Running On Vapour

Back in the days when I ran a car one of my motoring bad habits was to let the fuel level get dangerously low before going any where near a petrol station. It didn’t help that my Citroen 2CV could, it seemed run on vapour for days. In fact I’d ride around with a 5 litre plastic can (eh?) of fuel in the boot for those times when I did eventually splutter to a halt and that was the extent of my tank refill. For a while the minimal dashboard on the 2CV failed to register anything other than my speed so even a fill-up of fuel still left me clueless as to quite how much I had filled up with or didn’t have ‘somewhere back there’. And I liked it that way. Mercifully I no longer run a car and don’t live in the Antipodes so this story about a proposed fine for drivers who run out of fuel on some of New Zealand’s main highways reminds me how lucky I am not to be driving full time these days (I’d soon go broke from proposed fines like these alone).

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Run out of gas, pay a fine — police plan

by Wayne Thompson

The New Zealand Herald

25 Aug 2009

Drivers trying to squeeze the last kilometre from an empty fuel tank now face the prospect of a hefty fine if they run out of petrol on Auckland’s motorways. Acting on a request from the police, the Transport Agency is proposing a bylaw that would…read more…

Tech Tags: The New Zealand Herald newspaper FRONT PAGE

Fighting For The Battler?

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The Daily Telegraph (Sydney)

25 Aug 2009
Australia has raised the threshold for personal bankruptcy from AU$2000 to AU$10,000 to better help the ‘battler’ population (the traditional low income, low asset, no social mobility  demographic in Australian society) better survive the recession and help them avoid the shame of bankruptcy under the headline  of keeping the ‘banks at bay’.. In Australia it perhaps is better recognised that debt and bankruptcy occurs more readily within the low income members of society who turn to credit cards to help fund house price, rental and cost of living increases and that bankruptcy in the face of few assets achieves very little other than compound the problems of the long term poor in a recession. The ‘Battler‘ is often cited by some as being closer to the real heart of Australia and is a term of endearment a world away from Britain’s demonising of what remains of and what it means to be working class.

Conforming Feminine Outlook

“It represents a mentality of conforming feminine outlook within the white race, and that as long as it does not fall within this race or starve and paint itself in order to look like the white race it therefore is not feminine.”

Quote from the young communist league of South Africa regarding the questioning of the gender of athelete Caster Semenya. The quote has, in my opinion great merit regardless of the outcome of any supposed ‘test of gender’.

Playaway Time

Just picked up an audio book (Yes Adam I took the lazy option) from the library that’s in the playaway format which I’ve not tried out before. It was this or 22 CD’s which I didn’t fancy faffing around with. It’s a tiny pocket device that’s been supplied with x2 rechargeable AAA batteries. You use your own headphones. I had assumed that it’d perhaps be reasonable quality low bitrate  AAC/+ or more likely protected WMA loaded into an internal digital memory but sadly evidence of quite severe bitrate crushing is audibly evident so perhaps I should have suffered the suitcase full of CD’s instead (well it is unabridged so I guess they have to compress like crazy but do they really now in this day and age?). The audio can be speeded up or slowed down without the pitch being shifted and the device remembers the point at which you were last listening. A new experience technologically anyway.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Costing The Daily News

Rupert Murdoch has signalled his intention to begin charging for on-line news content. In the UK this should mean that the Internet editions of The Times and The Sun will now ask for some kind of payment either for all or specialized content access.

Obviously the newsprint media is desperate to halt its revenue decline but will this just hasten their ongoing decline in readership numbers and are they as deluded as the music industry in the self assessment of their own worth. And like the music industry are they clinging on to old models rather than embracing new alliances and innovation?
Advertising is no longer the financial crutch it once was and the vexed problem of monetizing on-line is a tough call for anyone that offers a service on the Internet to a world that has grown to expect free access.
And yes I’m one of those people who hasn’t bought a newspaper since sometime in the 90′s.
I’m happy to pay for on-line services like PressDisplay (surely the iPlayer of the on-line print media world) but if newspapers start building pay walls around their content rather than differentiating themselves from a sea of other news media alternatives then they could find themselves addressing a decidedly smaller niche market. That may or may not be enough to keep them viable.

Picture from Flickr under this creative commons license