The good news is that Julian Assange is not to be extradited to the USA and seems likely to be freed soon. The bad news is that magistrate Baraitser appears to have conceded some highly dangerous principles in favour of the US:
'The judgement is in fact very concerning, in that it accepted all of the prosecution’s case on the right of the US Government to prosecute publishers worldwide of US official secrets under the Espionage Act. The judge also stated specifically that the UK Extradition Act of 2003 deliberately permits extradition for political offences.'
'While we are extremely disappointed in the court's ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised,' the [US] justice department said.
*as per the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement reached on 24 December 2020: 'surrender and replacement arrangements for the European Arrest Warrant'
Those of us of a certain age can recall the early films at our weekly outings to Saturday morning pictures like Flash Gordon and aliens from outer space that depicted those fledgling robots and telekinetic beings with devices that could transport one about the planets, all jaw-dropping for us as children and a portent for things to come.
Ever since those days we have been constantly told that within 5/10/20 years robots would be doing mundane tasks around the house and a life of decadence awaited us as we hailed our robot to bring us more drinks.
As with most predictions it hasn’t happened, certainly not in the way foretold. Robotics are well established in industry, but outside of assembly lines and laboratories they are still a rare commodity.
Is that about to change? In many ways it has already started; the personal robot may still be a long way off but methods to ease the drudgery of life are becoming ever more self evident.
Little by little ever more items are chipped and programmed to automatically do the job for us, from the programming on the now humble washing machine to the touch screen in cars. They are signs of the way things are going; whether much of it is desirable or necessary is another matter.
The automobile has seen a lot of electronic input in recent years. The coming of the EV will see almost total digitalisation of controls and functions, eventually culminating in driverless cars. The problems in achieving the latter are enormous and solutions nowhere near ready, but they are coming down the line in one form.
Yet what of those functions now included in ever growing numbers in such things as automobiles? So much today that is offered electronically is geared towards the young but do even they use all of it? The functions on a modern car's touch screen (apart from being a very unsafe way of communicating in a moving car, another subject) seem to be there because of a race among manufacturers to provide the biggest range of items simply because they can. A friend's recently purchased Mercedes bore that fact out and even he says that he is almost frightened to touch much of it as he has no idea what is there; the handbook is a miniature Encyclopedia Britannica; it is absurd how much is electronically controlled as so little is ever used.
I know only too well in my comparatively simple car that I only use in the range of ten per cent of that in front of me outside of the mandatory speedometer, fuel gauge etc. The rest is not only redundant, I can only guess what lurks beneath the touch screen as I have no known use for it all.
The young today are glued to their mobiles. A mobile phone has become for them a replacement for so much that it is doubtful they have the knowledge to communicate without one, and I read (a sad indictment of our times) that the NHS, 'she who must be revered', is setting up clinics for children who are addicted to the things and show violent tendencies if any one tries to cut their user time down - indeed a child who plays video games for 14 hours a day threatened his mother when she tried to take the phone/tablet away, though one has to ask how does a school kid get to spend that time playing games that long and get away with it.
VW have just announced they are trialling robotic EV chargers, thereby circumventing the need for chargers to be installed at great cost everywhere. They even talk of them being able to connect with the car while the owner is away - sounds good, but we have seen what happens to electric scooters and the like when not supervised; yobs attacking electric chargers could give a whole new meaning to shock tactics!
What the video shows is that the good idea, on paper, has some downsides: you have to park the things somewhere and what if a car hits one or they ignore pedestrians in the street etc.; and do we really want these mobile bins? Remember there are two of them to set out and collect, so rather large objects, hurtling about everywhere on the pavements and crossing roads... nah, once again I don’t think this has been thought through; in an enclosed garage maybe, on the streets, not so much.
The item that prompted this short piece was in the Times and told the story of how LG the South Korean electronics giant want to take white goods a stage further in the innovation stakes.
They are introducing a refrigerator that that opens by voice command. The reasoning is a bit spurious, to put it mildly: “No longer will shoppers have to struggle to open the fridge door with arms full of groceries.” Two things there: I have never known anyone with 'arms full of groceries' even try to open a fridge door; and if the door opened on voice command you would still be standing there with arms full of shopping. There is no way you could put the bloody shopping in the fridge unless you do the sensible thing and put the shopping down.
LG claim the feature will make time spent in the kitchen “more productive and convenient”; hmmm.
Naturally it has a Coronavirus slant and benefit as you would touch surfaces less! The phrase 'grasping at straws' comes to mind.
The Japanese just can’t leave anything as it was. With this in the house I imagine many people would never leave the bathroom.
You know and I know that will not stop this type of feature/gimmick gaining traction. I suppose one plus would be if the feature failed to work you could vent your spleen at the fridge door rather than the wife.
It goes without saying that the feature can be linked to that ludicrous Amazon ‘voice assistant’ Alexa so as well having the time told you, the weather report, and who's top of the pops, it will also be able to tell you what is in the fridge without opening the door. This, LG say, 'will save significant amounts of energy'; how is not laid out. As in the normal world you only open the fridge to take things out or put things in, any saving is in the minds of the inventors of this technology.
There are several other plusses added, such as an app for the phone that can receive messages from your fridge when you are shopping suggesting recipes using what is still in the fridge - oh, please! And it can tell you if you left the fridge door open; in that case, surely this oh-so-clever feature would be able to close the same door as it can open... oh no, you are too far away to shout at it.
Fear not, more is to come. Remember the days when you had built-in Hoover pipes in every room so you did not have to carry the machine round, just plug in hose and cleaning head? This was a feature that was going to revolutionise home cleaning and it died a death in the time it took to read the advert. That is just a foretaste of the delights lined up for us: the 'internet of things' is coming to a home near you and soon we are told, household objects (and the body of the house?) will take actions on behalf of the owner without prompts.
This will mean the fridge will order more milk while sensors in the wall will call a plumber if they detect a leak. What could possibly go wrong! With cars the highest incidence of failure today is in the electrical systems; transfer that to a house and the potential for trouble is endless.
Not that all is useless overkill. The phone app that means you can turn on/off your heating or cooker on the way home can make sense if you live alone and work irregular hours, but so much else with time becomes more bother than it’s worth, the internet itself has in some ways become self-defeating.
The convenience of shopping, banking etc. from home is nullified by necessary precautions. In the case of internet banking, there are additional measures because those institutions can’t guarantee safety, so they are putting the onus back on the customer to provide extra levels of security. Instead of clicking on with a password to your banking account you now have also answer a question, add the last four numbers in reply to another question and then add a code number you have asked for on your phone using your ‘unique’ ID. Simples! It would be easier to walk into your bank branch - if they still existed .
These extra levels of security apply now to everything you use on the internet. All passwords are to be remembered and not written down - hundreds of them! Even using a password manager is not the full answer as the very good free ones are prone to lose all your details during a Windows update or crash, as I and others have discovered; that’s when those bits of paper with the details written down that you should not have lying about come into their own as the only way back into the same sites. 'One step forward, two back' comes to mind.
We have become obsessed with digital gadgets, the fascination stemming from items like the 'speak your weight' weighing machine of years gone by and extending to the sat nav and all the other aids to modern living. Some have a place, some think they do; others are, well, shall we say misused? There is the case of the fitness fanatic who as so many do went on a run with his heart monitor on his wrist; he stopped to speak to another runner and they exchanged peak heart rate numbers, and just after he gave his he dropped dead of a heart attack. At least he found his limit.
No, we cannot stop the advance of robotics in their various forms. Much will become the new normal as has been said a lot lately and many features/items will end up in cupboards along with the endless kitchen items beloved by Lakeland customers which are for display only or used once and discarded. Some will survive; I won't.
Why do we do it? Simple really, we enjoy it. We enjoy losing ourselves in conviviality especially after this bad, mad year. For centuries, possibly millenia, it has been an important safety valve for society and a perfect example of this is the medieval Feast of the Fools -
'The Feast of Fools was a festival celebrated annually on January 1st throughout Europe and particularly France. It was a cherished day, for it was the one day where Christian morals were abandoned and replaced with ridiculous rites. Serious Christians were allowed to create parodies of church rituals.
'During the festival, performers wore animal masks and women's clothing, sang obscene and bawdy hymnal songs, drank excessively, hurled manure at bystanders, ran and leaped through the church, rolling dice at the alter, howling through the streets and other scurrilous acts that parodied the liturgy of the church. In addition, people would drive about on carts through the streets to rouse laughter from their fellows through performances that involved indecent gestures and language.'
I tried today to share an interesting item with my brother, via a Facebook post; but a robot censor intervened and their complaint system has somehow failed.
Here is what I tried to say the second time, through the electronic muzzle strapped to my face by FB; this too was blocked:
__________________________________
I was going to preface this with an ironic comment* about recent allegations re these two countries but the moronic and totalitarian system of censorship at FB automatically interfered, saying 'Your post couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards.'
When I explained, saying 'This is an historical essay showing how Russia prevented the breakup of the USA despite the enmity towards the latter of France and Great Britain. May I say I deeply deplore your system of automatic censorship,' it replied 'Your request couldn't be processed. There was a problem with this request. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can.'
*using the phrase 'Russia collusion'; but what's above was also blocked, so it's the link itself. Presumably FB is actually blocking certain websites or subjects.
It's time high-handed monopolists like Zuckerberg were called to account. They have clearly become publishers rather than mere platforms.
(a) Grant Watson's mother sent him to a newly-established experimental school, Bedales. The headteacher seems to have hung back from imposing the discipline common in standard public schools but unfortunately this merely allowed a culture of bullying to develop among the boys. Attempting to rectify the situation indirectly, the head began to admit girls, but the conventional sexual restraints of the age dominated; the author (who later went through Freudian analysis) thought, harmfully:
'The headmaster, that highly cultured, idealistic and all too pure repressor of desires, was, of course, the father-substitute. He was the 'Old Man', and he, in the unconscious, possessed the girls who were forbidden to us. We, his sons, lived under the almighty power of Taboo. But we were allowed less outlet than were those suppositional sons of the First-father. His sons were driven out into the wilderness to practise homosexuality. But no such relief for us! Smut of any kind, even a hint of it, was the worst of sins, and our naturally developing sexual urges must find other expression: in cruelty, in an inflated idealism, in fantasies of superiority, and every kind of priggishness and prudishness, and in fact in any kind of high-tension absurdities...'(my emphasis)
Does this go some way to explain the rigidity and cruelty of seventeenth century English Puritans, and the modern Islamist Puritans? Perhaps; though human aggression and cruelty seem common anyway. Still, far less dangerous to see ourselves as sinners than as the Elect.
(b) In 1900, he was sent to Heidelberg for the summer/autumn, to learn science because it was not taught well in his English school (perhaps, in many English schools). A German he met on the sea-voyage
'talked with great enthusiasm about the glories of Germany and the inferiority of England. Germany was going to rule the world. He was indeed a prophet of the Herrenvolk...'
In southern Germany he found the people punctiliously polite, friendly and hospitable, yet one day:
'I was in a restaurant with Fräulein Müller and Herr Burn [a Scottish student at Heidelberg University]. A group of German officers came in; there was something not to their liking; discussion and raised voices. A group of peoplewho were sitting at a table nearby got up abruptly and retired. What was the fuss about? I enquired. The officers had objected to the presence of some Jews. That the Jews had had to go set me wondering. I had not been Jew-conscious before, except in so far that I knew that Jews usually got bullied at school.'(my emphasis)
This was long before the little Austrian corporal made himself felt. I haven't read much about anti-Semitism in both countries during the nineteenth century, but clearly there was a deep and very nasty vein of it.
At the end of what can only be described as a horrible year on so many fronts, with pestilence and politicians vying for the top spot on most people's hate list there has been little to raise a smile and less to raise a glass to.
Of all those stories that have been swamped by the endless bad news and prediction one stood out for me; I suppose in a year when man buggered up almost everything he got involved with an animal story was the perfect antidote.
These elephants were originally said to have raided a corn wine store in southern China and got drunk. The story went viral and the picture above of them sleeping it off was shown world wide. Subsequent information claimed they were not drunk but just resting; by then no one cared, it was just such a good story true or otherwise, after all we have lived through a year of disinformation and all of it was doom and despair, this story was not.
So sleeping it off or just resting, either way the elephants showed the best way to beat the blues: find a nice spot lay down and forget about it all.
