Posts by Watashi

Eric Schmidt reanimates el cheapo PC zombie

Web 2.0 alive and well despite El Reg

El Reg really doesn’t like Web 2.0 does it? If it’s not Andrew Orlowski’s supercilious attitude towards anyone who actually uses Web 2.0 or who wants to make money from Web 2.0, then its general claims like this about Web 2.0 being dead.

Of course, in the real world (as opposed to the jounalistic world or the business world) Web 2.0 is thriving. It's impossible to listen to the radio or watch the TV without someone going on about Twittering, and there are now several TV shows devoted to showing harvested Web 2.0 user-created video content. Not only this, but more than a few marriages have collapsed as a result of social networking and virtual reality sites. As for making money – the Apple iPhone app store seems to be doing quite well when it comes to selling user-created content over the web for people to use on the web.

Like any new technology, there will be many investors who think that consumers will sign up to any new Web 2.0 product simply because it's new. Of course, this isn’t true, but the hype put out by companies looking for investment gives a false sense of what Web 2.0 is supposed to be like. Web 2.0 should be judged on the same grounds that other sectors are judged. If you want Web 2.0 to make money, you need to do what other industries do: sell something that people want to pay for and have no choice but to pay for. And jouralists should expect this and not be all superior when the hype turns out to be nothing but hype.

The reason Web 2.0 is so popular with web users is that Web 2.0 is cheap to run, cheap to use and focuses around services that users don’t mind if they go down every now and again. Trying to make a lot of money in an open market on a product that has a tiny cost per user overhead (e.g. Friends Reunited or Facebook) is always going to be very difficult. The same is true when selling something that people can already do better and more reliably on their local systems (e.g. Google web applications).

Web 2.0 products that do make money are not those that people merely like to use, but products that people have to pay for to use because they can only accessed through one channel, or where advertisers will stump up because of a single channel's dominance. Would Apple make money on iPhone apps if you didn’t have to buy them through Apple’s own service? Not a chance. And would advertising space on Google cost anywhere near as much if there was genuine competition in the search-engine marketplace? I doubt it. This is where the innovation will be focused – not on the products themselves, but on making money from those products.

Web 2.0 has become immensely popular in a very short time, so it's far to early to judge how much money can be made from it.

Illinois restores Pluto's planetary status

Plutards

How arrogant it is to completely ignore the scientific community's official classification of something simply because it makes you feel better about yourself...

Hopefully, they'll reclassify organic 'liquids' as actually being 'solid'. Thus, I no longer have a 'drinking' problem, as you cannot drink a solid. Also, one mile could be redefined as what is currently three miles, meaning that I could drive down the motorway as fast as my car will go (having an 'Illinois' top spead of around 45 miles per hour).

p.s. Didn't Brown get standing ovations over in the US when he gave a speech? Do they want us to think they're morons, or what?

UK 'bad' pics ban to stretch?

Why?

I expect that soon simply watching videos expressing anti-religious sentiment or anti-Western sentiment will also join this list. If making multimedia content comparing Islam to National Socialism is worthy of censorship, or if making internet videos telling people to kill Westerners in the name of God is illegal, then presumably so is watching them.

Actually, why not include all videos that could inspire acts of violence against the British government (as judged by Jacqui Smith)?

If the government has good evidence to show that viewing the about-to-be banned material is harmful to the viewer, or to society as a whole, then fine. If (and I suspect this is the real truth), the government is merely banning media content because it doesn't like the topics covered, then there is no reason to expect the censorship to stop at extreme pornography.

As this is a democratic nation, the electorate has a right to know on what basis the government is passing its laws. Exactly why is some content to be made illegal (ie that which involves sexual violence) whilst other potentially harmful content (eg that which involves promoting drinking alcohol, glorifies non-sexual violence or advocates religious homophobia) is deemed acceptable? And exactly what checks and balances are there to stop a government undermining our freedom of speech by banning important ideas just because they are threatening to the government's belief system?

In the modern internet age, freedom to create and view multimedia content is supposd to be a major part of our liberal and secular democratic culture. Should we allow the nature of British censorship to be determined by the personal sensibilities of a handful of idealogically partisan, and in some cases deeply religious, Ministers?

Jacqui Smith ecstatically ignores more scientific advice

The kids are alright

If we could switch the country from Alcohol to Ecstacy, we'd see a huge drop in crime, in street violence, spousal abuse, mental health problems, premature deaths, traffic accidents, serious long-term health problems, sick days taken due to hang-overs, and kebabs consumed.

However, we'd also see a significant increase in Tabloid scare stories and militant mothers on the rampage, and a complete loss of alcohol tax revenue and the end of the current New Labour government.

This decision is a combination of realpolitik and knee-jerk establishment authoritarianism. It's democracy at it's worst: supposedly ethical and intelligent politicians punishing the enlightened majority for the benifit of the swing-vote holding, ignorant minority.

Hackintosh maker lands Apple punch

3 Dimensional Thinking

It's true to say that Apple is the master of the Vertical Monopoly. The iPhone is a prime example - if you want to use an iPhone, it has to be on a iPhone partner network provider, you have to use Apple software to put music etc on it (and download music from iTunes), all the Apps have to come from Apple's certified website and the only OS you are allowed to run on it is made by Apple. If you need a new battery, you have to get one put in by Apple.

The Apple branded PC is also a Vertical Monopoly as you can only run MacOS natively on a Mac (and vise versa). Whether this is 'wrong' or anti-competitive is debatable. Is this any different from video games being console specific? Or Sky requiring you to buy a Sky decoder to watch their TV? When you buy a Mac PC you do it because you want the OS and other Mac software, as well as the status that goes with the Apple brand. You don't buy it for the actuall hardware itself as you can easily buy a Windows PC with equivalent hardware set made largely by the same hardware manufacturers as used in a Mac, but for less money. Just compare the specs of a MacBook and a Samsung laptop to see how much more hardware you get for your money if you buy PC rather than Mac capable hardware.

What this company is trying to do is trade off the Mac brand without paying the owner of that brand for the right to do so, not 'compete' with Apple. If there was stuff you could do on a Mac that you couldn't do on a PC, that would be a different matter - but there isn't. The chances are, your reading this post on a direct Mac competitor, so that argument just doesn't fly.

Brits and Yanks struck with embarasment embarrassment

No pp in Apple

Did you know that the word 'apple' has no 'pp' in it? The noise you think is a 'pp' is actually just a combination of the end of the 'a' sound and the start of the 'le' sound. If you want to write it down you need the 'pp' because otherwise you'd just be saying 'ale'. However, if you wrote a**le, and asked someone to name the fruit, everyone would know what you meant.

In other words, correct spelling is a necessary evil forced upon us by the practical need to associate written words with spoken noises. The 'right' way to say a word is merely that which people can understand. Sure, uniformity helps everyone understand the language, but variation allows the evolution of language, which is an inevitable side-effect of social development. If all spelling was eternally fixed, language would be stilted and a lot less fun - however, if you ignore the rules altogether you end up with new dialects (and eventually languages) that make communication accross social groups impossible.

I don't think 'embarrased' or 'embarased' is really an issue as everyone knows what you mean if you write it the wrong way. Text speak is different, as poor use of text speak can make it impossible for a non-expert to understand what is being said, and if it is not formalised or banned, could easily become a seperate language. One day, kids may have to learn English AND Textspeak at school!

UK gov unleashes biometric IDs

Broken technology

If New Labour are, by some miracle, still in power in 2011, this could be a cunning way of helping get rid of ID cards.

1) Move to Scotland, or already be in Scotland, which is easier!.

2) Get an ID card as soon as possible

3) Take your ID card and put in microwave long enough to destroy the RFID.

4) Take card to bank and apply for new account. When they try to read your card, but can't, make a big fuss about how you knew the system wouldn't work.

5) Demand a new card, free of charge, from the authorities. If they try to charge you, take them to the small claims court.

6) Repeat 3) to 5) once.

7) Write to your local SNP MSP/candidate and explain above except the microwave bit.

If enough people do this, ID cards will become a big political issue in Scotland. Brown, terrified of loosing Scottish MPs in London will be forced to scrap them.

Benjamin Button eyes 13 Oscars

Through a glass darkly

The Dark Knight for Best Picture? Not even the short list?

I guess the Acadamy don't know sh*t.

First Windows 7 beta puts fresh face on Vista

Cool running OS

Running W7 Beta 1 for three days on a 4 1/2 year old laptop (2.8Ghz P4, 1Gb RAM).

1) It's more stable than either of the two new Linux releases I tried last year.

2) It's better looking, faster and smoother than Vista.

3) It's more intuitive to use than XP.

4) Almost everything that runs on Vista runs on W7, except Messenger, which crashes the MS Vista VGA drivers I managed to extract from Vista and install on W7 (note: Messenger is the only thing that's led to a crash so far).

5) It was really, really easy to install - it even connected to the internet through the wireless to download updates during the initial installation process!

6) It has a seperate volume control bar for Windows sounds (but this doesn't work yet - it is still only Beta 1!!!).

7) Nice check box list allows you to easily turn off unwanted process groups (eg Indexing).

8) Uses noticably less RAM than Vista.

9) Nice progress bar effect on the taskbar program group icons to show how far along a file copy process is.

10) Having open program windows grouped 'behind' the icon used to launch the software on the Taskbar is much better than seperate Quicklaunch and window tabs combination. You can close open windows by hovering over the Taskbar icon and clicking the cross next to the entry in the list that appears just above the icon. Note: seperate IE tabs appear as seperate entries in the IE list, so you can close specific tabs from the Taskbar with a single point and click. Right-clicking IE, Explorer and other icons on the Taskbar gives a history list.

11) Just transferred 250Mb of smallish files onto my flash drive at approx 4Mb/s

12) It looks like it will work well with touch screens.

I hated Vista - in fact, I sh4t all over it several times in El Reg posts - but I liked W7 the moment it started installing. It looks modern and feels snappy: you feel like you get more OS in a smaller package. Two weeks ago I was thinking of buying a laptop ASAP so that I could get one with XP on it, but now I'm going to wait until W7 comes out.

Some people have compared W7 to Win98, but this not true. Win98 bolted a load of extra stuff onto Win95 and the price was a big loss of stability. In a direct reversal of this trend, I'd be surprised if this old laptop ran Vista as well as it runs W7 Beta 1. I know the Apple and Linux fanboys, and the general M$ haters, will not like to hear this, but M$ really does seem to have listened to consumers. Most of the issues I can think of have been addressed (within reason). Sure, its more bloated than Linux... but it does an awful lot more than Linux, and it's more stable even in Beta. Yes, it takes some of the good looks from MacOS or some Linux distro's... but then Linux and Apple stole most of the nicer bits of their GUI from M$ in the first place. Remember how bland Win95 made MacOS look? OK, a new PC running W7 will not be as quick as a new Mac, but it will likely be a genuine competitor in terms of usability, speed and stability, and will still cost a lot less.

Assuming M$ doesn't mess this up, we will have an OS that can be installed and run with fair speed on single core computers with a single gig of RAM and that will be compatible with pretty much everything that runs on Vista, and a lot of stuff that runs on XP.

The big question will be what M$ do next. XP to Vista to W7 is a clear demonstration that you can't tell consumers what they should want to buy. M$ seem to have learned the lesson, but this would imply that W8 should be a refinement and update of W7, which is itself merely a new version of W6. This is the MacOS model, where OS cost is built into the price of the hardware allowing new versions to progress along a clearer path of incremental improvement. Perhaps this is a sign that M$ has realised that in the new 'computer as comodity' marketplace, the OS can no longer be presented to the consumer as a huge money-spinning, high profit margin flagship product. Innovation on upgrade pricing and on hardware tie-ins is what's really needed. Linux has recently got the jump on M$ with its Netbook tie-ins, so M$ are now playing catch-up.

Vista has been called the longest suicide note in software history. I think it will turn out to be the biggest wake-up call in software history.

Govt uses Obscenity Law to stuff up cartoon sex loophole

The seperation of State and Reality

We should expect nothing else from a government no longer able to tell fantasy from reality. The gap in realism between cartoon images and photographs is much smaller than the gap between, say, Brown's view of the recent economic past and future, and the actual reality of the situation.

New Labour's core tenet could well be written down thus:

"If the emotional reaction to an invented idea is the same irrespective of whether that idea is true or false, the invented idea should be treated as though it were an actual fact."

Or

"If you can persuade people you're right, it must be because you ARE right."

The rationale behind the second point is the same rationale behind the idealised evolutionary market forces philosophy underpinning so much New Labour ideology. Truth, like efficiency, arrives as a natural consequence of consumer behaviour (so the hypothesis goes). Just as the pressure placed on suppliers by consumers 'selects' only the best suppliers, so consumer pressure 'selects' only truthful governments. The logic is clear: if the electorate believes you speak the truth, then it must be because you actually ARE speaking the truth. If you are not speaking teh truth, the people will know this and so not vote for you.

Of course, humans are often poor consumers and poor judges of the truth, which is why BT get away with Phorm and how Blair got away with the 'dodgy dossier'. Fortunately, there is a limit - as Brown will find at the next General Election.

Retired army generals: Spend Trident money on the army

Our friends in America

The Nu Lab government clearly sees the UK as a lesser partner in a great Anglo Saxon political, economic and military superpower, and signing up to the new nukes is part of this political axis. The key factor is that there is currently a world-wide ban on developing new nuclear weapons, but just like the war in Iraq its much easier for the US to go against the international community's wishes if the British are on their side. Quid pro quo - the US gets our political support, we get a new nuclear deterent that would not be affordable if we tried to go our own way.

If we cancelled the Trident replacement, it would really, really annoy the Americans - in my book, this is reason enough to do it.

Ballmer talks 'post-PC' Microsoft with Windows 7 beta

Portable PCs

I want a single computing environment that can be accessed on any suitably specced device. It should be able to tell whether I'm accessing it via my phone, my car or my PC, and it should be possible to run it either locally on top of a hardware layer or as hosted either on a server or in a virtual machine. I don't want to turn a DVD into a coaster because I lose my network connection half way through the burning process, and I need to be able to listen to music on my phone even when I have no signal, but I still want to be able to access it on a net cafe or at work.

With storage costs being so low and with processing power now high even in small, cheap devices, I see no reason why I should need a live net connection to be able to work with my centralised, net hosted environment. What I suggest would be a central net based service that downloads your computer environment onto your device when you buy it. The environment then runs locally, with any changes being uploaded to the image held on the server. When I turn on my PC, updates to the image made on one device will be applied to the cached image on my hard drive, thus minimising the data transfer. However, it should be possible to access this environment without having to download it at all.

This way I get the best of both worlds - the convenience of cloud computing combined with the stability and computing power associated with PC computing.

'Lord of the Universe' disciple exits Wikipedia

Don't Panic!

Wikipedia seems to be slowly mutating into the Galaxy's favourite encyclopedia, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. With many of its articles based on biased opinion or on the limited knowledge of a single person or small group of people, it can hardly regarded as either reliable or extensive. In H2G2, this is seen in the comment Ford Prefect entered for Earth; "Mostly Harmless". However, the main comparison lies in the biggest selling points of the two encyplopedias - the user friendly interface and the great number of articles that are of practical use in every day life rather than of use in the world of academia (eg, finding the running order for P2P downloaded TV series).

No one [sane] goes to Wikipedia because they believe it to be the most reliable source of information. They do it because it's the frendliest source of information, and that means that providing fun info is more important than providing factual, unbiased information.

BBC: Top Gear Tesla didn't run out of juice

Danger, high voltage

If you run out of petrol in a modern car you'll have to pay a couple of hundred quid to your local dealer garage to get the engine re-callibrated.

However, the point is a fair one - which is why Top Gear showed us a battery powered sports car and a hydrogen fuel cell powered family car. Battery power is fine for sports cars because most of them don't get driven very far in one go and carry a much lighter load. Fuel cells are needed for a family car because of the much higher energy density and the greater ease of re-fuelling.

All we need is to get some fusion power stations up and running and we can phase out all those 20th Century petrol and deisel cars. Now, where did I leave those dilithium crystals?

RIAA won't sue, but will throttle

I have a dream

If only there was a way we could adapt current internet technology to produce some kind of digital super-library that would grant the entire global community access to the sum total of human musical output for a relatively small cost (compared to the money we've just spent saving corrupt bankers, or invading Iraq, or which we plan to spend on new Nuclear power stations).

If the point of the music industry is to make as much money as possible, then illegal P2P is a problem. If the point of the music industry is to get as much music as possible into the hands of as many people as possible in the most efficient way possible, then non unit-priced P2P downloading is part of the solution. We know what the priorities of the music executives are, but what about world-saving super-politicians like Brown and Obama?

It's worth noting that the nationalisation of the global banking and car manufacturing sectors has much more to do with national self-interest (ie protectionism) than high-minded political ideology. Banning P2P isn't about helping music lovers or creating good music - or even helping the artists; it's about protecting tax generating US and UK based companies.

Jacqui calls Vodafone man to run massive snoop database

If you have nothing to fear...

....you're on the wrong side.

Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah set for top two spots in Christmas Day charts

No need!

As a fan of actual music (as opposed to noise with a brand name attatched), I'm morally opposed to both Buckley's narcissistic, 'look at me, I'm so depressed because my mum won't drop me off round the corner from school when she gives me a lift in the Range Rover - it's so embarrasing because I'm only 16 and my friends are 17 and all drive brand new Nissan Micras' rot and the 'I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy just doesn't work', X-Factor Opportunity Knocks pish.

I'm hoping for a decent Christmas number one.

Go John Sergeant!

Trouble in Paradise iTunes Land

Market forces

I find it hard to feel any sympathy for iPhone app developers. Surely if people actually wanted their products they'd skip past the cheaper apps to get to the usefull ones? I'm sure there are some genuinely usefull bits and bobs out there for the iPhone, but from what I've seen on my pals' iPhones most apps are useless gimmicks designed to 'show off' the motion sensor or touch screen without adding any functionality, or games that quickly become repetative.

Harvard prof slams US nut allergy hysteria

Food madness

There was a study a couple of years ago suggesting that most people who think they have serious food allergies actually only have mild intolerances, or have no intolerances at all. Unfortunately we in the West have developed a culture of codependence between 'nomal' people and the authorities. Our governments are so afraid of losing our votes that they enable anxiety related behaviours which are bad for us. Rather than telling middle England voters that they are foolish to obsess about lactose intolerance, they encourage us to get hokus-pokus homeopathic medicine on the NHS!

Unfortunately, it benifits politicians more to pander to our irrational anxieties than to encourage us to be rational and judgemental. Firstly, by taking a hard scientific stance you lose all the votes of the chronically irrational (of which there are many), and secondly, you encourage everyone else to take a rational attitude to politics, which never helps the incumbant party apply their own irrational policies. Look at it this way - when was the last time you heard government politician call for a greater level of rational thinking throughout society. Right-minded thinking, joined-up thinking, pro-change thinking, yes, but never more rational thinking.

Of course, in the US its even worse because there is the very rational fear of being sued that organizations have of parents. The chance of a loose peanut killing a child is very small, but the chance of being sued successfully for millions of dollars by a parent because their hypocondriac kid got sick after seeing a peanut on a bus is much, much higher.

Reg readers in the dark over extreme porn

Sensiblification of the law

In recent times I've started to understand the way British law works. The government will pass a piece of law which, if applied exactly would be pretty harsh, but knowing that lawmakers are idiots and don't know what they're doing, the police and the judges will apply the law in ways that make it less stringent and authoritarian. Take for example, the laws on assisted suicide - today a case of assisted suicide against the family of a young rugby player crippled by an accident was thrown out because it was "not in the public interest" to pursue a prosecution, even though the judge said that it was likely a conviction would be obtained. The judge has moderated a law to allow a sensible situation to arise. The law does not allow you to help someone kill themselves, but in certain circumstances the law will not be applied. Similarly, police forces have taken a rather casual attitude to cannabis and even before the drug was downgraded, it was treated as a minor issue that would frequently be ignored. Those caught in possession would be let off with an official warning, rather than being prosecuted.

So, for this new set of laws I expect the following: if you are on the sex offenders register you will have your computer regularly searched for any material that falls into the category of 'extreme porn'. If someone is caught looking at 'extreme porn' at work, or in a public place, the police can now be brought in to deal with the culprit. If someone is found to be an active member of a web-based community dedicated to questionable sexual practices, you can now be placed on the sex offender's register. The police will also now have the power to treat faked rape porn websites in the same way they treat paedophilia websites under the logic that anyone who pays to watch women be raped is much more likely than the average person to commit an act of rape (I don't know if there is any evidence to actually show this is true). Credit card details will be seized and groups of people will be arrested. Importantly, any one in the UK now making this kind of material on a large scale can now be prosecuted. It is also possible that ISPs will start scanning for people regularly downloading material of this nature and pass their names onto the police.

What I doubt will happen is that the average Joe will find his computer seized at random and be banged up because he has a few mild bondage pics in his porn collection. The amount of work needed to look through thousands of pictures and videos only for a punter to escape prosecution because the lawyer successfully argues that the handful of questionable images fall just outside the definition of 'extreme porn' would be prohibitive. For the law to work, those applying it on the ground will have to distinguish from curious, sex obsessed porn thrill-seekers (ie 90% of men) and small minority of dangerous sexual deviants for whom porn is likely to trigger harmful behaviour.

It is also worth remembering that a very unpopular Labour party is up for re-election in just over a year's time. They don't want to frighten millions of men into voting Conservative by making inevitably high-profile prosecutions of normal porn users who happen to have gathered a few questionable pictures in their years of surfing. New Labour justice works by demonising certain groups of people (which it is then acceptable to treat like animals), and the typical middle-class professional male voter (ie Mondeo man) does not take kindly to being demonised or treated like an animal. For most of us, this law is really just cognitive behavioural therapy; curiosity is fine, but if you get into the habit (or fail to get out of the habit) of looking at 'extreme porn' the police will come and get you.

Berlusconi plans to use G8 presidency to 'regulate the internet'

Unfit for purpose

The internet could use some regulation... but as so many governments are suffering from compulsive authoritarianism at the moment, now is probably not a good time.

On the positive side, the credit crunch / recession means that the Communications Data Bill has been left off this year's list of proposed Bills - this means there is a good chance it will never come into being, what with Brown unlikely to get re-elected and the Tories being publicly opposed to many of the worst aspects of the idea. Hopefully, the impending mega-recession will delay Berlusconi's plans long enough for both him and Brown to be removed from power before anyone comes up with some serious ideas.

Windows patching abysmal, and getting worse

Lack of regulation

Problems for the computer literate:

1) Some of us are still using PCs with 2k installed - which isn't supported by the latest versions of some software (eg Quicktime). Is anyone offering to pay for XP upgrade and extra RAM?

2) The new 'secure' versions of some software are less stable and more bloated than older versions.

3) Newer, more secure versions of some freeware / shareware have fewer features than previous versions (eg dB PowerAmp doesn't have free mp3 re-encoding, but earlier versions do).

4) The only realistic way to keep patched is to allow all those automatic updaters freedom to do what they want (ie install Safari when you're not paying attention). It's too easy to forget to untick the 'Install Yahoo toolbar' etc options on things like Java.

5) Legacy software sometimes needs legacy versions of plug-ins to run properly.

There's no easy way to address these and similar issues - companies like Adobe could be forced to ensure full backwards compatability with obsolete OSes, or made to continue patching up older editions of their software long after they've been replaced by new versions, but this would be impracticable. Plug-ins and OSes could have deadlines built in to turn the software off and so prevent it being insecure - but this would enrage many users.

My suggestion would be for the governments to licence software and require it to meet minimum security specs. Sure, no one can make 100% secure software, but I bet all the big software houses could afford to spend a lot more on ensuring security than they currently do. Medical drugs, food, toys, vehicles etc all have to meet specific safetly regulations - considering how many of us channel our personal details through our computers, shouldn't software with exposure to the web also be regulated. This wouldn't eliminate the problem, but should dramatically cut the need to update every month.

Windows internet share drops below 90 per cent

Credit Crunch

It would be interesting to see if petrol consumption market share has moved away from family cars and towards executive cars over recent months. In a recession, it's the people with a low amount of disposable income who will cut back first. Just as struggling working class families will try to reduce petrol use where middle-class families will not have to, so owners of cheaper computers (ie Windows computers) will need to cut back on internet costs where wealthier Mac owners can afford to carry on as usual.

I predict that when the recession ends, there will be a splurge on low end PCs and a big increasing in surfing amongst the working class demographic, leading to a move back towards Windows based surfing in the stats.

Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers

VoIP freetards

Yeah, bloody spongers! I don't pay my ISP all that money just to let freeloading chatterboxes suck up my bandwidth. Hey, Skypers - you see that telephone shaped thing sitting on the table next to the sofa? It's a phone. Pick it up, use it, pay your own way and get off my interweb, you communication freetards!

And whilst I'm on the subject... will people learn to programme their cable / sattelite / VHS video recorders instead of hogging the internet by watching UK TV channels on their computers! Look, if you find it that difficult, give me your phone number and I'll talk you through it. Think of it this way - every programme you forget to record and watch over the internet instead costs society 50p in wasted bandwidth (or something like that, I'm just gessing really).

Gamers? That's fine - at least its using the technology to do something you can't do any other way.

UK.gov says extreme porn isn't illegal if you delete it...

Let them read Playboy

The key point here is that there has been absolutely no sign of a public debate. The proles are clearly too stupid to understand and the bourgeois obviously should know better. That there may be a genuine psycological discussion to be had over the effects of watching 'extreme porn' is neither here nor there. Also, it seems the question of whether or not there could be a wider libertarian justification for tolerating some of the images being labelled extreme porn, (or tolerating strong cannabis, militant religion, prostitution or Treasury leaks for that matter) is a question that we're not supposed to ask.

The rank hypocracy is another problem here (but this is not a suprise from Brown). In the context of a society where glamour model is listed as many girls' top choice for ideal job, one wonders if Brown is going after the right target. Surely women would benifit more from stopping supermarkets displaying pictures of semi-naked women with giant fake breasts and photoshopped waists and thighs on the front covers of Nuts and Zoo? Some proper sex education in schools and the government actively talking about the now ubiquitous objectification of women throughout the whole of society (which is worse now than it was before feminism was invented) may help even more. Or is this more about controlling the behaviour of those who enjoy anything that runs against Brown's private Christian moral sensibilities?

Apparently the term 'New Labour' is no longer applicable; I've read that it's 'Zanu Labour' now.

RISC daddy conjures Moore's Lawless parallel universe

No sh!t, Sherlock.

I've been writing this stuff in posts on this and other sites for a couple of years now. The key is economics - as the computing market has matured, the advantage gained by investing in faster CPUs has considerably diminished. Beyond the technological limit of the current CPU structure of semiconductor transistor switches, there is the limit of consumer demand.

The biggest growth sector in the computer world has been the laptop, and that means efficiency and lower temperature are the areas to invest in. Do you want a 3.6Ghz quad core processor in your Eee PC? Nope. Also, the biggest established sector of PCs is the computer as business / home workstation. How much processing power do you need run a few office apps at work or surfing for pr0n at home? 2.6GHz Intel dual core processor is more than enough. If you want a faster general use computer, buy a solid state hard drive and a Gbit network setup, because booting up your PC, accessing data and moving it around networks are by far the slowest parts of modern computing

So it is that my prediction of a couple of years ago has come to pass - the demand for top end CPUs has collapsed. Parallel computing is obviously the future as far as Intel and AMD are concerned... but the demand will be in specialist computers such as gaming PCs and consoles, number crunchers and system modelling machines in academic research and in servers that have to deal with big databases and the like. For the majority of the market, the most value for money research will be in reduced power consumption.

What this means for the industry is hard to predict, but we could draw comparison with car engines. For the first part of its development improving the power output of the engine was a significant part of advancement in car technology. Providing greater horespower was more important than most other factors... until we all got engines that were about as powerful as we needed. Since the 90s, most R&D on petrol engines has been on greater reliability, fuel efficiency and tune-ability. Most research has gone into getting the more efficient deisel engine (equivalent of laptop CPU) to be more like a petrol engine in its performance. The basic acceleration of the typical car has not significantly improved - what has changed is that car types once low on acceleration have caught up with the faux-sporty saloon cars at the top end of the mainstream family car sector. Have car companies stopped investing in car R&D? Quite the opposite, and as car engines became less important, other factors like safety, aerodynamics, in car entertainment etc have more than compensated. There will always be investment in CPU research, but it will no longer be targeted at the mainstream PC and instead what we get in our home computers will be a side-effect of what is developed for other uses.

So will processor researchers lose their jobs? Well, that comes down to the growth of the technology outside of the stand-alone computer. Parallel computing offers significant advances, but will they be ones that society wants? If on-line applications take off, then I'd say 'yes'. If they don't, I'd say 'no'. After all, current engine technology would allow me to put a 1000 horespower in my car, but the 1000 horsepower car engine will never become standard, even if cars are still being used in a thousand years time, simply because there is no use for all that power. Parallel processors have to demonstrate that they offer the consumer something they need.

US intelligence predicts EU 'hobbled giant' by 2025

Disinformation

The single greatest threat to the US's hold on global power has to be the EU. The US, Japan and China are all intrinsically limited by their deeply nationalistic cultural baggage - the US and Japan cannot get any bigger than they are now, and China will also find its economic limit in a few decades. The EU, though, faces no geographical limits, there is no real practical reason why the single market idea cannot expand to include first Turkey, then Russia, Pakistan, India, the North of Africa travelling downwards and eventually even to the East and Israel, Iraq and any of the other Middle-East nations that have become democratic. It is possible to imagine, a few hundred years down the line, a pan-continental single currency uniting war-torn regions of the world, lifting a billion people out of poverty and creating a diverse but co-operating multinational state containing a third of the world's population. If the European nations can learn to live together, then anyone can.

Eventually, the US will need to either start its own single market covering the Americas, or become a member of the European one. The long term choice for America is to either surrender its independence or surrender its global influence. The Credit Crunch has highlighted the fact that it is impossible to be independent in the global economy, and the EU single market concept has so many benefits over the current patchwork quilt version of the global economy that it would be foolish not to either join it or emulate it.

Vintage IBM tape drive in Apollo moon dust rescue

Domesday content provider

F*ck me - just found my entry in the Domesday 1986 book. Apparently, when I was aged 11 my favourite TV shows were Dungeons and Dragons and Street Hawk. I hated Sunday TV because of all that Religious and Political TV programming.

Also, there's a peice on the playground game of 'Foxey' written by the girl I had my very first crush on!

Twenty-odd years of typing user generated content later and I'm not sure my stuff is any better written... but that's Web 2.0 for you!

Webcast quango: One-third of UK teachers are creationists

Who votes wins

But how many were Biologists? "Teacher" doesn't mean "polymath" or "intellectual", and there's no reason to expect a History or Technology teacher to know any more about evolutionary theory than any random punter off the street.

Also, I worry about the methodology of this study. "Self-selecting" equates to "meaningless sample group" - those who are strongly motivated to have Creationism taught in schools are much more likely than any other type of person to take part in this study. Most Creationists are in religious organisations that are likely to treat this kind of survey as a means of promoting their particular viewpoint.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly what happened here; by ambushing the vote a handful of well organised Creationists could easily skew the results.

Is the internet going down down under?

That is the sound of inevitability

There is no way that this is NOT going to happen if Brown wins the next election for New Labour. So far since the new PM came in we've seen a more authoritarian attitude to "suspected" terrorists, to P2P file sharers, to those who use recreational drugs, those who look at extreme pron, those who work in the sex industry and those who work in strip clubs.

Brown beleives that he has a right to tell people what they can and can't do, and a General Election victory will give him what he beleives is a mandate to do whatever he feels like doing in the name of the "common good". His view is the only view that matters.

French Senate passes bill to disconnect filesharers

FCUK the citizens

The pendulum swings back and forward between the liberal and the authoritarian. When society is controlled by the mob (eg the Communist revolution, Hitler directed mob rule or consumerism) authoritarianism rules, because most people are only happy if some evil bastard ruler is grinding his boot down on the faces of those who look funny or think differently or don't conform to a 'train on the rails' type aherence to social laws.

Now we see full swing into authoritarianism. In the 60s and 70s music was the realm of the poet and the protester, the freedom fighter and free lover, drugs experimenter and free thinker. Now it is the land of conformism where artists are criticised for having their own ideas and the non-conformists of the world are expected to toe the line and give up on any belief that maybe the governments and the corporations don't know best. Even brash young web journals like El Reg pander to the idea that anyone who thinks different is an idiot (the word "freetard" is the kind of newspeak b*llshit term Big Brother would be proud of).

The real reason that music piracy has become such a problem has nothing to do with freetard; it's actually because the establisment is looking for new ideas in all the wrong places. Get a bunch of conformist politicians, money obsessed music insiders and journalist hacks together and you have the creative problem solving ability of a bunch of monkeys locked in a small shed. The same answer comes up time and time again: protect the existing system by whatever means necessary.

If you want my opinion, the best way of solving this problem is to do for all music what Radiohead did - offer medium quality downloads of all music on a pay-what-you want pricing strucure, then offer a fixed-cost top-quality download. The governments should then set up a universal P2P site that everyone can upload their music to free of charge. This way, consumer will pay more for music they like and less for music that isn't so good (which the current consumer is unable to do) and so the market will become more competitive. Musicians will be freed from the creativity-limiting dependence on big corporations and music communities will spring up to help spread news of new music, which will create a true driving force for innovation.

As Radiohead showed (and as basic economics predicts) people who want to pay £4 for a new album will pay £4 for it if they are given the chance. More money is spent if a sliding scale of pricing is available than if the choice is between paying either £8 plus for the album legally or £0 for it from illegal P2P. Create a much more free system and not only will costs be driven down, but the profit to the artists and the musicians will increase AND quality will go up. The amount of music made available at an affordable price to consumers will increase tenfold overnight without losing impoverished bands like Metallica a penny. Its a win-win-win situation, and the only losers from this more competitive and more creative new system will be those who put the least creativity into the current system, ie the big music executives.

The problem is that the only people who can stop this happening are also those who have nothing to gain from this new system, and the people in charge of coming up with alternative ideas are exactly the same type of people who allowed our current big industry disaster of the credit crunch to happen. So, we'll be left with an inferior and costly re-hash of the old system that fails to take advantage of the new technology and makes lots of people into criminals.

New Scientist goes innumerate in 'save the planet' special

If its broke, fix it

There are a growing number of scientists working in fields relating to complex systems who view the field of economics as being ripe for the picking. In the two centuries since Adam Smith's inspirational works set the scientific community ablaze with innovation (Darwinian evolution came about as a direct result of Smith's new thinking) not that much has changed in the introspective and narrowly mathematical field of economics, and intelligent empiricists are now looking to make a name for themselves in an arena they see as backward and underdeveloped

Kool-aid drinkers like Worstall may not believe they are fighting a rear-guard action, but this is exactly what they are doing. Science has got some shiny new tools (Emergence being a conceptual one and the supercomputer simulator being a physical one) that economics has pretty much completely ignored. If this was a war, its a war between a bow-and-arrow wielding tribe who win battles because they are experts in thier local geography coming up against a battleship bristling with cannons, machine guns and missile launchers. The battleship may get lost and comically run aground occasionally at first, but I know which side I'd rather be on.

Taking on economics illiterate science journalists may feel edifying, but this is just the first glimpse of a new science that will probably be called something like awful 'human interaction dynamics'.

Home Office coughs to Dutch DNA screw-up

Dopes!

Out there, right now, is an evil genius creating a Dutch super-criminal by combining the DNA codes on this disk. I hope Brown's house is the first to be targeted by his super bad guy "laser"! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

Civil servants' pro-Labour memo reignites child data controversy

What is the Matrix?

I don't know whether this morbid fear of death comes from inside the New Labour camp itself, or whether New Labour believes we are all living in permanent fear of our imminent demise (following Hitler's belief that "Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death".) but either way I'm getting sick of the 'this will save lives' argument for taking away our freedoms.

What Labour don't seem to understand is that taken to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning tells us that the only acceptable way of living is be to be strapped into a life support mechanism and live our lives out entirely in government controlled virtual reality.

Being a real person who is part of a real society entails living with risk – be it the risk of a dangerous driver, a religious nutter with a bomb or abusive parents. Yes, we have to try to stop these bad things happening, but not to the point that the lives of the British people become those of soulless automata.

Is Amazon censoring anti-DRM reviews?

Economics

There are three on-line retailers who sell similar goods at similar prices. A new game comes out, and consumers take a look at the on-line reviews. Site 1 has no reviews at all, so you take a mental note of the price and go looking elswhere. Site 2 has reviews, but most are negative - put off by this, you decide to leave buying the game. Next day, you are browsing site 3 and notice that all their reviews of that game are pretty positive. You give in to temptation and buy the game there and then, having already forgotten that site 1 was actually cheaper.

The moral for the seller: having no ratings is bad as consumers will go to a site with reviews unless they already know they really want the game. However, having bad ratings is even worse because not only does it put people off buying something from you they actually want, it also means you're less likely to be a site where people buy stuff from you on a whim. The only review system that makes economic sense to the seller is one that keeps scores as artificially high as possible without loosing the credibility of the review system. As there is no legal requirement to have unfiltered reviews, there is a clear benifit to bias reviews when the conditions are right. Even in this specific case, the number of sales made through this 'accidental' biasing of reviews will probably hugely outweigh the people put off by the El Reg article.

Basically, never trust review scores for an item on a site that makes money from selling that item.

Europe gives temps same rights as permanent staff

Bad day for NuLab

One of the main reasons why NuLab loves private involvment in public services is that it cuts labour costs. This is because private sector companies can use temp employees with much greater freedom and so have lower overheads with regards to pensions etc. This ruling will push up costs for the private sector and will make part-privatisation and PFI contracts even poorer value for money than they already are.

So, this is actually yet another bad day for Labour - but as the cost increase won't filter through for a while, it will be the Tories who have to deal with the problem of having to pay more to maintain the same level of service. The next Tory treasurer is going to have to be a real miracle worker!

Top prosecutor warns against growing state power

War on freedom

Geoff Hoon also said: “the biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist”.

When my granddad fought in Africa during WW2 he wasn't doing it to stop a small group of religious nut-jobs blowing up a couple of buses. He did it to protect the British way of life... and it is with terrible irony that Brown, who claims to be such a fan of Britishness, is now doing a better job of destroying it than Hitler ever managed.

400,000 British lives were sacrificed to protect the liberty of the British nation during WW2. And now Hoon is proposing we give up that same liberty to 'protect' the lives of the tiniest fraction of that number. The worst thing is that there is no good reason to think this will even prevent acts of terrorism.

It will be election time soon - every vote against Labour is a vote for freedom.

Vista SP2 beta could land within next four weeks

It's all a matter of hardware

My last PC had crappy hardware and I had no end of trouble with 98 and quite a lot of trouble with XP. So, when it came time to buy a new PC I went for reliability: Asus mobo, 2GHz Intel Dual Core Processor, Crucial RAM & Samsung HDD. Vista runs sweet as a nut and stable as a rock. Takes 30 seconds from finishing POST to getting to the desktop, critical processes never crash and I haven't had to do a hard reboot since Vista SP1 came out.

It runs most things as quick as XP did on the same rig, and some things work quicker. Also, I don't seem to be suffering that XP drag I used to get where the OS gradually gets slower the longer it is since a fresh install. In fact, I'd say that my Virtual PC XP install on Vista is quicker than a XP install on a 2GHz single core PC.

The biggest difference I have made to Vista settings is to turn off windows fading in and out . It's amazing how much quicker Vista feels when all the windows snap in and out of view. Also, this is a fresh install with SP1. I remember that when XP SP2 was released the general recommendation from experienced techies was to do a clean install rather than upgrading an old install. I guess the same goes for Vista SP1.

Home Office mulls fighting hacking with corporate ASBOs

Habeas Corpse

Innocent until we think you're guilty. How much longer do we have to put up with New Labour's bollocks? C'mon people of Glenrothes - now's your chance to put this failing government out of our misery.

UK.gov says: Regulate the internet

Freedom vs anarchy

If a programme like 'You've been Framed' started to show videos without reviewing them first it wouldn't take long before unsuitable content was broadcast to millions of families. Then there would be a public outcry, questions would be rasied in Parliament and ITV heads would roll.

But for some reason the Internet doesn't seem to work this way. It should, of course - the arguments for stopping 10 year olds viewing hardcore pr0n are just as compelling for a PC screen as a TV screen. Do we accuse government of Nazi tendencies because the 9pm watershed exists? Or because you can't show simulated rape pr0n at ANY time of day or night on TV? Of course not.

It seems to me that the problem here isn't with the idea of regulating the internet per se, but is the fact that a) it will cost us money and b) we don't trust New Labour to do it. If YouTube need 2,600 employees to monitor its content, then that's what we have to pay for. We pay for our safety in the real world by employing hundreds of thousands of police officers, H&S regulators etc, so why not for the internet? And someone has to organise it!

I'm a liberal, and really dislike governments telling us what we can and can't do - but you don't have to be an anarchist to be pro individual freedoms. We have seen in the financial markets that the complete absence of regulation leads to chaos. The best solution is to have a genuinely objective, expert led cross-party look at internet censorship so that the rules are determined by reason rather than by party politics and personal moral agendas. I know that rationally determined policy making doesn't sound very New Labour, but someone needs to do something. A wholesale turning of a blind eye on the part of the IT community leaves many millions of vulnerable people around the world open to abuse.

US teen admits to 'Anonymous' DDoS attack on Scientology

A lesson to the Scientologists

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

I guess the Scientologists don't bother with this Christian principle. Personally, I think the US government lets Scientology get away with so much because its opponents are usually atheists, which the current US theocracy hates even more than Scientology. The whole 'vapourised alien souls inhabiting humans' thing is just a small step away from the Holy Ghost stuff in the Bible; give people a free reign to criticise Scientology and who knows what religion will be next!

Das überdatabase: Inside Wacky Jacqui's motherbrain

Joined up thought police

This is what New Labour thinks about humans:

1) Humans are robots that are programmed through interactions with society.

2) It is the duty of the State to make sure that citizens are given 'good' programming and protected from 'bad' programming.

Given these two beliefs, it's easy to reverse engineer Blair, Brown et al's policies on justice. How do we know what programming people have inside their heads? Monitor their on-line activity and keep track of who they interact with. How do we prevent people receiving 'bad programming'? Make sure easily impressionable people have no access to dangerous ideas / people.

Now, it seems quite likely that humans are deterministic entities that can be manipulated quite easily by the State. However, this does not give our leaders Carte Blanche to f*ck with our minds, and there are several important reasons for this. The first is that humans are not born with 'a clean slate' as is believed by Socialists and Neoconservatives. The genes we are born with mean that different behavioural manipulation tactics will have different effects on different people. Some humans are quite happy to live with the idea that 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear', but others are incapable of tolerating this principle at a genetic level, and no amount of reprogramming can change this.

Secondly, Governments are notoriously bad at understanding the principles behind human behaviour. Most MPs are not even science grads and so live in a theoretical rather than an empirical reality. They have no concept of double-blind trials and the like, so there's no point expecting them to be able to deal with the latest ideas on evolutionary psychology or neuroscience. Think of your IT illiterate boss boss trying to install Windows on his work PC and you're about right for the ability of our politicians setting policy that will effectively indoctrinate people into being universally good citizens.

Thirdly, 'human rights' legislation exist to protect citizens from the State. The complete lack of respect Labour has towards human rights shows how little perspective they have on their own activities. Other governments may have been fallible... but not this one! In the US, the Constitution serves as a reasonable means of protecting citizens from barmy political ideologies, but Brown and his cronies don't seem to understand the philosophical importance of this (despite Brown being a student of politics!).

Fourth, any government has a duty to be representative of ALL its citizens, not just the ones who vote for it. Blair and Brown are true believers in the idea that the popular vote gives them a mandate to do whatever they want. What they ignore is the fact that most British governments are elected by a minority of the electorate, and so it is pretty impossible for any British government to ever have a true universal mandate. Policies that strongly offend the political ideals of a significant proportion of the population are necessarily unrepresentative of the wishes of the population, and should only be pursued in times of crisis. Imposing ID cards when a large percentage of the British people are against them is effectively the action of a state under Martial Law.

Finally, and most importantly, the illusion of free will is immeasurably valuable to human society. It may be that free will is simply along for the ride whilst the subconscious does all the decision making, but the experience of having free will exists non-the-less. A government that explicitly treats humans as things to be manipulated threatens this illusion and so undermines the spiritual well-being of its people. Sometimes, doing the right thing is actually doing the wrong thing, and for many millions of British people, protecting the belief that we are in control of our own lives (irrespective of whether this belief is justified or not) is just as important as protecting children from paedophiles or buses full of commuters from terrorists.

It may be the case that life is short, nasty and brutal, that we have no free will, that many evil acts go undetected and unpunished, and that New Labour style justice may make the world a safer place. But it should always be remembered that both Hitler and Stalin believed they could create Utopian societies and look what happened to their people. The difference between monkeys and humans comes from our human values, not our ability to use tools or language. Sometimes protecting 'good' humans from 'bad' humans runs contrary to protecting humanity as a concept. This is why history has so many martyrs; for better or for worse, placing our freedom above our personal well-being is what makes human beings human.

Internet searches stimulate brain more than books

Hunting vs grazing

Reading is a largely passive activity, you pick up a book and the information is piped directly into your brain. Web searching is very different as rather than taking the information at face value, the expert data gatherer has learned that to track down the information they need, they must search for it from a variety of mixed quality sources and then interpret what they find to judge its usefulness.

This finding really shouldn't be a surprise. If we asked which would employ the most brain areas - reading Wayne Rooney's biography or going to your local library to make your own biography of Rooney - the answer would be clear. The inexperienced library user will probably just head to the biography section, but the experienced library user will include the newspaper microfiche, histories of Everton and Man United football clubs etc. Then they will have to compare all the sources to try and find what is true and what is false.

I'd say web searching probably mirrors human hunter gathering behaviour, perhaps specifically the type of data gathering techniques we employed when our day-to-day survival depended on knowing exactly what the other members of our social group were up to.

GooTube snubs McCain's call for DMCA favoritism

Political banckruptcy

McCain could have just asked for the videos to be put back up... but perhaps there is a reason why he didn't. Takedown notices don't just allow copyright holders to remove infringing material, they also serve the function of allowing innocent people have slanderous and factually incorrect material removed without having to go to court. The burden of evidence is thus placed on the poster, rather than the subject of the video.

In terms of political material, if McCain posts (questionable) statements about Obama then Obama can protect himself by having the videos removed if he doesn't like them. McCain can then go to court and prove the statements are true, in which case the videos will be put back up. Freedom of speach should be protected, but its also important to protect citizens against damaging lies. Perhaps the motivation behind McCain's letter is that he wanted to be able to post videos about Obama that he couldn't back up in court.

Blu-ray Disc a 'bag of hurt', says Jobs

Backup plan

Certainly the need for Blu-Ray as a backup medium is pretty much gone. Compare storage costs:

DVD-ROM - approx 5-10p per Gb

USB Hard Drive - approx 10-20p per Gb

BR-RAM - 25-50p per Gb

Obviously BR-ROM prices will drop significantly, but it has a long way to go to catch up with other storage methods (esp considering how quickly HD prices are dropping). If you want to save messing around with all those DVD-ROM disks, go for a 1Tb USB drive, if you want to stick with disks, you probably still want to be able to play the movies you've backed up on a DVD player, so the higher capacity of BR isn't a benifit.

BR is just an improvement on an existing technology, and the only people who want it are those who will notice the improvement. At the moment, this is basically just people with big 1080p TV sets. Both CD and DVD allowed the consumer to gain significant quality improvements whilst being able to use most of their existing AV equipment. All you needed was a DVD player to go wth your old TV, or a CD player to go with your old amplifier set-up. BR requires the buying of a whole new TV, so has a much higher entry cost than CD or DVD ever did.

The race is on between the spread of fibre broadband and big 1080p TVs to see whether BR or downloaded content dominates the market. As we all know broadband will get there sooner or later, the sensible consumer will probably just hold out and ignore BR.

CPS to consider private prosecution over stealth Phorm trials

Terrorists

The only way I can see this being against the interests of the British public is if terrorism is involved in some way. I doubt this will happen, though - using anti-terror legislation to derail a legal case that's not in the government's interest would be like declaring an innocent country a terrorist state in order to seize their assets.

Nah... a country prepared to go to war to protect the principles of democracy wouldn't do that to another democratic state! Sorry, bad comparison.

Mine's the one with the Bjork CD in the pocket.

MS: Xbox will not go Blu

Demographics

Microsoft's sales strategy recently has been to cut the price of the 360 - why would they suddenly start including new hardware that added a significant extra cost to the system? Sony never put a DVD drive in the PS1 even though it was still selling several years after DVD format became popular. The Wii doesn't even have the ability to play mpeg files, and its hardly been a slouch in the console wars!

I'd suggest MS will only put a Blu-Ray drive in the X-Box 3 if they need the disk capacity for their games. If they don't, then I think we'll see two X-Box 3 specs, one with Blu-Ray and one without.

'Overplayed' privacy concerns rile Symantec boss

Touting for government business

There is a reason why internet software company bosses don't decide internet privacy laws, and its the same reason why the police don't decide how long criminal sentences are, why the army can't decide what wars to take part in, and why employers don't decide what counts as a minimum wage. Basically, people in positions of power have a subconscious and inescapable bias towards philosophical beliefs that benefit themselves and their organisations.

When excessively authoritarian governments like the British New Labour one are looking for new ways to invade our privacy, what better way to tout your business than to announce to the world that you have no moral objections to snooping through citizen's private lives? Guys like this probably think their positions give them an extra insight into the moral philosophy of the relationship between the individual and the state... what they fail to realise is that the reason they are what they are is exactly the reason why they should keep their big fat f*cking mouths shut on matters that don't concern them.

Roll up for the freetard smackdown

It's the economy, stupid

Don't bother going, the argument is redundant and the future is already clear. Radiohead made more money and sold more albums from their 'freetard friendly' pay-what-you-like pricing structure than they could ever make thorugh the old fashioned pricing structure. This is what will soon become the norm.

You see, from an economics point of view the Radiohead model is actually quite attractive. At the moment, a music lover has two options; pay £10 for an album or download it for free off P2P. However, most albums are only worth, say, £5 to many people. The Radiohead model allows these people to buy the album for £5 if they are prepared to 'jump the hurdle' (economics term) of going to the effort of visiting the website and downloading lower than CD quality tracks. Those who are not prepared to put up with the lower quality files will still pay £10 or £15... which will include pretty much everyone who was going to buy the album anyway.

Basically, what Radiohead did was get the full whack from the well-off Radiohead fans, but also get a smaller price from many hundreds of thousands of tentative Radiohead fans who would otherwise either not have bough the album, or would have downloaded it for free. Radiohead kept the value of the traditional market, but also tapped the huge amount of money available from the supposedly non-paying 'freetard' market.

The whole 'freetard' myth has centered on the assumption that most people will take something for free if it is available for free. However, this doesn't reflect the reality of human nature - basic economics means that if you provide price sensitive people a moderately easy way of paying less, more people in total will buy your product. Rather than 'freetards' being freeloaders, most 'freetards' are just price-sensitive consumers who have, until now, been denied the option to pay what they want to pay.

Of course, there will always be people (genuine freetards) who do pay nothing for music they really like and can afford to pay for, but because the new system works better, economically speaking, the losses from genuine freeloaders will be lower than any possible variation of the current system.

Once we get over the idea that an album is equivalent to a physical item with a fixed price, we can free the music industry up to use a sales model that both generates more money AND enables more people to own music. Not only this, but because people can give less money to music they want but value less, it creates a clearer pressure on artists to improve their music. Also, it allows new artists to break into the industry because the potentiall cheapness of the music makes it easier to get word-of-mouth sales without having to pander to the big labels and rely on big adverising campaigns that take money out of the artists pockets.

Basically, its a win-win-win scenario - and as economics is so powerful it will win out in the end.

Apple scraps iPhone NDA

Jobs giveth... and Jobs taketh away

So Jobs decides that it's OK for people to talk about the way the iPhone works.

Then he decides to screw over music artists by threatening to deny iPod and iPhone users access to new music. Why? Because the US Government thinks artists should earn more money from downloands.

Way to go Apple, you monopolistic b*st*rds.

Now's a chance for the Apple fanboys to prove they actually have a will of their own - boycot iTunes!!!