In a strangely horrifyingly horrendous (but non-suprising) move, the RIAA are now going after university and college students in the US, after issuing over 600 letters of settlement to persons across the states.
Sweetly, the RIAA have set up a website where the students who receive the letter can enter in a code and settle the case online, as if justice through the courts wasn’t even and option to them.
What made me so angry upon reading this website was that the RIAA had been quoted saying the following to the defendants:
… to help fund the fine of the copyright infringement of music, you can drop out of college of university …
Are they serious? Destroying young lives as well as old?
To quote their website…
The unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music is JUST AS ILLEGAL AS SHOPLIFTING A CD. Burning CD’s from peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA, Morpheus or Gnutella is against the law
So, if I walked right now into a music store in America and a CD, I wonder how much the RIAA would sue me; Almost worth trying…
Say if I stole an ice-cream from you. You would no longer have that tasty ice-cream. Whereas if I chose to ’steal’ an album over the internet the company who sell it still have it, the artist still owns the all the songs and Johnny Public can still sleep safe at night! Stealing involves physical objects. Music sharing is not stealing.
Shoplifting is a completely different crime, involving physical objects and material and not groups of ones and zeros. Filesharing is caring, not stealing.
Then Daily Mail writer James Delingpole can cater just for your needs!
Daily Mail is known for its pandering to a certain demographic and estimating that there are 6 billion immigrants living in England AT THIS VERY MOMENT IN TIME, and they are all out to steal YOUR job. Yes, you, the highly trained technician in a specialised job. But anyway, onto the article which gives away all its coming content in the title: “An A-Z guide to the PC madness blighting modern Britain”. That PC madness! I mean promoting tolerance and good nature towards each other, what fucking insanity!
Let us look at a few choice paragraphs:
While the Crown Prosecution Service can always be relied on to prosecute you if you use racist language, show signs of homophobia or defend yourself against burglars breaking into your home, it appears hugely reluctant to bring cases against genuine criminals.
Racism? Homophobia? Seriously injuring or killing other members of the human species? Forget that, go after the proper criminals! Blacks and Asians and those left-wing fucking hippies! I could imagine James frothing at the mouth in rage as sparks flew from his fingertips on the keyboard, I am actually very scared at this point to know what sort of fascist paradise James Delingpole would like this country to become. But this is just the tip of his insane, white, middle class only iceberg.
Let us move onto “D”, yes that’s right, Mr. Delingpole is going to take a pop at “Diversity”.
It’s also why, if you apply for any kind of state funding for your church hall, cricket pavilion or bowling clubhouse, you won’t get it – because the people who would benefit don’t press the correct ‘diversity’ buttons.
This had me laughing quite a bit because it seems Mr. Delingpole can’t help but fall into the same old bigot stereotype. Everything is a conspiracy against the white middle class. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought the British Empire was a good thing and would probably give me a good slap across the face for not saying “Great” in front of “Britain”. James doesn’t like all conspiracy theories though, oh no, only the ones that fall into his single minded hatred. For example… (more…)
I saw this post earlier, I don’t think it needs much explaining… enjoy.
A new idiot
This will be a short post, as I am currently in a Software engineering lecture, bored to death. I am able to contact the outside world through my pda, and Wi-Fi. Next I have COTS, which is even more pointless – an hour ‘practical’ of a lecture treating us as year sevens. Were doing… powerpoint this lecture. Oh what fun!
Maybe next week ill record my COTS lecture and post it up on here to prove how boring they are.
Dr. James Anderson (BSc, PhD, MBCS, CITP, CSci – if you like those things) lectured us in Reading Uni last year in our module, 'Computer Science Roadmap' about his new system of numbers called 'transreal numbers' which he claimed 'solved a 1200 year old math problem: dividing by zero', and would stop computers from crashing due to division-by-zero errors and therefore save everyone's lives, and cause peace on Earth. We all met this lecture with extreme scepticism as he showed us on his slides how his new computing system has 'super-Turing' and made all existing mathematical algebra theory bogus. Download Dr. Andersons’ presentation on Transreal numbers and the perspex machine. He began his lectures by dedicating the lecture to a naval vessel, which was stranded at sea because of a 'division-by-zero error crashed its entire network of computers, causing its engines to stop.'. Granted, I couldn't see the reactions of anyone there as he presented these slides… as I was late to his lecture, and subsequently didn't record it on my portable digital recorder. Oops. Well none of us are perfect I guess. When I did enter and begin listening, he was presenting his 'proof' of how year 10 students can all divide by zero. The stages are as follows.
- 0^0 = 0^(1-1)
- = 0^1 x 0^-1
- = (0/1)^1 x (0/1)^-1
- = 0/1 x 1/0
- = 0/0
- = Phi – nullity
What does that proof even prove? We already know everything up to line 5; Calling any number that has been divided by zero 'nullity' is not new. It has been an IEEE standard for 20 years, incorporated into floating point numbers, as the (confusingly named) number NaN – Not a Number. All the Doc has done is rename it. He then proceeded in telling us that large corporations were giving his company 10 million pounds (he repeated this a
humorous amount of times), to research and build a 'perspex machine' which would be able to compute not only a divide by zero, but also compute in four dimensional 'perspex space'. This great new computer he claimed would be able to travel back in time and tell itself instructions to do things when it finds idle time, therefore filling it up and always being 100% efficient with CPU time. He also said to us that '… once you create a perspex program, you virtually grab hold of it and mould it, shape it and create different programs to suit your function in perspex space'. To say, i was extremely cheesed off at this point to be wasting my time listening to his fairy tale of a time-travelling computer system. Maybe he'll get the movie rights! "Back to the Future Part IV: Tales of the Magical Wizard and his fantabulous perspex machine". I think… put it a different way… I hope that by now you too find this grinding your gears.
Just installed a legit version of Vista Business that we get free from the uni, and it has already crashed…
I’ll report in a about 5 days on how the new OS is performing, it’s major faults, minor annoyances and nicest features; But for now, I’m battling getting sound drivers to work on an HD 7.1 card.
The on-line Swedish torrent website, the Pirate Bay, have vowed to buy the prestigious country of Sealand,
about 3 nautical miles off the coast of Ipswich, England.
The island has a rich and interesting history, that I’m not going to go into, but basically ‘country’ is a tiny offshore island built in the second world war by the English. The family that live there were granted principality by the English courts some time ago, and now they are offering it for sale.
The pirate bay have taken great interest in this micronation, as it could hold the prospect of dodging lawyers and avoiding international intellectual property laws. Although no legal proceedings have been charged against The Pirate Bay, it is only a matter of time until the MPAA (Motion Picture Ass. of America) slaps them with a huge one.
Visit the Sealand for your holidays!
The most famous media war was between Betamax and VHS, where VHS won because as many believe, it allowed for longer recording times over VHS. This is not the complete truth. When the adult industry were deciding upon which format to record all their ‘films’ on, they decided VHS. Unsurprisingly, soon after VHS player sales shot up and the war ended.
An identical thing is currently happening with the war of Blu-ray vs. HD DVD. The adult industry has announced that it will be only using HD-DVD when it comes to high-def content. This should see an edge for HD-DVD in the war and end it, resulting in the PS3 becoming a humongous flop.
The new iPhone was made public at Macworld, with general acceptance and most of the tech critics loving it; I am impressed with the looks, but a little sceptical what going on inside. Something that will feature is nasty DRM software, and the inability to sync the iPhone up with anything other than iTunes… No thanks.
Generally though, on a tech level, the iPhone isn’t too bad, with WiFi a/b/g, touch-screen display, and a 2mp camera. Of course, there is an iPod function to the phone – but will you really want to use it, running the risk of running the battery out?
I think this phone, at least for the first generation, will be for rich-kids or Mac buffs (come on… you all know one), and it’ll be hard for the moment for Apple to enter the mainstream market in phones.
Another problem will come when the phone is released in the UK. Will the chavs of the UK really understand a touch-screen phone? Will they still think the screen will work when lovingly wrapped up in a Burberry pouch?
It’s hard for me to imagine the public embracing the iPhone, because smart-phones are still too niche for the average user.
