The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
The U.S. Navy staged its latest show of military force off the Iranian coastline on Wednesday, sending two aircraft carriers and landing ships packed with 17,000 U.S. Marines and sailors to carry out unannounced exercises in the Persian Gulf.
My spidey-sense stupidity sense is tingling. This can't bode well. Surely they're not that stupid, are they?
Last time we saw our Hero, he's just voted in a National Wiretap Bill for the Internet that would force all ISPs to buy and install online wiretapping infrastructure to make it easier for Big Brother to look in on your online activitires.
We now resume the action with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his posse at the Justice department who will be getting even harder on copyright infringement, targeting repeat offenders. The new 'Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007' is headed for Congress promising to 'hit criminals in their wallets' hoping to ensure that any 'ill-gotten gains' are forfeited.
This will give even more powers to the RIAA to sue grannies and 3-year olds, as well as go after anybody with a “give us 3000$ and we'll make this go away” lawsuits.
The more I see how things are headed, the more I think about “Rainbows End”, a book by Vernor Vinge. It's not an easy ready, and it's not his best book, but damn if it doesn't hit the nail on the head on a few issues; most notably invasion of privacy and the government cracking down on “really important crime, like pirating music and movies”.
I love this quote from an AC on Slashdot:
“Bah, when copyright is infringed, corporations lose money, and when corporations lose money, the terrorists win! Why do you hate Freedom so much?”
Wonderful!
We went to the Greene King Brewery in Bury St-Edmunds last weekend. It's a nice little market town about 30 minutes from home. There's a big parc where an old Abbey used to stand and the brewery offers hour-long tours with tastings of about a dozen beers for only £8. We discovered a shop that specialized in game meats. We need to go back there.
More pics here: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/bury_greene_king_may_2007/
Next weekend: WINE!
Source: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,2078667,00.html
British Asians are role models, says Cameron
British asians provide a model for the rest of the country, David Cameron declares today, as he argues that many Asians cannot be blamed for failing to integrate.
In a powerful article in today's Observer, Cameron says that Britain's drug ridden cities are understandably alarming many Asians. 'The picture is seriously bleak: family breakdown, drugs, crime and incivility are part of the normal experience of modern Britain,' Cameron writes.
'Many British Asians see a society that hardly inspires them to integrate. Indeed, they see aspects of modern Britain which are a threat to the values they hold dear. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that it is mainstream Britain which needs to integrate more with the British Asian way of life, not the other way around.'
And this dude is the leader of the Tories??
Bus drivers have nicknamed a white cat Macavity after it has started using the No 331 several mornings a week. The feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsall to Wolverhampton bus at the same stop most mornings – he then jumps off at the next stop 400m down the road, near a fish and chip shop.
The cat was nicknamed Macavity after the mystery cat in T.S Elliot's poem. He gets on the bus in front of a row of 1950s semi-detached houses and jumps off at a row of shops down the road which include a fish and chip shop. Driver Bill Khunkhun, 49, who first saw the cat jumping from the bus in January, said: “It is really odd, the first time I saw the cat jumping off the bus with a group of passengers. I hadn't seen it get on which was a bit confusing.
“The next day I pulled up on Churchill Road to let a couple of passengers on. As soon as I opened the doors the cat ran towards the bus, jumped on and ran under one of the seats, I don't think any of the passengers noticed.
“Because I had seen it jump off the day before I carried on driving and sure enough when I stopped just down the road he jumped off – I don't know why he would catch the bus but he seems to like it. I told some of the other drivers on this route and they have seen him too.”
Since January, when the cat first caught the bus he has done it two or three times a week and always gets on and off at the same stops. Passenger, Paul Brennan, 19, who catches the 331 to work, said: “I first noticed the cat a few weeks ago. At first I thought it had been accompanied by its owner but after the first stop it became quite clear he was on his own.
“He sat at the front of the bus, waited patiently for the next stop and then got off. It was was quite strange at first but now it just seems normal. I suppose he is the perfect passenger really – he sits quietly, minds his own business and then gets off.”
Katy and I went to Leics last weekend to go wash the car and generally annoy her folks. On the way back, we caught a patch of rain; at the edge of which there were rainbows. I'd never seen before a rainbow where you could actually see both ends of the arc. My camera didn't have a wide enough lens to be able to capture it, but it was beautiful.
Oh, and if the pictures seem a bit blurry, they were taken while we were going about 70 on the M11 :)
More here: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/rainbows_may_2007/
Bill Cosby singing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is disturbing, btw.
I had a bit of a chat with one of the women who run the DiNA (one of the on-site cafes on campus). They go through about 15 boxes of teabags in a day. That's just them. Figure the same with Pebbles (the other cafe) and that means that there are roughly 3000 cups of tea sold every single day on campus. Now if you consider that there are maybe 1000 people on campus, that means an average of 3 cups of tea sold for everybody in a day.
This makes me smile for some reason.
There are a few things lawmakers have decided really ought to be handled with the “care and oversight” that only the government can provide: e.g., tax collection, radioactive materials, biohazards, guns, and CDs. CDs? No, I'm not talking about financial Certificates of Deposit, though that might make more sense. I'm talking about Compact Discs.
New “pawn shop” laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won't spend any time in jail, but you'll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints. Such is the state of affairs in Florida, which now has the dubious distinction of being so anal about the sale of used music CDs that record shops there are starting to get out of the business of dealing with used content because they don't want to pay a $10,000 bond for the “right” to treat their customers like criminals.
The legislation is supposed to stop the sale of counterfeit and/or stolen music CDs, despite the fact that there has been no proof that this is a particularly pressing problem for record shops in general. Yet John Mitchell, outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, told Billboard that this is part of “some sort of a new trend among states to support second-hand-goods legislation.” And he expects it to grow.
In Florida, Utah, and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, selling your used CDs to the local record joint will be more scrutinized than then getting a driver's license in those states. For retailers in Florida, for instance, there's a “waiting period” statue that prohibits them from selling used CDs that they've acquired until 30 days have passed. Furthermore, the Florida law disallows stores from providing anything but store credit for used CDs. It looks like college students will need to stick to blood plasma donations for beer money.
Why this trend, and why now? It's difficult to say, but to be sure, there is no love lost between retailers who sell used CDs and the music industry. The Federal Trade Commission has scrutinized the music industry for putting unfair pressures on retailers who sell used CDs, following a long battle between the music industry and retailers in the mid 90s. The music industry dislikes used CD sales because they don't get a cut of subsequent sales after the first. Now, via the specter of piracy, new legislation is cropping up that will make it even less desirable to sell second-hand goods. Can laws targeting used DVDs be far behind?
The music industry has never been a big fan of the Doctrine of First Sale, and the rise of digital music sales will only exacerbate the tension between consumers who believe that they “own” what they pay for, and the music industry. As more and more content-oriented goods transition to digital formats that are distributed free of physical formats, this issue is going to get tricky because it will be harder to spot the counterfeits from the authentic products, and consumers will still expect to exercise robust rights with the content that they've paid for with their hard-earned cash.
God Bless The Land Of The Free…
Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070507-record-shops-used-cds-ihre-papieren-bitte.html
A cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father will let you live forever if you pretend to eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that he put there a long time ago as punishment for all humanity because a rib-woman made from a dust-man was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magical tree.
I am so going to hell for finding this hilarious :)