Photo credit: Kake Pugh

Postcodes are something most people give little consideration to, originally created to aid the sorting of mail and first introduced under Postmaster General Ernest Marples in 1959 the postcode took until 1974 to become universal across the UK. It has since gone on to be used for a wide range of location based purposes.

To licence the database of postcodes to latitude and longitude from The Post Office costs anything from £1000-4000 per year which puts it out of reach of most non-profit and community web services. To address this, Ernest Marples Ltd (named after that 1950s Postmaster General) was formed to provide free conversion from a postcode to latitude and longitude, how this was done is a bit of a mystery as all they would say on the matter was:

Where’s the data coming from?
We’re not saying. But, just to be clear: we don’t hold a copy of the postcode database ourselves, neither in complete form nor as part of a cache.

Their API was used by a number of sites such as PlanningAlerts.com, JobCentreProPlus.com and Healthwhere to provide free information to the public.

The Royal Mail weren’t happy about this and this week Ernest Marples Ltd was effectively shut down by the Royal Mails legal team.

Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, said:

“Post codes were created with public money, so they need to be used for the widest public benefit. Ernest Marples have been showing how this can be done. Their ideas need to be legalised for non-profit use, not shut down.

Intellectual Property rules need to work for society, and not the other way round.”

It’s hard to disagree with that. If you agree you can sign a petition here that asks the Prime Minister to encourage to Royal Mail to offer a free licence that wil allow non-profit projects to continue to offer location-based services of this nature.

I’ve also been using the Free The Postcode! iPhone app over the last year, I urge everyone to register their post code and latitude and longitude here so that we can at least build a postcode database free of the Royal Mails limitations.

Photo credit: Vermin Inc

Remember all the exciting things we were promised? Back when the year 2000 seemed unfathomably distant the future looked rosy, by now we would be living in a Star Trek like world where robots would do all the work and we would be able to spend all our time on leisure pursuits. A world where diseases and even the common cold would be a thing of the past.

Now here we are, nearly ten years into the 21st century, where is it all? Where is my jetpack, my electric flying car, the underwater cities and the day trips to the moon? What happened to being able to control the weather?

Instead, we have a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots and the technological wonders that would bring our new peaceful, prosperous society have not appeared.

Our cars are still grounded and powered by fuel extracted from the earth at great cost (both monetary and politically) not electricity. The electricity which by now was supposed to be “too cheap to meter” instead of increasingly expensive and still generated by pollution spewing power stations burning a dwindling supply of fossil fuels.

Even some of the things that have materialised are disappointing, the household robot is here after a fashion, but it’s really just a vacuum cleaner. The jetpack is here too but you won’t be going to work on one anytime soon.

Photo credit: SamJUK

Recreational space travel might be on the cards but it’s not going to be the ubiquitous, even routine image portrayed in the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey for a long time, if ever.

So what went wrong? Well I think a lot of the time, investment and talent that should have gone towards bringing us these things has been squandered on military development, procurement and war. The oil companies and others tried to strangle the electric car at birth for their own financial gain (at least this seems, finally, to be making progress again) and fear of nuclear power killed our cheap electricity. Maybe those were just more optimistic times too.

Sure, it’s not all doom and gloom; Computers, the internet and gadgets such as smartphones are bringing a different, perhaps unpredicted, slice of “the future of the past” into our present but it’s not for all, there is still war, famine, sickness and a huge percentage of the worlds population still don’t even have basics such as clean drinking water.  Maybe William Gibson was right when he said “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

At the very least, we’re more than a bit behind schedule and frankly, it’s all a bit disappointing really.

This was one serious pot growing operation.

Bet they didn’t think that one would get found!

Edit: Couple more links on that: one, two

Edit: and another.

The Beeb have a great site with loads of info, pics and a video tour of the “Burlington Bunker”. You might remember this as the place Mark Thomas went and made a nuisance of himself… “there are no underground tunnels” was what they told him! It’s HUGE!  Some of the time warp stuff in there is mad!

I’ve posted some of these optical illusions on here in the past but I’ve never seen the third one before… it’s mad!

This is really rather good.