Salocin

What would you endure to visit your family for the new year? Chinese adult nappy sales are up as migrant workers face long train journeys home.

Best preparation for a speech is sex. Relieves tension, lowers blood pressure, inhibits stutter.

Frustrated German wife (58) takes part time work in brothel after husband loses sex drive.

Authorities apologise after speed camera clocks tractor doing 85mph on the other side of the Severn Bridge.

While there has rarely been any shortage of people (especially from the film industry) claiming that war, and specifically the war in Iraq, is pointless, this story brings a new angle to that point of view.

We experience the war from the point of view of one particular marine, and while the purpose and success or failure of the US presence in Iraq as a whole is not dealt with, the pointlessness of this particular individual's presence in the war zone is keenly felt throughout the entire second half of the movie.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swoff, an ordinary individual who enlists into the marines, and quickly decides that he would rather be anywhere else. A fortuitous transfer brings him into an elite sniper's unit. Once there, the training, psychotic camaraderie and mind-numbing discipline quickly transform a group of 40 trainees into a squad of 8 professional snipers.

Saddam invades Kuwait and the marines are deployed. They originally believe the entire war will be over in a matter of days, but the situation quickly becomes a waiting game, as these expert snipers come to realise that when the air force is capable of destroying entire platoons with single strikes, there is little role for expert marksmen. Their presence in the desert appears to be a combination of pointlessness and public relations.

The narrative of this story has a powerful message about what we put enlisted soldiers through, the expectations that are set, the preparation their training gives them, and how those expectations are not met once they are deployed in battle. Their vision of what going into combat as highly-trained members of an elite fighting force quickly rubs up against the reality of waiting for six months in a sandy ditch, and the effects on their morale and their capabilities becomes quickly apparent.

The bravado and behaviour of the marines and their leadership, the gung ho "we are so righteous and unstoppable", and in particular the platoon commander's welcome speech given to the marines as they arrive on the ground in Kuwait, all serve to make us wonder what sort of creatures were sent there, ostensibly to represent us, including our interests and morals in the area, and the impression the locals were left with after they saw the behaviour of the armies of the west, both on the ground and on CNN.

The performances are good, and there's nothing wrong with the detail of the script, other than the occasional loss of momentum, but the basic premise of the movie is difficult to carry off. What, after all, is the point of a war movie which has as it's message the pointlessness it all? It's hard to make a point about pointlessness and keep the movie functioning within the parameters which make the audience walk away and feel either entertained or enlightened.

While no blame can be attributed to the makers of the film or the actors within it, the decision to make this book into a movie was misguided, because it just doesn't seem to work.

Man discovers cheating girlfriend after parrot keeps speaking another man's name. "I wasn't sorry to see the back of Suzy after what she did, but it really broke my heart to let Ziggy go," he said.

Man dates girl over internet for 6 months before meeting her to find out she's his own mother.

The airline industry has recently been to court (represented by the IATA) in an attempt to reverse some new European legislation that forces them to pay compensation to passengers stranded because they were denied boarding or because their flight was cancelled. They failed. Here's an example of how the European machine can get it right.

Airlines have traditionally relied upon certain contract clauses to acquire rights that would be considered unreasonable in any other industry. For example, they are entitled to overbook their flights on the basis that some people do not turn up, and therefore their seats can be reallocated to others. For a flight with 200 seats, they might therefore sell 210, and get the revenue for 210 individuals. If 205 passengers show up, the airline can send 5 of them packing at absolutely no cost to itself, thus pushing the entire cost of overbooking onto the passengers that are turned away. These passengers will suffer much more than the airline would have by not overbooking, as it's possible their entire holiday will be ruined, or that they will miss an important meeting. This judgement appropriately reallocates that cost back to the airlines by forcing the airlines to compensate individuals for their inconvenience.

The low-cost airlines are arguing that they may be required to pay back many times the value of an airline ticket because the compensation amounts are based on the distance of the flight rather than the amount paid for the ticket. This also is a convenient logic for the airlines, but fails to reflect the immense cost of being stuck far from home, which in reality has nothing to do with what you paid for the ticket.

If an airline sells me a ticket to go from A to B, I expect to be taken there, and if they are unable to provide the service they have promised, and upon which I am now reliant, they should expect to have to pay an amount commensurate with the damage they've caused, rather than with the cost of the ticket they sold. It's nice to see the court ignoring an argument that has the benefit of being logical, but the basic premise of which is so biased.

While this may cause airlines to increase their ticket prices somewhat, this is because the ticket now more closely represents a guarantee of travel, rather than probability of travel. To the extent that these airlines usually run on time and provide the service they ought to, this new law should affect them very little.

The problem with flights is that they're time-critical, and if you've gone all the way to the airport to catch one, and you're turned away at the gate, the inconvenience caused to you is often far more significant that the mere cost of the ticket. To force airlines to take this into consideration when managing their business practices is a good thing.

Another aspect is that airlines are much less likely to bump a passenger in business or first class than they are an economy passenger. I agree with the principle that these higher classes of travel are entitled to better levels of service and a more comfortable travelling experience, but I don't agree that there is any justification to creating a likelihood that economy passengers might not be able to travel at the time they selected, despite the fact that they have paid for a ticket and planned their trip/meetings/holiday around the flight times.

In effect though, the change is merely an adjustment to the pricing and yield management equations used by the airlines. It's a simple mathematical problem whereby you set the price and the number of seats sold based on the probability of each ticket-holder showing up and the cost of turning someone away.

The cost of turning someone away at the moment is reputational, but monetarily it's zero - passengers have no right to redress in the case of being forbidden to board - this is due to a long clause on the ticket which states that the airline has the right to deny you boarding in the case of overbooking, and that they can offer you alternative travel within their means (i.e. if the next plane is tomorrow, that's just too bad, and they don't have to offer you lodging).

Since right now the low-cost airlines have little incentive to avoid turning passengers away, they are likely to be encouraging it by selling significantly more tickets than there is room on the plane - they get the revenue and have no reason to care if there's insufficient space for everyone. This new ruling changes that by putting a substantial penalty on screwing with your passengers in this way. The airlines will simply recalculate, and while they will undoubtedly continue overbooking because it makes economic sense, the probability that any individual will be turned away will drop dramatically, because they're going to try to avoid it more often.

Bored student proposes to his girlfriend in the middle of economic law exam.

Man donates sperm, faces child support payments 13 years later after lesbian couple split up.

If past experience were anything to go by, expectations should have been low when I went to see the latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise. The films (especially the first few) have been for the most part uninspired and uninspiring to any but the youngest members of the audience. By the same token, were the fifth book to be the measure of the franchise, there would have been no sixth book. Fortunately, Mike Newell does for Harry Potter IV what Christopher Nolan did for Batman Begins, bringing a dark and brooding atmosphere and a sense of complete immersion to the Hogwarts experience.

I have little time for the constant barrage of new nouns that charaterises some of the written Potter franchise, but Goblet managed to do away with much of that, assuming early on that the audience knew what it was about, and wasting no time explaining either the rules of Quidditch, or the relevance of the individual constantly referred to as "he who shall not be named". Instead, it focuses on the dangers, the action, and the rites of passage faced by the main characters.

Although the young heroes have clearly become better at playing their parts since the last film, much of the acting (or at least most of the talking) is left to the adults. This results in a few strange scenes where I was left wondering if they have lost their voices. The film's weaknesses are, however, nothing compared to it's strengths, the greatest of which are the amazing special effects. Not for a single moment do we doubt that the dragons are really there, or that it really is an awfully long way down when you're flying around on a broom.

If I had a complaint, it would have to go back to the original story, which has much of this chapter out of the control of the heroes. They appear buffeted by events planned and co-ordinated by others. Caught in these rapids, they go where the current takes them, bruising and gasping for air as they go. Even the initiative taken at the end is due largely to the guidance of others. This is how the story was written, and while the action may at times seem to be guided by outside forces, there is no doubt at all that the characters are changed by their experiences, and more than ever before, we can really relate to the coming of age of the story's heroes.

In the interests of saving space for the story itself, the movie does away with Harry's foster family, as well as much of the noise and background that give the book texture but distract from the story when you only have so much canvas to paint on. Gone are the shots of ghosts wandering about the castle, or the lingering views of characters in paintings going about their daily business - only the magic that is pertinent to the story is here, and there's easily enough to have children and adults alike leaving with a pleasant overdose.

The producers, director and special effects teams on this project have taken J.K.Rowling's imaginative setting, and used it as the starting point for a visual spectacle far more wonderous than what I originally envisaged when I read the book. Hogwarts and the surrounding countryside are more spectacular, the creatures and magical artifacts more realistic and impressive, and the detail more precise than ever before.

How they're going to film that dreadful fifth book is anyone's guess.

While the phrase "Big Brother" is vastly overused, some of the applications for the new Galileo positioning system might raise a few eyebrows amidst the more privacy-conscious in the UK.

Galileo is a network of 30 satellites similar to the American GPS system that will allow suitably-equipped cars to identify their exact location (to within a couple of feet) anywhere in the world. The first satellite went into orbit a few days ago.

On the back of this new infrastructure, the UK is considering a revolution in road tax [BBC news]. If these plans are implemented in their current form, we would see funding for the road system allocated more directly to those who use the road system itself. On the surface of it, this sounds like a good thing, but there are two areas of concern that will undoubtedly cause a number of raised eyebrows.

Implementation - I know where you are
The proposals for the new system would require that cars all be fitted with GPS navigation systems which would be used to calculate payments according to the roads used and the distance travelled, as well as what cities are visited at what time.

Economically, the thought of charging the users directly seems appropriate - it certainly appeals to a rather simple logic that implies that those who use something should pay for it. The idea can be taken quite far, and can also be used to charge individuals differently based on the time at which a road, bridge or tunnel was used.

This implies that differential payments could be used to increase the cost of travelling at rush hour - it could cost you £2 to use the M4 between 8am and 9:15am, but only £0.10 if you drive down it at 10am, when the traffic is much lighter. Theoretically, the London Congestion Charge would be debited from your account automatically when your GPS system reported that you'd passed the limits of the charging zone, and if you use the blackwall tunnel, then there goes another £1, to contribute to the cost of maintaining the tunnel.

The sacrifices required in terms of personal privacy are quite steep. In order to charge you £0.10 for use of the M4 between junctions 2 and 8 between 10am and 10:27am (hypothetically), the system would need to know that you got on the motorway at junction 2 and off at junction 8, and at what time that happened. It would have to know this in a verifiable way, and within a certain amount of time so as to be able to charge you in a timely fashion. This means that the whereabouts of the car registered to you would be known at all times. Not everyone will be comfortable with that, and it's likely to lead to yet another round of "why do you care if you've got nothing to hide" argumentation. I have no doubt that the government will be able to push this through if they choose, however.

Knowing where you are and when also allows the supervising authority to calculate exactly how fast you're travelling. This implies that speeding of any kind becomes a thing of the past, as the government's enforcement arm will know how long it took you to go from A to B, and can therefore calculate your speed.

Economics - It's less fair than it seems
While on the surface of it, it may seem fair to charge someone who uses the M4 every day to get to work for the miles that they drive on it, this doesn't always work. In fact, I would argue that there are enough exceptions to this to make the entire exercise economically unfair and distorting.

For example... Dell has a very large office in Bracknell. It's their European headquarters or something. It's not surprising that they should pick Bracknell as the location for this campus, as the town is a comparatively cheap location in which to operate a large business complex. The cost reductions available to Dell as a consequence of this choice of location have (by and large) been passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices for their computers. Some of this cost is reabsorbed by the taxpayer through the fact that they subsidise the infrastructure that allows the employees to get to the company. Were this subsidy removed, the cost of working at Dell would go up dramatically as each employee would have to stomach a greater charge as they used rush-hour motorways to get to work, and this would be reflected in increased costs, either for Dell, or for it's employees, which would have a negative impact on the company and it's products.

An easier example is the food you buy in the supermarket. Most of it is shipped around in trucks, and any attempt to charge the owners of those trucks the direct cost of their use of the road infrastructure will inevitably cause a huge increase in transport costs of produce. This will increase prices, decrease choice and negatively impact the freshness of the product as shipments are delayed to ensure trucks are as full as possible before they leave.

In other words, the current system whereby the government subsidises the road and transport infrastructure is a huge hidden subsidy that we all benefit from. The removal of this subsidy will merely cause the difference to appear in the prices we pay for the products and services that depend on that infrastructure.

In reality, we all benefit from the current setup in different ways, and forcing individuals to pay for the infrastructure element of their travel will increase the concentration of people living in towns and cities as it penalises those who travel to work. While it may cause some people to switch to the public transport infrastructure, many trains journeys are prohibitively priced (a return to Bracknell from Paddington is £29.10), often fail to run on schedule, take longer than a journey by car and are already overcrowded. Increasing the cost of roads should also lead to a further increase in the cost of alternatives, which would imply even more expensive train tickets.

Conclusion
I've yet to see a clear appraisal by anyone of what the impact on privacy and the distribution of income will be. Perhaps one will come, because such a plan is clearly several years away at best. Nevertheless, when I think about the people who are most likely to travel significant distances to get to work, I expect they work for companies that can't afford to be in central London, and have therefore had to move out as costs in the capital increased. These people are not paid as much as the bankers, lawyers and advertising execs of the capital who will not see an increase in their direct taxation costs, I believe it will be those who are paid somewhat less on average who will feel the brunt of such a change, and that this tax is therefore regressive. I also think that the impact on more remote towns and cities will be negative, as they will find it increasingly difficult to attract investments from corporations as the cost of travel increases.

I work in telecommunications, an industry in which companies have to constantly reinvent themselves in order to survive. This may make it sound exciting, but where the rubber hits the road, the work remains more or less the same as in any industry: we make budgets, do forecasts, measure revenues and costs, calculate commission payments, monitor expenses and do the hundred other things that a business needs to do in order to run. This apparent monotony belies the grinding effects of technical innovation on our industry.

At business school, one of the many concepts you study is disruptive innovation or disruptive technologies. The idea is that some new technologies cause massive shifts in the profitability of various industries, resulting in incumbents having their previously dominant positions challenged by apparent start-ups, and previously monopolistic or oligopolistic companies finding themselves powerless to prevent an erosion of their revenues and margins because the way that their businesses are configured makes it impossible for them to compete.

One such innovation is the development of Voice over IP (VoIP). In it's simplest incarnation, this is the Skype service, a system that allows two individuals to talk over the internet, using their computers, as though they were talking over the telephone. Skype has a service called SkypeOut, where the system links with the PSTN (the public telephone network) and allows individuals to call normal telephone numbers from their computer for only the cost of a local call, irrespective of where in the world they are calling. This is possible because the Internet carries the call most of the way, leaving only the cost of the local connection at the end, the so-called "last mile". To do this, Skype has had to get agreements with incumbent national telephone companies to carry the call down the wire to the telephone itself - it has these already.

Skype is, however, nothing more than the bridgehead. The real disruption will come with the next iteration of this technology - the combination of VoIP, mobile handsets and wireless networking.

It isn't hard to install a bit of software into a telephone handset that allows it to connect to a wireless access point, and therefore to the internet. Once you've got this installed, it takes very little additional work to install software on that telephone that can communicate telephone calls over IP in exactly the same way as Skype does. What you would then have is a telephone handset capable of making telephone calls using the same technology as SkypeOut, but completely bypassing both the GSM and the GPRS networks. Assuming you were a Vodafone subscriber with one of these telephones, that would mean you could make calls - while within range of a wireless access point - without ever connecting to the Vodafone network. In fact, Vodafone wouldn't even know you made the call.

For this to be possible, the technology has to be free (as in unconstrained). As people like Motorola and Nokia develop these phones, they're going to want to generate ongoing revenues from the sale, and so the handsets will be unable to simply connect to the internet and make telephone calls over any service the user cares to choose - that wouldn't be very profitable for anyone. At least at first, consumer choice will be limited as corporations try to skim the market. They have to do this to give them time to find new business models that allow them to continue to exist.

A company like Vodafone (or Sprint, or t-Mobile, or any mobile operator) should be extremely worried about such a development. Essentially, they're going to see their customers using their service less and less because it's cheaper to use VoIP connections.

The first thing to go will be roaming revenues : these are the exorbitant prices applied to individuals using (for example) a UK telephone in France. You get charged extra for being a guest on someone else's network, and then extra again because every time you receive a phone call, it's basically being routed internationally. The mobile operators make a killing on these price plans. Who in their right mind would pay upwards of 40p (72 cents) per minute to call home when they can make the same call for about 1p per minute (today's Skype price).

The next thing to go will be international calls - it costs a fortune to call (for example) India over a mobile phone, but only 10p per minute using Skype, if the mobile phone can connect to the internet, there's no reason anyone should pay more than the Skype price (and this will probable fall over time too).

As the high-rate revenues decline, the mobile operators will have further problems because the high contributions from these products go towards maintaining their network infrastructure. That maintenance cost is unlikely to fall nearly as fast as their revenues, and this will cause their pre-tax profits to plummet. These companies are also trying to recoup the cost of the 3G licenses they bought for outrageous amounts of money from government auctions some time ago - these new developments call into question investments these companies have made in the mobile infrastructure and 3G licenses, because much of this could be rendered suddenly, abruptly, obsolete.

In fact, all this is already possible - all it takes is a small laptop, a wireless connection and a headset. That's an expensive piece of hardware to carry around with you though. When this technology gets built into telephone handsets, it will be within reach of every person on the planet, and anywhere with a wireless connection becomes a low-cost telephone point.

This industry is about to experience a revolution, and how the likes of Vodafone, BT, t-Mobile and others choose to react will decide who is relegated to the ranks of has-beens, and who benefits from the transformation of the industry. While my day-to-day job may not reflect the excitement of what's going on in the wider industry (and more's the pity), there's no denying that it's a fascinating case study to observe.

Note : I do not work for any of the companies mentioned above.

I don't go for New Years resolutions. I think the idea lacks substance. Take a few examples...

If you knew you needed to lose weight in November, waiting until the end of December before starting the process is using the New Year as an excuse to delay. This delay is a symptom of an unwillingness to make the change (after all, it's just as easy to lose weight in November as it is in January). It's foolish to think that the momentary fervour brought on by a tradition of new hope at some arbitrary date will be sufficient to overcome this unwillingness. The good intentions will lapse because you'll find another excuse.

The making of New Years resolutions, especially those that have a large potential influence on your happiness and wellbeing, provides positive emotions associated with the impression that you're taking control of your life and your destiny. It triggers a visualisation exercise in which we see ourselves as having overcome some bad habit, or having achieved some goal, and the visualisation itself brings us happiness as we indulge in it, in much the same way as a lottery ticket is a license to dream with little chance of realising that dream. We too often enjoy the buzz and then make excuses to ourselves as to why we didn't bring the resolution to fruition. The act of making the resolution was itself the payoff, and acting on it is far too much like hard work.

Visualisation is an important component of reaching our goals, but not when subconsciously the visualisation provides satisfaction enough, and the only reason we want the change is because it's New Year and so we're thinking about it - as January rolls into February, there will be no triggers to remind us that we've covered none of the ground between where we were in December and where our resolutions wanted to take us.

All this is a problem to me because at the moment, I am thinking about what I would like to change in the coming year, and I know this is because of the time of year, and that the New Year brings out this sense of new hope and future achievement. I don't want to see this new hope and these shadowy undertakings crushed in the daily grind of working and sleeping and existing.

If I fall back on my analytical nature, I'll set targets and goals, and measure myself against them as the weeks go by. This can help, but too much can make the entire exercise feel sterile and uninspiring, and this kind of approach causes me to lose sight of why I'm making these efforts in the first place (i.e. because at the moment, from this particular vantage point, I believe that I would be happier having achieved these things and therefore undertake to do so).

All the New Year does is cause me to accidentally write the wrong date on a couple of cheques. It has no power to make anything happen for anyone. We have to do that for ourselves.

One approach might be to focus hard on how happy we would be if such achievements, goals or aspirations were made reality, but not allow ourselves to feel that enjoyment, only to become aware of how it would feel to live up to our own New Year's expectations. In this way we motivate the person we'll be tomorrow, in a week, or in a month. The person today doesn't need that motivation, he's already sold on the idea, we have to find an argument powerful enough to convince ourselves later on that the goals we've set ourselves for the new year are worth living up to, when the emotion associated to the New Year itself has faded.

Ultimately, the key is to find a resolution that would mean as much to you, and will motivate you equally in mid-March as it does on the 31st December, and every single day in-between, because it's worth doing regardless of the time of year. Calling it a New Year's Resolution subconsciously classifies it as something worth forgetting my Spring.