Ageism at Carphone Warehouse?

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Hmmm… This is from the Daily Mail, so I’m not sure I believe it.

After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle.

But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred – because she was too old.

The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.

Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: “I was absolutely furious. The young man said, ‘Sorry, you’re over 70. It’s company policy. We don’t sign anyone up who is over 70.’

“Later a young lady said company policy is that anyone over 70 might not understand the contract. She said, ‘If you would be prepared to go to the shop in town and take a younger member of your family we might give you a contract.’

MySpace To Sell Music Through Snocap

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The move to the new ecology continues apace. TechCrunch reports:

MySpace is getting into the music business. They announced today that they will allow nearly 3 million unsigned bands to sell their music directly to Myspace users. Snocap will provide the back end technology for the service. The agreement also includes performance-based warrants to purchase stock in SnoCap (Fox recently took an equity stake in startup SimplyHired as well).

The music will be sold in MP3 format without copy protection of any kind (see eMusic and Amie Street for similar models, as well as others). This comes as major labels are starting to experiment with free music downloads, albeit with copy protection.

It’s unclear whether Myspace will also offer music from major labels pursuant to the deal. The agreement does not prohibit these sales, and Snocap has deals with most major labels.

Downloads of music from labels would require copy protection pursuant to Snocap’s existing deals. Look for additional deals from Myspace as they continue to develop their overall music (and revenue) strategy.

New York Times report on this here.

“John Naughton Certified as Braindead.” Sigh.

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Lovely post on Thomas the Tank Engine Blog. It’s headed “John Naughton Certified as Braindead; Few are Surprised” and goes on:

In my first ever attention grabbing, go out on a limb, blog post, I decided to comment on John Naughton including Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends (1984-1991) among his worst 50 TV shows of all time (discussed here).

The inevitable conclusion of his including Thomas and Friends on such a list is that he’s lost his mind. I suppose there might be other conclusions… feel free to post below should you think of any but my list is as follows:

John Naughton is so stupid that he sits on the TV and watches the couch

John Naughton recently sat on an airplane in close proximity to a loud-mouthed Thomas loving 2 year old

John Naughton thought no one would pay any attention to him unless he said something so stupid that it was news worthy (I have no doubt that this is true… whether he realizes it I have no idea)…

Good stuff, eh? It goes on a bit in the same vein.

Sadly, it’s nothing to do with me. There’s another guy with the same name who writes about film and TV for low-rent magazines (and, I think, the Sunday Times). I still get sarcastic flak from my academic colleagues over a review he wrote, many years ago, of a compilation of stag night videos!

Just for the record, I loved Thomas the Tank Engine and often had learned (and interminable) conversations with my kids about Annie and Clarabelle (who — I need hardly remind you — are Thomas’s carriages).

Later… It’s interesting to see what bloggers pick up. When I looked on Google Blog Search, I found that the two things that had been most widely linked to were my piece about ‘websites that changed the world’, and my doppleganger’s Radio Times piece about the worst TV programmes ever. Clearly there is something about lists that piques people’s interest.

The interesting thing about the ‘websites’ piece was that I didn’t choose the sites — that was done by other Observer writers. I was merely asked to write the introduction to the list. But that hasn’t saved me. On Friday I was having lunch in Cambridge University’s West site (where the Computer Lab and the Microsoft Lab are located) when a prominent computer scientist walked in, spotted me, and said severely “I have a bone to pick with you, John Naughton”. She then sat down and berated my for the list which — she opined — was far too oriented towards what she dismissively referred to as “leisure sites”.

Google growing up?

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Robert Scoble has paid another visit to the Google campus. And he was impressed…For example,

every interaction I had with Googlers this time was different than the last time I was on campus. They seemed more humble. More comfortable. More inquisitive. And, when I gave them chances to say “you’re an idiot” they didn’t take it (and I gave them many opportunities). This is a different Google than I was used to. And it’s the small things that I noticed.

One other small thing I noticed? A lot more blog listening behavior. Carl Sjogreen, who runs the Google Calendar team, told me that the first thing he does every morning is do this search on Google’s Blogsearch service: “Google Calendar.” He says he answers everyone’s questions, even if you’re a kid in another country with only four readers.

Bing. Small things. They are gonna prove to be dramatically important over time…

Agricultural productivity up in Afghanistan

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At last — a success story from Afghanistan! Or perhaps not. From today’s New York Times…

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 2 — Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.

He described the figures as “alarming” and “very bad news” for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001. He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region.

As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations. “This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,” Mr. Costa said at a news briefing.He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,000 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005…

New Labour and ‘business’

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Interesting report in yesterday’s Guardian.

The annual bill for Whitehall consultants advising government departments is running at more than £2.2bn, an investigation by the Guardian reveals today…

One reason for this is that New Labour ideology includes a naive assumption that ‘business’ methods are invariably superior to old-style ‘public-service’ methods. The problem is that nobody in the Labour leadership knows anything about business because they’ve never run one. And (poor saps) they think that consultantcy firms do. The Guardian report claims that one section of the Department of Health is now staffed by almost as many consultants as full-time officials – 180 civil servants and 170 consultants.