Deriziotis

Lord Sugar has been investigated after he was accused of posting a racist message on Twitter, police say.

A patent for a database that uses DNA testing to tell prospective parents which traits their future offspring may inherit is criticised by experts.

The media has paid a lot of attention recently to various objections to the UK's Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill. The register of consultant lobbyists outlined in Clauses 3-7 has received relatively little coverage. We recently joined a number of organisations in writing a letter calling for the register to be published as open data. This post provides some background on our position.

The goal of public registers is to make information available to the public. It used to be that such public registers could be inspected by anyone but were only accessible (as paper copies) in particular places, such as council buildings or local libraries.

As computing and the internet have spread, public registers are now generally published online, which in general makes it easier for people to view those registers. However, this is only the first step in providing better access. We believe that if they are to serve their purpose, by default, public registers should be available as open data, namely:

• in a machine-readable format
• under an open licence

A machine-readable register can be manipulated on a computer. Think of the difference between a table in a PDF document and a spreadsheet. You can read a table in a PDF and search it, but a spreadsheet can be sorted, filtered and graphed. This makes it easier for people to extract the information they are interested in from the register. It also makes it easier to analyse the register to create new insights.

Machine-readability removes the technical barriers to processing information in a public register. An open licence removes the legal barriers. An explicit open licence reassures people who want to work with the data within a public register that they can do so. It permits them to reuse and republish the register, with few constraints (such as attribution). It ensures that everyone can use the information in the register; that there will be no privileged access to the information that it contains.

The government creates new public registers only rarely. When it does, as in the Lobbying Bill, we would like to see its publication as open data being given a firm legal footing. The legislation should say that the register:

• must be published online
• must be held in a machine-readable format
• must contain certain basic information
• must be available under an open licence

Business reusers of open data need guarantees about its long term availability. Legislation is a great way for the government to provide these long term guarantees — legal obligations are significantly stronger than policy statements.

Regardless of the other issues with the Lobbying Bill, and indeed with the scope and content of the register itself, we believe that the current wording of the Bill misses an opportunity to make a firm commitment to open data and transparency.

This past week, we've been eagerly awaiting Valve's three announcements that are aimed at revolutionizing the console and PC gaming industry. The first announcement was SteamOS, a free Linux operating system composed primarily of Steam. The second announcement was a vague description of the Steam Machine, the actual set-top console. Now, Valve has made its third and final announcement: a revolutionary new gamepad that replaces physical analog sticks with trackpads.

We've only known about the Steam Controller for 24 hours, but it turns out a variety of developers already got a chance to put the controller to use ahead of the lucky 300 beta participants later this year. The devs we spoke with didn't use the final format of the controller, but the non-touchscreen beta form seen above: four large buttons stand out in place of the clickable touchscreen panel (planned for the final version of Steam Controller). It's the version that will ship to those aforementioned 300 beta participants later this year, and it's the version that Valve is showing game developers ahead of anyone else. Follow us beyond the break and find out what they had to say.%Gallery-slideshow99391%

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Peripherals, HD

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Now that everyone is talking about SteamOS and Steam Machines I thought I’d blog about my “Faux Steam Machine”. SteamOS is basically a Linux-based OS, and we know that the SteamBox is basically a PC. And while people are guessing that the announcement on Friday will be a controller, I went ahead and assembled my own with my own stuff.

Certainly not “Steam Certified”, but it’ll tide me over until I can buy the real hardware, and it’ll let me follow along with development of Steam at the “Big Picture” level. This is all pretty straightforward and there’s nothing new in this post that you haven’t been able to do before. It’s just now that Valve is committed to this direction I want to follow along – especially as the number of titles coming out continues to increase.

For this tutorial you need:

• An Ubuntu machine with good video performance. I have an Nvidia based machine. You need to install Steam on this machine.
• This wireless receiver which enables you to reuse your Xbox 360 controller on your PC.
• An Xbox 360 controller or some other wireless gamepad.

First you need to get the controller working in Ubuntu:

• How do I get a wireless XBOX 360 controller working?

And now, make a Steam session:

• Can I run Steam as its own standalone session? - this is great because it allows us to just login to the machine and then Steam fires up automatically in big picture mode. Kudos to you thor27 (the author of this little integration bit).

And finally, turn on auto login in LightDM so that our machine just boots right into Steam with no user input:

• How do I enable autologin in LightDM?

Steam updates itself at the client level so there’s no need to worry about that, the final step for a console-like experience is to enable automatic updates and you should be good to go!

TODO

• There’s certainly some work we can do in Ubuntu to make configuring gamepads suck less.
• There’s a Steam repository that has some goodies like a Steam Plymouth theme, this would make first boot look real slick.
• Does anyone know if there’s a similar cable for PS3 controllers?
• Performance: I assumed that loading Steam in a dedicated session would lead to better performance but it’s actually slower than running it in Unity. I think it has something to do with Steam running in the stripped down XFCE window manager that doesn’t have compositing? Need to investigate.
• Someone on reddit mentioned that SteamGuard/login in could be a problem but I haven’t run into those issues yet.

One of the major gripes users have had since the Google Hangouts platform and apps rolled out is that they could no longer actually see if their contacts are active before sending them a message. A new update for the Android app is ready to fix that, and is rolling out over the next few days. As shown in the image above, green icons on the photo mean they're available, grey icons mean they aren't. Another change is that when you start a hangout it lists People you Hangout with, Suggested People and then Other Contacts (as shown above). Finally, Hangout invites have popped to the top of your conversations so they're easy to find, and you can hide people from the New Hangout screen by long-pressing their name and then selecting "Hide Contact." So, are all of the old Google Talk features you needed back in action (outbound calls from the desktop returned in July), or is there anything else still missing?

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Google

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Source: Randall Sarafa (Google+)

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The fine people of Canada may still not have access to Spotify, but Greece, Turkey, Taiwan and Argentina are all getting the ad-supported music-on-demand service starting today. Yes, that's at least one new country for three separate continents -- Spotify's really spreading the love around with today's expansion, apparently. According to the company, that puts Spotify in 32 total "markets" worldwide, comprising 24 million "active users" -- not too shabby for seven years of existence!

The company's last big expansion was in April, when it arrived in Mexico, Malaysia and several other territories. Here's hoping it finally arrives in Canada some time this year as well -- our Canadian staffers are getting awfully antsy.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Source: Spotify

The Russian government is asking for 'planet hacking' to be included in the climate science report, leaked documents show

Russia is pushing for next week's landmark UN climate science report to include support for controversial technologies to geoengineer the planet's climate, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.

As climate scientists prepare to gather for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Stockholm to present the most authoritative state of climate science to date, it has emerged the Russian government is asking for "planet hacking" to be included in the report. The IPCC has not included geoengineering in its major assessments before.

The documents seen by the Guardian show Russia is asking for a conclusion of the report to say that a "possible solution of this [climate change] problem can be found in using of [sic] geoengineering methods to stabilise current climate." Russia also highlighted that its scientists are developing geoengineering technologies.

Geoengineering aims to cool the Earth by methods including spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, or fertilising the oceans with iron to create carbon-capturing algal blooms.

Such ideas are increasingly being discussed by western scientists and governments as a plan B for addressing climate change, with the new astronomer royal, Professor Sir Martin Rees, calling last week for such methods to buy time to develop sources of clean energy. But the techniques have been criticised as a way for powerful, industrialised nations to dodge their commitments to reduce carbon emissions.

Some modelling has shown geoengineering could be effective at reducing the Earth's temperature, but manipulation of sensitive planetary systems in one area of the world could also result in drastic unintended consequences globally, such as radically disrupted rainfall.

Responding to efforts to discredit the climate science with a spoiler campaign in advance of the report, the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra K Pachauri, said he was confident the high standards of the science in the report would make the case for climate action. He said: "There will be enough information provided so that rational people across the globe will see that action is needed on climate change."

The Russian scientist Yuri Izrael, who has participated in IPCC geoengineering expert groups and was an adviser to the former Russian president Vladimir Putin, conducted an experiment in 2009 that sprayed particles from a helicopter to assess how much sunlight was blocked by the aerosol plume. A planned test in Britain that would have used a balloon attached to a 1km hose to develop equipment for spraying was prevented after a public outcry.

Observers have suggested that Russia's admission that it is developing geoengineering may put it in violation of the UN moratorium on geoengineering projects established at the Biodiversity Convention in 2010 and should be discussed on an emergency basis when the convention's scientific subcommittee meets in Montreal in October.

Civil society organisations have previously raised concerns that expert groups writing geoengineering sections of the IPCC report were dominated by US, UK and Canadian geoengineering advocates who have called for public funding of large-scale experiments or who have taken out commercial patents on geoenginering technologies. One scientist who served as a group co-chair, David Keith of Harvard University, runs a private geoengineering company, has planned tests in New Mexico, and is publicising a new book called The Case for Climate Engineering.

Nearly 160 civil society, indigenous and environmental organisations signed a letter in 2011 urging caution and calling on the IPCC not to legitimise geoengineering.

Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America director of the technology watchdog ETC Group, said: "We have been warning that a few geoengineering advocates have been trying to hijack the IPCC for their agenda. We are now seeing a deliberate attempt to exploit the high profile and credibility of this body in order to create more mainstream support for extreme climate engineering. The public and policymakers need to be on guard against being steamrollered into accepting dangerous and immoral interventions with our planet, which are a false solution to climate change. Geoengineering should be banned by the UN general assembly."

Matthew Watson, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol's Earth sciences department and one of the team behind the cancelled balloon project, said: "In general ought the IPCC to be thinking about geoengineering? Yes. But do I want to see unilateralism or regionalism affect the debate? Certainly not. The people who don't like geoengineering will suggest the IPCC is a method for normalising it."

He added: "The IPCC has to be very careful about how it handles this [geoengineering] because it is clearly a very significant output that people are very mindful of."

While the IPCC is intended to be a scientific advisory panel, government delegates have been reviewing the summary report and make final decisions about it in Stockholm at the end of the month.

Sweden, Norway and Germany expressed more scepticism about geoengineering and asked that the report underline its potential dangers.

"The information on geoengineering options is too optimistic as it does not appropriately reflect the current lack of knowledge or the high risks associated with such methods," noted the German government.

Geoengineering is expected to play a much larger role in the next IPCC reports coming out in 2014. Observers were surprised that it had turned up in this first major report – meant to assess physical science rather than mitigation strategies.

Russia's climate negotiators did not respond to a request for comment.

• Geoengineering
• Climate change
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• United Nations
• Global climate talks
• Climate change
• Russia
• Europe

Martin LukacsSuzanne GoldenbergAdam Vaughan
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Set up when other businesses had fled after the riots, Brixton Cycles co-op marks its anniversary this weekend

This is an unashamedly parochial post, given that it's in praise of a particular bike shop, one that happens to be just around the corner from me. But I'd like to think lots of other bike shops could learn from Brixton Cycles.

Set up exactly 30 years ago – the anniversary party is tomorrow – by a group of friends who hatched the plan on ride from Land's End to John O'Groats, it is is a full co-operative.

This isn't just the John Lewis model, where despite the annual profit share-out the management structure remains very much top down. At Brixton Cycles decisions are decided by consensus at a monthly meeting and everyone is paid the same (set on a daily rate – some work more days than others).

The result is the sort of staff loyalty almost unknown elsewhere in the retail trade. The longest-serving staff member has been there 25 years. A number of others have notched up more than a decade.

This brings experience and expertise the likes of which I've never seen in any other bike shop. Whenever I've been there to buy something, I'm either provided with whatever it was I sought, pointed to something even more suitable, or (rarely; for a small shop they seem to have Tardis-like levels of stock) pointed elsewhere if they don't have it.

It's the only shop I've ever been to where the improvement in a bike after I'd had it serviced was so dramatic I wrote them an email of thanks.

It's not the oldest, let alone biggest, bike shop co-op in the UK. Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op (which now has eight stores, five in England) was set up in 1977 and has more than 100 members, who gain an equal share in the business after a year's "apprenticeship".

But it's worth recalling that Brixton Cycles started business just two years after the riots which saw many other businesses flee the area. Brixton is now (in some ways) very different, and the traditional queue outside the shop for its morning on-the-spot repair clinic is now just as likely to include a suited professional on a hybrid as a teenager on a BMX.

I had a chat with Terry Green, 25, one of the newest recruits – he joined 18 months ago – about what makes the shop special. He said one aspect was that everyone works both in the shop and in the stockroom and workshop, giving them wide expertise:

We've got people who've been here for more than 15 years. Even if I'm not sure about something I've got those guys to fall back on. Their experience is unrivalled.

He explained the way the shop is run:

We have a monthly meeting and we collectively decide on things we want to change, or make better, or make easier for customers. It goes pretty smoothly, because everyone's so laid back about things. If someone's genuinely got a good idea we'll usually try it.

It's a really, really nice place to work. Last Friday we were listening to disco all day, which really made things positive. The customers loved it as well.

I was in the cycle trade before I joined, but even when I worked in other bike shops I still spent my money in Brixton Cycles.

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Google revamps its logo, the look of its search page and other products in the same month Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing have shown off new looks.

You may remember the ParaShoot wearable camera we covered a few weeks ago, which had shattered its crowdfunding target with a month and change to spare. If you decided to sink some cash into the project, then you may also be aware it was suspended on Kickstarter a couple of days ago. Matt Sandy from the ParaShoot team has been in touch to share what little info he has -- it's claimed the suspension was out of the blue, and no communication has come from the funding site since. With "manufacturing plans" sorted, however, there's no time to twiddle thumbs, so ParaShoot's hit IndieGoGo instead. Seeking $117,358 -- the amount the Kickstarter campaign was frozen at -- version 2.1 proposes a slightly different flat-fronted design (see above and try to ignore the ugly watermark), more choices of skin and a new time-lapse photo feature. Pledge levels are the same, although there's now a "Distributor Pack" option if you want ten of the things. We've reached out to Kickstarter to see if it's willing to tell us the other side of the story, and we'll let you know if we hear back.

Filed under: Cameras, Wearables

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Source: IndieGoGo

People should be persuaded against having large families, says the broadcaster and naturalist

Sir David Attenborough has said that he is not optimistic about the future and that people should be persuaded against having large families.

The broadcaster and naturalist, who earlier this year described humans as "a plague on Earth", also said he believed humans have stopped evolving physically and genetically because of birth control and abortion, but that cultural evolution is proceeding "with extraordinary swiftness".

"We stopped natural selection as soon as we started being able to rear 90-95% of our babies that are born. We are the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were," he tells this week's Radio Times.

"Stopping natural selection is not as important, or depressing, as it might sound – because our evolution is now cultural … We can inherit a knowledge of computers or television, electronics, aeroplanes and so on."

Attenborough said he was not optimistic about the future and "things are going to get worse".

"I don't think we are going to become extinct. We're very clever and extremely resourceful – and we will find ways of preserving ourselves, of that I'm sure. But whether our lives will be as rich as they are now is another question.

"We may reduce in numbers; that would actually be a help, though the chances of it happening within the next century is very small. I should think it's impossible, in fact."

The broadcaster, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, which promotes family planning and campaigns for sustainable consumption, also appeared to express qualified support for the one-child policy in China.

He said: "It's the degree to which it has been enforced which is terrible, and there's no question it's produced all kinds of personal tragedies. There's no question about that. On the other hand, the Chinese themselves recognise that had they not done so there would be several million more mouths in the world today than there are now."

He added: "If you were able to persuade people that it is irresponsible to have large families in this day and age, and if material wealth and material conditions are such that people value their materialistic life and don't suffer as a consequence, then that's all to the good. But I'm not particularly optimistic about the future. I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse."

Attenborough's next screen venture, a two-programme study of the rise of animals, begins on BBC2 on 20 September. The BBC has already announced future projects involving the much-loved face and voice of natural history. "If I was earning my money by hewing coal I would be very glad indeed to stop," said Attenborough, who had a pacemaker fitted to regulate his heart in June.

"But I'm not. I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune."

He also told the magazine: "I'm luckier than my grandfather, who didn't move more than five miles from the village in which he was born. I have all kinds of pleasures and luxuries that I appreciate and I'm very, very fortunate. I think that applies to the majority of people – in this country, at any rate.

"But I think that in another 100 years people will look back at a world that was less crowded, full of natural wonders, and healthier."

• David Attenborough
• Evolution
• Biology
• Population

James Meikle
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PayPal's commerce system wasn't built for crowdfunding, and that has created problems for some startups -- the company recently (if briefly) froze $45,000 of Mailpile's assets, for example. The PayPal team is determined to set things right, however, and just announced that it's reworking its policies to better accommodate crowdfunding projects. The firm isn't yet saying what those changes entail, but it's requiring that its Risk Management group review any potential freezes on crowdfunding campaigns until there's a permanent solution in place. While we'd prefer that PayPal devote the same kind of care to all frozen funds, it's good to know that fewer entrepreneurs will have their dreams dashed by someone else's mistake.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: PayPal (1), (2)

Blitz Games Studios, a major video games maker based in Leamington Spa, closes after 23 years of games developing.

The athlete seeking a new speed record with a very unusual bike

This is a tech demo for something something Oculus Rift blah blah. Look at the video! It almost has boobies. This one has the jubblies.

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Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

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I must warn you, I’m a keyboard snob. Not even the kind of keyboard snob people like, I’m a mechnical keyboard snob. To me a good day is spent mashing away at the pinnacle of human achievement, the IBM Model M. When I worked at Oakland University I had an opportunity to run into these all the time. Your local university probably has a ton of these, and you can find people like myself and Kyle Rankin trudging through garage sales looking for these gems. Whilst others hated these mechanical monstrosities they appealed to those of us who love to type. Over time I just started owning a bunch of them.

However as they run down and start to break I started to find that replacing them was becoming more costly as the market went up, and to be honest, even the latest crappy keyboards were starting to get good enough. One of my current favorites is the Dell USB Enhanced Keyboard which is a great keyboard for about 12 bucks. I know right.

Over time some of my friends like Rick Harding had moved on to Filcos or the Unicomp brand; which acquired the Model M patents for crunchiness and started shipping a modern version of the keyboard. I myself moved on to a Happy Hacking 2 which is a great keyboard but not a proper mechanical one. When I was rebuilding my work area I needed something wireless and ended up with a Logitech K360, which is not a bad chiclet keyboard, and the ability for it to share a dongle with my wireless trackball made for a nice clean desk. Good Enough(tm).

Still, there’s nothing like a real mechanical keyboard. I had discovered WASD keyboards via Rick Harding and I used their customizer to make an “Ubuntu keyboard”. It had an orange escape key, and aubergine keycaps for the Unity shortcut keys, and of course, used the Ubuntu font. But the price was steep, and though I bounced some ideas with Paul Sladen on how it would look I never followed through on actually getting one made. Then a few weeks ago Jeff Atwood announced the CODE Keyboard. A clean redo of a mechanical keyboard. Ok, I can dig this; so I ordered one.

What’s to love

• Very clean design; there’s no logos or any kind of badging on it.
• The Cherry Clear switches “feel” really good. Subjective I know. It took me this blog post to get used to it.
• The backlighting is absolutely gorgeous. I leave it on even when it’s not dark, it looks great.
• Thanks for making the Super Key OS-agnostic!
• The Insert/Home/Delete/End/PgUp/PgDown cluster is also your media keys. This allows me to control my media player with the keyboard shortcuts and adjust volume without taking my right hand off the keyboard, as the Fn key is the bottom right “menu key”. This is configurable via a DIP switch.
• There is a DIP switch to make the Caps lock key be a Ctrl. This is vitally important for UNIX-like operating systems as it’s the proper placement for the Ctrl key. Of course you can set this option at the OS level, but it’s nice to not only have it an option to be configured that way, but to have the key not labeled as Caps Lock.

• I like that the keyboard cable is just a mini-USB cable, which means I have a ton of them around already.

Thoughts on improvements.

• The keys feel “narrower” than a Model M, and a bit too narrow for my fat fingers, however since they’re “scooped” keys I don’t miss the key, it just takes some getting used to.
• I’d like to see WASD expand their custom keycaps to support this keyboard (Hopefully there will be enough demand to justify this).
• The backlighting doesn’t work on the lower side of the keycaps, so the labels for pause/play, fwd, stop, and volume are not lit up at night. This is a nitpick as it’ll be easy to memorize their location.

Things I’d like to see in version 2.0

• Built in USB Ports for things like a YubiKey or whatever.
• A wireless option for those of us who want a cleaner desk.
• Jo Shields mentioned that there’s no option for a UK layout, for those of you on that side of the pond.

What about the noise?

I think it’s worth noting that this keyboard is considerably quieter than a Model M. Notice that I said it’s quieter than a Model M, but this is not exactly a quiet keyboard. It’s not really loud either, but if you’re in the middle of flame war on the internet your cube mate might notice.

I work from home so this isn’t an issue for me, however I have worked in an office with Model M fans and it can get pretty loud in there so I think it’s worth pointing out that the CODE is not particularly loud. As far as how it stacks up noise-wise against other mechanical keyboards I’ve used, this one is relatively quiet, but I don’t have science handy to back this up.

Sean David O’Connor was quick to point out that WASD sells sets of rubber switch dampeners in three different configurations to soften the noise if this is an issue for you. I can confirm that the CODE as shipped to me does not include these dampeners.

Final Thoughts

So overall, it’s a nice keyboard, it has a very “Dark Knight” or “Monolith” feel to it. It’s a little heavy, but not Model M heavy, it certainly is not sliding around on you. The real test will be in a month or two when I start to clean it regularly. The “art” of cleaning a mechanical keyboard is something I’m experienced with, and I’m hoping that this modern keyboard will be easier to maintain than a Model M. Hopefully the spacebar isn’t as easy to break during maintenance as it is on a Model M.

In the original comments on Hacker News people were complaining about the price, $150. If you’re looking around at mechanical keyboards with proper cherry switches and so on, this is about the price range, so compared to the competition, it’s similarly priced; keyboards like this are not cheap and people who buy these kind of keyboards do for the same reason that Geddy Lee doesn’t play a $500 bass. For comparison the Unicomp Model M style with the original buckling spring is about $80.

Overall I like it; this is my first WASD keyboard and I can see where they get their good reputation from, I’m hoping to get some long life out of this keyboard and it seems off to a great start. Jo Shields pointed out that there’s really nothing on this keyboard that you can’t get in other ones, and that’s true to a certain extent. I think anyone who is into mechanical keyboards has their own (strong) opinions on what right feels like. I think people who swear by Cherry Reds will always get that switch and be fine. Where I think this keyboard shines is that it’s an “opinionated default” that works out of the box and gets you started about typing quickly and efficiently without getting all Linux-user on you with a ton of options on switches and stuff.

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Microsoft agrees to buy Nokia's mobile phone business and gains access to its patents and mapping services for 5.4bn euros ($7.2bn; £4.6bn).