That is what a computerised train safety system would cost and the number of lives it is expected to save, on average, in the UK. Yet a new report by Rail Safety still recommends that it be installed. £3bn spent on (say) heart defibrillators would save many more lives in this country and if spent on carefully targeted overseas aid could save hundreds of thousands of lives. It seems to me insane to even consider spending it on improving rail safety when rail is already one of the safest forms of transport…porn sex amateuradult porno clip s100 sex best sitesgay free porn allpictures pornstar tyler aliciachat sex aaa freeporn absolutely free ebonyclips 100 porn free Map

An interesting news item about relationships that start online suggesting they might be better than ones that start more conventionally. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the detail of the study referred to in the news report.

I would say that it can work both ways – it can allow people to be more emotionally open but it also encourages (even more than usual) projection of positive characteristics onto the person you are corresponding with that may not actually be real, and because text can’t transmit tone of voice or body language it is dangerously prone to misunderstanding. So proceed… but with caution would be my advice.

Perhaps because of the difficulty in opposing software and intellectual piracy privacy without looking impossibly self-righteous or in the pay of big corporations, Garry Trudeau rather fudges the message this time around (in this and the 5 following strips). This is a pity, since the message “go ahead, take anything you like” promulgated across much of the Internet is one that needs some criticism by voices outside the industry.

Pigeons…

The Economist praises (registration required) the remarkable success of a UNICEF booklet, Facts for Life, that provides basic health information targetted at some of the world’s poorest. It’s a simple step but a vital one. As the Economist points out:

Each year nearly 11m children die from easily preventable causes before reaching their fifth birthdays. Ignorance is often the cause. Many parents, for example, do not know that breast milk is the only nourishment an infant needs in the first six months. Some 1.5m children might be saved each year if they were not also given polluted water. Many people believe that drinking liquids makes diarrhoea worse, when someone suffering from it should actually drink as much liquid as possible. It is safe to immunise a child who has a minor illness or disability, or who is malnourished. Many parents, and even health workers, do not know this. The symptoms of pneumonia are often overlooked, with fatal results. Staunching a cut with mud, a traditional remedy, often causes infections. Two-thirds of students in their last year of primary school in Botswana, according to one survey, thought they could tell if someone was infected with HIV simply by looking at her.

Another company springs up in the US (to acclaim from the tech community) to encourage people to share their broadband using their wireless network equipment. Joltage’s idea is similar to what Sputnik wants to do (except unlike Sputnik it doesn’t seem to be open source). The key (to me) is in this para from this Wired report:

“At $50 per month, a DSL line — if shared by multiple users — could easily eat up several hundreds of dollars’ worth of wholesale network traffic at the back end.

“As ISPs realize this stuff is going on, they’re going to start looking closer at the heavy traffic users,” said Mike Durkin, president of Raw Bandwidth Communications, a Belmont, California, provider of home DSL service. “Think Napster and how ISPs and universities can block it.”

I think this is where the whole concept will come unglued unless the telcos also get a slice. If they do get a slice, though, it could be a good business, especially if standard antennas start offering greater range. It might also be a good way to encourage the development of community-wide networks run by not-for-profit organizations in depressed areas (a particular interest of mine).

A depressing side note – it is possible that 802.11a – the higher speed, incompatible upgrade due in November – may have a smaller range (60 feet vs 300 feet), so if people start migrating to that then the opportunities for neighborhood-wide sharing would be less. (Another publication says that the range should be the same).

One of my favourite directors died on Wednesday. Films of his I have loved include Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard.

The Economist (subscription required to read link) hits the nail on the head when it savages the government for using public private partnerships to conceal taxation.

“PFI deals are supposed to transfer risk from the public to the private sector. But with so much at stake politically, the government cannot afford to let them fail. One way or another, the railways have to work and the underground has to run. This makes it impossible genuinely to transfer risk from the public to the private sector, which undermines the purpose of PFI.

“If risk cannot genuinely be transferred, then the Treasury should own up to the actual cost of the borrowing that the private sector is undertaking on its behalf… Keeping risky investments off the books is the sort of thing that Enron did to its shareholders. It is not the sort of thing that governments should do to taxpayers. ”

The government should simply own up to the amount of money that fixing transport and health will require and raise taxes in order to pay for it.

Not only can you search what 6800 webloggers are writing about – it also lets you see what the “top 40” links of the weblog community are at the moment and even see what the most popular items are that webloggers request on the Amazon wish lists that they often provide for benevolent strangers (I have one too!).

The most popular links tend to be a little geeky but there is usually at least one interesting link in the bunch – today I read that adcritic, the site that used to bring the public streaming video of its favourite advertising (before it went bust) has been taken over by Ad Age which will be relaunching it as a subscription-only service.tone ringtone polyphonic free 16ringtones 213ringtones free nokia 2600for cent 50 ringtones sprintringtone emergency 51ringtone mobile 2 sidekick tcent do how ringtones we 50mp3 ringtone 6630 as Map

As this piece in Salon makes clear, even if you accept that widespread encryption would be a good idea on the Internet (I have my doubts) it won’t emerge very quickly because 1) most people don’t recognise the need and 2) the software needed to encrypt and decrypt is still too hard to use. The latter is a particular problem because at the moment the commercial company that owns the original PGP email encryption software, Network Associates, is not continuing development.

Open source developers have stepped in, but there we run into the problem with open source – most open source programmers just don’t ‘get’ useability. They write for each other, not for a wider public, so you end up with products like GNUPG that require you to type in cryptic commands to use it.