August 2007 Archives
It doesn't. It needs less passengers, not more. The location of Britain's busiest airport is ridiculous: carved into the side of West London it brings mass congestion to the area of an unsustainable level. It also means myriad planes end up taxiing over London and making their landing descent over South London. If you were to design the way to ensure maximum casualties and deaths when a plane falls out of the sky that would be it.
Business complains that delays at Heathrow are damaging our economy; our ability to host meetings of international partners. Aside from the fact that most of these meetings are nothing more than junkets and could easily be replaced by tele- or video-conferencing, the conclusion that another runway is the answer is dumb: what's needed is a more punctual, reliable transport hub. Reducing the number of passengers to the level it was designed to handle would achieve that.
And for the excess passenger load that would be displaced, and the extra load predicted for the future, why not build a new airport in the large, open, flat area of Essex close to the M25 and Thames estuary and give it a bullet train to central London? In fact, Heathrow could be closed altogether and replaced with such an airport. Planes would then taxi and descend over the North Sea, not London, and that large piece of prime real estate in West London would be freed up for better uses, such as housing, business, shops and such like, whilst an underused (often disused) part of London's surrounds would replace it.
Business complains that delays at Heathrow are damaging our economy; our ability to host meetings of international partners. Aside from the fact that most of these meetings are nothing more than junkets and could easily be replaced by tele- or video-conferencing, the conclusion that another runway is the answer is dumb: what's needed is a more punctual, reliable transport hub. Reducing the number of passengers to the level it was designed to handle would achieve that.
And for the excess passenger load that would be displaced, and the extra load predicted for the future, why not build a new airport in the large, open, flat area of Essex close to the M25 and Thames estuary and give it a bullet train to central London? In fact, Heathrow could be closed altogether and replaced with such an airport. Planes would then taxi and descend over the North Sea, not London, and that large piece of prime real estate in West London would be freed up for better uses, such as housing, business, shops and such like, whilst an underused (often disused) part of London's surrounds would replace it.
Continue reading Heathrow doesn't need another runway.
I upgraded vim on my Debian box as part of the the general dist upgrade from Sarge to Etch. However, this resulted in all manner of problems with syntax highlighting. The answer was to purge remove vim-runtime then reinstall vim. That appeared to reinstall the syntax files and everything appears to work as expected now.
sudo apt-get --purge remove vim-runtime
sudo apt-get install vim
sudo apt-get install vim-doc
sudo apt-get install vim-scripts
sudo apt-get --purge remove vim-runtime
sudo apt-get install vim
sudo apt-get install vim-doc
sudo apt-get install vim-scripts
This story in The Times makes my blood boil: the state is going to roll out ContactPoint - a database of all the children in the UK - next year. Social workers fear it could be accessed by child abusers. The state assures us it will be secure and only accessed by those who need to. Meanwhile, the details of politicians and celebrities children will be kept off the database:
"The security fears are fuelled further by the admission that information about the children of celebrities and politicians is likely to be excluded from the system."So we have a secure system that only those who need to will be able to access so why will politicians children be kept off it?
Napster have a slimy tactic for maintaining revenue: what they do is make it inconvenient to unsubscribe. First, they hide the link to the relevant page in their client application, and make it as inconspicuous as possible. Then when you do find it it gives you a phone number and no other means to raise complaints or unsusbcribe. Once I found this was the case I was determined to unsubscribe, on principle that they are acting like two-bit loan sharks.
Five phone calls later and eventually I got through to an operator and then the process was relatively painless. However, I wasn't happy with this. After three calls that resulted in being put on hold for ridiculous lengths of time I wrote to my MP and also to the local Trading Standards office in mid to late July. Trading Standards passed the letter onto Camden Trading Standards, where Napster has a registered office. I haven't heard anything since from them. MP passed on my letter to the Dept. for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (the DTI in old money). They in turn got back to me to see how my case was going. They also checked Napster's web site and found a Luxmbourg address for them. They are now writing to the authorities in Luxembourg to point out that Napster give no contact email address to send complaints to. It turns out there is a European Directive that requires companies to do exactly that. Hopefully this will give Napster the kick up the arse needed to get them to let their customers contact them online - like they were happy with when I signed up for the service and started paying their wages.
If you use Napster and have had problems with unsubscribing then write to your MP and tell them to get in touch with the DBERR's EU ICT Policy team to make sure Napster tow the line, the eejits.
Five phone calls later and eventually I got through to an operator and then the process was relatively painless. However, I wasn't happy with this. After three calls that resulted in being put on hold for ridiculous lengths of time I wrote to my MP and also to the local Trading Standards office in mid to late July. Trading Standards passed the letter onto Camden Trading Standards, where Napster has a registered office. I haven't heard anything since from them. MP passed on my letter to the Dept. for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (the DTI in old money). They in turn got back to me to see how my case was going. They also checked Napster's web site and found a Luxmbourg address for them. They are now writing to the authorities in Luxembourg to point out that Napster give no contact email address to send complaints to. It turns out there is a European Directive that requires companies to do exactly that. Hopefully this will give Napster the kick up the arse needed to get them to let their customers contact them online - like they were happy with when I signed up for the service and started paying their wages.
If you use Napster and have had problems with unsubscribing then write to your MP and tell them to get in touch with the DBERR's EU ICT Policy team to make sure Napster tow the line, the eejits.
