A lightweight 100% Java RDBMS
Introduction
IBM have a 100% pure Java relational database management system which has been called at various stages in its history SQL/J, Cloudscape and Derby. IBM are now eagerly pushing the system to open source developers under the 'Cloudscape' label. I downloaded it to evaluate for use with PRES and other Jacquard applications.
License
Using, not losing, your head
Cycle helmets are a good thing, aren't they? It's obvious. They protect your head. They must be a good thing: it's common sense. Why then is the cycling community, in the face of proposed mandatory helmet legislation, fighting internecine helmet wars?
Don't panic
Before going into the details of this argument, let's start by putting this into perspective. Cycling is actually a very safe activity. Nothing, of course, is absolutely safe. Last year, in Britain, 114 cyclists were killed. Of those, 95 (83%) died as a result of collisions with motor vehicles. But that's out of millions of cyclists, covering billions of miles. In fact, according to the National Statistics Office, there is on average one fatal accident for every twenty one and a half million miles cycled. Twenty one and a half million. If you were to cycle ten miles every single day, it would be nearly six thousand years before you had a fatal accident.
Lies, damned lies, and cycle helmets
I've just been moved to write to the British Medical Association, a thing which doesn't often happen. The BMA had a critical role to play in the recent campaign to make cycle helmets compulsory in the United Kingdom; they have long had a well thought out policy on cycle helmets — on the whole favouring them, but aware of the ambiguous nature of the evidence in favour of them and siding against compulsion. Their position helped persuade MPs not to vote for compulsion. It seems the pro-compulsionists have seen the BMA as a key target to convert, and recent press releases have announced a policy change, apparently by fiat at the top. The papers the BMA have published in support of their new policies are masterpieces of dishonesty and sloppy thinking. So here is my first, brief, critique, as expressed in an email to parliamentaryunit@bma.org.uk, the address they cite for comments.
My attention has been drawn to your web pages published at URL:[http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclhelmet](http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclhelmet) and URL:[http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclehealth](http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Cyclehealth).
In the first you quote: "Each year over 50 people aged 15 years and under are killed by cycling accidents, with 70-80 per cent of these resulting from traumatic brain injury."
This United Satrapy
Sometimes some things make one more angry than it is easy to express. This morning I am faced with one of these.
The issue
First, a bit of background. There is an organisation called 'indymedia'; it is a journalists collective, which reports stories not generally covered by the mainstream press, specifically including reporting on the demonstrations at G8 summits and such things. On October 7th this year, officers of the United States of America's Federal Bureau of Investigations, acting on behalf of the Italian Government, entered RackSpace's supposedly secure colocation facility in London and removed two servers belonging to indymedia.
My longbow
This week I have been mostly making a longbow. Yes, that's the one I made, in the picture. What? Show-off? Moi?
At this time of year, for the past several years, we (where for these purposes 'we' is Southwest Community Woodlands Trust) have put on courses on making this or that out of the products of the forest, and this autumn one of the things we'd decided to make was longbows. And as soon as the idea was mooted I thought I definitely wanted to give that a go. In the way of things, somebody knew a bowyer, a man called Dave Cotterill, who turned out to be a gentle, competent man and a most excellent teacher.