I started ranting about consumers rejecting the enforced bundling of products (such as songs they didn’t want on an album) in 2001 (including music – see Courtney Love – and mixed media). It sounds like my prognostications of doom are coming true (even DataWaz will serve up individual data points now – something they swore they’d never do when I was on board).
What a strange thing to want to do, but class, nevertheless. Down a 200ft escalator on skis. Bootiful.
I need a new Oyster wallet
The local government shared services movement is taking off. Announcements that IBM will be preferred partner for Somerset and Capita for Southampton show that there is real traction in value creating public-private partnerships. Sandwell is going with BT and Liberata (interesting that BT is one of Liberata’s major clients).
In other news, Communities and Local Government has released the business improvement pack, as promised. Nice to see the business architecture we helped create at the heart of it.
And the OGC has started its work to modernise the procurement profession.
It was interesting to see the Indy come out for prohibition of cannabis. I don’t have a problem with their changing their mind on whether the drug is harmful or not (although badscience seems to debunk this pretty effectively), but flipping on prohibition seems extreme.
I’m pretty convinced that legalisation of drugs is the only sensible option left to us. No industry wants to kill or impoverish its customers (yes, even smoking) and a regulated, legal drugs industry would want to keep us all in work (to continue buying) rather than cleaning us out ASAP (as the illegal drugs industry will).
Confirmed that Gus O’Donnell has written to smaller departments pointing them towards DWP and HMRC for their finance and HR needs.
I wonder if the good burghers of Navarra think that their wind farms ruin the scenery? Interesting that they have over 70% of energy from renewables and that Spain recently had its biggest day of wind energy–at 27% the largest contributor to the national grid.
Lovely idea from Mumbai. You get an Rs200 fine for travelling without an Rs8 ticket. This is sufficiently high to deter most of the 6m people travelling each day. Given that there is no system able to check everyone, random checks are the order of the day. Along comes an entrepreneur who says “pay me Rs500 a year and I’ll refund your fine if you get one”. Genius.
How a tiny subset of the brain is being modeled on a serious supercomputer. I love the idea that it started working spontaneously. Put a sufficiently sophisticated system together and you get thought-like activity? Who needs a creator?