The Weekly Round-Up: 23.05.08

If the thought of ermine-clad Lords gliding gracefully up and down the hallowed corridors of the Palace of Westminster on Segways is your idea of a grand opening to an edition of the Weekly Round-Up - then you're in luck.

As a matter of coincidence it's the intro the Round-Up has always dreamed about and now it's here. Happy days.

In this week's Hansard - the verbatim record of debates in both Houses of Parliament - tucked in between discussions on polyclinics and an education and skills survey was a short but lively debate on the legal use of the Segway in the UK.

The device you'll no doubt recall was described as the next big thing by many industry leaders.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, no less, predicted that entire cities would be built to accommodate it. "If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen," he was quoted as saying a few years back.

The bad news is that so far the Segway has failed to cause cities to reconstruct themselves spontaneously around a brave new urban transport infrastructure (although they are probably easier to handle than one of these)

The good news for Segway fans - that'll be Steve Wozniak and George W Bush - is that the Right Honourable Earl of Glasgow and Lord Redesdale are overexcited converts and took their case to the snoozing, dusty denizens of the Upper House earlier this week.

The peers have called on the UK government to lift the ban on the use of Segways on public roads and pavements in the UK. Segways are allowed in many US states but are currently banned on UK roads because of safety fears.

Lord Redesdale said: "I tried one of these machines 20 minutes ago... It took me a few minutes to learn how to use it and I was very impressed with it. The vehicle's safety mechanism was particularly good and was demonstrated by the fact that I drove straight at the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, with his consent, and failed to do him any damage at all - unfortunately!"

Ho ho, Lord Redesdale, you little joker.

Hurtling by on his own Segway, the Earl of Glasgow added: "It is no more dangerous than bicycling, and a lot more fun, I can tell you. It is technically innovative, self-balancing, carbon-free and ideal for travelling distances of two to five miles - journeys that people usually now take by car."

Spoilsport Lord Bassam said that while there are currently no plans to lift the Segway ban it is under review and the government is looking at a number of trials elsewhere.

Bah!

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has had its ups and downs since it launched the first version of its laptop.

One issue is that the XO laptop resembles the unwanted lovechild of a frantic, drunken coupling between a toilet seat and first-generation iBook.

The good news for the project is that the laptop has a new design and it looks quite snazzy. Although it is still white and green, which is a strange choice for a computer.

Either way, the project took the wraps off its new laptop design this week and you can judge the design merits for yourself by checking it out here.

The new XO2 laptop is one large touch display that can be transformed into a hinged laptop with a touch keyboard, an electronic book or two-screen display. The new machine will further squeeze its power consumption, the original XO laptop consumes 2W to 4W, compared with 20W to 40W for a standard laptop, and the XO2 will draw just 1W.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said in a statement: "Based on feedback from governments, educators and most important, from the children themselves, we are aggressively working to lower the cost, power and size of the XO laptop so that it is more affordable and useable by the world's poorest children." It's still not edible, though.

Sales of the first device have been Segway-esque and, despite the predictions that the project would sell 100 million devices in 2008, in fact just 600,000 have sold. Still a reasonable number given the state of the PC market but a little short of the mark, Nick.

Anyway, OLPC will soon have a brand new laptop in the mix and an injection of energy to its ambitious and extremely worthy goals. Everything should be fine just as long as it doesn't repeat its error of making bold predictions.

Speaking of which, Negroponte has boldly predicted that the overall cost of the device would be $75 by 2010. The current $100 laptop actually costs closer to $190.

Oh Nicholas, will you ever learn...

Depending on who you talk to, we already live in a Big Brother state.

Some people use it in the context of a national TV programming schedule profligate with hideous reality TV shows.

Other people use it in the context of a government that has a heavy-handed approach to dealing with personal privacy in the age of ever-pervasive terrorist threats.

Thankfully, today we'll be dealing with the latter, a subject largely unfettered with drunken, screeching chavs fighting and copulating in televised prisons, occasionally at the same time.

The quixotic approach to keeping us safe by having complete access to our most intimate personal data. Not satisfied with ham-fisted plans to introduce national ID cards, the government is now suggesting that all email, blogs, instant messaging and VoIP calls could be monitored.

Unsurprisingly, critics, many of them spluttering with outrage, warn that the plans go too far.

This week a Home Office spokeswoman described how the draft Communications Data Bill could broaden the scope of records demanded under an EU directive.

She said: "We are looking at the wider provision, there are a huge number of communications that could be covered by it, email, text messages, blogs..."

Which is great news for companies offering pervasive, enterprise-level search technology and people hawking storage devices.

Gus Hosein, senior fellow at Privacy International and fellow at the London School of Economics, said that this "simple" traffic data would be a "map of every individual's life". A bit like a government-mandated version of Google Web History.

Jonathan Bamford, assistant information commissioner, warned in a statement: "We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society."

"We aren't sleepwalking anywhere, we are being taken against our will," cried one silicon.com reader in a comment , who suggested, perhaps uncharitably, that the same rules won't apply to grey-suited civil servants in central and local government, which is probably a lucky escape for the people responsible for monitoring all of this nonsense.

Another poster, who's so concerned about privacy that he/she posted anonymously said: "Another appalling step towards the totally monitored society.”

She/he added: "This is alarming enough - but what is TRULY alarming is the apathy and lack of rebellion in the population at large."

Yeah, whatever.

No wait. Would that be the same apathy and lack of rebellion that led to the widespread condemnation of the ID cards scheme and contributed to its downfall? There's fight in the old dog yet.

The government is currently drafting the Communications Data Bill that contains the proposals and will release it later this year.

In the meantime, the rebellion starts now, but let's keep it polite and no pushing and shoving at the back, there's a good chap.

Just form an orderly queue and sign the petition, as soon as one appears, and don't drink the Kool Aid...

In other news this week:

The British countryside, glorious isn't it? Now more good news for rural dwellers: broadband penetration in the countryside is higher than it is in our cities. That's another pre-conception blown out of the water for the Round-Up about life outside the nation's conurbations.

Green IT in action: the country's biggest biomass-powered plant urges you to save the planet by burning some trees.

Green IT in-action: the government wants to reduce its carbon footprint massively by getting civil servants to turn off their computers overnight. Genius.

The Apple-branded house of fun is the future.

Don't forget, the Weekly Round-Up podcast is a mere click away resplendent with wit and ironic theme tune.

And also, try your hand at the caption competition.