Interesting Links for 18-02-2014

[andrewducker]

• TV's changing? Not so fast….
  (tags: tv society )
• How getting a diagnosis can help someone to take control of their life.
  (tags: aspergers mentalhealth diagnosis )
• Meta-Shakespeare is the best Shakespeare
  (tags: shakespeare )
• On abusers, and their limits
  (tags: abuse )
• Scottish independence: The currency debate, claim by claim
  (tags: Scotland

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

If I were very, very, very rich I’d totally be tempted to troll Trump by trying to set up windfarms anywhere he had any business interest. In fact, I’d actually call my wind turbine manufacturing arm something like Trumpet or Trumped or the Toupee Lifter.

That, and I’d commission a sound sculpture that would sound the words “I am the evidence” when the wind blew.

[andrewducker]

If you Kickstart it I'm in for £10!

[alitheapipkin]

Me too!

[gonzo21]

"The Spanish government has not said it will definitely veto EU membership for Scotland, but it has not ruled it out either."

So I guess it becomes a game of probabilities with regards what direction the Spanish will take?

Personally I think they'll make it as difficult as possible for iScotland, because the Basque Seperatists are watching *very* carefully to see how Scotland fares.

[gonzo21]

Oh, and that Glacier thing is absolutely astonishing. The soundscape.

Shame it's so hard to tell what the scale is.

Wonder how long the cameramen were sitting there? :)

[danieldwilliam]

I disagree.

As soon as the Catalans start talking about not accepting their fair share of the Spanish national debt if the Spanish don't allow them to leave Spain and remain in or re-join the EU I think the Germans will have a quite word with the Spanish Government and tell them to whisht.

[danieldwilliam]

It seems very unlikely to me that a European Union that welcomes Bulgaria and Romania and is in accension talks with Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia won’t find room for both Scotland and Catalonia.

I don’t think Spain will do anything about blocking Catalan membership and they won’t have a peep to say about ours.

And I expect EU officials i.e. Barroso, to change their tune on this subject when Barroso is succeded as President over the summer of 2014.

The only question of interest is whether both we and the Catalans quality for either automatic entry or continuing membership (on the grounds that most of our citizens are currently EU citizens and will remain so) or whether we’ll have to negotiate re-entry.

Given that there is no precedent for this sort of thing I’d expect the legal wranglings to end up hugely politicised.

[andrewducker]

I strongly suspect we'll have to negotiate - but that it will be a negotiation where both sides strongly want it to go smoothly, the laws are already in place, and thus it works very well.

[danieldwilliam]

That would be my bet too. We might have to negotiate away a couple of things, if only for the look of thing, some concessions on fishing rights or policy or minimum alcohol pricing perhaps.

Basically, haggling over an acceptable form of words for Scotland de jure joins the EU but de facto remains a member.

Some private individual is going to try sueing the EU for a declaration that their EU citizenship continues and I'd expect the EU to want to conclude negotiations before that case reaches a conclusion.

[andrewducker]

Plus, all of those European students and workers in Scotland.

And Spanish trawlers off the Scottish coast...

[steer]

A friend works for a major british ISP. He recently told me that this year was the first year his company thought "oh fuck, netflix" (in the way that a few years back there was an "oh fuck, iplayer" round of panic from ISPs). It's now a huge traffic component throwing a few of their estimates out of whack.

[andrewducker]

Doesn't surprise me - it'll be sucking up a huge amount of bandwidth.

You'd think, though, that anyone being badly affected by it would get one of their CDN boxes: https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

[steer]

They are CDNd to the eyeballs. Majority of their traffic comes from disk more than from network. But Netflix is playing in the long tail. It is not like iPlayer which is for the most a week long archive our you tube which is mostly low res and five minutes long. Netflix is a wide variety of content and people play obscure stuff. It is not quite financially viable to have a complete local mirror on cdn.

[andrewducker]

The Deployment Guide is fascinating - they think they can cache 60-80% of traffic - but I suspect that the remaining 20-40% is still massive.

I am somewhat boggled that they expect their nightly updates to be 5TB in size!