Posts by Watashi 296 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008
"Dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time" apparently. If Palin is a Young Earth adherent, it's not her policy towards science education that we should worry about. It's her obvious stupidity.
Could the US end up with a president even more anti-intellectual than good ole' Dubya Bush?
Where's the EU when you need it? C'mon guys, help us out here!
Alternatively, BT customers could go the Amercian route and take a Class Action lawsuit. Even if this did go to the criminal court you'd only be looking at a slap on the wrist of a few hundred thousand quid anyway. Sueing BT in the civil law courts could be much more embarrasing and expensive for the sneaky buggers.
This is basically a sound box, and so works the same way the open body of a guitar or violin functions. The iPhone makes the device resonate and so makes sure the maximum amount of energy is turned from speaker/iPhone casing vibration into sound waves.
The problem is that this is driven by the iPhone speaker, and so will use (esp at high volume) much more battery power than is needed to produce the small voltages used as a signal by powered speakers. It will probably also lack in bass volume, and will never be that loud, so the iPhone volume will need to be at max most of the time. Considering how short the iPhone battery life is, you'll only want to use it with the iPhone plugged into the mains... in which case you might as well use mains powered speakers.
I'd say this is a neat stocking-filler for the hard-to-buy-for iPhone owner, or is a fun gadget for technology show-offs (which fits in with iPhone owner demographic quite nicely). As a practical way of listening to your music, I'd suggest this isn't worth the money.
The answer is to teach the Philosophy of Science - but this would open a huge can of worms. How many evangelical Christian or Islamic parents would be happy to have their children coming home and saying "sorry, mum, I don't believe in God\ Allah now because the limits of human perceptions and the subjective nature of our thoughts mean that objective knowledge is ultimately dependent upon empirical observation and testing, and as there is no empirical support for God's existence it is irrational for me to accept that he is a real entity".
Would the deeply Christian Gordon Brown tolerate science teachers training children to be agnostics and atheists? I went to a CofE school where 15 years ago loopy Christian parents forced the removal of Zodiac pendants from the school's summer fête because they were afraid that the symbols encouraged their kids to be Satanists. There are even quite a lot of scientists who are unable to take the principles of science they use on a daily basis and apply them to their own personal beliefs. Society isn't ready to give up its addiction to religion yet, so Creationism is a burden we're just going to have to bear for the foreseeable future.
I have often thought that we need a term comparable to "champagne socialist" that can be applied to scientists who strictly adhere to the principles of science where other people's ideas are concerned, but refuse to allow those principles interfere with any superstitious personal belief systems they may hold themselves. The aforementioned Rev Reiss is a fine example of this hypocrisy, which is probably why he's taken suck a hammering.
Considering the (lack of) diversity of output produced by the Kings Of Leon, one wonders how often they are awoken at 3am with original ideas. Once a year? Or is that being optimistic?
They've spent at least two albums rewriting the same song over and over again. I put more original thinking into a single week of work than they put into a whole album, yet they complain about lack of income.
Cheeky f*ck*rs.
I'd be quite happy to join a project that allows us to descriminate between what is fact and what is rubbish.... just so long as I'm not the one who has to explain to the gun-toting future VP of the US why all her favourite Creationist websites have been labelled 'this is all bollocks'.
"Look beyond the headlines, and questions begin to pile up."
Nice to see El Reg continuing the "scientists are all trying to pull the wool over our eyes" agenda.
Any good physics school teacher will gladly tell their A-Level pupils (if not for even younger pupils) about the failings of modern particle physics, QM and Relativity. If you study Physics at University you can't escape it. The fact that the Standard Model has serious problems is the least well kept secret in the whole of science - it's hardly the fault of the particle physicists that most people (inc. journalists) are idiotic buffoons with the scientific aptitude of a warm cup of tea.
Put it this way - this experiment will not reveal the mysteries of the universe, but if we want human colonies on far away worlds, then pinning down the Higgs Boson (if it even exists) is as necessary a step as that of Newton realising that gravity was a deterministic force acting between lumps of matter.
Who cares about 1Gbit? Why, exactly, do I need that much bandwidth (how much music or pr0n can one household listen too / watch)? That's 128Mb of data per second, or the equivalent of a DVD quality movie every minute or two people streaming Blu-Ray quality digital content at the same time with no buffering.
If the only result of this digital divide is that people out in the countryside have to rent Blu-Ray disks by post, then I'm not really that worried about it. And anyway, we still have the current digital divide to deal with, with half of homes still stuck with crappy dial-up. The difference between 56Kbit, 10Mbit and 1Gbit is like the difference between a bike, an SUV and a minibus. 1Gbit sounds great, but it doesn't actually offer much advantage over 10Mbit simply because that extra transport capacity is needed so infrequently.
Lets get everyone in the country onto 10Mbit bandwidth at FULL CAPACITY before we start worrying about taking the technology to its pointless extreme.
Google Chrome is the Web 2.0 version of AOL's own web browser. They hope to hive people off into an ever more Googlefied web user experience where you only use YouTube for video sharing, only ever use Google Chat, Google Mail etc etc. This creates a captive audience for Google's main money generating business; selling ads.
I have myself fallen prey of the 'Windows killer' potential software hype in the past - but having tried Linux a few times now, I just don't think Windows will dissapear. Like QWERTY or base ten for maths you'll find better ways of designing keyboards or doing sums, but its too late to change to them. Its all down to how you define success. If success for a keyboard means 'allows best possible typing speed and ease' then QWERTY is crap, but if you mean 'can be easily used by as many existing computer users as possible' then QWERTY is clearly miles ahead of anyone else. With Chrome there is very little (I'd say at the moment that there is nothing) Chrome does significantly better than current systems. I'd go as far to suggest that Chrome is like Vista for web browsers - the new stuff it offers isn't really worth the effort of changing for a majority of users.
For the world to change from M$, we need an 'extinction level event' to take place in the OS sector, eg, the banning of M$ from China, or the nationalisation of M$ by the US government. Alternatively, we need a major evolution in Macs (eg, they learn how to price their products competitively, or find a way for MacOS to be able to port any Windows software automatically) or we need a freshly engineered version of Linux (GM Linux) that is acutually easier to use, better looking and more versatile than Windows (but that would take billions in investment).
Until then, Windows is the T Rex of the OS world, and furry or feathered Macs, Linux boxes and web-based computing systems can't compete.
I get my TV, rent movies, conect to the internet and call people through Virgin. I get a discount by doing all these through one company, and its naive in the extreme to expect that the Virgin will not want to provide favourably priced music and movie downloads to Virgin customers as part of a complete package. Why would Virgin NOT offer discount packages for Virgin subscribers? It ties people in further than they already are.
I wouldn't be supprised if we see the growth of parallel internet that works in the same way as mobile phone networks. If a Virgin user uses Virgin web services and partner sites, the download rates will be quicker and the data won't get added to their daily download limits. Using non-Virgin sites will be slower and capped at a specific download volume. P2P will be banned, as will access to certain 'illegal' sites (ie 'extreme pr0n' and 'terrorist' sites), but a deal will be done with the government to support BBC TV (as it's a public service).
Then the EU will step in and things will get very messy, probably ending up with expensive anti-competition legal battles (a la Microsoft IE bundling), fines for the British government and an eventual humiliating political climb-down.
By this time the UK will have lost Scotland to independence, and anti-EU feeling will lead to the remains of Britain leaving the EU altogether (after all, England alone is not part of the EU) and becoming the 51st state of the US. As the US loves monopolies, those living down south will be burdened with all-powerfull ISPs for the forseeable future.
I don't 'browse', I target. I don't socialise, I research. I don't chat, I post.
What I want is as minimalist a browsing experience as possible, and anything that provides web designers with new and exciting ways to clutter up web pages with attention-seeking gimicks and toys is a bad thing in my book.
But that's just me. I remember Mosaic and the days when advertising banners were first introduced.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who treat the web like Blackpool pleasure beach, spending their time aimlessly wandering around looking for fun but pointless distractions to waste their time on. Google Chrome is another step in the development of the web as a form of general entertainment, rather than the earlier network of hobbyists it once was.
Bad for me, as I get caught up in the congestion, but who am I to tell people how to enjoy the internet? Mind you, it sounds like a great way to add time wasting fun into your boring workplace.
The problem with this futures system is that the seller has to say when they are going to buy/sell the goods in question well in advance of the date of sale. This may work fine for organisations who have an annual cycle and so can take out futures every year... but with housing the cycle is closer to a decade, and so the futures terms would be far too restrictive. Young, professional singles and couples, and divorced middle-aged people (who have largely created the boom in housing) would never sign up to futures because their lives are too unpedictable. What happens if the young couple gets pregnant, but can't sell their town flat for another three years? Or the divorcee wants to move in with her new spouse but can't because their stated sales dates on their respective current houses are two years apart?
Other home owners can sit on their houses for years at a time, and so would know they could ride out a storm when it comes. Why agree to sell your house in ten years when you know you won't need to move for twenty? Or commit to twenty when you know you may fancy a change in ten? The only people who actually lose out in a house prices slump are those who lose their jobs and have to sell up because they can't cover the mortgage. It's very unlikely that these people would have set their futures bet date years in advance to co-incide with being made unemployed.
Lets get this straight. The lack of movement in the house market is a temporary symptiom of a wider problem caused by lack of liquidity, high fuel costs and the natural economic cycle. There is no house price bubble in the UK, just a high level of disposable income coinciding with a big increase in the need for a commodity that is in short supply. The slow-down of housing market that the government is trying to turn around is a consequence, not a cause of, the economic problems we face. A futures market wouldn't fix these problems even if it could reduce the impact on home owners of a house price crash.
It is interesting to note that in Scotland house prices are still increasing.
In the inward-looking cultural ecosystem of Anglo-Saxon US and UK, we tend to forget that just because something isn't a fashionable name here doesn't mean it's not successful. Samsung is actually the world's biggest consumer electronics company. For comparison, some prices on Amazon:
Basic Air: 1.6Ghz, 60Gb HDD, 2Gb RAM - £1090
Basic Q45: 1.83Gz, 320Gb HDD, 3Gb RAM - £549
Top Air: 1.8Ghz, 80Gb HDD, 2Gb RAM - £1475
Top Q45: 2.4Ghz, 320Gb HDD, 3Gb RAM - £830
Is a slightly bigger screen, a slightly smaller size, a few hundred grammes and the Apple logo are worth £500? OK, so we have Vista instead of MacOS - but knowing the quality of Samung, the HDD is probably quicker, the processor's quicker and it has more RAM. I bet it's actually faster than the Air, and the hardware is probably more reliable.
Only a Mac fanboy would buy the Air over the Samsung.
Interesting article in New Scientist - apparently (so it is claimed) medium term patterns in global climate change depend on (currently poorly understood) cycles in ocean temperatures rather than CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. This effect has led to periods in the last couple of centuries where global atmospheric temperatures have temporarily stabilised, or even decreased. However, as soon as the cooling part of the oceanic cycle ended, global temperatures increased one again, broadly following the long term trend predicted by global warming theories.
This ocean cooling theory goes a long way to explaining how it was that despite a two century long period of CO2 addition to the atmosphere we briefly feared (up to the 70s) the onset of a mini-ice age. This was, it seems, an illusion created by a medium term fluctuation stamped onto a longer trend of warming. It looks like we can expect another period of oceanic cooling in the very near future, followed by another extended period of warming picking up roughly where we left off.
It would be rather naive to expect global temperature changes to always follow nice, smooth, predictable graph slopes. Rather than see this as the evidence the conspiracy theorists have been looking for, we should treat it as an opportunity to accelerate the development of renewables in the hope of stiffling the next global warming phase before it hits us.
Ye Gads - learning lessons, taking responsibility and being more transparent? Has Redmond been annexed by New Labour?! ?
How long after the launch of their next OS before we see pretty, middle-aged female spokespersons explaining how Windows 7 is only unpopular because M$ 'didn't win the argument', how they 'didn't explain clearly enough' how good the product is and how they are now 'listening', 'learning hard lessons' and 'having a public debate' with consumers.
It's now becoming a classic method of revisionist excuse making; our product is failing because people don't understand how good it is. Better to believe your own hype than face up to the fact that you're sh*t and the only reason everyone sticks with you is because your opponents are either arrogant, elitist ars*holes or amateurish fringe types with no clue about running a country... err running an operating system.
In 15th Century Spain, Tomas de Torquemada persecuted people who professed to be Christian (because Jews and Muslims were discriminated against) but who were actually Jewish or Muslim. The non-governmental Inquisition would keep an eye out for those who were acting in suspiciously non-Christian ways and then report them to the government for punishment.
It is a tragedy that British Universities, once held up as the standard-bearers of free thought and open-minded intellectualism, have lowered themselves to the role of police informants. So what if someone doesn't act like a normal British 'citizen'? So what if they don't think in the same way that Blair, Brown and all the other 'right minded' people think? If we cannot rely on our Universities to stand up to though-police authoritarianism, then our society really has sold out.
I nearly went to Nottingham to study a decade ago - now I'm glad I didn't.
Reading this has given me an idea - by creating special 'adverts' you could undermine the rational thinking of normal people by keying into subconcious fears and so bypass reasoning skills.
These 'adverts' could be deployed by electoral candidates in the run up to 'democratic' elections so as to bypass any intellectual or carefully considered preference any member of the electorate may have to voting for the other guy. Any political weakness, ideological unpleasentness or policy vacuum that may make you unelectable can be hidden beneath a false facade of attractiveness that subverts the electorate without them understanding why their voting intentions have changed.
Thus, a well planned campaign of adverts (esp. when supported by the popular press) can unjustly win you an election without having to go to all the effort of threatening people with guns.
It's a good job they didn't know about this stuff in the US for the last couple of elections - who knows who they would have ended up with as President!
Oh... hang on...
The EU Human Rights Act was designed to please a fairly wide range of political and philosophical ideaologies. Inspired by a genuine desire to create a free and fair society, the laws also had to be tolerated by different European cultures eg, French individualism, German pragmatism and British arsiness. The result is pretty good - the proof of its usefulness is that the New Labour keep falling foul of it.
The US Bill of Rights and the US Constitution were written by a mixture of independent intellectuals and visionary politicians hoping to avoid the worst elements of British Imperial opression, the injustices of European Monarchy and class based elitism, and religious bigotry and other forms of intolerance. Say what you will about the US, it would be much, much worse if it wasn't for the hard-line liberal attitude of the founding fathers.
The problem with Westminster politics is that it is short-termist, parochial and lacks genuinely outward looking, up-to-date intellectualism. It's also increasingly a monoculture, obsessed with a narrow field of late 20th Centurly political thought and has little philosophical variation between parties. A modern cross-party political consensus covers a smaller part of the philosophical spectrum than that covered by any one of the individual political parties of thirty years ago. A thought experiment - what would be the difference between a British Bill of Rights produced by the Tories or by New Labour or by the Lib Dems? Now, what about a Scottish Bill of Rights produced by the Scottish Government? What about one produced by Old Labour? Or one by the Victorians? Westminster is close to being a single party state - three flavours of one single set of core principles.
This is the Catch 22 situation - we desperately need a Bill of Rights to protect us against the current toxic mixture of suffocating state authoritarianism and regulation free, do-what-you-like business culture, but the people who write that Bill of Rights will be the self-same bunch of authoritarian politicians intent on controlling us but protecting the big businesses that we're trying to get away from.
Isn't spending on ads usually the first thing to be cut when a recession comes? So, those who make the biggest proportion of their income through advertising will be amongst the first casualties in time of global economic meltdown.
Google must be bricking it at the moment.
Hmmm, who causes the most harm? Some guy who wastes our time and money filling up our inboxes, or some moron who thinks its 'cool' or 'telling it how it is' or thinks he's being 'brave' by 'challenging' the wolly-minded liberal elite that runs the media (yes, the one that only exists in the mind of would-be Brownshirts) by celebrating some guy killing his little girl and his wife.
I'm all for the freedom of the press, so I wouldn't wish to see this guy stop writing. However, I think the level of hell reserved for spammers is probably much less painful than the one kept aside for journalist like this.
Tell me how many kids play areas have run out of funding because Mr Company Director is only paying 5% tax thanks to all his tax loop-holes and dodges?
No, that's not enough. Tell me how many Amercian kids are being made homeless today because the US government thinks that only normal 'citizens' need regulation? Free market capitalists are all very keen to point out their losses when WE cheat the system. Where's the payback? When do we get to take out our frustration on the cheats and idiots who have screwed up the global economy?
We're on the verge of what could be the worst global financial collapse in three quaters of a century - caused entirely by the behaviour of those at the top of the economy - and all we get is complaint after complaint from the big businesses about how we're cheating them out of money.
What would I want from an iPhone?
1) Good camera with flash.
2) Removable memory stick I can plug directly into my computer for faster data transfer.
3) Good music player.
4) Good phone quality.
The iPhone has number 3. (but not number 4. - I have received calls from iPhone and the sound quality from their end is poor, and I get better reception on my phone in some areas due to being able to choose from different service providers), but my Pay-as-You-Go phone I got for £70 does all four really well. Yeah, there is a lot you can do on an iPhone that I can't do on mine... only I don't want to do them.
Also, now that I've seen the iPhone close up I have to say that it looks so cheap! It's a style black hole - just a sheet of glass with a nasty black plastic back. By focusing on the touch screen, they've removed any features that give it a physical presence. Its like one of those modern family cars, just a lump of synthetic materials with loads of goodies on the inside, but entirely uninspiring on the outside. It looks minimalist for five minutes, but dull for the rest of it's lifespan. The really weird thing is just how unimpressed I am with its two main 'innovative' features - touch screens are not new, we've had them on supermarket self-service tills and photocopiers for a while now, and the motion / angle sensitivity? Well, once you've had a Wii it quickly becomes passe (MonkeyBall is available on the Wii - the iPhone version is probably ported from this).
It will be interesting to see what owners do when the contract runs out. Will they go for the iPhone 3.0? The fanboys will, and the business types will, but I'm not sure this item has long-term widespread appeal.
Beacuse we always thought the Swedish were the good guys... the country we Brits could look at and say "well, perhaps there is still hope for humanity".
If the Swedish government is so willing to scr*w over their citizens, then the rest of us non-Swedish people might as well just go right now and lie face-down on the ground with no trousers on and pull our arse-cheeks open in advance of the inevitable f*cking over of our rights to privacy.
The irony is, countries like the UK and Sweden use many of the principles enshrined in the Human Rights act as demonstration of why we're morally superior to nations with 'poor human rights records' like Russia and China.
Some rights are too important to leave up to idiot citizens to protect, and the right to internet privacy is one. Look at it this way: you're 18 years old and you live with your parents, then one day your dad gets a letter from BT explaining how all traffic through the BT broadband will now be monitored for advertising reasons.
However, you happen to be secretly born-again Christian / young Conservative / Mac fanboy / etc and really are not happy with giving your ISP the right to release your personal browsing habits to anyone, even if there is only the smallest risk that your personal secret will be somehow be revealed to other users of the broadband. You tell your dad that you don't want BT analysing the websites you visit and the forums you post to. 'Why?' asks your anti-Christian, New Labour voting Microsoft employee dad 'what have you got to hide?'.
This situation is absolutely unacceptable. No adult should be put in the position of having to surrender their right to privacy out of social obligation or family pressure, and that's exactly what Phorm will do. It doesn't matter if there is a blatant warning, or even an opt-out, because there will always be situations where individuals will have to choose between allowing their ISP to monitor their personal info against their wishes, or telling the person who pays the bill exactly why they don't want their privacy invaded. It's quite likely that some will only be able to protect their privacy by stopping using the internet altogether... and all this just to feather the beds of ISP company directors.
Once upon a time, our democratic system had five layers: PM; Cabinet Ministers; Parliament; Establishment; Electorate. For the Cabinet to get laws through they had to convince both the Parliament and the Establishment (ie Civil Service, Scientific Advisers, Foreign Office, Judges etc) that the new policies were a) workable and b) morally acceptable.
However, when Blair got elected he had a big majority of Labour MPs, many of whome were so greatful to be in power that they were effectively a rubber stamp for whatever policies were put to them by the Cabinet. One level of democracy is bypassed. Next, because the Cabinet was largely made up of devout New Labour believers it had very few dissenters against the PM's line. This reduced the layers of our system to three: PM; Establishment; Electorate.
In the years that followed Blair's first victorious election, Blair and his minions worked tirelessly to undermine the Establishment. Now we have a government that doesn't respect what anyone outside of Parliament thinks at all. Judges are lambasted whenever they say anything the PM doesn't like, the Civil Service has been beaten into blind obedience, military leaders are appointed on the basis of whether they are pro-government line, scientists are ignored whenever thier evidence isn't palatable. This gives us two layers of government: PM & Electorate.
This wasn't the end of the changes made to our system. Ater a while it was noticed that Blair & Brown's Big Ideas were not fixing all of society's problems. To come up with new ideas, New Labour turned to political Think Tanks (they'd alienated everyone else) to come up with new policies. The Think Tanks do the job of 'understanding' society and suggesting fixes, and then the PM decides whether he think's they'll work or not. Our democratic system had become: Think Tanks; PM; Electorate.
That was, until Blair left. Brown is so obviously out of his depth that he is incapable of moderating the loonie ideas being suggested to him by Think Tanks and the role of PM has become largely irrelevent. Brown is so afraid of losing the next election that he will agree to whatever ideas the Think Tanks suggest to him. Now government looks like this: Think Tank; Electorate.
Ten years ago we had a well respected system created over many hundreds of years to ensure a good set of balances and checks despite having no written constitution and only one elected House. Today, we have a system where a few groups of shadowy unknowns tap directly into the ignorance, fear and predjudices of the Electorate to create policies whose ultimate purpose is unmoderated by either our elected officials, the experts in the fields concerned or the principles and traditions upon which our sense of Britishness is based.
A modern liberal democratic system is supposed to do two things: 1) create a moderating buffer zone between the Electorate and government inner circles to prevent what is essentially mob rule from dominating policy making and 2) make sure that new policies are passed through a largely apolitical filtering system to stop extreme or unworkable ideas getting into the hands of the population. The break-down of this sytem was fundamental to the rise of many of history's worst governments, including Germany's National Socialist dictatorship and Zimbabwe's current despotic regime. What hapens to us will depend on how quickly we can get rid of New Labour, and whether our next government is up to the job of putting the peices of our system back together.
When my last car had a faulty starter motor (this is about five years ago), I left it parked outside the Chinese with the engine running. I was stopped by the police and told to go to the police station to show my documents, as apparently you're not allowed to leave a car parked this way. When I got there, the policeman on the counter expressed surprise, as I was 'not the sort of person' he expected to see. I was a little confused by this, because I was still labouring under the naive belief that the police didn't explicitly descriminate against different social groups.
It seems that this descrimination has now become a government policy for social regulation. New Labour wants to create two lists - one for 'good' people and one for 'bad' people. The 'good' people will be allowed to have nice jobs, the 'bad' ones will have to do the shitty jobs that the 'good' people don't want to do. Presumably, there will be so many 'bad' people that subcategories will be created - sex offenders, criminals as teenagers, credit defaulters etc. Your access to people in your job will depend on what anti-social activity you've committed.
The next step will be to make these lists available to everyone from call centres to credit companies. Mr Smith, who was caught possessing drugs as a teenager, will be allowed to work as the office cleaner, but not as a manager. Mrs Jones will be able to borrow enough for a new car, but only at the highest rate because she once stole a CD from a shop when she was clinically depressed. Some people won't even be allowed into shopping malls, and family members of known sex offenders won't be able to buy pictures of their kid's school play.
Basically, the government wants to control society by creating a caste system like the one the Indian government has been trying to get rid of for so long. The very bottom of the pile - paedophiles, gun and knife criminals etc will be barred from pretty much all activities that are classed as non-essential to survival. Then there will be a big group of several million people who have varying amounts of social restriction as a result of being pulled up for anti-social behaviour (not necessarily convicted), then there will be the rest of us who can sneer at those beneath us and congratulate ourselves on how great we are... right up until one of our children gets caught downloading a few mp3s illegally and finds she can't get into a good University despite being a Grade A pupil who spends her spare time doing charity work.
The long-term result will be a highly divided and constantly suspicious society where parents check the criminal records of their daughter's would-be husband and where many people are unable to get jobs simply because they would spoil potential employer's claim of 100% CBR checked staff. When you look at a road sweeper you won't be thinking 'he's uneducated', you'll be thinking 'he's a convicted criminal'. Then will come the slums, the sink schools, generational poverty, widespread racial discrimination... and then the riots and the social chaos and police with guns beating young black men to death because they were carrying a knife and came up as a false positive on their list of 'bad' people.
Brown wants us all to be proud of our Britishness. Well, he can f*ck right off, because I see nothing to be proud of.
It is easy to dismiss this proposal as only being intended to fight large scale piracy. However, piracy is to be dealt with through criminal proceedings, it is the other bits that can potentially be applied to us. The interesting bits come at the end, the first two under the heading of Civil enforcement:
- Authority to order ex parte searches and other preliminary measures.
- Damages adequate to compensate, including measures designed to overcome the problem of rights holders not being able to get sufficient compensation due to the difficulty in establishing the full extent of damage.
And the third bit comes under Internet:
- Legal regime, including safeguards for ISPs from liability, to encourage ISPs to co-operate with right holders in the removal of infringing material.
The first means that the criminal justice system will be able to grant warrants to the police to search your possessions solely for the purpose of finding copyright infringing materials. At the moment, the police need to demonstrate reasonable suspicion that you are engaged in criminal piracy to obtain such a warrant.
The second relates to the fact that at the moment the BMI can only sue you to cover the losses from what copyright it can PROVE you have infringed. If you have a collection of The Beatles' back catalogue on your PC, they can only sue you to reclaim the costs of what you should have paid for on CD. Here it suggests that compensation should be paid for a hypothetical amount of copies of those files that you have given other people through P2P. Essentially, the new laws would encourage governments to set minimum levels of 'compensation' for the act of file sharing in general rather than specific acts of file sharing. The BMI would only have to prove that you have used P2P to download a single mp3, and you would count as a file-sharer and so be subject to what is effectively a fine of several thousand pounds. The proposal is designed to criminalise file sharing without actually making file sharing a criminal offence.
The final point is the big one, because it demonstrates that ACTA is not just about large scale piracy, but about civilian file sharing too. At the moment, ISPs could be taken to court themselves for allowing people to file share via their internet service. This proposal protects ISPs from being sued, but only if they comply with the demands of the BMI, RIAA etc. And as we all know, piracy is not the big issue with internet copyright infringement; it's the behaviour of Average Joes they are targeting.
So, the papers are wrong about border searches of your mp3 player – but El Reg is wrong to suggest that individual infringers have nothing to worry about from ACTA.
OK, there are two types of surveys - the ones companies use to understand the market and the ones used to puff up thier new product. Can you guess which one Apple were paying their money for?
Surveys are extremely easy to manipulate; for example, an on-line survey will naturally include a much higher percentage of technophiles than a phone survey. A survey that sends out 10000 emails and counts only the first 1000 will get an even higher percentage of technophiles than would be found in the population.
If the survey was a pop-up window on iTunes website, and it offered the chance of winning an iPhone, then I'd suggest that the only people who would fill in the survey would be those who wanted an iPhone.
I want to see a link to a description of the way the survey group was selected before I believe this.
I don't even know where to begin with just how wrong this guy is.
There is a bit of an intellectual turf war going on at the moment - check Waterstones and you'll see a growing range of pop-science books written by researchers from the 'hard' sciences covering areas once considererd to be beyond the reach of straight-forward modelling techniques. These guys are applying their empirical based theories of physical systems to human based systems that were, until recently, the sole territory of social scientists, political scientists and economists. Its not surprising that the intellectually wooly inhabitants of web journalism land (very few real scientists in that community) are getting pissed off (there's plenty of this sort of knee-jerk anti-science thinking on El Reg too).
This 'we don't need science' thing is a response to that direct encroachment of physics and chemistry into the 'soft' sciences and the humanities. The Islamic community went through a similar thing back at the start of the last millenium when they decided that the information garnered from studying religious texts gave a better understanding of reality than philosophy. This was very handy for religious leaders and it cheered up no end the more religiously minded section of the populous who had got tired of being undermined by rational thinking and pesky logic.
The worrying thing is that the move away from science as a means of measuring the value of data is an easy way for politicians and policy makers to avoid having to demonstrate their dogmatically motivated beliefs are actually correct in any meaningful way. In a society ruled by the principle of 'believe what you want' it is also convenient for the population to be able to hold onto their predjudices without fear of being proved wrong by well-conducted double-blind testing of social policies.
...is having to deal with the problem of penalising heavy use of limited resources without creating a society that discriminates against the poor.
New Labour obviously doesn't care so much if poor people suffer more than rich people. But what are the alternatives? Rationing car use on a per person basis (eg everyone can go into London by car three times a week)? Or a sliding scale of charges based on income (eg millionaire Porshe owner should pay £1000 a day for driving in London)?
A lot of this may come down to cost rather than fairness. The UK style road congestion scheme and the tax bands for engine size scheme are easy to set, cheap to administer and bring in loads of tax. Other schemes like rationing car use are difficult to regulate and may end up costing money rather than making money.
When people accuse New labour of no longer represent the working man and woman, this is exactly the sort of thing they are talking about. It will be interesting to see what effect the Conservative Party's new 'touchy-feely' principles has on their policy making.
No sh*t Sherlock.
Brown is so blinded by his dogmatic Utopian belief in the universal cure-all ability of market forces that he didn't bother to check that the West was investing enough money in food production research. Turns out that it wasn't. This isn't about temporary market shortages or the growth of China and India, it's about the lack of forward planning by Western governments. And many, many people will die as a result.
The 'that's just the way the economy works' fatalism isn't good enough. We give people like Brown so much power because we expect them to spot these things coming. If he'd spent less time thinking up interesting ways to have Blair killed, perhaps he'd have done something useful with all that economic growth he likes to claim credit for.
BT is getting all this money because it is the government's new pal, just like Virgin. Notice a pattern here? Government watchdog challanges Sky's ownership of ITV, and soon after, Virgin Media rolls over on P2P. BT promises to stop people using its ISP service to share copyright material and the Government turns a blind eye to Phorm and promises BT a load of cash to upgrade its infrastructure, so helping it maintain its near monopoly on ISDN broadband infrastructure (until the EU steps in, which won't be until after the next election).
This is classic New Labour stratergy; get the private sector to run the public services so that the government can a) avoid the blame when things going wrong (eg Railtrack) and b) hide the costs of buying infrastructure for public services. The tell is in the quote: "Richards said the debate on next generation access in the UK has been "slow to ignite" because the existing copper-based broadband market is so competitive." What this actually means is that companies have been avoiding investing in new infrastructure because they would have to pass the costs on to the consumer and so price themselves out of the market. If Brown had any sense he'd have seen this coming years ago and would have paid for the inevitable cost of upgrading the system directly, instead of holding us back in comparison with other nations, only for the consumer/taxpayer to have to pay the costs (plus private sector mark-up) anyway.
It is very easy to be a good Chancellor/PM cum economist when credit is easy to come by, when consumers have money burning holes in pockets and when the system is looking after itself. The tricky bit is dealing with the system when it breaks down, and Brown has been pretty hopless when it comes to intervening in any poorly performing market sector.
According to the Copyright, Designs and Patents acts1988:
A person commits an offence who: [...] distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright.
In other words, for file sharing to be a penal offence (ie with a statutory fine / prison sentence) it is necessary to share enough copies of a file to significantly dent the income of the IP. Now, if a file sharer doesn't seed a file, then they are only going to be part of a downloading swarm for as long as it takes to download the file. This means that the downloader is only going to upload the equivalent of a single game's worth of data. That's the same as making a copy of the game and giving it to your mate. Some may feel that file sharing is a 'crime' in the same way that stealing a CD is, or that it is equivalent to piracy - but in the eyes of the law that just isn't the case.
This is the weakness of the law as regards file sharing - the typical file sharer is committing a very large number of civil offences, (as opposed to a pirate, who is committing a penal offence), and so cannot be arrested by the police. A private court case taken on a single file being shared should not result in a fine of more than a few tens of pounds (unless you're seeding files) to compensate the two copies worth of copying that has taken place. The only direct way round this is to make the sharing of a single file a crime along the lines of selling drugs.
This is why ISPs and Torrent sites etc are a better target, as they can be said to be taking part in an activity that can 'prejudicially' affect the copyright holder due to many copies of a single file it distributes. A single file sharer loses an IP one or two sales of a game or piece of music - a Torrent site can lose him or her thousands of sales. That is, if a Torrent site can be held liable for the material it distributes.
This puts ISPs in a strange situation. As long as ISPs are unable to spy on your internet use, they are no more responsible for file sharing than the Royal Mail is responsible for me posting out copies of a CD. However, if ISPs are able to snoop on your internet use, they suddenly find themselves being potentially responsible for the illegal distribution of copyright materials and could end up in prison. Thus, companies who wish to use spyware technologies like Phorm will find themselves able to easily determine who is filesharing and so will have to co-operate with the government to clamp down on P2P. This is, coincidentally, exactly what is happening at BT.
There is a clear 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' thing going on here - the ISPs ban file sharing, the government allows ISPs to monitor our internet use without our permission. For them its a win-win situation.
I'm not sure we're familiar with that concept in the UK, could someone please explain?
Traditionally, laws like RIPA exist in state of legal uncertainty when they are created and first implemented. Only when RIPA is tested in the courts will its compatability with human rights legislation be determined.
What Liberty is saying is that if the spooks and the cops were allowed to snoop on British citizens illegally for so long, why should we think anything has changed now?
The EU needs to take a pro-active attitude with the laws of member states and test them in simulated law courts before they are allowed to come to the statute books. It may not be pretty, and it would be slow... but until we have a proper written constitution or a proper set of checks and balances, its better than nothing.
If we implanted explosive devices in the heads of all British people at birth that were set to go off when the individual had murderous thoughts, then we'd have prevented between 700 to 800 murders last year. Many more would have died as a result of the devices... but hey, they were guilty of being potential murderers, so they deserve what they get. Or is this, perhaps, a little extreme even for Brown?
The brutal and harsh truth is that by the year 2100 we'll all be dead whether we're murdered or not, and so will all of our loved ones. Most of us will have had unpleasant deaths, and many of us will have had very painfull deaths. Far more of us will have died early as a result of smoking, drinking, over-eating, driving or being depressed than through murder. Of course, no one wants to die before their time, and no society should tolerate murder... but there are limits, and allowing the fear of one very unlikely cause of early death to completely overshadow the enjoyment of life seriously degrades the experience of being alive for many people.
Gordon Brown is a coward on all the behalf of all of us. He fears things that many of us do not, and feels a obliged to overshadow all our lives with his own personal paranoias. Considering he has no democratic mandate, I think he's overstepping the bounds of acceptable governance and needs to be chucked out ASAP.
My vote is for an Autumn election this year.
With data transfer rates expanding and with web storage costs shrinking, the replacement for P2P is already in use and growing in popularity. Rapidshare and it's like will soon replace P2P, causing even greater traffic jams and will lead to the government allowing ISPs and the BPI snooping on your internet use.
In fifty years time we'll all be subscribing to some kind of flat-rate unlimited (or high volume) music use service. Why do we have to go through all this b*llsh*t to get from where we were ten years ago to the blindingly obvious outcome?
Basically, there are few real internet laws and those that do exist are applied in a patchy and unfair way, benifiting government and big business rather than the normal web citizen. AVG is doing what it is doing because a) the authorities are not doing enough to protect web users and so AVG have a market that shouldn't exist, and b) the authorities are not doing enough to control the activities of internet companies like AVG as there are no principles governing acceptable internet behaviour.
State-run, taxation funded policing exists for a very good reason - not only does it reduce crime, it reduces vigilante justice and helps (but doesn't ensure that) governments create a comprehensive and fairly applied set of laws. Until we have proper internet police, companies like AVG will carry on doing what they like because governments can simply turn a blind eye. If there are no explicit rules and if there is no explicit policing, the Gordon Browns of this world have no reason to be seen to be encouraging fair and just behaviour on the internet.
As anyone whose been involved in a Warhammer wargaming rules argument can attest, there is plenty of reason to believe that nerds are capable of blowing themselves (and anyone nearby) up to prove a point.
The difference between the typical terrorist and the typical Western citizen is that the terrorist actually cares about his or her (granted, rather perverse) moral and ethical priciples. Nerds are the exception in our society, as they are so obsessed about being right that they will dedicate their lives to following their personal cause. If only we could haness that nerdosity for the forces of good (like we did during WW2 ie RADAR, jet engine, Enigma machine), then we could fight fire with fire.
It is easily forgotten that both Stalin and Hitler achieved their totalitarian states with the support (often tacit, but also often active) of a large section of the population. This was achieved in both cases by persuading the population that social chaos can only be avoided by treating certain social, political, ethnic or religious groups as a dangerous threat the average 'hard working, right-minded' member of what is now called the 'silent majority'.
In the UK we are seeing exactly the same propaganda at work. Recent examples of this propaganda include treating Muslims as being prone to 'radicalisation', treating young, black people as all potentially part of an unstoppable 'gang culture', branding young white boys from poor backgrounds as drunken 'yobs', and now by claiming that porn addicts are sexual deviants only one step away from becoming paedophiles or rapists. Using 'protection of society' fear-mongering, the government gains the approval of the fearful and selfish majority of the population, and are therefore given free reign to start oppressing minorities right under the eyes of the very voters whose democratic instincts are supposed to prevent this happening.
Once we have reached this point there is not much to be achieved by any one person sticking their head above the parapet. Macarthyism showed that taking individual direct action against a fear-mongering propaganda machine gets you branded a traitor and ruins your life. Instead, it is necessary to form a social counter-movement that exploits the weaknesses of the authoritarian state - namely, that authoritarian leaders are usually irrational, anti-intellectual, and paranoid of showing any sign of weakness.
If we are to prevent a further slide towards NeoConservative socialism/fascism, then it’s up to intelligent and objective people to ignore the Statist fanboys and pick apart every single stupid rule New Labour introduces. This is happening widely now, and Brown's continued idiocy is currently pointed out on a daily basis (eg, discovering that many of Brown's soon to be closed 'failing' schools actually get good or even excellent ratings from school inspectors, or that Brown wants to lock people up for 42 days to protect us, yet lets his staff break basic rules of information security).
There is now a below-the-radar battle taking place in Britain; Brown has a large segment of 'the masses' on his side when it comes to many policy areas, but the liberals have a growing number of intellectuals (even former New Labour cronies like Lord Goldsmith) on their side. At the moment, the rational people are desperately waiting for Brown to get kicked out at the next election. If he doesn't, the shit is seriously going to hit the fan, and I think we'll start to see the kind of social chaos that Brown thinks he's helping avoid. It won't happen at the level of the typical 'protect society at all costs' electorate, but at the level of the social elite - that is, the civil service, the military elite, the Judiciary, the Eurocrats, academics and scientists, and Company directors. A PM needs their support just as much as he needs that of the voters... unless he truly is the next Hitler, in which case he will simply use a combination of 'loyalist' security forces and malevolent mob rule to overcome anyone who questions his authority.
Fortunately, the state of the economy is really scaring people, and that’s probably enough to over-ride the propaganda machine. Self-interest of the most basic kind (ie, food prices, housing shortage, fuel costs etc) will usually over-ride self-interest on a more abstract level. The next election will be the first true test of democracy this country has seen in a long time - if Brown loses, democracy wins.
Irony can be painful when you're on the receiving end. Back in the 80s I studied German, but thought to myself 'I don't really need to learn this... after all, English is the new Universal language'. Only here I am, stuck in the UK and wishing I could move to Germany.
Germany! My grandad fought in WW2, and was on one occasion literally only an inch from death when a bullet hit his helmet whilst fighting in Africa. A little lower and I wouldn't be here. What would he have said if he was here today and I told him I wanted to move to Germany because that country valued justice, freedom and liberty more than "Great" Britain?
The cliche goes that if we hadn't taken part in WW2, we'd all be speaking German. If only I'd paid attention in classes, then I WOULD be speaking German and could move away from this sh*t-hole country.
Brown is (as was Blair before him) a Statist and a true believer in the 'social contract' – that is, he believes that the act of being born into a country is enough to sign you up to giving tacit support for whatever rules the State sees fit to impose on you. This means that as long as a government is mandated (i.e. voted for by the public) it can do whatever it wants (e.g. go to war on the basis of a pack of lies) and the public is morally required to put up with it. You are a British citizen; therefore you are obliged to conform to the wishes of the British State.
Old-fashioned institutions that may oppose the wishes of the State, such as the Justice System or the House of Lords, are, in Brown's mind, anachronisms that should be bypassed wherever possible. After all, these bodies were not voted for, and so are not 'mandated' - they cannot understand what the people need, and provide an obstacle standing in the way of his ideal society. Because it was elected, Gordon Brown believes that New Labour is the literal embodiment of the State, and that he, being its ‘chosen’ leader, is the focus of that embodiment. In his own mind, Brown doesn't serve the law, he IS the law (Grud on a greenie!).
That BT broke the letter of the law is, therefore, irrelevant. Serving the State is a ‘get out of jail free’ card as far as Brown is concerned, and as long as he personally approves of their activities, he will allow them to continue - no matter what anyone else says. Religion, industry, human rights laws, science... all these things are good when working (as defined by Brown) FOR the State, but are bad when working AGAINST the State. Brown's position as PM is all the self-justification he needs for his righteousness, which means that our society’s moral compass is in the hands of a single puritanical, antisocial, control-freakish, paranoid idiot.
In other words, we're all phucked.
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