Individuals 1 Old guard 0

The Ryan Giggs injuction shows just how quickly the world is changing and how slowly the old guard is realising this.
Governments think they decide how everything works in their country.
Companies think they decide how everything works, no matter which country they operate in.
Lawyers pride themselves on being able to write unintelligible documents about any country’s legal rules in any language.
But more and more, individual people are able to use international services over the internet. The people in France, Malaya and India are deciding to use the services provided on the internet by Google, Facebook or Twitter without worrying about where those services reside or whose laws they obey.
The old guard haven’t worked out how to cope with this.
Much of the debate about the Giggs injunction has centred on whether his off-pitch moves meet the public interest test. This is old thinking. Public interest is something you can use in the UK to justify publishing something other people want to hide. Newspapers and broadcasters worry themselves sick over whether something is in the public interest or not.
Twitter doesn’t bother about justifying any of the tweets its punters throw out. It just lets them throw them. The volume of garbage people tweet every days makes it impossible to monitor.
If the twitterati start to gossip about something, they don’t stop to check whether there is an injunction.
Ten years ago, if you wanted to publish something, you needed a fairly big organisation to do it - a newspaper, a magazine, a TV or radio station. If a publisher publishes something it shouldn’t, you can sue it, with a reasonable chance of collecting any damages if you win.
Today, any cheapskate can publish on Twitter, on a blog, with an e-mail. They can do so anonymously if they choose. Try suing an anonymous cheapskate who published on a service run from Tucson, Arizona and see how much you collect.
The Arab spring has shown how the internet allows people’s voices to be heard even in countries which use force to stop them complaining.
The inability of a British legal injunction to keep sexy gossip hidden shows people’s voices can be heard because the old rules were made for the old world.
The internet is allowing the individual to blossom.

Engineers

London Bridge is one of the busiest areas in the city. Big station, carrying thousands of people every day; big bridge taking people and road traffic to and from work in the City; big bus station taking people to and from other parts of London; big hospital sorting out people who don’t feel too good; big market where thousands go to buy great food.
And in the middle of all this hubbub are two massive projects: the Shard and a new railway bridge. Both are being managed superbly.
I worked in newspaper production. It’s a fairly simple process; it’s the same process every night;  most of the people work for the same company. And it is always chaos.
A building is much more complicated. Each one is different; hundreds of sub-contractors do their specialist bit; the raw materials are heavy.
The Shard is wedged between the stations and the hospital, but all the concrete, steel and glass cladding comes in and is dealt with, just in time and without disturbing the buses and ambulances too much.
The bridge goes across Borough High Street at the end of London Bridge and its viaduct goes through the famous market. The engineering solution: Build the viaduct first, build the bridge on top of it, then slide it over the road over a bank holiday weekend, without disrupting any of the trains going over the existing bridges. They did it this weekend. The sub-contractor they called in to do the sliding was Mammoet, the Dutch team who are the world champion heavy lifters.

Start

Going

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In

I take my hat off to the engineers who are doing these massive jobs. I also marvel at the people who did massive jobs in this same area hundreds of years before. Those who built Southwark Cathedral and the brickies who built the arched viaduct which takes the railway through South London to Kent. They had no tower cranes, no computer design or control systems.

Engineers have always been giants. Thank you, gentlemen.

Zap

Smart phones are rapidly taking over from the umpteen remote controllers which lose themselves in the home.
Why does a TV manufacturer need to design and build a zapper for each TV he makes? Why not get someone to create an app for the iPhone and Android which will do the job.
I have different zappers for four devices in my home. They range from the sticks which come free with a TV set to the hand-held controllers for my Sonos music system which have sealed-in batteries and cost £279 to replace when those batteries die.
Luckily, Sonos controller apps are available free for my Android phone and my wife’s iPhone. We use them, now. How long before we can zap the TV with our phones too?
Our phones are always with us. They have intuitive interfaces which are weaning people off the idea that a Windows interface is the only one they can use.
Manufacturers who need a device to operate anything in the home, in the car, on a bus or train, will find it simpler to create apps for the phones everyone has than to manufacture a unique controller.
Grandpa, what does this thing with buttons do?

Grey power

The debate about how we elect MPS is interesting. It demonstrates the black and white nature of our politics.

Black says our way is right and the white lot would ruin it. White says the black lot are ruining it.

The reality is that black and white are both grey. Their ways are more or less the same. It doesn't matter which one is in power.

One faction does better under the blacks. Another does better under the whites. Most of us do better when times are good and worse when they are bad. And a government, of any hue, has little control over that.

So how we vote for our MPs matters little.

We have first-past-the-post now, which means there are safe Tory seats, safe Labour seats and the LibDems, Greens and other fringe parties may get an odd seat here and there, but are never going to gain a majority. Once a blue moon, neither black nor white gains an outright majority and the LibDems, or one of the other fringies, may be offered a coalition.

We are offered Alternative Voting, which would still produce safe seats, but might give the fringe parties a better chance in the seats which aren't safe. This might increase the number of times when a coalition is needed.

So what? European countries often have coalition governments. Germany does and Germany is doing better than most of us.

We have a coalition and the wheels have not fallen off. The LibDems are getting a lot of stick for taking part, but all political parties get stick from other political parties all the time. The punch and judy show at Question Time demonstrates this. The only other people who behave like this are football fans.

The party we vote for, the way we vote for them, are just details. When we get fed up with one lot, we can vote them out, whatever voting system we use.

People in Zimbabwe and Libya would love to have any parties to vote for and any way of voting.

Sir Alex Ferguson

Sir Alex Ferguson has been banned from the touchline for five matches and fined £30,000 by the FA.
The FA aren't fit to lace his boots. What has the FA ever achieved? What has Sir Alex Ferguson achieved?
Sir Alex is passionate about football. So are football fans. It's a game of passion.
Referees have a difficult job, so difficult that they sometimes make mistakes.
If the FA don't organise some way for referees' mistakes to be put right; if the FA simply say obey the referee and shut up, they will get managers shouting their mouths off. And if their only response to that is to ban and fine the giants of the game, they lose any remaining respect from the people who play and watch football.
The FA should do the job is is there to do - organise the game properly.
John McEnroe used to be censured for disputing line calls. Now, tennis players simply ask for Hawkeye to demonstrate whether the ball was in our out. What is the FA doing about using technology to demonstrate whether a player is offside, or whether a ball has crossed the goal line? Nothing. All they say is obey the ref and shut up.
The FA should not fine Sir Alex. They should listen to him and work out how to stop him moaning by making the game demonstrably more fair.

Success

We crave success. We hate those who achieve it.

Rupert Murdoch is the latest successful man to raise our hackles. He actually wants to profit by his success. And people say the Government is guilty, too. It shouldn’t let him be so successful.

In the West, it is possible for any of us to be a success in business, sport or showbiz. All you need is a vision and the ability, guts and determination to make it work.

Very few have all these qualities.

Millions of youngsters are clever with computers. Bill Gates at Microsoft, Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook have turned their skill into businesses generating millions. The rest are just clever with computers.

Millions of youngsters are brilliant at sport. Roger Federer, Valentino Rossi and Lance Armstrong are champions. The rest are good losers.

We like a good loser. The Americans say a good loser will always be a loser.

Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger are bad losers. They have cupboards full of trophies to prove it.

Rupert Murdoch built a successful newspaper business in Australia. He then came to Britain and wanted to repeat the trick. We wanted all sorts of assurances before we let him buy The Times. We didn’t ask him if he was prepared to pour money into it, to employ journalists in it, even though it has never made him money. He did because it was part of his vision.

He saw the possibilities in satellite broadcasting. He reckoned people would be prepared to pay for good programmes. They didn't initially, so he did a deal with British Satellite Broadcasting, which limited both their losses and bought the joint company the time to make it work.

That took guts and a lot of money. But, eventually, the losses turned to profits – huge profits.

He spent the money to produce good programmes - Sky News, with all its journalists, Sky Sports and HBO programmes, even though they cost him a fortune.

He then took the same vision to America and made it work there, too. And if you succeed in America, you become rich and powerful. They understand about success and power in America.

Now, he wants to buy out his old BSB partners here in the UK. He wants to keep all the profits, no doubt so that he, or his organisation, has the money to spend on other ventures.

We want assurances again. We don’t think the Government should let him do this. He would become too successful. He would overshadow other News organisations.

The door is open to any other news company to be as successful, as powerful. They could try to emulate his success, or even exceed it.

But they don’t. They complain and try to restrict him.

Go web, young man

In the old days, you needed to know where you could get stuff. All the shops in your town which sold the DIY stuff you wanted, the records and books you wanted. The places you could go with a stripped bolt and say I want something like this.
Now, we have the long tail of the internet, which will find you something like this wherever it is and charge you a pittance to have it sent to you.
Example: I needed a short HDMI lead. Nothing fancy, just a 1 metre lead.
PC World had one in an awful bubble pack for an amazing £26. Maplin, who used to have cheap stuff, charge the same price.
On the web, various cable firms can do one for £6 to £8 plus postage.
Amazon, bless them, found a Marketplace bunch who wanted just 20p for a 1 metre HDMI lead, plus £1.99 for postage.
The web has taken all the skill out of being an anorak.