Electric Day Motions

Many are suggesting that EDMs need to be reformed rather than scrapped.

I have nothing to say on the cost or efficacy of EDMs as they stand beyond James Graham's view. However I do worry that, if badly done, electronicizing (?) EDMs would effectively neuter them. Part of the point of digitizing (that's better) things is that they become cheaper, easier to use and easier to maintain. If setting up an EDM became easier than it already is, then it is inevitable that there would be more of them, and more of them would be signed by more MPs.

Therefore, in order to be seen as worthwhile, an EDM would have to attract a considerably larger number of signatures than they do at the moment, which means that more MPs would spend more of their time ticking boxes and signing them.

Eventually, I envisage a situation in which there are 10x more EDMs, each with 10x more signatures, with MPs spending exactly the same amount of their time signing them, and the Commons spending the same amount of money maintaining the new, larger database.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but I hope you see my point.

Torture

None of us want the UK government to use intelligence gained by torture, do we?

Support Craig Murray's quest to have his evidence heard by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/your_help_neede.html

It'll take you two minutes to write one email, and another two minutes to forward the link to all your friends.

spag

Got an email from the lib dems suggesting that I go digg something. What does anyone think about this? It seems like going and voting things up on aggregators is going to be a new form of spam (spag, anyone?) because loads of special-interest groups are going to try it on - and special-interest bodies are going to have a lot of mindless clickers, whereas the rest of everyone has less of a stake in ruthlessly voting things down. This could lead to the ruin of aggregators by diluting their usefulness. At the very least it seems that the aggregator sites will have to fight back against spag, provoking another arms race.

Your thoughts?

Smoke

GOVERNMENT LYING ABOUT DRUGS SCANDAL. Except that it's not a scandal, is it, because bleating tabloid journos would rather a) be able to write ARMY BUSTS HUGE DRUG RING rather than ARMY ACTION COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME or b) report on the agonizingly slow death of Jade Goody. Girls Aloud are playing her wedding, don't you know?

free xbox controller as mouse software

If you are looking for some free software so that you can use your xbox controller as a mouse in windows, you could do worse than ControlMK. It is a bit fiddly, but it's free and it does the job. Saved me from the agony of the dodgy trackball on my cheapo wireless keyboard.

I'm mostly writing this post to give the guy a better search ranking, because when I was looking myself I came across a bunch of apps that wanted to charge money for the privilege of doing this fairly simple task - in fact, I was pretty gobsmacked that the Microsoft driver didn't allow you to use the xbox controller as a mouse in the first place.

Horse Bang

Compare and contrast. Oh, wait - artist with mental vision and no clear idea how to fix the engineering problems given heaps of money. They're both the same.

Watch this space for the first person to be killed in the UK by a giant steel horse cock, coming (so to speak) in 2012. At the earliest.

George Monbiot is often a smug tool. Today he is a king.