I have started an completely new blog and it has absolutely nothing to do with video games. It is Bruceonshaving.com.
More and more people are joining the real shaving revolution. Using a traditional double edged razor and a lather generated with a brush, shaving becomes a daily ceremony to look forward to instead of being a bothersome chore. Not only that, you can luxuriate in the finest quality shaving products at a cost per shave that is less than using multibladed system razors with aerosol gels and foams. All the components of a real shave, the razor, blade, lather and brush are made by many different manufacturers with an absolute profusion of choice, this allows you to tailor your shaving experience every day to your exact requirements. And whilst real shaving is easy to do, developing a good technique will reward you with progressively more perfect shaves.
You asked for input on laws that need removing. This is one of the prime ones.
The English libel law is the most repressive and stupid in the world and it affects everyone every day.
Now is a good time to act. All three main parties have recognised the current stupidity.
Our libel laws were designed to protect the landed gentry from the tittle tattle of their servants, as such they are incredibly difficult and expensive to defend. Nowadays they are mainly used by the nefarious to keep themselves and their activities out of the public eye. For every case that reaches court there are thousands of bullying, threatening letters sent out by London libel solicitors. The recipients of these letter usually have no option but to self censure, no matter how right they are, they simply cannot afford to defend their position.
How this affects everyone.
1) The internet does not tell you the truth. Large chunks are censored and thus removed by the solicitors. Often they just write and threaten the hosting company, so stuff is removed without the author’s say so. The people who hide behind this are the people with the most to hide. People that you really should be allowed to know about. This censorship is for the whole world, the English libel lawyers are taking away the fundamental human rights of everyone on earth.
2) Science is now fought out using libel law. If a person or group of people can make a lot of money hiding behind what they say is science then they often act against anyone who criticises that science. Homeopathy and Chiropractors are just two examples of this.
3) You cannot say anything critical of any policeman, no matter how bent or corrupt they are. Even if they just do their job badly you are not allowed to say so. The Police Federation act against every single criticism of a policeman. They send out lots of letters and are very happy to go to court. Several times they have lost over a million pounds in these actions, but still they do it. So every editor in the country is frightened of publishing the truth. The result of this is that bad policemen are protected, the public have no insight into what is really going on. So we end up with far worse policing.
Here are some useful changes that could be made:
1) Currently if you are accused of libel you are guilty till you prove yourself innocent. This is against natural justice and is onerous and expensive to defend. This should be changed to the accuser having to prove that they were libelled.
2) We need a free speech act, like most other countries have, that enshrines our rights to free speech.
3) Companies or other organisations should not be allowed to claim for libel or finance anyone claiming for libel. Only individuals should be allowed to claim and the no win no fee system will fund valid claims.
4) The initial forum for hearing libel complaints should be low cost tribunals. It is ridiculous using the immense cost of the High Court because somebody objects to what someone else has said.
5) The test for jurisdiction of the English legal system as a suitable venue for an action should be much stricter. Currently we are the libel tourism destination of choice which makes us the laughing stock of the world.
All our rights and freedoms are based on free speech. And we don’t have free speech because of repressive libel laws that are abused on a massive scale.
I am sorry about not posting for so long without keeping you informed. Basically the Evony thing caused a huge backlog of normal stuff that needed doing. So we visited my mother in law in Latvia, then I went to Menorca to visit my mother, then we went to France for a well earned driving holiday. Now I am back.
I have two fundamental problems with Bruceongames going forward.
The first is that libel laws are being abused to suppress free speech by those who have things to hide. Great swathes of the internet are now censored by London libel lawyers sending out threatening letters to protect often nefarious characters. You may live in America, but this effects you, the internet is being censored for the whole world.
Our libel law was designed to protect the landed gentry from the tittle tattle of their servants. So it is incredibly difficult and expensive to defend against, no matter how truthful your words are, cases are typically over a million pounds now. And you are guilty till you prove yourself innocent, which goes right against natural justice and gives a massive advantage to those who are abusing the law. So the only option when threatened is to give in, as happens many thousands of times. We really, really don’t have free speech. Those with money control what is said about them.
I have been acted against four times in the last year for telling the truth. This occupies a huge amount of time and is an immense pressure. If anything goes wrong it would destroy my life. Is it worth telling you my opinions with this weight hanging over me?
Most other countries have far less repressive libel laws and it causes no problems, society still works. The only people who lose out are the solicitors and the nefarious characters with something to hide. The English libel laws are a total disgrace and do not reflect well on us as a nation and as a democracy.
You can do something about this. Write to your politicians, whatever country you are in. Support organisations like The Libel Reform Campaign. It is your freedoms and rights that are being taken away and only you can fix it.
The second problem is that with Bruceongames I am giving away immense value with no benefit to myself. This site was a long way ahead of the curve on a huge range of subjects: iPod as gaming device, the demise of high street retail, convergence between social networking and gaming, free online gaming, gesture interfaces, Android etc etc. And I have written a lot of “how to” articles that distil three decades of experience. My reader benefit, I don’t. Nobody pays me to write this and the Google ads only bring in pennies. So why should I do it?
I started this blog as a sort of marketing exercise for myself. Give me a job. And it has become much more, growing to a hundred thousand visitors a month. But I still don’t have the job I want. Lots and lots of requests for my help, which I have given, mostly for free. But still no job. So now I think my time would be better spent sending out my CV, ringing around, going to interviews.
I haven’t given up completely. You can expect the occasional article when I have some free time, there is a worthwhile issue and the likelihood of being sued is low. But I am not going to put anything like the previous effort into this.
In the early hours of this morning Guy Kewney died, from cancer, at his home in London. I have written about Guy before, as a journalist he was the colossus who oversaw the birth of home computing in Britain. Everything that happened here: Sinclair, Amstrad, Eidos, Rare, ARM, and so much more, only happened because of the foundations laid by Guy.
In the mid to late ’70s at the weekly specialist newspaper, Computing, Guy wrote regular articles about the birth of microcomputers. These inspiring missives told us of an imminent and portentous revolution that would transform everything we did. Many people’s lives were changed by reading these. I was inspired to leave the safe world of accountancy to open one of the first computer stores, Microdigital, in 1978. Many other made similar life changing decisions because of Guy!
As the industry Guy had predicted emerged his influence also increased, initially at Personal Computer World, the first dedicated home computer magazine, then at senior positions in several of the top journals and with a lot of television work. The effect he had was vast and covered a period of over 30 years. He was considered the pre eminent journalist in his field and it is impossible to overstate his influence.
But Guy didn’t just write and broadcast, he did it well. He was clever with an incisive mind, he asked the difficult questions and he analysed the facts in a way that brought so much added value to his output. And of course his experience gave him an unmatched platform with which to work, such as when he predicted greatness when Google first saw the light of day.
And of course there was Guy the person. Always clever, supportive, interesting. I met him at shows and conferences, we had meals and drinks together, he invited me to his home to meet his family. And we chatted on the phone to gossip. Talking to him was always fascinating and educational, he knew far, far more than went into his articles.
Gaming is brilliant for learning because it has the task/reward cycle which comes naturally to the human brain. Additionally, as I have said in previous articles, because educational games are on computers they track the student’s progress, so there is no need for exams.
Smart.fm takes this one step further. It tracks the student’s progress and presents material at the optimum moment for the most efficient learning process according to the Ebbinghaus Curve. Their system of spaced rehearsal ensures the absolute most efficient absorption of knowledge over time. Take a look and you will see that it is individually tailored by feedback loop and that it uses computer processing power to apply the science. This whole methodology would be simply impossible in a classroom but is straightforward for a video game to achieve.
To me it is immensely frustrating that we have the means to massively improve our formal education system yet we persevere with the archaic relic that is the classroom.
Dr Henry Edward Roberts has died at the age of 68. He was truly the father of home computing, the platform on which video gaming is based. His company was Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) and in January 1975 his $395 kit computer, the Altair 8800, appeared on the front cover of Popular Electronics. And the word exploded. They could not keep up with demand, cloned imitators appeared, new magazines were published and a young man wrote a version of the programming language BASIC to run on it. His name was Bill Gates.
The main feature of the architecture of this machine was a backplane bus that cards carrying components plugged into, called the S-100 bus, this became the standard for microcomputers until Apple came along. When I opened my computer store Microdigital, in 1978, we offered an S-100 machine.
It is now well over 30 years since the revolution that we now take for granted happened. It was created by individual people and it is sad that time is now catching up on them, what was real events is now rapidly becoming history.
The Daily Mail is a British newspaper with a circulation of about two million. In terms of content the nearest American equivalent is, perhaps, Fox News. Their editorial stance is mostly shock and outrage and they pick on the easy targets, like immigration and video games.
info@nickclegg.com,
