Go Go Car competition winners announced

3 Replies Christopher Roberts

Way back on the 4th of December, we launched a competition to win a build your own solar powered car kit, thanks to British Gas, who provided us with 5 fantastic Go Go Car’s to give away, to celebrate The Future Car Challenge!

The competition closed on Wednesday the 12th of December, and the winners were announced shortly after. Three of the winners got straight back to me with their addresses, and soon had their Go Go Car in the post to them.

Of the other two winners, one lived outside the UK, so asked us to redraw their name, and another never replied to my messages, so after nearly a month of waiting, I was forced to redraw their name. British Gas have received the names and addresses of all five winners, and they each now have their prize, or it is currently on the way to them.

I thought it would be good to share some of the responses I received from the winners.

The five winners (that are now displayed on the Rafflecopter entry widget) were:
Build your own solar powered car set - John Lewis

  • Claire R
  • Julie K
  • Mel J
  • Michelle J
  • Christopher T

Julie was very appreciative, saying

“Thanks so much – my son will be over the moon”

One happy customer 😉

Chris replied:

“Thank you Technology Bloggers, I’m thrilled and delighted to have won this prize, I always wanted a steam powered model as a child and in the 21st century here I am with what I consider the modern equivalent.

Thanks again, I’m sure my grandson will be fascinated with his new toy.”

I am not sure John Lewis make the steam powered kit anymore, but I am sure the solar substitute will be just as good!

Mel thought the car would be great for her nephews, saying:

“Thank you I am really happy to have won. I’ve told my nephews about it and they think it looks really fun and futuristic and are really looking forward to going solar powered.”

Hopefully we have made more than one person happy with that kit 🙂

Claire jokingly replied:

“Oh my gosh! That is amazing! I can’t wait to drive my new car!”

Claire even sent a picture of the car fully constructed!

Solar Go Go Car picture

The picture Claire sent of her fully constructed solar Go Go car.

Michelle’s story is probably the one that will touch you the most, when I emailed Michelle, she responded:

Thank you so much for your email. It’s made my day! I have MS and am currently experiencing the worst relapse I’ve ever had. The pain is ridiculous and it’s taking me for ever to type this reply as my hands are currently on strike – along with my body and legs!

It will be lovely to see the look on my youngest daughter’s face when I give her this prize. It’s perfect because she’s been learning about the importance of this kind of technology at school and she’s going to feel like Adrian Newey when I give her this!

Five deserving winners and an overall good competition – well done everyone!

Our thanks go out to British Gas for offering the prizes, and to everyone who took part for their entries. Stay tuned to the blog, as we hope to run another (our fourth) competition in the near future.

Freedom of Information or Criminals?

9 Replies Jonny Hankins

In this post I would like to tell the stories of two young gentlemen, Aaran Swartz and Bradley Manning.

Many of you will know these names. Aaron is unfortunately all over the web this week due to his recent suicide, and here in Boston there is a lot of soul searching going on.

Aaron Swarz

Aaron Swartz

Aaron started young, at the age of 14 he was part of a working group that developed the RSS system. He was co-owner of Reddit, having been owner of Infogami, a company that merged to form the Reddit that we know today. He was most importantly an online activist, fighting for open access and against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

His activism got him into trouble with the police however. In the first instance he was investigated for publishing documents managed by the Administrative Office of the US Courts. These were public documents but the administrative office charged per page for individuals to see them. Aaron did not believe that this was fair so decided to take the chosen course of action. After an investigation he was not charged however, so no case was ever brought.

His second brush with the law went rather differently however. In 2011 he was arrested and charged (amongst other things) with fraud and unlawfully taking information from a computer. He had allegedly walked into the MIT library, attached his laptop to the system and downloaded 4 million academic articles.

His complaint was that the database holding the articles (JSTOR) were unfairly paying royalties to article publishers and not authors, and in doing so and charging for their service they were restricting public access. JSTOR did not push for charges and made no complaint, but Massachusetts Attorneys did, stating that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars”.

The charges carried a possible prison term of 35 years and a 1 million dollar fine.

After Aaron’s death his family criticized both MIT for not behaving responsibly when the activity was discovered and the US attorneys for disproportionately pursuing criminal charges. Some people argue that the problem lies in the law however, because it does not differentiate between taking things for profit and for other reasons. In effect stealing money from the bank is the same as stealing articles, even if the aim of stealing the articles is not to make money from the crime.

The BBC has a collection of messages from many of the best known architects of the cyber world and they really demonstrate the great esteem that the entire community held for Aaron. We do not know and will never know why he chose to take his own life, nor if the possible 35 years in prison played on his mind and pushed him into it, but as I stated at the beginning there is a lot of soul searching here about how the entire event was handled.

To Bradley Manning. Bradley is another young man who got on the wrong side of the authorities. He is a soldier who worked in intelligence, not high ranking but with access to a certain amount of low level classified data. He was arrested in Iraq in 2010 on suspicion of passing data to Wikileaks and is currently in a military prison awaiting trial.

Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning

Before his arrest Bradley was possibly not in the best frame of mind. Life in Iraq is not easy, he was taunted for his presumed homosexuality and self acknowledged gender difficulties and had outbursts of anger and self reclusion. He was not transferred though, nor his access to classified information revoked.

At some point Manning allegedly forwarded what were later to be known as the Iraq War Logs and Afghan War logs to Wikileaks, a crime that prosecutors say he admitted to in online chats.

He was charged with Aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty, although prosecutors have stated that they would only ask for life in prison without parole. An offer was made for a guilty plea in return for 16 years in prison but Manning maintained his not guilty stance.

Once again Manning’s presumed crime was not committed for profit but in order to give the public information that he believed they had a right to. The most known of all of the materials is the killing of the 2 Reuters journalists by a US helicopter crew, a sickening thing to watch.

Manning was very unhappy about the type of war he saw and felt that the general public needed to see what he had seen, and referring to the helicopter killing video said something in one of his chats that I believe expresses his motivation; “well what would you have done if you had seen it?”

Business savings using conference calling

2 Replies John Iliopoulos

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A video conferenceIf you run a business, the likelihood is that, every once in a while, after poring over your finances, you look at ways of saving money. You might look at how much you spend on your energy bills, whether you could cut jobs or persuade some of your employees to work part-time instead of full-time or even look at technology that can help to reduce your company’s outgoings.

Video conferencing is perfect for any company that wants to reduce its costs, but you may wonder how it can do that. If you regularly go to meetings away from the office, you’ll surely be aware of the expense involved. If you’re not spending a fortune in fuel costs, you’ll probably be paying for plane, train or coach tickets or even a taxi, and doing this all the time can really add up. By video conferencing, you eliminate all those travel costs.

You can invite anyone you want to a conference call, irrespective of where they are. You can talk to them for a very low price or even for free, plus you can do all things you can do in a normal meeting thanks to the visual element of video conferencing such as showing prototypes or graphs. It also allows for collaboration too, which sets it apart from other forms of communication.

A conferenceSaving time – this is another benefit that video conferencing can bring to your business. Meetings take a lot of time to get to, but by arranging a conference call in their place, you could save your business and employees hours at a time. This allows you to prepare for the meeting properly, while you can also get on with any other important tasks such as accounting.