Yet another comparative survey on broadband takeup across Europe – this one indicates that 7% of UK users are now on broadband, compared to 17% in Spain (how humiliating to be left behind by Spain!) and 29% in Sweden. But the news is not all bad – we are catching up to Germany and Italy who are tied on 8%. Of course the low German numbers may be due to the large number of ISDN connections there – if you can get 128KBps on dialup then you might not be as keen to upgrade.

Across Europe, 26% of people said they were looking to get broadband but worryingly a quarter said they “would never” get it. And that’s a sample of people already using the Internet – if you looked at the overall population the numbers would be even more discouraging. Cost of access used to be a significant barrier, but with some broadband connections under £20 a month this is getting to be less of an excuse.

Clearly the man on the street (or even more importantly the woman on the street) needs to understand what the relevance of broadband is to them.for free adult sexaja 80 s pornoffender registry alabama sexporn amature trailersalicia sex silverstonefree amature sexsex ameteuramatuer photos sexy Map

The BBC World Service‘s Assignment programme reports from China’s old heavy industrial heartland on the desperate plight of the workers there. It isn’t news but it is poignant and depressing to learn that away from the glitter of the coastal provinces workers are struggling to make ends meet and government officials are robbing both them and many of the new neo-capitalist entrepreneurs that emerge.

I didn’t realise that in China there is no longer a welfare system or free medical care as I had assumed there would have been during the more “pure communist” era.

Howard Rheingold shares an anecdote about what happens when you combine a bar code reader with Google. He picked up two products at random off the shelf and then googled to find out more about them and got some interesting results.

Of course he could just have pulled the name of the products and their manufacturers off the boxes in plaintext somewhere, but this was a kind of “v. 1.0” thought experiment.

If people had bar code readers attached to smart devices wirelessly connected in future (or more likely were reading the radio tags that will be provided in future products) the process of checking your consumption against ethical (or dietary or environmental) criteria could be very much speeded up. You could just swipe an item and have it checked against your choice of “blacklist” – ie “Don’t buy that pineapple – the growers are being drastically underpaid by that company”.

As long as you have a broadband connection so you can watch this video without downloading for hours. Since I normally abhor “click here”-style postings that don’t give you a clue about the content, think Leonard Nimoy… and hobbits.

(Thanks to Karen Murphy for the link…)

The BBC has finally cracked its copyright problems and is starting to archive all of its radio dramas for a week after broadcast to give you a chance to listen to them if you missed them live. Excellent! It’s a shame OneWord (which offers streaming books from 6 to midnight UK time 7 days a week) can’t offer the same feature…

Wired has revealed in its latest issue that not only does Google remove hate sites on request of foreign governments – it also removes sites that a lawyer suggests infringe copyright – again without notifying anyone. What the article doesn’t make clear is whether they bother to follow through and determine whether the site actually does infringe copyright or whether they just take it off the database and wash their hands of the consequences. Do the offending sites even know that they have been removed?

Nature writes about an EU-funded pilot programme to let people rent out PDA-based tourist guides with GPS to guide you to the right info.

This is something I keep telling people someone ought to do. Of course the GPS will only work outdoors and away from tall buildings so some may have problems. I suppose art galleries could put in some kind of “auxiliary positioning” system so the devices could know which painting you were stood in front of? Anyone heard of this kind of thing? Hmmm…

I just discovered, to my horror, that the poverty line measure in the US is simply the cost of food times three. Not only is that measurement dating back to 1963 extremely primitive – it is also not adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living, so, as the article linked says, “Uncle Sam thinks a dollar goes as far in New York City as it does in Fargo, North Dakota”. Measures of poverty are, of course, a political hot potato, so it is perhaps not surprising that nobody wanted to examine this too closely, but it really is amazing that policy making in the US is still largely based on such a limited set of figures…

I am pretty sure that the UK and Europe are a little more sophisticated in their calculations.payday business 8 loan 11loans 99 paydaya loan consolidation bill debtpayday only loan saving accountloans realestate adjustable rateloan payday california advancecash loan 5 advance illinoisfast cash loan advane paydaybank advantages commercial loanscredit loans adverse onlinemovie holes disneyscript vocabulary moviewatcher moviepeople of sex having moviesmovies musclemenxxxnaked movie maleold movies sexonline sex moviesquicktime maker movieschoolgirl moviescredit aaa aa credit versusaccredited high schools correspondencecredit mortgage adverse sussexcredit adverse personal loatax credits 2006 underusedsecurity causality accredited company andaccreditorsprivate in schools accreditated pa harrisburg Map

The Economist produces yet another survey defending increased immigration to the West. It’s a mixed blessing – on the one hand it correctly points out that Western countries need immigrants and that countries that have a lot of emigrants can also benefit if they return.

One interesting effect of tight immigration policy they point out which is obvious if you think about it is that it tends to encourage those immigrants who make it in to stay even if they would prefer to return to their own countries, since it is difficult to leave and come back again.

One interesting partial solution The Economist mentions is the idea of selling temporary work permits, with the price going partly back to the country from whom you are emigrating, alongside a bond which would be refunded once a worker returned to their country of origin. That would help control the process while taking it partly out of the realm of illegality (a similar argument to the taxing of currently illegal drugs with the money to be spent on treatment centres, which also makes some sense to me). Unfortunately, most of the survey is only readable by Economist subscribers.

Here are the related items The Economist pointed to:

Britain’s Home Office publishes “The Migrant Population in the UK: Fiscal Effects”. The National Academies Press posts “The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration” (the NRC report 1997). Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti posts its report “Managing Migration in the European Welfare State”. The UN offers highlights from its study “World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision”.rd herrington lawrenceville 1098ringtones 8125 preloadedringtones 8stops7psychology criminal farrington full a2 studyringtones nandi aldo90064 avenue barrington 2515adkins familytree england warringtonringtones 100ree 3585i nokia Map

To me the most interesting thing about this article revealing the contents of Saddam’s email box is not the contents themselves (though there are a surprising number of people who want to help the guy out, apparently) but the fact that it is published at all. If someone at Wired had hacked into, say, Tony Blair’s email box do you think they would have been allowed to publish those results?poster serenity moviesex female pics free free ejaculation moviessex movies flashmovie sex samplein disney subliminal messages movies sexualmovie thumbs shemaleclips silvia saint moviedipping skinny movies Map