Parliament has risen for the summer, so it's officially the "Silly Season". Of course it's been the Silly Season in Northern Ireland politics for ages - the Assembly has been suspended since 2002, and they are only now talking about restarting it. What do you reckon the chances are of our politicians getting their acts together by the November deadline, and agreeing to form a government? Or will we be condemned to a Silly Season that never ends...?
I was trying to think what it reminded me of, and then I realised...
Tony Bush and George Blair on the current middle east crisis sound a bit like Father Ted and Father Dougal protesting outside the cinema in the episode The Passion Of St Tibulus...
Watching Portugal put England out of the World Cup, on penalties, after extra time.
This being Dublin, Portugal had lots of support.
Lots of sailing ships came to Belfast the other weekend, and there were hordes of people looking round the ships (free) and the market stalls (not so free). 
I was reading the label on some "daily shower cleaner" today. It says "to achieve best results, start with a clean shower".
Inconceivable :-)
Here's a slightly "cute" video about just how seriously your next TVs, video or radio is going to be messed up by new legal superpowers that the industry is trying to sneak right now! Power over your equipment.
You won't control your TV - they will.
The video is here!
I just received some spam from people calling themselves the "DOMAlN LlSTING CENTER". It described itself as a "final notice" and asked for $75 for what they called "ANNUAL WEBSlTE SEARCH ENGlNE SUBMISSlON".
They are evil spammers, using very dodgy business techniques. Have nothing to do with the folk at:
Domain Listing Center Inc.
8171 Yonge St. Suite# 149
Thornhill, ON L3T 2C6
Canada
I was shocked when I saw the following article on wikipedia:
Are they taking themselves too seriously? Is it just an American thing? Irony bypass? Too many lawyers?
Maybe it's a deliberately ironic jab at the modern need to provide labels and warnings with everything? We can only hope!
I added categories to this blogger blog a while ago (because they weren't there, and because I thought that some people might not want to read about computing - shocking, I know!). Then I thought I needed an easier way to edit the categories than fiddling with the blog's template, so I wrote a wee script to do all the fiddling.
Unfortunately it didn't seem to work - or so I thought - so I left it for a while. When I came to look at it again, lo and behold, it had been working all along. The template was indeed being updated with the new categories. I'd just forgotten that updating a template on its own was no good - The old pages would still be sitting there, serenely unaffected by any new but unused template. I needed to republish the blog as well. I felt a bit silly.
But it's working now - so I don't feel all that silly :-)
I think I feel a bout of creeping featuritis coming on. Wouldn't it be nice if it could also...
Yes, they even have their own website. But since they don't have any pictures of the wedding up there yet, here are a few to get things started!
Some of their friends, old and young (or maybe old and new), were there to see them off!
There were some ex-skiers, illustrating Olga's artistic talents (Olga can explain all - I'm not going to).
And some fellow barn-dwellers!
It was a great day, and a wonderful chance to catch up with old friends. Some danced far into the night - others just put their feet up, and talked far into the night :-)
It's been a busy weekend, and a busy week too! Off to England at the end of last week for a good friend's wedding. Caught up with lots of old friends, and generally had a great time - we especially enjoyed the dark satanic mills!
Then wandered around England a bit for work. Met some of our foreign colleagues, who seem to know what they are talking about (which is nice). And noticed that England seems to have developed far more speed cameras than I remembered. We may well be the most watched people ever.
I drove three cars in four days, and discovered that Saabs are mad, that cruise control is a real boon when you have to keep to 40 on a stretch of motorway, and that the AA website routefinder directions are not always as good as they might be (or that I can't read... but I don't think that was it). Maybe I should get myself one of those satellite navigation systems instead for my birthday? Fortunately it's not for a while yet, so I have plenty of time for sanity and my "how much would I really use it" instincts to reassert themselves.
So... are they any good, these SatNav thingies?
We are used to hearing that you are not allowed to copy music, films, books, or pictures. They are copyrighted. The owners' rights must be protected.
Fair enough... So what's copyright?
It's the right to control how works are reproduced, for a limited time.
It's about justice, and pragmatism: Justice, because it's only fair that the author of a work should be allowed a reasonable chance to profit from it; and pragmatism, because if it's profitable, then more useful or beneficial works are likely to be produced.
Yes, and No. You own the physical copy, but you have only a license to use the music or software or whatever. And that license is very limited.
No. There is something called fair dealing (in the UK) or fair use (in the US). It allows copies of part of a work to be made for study purposes, for example. Or parody. The rules vary. In the US you may be explicitly allowed to make a copy to listen to on your car hi-fi. In the UK, you may not be (we really could do with a formal statement of a sane and fair set of rights here).
Not very much - the basic principle is fair. Except that...
- In the UK the consumer's rights are very limited. This should be fixed!
- The copyright term keeps getting extended. In the USA it started as 17 years. It's been increased 11 times, most recently by 20 years. And it's never been decreased. That is pointless and bad:
- Pointless because an extra 20 years of revenue on works produced by dead people won't give them an incentive to be more artistic or creative or whatever - it's just a handout to copyright holders (rarely the original artists);
- Bad, because the public domain - the works we CAN use freely - becomes that much poorer, as all that content is suddenly snatched out of our hands.
- A cunning trick called DRM (digital restriction methods, or digital "rights" management) is being planned by content distributors - film & TV studios, record companies, etc - to control even more what you can do with your CDs, your DVDs, your TV and video even.
You know how you can record TV or even Radio programmes, to watch at your leisure? Or if you are studying them? Well, with new digital radio and high-definition TV, they want to be able to stop you. And your TV that you paid for will do the enforcing.
Never mind whether you have a legal right to make a recording - at the whim of the content company, they will be able to turn off your recorder, or delete the recording automatically after you've made it.
If you're still on holiday when your recording of Eastenders or Dr Who "expires", or if you're an historian who wants a record of what the Prime Minister actually told the country, too bad!- Greedy corporations - the people who called the video recorder the "Jack the Ripper" of entertainment, and tried to ban it - will decide what you can watch, and when you can watch it. "They" will own your TV & video, not you.
That can't be good for innovation, for cheap and competitive gadgets that help you control how you watch TV or listen to music. It will protect today's technology and today's businesses with the might of the criminal law (using our taxes to pay for it all), and it will stifle progress.- And best of all, even if you have a legal right to make a copy, it will be a criminal offence to try to get round any sneaky DRM that might stop you from making those legal copies. It already is in the USA. You could go to jail for something you're legally entitled to do.
