PaulBristow.net

That’s it! I have had enough of England, far from being a green and pleasant land, becoming a concrete and ugly one. I may not live in the UK any more, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love the things that make England a nice place to be.

I have created an electronic petition, available at the Prime Minister’s e-petition site aimed at providing a financial incentive/reward to those who help keep England green.

Many inner city gardens (front and rear) are being paved over, either to create parking spaces or patios, and this is causing flooding, as well as removing green spaces. I propose a system of tax rebates for ground not paved over (or covered in decking) with extra rebates for trees in the garden on a sliding scale according to height. Obviously care must be taken to avoid light-blocking etc, so you can’t just start planting Leylandii or other fast-growing conifers to get a tax rebate.

Before people start saying “but you need to have somewhere to park your car” let me just say, I agree! But you don’t need to pave over the whole front garden to do it. Just paving over the tyre tracks will work just as well, maintaining a green lawn which will allow moisture to soak into the ground, as well as being pleasant to look at.

So, if you think green taxes should not just be about punishing those that do the wrong thing, but about rewarding those who do the right thing, join the discussion below and help me formulate a comprehensive tax rebate proposal so those of us that help keep England a nice place to live are rewarded. Sign the petition and tell your friends.

Fabulous news. Today, EMI Music launches DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire. They will release 256kbit AAC tracks without DRM on iTunes, but also on any music download service, and will allow upgrades if you are an existing DRM-equipped music customer. The difference in price is 30c or 20p. Albums, however, will remain the same price.

I can’t wait for iTunes to offer me the chance to upgrade my tracks.

I hope the other labels follow soon. So much for DRM.

So, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is out and it states that scientists are more than 90% certain that climate change is caused by our actions. Let’s think about that. That means that there is a 90% that taking no action now means we will continue to change the climate of the places where we live, change our rainfall, increase sea levels, cause more violent storms and have all the fun of summer temperatures that will make the heatwaves of 2003 seem pleasant in comparison. Most people take out household insurance despite the fact that there is only a much less than 1% chance of anything happening. If you went to the insurance companies and asked to be insured against climate change they wouldn’t do it.

So what are you waiting for? Take personal responsibility for your own actions now. Don’t wait for the politicians - they’re far more concerned about the next election than they are about what will happen in the next fifty years. Lets force the poliuticians to put in place the conditions to reduce global warming AND encourage investment in green technologies. It can be done, and all we have to do is actually think about our actions for a change.

Oh, and if you’re not sure if the science is certain, don’t listen to the media. Particularly not if you live in Washington D.C. Download the report and read it for yourself. It’s only 22, relatively accessible pages and can be downloaded from the BBC here.

My wife and I just saw An Inconvenient Truth at the cinema.

If you have any questions about global warming, and want to actually get some facts on the issue rather than dumbed down “opinion”, go see “An Inconvenient Truth”.

The most shocking item for me: Out of hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles, zero question the science. Out of the popular press, 53% of the articles question the science. Why do people deny global warming? Because if they admit the truth of it, they would have to do something about it. Now.

For me, it seems that most people are so far from reality that it will take the Greenland ice sheet melting, or one of the Antarctic ice sheets melting, raising sea levels and displacing hundreds of millions of people before the majority start to do something about it. Sigh.

Myself, I’d rather we took action before London and the South-East of England is flooded.

Finally! If the story at Boing Boing EMI abandons CD DRM is accurate we might be starting to see the end of the pathetic game played on CDs over the past few years.

This has been particularly frustrating to me as I haven’t owned a non-computer based CD player since 1995. I simply avoided the problem by refusing to buy CDs infected with DRM. The one time I did accidentally buy a CD with DRM I was at a Copy Protection meeting in DVB in Berlin, and Exact Audio Copy ignored the DRM and made a perfect rip during the meeting, while I sat opposite the Warner Brothers representative (it was a Warner Brothers CD).

Now, if we can get more download sites to sell non-DRM infected MP3s or AACs (like one of my favourites Maganatune life would be perfect. iTunes anyone?

I can’t believe it! I am writing in support of the Sun after all the bad things I usually say about that comic.

In The Sun Online - News: 27 ways to go green in 2007 they tell you 27 easy ways to be more environmentally friendly. Even I only manage 21 of them.

The Independent has an article about the UK government privately assuring UK supermarkets that it’s OK to continue selling rice from the USA that has been contaminated with Genetically Modified rice. So consumers in the UK can now secretly be forced to eat GM rice when they have chosen not to. All to please the American corporations…

Contrast this with the Swiss supermarkets who have withdrawn the rice in question and will not stock it again until the manufacturer puts in testing equipment to ensure this cannot happen again.

Market forces, in this case against GM food, can only work if the consumer (I prefer citizen) has sufficient information to make an informed choice. Hiding the GM status of food is the worst sort of fraud because it hits at individual citizens.

Pimlico Software have released Datebk6 for the Palm platform. The version 6 upgrade brings new autoswitching of views, so I can finally have my Palm automatically switch between work mode and home mode. Now if it could just learn to read my mind I would be really happy.

So I checked my iBook G4 battery against the recent battery recall, and mine needed replacement. As I have had it for three years this is great - it would probably die soon anyway. Thanks Sony!

banthebulb.org is a web site dedicated to banning incandescant bulbs. I got rid of all mine nine years ago. Saved money from day one. In those days it took more than a year to get the payback. These days it is more like a month or two. Please change those bulbs - you will love the reduction in your energy bill.