I switched to a 12 month deal.
Fortunately, the app appeared shortly afterwards.
The downside is that you can only use it with phones on which the app is supported. The femtocell will work with any phone compatible with the network, and you can easily add handsets for friends/family so they'll "just work" when they visit you. But for a household with a couple of people, who have compatible phones, I can't see any other significant difference.
(well, I suppose, since you may pay for data over the femtocell, if you have metered broadband, you'd potentially be paying twice for - to your ISP and to 3 - for heavy data usage).
There were those dotted around the place, yep. But as they were mentioned in the piece I linked to, and aren't so new, I decided to look more at the things that hadn't been covered before. I do quite like the Aeropress, and use it sometimes when my big bean to cup machine is out of order (which, thanks to its fiendish german complexity, happens rather more often than I'd like; thanks Siemens)
There usually are - with the various tools supplied, you can set your own password, but the 'easy connect' buttons would seem to make that fairly redundant. If security is an issue, you'd have to avoid using any such bits of kit, and set a password on each unit yourself.
If it were a "puff piece", I think I'd probably have omitted a whole section titled "Falling out of love," in which I discuss the problems that simply turning something off can have, and I'd have completely ignored the audible interference I mentioned I can hear on my kitchen sound system, following the installation of a 1.2Gbps unit.
I wouldn't have talked about "major hassle" and being "wary of HomePlug for the long term" either, I expect.
Now, I may not be as critical as you want me to be, but I certainly don't think pointing out these things makes it a cheerleading piece for HomePlug either.
Yes, I was wondering that. Where once most of the things plugged in were chunky devices like TVs or PVRs with proper grown up power supplies, there are an awful lot more things now running with cheap plug-top PSUs - besides the phone, there's now the tablet, there's a test PVR, the PSU for the Raspberry Pi, the Roku, ChromeCast, VoIP phones, and so on - so, compared to when I first started using HomePlug, there's probably a lot more noise than there was in the past.
Well, it's not the only security camera in the house; just the one that causes most concern, for some reason :)
I can also use it to check on the cats when I'm away, as they curl up in the chair or on my bed.
The mere suggestion that it might ever be used in conjunction with the sort of remote controlled sex toys I wrote about here is, of course, mortifying.
Nope; storage on my 2012 WiFi only version never got anywhere approaching even half full, I think.
I did find, after the stock update to Lollipop, that wiping the cache partition helped a little, as suggested by various websites. But while it was tolerable for a bit (as I mentioned in a post on ElReg around the time), it quickly became slow again.
Cyanogen has given it a new lease of life; though it's still a bit slow at some things, it's usable.
It does appear that the 2013 version behaved better; I don't know if there are also perhaps significant differences between the wifi only and GSM versions of the 2012 edition.
After the Lollipop update made mine horrible to use (and I mostly just use it for reading, so that's some achievement), and the second Lollipop update failed to improve matters substantially, I went for Cyanogen, which was pretty easy to install with their app, and has made it much, much more usable.
Still doesn't feel quite as good as when it first came out, but it is much better than with the recent Google updates (including the KitKat one, which was where things started to really go downhill for me).
While you may be able to make a claim for a fault for up to six years, unfortunately that won't really help (other than in a vanishingly small number of cases).
That's because, broadly speaking, up to six months the assumption is that the fault was present at time of purchase. After six months, the onus is more usually on the buyer to show that there was an inherent fault. And "not being compatible with the actions of a third party, which couldn't have been forseen at the time of sale" would not, I think, be what anyone could consider an inherent fault.
Fit for purpose is a slightly different matter, but even that is unlikely to extend beyond a limited time, sufficient for trying a piece of equipment and establishing whether or not it works. You can't retrospectively apply it. Otherwise, for instance, anyone who bought an analogue only TV set would be able to make a claim because of digital switchover. Or, for example, if you bought a set with a CAM so you could watch TopUpTV when it launched, only for that service to be discontinued, you wouldn't expect to be able to get your money back for the TV then, would you?
I would imagine that the only situation in which you might possibly have a small chance of a claim would be if you happened to buy one of these sets very recently (ie, probably within the last six month, so you don't have to prove an inherent fault) and you made clear at the time of purchase that watching YouTube was a key factor in choosing that set. Since the affected sets are older models, the chances of that are pretty slim.
Yes, it's pretty crappy behaviour on the part of manufacturers not to do updates for older sets - my first gen Panasonic VieraLink will doubtless fall foul of this - but I can't see any way in which the switching off of a service by Google could be turned into a claim under SOGA or other consumer regulations, so long after the sets were sold.
That would be me; the name's at the top of the article, but I guess you missed that in your rush to comment.
You also missed where someone pointed that out earlier, and I responded; simply mentally insert the word "formats" at the end of the sentence, and you'll get exactly what was meant, and what most people correctly inferred too.
Well, not quite.
Typically a Dansette (or any of the other numerous 'luggable' record players of the time, like the Hacker Cavalier which we had) was a little more than just the turntable.
While the LP60 is an automatic, the Dansette and its ilk would have an autochanger, which allowed for a stack of records to be played one after another, in a sort of mechanical playlist arrangement (can you tell I'm practising explaining things to young folk? ;-)) The mechanisms mostly seemed to come from either BSR or Garrard, as far as I can recall.
Plus, they also had an amplifier (usually valve). And a wooden case that was portable in the same sort of way as the Osborne 1. And some sort of leatherette material, that helped create that particularly evocative smell once the whole thing warmed up.
In the photos linked above, the Garrard SP25 is shown in its single play version; it more commonly had the usual stabilising arm to hold the stack, a longer spindle (you could pull it out and swap it for the single disc one), and a second sensing arm which worked out the size of the discs, so it could play a mixed size stack, whereas cheaper models (and many BSR ones) would have a lever to select disc size.
I have toyed with switching to a Hercules board, and almost did, as the power switch for the Valhalla failed. In the end, I bought a second hand one on eBay from someone who'd upgraded and just used the switch from that. The board does look a little cooked, but at least I now have a spare.
As others have indicated, it varies a lot between labels. Some are better than others.
Linn has a label of their own, primarily Jazz and classical stuff, and offers FLAC at a range of qualities, detailed here
Well, the Linn is certainly much better - but the TEAC isn't bad, and I would perhaps put it in a similar class to one of the lower end Rega models (I still have a P3, which is mostly used for 45s, the Linn being an old one with Valhalla PSU and so needing the adaptor ring to be fitted.to change speed).
With the TEAC, you could of course upgrade the cartridge too.
One of the most startling things was in the surface noise, especially from a slightly (but not much) warped single, on the Audio Technica. There was a clear and very noticeable effect, which almost overwhelmed the start if the track (The Visitors, b side of One of Use). I suspect that could be helped.by adjusting tracking weight, but you can't do that on the LP60. That noise is substantially lessened on the TEAC, and I've never noticed it on the Linn or Rega.
The other thing is the mechanical isolation - taken to extremes on the Linn, and that avoids pick-up from the lid. Eagerly grab the lid on the TEAC when the record gets towards the end, and you risk a thump on your recording.
As long as you don't get into things like click and noise removal, yes it's pretty straightforward. The biggest issue people may suffer is either not having a suitable line in, especially on modern laptops, or not realising about the need for a phono pre - amp, because most kit "just works."
A fair bit of new AV kit doesn't have a phono stage these days.
So, I thought it worth looking at these turntables that solve both those problems.
The record shop I went to in Dublin, while a touch chaotic, was at leas far less busy than the London ones. So I treated myself to a Kinks EP, a gold Adam and the Ants single, and Greetings from Asbury Park.
Anyone else a) been shopping and b) bold enough to hold their choices up for ridicule?
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