Few things are as dangerous as the crusades of the good intentioned and clueless.

Perhaps it would be a stretch to call the One Laptop per Child project "dangerous". But one thing it is, is a badly overrated idea. We can take off "ly" and "overrated", and it would still be just as true.

I will not think too hard about the necessity of children in poorer countries owning laptops. It's not entirely clear, however, that this is desirable. The question is not "will laptops help to this end?" (they may or may not do), but "at what cost, compared to what alternatives?". Would 400 laptops be a better way of spending money than, say, a $40,000 library?

But let's grant the premise that laptops in the hands of children in developing nations is a wise way to spend money. How do they intend to distribute them? Via governments.

At this point, we have to ask whether a government in a developing nation is to be trusted with this. I would barely trust my own government to post a letter, let alone distribute laptops in an intelligent way. And yet, we are meant to trust governments in developing nations to do the same.

The problem here is that developing nations are almost invariably poor because of bad governments. Sometimes, this is because such governments have still not realised that socialism has failed (take a look at the upcoming disaster of Venezuela). Others treat it as their own private fiefdoms, and abuse the power granted unto them as a club to beat around the ethnic and social groups they dislike. The incompetencies and abuses are many and varied, but the upshot is the same: bad government. And the outcome is always poverty.

It is only those blinded to history by the sight of a noble-sounding crusade that would think that bad governments will distribute these laptops fairly. But history will show the folly of this. Foreign aid has always been misallocated; either soaked up by the establishment, or wasted on pointless prestige projects, or used to bestow favour upon their own favoured ethnic groups. The laptops will be misallocated in the same way, if history is any guide.

There are other issues which have not been adequately settled. One could make the point that used commodity desktop hardware would come out at the same price (the OLPC project is still a long way short of getting the price down to $100), for example. But these are minor concerns in comparison.

I'M BACK (FOR REAL THIS TIME): Yup, I've said this before, but for some reason, I've actually started to care about things that are happening in the world. Coming soon, tiring screeds about nuclear power and global warming. Stay tuned.

Alan rules.

Materials, goods or paraphernalia for use in satanic, sacrificial, or related practices

Interesting.

That's right, I finally gave into the dark side and bought a portable telephony device. A Nokia 8110 (AKA Matrix phone) from these fine vendors of brick-like products.

It's a multi-purpose phone; very useful as construction materials, or maybe even a large sledgehammer.

Plan to ban muzak goes to Lords
The scourge of background music must be banned, the House of Lords is being told as a peer tries to introduce new laws against noise pollution.

Green Party peer Lord Beaumont is trying to win support for his Piped Music and Showing of Television Programmes Bill.

There we have it: a Green that I admire. And in the next episode of Lewis Makes Sporadic And Pointless Observations On BBC News, Satan spotted shivering and wearing wooly sweater, British army manning anti-aircraft defenses ahead of anticipated flying livestock invasion, etc...

Competition between counterfeiters will reduce their profit to an amount approximating their costs, so the harm from counterfeiting will be minimized. Society will have a stable non-fiat paper currency.

It has some very interesting implications for how money would work in a stateless society. Read it all.

The Prime Minister is shown swaggering along wearing a hoodie, carrying a baseball bat, on a giant billboard near Earl's Court Tube station in West London.

His image has been used to advertise the movie Kidulthood. He appears alongside Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and Charles Clarke, sacked last week from his post as Home Secretary.

I think it suits him.

Britain is seen as having the biggest problem with anti-social behaviour among a group of European countries, figures showed today.

...

Adrian Casey, managing director of ADT Europe & South Africa, said: "These perceptions, both inside and outside of Britain, are worrying.

"Government and policy makers may challenge them with statistics on crime and disorder, but as a nation we don't believe this situation is under control.

Yup. And uh...what? Let's get this straight: they are saying that no matter what the actual facts of crime are, we should be worrying about what people feel about crime? Better yet, this was a survey based on a survey of residents of France, Spain, Germany, and other places that are not actually Britain. Why, exactly, should the personal opinions and feelings of people who don't actually live here be worth a damn?

The Let's Cash In On A Dead Television Presenter Institute continues:

"The study shows people believe it is fuelled by the excessive consumption of alcohol.

But it's still a non-sequitur to claim this as a basis for policy, for the simple reason that if people believe something to be true that does not make it so -- and how much more true when more than 75% of the sample group would only in very rare cases personally experience being within a hundred miles of the "yob culture" in question. There are all manner of other explanations. It could be ignorance. it could be paranoia. It could be cultural stereotyping among the 75% of non-Brits; by the same criteria Germany would come up as the war-mongering-fascist capital of Europe. And France would be the last hold-out of cheeses that look and taste like MDF dust bound with mouldy cat sick, and nasal torture by armpit (except it happens to be true). I'm happy with yobbery, ta very much.

Tangent? Yeah. So anyway: how, exactly, is this a good basis for policy? The only things that matter are the facts on the ground, not how people perceive them. And rather than telling people that the Brits aren't a bunch of drunken hooligans, how about actually making sure it's true beforehand?

And thus do we get to the meat of the discussion:

"Increasing our access to alcohol cannot be the answer and it is time that the Government addressed perceptions of this problem."

But I won't quite so willingly gloss over any discussion of the real-world influences of 24-hour drinking. Forget that a bunch of Europeans (and British people who really need to get out more) might think we're going to get drunk and vandalise bus shelters and kick small, fluffy animals more often because of it. Rather than, "what will the neighbours think?", we should ask: "will this reduce crime?"

Now, I probably speak for all decent people when I say that 24-hour alcohol binges are awesome fun and that more people should try them. But I also think that 24-hour drinking will reduce crime for the simple reason that drunken crime (street brawling, huge queues at the local takeaway, etc) are more likely to happen when you get lots of drunk people together in the same place. Indeed, a drunk person alone is more likely to simply fall over and/or make odd phone calls to the effect of "iruvyoooo". It seems obvious to me that the biggest problems come at closing time for pubs and clubs, with a whole lot of drunk people leaving at the same time. The number and severity of problems would be reduced if this were not happening -- by allowing people to drink and leave at times that suit them.

And so the notion that having pubs open 24 hours will reduce crime is only counter-intuitive in the same way that the fact roads are open 24 hours (rather than, say, two hours a day) might reduce the number of car accidents is, likewise, "counter-intuitive". Which is to say, it isn't. It's common sense.

Of course, that would mean that the police would have to do their jobs (amazingly, the fact that police would have to be on the streets 24 hours a day is raised as an objection). It might also not do anything to assuage the fears of the Daily Mail crisis-factory and people that don't live here. But for the rest of us, more 24-hour pubs will work out well.

FOR 60 years the tinny jingle of Greensleeves that announced the arrival of the ice-cream van has been an indelible memory of childhood, but that sound may soon be removed from suburban streets. Health lobbyists have decided that ice-creams are too much of a danger to children’s health.

MPs and health officials are planning a series of measures across the country that are already forcing Mr Whippy and his helpers into meltdown.

Under an amendment to the Education and Inspection Bill to be put forward this week, local authorities will be given new powers to stop ice-cream vans from operating near school gates. The move comes as operators claim that they are already being forced out of business by an over-zealous health lobby.

Fascists.

JAIL bosses are rebuilding toilets so Muslim inmates don’t have to use them while facing Mecca.

Thousands of pounds of taxpayers money are being spent to ensure lags are not offended.

I'm glad there are no unsolved crimes in Britain, because otherwise this would be a total waste of money by the criminal justice system. Hurrah!

School closures may be necessary in areas affected by bird flu to prevent the deaths of 50,000 children from the disease, the chief medical officer has said.

The closure of all schools in an infected region could cut the possible death toll of 100,000 school-age children by half, according to Sir Liam Donaldson.

Uh...how did this idiot get appointed as chief medical officer? According to the WHO, it has killed 109 people. Globally. In countries that are far poorer, agriculturally-dependent, and less prepared than we are. A death toll of 100,000 is a flat-out lie.

I hate scaremongers.

Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo calls illegal immigration "a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation." Huh? That's xenophobic nonsense. In economic terms the U.S. has never had it so good. Statistic after statistic says we*re booming, with 175,000 net new jobs created each month and record levels of Americans working. In fact, since the early Reagan 1980s, the U.S. economy has been booming almost uninterrupted, creating 44 million new jobs even during the takeoff of high immigration.

Exactly what are we so afraid of? As Center for Equal Opportunity chairman Linda Chavez has been pointing out, Hispanics are great entrepreneurs, small-business owners, and job creators. According to 2002 Census Bureau data, Hispanics are opening new businesses at a rate that's three-times faster than the national average.

As a Reagan conservative, I believe in freedom and opportunity. Globalization is here to stay. Proper reform should combine stronger border security with higher visa levels and a path to citizenship. Yes, illegals should pay fines and go to the back of the citizenship line. Yes, employers must aggressively cooperate with the new rules. But compassion must coexist with free-economy principles and the rule of law.

Before he passed away, Pope John Paul II quoted Matthew 25:35: "I was a stranger and you welcomed me." That is precisely the spirit America should seek when it comes to immigration reform.

Indeed. Jonah Goldberg notes that there is not an immigration debate to have, but rather, many sub-debates. Read also Russell Roberts on immigration economics, in which he rightly concludes:

Immigration makes most Americans better off. Are some Americans made worse off because their skills are closest to new immigrants? Here, at least in the short run, one's usual intuition about supply and demand might hold, though my questions above make me wonder if it's even right in this case. But let's help poor Americans by giving them better schools instead of keeping out immigrants. And immigration is really good for immigrants. I care about them, too. If they want to work, let them come.

Also, don't miss his industrial-strength smite-down of an anti-immigration article in, of all places, the New York Times.

A 20-year-old man who took a zoo's rabbit and threw it to an alligator has been given a six-month suspended prison sentence.

No, the next bit...

Damien French took the rabbit from a petting section of the Welsh Mountain Zoo in Colwyn Bay, north Wales, then dropped it into the alligator pool.

The rabbit was savaged by Albert - a large male alligator.

Hahahahaha.

In an ideal world, what would happen is this: Google would refuse to censor its search results. The Chinese, being wonderful, benevolent, and willing to compromise when needs be, would shrug their shoulders, offer a resigned sigh and not block Google anymore.

But the ideal world is not what we live in. The one we do live in, is the one that we have to deal with. It is by the real world consequences of actions that we decide whether an action is good or evil, relative to the options that are on the table.

And the options on the table were this: Either the Chinese government would block access to Google, or Google would have to censor their search results. There's little room for compromise there. And so Google had the choice between denying Chinese users access to the most comprehensive search engine in the world or allowing them access to most of it.

Those are the options which Google had to choose from, and it is in that light that their actions should be assessed. And on that basis, I think it is clear that what Google did was the least evil thing in their situation, even if it was not the right thing.

So I was wrestling with the problem of Movable Type chucking out "500 Internal Server Error"s for the longest time when rebuilding all the entries on my photo album (being, as it is, about 100 photos and growing! plug plug!). Hitting F5 has sometimes done the trick, but sometimes not. However, in a moment of CGI whimsy as it were, I stumbled upon a solution. Open up your Movable Type config file (called mt.cfg here, but I've seen other names for it). Find a line that reads something like this:

# EntriesPerRebuild 40

Uncomment it and change it to read thusly:

EntriesPerRebuild 15

And right with thine world shall all be thereafter. To hazard a guess as to why this works, it's probably because rebuilding 40 (the default) entries on a loaded down system takes a long time, and some servers will forcibly kill CGI scripts if they do not finish executing after a certain, reasonable number of seconds. Reducing it from 40 to 15 (a number you should experiment with if it doesn't work for you) will reduce the time it takes to execute and should, therefore, get rid of the 500 error.

Woot. :D