It's an unfortunate truth that not all first class rail services are created equal. In fact, it would be fair to say that standards vary enormously depending on the operating company, veering from "slightly better than standard class" all the way up to "really very good indeed". Given this disparity, how can all these services be classed as "First Class"?

The first problem is that, as far as I can tell, there doesn't appear to be a standard definition of a First Class rail service. This means that train operators are free to call any carriage "First Class" if it represents even the smallest improvement over the quality of their standard service (which can itself vary hugely between trains, routes, operators, distance travelled and so on). Even something as fundamental as seat size isn't a good indicator; some services have First Class seats which, on other services run by the same operator, would be used for the standard class service.

What this means is that passengers cannot really tell, when they buy their "first class" tickets, what sort of service they're going to receive from a train operating company and they therefore cannot make informed decisions about the class of ticket they should buy. This leads to confusion, disappointment and not inconsiderable annoyance when you turn up and find that, rather than the luxurious throne you were expecting, you have instead purchased a cramped little seat in a noisy carriage.

Let me list for you the things that I think should form part of a first class rail service:

• Seats - all seats should be wide (no more than three across the width of a standard UK carriage), comfortable and well-padded. Power points should be provided at every seat so that phones and laptops can be charged (vital for business travellers or those of us with an iPhone or other power-hungry device). Windows should have blinds.
• Wifi - First class rail services should offer a decent wifi service for the duration of the journey. Such service should be free (or included in the price of the ticket), fast, reliable and secure.
• At seat trolley service - Wandering the carriages in search of sustenance is an acceptable compromise if you're slumming it in the cheap seats but there really should be an at-seat service in the first class carriages. On longer journeys, this should include a full table service and good quality meals with decent wines.
• Complimentary food and drink - If the service offers only sandwiches and coffee then these should be free (or, again, included in the ticket price). Virgin do this on some of their services and it makes a huge difference to the quality of the journey.

For anyone who likes gadgets, Kickstarter is simply brilliant. Not only does it feed our addiction to techno-porn (details below), it also allows us to contribute to a company’s product launch, helping to bring to market some fantastic ideas that might otherwise have failed to find the backing they needed. Here are a few of my recent favourites. 

Predicting the details of Apple's product releases is fairly easy if you stick to broad generalisations: we can be fairly sure that the new iPhone (expected in the autumn) will be faster, about the same size and weight, have better wireless connectivity, an improved camera and about the same battery life. We're also likely to see, thanks to iOS 6 (previewing at WWDC?), improvements to key software elements, including Apple's stock applications, APIs and integration with 3rd-party systems. Improvements in all these areas would probably keep the iPhone ahead of the competition. 

How can we be (reasonably) sure of this? Apple is secretive and doesnt discuss future releases but their general philosophy of incremental improvement is well known and can be used to make broad-brush predictions.

It's more difficult to spot the new things, the unexpected leaps into the unknown, like Siri or deep Twitter integration or the completely new chassis of the iPhone 4. Once we move beyond the incremental improvements we proceed by guesswork, guided only by Apple's patents and the unhelpful "intelligence" of various sources "close to Apple" or their manufacturing partners.

There are, however, a few rumours that we can probably discount:

Larger screen - the trend in Android devices has been toward ever larger screens with some "phones" now reaching a thumb-destroying five inches. The iPhone has had a 3.5" screen since launch and there are good ergonomic and product differentiation reasons for expecting this to continue.

More storage - it's normal for successive generations of computers to feature ever larger storage systems but in a mobile device with limited battery capacity this isn't always helpful. The fact that the new iPad, which arguably has a much greater need for storage capacity, has a top limit of 64Gb suggests the iPhone isn't likely to jump to 128Gb.

Quad-core processor - the iPhone 4S is already very fast. Adding extra cores might make it faster but it would also burn battery more quickly. Maybe next year.

Liquid metal chassis - sounds fantastic and I think it will happen at some point but probably not this year.

NFC - I'd love to see NFC in an iPhone so that I could dump my credit and Oyster cards but, based on nothing at all, I don't think it'll happen this year.

So what, apart from the incremental improvements mentioned above, do I predict for the next iPhone/iOS combination?

• Siri will be improved and extended, possibly with a third-party developer API and (more likely) access to many more databases (particularly outside the US where coverage is relatively poor).
• Enhanced gestures and interactions to simplify tasks that Siri can't handle.
• New mapping and navigation features, probably with reduced emphasis on Google Maps.
• Widgets and other improvements to the home and lock screens.
• Deeper integration with iCloud, Facebook, iPad and, hopefully, Mountain Lion.

Every previous prediction I've made about Apple's products has been wrong and I confidently expect to be wrong again. Check back after WWDC for an update.

My quest to find the perfect laptop bag may never end, mostly because I can’t quite convince myself that the bags I’ve found will really meet my requirements, which are: 

• Capacity - I need to to carry a 13" MacBook Air, an iPad and various minor accessories like chargers, headphones, phone, passport, notebooks and pens. 
• Traveling - I do a reasonable amount of traveling so the bags needs to be suitable for use on planes, trains and buses, as well as offering good protection from the inevitable violence and stress of everyday commuting. 
• Style - all bags are not created equal. I want one that will not look out of place in the office, in an airport departure lounge and, ideally, tucked out of the way in a smart bar (not because I frequent smart bars, of course, it's just useful short-hand for general non-geek acceptability). I’m planning to use it for several years, so it has to be tough. 
• Features - as well as holding all my stuff, I want a secure, easily fastened bag that can be worn for cycling, walking or jogging. A decent shoulder strap, secure phone pocket, good padding and a tough, waterproof outer layer are all essential. 

• Tom Bihn’s Ristretto for 13” MacBook Air, US $155 including the Absolute shoulder strap. 
• Timbuk2’s D-Lux Laptop Messenger, US $129 plus custom options. 
• Crumpler’s Moderate Embarrassment, AUD $175. 

I'm not an uncritical fan of Facebook but I do quite enjoy using the service, from time to time. There are weaknesses, problems and difficulties with all websites and there are quite a few things I don't like about Facebook's site but my main complaint is that I don't like being the product; I prefer to be the customer.

What do I mean by this? In common with many other 'free' web services (Twitter, Hotmail and Gmail, for example, all of which I use regularly), Facebook generates the revenue to cover their costs by displaying adverts to their users.

The nature of the adverts varies between the different services but the basic plan is the same; gather your users' personal information and show than adverts chosen, at least in part, by reviewing that data and making predictions about their habits. You are, in effect, sold to advertisers so that they may exhibit their wares to you.

The advantage for the advertiser is that this sort of customer profiling (which happens even if the only information the advertiser has is your approximate location) allows them to target their adverts at the people most likely to be interested in their services (it's a bit more complicated than this in real life but you get the idea). This reduces their costs (showing adverts costs money) and improves their hit rates (people are more likely to click through adverts showing things they actually want).

The advantage to the service user, apart from not laying out cash to use the service, is that they are more likely to see adverts which that might be of interest to them. Nobody wants to be spammed with adverts for products they're unlikely to buy but carefully targeted ads can sometimes be useful.

If targeted ads can be useful and if they allow a service to be provided without charge to the end user you might ask what I'm complaining about. Essentially, service quality and privacy, neither of which the providers of free services are incentivised to offer beyond the minimum required to attract or retain users. Facebook's business plan relies on gathering as much private data from users as possible so that their advertisers can more tightly target their ads. They're basically selling you and your data to the advertisers.

This is fine if you're happy to share your data, accept the loss of privacy and have your page cluttered with adverts. I'm not happy to do this any more. I want to pay for Facebook's service, which I enjoy using, so that I see pages without adverts and to incentivise Facebook to look after my interests and data.

I don't expect this to happen any time soon because the people most likely to pay to use the service are probably the most valuable users to advertisers and Facebook won't want to risk advertising revenue just to offer an improved service to a minority of customers. Maybe this is an opportunity for someone else to make a splash? 

The Chancellor’s decision to impose VAT on alterations to listed buildings (20%) appears to have upset people who own, manage, use or alter listed buildings. That’s not really a surprise - vested interests always complain when their privileges are withdrawn - but the Church of England appears to be particularly aggrieved. They’re so worried about having to pay tax like other businesses that their Director of Cathedral and Church Buildings, Janet Gough, has started a petition to stop the change. 

A brief conversation on Twitter with Father Andrew of St. Peters in Walworth got me thinking about the application of VAT to alterations of listed buildings. The argument made by the Church - essentially that the new rules will inhibit their ability to alter their listed buildings - is probably correct (in that increasing costs by 20% is likely to reduce the work they can afford) but it is not, I would suggest, a strong reason for either halting the change or granting an exemption to religious buildings. Here is my reasoning. 

The Church of England exists within the wider context of our society and functions, at the simplest level, as a charity in competition with similar faith-based organisations. It might not pursue profit, as such, but it is definitely interested in stakeholder value and service; in this respect it is no different from other businesses. The Church has large numbers of customers, any of whom could be poached by other religious organisations. The potential for the movement of customers between organisations, and the changes in revenue that those movements might create, drives competition between the churches. 

Like all businesses, the future of the Church is in the hands of its customers and it must strive continuously to satisfy existing clients and attract new ones. In a de-regulated market with lots of new entrants (walk along Walworth Road, where St. Peters is located, and count the number of churches to get an idea of the nature of the marketplace), many of whom are unencumbered by the Church’s traditional cost base (buildings, management hierarchy etc.), this is increasingly difficult. 

One of the Church’s key advantages is that it has a virtual monopoly on spectacular custom buildings, for example cathedrals. By comparison, new churches often start in abandoned or dilapidated conversions (again, see Walworth Road) which are anything but attractive to new customers. One consequence of the VAT change, and possibly the main motivator behind the Church’s complaints, is that it reduces the number of infrastructure improvements the Church can afford to make and thus weakens its ability to compete with new market entrants. 

In our modern economy we try to avoid extending privileges to a particular business or sector at the expense of its competitors because this practice generally has a negative impact on customers. The Church may struggle to alter its buildings as a result of this change but that doesn’t mean the change is wrong. All companies should receive equal treatment and operate under the same rules. The tax should stand.

The campaign for the office of Mayor of London is warming up. The vote will be on 3rd May and the polls indicate, even before the recent arguments about tax avoidance, that Boris Johnson is likely to win a second term.

The question of tax avoidance is interesting. Although there are no suggestions that either candidate has done anything illegal, Ken Livingstone's use of a limited company as a vehicle for his media work have allowed him to avoid a significant amount of income tax. By asserting that Boris Johnson had a similar arrangement (an assertion that turned out to be incorrect) Ken opened the way for Jenny Jones, the Green party candidate, to challenge her rivals to release the details of their tax returns. Boris (and Brian Paddick) agreed and promptly published, Ken released partial figures some time later.

Here are the details:

• For the year 2010-11, Ken earned £94,500 and paid just under £35,000 in tax.
• Boris did rather better, earning £473,280 (of which around £130k is his salary as the Mayor of London) and paying tax of £210,410.
• Brian Paddick's income was £76,804 (mostly his police pension) and he paid £14,534 in tax.
• Jenny Jones' finished fourth (coincidentally her expected position in the coming election) with a still very respectable £63,009 (around £15,133 in income tax) generated mostly from her work as a London assembly member.

Unsurprisingly, the Eton and Oxford educated Johnson leads the earnings table, gathering rather more than the other three candidates put together. Despite Ken's comments about tax avoidance, Boris  doesn't take advantage of the more tax-efficient arrangements favoured by Mr Livingstone and he also manages to pay more than three times as much tax as his rivals. In fact, not only does Boris pay the most tax in absolute terms, he also pays the most tax as a proportion of his earnings; as an example of "we're all in this together", Boris, despite his colossal earnings, is putting on a pretty good show.

The tax avoidance row probably won't affect Brian Paddick and Jenny Jones, who have almost no chance of winning the election, but it has probably damaged Ken's chances by exposing him to a charge of hypocrisy. Writing in The Sun on this very subject, Ken said:

"These rich bastards just don't get it…No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in our Parliament, unless they are paying their full share of tax."

It would be difficult for Ken to argue that he isn't fairly well off and, if we consider the evidence released so far, it would also be difficult to say that Ken is paying his full share of tax. Should we exclude Ken from the contest for Mayor of London simply because he appears to have channeled his fees through a (completely legal) tax efficient company? No, of course not, but we can certainly ask searching questions during the campaign.

Newspapers, TV journalists and other commentators love political u-turns. A big change of policy by a prominent politician, ideally after a long and costly defence of said policy by said politician, makes a great headline (or, if you're lucky, several great headlines, followed by a resignation). The media as a body seem to love criticising politicians for the policies they promote and then, if they actually persuade someone to change their mind, they attack again over the apparent u-turn.

This could really be a much longer list but six is a good round number. Some people might even read the whole article... 

Dodgy Road Signs: it doesn’t take much to get the text right on road signs - they’re not exactly verbose - but when they say things like “Use Both Lanes” rather than the somewhat more accurate “Use Either Lane” I feel a terrible urge to obey; imagine the fuss if you actually did exactly what the sign instructed you to do. 

Badly Designed Websites: unlike road signs, designing an good website is not easy to do. That’s not an excuse for doing it badly, though, which is the option taken by too many companies. Rather than release a half-finished, untested mess of poorly thought out user interactions, give your website the treatment it deserves; either finish it properly or execute it humanely and spare us all the pain of having to use it. 

Real-life Television: I’m looking at you, Airline, with your scenes of people missing flights because of drunkeness, heavy traffic, poor process design or bad temper. Yes, occasionally, some people do make it through the airport to their destination, but programmes that concentrate so heavily on pain and anguish really ought to come with a health warning: “Beware - may seriously damage your sense of humour”. 

And while we’re on the subject of television, let’s spare a moment to consider Strictly Come Prancing. Sorry, Dancing, which my wife insists on watching (sometimes twice a week if she feels the need to catch up on the results). It’s not that I particularly object to these shows (although I think it’s time to put Bruce Forsyth back in his coffin) but there should be limits - no more than an hour a week and no more than 12 weeks a year. Seems only fair. 

Hotel Rooms from the 19th Century: if you regularly spend time in hotels you may notice that many suffer from a flaw, namely a shortage of readily accessible power points by which electrical devices (phones, tablets, laptops etc.) can be charged. Typically, power outlets are hidden under beds or behind cabinets where they are out of sight, presumably for aesthetic reasons, making it difficult or inconvenient to gain access. In 21st century hotels, available (i.e. unused) power sockets should be located beside the bed (both sides) and the desk. 

Sunday Trading Laws: in the UK we are blessed with a collection of antiquated traditions based on a largely abandoned Middle Eastern religion. These traditions, codified as the restrictive ""insert name of Act here"", are used to justify an artificial shortening of trading hours on an arbitrarily chosen day of the week to placate the sensibilities of a non-existent supernatural being. Madness, and enormously annoying to anyone who has limited free time and who might like to shop on a Sunday, i.e. pretty much all of us. 

It turns out there are a lot of things that annoy me. This may become a regular series.

The more I hear about renewable power sources the more clearly I understand that these technologies are only part of the answer to the problems of global warming and fossil fuel exhaustion. It's not that the technologies don't work (they clearly do) or that they are uneconomic (they’re fast approaching economic parity, a trend that will only accelerate as investment grows) or even that we can't find somewhere to site them (although there are bound to be limits on the numbers of wind turbines we can build).

The problem is simply that they, or rather the weather patterns they exploit, are not reliable. Wind turbines can be becalmed, solar generators can be hampered by cloud, fog or the turning of the earth, and the result is that predictable peaks of demand probably cannot reliably be met by solely by these technologies. They aren’t going to be enough, so what do we do to bridge the gap?

Ultimately, when the coal, gas and oil run out (or when the CO2 emissions from their burning just become unsustainable), we should have plenty of options if we continue to pursue scientific investigation and the application of new technology. I have undoubtedly missed something obvious, but I think the solution is likely to include some combination of the following:

• Large numbers of wind and solar power generators as well as tidal power turbines,
• Large-scale electricity storage systems to time-shift generating capacity to coincide with demand,
• Imported electricity from places like north Africa, where solar energy is abundant and local demand is negligible,
• Changes to our lifestyles to use less energy, focussing on efficient, low-carbon, sustainable behaviours,
• Innovative new power sources, like Bill Gates’ Traveling Wave Reactor, or, if we’re very patient (or lucky), fusion power generators.
• Traditional fission power stations, along the lines of the new experimental units currently being built in Europe. 

The problems of carbon-free power generation are many, varied and non-trivial but they’re also amenable to the effects of time, ingenuity and investment. We could tomorrow launch a plan to replace fossil fuels with a combination of wind, tidal and nuclear power, for example. It would be unpopular, probably, but it could be done.

At the same time we need to be investing in distribution infrastructure. A smart grid should allow us to smooth the peaks of demand to some extent, for example by switching off refrigerators or air conditioning units for the fifteen minutes after Eastenders when everyone rushes off to boil kettles. This also requires considerable investment by large numbers of people but, again, it’s probably doable.

It seems likely, in an otherwise uncertain future, that our population will continue to grow and that even if our per capita usage shrinks, our overall requirement for energy will increase. The above suggestions may help us cope with this situation but the underlying requirement is continued investment in education, science and technology. Without that, and the benefits such investment brings, the future looks very grim indeed.