Category Archives: technology

Thoughts on fact checking

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This may I’m afraid be a bit of a ramble. It seems that “independent” fact checking has become all the rage in politics today. The Electoral Reform Society has opined that official “facts ” should be published before any future referendum, and anyone disagreeing with them should be punished – presumably “so the oiks don’t win again“. The Clinton/Trump debate was also live “fact checked”, and many on line debates are “settled” by referring to fact checking sites. Now checking facts in debates is a good thing, I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a very good … Continue reading →

BBC Van Scam

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There has been a bit of a furor of late due to a leaked report about how the BBC plan to capture those heinous people who watch iPlayer without a TV license. This has raised the question of BBC detector vans and how the BBC can catch you for watching TV without a license. Just to save time I’ll give the first word to Arstechnia and say out right that: “The real scandal is that you still believe TV licence detector vans are real” Once upon a time the BBC could maybe perhaps have monitored the radio signals given off … Continue reading →

Creative commons abuse 3D

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First off I will declare an interest the 3D modeller involved in this incident is an old friend of mine, so I won’t claim to be at all impartial. Now that that’s out-of-the-way I want to talk about the self entitled, ill-informed, delusional attitude of Ryan D. Simms of Just3Dtheft. The world of 3D printing is a new and burgeoning field and creating new and tested models that print reliably takes a huge amount of effort, so that the people who create such models release some of them for people to learn from and print for personal use is a … Continue reading →