Nick Jordan

ID cards scheme ‘may cost ?18bn’. From the article:

Identity cards could cost ?18bn over 10 years, triple the government’s estimate, a draft report has said.

This could put the cost to the individual at almost ?300 instead of ?93, as previously suggested.

Holy fuck! If, and I know it’s a big ‘if’, this report is correct, nobody could sell this to the British public. Perhaps the whole scheme will be doomed by its own costs, which would please me immensely, although in a way I’d rather see it killed because people woke up to the huge implications for civil liberties. I won’t complain too loudly, though, as long as the whole idea goes away and never comes back.

I’ve just finished reading In Search of Albion by Colin Irwin. It’s about his travels around England looking at traditional events and music as part of an enquiry into what Englishness means. It’s a thoroughly good-humoured and well-balanced book by someone who clearly feels much the same way about this country as I do and I recommend it to anyone who lives here or who has any interest in the place.

From a story about wind farms comes this wonderful quote:

One of the objections, the other night, seemed to be that the turbines ‘desecrate’ one particular area of outstanding natural beauty. Twenty miles off the coast of Scotland. This is not an area of outstanding natural beauty. It is an area of outstanding grim storm-tossed frozen grey fishy instant death.

Joyful. Absolutely joyful.

Charity pleads for tolerance as autistic youngsters face Asbos. I appreciate the need for some sort of control over the worst excesses of some of society’s nutters but the use of ASBOs against the mentally ill is outrageous. From the article:

In one example discovered by BIBIC, an Asbo was given to a 15-year-old with Tourette syndrome, which can involve an inability to stop shouting out profanities. The order banned the teenager from swearing in public, something made impossible by the gravity of his disorder.

If we can’t apply the law with some common sense then it really needs to be changed, and quickly.

Last night I went to the recording of Dave Gorman’s show for BBC Radio 4, Genius, in which members of the public argue for their brilliant (and not-so-brilliant) ideas before Mr. Gorman and a celebrity guest, in this case Paul Daniels, decide whether they’re a genius or not. The studio audience then votes on the best two to pick a winner. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed myself, more so because the tickets were free. I should do that sort of thing more often.

I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last night. As a long-time fan of Douglas Adams’ work I was a bit apprehensive and, to a certain extent, I had reason to be. Many of the jokes had been cut down to little more than the punchline and the plot would probably be almost impossible to follow for anyone who’s not already familiar with it. It did have occasional moments of brilliance (I won’t spoil it by giving away any details). Overall, I’d say that it’s fun to go and see but don’t expect too much.

I’ve done the dirty deed this evening and voted, although it was more out of a sense of duty than any real interest in the election. Being a bit of a liberal lefty I couldn’t possibly bring myself to vote Conservative, I refuse to vote Labour ever again because of the promises Tony Blair made and broke in 1997 and I don’t like the Green Party’s policy on animal testing, besides which they didn’t field a candidate in my constituency. That left me with the Liberal Democrats, who don’t have a chance of getting in around here so I feel that, in one sense at least, my vote was wasted. I have, though, expressed my view and done the right thing.

One consolation is that the local MP, Labour’s Neil Gerrard, seems to be pretty decent as politicians go and it looks as though he’ll win without too much trouble. I took the guy to task via email a while back as his website was rather out of date and I was surprised to receive a very nice reply from him, explaining that it was being redesigned. At least he’s contactable by email and actually bothers to read it, unlike some MPs.

I was thinking this morning about music downloads. Now, I don’t download much music for a variety of reasons, including the fact that very few sites support my preferred format, Ogg Vorbis. What I was wondering this morning was exactly how much I’d be prepared to pay for an MP3 or Ogg version of a four or five minute track.

If I lived in a country such as Canada where a levy is imposed upon storage media in order to cover the supposed costs to the music industry of ‘piracy’, then clearly the price I’m prepared to pay is zero. I’ve already paid, so I should be free to download whatever I want. The same would apply if we had a system similar to the proposed Dutch one, where a tax is put on hard drives and other storage devices.

I live in the UK, however, where we don’t have such a system. So what is an MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis) file worth to me? Well, clearly it’s not worth as much as it is on a CD. I don’t get the nice booklet and other packaging. The storage and distribution costs are minute compared to shifting actual physical media around the world. Most importantly, the reproduction quality is nowhere near as good as a CD.

Then there’s Digital Rights Management. While it’s easy enough to circumvent, that’s not the point. The record companies obviously don’t expect me to do that. So, if I accept DRM, I have to pay for the same track several times if I want to play it on a variety of devices. I know that most systems allow for some sort of limited copying but it’s never flexible enough, at least for my needs.

So, if I accept relatively poor sound quality and DRM, I reckon the most I’m prepared to pay is around twenty pence per track. Somehow, I suspect, that’s not going to happen.