Month: April 2012

Greek police is available for rent

There are many signs of a country’s economy in trouble, but I think this one is the most obvious one – renting out the services of police officers and their equipment to private citizens.  And that’s exactly what Greece is doing now, according to PolicyMic, which is quoting a Greek newspaper Proto Thema.

As reported by the newspaper Proto Thema, for only 30 euros an hour, Greek citizens could now use police officers as personal bodyguards. For 10 more euros they can get a patrol car and for an amount of 200 and 1500 euros per hour respectively, they can have patrol boats or police helicopters. The minister, nevertheless, warned that the services offered will be limited to legal activities only.

It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so sad…

Who is suing who in the mobile phone industry?

GigaOm links to an excellent visualization of smartphone patents’ legal battles.  It’s interesting how different is the representation of Apple and Google on this graph.  However, one needs to remember, that Google has acquired Motorola’s mobile division.

 

This seems to be a nice update to another graph that I’ve posted a couple of years ago.  Some of the lawsuits from the old chart are still here.  And there is a whole bunch of new ones.  I like this new updated one better than the old one, because company logos make it more readable. And this one also has references to the actual lawsuits, in case someone wants to follow.

Is parliamentary immunity obsolete?

While reading this article in Cyprus Mail, I had to ask myself if parliamentary immunity is any good.  Why do members of parliament need this privilege.  Wikipedia suggests:

Parliamentary immunity, also known as legislative immunity, is a system in which members of the parliament or legislature are granted partial immunity from prosecution. Before prosecuting, it is necessary that the immunity be removed, usually by a superior court of justice or by the parliament itself. This reduces the possibility of pressing a member of the parliament to change his vote by fear of prosecution.

I think this doesn’t work anymore in the modern society.  Those who do need to press MPs usually will find ways to do so, parliamentary immunity or not.  Giving MPs such an immunity relies on their good nature. And we all know how good-natured an average politician is.  The example was given in the above-mentioned Cyprus Mail article.

Update: another article in the same newspaper covers the story, and, among other things, suggests an interesting approach to the problem – a “name and shame” policy.

As we cannot expect our deputies to behave like law-abiding citizens with regard to traffic fines, the relevant article of the constitution, which allows them to flout the law, would have to be changed. Of course for the article to be changed, a two-thirds majority would be needed in the legislature, and we doubt there would be 38 deputies willing to vote for surrendering their privilege not to pay traffic fines.

There is an alternative. The police and municipalities could make public, once a month, the names of deputies who had refused to pay their parking and speeding tickets. A name and shame policy would be the ideal solution so that voters are aware which Representatives are so cheap they abuse their privilege in order not to pay a small fine.

Infinite scrolling : no go!

Jeffro of WP Tavern fame asks an interesting question about infinite scrolling:

Thanks to Pinterest, many websites think it’s cool to provide the ability to infinitely scroll down a page. Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a variety of tutorials that explain how you can add this functionality to WordPress themes. However, I’m wondering if this is just one of those trends that will go away once Pinterest dies off. For sites such as Pinterest where it makes sense to have an infinite scroll, does it make sense to have that functionality on a regular blog or any other type of website?

There is also a poll attached to that post, which currently shows 60% (133 votes) consider infinite scrolling bad, 23% (52 votes) consider it good, and 17% (38 votes) have no preference.

I joined the “This is bad!” crowd.  I think that’s because I belong to the old generation of onliners, who at least had the time to think things over, and see how it was before and after.  I think that everything on the web should have it’s own URL, which shouldn’t change once published.  The content of the page should also remain pretty much the same.  If done so, searching for things and sharing things becomes so much easier.

Just think about it for a second.  Look at the archives of this blog. If I found something useful on the second page of February 2005 archives three years ago, it would still be there today.  I can bookmark a specific page of archives, I can send that URL to someone else, and it would still work years later.

Infinite scrolling page would give you only a single URL and bookmarking or sharing that would be totally useless, as its content would change and scroll away after a few updates.

Even for things like a blog stream, which presents newest items on top, pushing older updates into archives, pagination makes a lot of sense.  Once you know how many items per page there are, and an average number of posts per period of time, you can fast forward into an arbitrary date much faster.  For example, if I post approximately 4 posts per week, and I display 10 posts per page for the front page stream, all I need to do is get the URL of the first archive page – https://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/page/2/ – by pressing Next link on the front page, then do a quick calculation, and replace “2” with the calculated page number to quick jump back into history.  (I’ve used this technique quite a few times, when I needed to find something that I didn’t know how to search for, but new roughly the publishing date of. And I know I’m not alone.)

With infinite scrolling, you’d have to scroll and scroll for hours or days.

There are also other issues to consider – time control on the user’s side, increased CPU and memory resources required to handle bigger pages, browser cross-compatibility, and so on and so forth.

Having said that, I understand that most people probably don’t care about these things and find infinite scrolling very much a convenience.  Good for them…

P.S.: One place where I think infinite scrolling makes sense is in the image search results (like Google Images).  There, it helps to scroll through a whole lot of images in shorter time.

Atomic physics resources

Doing my duty in promotion of knowledge and science, I bring you this collection of resources on atomic physics.  With the way the world goes, who knows when you’d need a quick reference to some research.  And, in case you are a bit rusty on what atomic physics is, here is a quick quote for you from the Wikipedia.

Atomic physics (or atom physics) is the field of physics that studies atoms as an isolated system of electrons and an atomic nucleus. It is primarily concerned with the arrangement of electrons around the nucleus and the processes by which these arrangements change. This includes ions as well as neutral atoms

[…]

The term atomic physics is often associated with nuclear power and nuclear bombs, due to the synonymous use of atomic and nuclear in standard English. However, physicists distinguish between atomic physics — which deals with the atom as a system consisting of a nucleus and electrons — and nuclear physics, which considers atomic nuclei alone.

As with many scientific fields, strict delineation can be highly contrived and atomic physics is often considered in the wider context of atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Physics research groups are usually so classified.