Royal Park is yet to get its markings, so we can view the invaluable space the council will be taking away, ruining with ugly yellow lines
Here, by Christchurch School, the lines already exist -but as they can be ignored, they have a beauty of their own
Round the corner, there's more pavement space. Its inevitable the council will put down double yellow lines here —just so schoolchildren can get to school safely
Given that small children on scooters can already squeeze past parked cars, there is no justification in adding more ugly yellow lines —or even enforcing the ones that are already there
Here's the nice new corner piece of Castle Park and Broad Weir where pedestrians can sit and rest after a hectic day of shopping in Cabot Circus. The Council have gone to all the trouble of landscaping a formerly naff patch of ground in an effort to make it a bit more appealing. And like flies to manure, the paveparkers have found out that you can dump a vehicle there all day, just behind the bus stop.But wtach out, that newly laid turf is a bit wet and the mud might get on your tyres:(
That's pretty significant. Because, as some subversives have pointed out, internet communications is locked down via HTTPS and other protocols that encrypt their data, often using the RSA Public Key algorithm to do it. Which relies on the fact that, given a big non-prime number, it's "computationally very hard", to determine which two prime numbers can be multiplied together to produce this number.
Thus, in order to stop people encrypting their data in a form which the government cannot read, they are going to have to ban prime numbers.
A number which is forbidden to be discussed, shared or published on the web is known as an Illegal Number, the 09F9 key to decrypt blu-ray disks being a notorious example: a number where everyone publishing it initially received an DMCA takedown notice. Certain prime numbers can also be considered illegal, such as one which is actually the x86 linux binary code to decrypt a DVD.
All Cameron is proposing, then, is expand the list of Illegal Numbers, to some other numbers, specifically all prime numbers. That's a big list, so we'll shorten it by providing a set-theoretic definition of primeness:
∀ n in Naturals: ∄ p, q ∊ {2..n-1} : (p ≠ q ∧ p * q = n)
That is all numbers n in the set of natural numbers Naturals, for which there do not exist two distinct numbers p and q in the set of numbers 2..n such that p times q equals n.
There: simples. And stopping terrorists sending messages the government —ideally a government led by Boris Johnson with Nigel Farrage as his deputy— cannot read is common sense.
Except, well, it's not going to work, not without bringing down The Internet As We Know It. Which would be somewhat inconvenient.
We've stated before that we are building a modern police state, a datacentre state, at an undisclosed location in stokes croft. Some of it is being rolled out, such as these undercover CCTV cameras near the Moon Pub. Some crimes don't merit hidden speed cameras enforcing publicly displayed limits, other crimes, like rolling some locally grown weed —do.
Because we are a small police state of our own, we have agreed to try out the new "no encryption policy" before it is rolled out nationally.
We do however recognise that encryption is critical to functionality of the internet, so will allow small primes —anything below 2^8. That is, only primes >= 256 are illegal.
We have issued our local PCSO with a list of all of legal primes, and given them a new power. As well as being able to fine cyclists for cycling on the pavement, they are now permitted to inspect phones and other computing devices to see if they contain prime numbers greater than 255. If so, the criminal will be arrested then deported to the Avonmouth detention facility (formerly: Portway Park and Ride) for The Duration of The Emergency.
Our PCSO will also be allowed to stop and search anyone, in case they are "Prime Number Mules", trying to sneak large prime numbers into the area in USB sticks hidden in body parts. We won't go into the specifics.
Be advised, because connecting to facebook or twitter uses encypted HTTPS connections, even when done from their phone apps, driving while texting is going to have to be made temporarily illegal —banned until our strategic partners release "Stokes Croft editions" of the applications.
To catch these possible terrorists, we are now recategorising cyclists such as here, RedVee, from "tax dodging scum", to "guardians in the war on terror". They are now permitted to report such incidents as the one above, in case the culprit is not a "hard working motorist", but instead "threat to society". A&S police will look up the vehicle registration, determine whether or not the driver is Muslim, and take action when appropriate.
The phrase "city gateway" should be a warning sign; it means someone has focused to much on some "urban realm" and new visitor experience rather than useful.
The only direction to be coming from where the "city gateway" would be the first thing you see of the city is if you are coming from the train station and have never visited the city.
In this situation, what would you rather see:
A six lane road with a bend in it, where, at the jut-out point, some trees?
A bus station with buses taking you useful places?
Because Bristol has two public transport city gateways: the bearpit and now this. And unlike the bearpit, we don't fear gentrification here, the Brunel pub suddenly serving beer you can drink, or open air pop-up cafes in front of the train station. (yes, we know about gateway 3, the underpass for walking and cycling. Another day)
But wait! people say, we are going to get a new showcase entry to the north of the station.
That entry point exists already. It's very convenient pickup/dropoff point today, because nobody else knows about it and you can pull off Temple Way early and stop right by the entrance.
It's also known by the cyclists as the way you can get to the station without being run over, the way you can get out without being run over on the way back, and where you can collect pre-ordered tickets from a machine which will only issue them to you if you have both the card and a six-character reference number. Given that you can check in for a transatlantic flight needing only the credit card, we are still trying to determine what security requirements mandate a significantly stricter policy for issuing tickets between Bristol and Bath, but we are sure it makes sense.
The cyclists gain from being able to get to the Bristol-Bath railway path, which is signposted
That's it, the blue one above the no-bicycles and "Cyclists dismount and give way to pedestrians" sign. That's our favourite, as it makes clear that even when they get off a bicycle they are still the Untermenschen of our city, the only ones we can discriminate against until UKIP come in to power and we can ban anyone muslim from the M4.
emplemads.
Anyway, cyclists can get to and from the railway path here. As this is the site of the most recent templemeads access point redevelopment, let's look at it and see what the last designers did in terms of making walking and cycling in Bristol better.
It starts at the Cheesegrater, one of the two Bridges added in the twenty first century. These are the showcase walking and cycling bridges to Templemeads. We'll get back to them after the tour.
Here then, we cycle across the Cheesegrater Bridge, as if the Untermensch were coming from the railway path, go past the "Untermenschen get off and respect your superiors" turnoff, where the Untermensch turns right, along what is currently a wide cycle route separate from the footpaths, and which will be upgraded to "new route for station dropoff". That is good, a bike path that wide is wide enough for a road: its what it needs. And we know from the rest of the area, that cyclists and pedestrians will share a pavement provided there's a sign telling the cyclists to dismount.
Carrying on from there, Herr Untermensch continues along past the "wet wood with afterthought traffic calming when they discovered people were actually cycling over it bridge", or as we will now call it "the rattling wood bridge"
Then: along the river. This could actually be a nice route to the city centre, except that its existence is kept a secret. Even the pedestrian signs to Cabot Circus don't direct people this way, not when there's some main roads to walk past. Oh, and a new "city gateway" of course.
In theory, then, this riverside walk could be made a walking and cycling "city gateway", one that took people to Cabot Circus and even the new Broadmead, whenever those plans surface. This path is also the most direct route to the Bus station, 15-20 minutes and traffic free the whole way. Maybe: but Bristol has always been proud of the inner ring road, "temple way", and should celebrate it.
On bike, an Untermensch will eventually reach the Counterslip Road where they can see that the council would rather provide three parking bays on a bridge than any form of cycling infrastructure. Just something to bear in mind whenever someone talks about a war on motoring: we still have those parking bays on the bridge on Counterslip Road.
Finally, down some steps and along the remainder of the path to Castle Park.
To summarise: a quiet route from the station, which with some minor effort could me made a gateway to the city:
Lighting
Signing
Tax-dodger routing on the counterslip
some way to get bikes up the stairs.
Finzal's reach will address this by adding a slightly different bridge, one to the west. As you can see from the consultation, this will be a curvy bridge, like Peros' the cheesegrater and the slippery wooden one.
There've been some mixed feelings about this. The cycling campaign felt that the route wasn't designed to take the cycling traffic volumes which would be seen if the councils goals of numbers of people cycling were actually to be met. On the other side, the Bristol Civil Society came out against it, because
Finzel’s Reach Bridge would not be the choice of most people walking or cycling between Cabot Circus or the Old City and Temple Meads Station; they would choose to cross Bristol Bridge or St. Philip’s Bridge.
This surprises us. Certainly people walking and cycling choose to use Bristol Bridge or St. Philip’s Bridge, but that's because "those are the two bridges they can use", especially when "the nice route by the river isn't known about by all". They also chose not to critique the bridge for the reason we would, which is
we are sick of architects trying to give us fancy bendy bridges as they don't appear to work. Given Bristol's history of being built around a bridge, being internationally renowned for its suspension bridge, can we have some bridges which now actually meet their design goals of "getting people over the rivers safely"?
Which brings us, in a roundabout way, back to the Cheesegrater. This is a bridge which has warning signs telling people not to cycle over it when wet, and even for pedestrians to take care. Think about that.
A bridge.
Two transport modes: walking and cycling
Expected traffic volume: more than one person walking or cycling over the bridge at the same time, possibly in opposite directions
For use in Bristol. Which has rained a lot in the past 1000+ years, enough for people to know that wet surfaces should be a common state, sometimes being replaced by "icy surface". Yet the cheesegrater bridge utterly fails to provide anything resembling traction in this situation.
Now look at the implementations we've had in C21
Valentines:
Surface: wood, slippery when wet or icy, rickety
Shape: S-shaped, for no apparent reason other than someone thought it was innovative
Designed for: walking and cycling
Not suitable for: anyone trying to cycle over it while someone else is walking over it
Amelioration measures: stick up some barriers over the bridge to discourage anyone actually trying to cycle over it.
Cheesegrater
Surface: metal,very slippery when wet or icy
Shape: S-shaped, for no apparent reason other than someone thought it was innovative
Designed for: walking and cycling
Not suitable for: anyone trying to cycle over it when it has rained in the previous 24 hours
Amelioration measures: cyclist dismount signs.
There then, are the two features we have had in terms of innovative city gateway work near Templemeads in the past 15 years. Two bendy bridges that completely fail to meet their design goals. One could just be misfortune. But a second? Didn't someone from the design team look at the first and consider how had it failed? Or did they just say "yes, bendy bridges with slippery surfaces are fashionable, let's do one too".
They didn't, did they. Which means that there are civil engineers out there who are still being allowed to build things. What we fear is this: they are involved in this new Templemeads work.
Step 1: find out who designed the rickety bridge and reassign them to doing bridges in Morocco and other low-rainfall regions. Step 2: find out who designed the cheesegrater bridge and reassign them to doing something completely unrelated to civil engineering, or indeed designing things that people are expected to use. Working on Windows Phone User Experience, perhaps.
Whatever happens: we have to make sure they weren't involved in the new Templemeads "city gateway" as we know its not going to work, even before looking at the designs.
Some revolutionaries exploited some known PHP hack and defaced the travelwest web site.
Cue cause for coverage in the guardian, Muslim Hackers take down bus schedule web site, including describing how people resorted to facebook to ask the Arab Security Team what the schedule for the #8 bus is.
Well, it's good for Bristol to get some coverage in a paper written in London but sold nationally. Sadly, the paper covered the story with a photo of a stock bus stop in the rural road middle of nowhere. This is surprising, as we'd expected at least one of the paper's unpaid interns to have studied somewhere in the city.
For future reference the #8/9 bus meanders round the northwest bristol urban areas, with Clifton is furthest point in its orbit from its terminus, Bristol Templemeads.
Here, then, is an authentic Bristol #8 bus. Sitting at templemeads with the lights out and no cue whatsoever as to when the bus engine will be spun up and passengers able to get to their destination.
This, and non-determism of Bristol traffic flows, mean that if you live in 30 minutes walk of BTM, then, even if you are on the #8/#9 bus line, you are better off walking, except when one or more of the following conditions are met: its wet, you have luggage, you have a child with you. Even there, given child fares are non-zero in Bristol, walking with a child is still appealing.
As for Clifton being a rural idyll of empty roads: no. The residents may imagine it is a village, but only by the same criteria that stokes croft could consider itself a village: it was one a couple of centuries ago. Avonmouth village has far more villageness.
Dear Guardian: when you next want a photo of a Bristol bus stop -please get in touch.
And a confirmation that engineering really does work.
After 150 years the Downs were opened up to as many cars as possible for a firework display, which lasted 15 minutes.
Yesterday the roads around the Downs became a thing of the past, and parking prohibition became a mere memory of some ancient time when Engineers were lauded for their contribution to the 'Modern World'.
Luckily for drivers the 'No Cycling' signs did not apply to them, so they were able to park and drive right across the Downs to avoid the gridlock caused by the other traffic and escape into the night. Pedestrians were particularly helpful in getting out of the way if hooted at whilst they walked home. It was fantastic.
Unfortunately, the Downs have returned to normal today, and if you are driving a car you will need to use a road.
However, Bristol's biggest car park WILL be celebrated with fireworks every 150 years from now on.
There's a bit of an upset in Birmingham currently, where (conservative) councillor came out and accused cycling of being discriminatory on race and gender, and that the £23 M could be better spent on things like parking spaces. And that it is also biased against women who want to wear modest clothing.
Well, we agree, in Bristol it is a discriminatory form of transport too. But not on race or gender.
No, in Bristol, Cycling discriminates against obese people with no legs and a lifestyle focused on fry-ups rather than hill climbs. These are people who suffer in our city.
Take this scene here, a mature Bristolian rastafarian working his way up Bridge Valley road. He's very much not a young white man -but to get up the hill on a road bike he has to be fit. A large proportion of our population —especially the residents of the suburbs, are significantly overweight, smoke, and generally live an unhealthy lifestyle.
These are the people that our city cycling project discriminates against —and no amount of cash on cycling infrastructure will fix that, unless the infrastructure involves lifts and escalators.
These are also the people that the city's expanding RPZ project discriminates: people to unfit to walk more than 15 metres to their destination. Removing all the free parking penalises those people who are too unfit to walk or cycle anywhere, by forcing them to pay.
The only person who cares for those people's needs is Eric Pickles –because he is the only politician who understands what it is like to obese and unfit. This is why his "short stops on double yellow lines" proposal is targeted at them: now they will be able to stop outside the newsagent to buy a packet of fags, then drive on to the chip shop to buy the evening meal.
Segregated cycling facilities will make this worse by removing short-stay parking opportunities, discriminating against the obese and the unfit merely by their very presence.
Returning to Birmingham, gateway to the M6, the councillor's colleague, Councillor Hutchings came out with the other part of the story, when he said “he feared hoards” of cyclists would have “a severe impact on pedestrians and motorists”. That's the other way a cycling program penalises the obese and the unfit. If you aren't fit enough to cycle round the city, driving is all you can do. The more cyclists there are, the more you get held up.
This is why the very presence of cycling infrastructure and increased cycling is so discriminatory against overweight suburbanites who will be hit by the triple whammy of cycling infrastructure removing main-road short stay options, the RPZ removing back road long stay parking, and finally cyclists themselves being in the way. Oh, and of course there's the 20 mph zone slowing down the journeys from their houses to the chip shops.
This is why it is critical that the Birmingham councillors recognise that cycling doesn't discriminate against gender or ethnic groups —if that city doesn't get the funding then it could come Bristol's way, and things would only get worse!
It's in the balance right now: which way will Scotland vote?
It's time we stopped being impartial and stated our preference: Yes
Why? One reason is that one of our reporters lived there in the 1980s and remembers how a London-based government killed its entire manufacturing base: the shipyards, Ravenscraig, the coal mines, all the time promising that new industries would take its place: the service industry, the financial sector.
Well the financial sector did go big, but mainly so that London grew so wealthy that nobody can afford to live there. Edinburgh gained too -but it turns out those bankers got so excited about short term bonuses they turned out be a con. Meanwhile, what was left of the scottish industry died. Now, an independent scotland isn't going to get the clyde busy again, but at least now it'll have a government that actually cares about Glasgow, unlike Westminster, which has only just discovered where Glasgow is.
The 1980s also came with the Poll Tax, showing how Westminster was happy to impose its daft ideas on scotland first, a country that could be "an experiment". Aye, we remember that.
An independent Scotland would have a a government that cared about Scotland. You don't get that today, and you have no guarantees it will happen in future.
What you do have today is all the legacy politicians going north of the Border and promising more devolved powers. Promising is the key word: no politician can make guarantees. That's particularly true in the Conservative party, who have to keep their backbenchers happy and try and stop voters defecting to the UKIP, which they can only do by having policies that keep Daily Mail commenters happy. They will try and weasel out of every promise they make to Scotland, and over the years, pull more of them back.
As an example: Eric Pickles. We have a government that claims that it is in favour of "localism", in which councils and people get more of a say in what they do. Yet the councils and people are only allowed to do what Eric Pickles wants them to. He's killing the ability of Bristol Council to drive round schools with a CCTV camera to catch parents endangering schoolkids by parking on double yellow lines and keep clear zones. He's killing the councils ability to use CCTV to enforce bus lane parking restrictions. Why? He'd rather appease daily mail readers who believe in "Common Sense" over having safe schools and a functional transport system. Do you really believe that any promises of devolved power to Scotland will be kept when you have ministers trying to restrict how councils enforce bus-lane blocking?
Scotland going independent will force the rest of the UK to think "how will we be governed". The north of England does have legitimate rights to say "we deserve to have devolved powers to ... there's enough of a cultural gulf between there and London, enough of diverged economies, that it makes sense".
The same goes for Bristol. We're the same size as Edinburgh, diverged from London -yet we don't effectively even have a say on whether or not parents can park outside schools. Any rethinking of how the UK is governed needs to address that.
An independent Scotland has the potential to bring change that will benefit Bristol. It's not guaranteed -yet it delivers an opportunity which can exploit
A vote for no is a vote for the status quo: irrespective of what the promises are.
Yes. We're sick to death of the endless phone calls reminding us we can claim for mis-sold PPI we bought years ago*.
Yes. We're sick of the texts telling us we can claim for that accident that wasn't our fault.
Yes. We're sick of being promised a new kitten if we watch the internet for long enough.
But most of all we're sick of the WAR ON THE MOTORIST!
So thank goodness it's now possible to use a new website to reclaim overpaid taxes, entirely legitimately. All Road Tax ever paid since since 1937 can be reclaimed here:
All of them have arts and law degrees. Usually the arts degree is "PPE: politics, philosophy and economics", which is an oxbridge-only degree with no real-world relevance outside local and national government.
The price guaranteed per MWh for nuclear power generated at Hinkley Point C, despite the way the price curves for solar and other renewables saying "massively over the odds"
Global warming. It may be bad news, but that doesn't stop you pretending it doesn't exist.
etc. etc. We have politicians on all sides of the house who have agendas and beliefs and who are not prepared to consider how many of those beliefs are defensible
And as noted, the media are as bad. Which means when the politicians say things that are blatantly wrong, this doesn't get picked up on. The classic example is when politicians say that cycling in the UK is safer than the NL as annual fatalities/head of population are less. They can quote the numbers because they are dividing the death rate by the wrong value ... it is as defensible as saying "the uk is safer as annual cycling fatalities per sheep in the country" is less. It's completely bogus, either said knowingly to defend a position —confident that it won't be challenged by a media without the understanding— or uttered because they are clueless and don't recognise its flaws themselves.
"A survey by the charity found one in four blind and partially-sighted people were involved in a crash"
As has eventually reached the press, this came from 14 people who may or may not have had guide dogs, and therefore is pretty much meaningless.
In contrast, we are data driven organisation.
Admittedly all our content is self-selected, hence utterly prone to selection bias and observer bias —but we are aware of this fact and happy to admit it.
we back up our assertions with photos and videos, not anecdotes about cyclists hitting wing mirrors and cycling off.
by surveying the same streets repeatedly, we build up a defensible dataset. For example, we have no evidence that the fabled "stokes croft bike lane" actually exists other than as a short-stay parking area for the post-office and the mercedes owner who lives next door to it.
Census: you measure the entire population (i.e. set of things you care about).
Survey: you measure a proper subset of the entire population in the hope that this data can be used to reach conclusions about the entire population.
The critical thing is that for a survey to substitute for a census, it needs to be a representative sample of the entire population. If it is not, then it can only be expanded to the non-representative portion of the population.
In the case of the guide dogs, it could be expanded to say "25% of the kind of people who follow our twitter feed and can be bothered to fill in surveys claim to both have guide dogs and to have been hit by a cyclist"
That's a very different statement. But it is all that can be made.
Which brings us round to the point. It's bollocks, but it is a bollocks that will be repeated blindly by much of the press then believed by its readers —and it will also be believed by politicians who don't have a clue about how numbers work.
The Economist has discovered the Clifton Popular Front in their article Four wheel Fever.
This shows what press a tank in a city can have.
The paper did fail to note what bad press a tank in a city can have, such as when the driver of the tank feels that a protest against an RPZ in Clifton is more important than a protest against bombing of UN refugee centres in Gaza
Which is the problem: a clash between a mayor trying address the traffic problems for the city with a part of the city that believes in the inalienable right to drive the kids to school even if there is no parking, to drive to the local shops even if there is no parking, and to drive to work even if there is no parking.
A lot of the city believes that, but Clifton is one part of the city that has come out in protest against it. There's also the Aberystwyth Faction of Gloucester Road, but they have gone quiet. And in Clifton, its the traders who believe in the right to drive to work that are being most vocal.
The article is interesting, we just have a few points to add
"Bristol is one of the most congested cities in Britain. Traffic during the evening rush hour moves more slowly than anywhere except Belfast, Edinburgh and London. "
That's something we've looked at before. "Congestion" is an odd concept; for Bristol it is often defined as "the city with the highest variance between peak hour and non-peak hour traffic". Bristol becomes easy to drive around between 09:10 and 16:30, whereas outer london is always near-stationary. Another metric "average traffic speed" fails to consider that journey time is defined as distance/velocity, so if the distances are short, so is the time. In London, people travel further to work.
"Locals will pay £48 ($81) for the first permit to park near their homes."
Locals in some of the city already do, Kingsdown (KN) and Cotham South (CM) being examples. Nobody protested there, showing that it's not the residents in the inner ring that have the issues. It's those people who have adopted a lifestyle that assumes that free parking will be available near their place of work, and consider congestion to be something imposed on them, rather than a consequence of their own decisions.
"In Clifton, a suspension bridge links Bristol with North Somerset. “Everybody and his daughter will park there and walk across,” predicts one resident. Rather than solving a city’s traffic problem, Mr Ferguson might just end up pushing it elsewhere."
If you ever visit Abbot's Leigh on a weekday you will see that it is already full of park+walk commuters. Why? You save on the £1 bridge toll, adding up to £10/week for commuters. There's also more chance of finding a parking space there. Claiming that the RPZ will force commuters to park elsewhere really means "the expanded RPZs will force commuters to walk further". Oh, and as the Downs is out of the zone, park+bus and park+pedal from there will continue to be as popular as it is today.
What the paper does pick up on is the fact that South Gloucestershire council has a big chunk of the Bristol metropole —and a very different transport policy. S Gloucs has the "Leeds Strategy": wider roads. They've had the space for this, but all it does is amplify congestion in the North Fringe. That conflict between strategies is going to place Bristol and South Gloucestershire in head-on conflict between long.
Out in Twitter Land, one of those paranoid characters accused the cyclists of "building a police state". They are, but not the toy one he imagines from helmet cameras and ANPR recognition. No, those are surface dressing, something to get irate about while the real mass surveillance state gets "deployed" -as the developers call it, "for the duration of the emergency"
Because this new police state is special.
The cost of storing the data is offloaded to to private companies, its a privatised police state.
It's designed to scale: it is now affordable to store a "record" about every SMS message, or HTTP connection opened up.
We, the population, are paying for the privilege of having the companies record everything we do, and the state being able to ask for it when we get it back.
We've moved on from Irish nationalists and communists to "paedos" and "jihadists" as the enemies. There's something dubious about the paedo one, what with the BBC of the 1970s being worked out, and the attention moving towards the houses of parliament. As for the Jihadist rising, yes, we do have idiots who are getting politicised by watching online videos. But the number of people killed by these naive fools is still a fraction of those killed in the troubles: a we didn't have a mass surveillance state then.
So what's changed since the 1970s? The back infrastructure for mass surveillance states now has O(1) scalability; the front end consumer electronics
In computational complexity theory, there's a notation, Big O Notation, used to describe the scalability of system. It doesn't describe how hard things are, but how much harder things get as the problem gets bigger.
The Deutschland Demokratic Republik, the DDR, is notorious for having the worlds most comprehensive mass surveillance society. But they did it by hand.
For every citizen to watch, they needed a watcher, so the scalability of their state was linear, written down as O(n) scalability. Double the population, double the watchers, double the costs. That's if you trust the watchers. If you want to keep an eye on them, well, if we assume one monitor per 8 stasi members -and that those monitors need watching too, the scale becomes O(n)+O(n/8)+O(n/64)+... You get the point: it doesn't scale. The DDR tried, but it placed too much overhead on their economy, and even being the most efficient of the communist states wasn't enough. Eventually the population chose they wanted those consumer toys rather than the police state, the army felt the same way, and because the russians chose not to send their tanks in, down came the wall.
Nowadays though, we can build a police state with O(1) scalability, where the 1 has a name: Google.
Yes, everyone views them as a search engine, or an email service, but behind the scenes they've been developing that infrastructure for storing a snapshot of the web, indexing it's cross page links ("metadata", as they call it). The Google File System, GFS, and its computation layers on top: MapReduce, Pregel and Caffeine,as well as most recently, Spanner. As the abstract there says, "it is the first system to distribute data at a global scale".
What else have google done? Android: a smart phone OS, that they give away, indeed, they even sell their nexus phones at a loss. Why? Because it is profitable for them to give away the OS and sell phones at a discount, in exchange for you to carry a little device wherever you go. One that checks in with Google regularly, giving Spanner data to replicate, Google FS something to store, Pregel something to join together.
We are all paying every month for the right to carry a bit of electronics that continually reports to your mobile phone company where you are, who you call, who you text, when you connect to facebook, twitter, whatever. Even everything you look up in the map. Google want that data because the more they record about you, the better they can get about predicting you (remember those Markov Chains?), the better they can target advertising at you.
And government? They want that same data. If they said "every adult has to carry a machine that tells us where you go, what you look up in maps and who you talk to", even the Daily Mail commenters would be up in arms, the UKIP protesting about it being european, and not even the Lib Dem apologists could think of any way to pretend it was good.
Yet we are already carrying those machines that tell google all this stuff -all the government want to do is get that same information. Which they do by pretending it's minor, "metadata", "call records", "web connection information", phrases that aren't obvious to people the same way "where you are", "who you speak to" and "what you do on your computer".
That's what they are after though -they are just hiding the fact so you don't wake up screaming, realising that you are already living in a mass surveillance state that even the DDR would be jealous of -jealous because of its scale, the information it collects, and best of all, the subtlety.
That's the police state the cyclists have built -those bay area pedal pushers- and anyone complaining about CCTV surveillance is simply so woefully innocent it's actually quaint.
Now that summer is here, the car windows are down and people can engage in spontaneous conversation.
Here, we can see a tax dodger having the rudeness to walk over a zebra crossing and lights, then, as they set off, decide to talk to one of their superiors -here the driver of Audi WR11FGG.
It's always hard to think of an opening for an impromptu conversation, but here the driver has left a way open by virtue of the fact she appears to be reading email on her smart phone as she drives down the road.
Admittedly, she does seem a bit surprised by the way the cyclist tries to strike up a friendly banter -but then as she was looking at the phone while driving down Whiteladies Road, she was unaware that were any tax-dodgers in the area.
As d-day for the Clifton RPZ rollout approaches, already tempers are getting hot. What will happen? Will it be tanks up Whiteladies road a-la Soviet Liberation of Berlin, or will be house-to-house battling like Stalingrad?
We know this: it'll be noisy.
Clifton Resident James Gadd sends us this video of one of the pre-RPZ skirmishes -one where the Clifton Popular Front and their tank are nowhere to be seen. Here it's commuter vs resident, soon escalating to the police and then finally the builders. As anyone who has spent time in the city will know, builder's trucks are some of the most damaged out there, and so have little qualms about banging up against someone's car while they get their scaffolding out. Which is why that's the time even the police should consider their exit strategy.
Part one: opening skirmish
Part two: the residents come out with their pitchforks
Part 3: here come the Polis
Part 4: I see your police car and raise you a Builder's Lorry
Part 5: call it a draw
James -thank you for these, and we look forward to more as rollout day arrives!
There's lots of hype about "Autonomous Cars", the UAVs of the tarmac, but who in the UK has seen one? Bristol-Resident RedVee has, here in Stokes Croft
As you can see, the driver of W845PDS can safely text on their commute, safe in the knowledge that the car itself will make decisions as to when it can and cannot go.
Sadly, a small firmware error in this model means that it is "red/green colour blind", so has been known to unintentionally drive through a red light.
Google have reassured us that this will be fixed in a later software update -all the owner will to do is hook up the car's USB port to a laptop, download the 17GB firmware patch, wait for the four hour update to take place and then accept the dialogs about changes in privacy policy for the car.
There's a 3500+ petition up on the council web site demanding a rethink to RPZs in Bristol. This shows how effective the Clifton people at organising defence of their rights. Or, as the late Glaswegian father of this team member said "The extension of the M1 to Swiss Cottage was stopped because it went through Hampstead. The inner glasgow motorways went through the Gorbals because it went through the Gorbals". Anyone who thinks this petition is about RPZs anywhere outside Clifton are wonderfully naive.
Again, this petition is repeating the claim that an RPZ is bad for your house price.
Some questions for anyone who repeats that claims?
-Why is nobody from Cotham or Kingsdown protesting about the RPZs, saying "the RPZ devalued our house prices"?
-Have house prices in Cotham South and Kingsdown either fallen since the RPZ -or even just increased at a lower rate than Cotham North?
-If, as is claimed, an RPZ will eliminate shop staff and commuter parking on weekdays, is that £50/year going to buy you the ability to park near your home, without having to pay that off-street parking premium?
-When the asking price for a house in or near Clifton is £1.5M+, who is suffering here? Because the only people that can afford a house like that is going to be someone selling up a flat in London and moving west, someone in Clifton earning large amounts of money and still overcommitting on the mortgage -or someone with money making an investment in buy-to-let and expecting prices to continue to rise.
-Why are the Clifton RPZ protesters so concerned about the limit of the number of cars/household, or the cost of registering an overweight car, when a large fraction of the inner city don't even own one car, let alone three?
As the Bristol Blogger observed the last time we covered this, the RPZ is potentially going to increase value of your house. "In the Clifton West RPZ" means that you are officially in Clifton, and will have the right to drive your SUV round the corner to Clifton village for a latte.
More interesting is not so much "what will it mean for Clifton houses costing £1.5M", as "what will it mean for St Pauls houses?" Or, phrased differently, "will all-day residential parking it St Pauls increase gentrification and so break up the community there?"
That's something to discuss, but it's hard for the Cliftonians to complain about a destruction of community, as there is none. Everyone hates their neighbours as they are competing for the same parking spaces. And that's speaking as a former resident who was taken aback when moving to Horfield that neighbours actually say hello to each other.
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