I'm a BBC employee, but these thoughts are my own and are not the official position of the BBC.

The BBC is world's largest broadcaster. We provide a wide variety of programming in a variety of areas. For historical reasons, we collect a license fee from the public. If you watch TV live in the UK, you currently have to pay £139.50 per year. The UK Conservative and Unionist Party, more commonly known as the Conservatives, or Tory party, wants to force the BBC to give up part of its license fee to for-profit corporations which, unlike the BBC, can advertise to earn revenue.

Well, so what? What's so special about the BBC that we should have a right to public money? Well, we have no intrinsic right to this money in the same way that, say, the police and fire departments don't have an intrinsic right to public money. However, like any public good, society cooperates to share certain resources for public gain. The fee is mandatory if you watch TV live and that's because voluntary cooperation leads to the free rider problem with public goods. In other words, when you have a shared resource that everyone can enjoy regardless of whether or not they pay for it, then some (sometimes many) will refuse to pay for, particularly in times of economic hardship. That's why you pay taxes for police, even in a recession. The presence of police will benefit you whether you're paying taxes or not. So the real question is, do we get what we're paying for from the BBC?

Just as a quick reminder, here are a few accomplishments of the BBC:

• We were the world's first national TV
• We were doing radio relay from the US in 1924
• In 1936 we launched the world's first TV service, proving it was viable
• 1937, we developed the first efficient speech microphone
• 1945, "Woman's Hour" was the first woman's radio programme (we already had the world's first female radio announcer over a decade before)
• 1952, we developed a video tape recorder
• In 1962, we were doing satellite broadcasting
• 1967, we launched colour TV in the UK
• 1974, we developed CEEFAX and gave subtitles to our programming.
• 1982, we introduced the BBC Micro in an effort to bring computer literacy to schoolchildren
• 1995 Digital audio broadcasting
• 2007 iPlayer launched

People seem to forget that many of the communication initiatives in the UK came first from the BBC because we were able to take risks that a profit-driven organisation is less likely to take, or will take later after waiting to see if others become successful. Many internal initiatives that we're currently taking are fantastic things I want to see made public, but I can imagine that if I were to go to another media organisation, they'd be less likely to take those risks due to the cost.

Of course, most people don't think about that. They just care about watching telly or listening to the radio. And what do we do there? Let John Cleese whinge about it.

So why do the Tories want to force us to give up part of our license fee? I don't know. Gosh, why would any politician want an organisation they have limited influence over to transfer power to profit-driven organisations whose corporate owners might hand that politician or their party lots of money or positive publicity? (Why would Republicans favour Fox over PBS?).

One thing the Tories would like you to forget is that we're already required to spend 25% of our income on external suppliers and we exceed that amount. So they want to force us to give up part of our license fee on top of our legal obligation to have a 25% external spend. I didn't hear that in the Tory speech I linked to above.

Inside the UK, we get beat up a lot by various media groups who are, to be fair, further right than we are. (In fact, the Daily Mail is only a short step away from being the mouthpiece of the racist British Nationalist Party). What people inside the UK often don't seem to realise is the worldwide admiration for the BBC. Many people outside the UK rely on the BBC to provide them "unfiltered" news they can't get elsewhere. You're simply not going to find profit-driven corporations forgetting what is needed to maintain that profit. There are plenty of times you can read about major stories being toned down or eliminated due to concerns about advertisers pulling out.

Many people in the US are unaware of the history of PBS, a station which could have been the US counterpart to the BBC. So what happened to them? In short, Richard Nixon. Nixon was unhappy with the independent spirit of public broadcasting. He felt they were too liberal and able to advocate for national causes that he didn't approve of. As a result, in 1972, he refused to sign H.R. 13918, a bill which would have provided full funding for PBS. That's why many shows on PBS are "brought to you by the MAJOR CORPORATE INTEREST OF THE DAY". Specifically, he wrote:

There are many fundamental disagreements concerning the directions which public broadcasting has taken and should pursue in the future. Perhaps the most important one is the serious and widespread concern--expressed in Congress and within public broadcasting itself---that an organization, originally intended only to serve the local stations, is becoming instead the center of power and the focal point of control for the entire public broadcasting system.

In short, public broadcasting should be about local interests, regardless of whether or not national issues fall within the scope of "public interest". PBS could have been so much more, but because it's funded by taxes and major corporations and the periodic public begging for donations, it's highly constrained in its ability to be independent. Republicans are still trying to cut its funding further. Right-wing news sources like Newsmax have pages describing why public funding for PBS should be eliminated. PBS periodically refuses to show public interest content which might offend corporate interests who fund PBS.

In short, remaining independent is critical to ensure that the BBC is able to present innovative programmes and independent news and public interest stories. The Tories want this independence to end. Right-wing media in the UK would love to see us eliminated. Yes, we present content that some people will find uncomfortable or unpleasant, but is the purpose of the BBC to present bland programming which does not provoke thought or debate? Is the role of the BBC constrained to not offending anyone? That's an impossible goal. As public and political attitudes shift, the BBC would have to constantly race to adjust all programming to be a bland morass of "feel good" shows which do little to make people think and does everything to avoid challenging their beliefs. Many people argue that we already have 1984 in Britain. Do we want Brave New World, too?

For more background on how the media works, I highly recommend the book Unreliable Sources - A Guide to Detecting Bias in the Media. Rather than have pundits tell you what is and is not biased. Learn to recognise bias for yourself. The BBC is not perfect, and perhaps our public funding does mean that we don't present news which makes a white, heterosexual Christian world happy, but that's what's great about the BBC. You may not always like it, but it's going to make you think and it's going to prompt debate.

Read it and weep Americans (read all of it, damn it). As with any system, there are pros and cons, but the British public health care system blows the American one out of the water. We pay less (both individually and as a percentage of GDP) and we get better outcomes.

If you do more research, you'll find out the Brits live longer, have better infant mortality rates and are generally healthier than Americans. At a fraction of the cost. I guess Americans are just too incompetent to figure out what the rest of the major industrialized nations have made work. Hell, the US has the highest infant mortality rate of any major industrialized nation. Latvia and Guyana are beating the US in infant mortality rates! Is it OK to let children *die* because your values reject people helping one another via the government?

A French friend told me the following joke:

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

Trilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Bilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language?

French.

I used to hear that joke, but the punchline was "American". When I moved to the UK, the punchline was "British". Now I hear it again for the French.

Interestingly, it's doubtful that this punchline would be "Dutch" or "German". There are many countries for which this simply wouldn't be meaningful, but it's nice to know that Americans aren't alone in this.

I don't know why this is difficult for people, but Joe Stack, the American who recently flew his plane into an Austin IRS building was a terrorist.

Some people call him a patriot. Others argue whether he is a criminal or a terrorist. What people are not doing, at least from what I'm reading, is defining the word "terrorist". Also, curiously, they're not talking about his victims (few, fortunately). Were he to have caused damage anywhere close to 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing I suspect that people would be more sensible about this, but hey, he only appears to have killed one person so far, so no big deal, eh? Unless you're in that person's family.

Let's get one thing straight: terrorism is the use or threat of violence against non-combatants to effect political change[1]. Ignore the the "proctologist with a flashlight" explanations from politicians or, for that matter, from most law enforcement officers with little to no experience with terrorism. This phenomenon, despite what people say, is actually fairly well known and understood and has been for quite some time. While those who truly study the field will have varying definitions, they all revolve around the central concepts of violence, non-combatants, and political change. Is a police officer a non-combatant? That's a subject of debate, but no one (even bin Laden, if you listen to him) denies that 9/11 was an act of terrorism because it clearly fits the definition.[2]

From this we can conclude:

• A man beating his wife is not a "domestic terrorist". He's a bastard, not a revolutionary.
• A hacker cracking the stock exchange's computers is a criminal, but regardless of his motive, he's not using or threatening violence and thus is not a terrorist (remember, without terror, there is no terrorism).
• The Thuggee Cult in India were not terrorists because their use of violence against civilians was to honor Kali, not to bring about political change.
• The Nicaraguan Contras, regardless of whether or not you agree with them, are extremely well documented as having used violence against innocent civilians that they thought were sympathetic to the government.

The issue with the Nicaraguan Contras is particularly telling. Many Americans thought the US was right to support the Contras. Regardless of whether or not you supported them, though, they still clearly engaged in terrorist activities. Like the many IRA groups in Ireland, whether or not you sympathize with someone's point of view has absolutely no bearing on whether or not they are a terrorist. You can call them "freedom fighters" if you like, but they're still terrorists. You can't have it both ways. They're not suddenly "unterrorists" just because you like them.

So what did Joe Stack do? He flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing one person, critically injuring two others and injuring eleven more. More casualties or deaths may emerge later. He had no reason to believe, and his writings support this, that he was attacking a military institution full of combatants. Further, he was doing this in protest to what he felt was unfair behavior by a branch of the US government. He wanted things to change and he wrote "Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer."

Thus, he's a terrorist. There's no way to escape this fact. It doesn't matter whether or not you sympathize with his position. He murdered at least one person and others may still die. If he had, however, flown his plane into a building at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, you could argue he was a guerilla fighter. He didn't and he isn't. Joe Stack was a suicide bomber. A terrorist. To argue otherwise is to make a mockery of the "War on Terror".

---

1. While most experts agree on a variant of this, they often disagree sharply on whether or not terrorism is exclusively the province of "non-state actors". The argument is that while a government might support terrorist groups, were they to directly engage in the same activities, it's an act of war, not of terrorism. Fortunately, this particular point is irrelevant to the fact that Joe Stack, not just a murderer, is also a terrorist.

2. For an excellent introduction to the field, I highly recommend What Terrorists Want by Dr. Louise Richardson, an internationally renowned expert on terrorism. Her's was the first book on terrorism that I read and I've written about Dr. Richardson before.

How did we get to the point of an idiot uprising in the USA, peasants marching on Washington and demanding tax breaks for the rich and insisting they've no right to health care? I'm still in shock over the idiocy of tea baggers. I'm sure you've heard the line "French Revolution in reverse". It's true. It's, it's, well, retarded. Country after country after country has demonstrated that you can take care of your citizens and still enjoy a very high quality of life. Are Americans so completely stupid they can't even pay attention to basic data?

Er, yes. Frankly, I admire the Constitutional ideals of my native country, but the current crop of patridiots is an embarrassment.

Ovid: Sarah, thank you for joining us today.

Sarah: Thanks for having me on your blog. wink

Ovid: Sarah, I know you're usually not asked about computers, but have you been following the Apple "whyPad" story?

Sarah: Of course, Ovid. I follow all of them.

Ovid: I've been struggling to understand Apple's "whyPad" and were hoping you could shed some light on this. Do you understand the "Jobs Doctrine"?

Sarah: Sure! People need jobs and death panels to kill off surplus unemployed isn't what the American people want!

Ovid: I'm sorry Sarah, I wasn't clear. I was referring to Steve Jobs. Do you understand his doctrine?

Sarah: Oh, him!

... long pause ...

Ovid: His doctrine?

Sarah: Right! wink I understand what he's trying to do. The American people want real, fundamental change with computing and open source computing means that terrorists can write software that tubes your credit card bill to Somalia for the pirates to pay off. That further engenders a change to the American way of life and our founding fathers wanted secure tubes. That's not what the American people want. They want honest change.

Ovid: So, do you see a fundamental need for this technology when anyone can buy a more powerful laptop computer which costs less money?

Sarah: Those laptops are made with foreign parts! We need to buy American to keep our economy strong!

Ovid: But it has a Samsung CPU. That's made in Korea.

Sarah: CPU was soooo cute in Star Wars! And that's the sort of feel-good American movie I want to see Hollywood make more of. Hollywood is full of liberals who want to undermine the American way of life. Except for Mel Gibson. He's a real American.

Ovid: Actually, he's Australian.

Sarah: Oh, that doesn't mean anything. The Brits do what we tell them to anyway. We have a special relationship, you know.

Ovid: Since you are worried about the American way of life, would you support a bill restricting foreign influence in US elections?

Sarah: Sure! Everybody knows that foreigners are just jealous of our way of life and want to destroy it if they can't move here. We need to keep America American!

Ovid: So you'll support the bill the Al Franken introduced to implement just such a restriction?

Sarah: Of course not! I mean, I haven't read the bill yet, but Al's a Democrat and they're real good saying nice sounding sounds which actually have a double entendre. Not that Al's not a great guy; he just doesn't have America's best interests at heart. And I want to say that I don't appreciate your question, it's just the sort of gotcha journalism that we need to stop!

Ovid: Fair point. So moving on, are you planning on running for the Presidency in 2012?

Sarah: Ovid, I'm flattered that you think I'm worth considering, but really, it's premature for me to think that far ahead. I just need to spend time listening to real Americans and get a better sense of how we need to progress forward. That's why I'm so honored to be a commentator on Fox News and that I can tell real Americans what we need to do. And besides, I heard there are inconvenient laws regarding me running for the Presidency while being a paid commentator. winkwinkwink

Ovid: Do you have something in your eye?

Sarah: Just a tear of love for the American people.

Ovid: Turning to Alaska, how do you feel about Ted Stevens conviction for apparently receiving bribes?

Sarah: I know Ted and I know he cares a lot about the Alaska Republican Party and I'm shocked to hear about this. I think he probably just forgot to keep his receipts.

Ovid: So you think he's innocent?

Sarah: Well, you know what they say. He buttered his bread and now he has to lie in it.

Ovid: Hey, that was pretty clever.

Sarah: What?

Ovid: Thank you so much for your time, Sarah. Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share?

Sarah: I love this country and I love the American people. Unfortunately, President Hussein Obama is pushing his bolshevik Muslim agenda on the American people and we need to see through his threat before he destroys our way of life. Oh, and we need more civility in US politics. People are tired of the socialist Democrats insulting everyone. They call us the "party of no", but the American people know we need straight party-line votes against anything the Democrats propose because they don't have America's best interest at heart.

---

If you liked this, you might also like Pulp Media Fiction.

When the Republicans extended an invitation to President Obama to speak at their retreat, I expect that many of them were surprised that he agreed to walk into the lion's den. Giving a persuasive speech to a hostile audience is always difficult, but it's generally agreed that the best way to start is to lay out common points of agreement and Obama managed to garner applause several times. He pointed out the bi-partisan support for the US military and the continued with a long list of things in which the Democrats and Republicans agreed upon. In fact, one of the most telling points — and one which will be largely ignored in the press — was when Obama pointed out that amongst world governments, the US Democrats and Republicans have relatively few differences.

Then he came out swinging, but in a decidedly polite fashion. He mentioned polls which showed that most Americans disagreed with the stimulas package, but overwhelmingly supported it when it was presented on a point-by-point basis. Again, this is something which will be largely ignored. He expressed his confusion at the widespread Republican opposition to his tax cuts for 95% of Americans even though said tax cuts are largely what the Republicans constantly insist upon. What's worse, he expressed frustration at how many proposals were attacked before before they were even described. His speech on how the politics of demonization — which he repeatedly made clear was an issue on both sides — made bi-partisanship almost impossible. You can't turn around and vote for a proposal which you've repeatedly told your constituents is a Bolshevik plot. You have no maneuvering room.

What truly showed his strength, though, was when he took questions for an hour after his speech. Many of these questions were hostile and some were clearly political pandering and Obama called them out on that.

What was truly impressive was how he reminded the Republicans, again and again, about how he took their ideas into consideration and how many of those ideas went into bills that were put forward. He also explained many of the Republican bills, showing that he not only read them and understood them, but also was careful to detail how even on Republican ideas he agreed with, he was carefully thinking through the consequences and working to minimize negative effects. He even owned up to some of his mistakes. Remember how our last President struggled to think of any mistakes he made? Obama was forthright about errors, though some of his answers seemed like painful circumlocutions to avoid some of the more painful topics.

It would be truly difficult for anyone to watch both Obama's speech and his question and answer session and claim the he's not willing to listen to Republicans. He also pledged that he's going to rectify his failure to bring Democrats and Republicans closer together and he'll work harder to bring the party leadership together for more open discussion. I suspect this was a carefully worded pledge to the Republicans to curb the perception of Pelosi's strong-arming of Republicans.

Was this a game changer? Will we see more bi-partisanship in the future? Immediately after the speech and Q and A, the Republicans appeared to shift tactics slightly, toning down criticism of Obama and blasted the Democratic Congressional leadership. I expect very little to come out of this other than interesting news stories. I hope I am wrong.

I know three programmers working at the BBC who were not offered jobs. At least originally. First, you search for a job. Then you answer a bunch of questions and you then have to register to apply. Then you then have to fill out an online application and click submit. You can't send a CV and you can't talk to anyone. The result? The three programmers I mentioned who were not offered jobs were all rejected by this Web process (I was sent a stock email informing me that I wasn't qualified), but all three of these programmers now work for the BBC because they found someone in IT who could forward their CV. The people who actually know about the jobs were very interested in the candidates in question, but the Web forms guarantee that many qualified candidates can't get pass the submit button.

Why, oh why, would you want to go through this pain? If the companies argued that it restricted the CVs to serious applicants, I could almost agree, but the fact that strong candidates are being rejected by this process is a frustration.

Similarly, I know someone who was trying to apply for a job with Islington Council and their application process was, in short, pathetic. CVs were not allowed. Instead, you have to jump through their hoops and answer a bunch of ambiguous questions which do nothing to judge whether a candidate is qualified beyond their ability to jump through hoops. Unless a candidate is dramatically unqualified, you can't judge a person's mettle without meeting them.

I told this person not to apply for that job. Any company which is so silly as to not recognize this idiocy is clearly not a company you want to work for. Then I remembered that the BBC does the same thing.

The BBC is a great place to work, but they often complain about a shortage of qualified applicants. I wonder why.

I've just had the most interesting meeting with another developer who needed to figure out a solution to a complicated problem. His solution was a caching strategy with synchronization issues. He had three separate processes which must be run in sequence and at the end, the only way he could figure out if his information was stale was to refetch the data he was caching. I was totally confused by the approach. When a solution is complicated and non-obvious, it's time look at the underlying design. He wanted to solve the problem and I wanted to simplify it. As it turns out, one minor change to our system eliminates many of the problems he was facing.

When faced with a complicated problem, I can't understand why someone's first instinct isn't to step back and say "what problem are we really trying to solve and how can we make it simple?" That should almost always be the first approach. When you can't solve it, simplify it.

Three guesses why this "exercise equipment" never caught on.



You have to wonder just who the hell thought they were going to make their fortune on this thing. How could you not realize what a laughingstock this thing is?

Birthers fail another one. They cite a 2004 "AP" story as evidence that Obama was born in Kenya. Turns out that the Associated Press did not, in fact, mention that Obama was from Kenya. Seems the "Kenyan-born" reference was added by an author who didn't bother to fact-check his sources.

His birth certificate has been released. Hawaiian state officials have verified that it's real. Hawaiian newspapers at the time of his birth had his birth notice. The courts have routinely tossed cases about this because there's no credible evidence he was born in Kenya. The "Kenyan" birth certificate which was released turned out to be a poorly made forgery. Several respected conservative magazines have investigated this and determined that Obama was born in Hawaii. Would you people who insist upon "knowing the truth about where Obama was born" knock it off? We already know the answer and there are far more important things to pay attention to.

In the Trinity College study American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population (PDF), we find that the Republican Party has troubling times ahead. The "nones" are those described as "no religion" in the American Religious Identification Survey 2008. The "American Nones" study has this to say about "nones":

Nones are easily misunderstood. On the one hand, only a small minority are atheists. On the other hand, it is also not correct to describe them as “unchurched” or “unaffiliated” on the assumption that they are mainly theists and religious searchers who are temporarily between congregations. Yet another incorrect assumption is that large proportions of Nones are anti-rationalist proponents of New Age and supernatural ideas. As we will show, they are more likely to be rational skeptics.

Amongst some of the highlights of the survey, it found that in 1990, 6% of Democrats were nones and 6% of Republicans were nones. Today it's 16% Democrats and 8% Republicans. Nones are currently 15% of the population, but that number is expected to rise to about one fourth of the population in 20 years. Further, fewer than 10% of nones under the age of 30 are Republicans. If the present trends continue, the Republicans are going to find it harder and harder to sway voters.

In short: the Republicans are actively chasing away one the largest and fastest growing demographic groups in the US. I wonder, perhaps, if they're actually responsible for this group's growth.

OK, pop quiz time. Please define "patriot".



(Originally found at Cake Wrecks)

Bureaucracy is a breathtaking thing to behold. I'm gone on holiday for two weeks only to come back and find that I'm now a Java developer. Though surprising, this isn't as entirely crazy as it sounds. A new system integrating with our platform needs to be developed and since it's a server on our Forge platform, it must be written in Java. Not having written Java in years, I am nonetheless our most experienced Java developer.

So we now have two new Java developers on loan to our team and my task, along with another developer on our team, is to learn enough Java to take over the new system being built and to use our rights modeling domain expertise to guide the Java developers on the creation of the new system.

So today, we find ourselves needing to explain the modeling of a particularly complex part of our system and we need to find a meeting room with a white board to diagram it. After much searching, one of the Java developers reports back that he's found an available room. Upon arrival, we find a lady in the room, gaily chatting away on her cell phone. Stumped, we stand around and try to decide options and I say "hold on a second." Our booking system is so rubbish that rooms are often double-booked.

I opened the door, stuck my head in and asked "excuse me miss, have we had another booking error?"

Since I asked, seems she just assumed that we had legitimately booked the room and apologized and left, making way for our team.

Not a nice thing to do, but we had a full, uninterrupted hour to realize that the problems we faced were greater than we thought.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

I'll be taking a couple of weeks off from hacking on my pet project as I'll be in the US for a friend's wedding, but in the meantime, I can still have ideas percolating in the back of my mind. What I'd like is some of your ideas percolating in the back of my mind.

Maybe you love adventure, you're bored with your home country, you prefer the politics of other countries, you want to travel, etc. Whatever your motivations, you probably have been annoyed trying to find "one stop shopping" for information about moving to other countries. Turns out it's a hard thing to do, but there's a lot of possibilities out there, if only you had the information.

Most Web sites dedicated to this topic restrict you to a single country or are old school sites like www.expatriates.com or hideous commercial sites like www.escapeartist.com with no social aspects.

I think it would be interesting to build an online community of world travellers (or would-be travellers) with an ability to share stories, experiences, tips, etc. Search for countries by ease of entry, languages spoken, government stability, job prospects, immigration laws, etc. If such a Web site appealed to you, what would you want to see in such a site?

Because you were just dying to know (ok, you weren't), I've been building a Web site. There's nothing terribly exciting and most of you would be bored to tears by it, but geeks might be interested in the technology used to build it.

The site is running from the built-in Catalyst server on a friend's box and the database is SQLite, so don't hammer it too hard :)

Naturally, the source code is public.

I had to send an email to our internal customers. Regrettably, it's both an extremely important and long email. Those tend to not get read. My email opened with this:

In our never-ending quest to annoy our customers, the PIPs team has identified a potential need for a backwards-compatible API change.[1]

See that "[1]"? Means there's a footnote. After a long, drawn-out technical explanation, I have a footnote. If they read the email, they might actually notice the footnote. This is that footnote:

1. Actually, our first plan to annoy our customers was to steal your puppies, but we quickly realized that some of your are puppyless and we'd have to spend our hard-earned cash to buy you puppies first. That would annoy *us*, hence our fall-back annoyance strategy.

I originally wrote "eat your puppies", but that would have been unprofessional.

So it turns out my trip to Portugal was more eventful than I thought. Leïla, the woman to the right, foolishly agreed to marry me. No date is set for the wedding, but given that it will be a mix of French, American, and English cultures (one of these things is not like the others), it should be interesting. I have a larger Lisbon, Portugal photoset on Flickr, if you care to see it.

We also mentioned this on Facebook. My favorite comment so far was by a French gentleman whose English appears about on par with my French. He wrote "We enjoy the weeding ceremony". Seems like a rather appropriate mistake :)

Update: Bah! They removed the image :/

(Can't credit the gif as I don't know the author and it's a random photobucket link)