Tags

UK DNA database consultation

The UK's Home Office has been running a consultation, entitled Keeping the right people on the DNA database.

I'm gravely sceptical about the entire episode and, throughout, the document tilts heavily towards keeping DNA for a long time because that will – supposedly – make us safer.

David Mery has had some choice words and a very thorough response to the Home Office's proposal. I am not so thorough, and kept my contribution to the section of which Ben Goldacre rightly asked 'Is this a joke?'.

The consultation closed yesterday, here is my contribution, written from the vantage point of my academic high horse.

More on UK DNA database consultation…

Amazon patent decent URLs for search

A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).

One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:

http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary

I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.

My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.

I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.

That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.

I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.

[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]