"We can't screen an event involving some teams and riders under suspicion of doping."(That's strange. Of course they can. They have before and I bet they'll still show motorsport, football, horse-racing, golf, wrestling, and so on if they get them. They just don't want to show cycling.)
"We want to show by this gesture that we're ready to support cycling only if it's clean, that's to say without banned doping sustances."(That's actually quite a high standard: over 180 participants, none of them cheating. That's a lot harder than 20 drivers or 30 footballers all being clean - even then, they don't always manage it and I don't see ARD/ZDF dropping those sports every time one player is accused of doping. Never mind all the smaller cheating attempts which are easier in many other sports than cycling.)
"It's a warning to cycling and to every other sport,"It's a warning that ARD/ZDF's TV producers are short-sighted and don't care about the viewers. At least Eurosport Germany continues with live coverage every day! Let's keep watching and see how the chips fall for Sinkewitz. Are ARD/ZDF fee-payers raising hell about this absurd decision? I hope so.
"Do these banks actually send billing information via email? The US banks I've dealt with (and other things, like most utility companies) only send you notifications to go to their encrypted web site to get your bill."Good question. Actually, I don't know. I already have web access to my bank statements, so it would be strange to describe that as email billing. My emailed phonecoop bill is the actual bill as a PDF file attached to an email, along with a zipped CSV file containing fuller call data. I don't mind that being unencrypted too much because I download it from their mailserver with TLS, which doesn't seem too risky. Another phone company sends me an emailed bill as plain text, also unencrypted - I should go stop that one. Looking at the other utilities, it seems like two of them send email notices telling you to use their (horribly broken) web sites to get the bill, while the water company try to screw you if you sign up to their web services, and don't seem say how their system works. So, I'll not be signing up for any more of these just yet. What idiots are describing "email notices that ask you to download from the web" as email billing, which UK companies actually offer proper email billing and do any encrypt email yet?
"pamflip does not seem to be in the fiesty netpbm package nor does it seem to show up in packages.ubuntu.com."Huh? Ah. Ow! Once again, I fall freely into a freedom freefall. It seems that netpbm is not the same as debian's netpbm (also used by ubuntu) and the machine providing my root window is currently using netpbm rather than debian's one. (Why? Not sure yet. It annoys the hell out of me, because every man page refers to a web page.) Apparently debian has its own netpbm because
"Upstreams and debian goals differ in some aspects too much to build the package on upstream versions"How? In what way? No further explanation is linked. Anyone got a good intro to the history of this? Any road up, it seems that debian's netpbm doesn't (yet?) have pamflip, but it does have pnmflip. I've changed the script to match.
#!/bin/bash
# keeps updating le tour on the top left of the root window
# Depends: bash, netpbm
while true ; do
xsetroot -bitmap <(
curl -s 'http://live.cyclingnews.com/?id=latest' \
sed -e 's/<br[^>]*>/\n/g;s/<[^>]*>//g;s/ / /g;s/ *$//;1,/Tour de France/d;/\(rovisional\ start.*prev\)/,$d' \
cat -s fmt \
pbmtext -builtin fixed pnminvert \
pnmflip -tb pnmcut -h 620 -pad pnmflip -tb \
pnmpad -black -w 1024 -h 768 -b 620 -l 0 \
pbmtoxbm )
sleep 300
done
"If Veolia does not have enough manpower it will send out a green waste lorry, or a domestic refuse lorry which usually picks up black bag rubbish, to pick up both at the same time. [...] The staff will just take it for granted that green waste is in the green lorries and domestic waste is in the blue lorries."This is bad on many levels, even worse than my old example where recycling-ready waste was knowingly tipped into landfill. There's green waste contamination and false collection statistics, for starters. The article continues to report that Cllr Carl Francis-Pester, North Somerset Council's executive member for environment, said:
"We are carrying out an immediate investigation into these allegations which we take very seriously indeed. This investigation will include urgent discussions with the contractor to ensure they are fulfilling the contract we have with them in the correct manner."There doesn't seem to be any information about this investigation on North Somerset Council's web site. And if Veolia have spotted a loop-hole in the contract, then what? Even if they haven't, the council has to watch solely-profit-led contractors like hawks because if you give them a chance to cut costs (and therefore increase profits), they will try it. That is the hidden cost of outsourcing, not covered by the Best Value Indicators and other privatised council jargon. Incredibly, the councillor continues with:
"Thanks to the residents of North Somerset we have increased our recycling rate from 20.5 per cent to 30.8 per cent in the last 12 months."If the allegations are true, then no, we haven't, because the statistics would be as full of toxic rubbish as the green waste lorries. Have private rubbish collectors been doing this elsewhere?
"I really appreciate finding somewhere that's giving info' on where to find the coverage on t.v. I've just looked through Sky t.v listings and coudn't find a damn thing at 9a.m. on Saturday.........unless I'm blind and stupid. So ITV4 sounds the best, then. I'm not subscribed to the larger SKY packages. It's such an excting time!!!! The Tour De France starting HERE in England!!!!"I've also linked CTC's listing in the last few days, which is more complete. I'm not subscribed to Sky either and I don't think British Eurosport's coverage was as good as International Eurosport in the past. I would be quite annoyed if I paid for Sky's sports package and still only got such limited coverage when better is available free-to-air. Get a dish, point it at 19 east and enjoy the German, or 5 west and enjoy French. Maybe today, the weather here will be good enough for me to fix my dish. I'm still surprised by itv's bizarre decision not to promote their tour coverage properly and not to put the highlights on itv1. Wouldn't 2 million fans be worth sacrificing a little of their much-hated late-night phone-in game show that currently hogs itv1 after midnight?
"The BBC should remain impartial, but they're currently having hot patootie with Bill Gate and his chums in Redmond. They continue to use OUR license fee regardless of our objections to their dimwitted decision to use DRM, and now say they'll review the situation is six months. Thanks, BBC. Thanks a lot. Can I get some of my license fee back to afford these additional costs, please?"No wonder the Open Source Consortium says they'll complain to the European Commission - it's blatent bundled sales. TV has got away with worse in the past (for example, Channel4-satellite requires you to buy Sky), but the BBC's TV-tax-funded services had been getting progressively freer. This latest reversal of that makes me wonder whether Freesat will be fully-viewable with free software. Also, they're up against another big problem: given a choice between the expensive and inconvenient legal iPlayer and the free and easy illegal torrents (which I'm told have US imported shows earlier), which will users choose? Surely not even the BBC's advertising power will overcome iPlayer's 200 quid bundled sale and auto-delete? Let them know it won't: petition the Prime Minister to open iPlayer. The BBC is a Royal Charter Corporation and should act in the public interest.
"All welcome to demo or watch, or get stuck in. 10am-4pm at the Trinity Centre Radio Studio BS2 0NW this Sunday 8th July. Please bring laptops and pluggable linux compatible sound kit. Small sets of speakers an headphones also good. We'll have access to 3 AMD64 machines with 64Studio installed. Please ask if you have any question, contact me through email or call Bristol Wireless to get other contact details, such as my mobile number. Entrance to the trinity will be through the back door, please be patient once you have rung as it's a long way from the radio studio to the back door. Ooo, and it's free. Cheers all, see you there."(Seen on BBLUG)
"I see--Redarded Terrorist--ok. So this Gareth fellow is making a comparison with smarter, more intelligent terrorist that was the IRA. Which kind of says that everyone should be far less afraid of the current crop of folks and yet the media, as it does so well, inflates their dangerousness for the sake of ... well, beats me. Oh, maybe it help Tony get a job ;-) If the IRA came to the US, what color (or is that colour) code would their activities get on our terror scale as opposed to these Tardorrists?"How about Emerald Green? More seriously, I think it's entirely fair to suggest we should fear this lot less than the often-USian-funded Provisional IRA, or local groups like animal liberationists. Those didn't just attack the big cities - it was everywhere, an attempt at terrorism. I lived about three miles outside Milton Keynes, then a fairly small midlands city, which was firebombed by both those groups. Ultimately, it didn't work. Most people weren't terrified. We carried on regardless. The government may be over-hyping this threat to ride in a new load of "expensive and ineffective" Security Theatre measures, like ID cards. Some media is sceptical, but the Murdoch-run media is mostly complicit, which is hardly surprising given the historic relationship. We should not let these "tardorrists" change our way of life, yet that is exactly what our spineless politicians seem to be doing. Let's continue as before: beware, but be happy. Update: niq comments:
"Recommended reading: Terry Pratchett "Interesting Times". Written before "9/11" and set in the wrong part of the world, but nevertheless beautifully relevant."
Next.