I got Google Wave today and it appears to be quite powerful and useful, except that Google Wave has stopped loading for me for now.
As soon as I can get back on, I’ll play with it in more depth.
*Someone has suggested that my ISP, BT, may be to blame. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Dan Bull makes another open letter song, it’s entertaining and raises some very important points, a few that I touched upon earlier in the week. Don’t forget to sign the petition (Britons).
We live in an alleged democracy and one of the key elements of this wonderful political system is that we are innocent until proven guilty. However, it seems that the Internet isn’t subject to this fundamental democratic rule that we are all entitled to.
So it’s bad. £50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000).
But that’s just for starters. The real meat is in the story we broke yesterday: Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, would have to power to make up as manynew penalties and enforcement systems as he likes. And he says he’s planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of. And of course, Mandelson’s successor in the next government would also have this power.
That’s not just bad, that’s a political fist fuck to anyone who even gives a damn about the internet and anyone who wants to protect net neutrality.
Of course, file sharing shouldn’t be illegal, sharing illegal files specifically should be, but even if you remove that debate, being accused of doing something is not good enough in the ‘real world’; why would anyone with an ounce of sense believe it is good enough online?
What the government effectively appear to be doing, is simply giving one big blow-job to the entertainment industry. After all, capitalism triumphs over freedom.
I recommend you read the full Boing Boing article (see source below) and then sign the petition if you are a British resident.
If you are a smoker or live with a smoker then your Mac (or potentially, any Apple product) will be turned down for AppleCare maintenance. Essentially, it is like breaking a warranty, you will not receive support for your Mac.
People have taken this to the highest level, Steve Jobs, and failed to gain anything other than a confirmed ‘lol no’.
There will be those who obviously complain about this, but I actually understand it. Have you ever seen a computer (more specifically, the insides of a computer) that has been subjected to the daily routine of cancer sticks emitting poison into the air for a long period of time? It discolours everything, stains important parts and the insides develop a brown sticky resin that builds up on the internal components, which can make them fail.
If you take a hammer to your Mac, of your own free will with full knowledge of the consequences, you will be refused a new one under warranty or AppleCare for being inherently fucking stupid. Of course, no one complains about this because it is mind-numbingly obvious.
The principles, albeit extreme, are fundamentally the same. Smoking causes damage to your health and the products that may be surrounded by the smoke, it can even discolour the interior of your house. Everyone knows this, and whilst Apple can’t discriminate against your personal health choices, smoking near technology is sure to cause damage to it, and if you didn’t know that then you do now.
A funny (and often true) video of the design process.
In the New Year, Gordon Brown is going to apologise for an often overlooked part of British history, one of the few disgraceful atrocities against human rights of the 20th century, the crimes involving compulsory child migration.
Up until only forty years ago (1930′s – 1970′s), children were secretly sent to former British colonies. Parents didn’t know about it until it was too late and children were falsely told that their parents were dead and that they were going to live a more ‘abundant’ life in Australia (or Canada). They were then shipped off to live in orphanages or in-care in another country, where many of them were under educated, suffered physical & sexual abuse and made to work long days as labourers.
Gordon Brown is expected to apologise for the past governments failings and crimes against humanity, in the new year, after ongoing discussions and research with those affected. Australia is also due, on Monday, to apologise for the mistreatment and abuse that British migrants suffered.
(Source)
An online debate has been aroused on Twitter again, this time about a legal term called ‘strict liability’. I could paraphrase what has already been said, but I think the blog post on Constantly Furious describes it better.
There’s a term in law known as ‘Strict Liability’. This is official, formal legal shorthand for ‘You know what? Ireally don’t care why you were doing it, mate’.
Strict Liability applies to offences like speeding. So, if you’re caught breaking the speed limit, you can’t just claim that you didn’t know, or that you had to get home to see the end of X-Factor, or you were fleeing violent axe murderers. Speeding is speeding. You cannot exceed the limit for any reason…
…Mr Clarke found a discarded shotgun and – rather than blagging a bank, or shootin’ up some boyz in da ‘hood – decided that he should hand it in at the local police station.
After all, possession of an unlicensed firearm is an offence, innit?
Oh yes. It is. But, unfortunately for Paul, it’s a ‘Strict Liability’ offence. Remember them? No excuses.
So, when Mr Clarke arrived at the local nick – having had the courtesy to ‘phone ahead to announce his intention – was he offered a cup of tea and the thanks of several beaming Bobbies?
Was he fuck. He was promptly arrested, and thrown into a cell…
…So – and here comes the sit down and brace yourself bit – when Paul Clarke is sentenced, on December the 11th, he must be sent to prison for a minimum of five years. Five fucking years. Five years in prison, for doing what pretty much every last single fucking one of us would have done in the circumstances.
I’m not sure it is as black and white as that, but I thought it was worth spreading.
(Source)
Twitter implemented a more ‘advanced’ ReTweet feature into it’s website (originally a member-made phenomenon), but I have mixed feelings on the issue.
I can understand why they implemented it the way they did, it allows for proper attribution; the original author gets credited (which is the moral thing to do) and people who ReTweeted it get a mention somewhere too. It should also be noted that I’m not entirely sure that anything that gets ReTweeted will be bumped, which means if you miss it from one person, then you may miss it from all of them (I can’t test this due to nobody I know using it yet).
I wanted to find an example in my timeline, but the people I’m following seem to be protesting by using the old ‘manual’ style ReTweet (I will probably do so too, until my desktop client, Tweetie handles it’s ReTweet function in the new native way). Note: A lot of people still don’t have this feature yet.
In terms of authorship, it may stimulate originality, and from the authors point of view, being credited is a lot better than having it ReTweeted in a chain, eventually losing your credit. You may get more followers if people decide to ReTweet.
This is one of those things that we may actually adapt to, but it will be hard, we shall see. So far, I’ve seen it as unnecessary meddling.
Amongst Rupert “Still-Alive” Murdoch’s greedy, absent-minded and lunatic plans to charge people to view his poor quality biased drivel (aka ‘news’) on all of the websites he owns (The Sun, The Times, Wall Street Journal, Fox etc), he now also plans to block search indexing for his sites, to encourage people to pay for his news.
Needless to say, in the age of information, this is greedy, monopolistic, fuck-headed and probably wont work. He called Google a parasite and questioned the validity of ‘Fair Use’ (an ideology that keeps free websites such as Wikipedia going). He seems to want to defend news as intellectual property, but of course liberal media such as The Guardian won’t follow the trend.
I don’t need to point out the obvious, such as the irony in Rupert Murdoch calling Google a parasite.
Look on the bright side, now you wont have to avoid News Corp’s bile, Murdoch will have done that bit for you.
Now to leave you with some comments made on The Guardian article:
“Excluding yourself from the single largest source of web traffic? What could possibly go wrong with that plan?”
“So we are going to lose free access to the Sun, Fox News and The Times…well that is a tragedy for the ‘Fair and Balanced’ media.”
“It is a terrible idea. I hope he goes through with it.”
“We really need the top-level journalism that Murdoch provides. After all, they did such a great job speaking truth to power and questioning authority with the Iraq war.”
Sorry, MacBook Air, Dell has managed to make a thinner notebook.
Usually saying it is one of the more attractive PC-based computers out there isn’t a compliment, because that’s like saying Jocelyn Wildenstein is sexier than faecal matter, it’s technically true, but only by default.
But this is a relatively good design for Dell, it is actually attractive in the photos. But we all know they are simply going to slap all sorts of annoying stickers all over it that let you know the obvious; that it has an Intel processor and it has Windows installed and that it can’t make you bacon and eggs in the morning. If they don’t do that, then they may be on to a winner, as much of a winner as you can get with Windows.
