Footnotes are something of a way of life for me. They're like bracketed sub clauses that don't clutter up the page, thus allowing information to actually make sense.
LaTeX's in-built footnote support is, as always, excellent. As usual, there are number of package to make it even better. Of the off chance that you don't know, or haven't figured it out whilst reading this, the way of having a footnote in LaTeX is
Read More...It sometimes worries me how much people don't stop to consider what's going on when they run across something they think is stupid - or, worse, when they're told something is stupid by someone else, and accept it without thinking. Myself most definately included. I'm going to demonstrate this with something I saw on facebook recently, but it could equally be applied to any of the political issues I've covered in the last couple of months
Read More...Subnetting is something that it somehow always surprises me that people don't immediately understand. This is probably because I have now done three, possibly 4, university courses where I've had to sit through lecturers trying different ways to explain it. In true Top Gear fashion, I thought: "How hard can it be?"
Read More...The Health and Social Care Bill went through its first day of debate this week (Wednesday, to be precise). I still haven't read the Bill in any form, nor have I read the list of Amendments moved for in Grand Committee. However, there's already a number of odd things going on which were highlighted by the Lords. The first is that there is already a feeling that the legislation is being acted on:
and raised with him the fear that, because of the long drawn-out legislative process, discussion of the Bill in this House could be pre-empted. I also told him that I had consulted the clerks in Parliament and it appeared that there was no written convention that guides the Government on what is or is not acceptable to take in advance of Royal Assent. Obviously they cannot implement the legislation in full. [....] I also drew attention to a speech that had been made in the other place by a Member of Parliament that had again raised the question of whether it was proper to stop the legislation when so much was already being done and so much pre-emption had occurred. Today I have written to the Constitution Committee on this question because an MP drew my attention to a letter that says that people, "are absolutely terrified of the chaos that will apply if the Bill is dropped altogether now. Restructuring is a nightmare, un-restructuring could be even worse!". On today's "World at One", the chief executive of the Foundation Trust Network warned of a no-man's land if the Bill did not go through.
Aside from these issues, there is still a large amount of resentment to the bill in general:
However, we have to remember that the improvement is a bit like trying to paint the face of a harlot; at the end of the day, it is still the face of a harlot, no matter how improved. We are seeing real impacts on healthcare in this country as a result of the Bill, as we speak.
On a slightly more practical note, two amendments were agreed upon to be sent back to the Commons. The first is the real reason I wanted to do this post - although people might say that it should be too obvious to need writing down, you have to remember that this is law - you have to write it down for it to mean anything in statute law, and I think the Committee made a good move here.
Read More...I'd like to normally think that I don't go straight for the answer 'the following questions' kind of thing, but the way this was posted on Courtney's Blog meant I couldn't really resist:
Read More...So, although I haven't yet found a way to construct my letter about Richard O'Dwyer , I did follow up my views on ACTA by emailing my MEPs via WriteToThem. Below, I give you a summary of the responses, followed by the actual emails. Most of this is really only of use for write-only memory, unless anyone wants to compare the responses they got to these - at least two are stock emails, and I strongly believe they all are.
Read More...It's Minecraft time (once again), which means lots of pictures, and not a lot of text. Which, you know, is good with me, given how long it normally takes to write one of my pieces of political...er...ramblings?
Read More...On the 13th of January, it was ruled that Richard O'Dwyer's actions in running TVShack.com constituted a criminal offense in both UK and US law, with a judge approving his extradition to face charges of copyright infringement in a US court (maximum sentence, 10 years) being transferred to the Secretary of State[ref name="ruling" />http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/us-v-odwyer-ruling.pdf. He plans to appeal if the Secretary of State approves the extradition.
Read More...Something which past me by in politics over the last year was the removal (April '10) and reinstatement (August '11) of public petitions as a valid method of bringing a debate to parliament. The basic idea is that you can submit a petition to direct.gov.uk (after checking for duplicates first ). It gets tagged to the relevant office (or deleted if, say, it's a motion for the discussion on "Changing the National Anthem to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'" or "The Game"). It then has a year to gain 100,000 signatures after which it 'could' be debated in parliament.
Read More...Few extra things I've stumbled across. First, the European Commission's FAQ like thing on ACTA.
More importantly, today's signatures will mean nothing until the European Parliament makes the agreement law, which is likely to happen in June. This is plenty of time to email you MEP, a process made much easier with WriteToThem
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