maniacmartin

Slashdot and The Guardian recently reported about the arrest of the owner of tv-links.co.uk and the sites subsequent closing down. TV Links was a site which linked to videos on other sites (like Youtube and Veoh) where users could see TV series. The arrest was made by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police.

The biggest use of TV links that I know of was people watching sci-fi series that had been released in North America, but that the industry wouldn’t make available to UK viewers. So these series-followers had no legal route to get the series in the UK when it was released in America. Maybe the industry should look at why people are using TV links and provide a legal route for them to get the programmes, without making them wait weeks after it’s been aired in America. No-one wants to wait to see programmes that have been aired.

The big concern to me is the americanization of our country. It seems it is now illegal to link to a site which could be used for piracy. In effect this makes merely distributing information on how to copy copyright material illegal. Websites like BBC seem to have covered themselves by not linking to any of the sites in question when reporting news stories about piracy, but is there any difference in telling people they can get movies from The Pirate Bay, than telling them they can get movies from The Pirate Bay? An interesting question would be whether telling someone they can buy pirate DVDs at a certain place at Hemswell market also counts as “facilitation of copyright infringement”.

I am going to outline what I consider to be the British electoral voting system’s most fundamental flaw, and why I think it must be changed.

The current setup
The UK is divided into areas called constituencies. People can stand for election in a constituency, and represent their chosen party. Citizens then vote for a party within their constituency. In national elections, what they are really voting for is only the party.

Within each constituency, votes are totalled and the party with the most votes then represents that constituency. On a map, this area would be coloured with a colour to represent that party.

Then, nationally, they add up the number of constituencies represented by each party. The party with the highest number of constituencies coloured their colour wins, and this party gets to run the country.

What’s unfair about this system?
The major flaw of this system is that only the votes of the strongest party in the constituency get carried across to the national tallying stage. All other votes within the constituency effectively don’t count at all.

Consider this extreme example. A country has 3 major parties: A, B and C.
In every constituency, party A gets 40% of the votes.
In about half of the constituencies, party B gets 60% of the votes, and party C gets no votes
In the other half of the constituencies, party B gets no votes, and party C gets 60% of the votes.

Now, in every constituency, either party B or party C will win, since they have 60% of the votes.
On a map, about half of the constituencies will be coloured with B’s colour and about half with C’s colour. No constituencies “voted” B at all. In national counts, party B or C will get to run the government.

But let’s do a national summation of votes for all 3 parties:
Party A got 40% of votes in 100% of constituencies ….. = 40% of national votes
Party B got 60% of votes in 51% of constituencies …… = 30% of national votes
Party C got 60% of votes in 49% of constituencies ……. = 30% of national votes.

Here it is clear to see that the country should be ran by party A, but in fact party A got no seats at all since you only get a seat if you win within a constituency.

Clearly this is a very extreme example, but it does show massive flaws in our voting system at present. The system disadvantages smaller parties, or parties whose voters are spread out as opposed to voters who live in clusters thus in the same constituency.
It does make a difference however. According to The BBC
, in 2005, Labour got 35.3% of votes - slightly more than the Conservatives’ 32.3% (top right of page). Yet Labour got a whopping 356 seats - 158 more than the Conservatives’ 198. This is just one of many statistics that show just how unfair the current system is.

This is why I believe the only way is to count votes nationally, and use this to determine the leading party. Evidently, this new system poses problems itself - such as the leading party hardly holding any seats in Parliament in some cases, but I’m sure a fair system could be devised.

Every year schools and colleges spend an exorbitant amount on license fees to foreign multinational companies such as Microsoft (one school quoted £60 000/year) for products such as Microsoft Word and Excel, despite the fact that open source software such as OpenOffice and Abiword exists which can be freely and legally downloaded by anyone.

Teaching solely proprietary software to children in schools from an early age gives many of them the impression that Microsoft software is the only way to get work done. Money that could be spent more wisely within education, and indeed all parts of the government, is being wasted on Microsoft’s shareholders.

If you feel the same way, vote here http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/teach-oss/

I believe that, in many cases, government departments and schools could go one step further by making their networks virtually free of proprietary software. Organizations such as the Cutter Project deploy cost-effective solutions for schools. The set-up is something like this:

A few powerful central servers running a free linux distribution such as Fedora, openSuse or Edubuntu are the powerhouse where everything essentially runs. Dell sell servers like this without Windows licenses. The PCs that the students sit at are Thin Clients - boxes that basically stream video, keyboard and mouse movements across the network to the servers. These boxes are cheap and about the size of a Freeview set top box. There are no fans, no noisy hard disks and a low power consumption - helping the environment and the school’s electricity bill.

A HP thin client

Schools could even use old computers that were previously retired or were donated by local businesses to act as thin clients too. Linux provides an unprecidented level of security and stability, and is easy to use. For the majority of users who do word processing, email and web-surfing, changing over is easy. Schools can legally give copies of all of their software to their students.

Many people say training and configuration are barriers to linux for schools, but I disagree. A mass roll-out backed by the government could mean simple instructions for a universal initial configuration to follow that work for all schools.

Indeed many schools have already seen the benefits of open source software and are reaping the benefits. The UK government’s school computing agency, Becta, has also said schools could save costs by switching

And it doesn’t stop at schools. Many companies and government organizations can save money from switching.

I have recently been quite active in http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/, the Online Petitions Site from 10 Downing Street. This is the first of many blog posts that explains my views on certain aspects of our country and why I have petitioned for or against certain things.

PSHE, PSE, Tutorials and Citizenship are a group of subjects that are compulsory to all secondary school students in the UK. When I was at school (upto last year), 2-3 hours per week were devoted to this collection of subjects, amounting to a whopping 12% of all teaching time.

This time was spent teaching the obvious. I know not to take drugs, so spare me 2 hours of time-wasting waffle. And no, I wasn’t planning on causing teenage pregancies either. Nor am I addicted to alcohol or cigarettes.

The vast majority of each year’s syllabus on these subjects repeats the previous years’ work, constantly covering the same cliche issues - drugs, sex, drugs, etc etc. Surely this is common sense today’s youth. My own experience shows that the type of people that take drugs, cause teenage pregnancies, etc etc scive these lessons anyway, so really they’re preaching to no-one. And I, for one, don’t think airing my personal issues to a class of secondary school students is a particularly wise idea.

I agree that PSE raises some valid points about the way society is driven, but the way it is taught in schools is totally timewasting, boring and pointless. Personal and moral issues cannot be taught by books. They need to be learnt through immersion and through good parenting.

What I really begrudge is that these pointless “subjects” are taking valuable teaching time away from other subjects, at a time when the government is being criticised for failures in education. What they really need is to scrap the self-evaluation, targets and red tape and get back to proper teaching.

At the end of the day, you can’t teach morals. They come from upbringing and our everyday exposures and influences everywhere.

If you share my view, vote at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/scrappshe/ Feedback comments welcome.