Record companies on the dole

The UK Government has just proposed [BBC] creating a special benefit for the increasingly desperate recording and film industries - and it's going to be funded by increasing what you pay for the Internet!

Here's how it works. All UK Internet Service Providers will have to police their networks (read, snoop on your internet traffic) for signs that someone, somewhere may be downloading music. If they find music files, they'll have to check who "owns" them. That's who owns the publishing rights, not who wrote it, or even who bought it. And if they think you're naughtily downloading some music that someone else owns (even if you've bought it yourself, and just want to listen to it on the move), they have to warn you, and then cut off your internet access.

This won't come free - so the cost will be passed on to you, the customer.

If it's not you copying the files -- say it's your kids, your neighbours accidentally or otherwise using your wireless network, or someone visiting your home -- then you may still be disconnected. And if your job depends on internet access, then you're stuffed!

Even if we're just talking about access to information, the consequences are disproportionate to the so-called crime. It's like banning someone from listening to the radio because they taped a song that was playing!

On the other hand, if there is someone you don't like, you could download a couple of Britney Spears' latest masterpieces through their wireless connection, and get them cut off. Or Cliff "50 year's royalties are not enough" Richards' music, and add public humiliation to the mix.

A few points leap to mind:

• The threat is hugely exaggerated - if these music executives think that everyone who copies a tune to see what it sounds like was going to buy it anyway, they are sadly deluded.
  
  
• If they think that exposing more people to their music is always bad for sales, they are misled. Before MP3s, student copying of cassettes (reduced quality versions of the originals, just like MP3s) was rampant, and music somehow refused to die, the sky did not fall down, and records were still sold.
  
  
• If they pretend that the most important threat is people downloading the odd tune informally, rather than industrial-scale piracy, they are lying.
  
  
• If they think that you and I should pay to keep their "intellectual property" safe, they are being just a little greedy and selfish. Shocking thought, I know!
  
  
• In fact, they probably think it's bad enough that they have to pay to get these new unfair laws passed, and are trying to work out how to get you to cover their lobbying expenses!
  
  
• If they are so worried about the interests of the poor starving artists, why are they still deducting huge amounts for breakages - of CDs, I mean to say (!!!!) before paying any of them their royalties?
  
  
• And maybe it's not piracy that's the problem. Could sales possibly be falling because of poor quality music, reduced catalogues, or increased competition from other media or even the Internet itself?

This initiative should be resisted, firmly.

It is disproportionate.

It demands too much snooping.

The wrong people are paying for it.

And it's unnecessary.

Just say no - and mention it to your MP, especially if you're in the part of the country where New Labour are brave enough to face the voters.

Did I say warmer?

Colombo is certainly warmer than Belfast. There are other differences as well. Yesterday I realised that driving lessons too are not the same - though given the traffic, that's not so surprising.

The appointed time was 1.30 so, naturally enough, when we arrived we were told that our instructor would not be there until 2pm. At least Maithrie was told (What do you think, Paul). We sat in the office, immersed in the sounds and smells of the street.
Unimpeded by door, wall or window, the sensations wafted (or blasted) from the road, across the rough ground in front, and straight into the room.

A minibus drew up across the road, and four of us stood up. "An interesting lesson this will be," I thought, as we weaved our way through the streaming traffic, towards the vehicle.

With seven of us wedged into the back, the minibus started slowly, unsteadily. For at least one of us the lesson had begun. As we weaved slowly through cars, buses and trishaws, parked, whizzing madly, or unexpectedly and randomly stopped, Maithrie and I realised we were heading right back where we had started from. Where we had caught that trishaw, rushing for our mythical deadline.

We meandered slowly onwards, yet backwards, the instructor gently nudging the wheel when the student's shaky course seemed desperately attracted to sudden death by bus or lorry, or to instant carnage for pedestrian, cow or passengers, or by a horrid fascination with the trenches that ran, hungry and inviting, along the roadside. Maithrie too had her turn in the fateful seat, reversing and threading ever closer to where we had started.

One hour later, and further than ever from our destination, we dismounted and ran for a bus. It stopped, half off the road, half in traffic, and we searched for a seat by a working wondow. It's good to breathe and watch as death and mayhem lurch slowly by!

When life gives you snow, make snowmen

At least that's what they were doing when I got home last night.

It's quite an impressive snowman, isn't it? Putting the head on must have been quite a job.

Now I think I'll go somewhere warm.

It's not normally like this

A slight change in the weather, and suddenly cars were moving slowly sideways at traffic lights, and sliding down hills. We're not used to this sort of thing.



Finally it looks Christmassy. Some of my neighbours were even building a huge snowman last night.

In God We Trust?

That's what it says on the US Dollar, anyway, and some Christian ministries have an awful lot of dollars. But does God have much to do with it? What, exactly, do these people do with the money they collect?

That's the question that US Senator Charles Grassley and the Senate Committee on Finance have been asking (PDF) of a number of very rich organisations in the USA. Ministries run by Benny Hin, Creflo Dollar (yes, really), Joyce Meyer and others have been asked to provide information on just what they have been doing with the funds donated to them, and how much they have been paying to fund the lifestyles of their leaders.

To be fair to Joyce Meyer, she has responded to the Senator's queries - but some of the others have said that the only way they'll say how much they are spending on themselves is if a court forces them to.

Ministry Watch have been asking similar questions for some time, but now it seems something is going to happen.

The tragedy is the lack of accountability that got us to this point, and the harm it will do to to the work of God.

On the other hand, if it makes people think twice before siphoning money from Gods work, that has to be A Good Thing ™. The 21st Century Christian fundraising industry seems to have forgotten about Ananias and Saphira. This may be a necessary reminder.

Farcebook!

According to a Facebook application that lets you compare your friends, I am... wait for it...

• Most punctual.
• Person who can drink the most.

No, really, It's official! The computer says yes!

More weaselly than Blair

Gordon Brown is turning out even more weaselly than Tony Blair.

After promising a referendum on the European Constitution, he's decided that the virtually identical European Treaty does not need a referendum after all.

And when it was being signed in Lisbon on Thursday, Gordon Brown arranged to turn up late, so he wouldn't need to be in the group photo. It might alarm the voters, or something. Then he nipped round the back and signed it anyway.

And why is the new treaty supposed to be different from the old proposed constitution?

• The constitution would have scrapped the previous treaties and started again. This treaty doesn't. Except that the provisions we end up with are almost identical in either case.
• The constitution would have included a "charter of fundamental rights" . The treaty doesn't include the text as such, but still makes it binding. Clever, eh?
• The constitution talked about the EU flag and anthem - the treaty doesn't. But since they are already there, it doesn't have to.
• The EU "foreign minister" has been renamed "High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy" - but he'll still have more or less the same power.
• The constitution would have removed many national vetoes. The treaty does as well. See - completely different!
• And there are a few opt outs, that will allow a second class EU to be established, containing the UK, and perhaps Ireland and Denmark, and the "first class" version, with the extra sovereignty the federalists demand. How long do you think it will take for the calls for the UK to be "good Europeans" and remove these "anomalies"?
• The BBC goes into more detail.

But we still don't need a referendum, according to Gordon Brown.

The federalists in the rest of the EU have realised the scepticism that exists in many countries, and are trying to avoid popular votes there.

Ireland has said they'll ask the people - but sure if the people get it wrong, they'll just ask them again, until they give the right answer.

Weasels!

Outlining a nightmare of an education system

I've just been reading the Education Minister's tedious and self-congratulatory statement on how she is going to truly transform our system into a world class system fit for the 21st century (download PDF).

One new policy is to abolish academic selection, and replace it with selection by parental income. Those who can afford houses near the good schools will get in. Those who can't, won't. Unless a tiny few of them win a special lottery that she's thinking of setting up.

I'm struggling to see how selection by wealth and postcode will improve social mobility and reduce division, or how a lottery for places will lead to a fairer society. Especially as the existing sectarian split will still remain, entire and unaffected.

But I was forgetting - she has another new policy. These income-based divisions won't be a problem, because henceforth every school will be good.

Unfortunately it's hard to tell how she's going to do that, because every few paragraphs she lapses into some other language. My linguistic abilities aren't enough to tell whether she's repeating in Serbo Croat what she just said, or saying the same thing first in Kiswahili, or adding some essential detail, perhaps in Irish, that somehow makes sense of the entire statement. I'm pretty sure it's not the last one though.

You'd think an Education Minister could remember what language she was supposed to be communicating in, and stick to it. It's hardly very inclusive to issue a report that only one religious community has been taught to read. Especially when she proclaims that equality is her watchword - Equality of access!

Her other big idea is to do selection at 14, instead of at 11 - but even this is hopelessly confused. She simply lists all possible permutations, and calls it a policy! Shift kids from half-way up one 11-19 age school to the middle of another one at age 14, or keep them where they are the whole time, or get them to take a few classes at a different school, or make every child in an area change schools at 14.

To those who say this will be disruptive, she says changes are needed due to falling rolls - so clearly these are the changes we need!

And to those who don't understand Irish, she says: Tosóidh muid anois ar an obair tábhachtach, whatever one of those is.

At least she gets one thing right: "My proposals... require further work!"

A good place to start would be where the real problem lies - in Belfast's ghetto primary schools from which 98% of students fail the current selection test, and in too many cases can barely read and write. By the time these kids get to secondary schools the damage has already been done!

(cartoons by xkcd.com)

What craziness is this?

It seems that an English teacher working in the Sudan was threatened with 40 lashes and a year's imprisonment for stirring up religious hatred.

What was her crime?

She had taken a vote among her mostly muslim 6-7 year old pupils on what to call a teddy bear. They ignored her suggestion and voted 20 to 3 to name it Mohammad, after one of the boys in the class.

Two months later a secretary in the school complains to the Education Ministry, and the teacher is arrested, and local Islamic clergy are baying for her blood. Before you know it, she is charged (Wednesday), and tried, convicted and sentenced (Thursday). She got 15 days, not one year and a flogging - but it's still absolutely daft!

I wrote it up for wikinews over here.

To be fair, the Muslim Council of Britain has roundly condemned this insanity:

This case should have required only simple common sense to resolve. It is unfortunate that the Sudanese authorities were found wanting in this most basic of qualities.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission was among Muslim groups to call for her immediate release, and some Sudanese bloggers are not impressed.

Picture by angelathesloth.
Not the real Muhammad.
I don't need a fatwah right now!

A tree has been planted on your behalf

OK, maybe a couple of trees:



Innocent, the nice smoothie people, are planting trees to help rural communities in India and Africa (see how here). There are even virtual images of two of them: one tree, and another tree.

If I keep drinking the smoothies, there may be more.

All your database are belong to, err.... no idea really!

Banking details of all families with kids in the UK, and details of their kids, have gone missing. Lost in the post, apparently. This is exactly why the government cannot be trusted with the enormous interlinked collection of data on its citizens that their ID Card scheme would require.

Mistakes happen in any system, especially if security is not considered at the outset. The bigger the collection of data, the more of a prize it makes for wrongdoers, and the more likely it is that someone, somewhere, will make just such an error. A national ID card scheme, bound as it is to grow and grow, as new and more cunning uses are invented for the data, and more and more people need to access it, is a disaster waiting to happen.

And best of all, it's completely unnecessary. Nobody has explained exactly how it solves any of the excuses being offered for its sorry existence - can't stop illegal immigration unless the police get the powers to make us show our papers on demand, can't prevent employment of illegal immigrants by unscrupulous employers who pay slave wages, can't stop terrorism (Seriously, how could it? The London tube bombers all had valid ID, for goodness sake).

At least it will make a few IT suppliers (who definitely won't have ties to government, right?) very rich indeed.

On a lighter note, it seems the missing CDs have turned up on ebay:

"Cash on collection ONLY please from Portsmouth PO8, since we wouldn't want these to get lost in the post!"

Romance, sarcasm, maths, and language

If you liked Douglas Hofstadter's books, you'll enjoy this!

I just found a rather unusual web cartoon site - check it out at xkcd.com. They even use a creative commons licence, so you can copy their stuff for personal use.

But they warn you: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).


Hello Maithrie!

If you were wondering why clear plastic bags make toothpaste safer...

Anyone who is puzzled by the peculiar EU rules on bringing "liquids" onto planes (you can, as long as they are in a resealable clear plastic bag, and they are in containers less than 100ml) will be pleased that sanity is dawning - in the European Parliament of all places.

They have asked the European Commission to repeal the ban, unless new facts emerge. They also, quite sensibly, ask for information about exactly what you can bring (the real rules, not the cartoons that every airport interprets differently), and the reasons why, to be given to passengers.

Of course the Commission have a record of ignoring the Parliament, so don't hold your breath waiting for the sanity to spread.

Credit to Bruce Schneier's October Crypto-Gram for spotting this.

Art 2 get

Last week I saw something new - door to door art salesmen. Young women actually, but never mind. They seem to roam the world, selling paintings. Some interesting pictures too.

I think it's these people!

(photo by numstead, creative commons licence)