I’m a Pundit

Meredith Kercher was pretty much your normal British exchange student, but in November last year her semi naked body was found on the floor of her apartment in Italy with her throat slit.

Now deaths like this are always a sad affair but should the family really be seeking £20 million in compensation, that’s around $40 million, or roughly 8,695,652 pints.  Now it would be naive to think that the family are not grieving the loss, and expecting some kind of reparations for the pain caused would be more than understandable.

But consider this, the average compensation for death in the UK is around £10,000, barring life insurance which tends to hover around the 4x earnings mark.  If the average is £10,000 why in God’s name would anyone try and obtain 2000 times that amount?

While I am unsure of who exactly the parents are trying to sue, since obviously the perpetrators were young and poor, while the government cannot really be held accountable, I think the amount being chased is unfair, unreasonable and in itself unjust.

written by Oli \\ tags: Compensation, Crime, Culture, Murder

I read through quiet a few blogs on an evening and it was a couple of nights ago when I went through another of my regularhaunts, Jaggy’s Blog.  It was on this website where I saw the following.

Text messages are just data, there’s nothing special about them, in fact they’re a tiny amount of data. Each character (a,b,c etc) is represented by a single Byte of data. You can have 160 user characters per text message, plus the header data which is added automatically including the phone number the message is from, where it’s going, and the date, time etc. Let’s say a round number of 200 Bytes of data.200 Bytes of data, at roughly 10p per text message.5 X 200 Bytes gives you 1 kilobyte at 50p.

1000 X 1 kilobyte (KB) gives you 1 Megabyte (MB) of data at 50,000p or £500.

1000 X 1 Megabyte gives you 1 Gigabyte (GB) of data at £5000.

You can expect to use about 1GB of data a month on a typical home broadband connection, provided you aren’t downloading movies, are a porn addict or illegally sharing music. So would you pay £5000 a month to your Broadband provider?

Personally, I find these statistics shocking,  would you pay £5000 ($10,000) for a mere gigabyte of data, most providers are giving out 1 Terabyte of data  with computers nowdays!

On your broadband connection they usually have a fair usage policy, this apparently settles at around 30 gigabytes per day, so if you had to pay per gigabyte at this rate for your home broadband connection you would be shelling out £150,000 a month!

I had never even thought about the cost of text messages untill I read this post, now however I am utterly disguisted that the phone companies must be making such a huge killingon 10p texts it is insane.

True there must be connection and distribution costs to the suppliers, but do they really amount to £5000 per gigabyte of transfer?

written by Oli \\ tags: , Cellphones, Mobile Phones, Rip Off, Text Messages, Texts

While Sci-Fi has only been a passing passion in my life, with the literary works of Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov still fresh in my mind, the tales coming from Mars have fascinated me.

Today it was announced that they have found snow falling in the Mars atmosphere, not to mention clay and calcium carbonate (Limestone) in the ground.   Both of these can only be created in the presence of water.

This brings us one step closer to the ever advancing realisation that the only ting stopping humanity from populating Mars is its lack of atmosphere, something that is with time fixable.

Now while many may think of it as a deserted wasteland, others think of it as a  mutated triple breasted utopia and many think of it as another way of ensuring humanities survival, i personally think of it as a true trek of exploration.   In recent years exploration has become defunct, no longer is there a call for people willing to risk their lives in jungles, why bother when a satellite can view the land from above.  But building a civilisation from scratch, now that’s a challenge.

written by Oli \\ tags: , Adventure, Exploration, Mars, Planets, Space, Water on Mars