When radio listeners tuned in to the BBC on Good Friday 1930 for the 6:30pm news bulletin, they were informed "There is no news today" and were instead treated to fifteen minutes of piano music.

I did have a link to a bbc.co.uk article on this "event" but they've changed things around since then. The only information I can find now is this transcript of the QI show where it's mentioned.

Sadly, it seems to work without magic sliding and stacking tiles. I located a few pics here [flickr.com]. There appear to be areas in the table that open or drop away to allow tiles to be dropped in, shuffled, then delivered back as a ready-made wall.

Whatever happened to the RFID-killing mini-EMP device someone was trying to fabricate from the innards of a disposable camera?

Try imagining a world in which character types and situations can be claimed exclusively by the authors who create them. It's doubtful even the Scotsman journalist would think that reasonable.

What this story demonstrates is just how ingrained the concept of intellectual property has become, even before IP had become a household phrase. It has generated this persistent idea that everything must be owned by someone, even something as vague as a plot concept.

The content industry want kids to be taught how to respect intellectual property. Perhaps, instead, they need to be taught how to respect fair use and how to work around these fictional barriers to creativity.

From the uniform it is clear that the retail security officer pictured above is employed, and presumably trained, by Northern Security Limited. You will find their contact details here should you wish to offer any helpful suggestions on the proper education of their personnel.

The Opera browser provides an option to disable GIF and SVG animations:

Tool->Prefereces...->Advanced->Content->Uncheck Enable GIF/SVG animation.

Java, JavaScript and plug-ins can be disabled at the same dialogue, though this will start to degrade the browsing experience if used globally. Fortunately Opera also provides these options for individual sites:

Tools->Quick preferences->Edit site preferences...->Content

One of the things I notice about a certain subset of DIYers is an extraordinary impatience with completing a job. Their frustration leads to some very unusual and extreme measures to complete a task quickly, almost always at the expense of completing it properly. If this story is true I'd expect that the husband simply did not want to take the time to go out and buy the necessary tools (or read the instructions on how to use them) and instead made what he may have thought was an inspired improvisation.

It is extremely saddening that the price of this improvisation, this moment of misguided inspiration, was a woman's life.

I have a vague recollection of reading a comic in which a time traveller takes the place of one of Hitler's aides, simply as an observer. Soon he discovers that some of the other people around the fuhrer are also time travellers. It is eventually revealed that even Hitler himself is a time traveller and that there are no people from that period there at all...

I think it may have been in 2000AD.

I used to work in photo processing and some of those single use cameras had to be smashed open to retrieve the film. More than once I picked up or pulled away the shattered parts only to receive a shock from the exposed points of the capacitor. I can't say that it actually hurts though. The sensation I recall is of a violent "buzzing" in the forearm which is surprising but not painful and would usually elicit the involuntary tossing of the component, swearing and much laughter.

Having said that I'm not convinced this is the wisest piece of invention. As a mistake it's funny, as a prank I could imagine it being considerably less so.

It's such simple reasoning that it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend why so many either fail to understand or refuse to accept it.

I'm reminded of the scene in the end of HHGTTG when the colonists decide that the currency of their new world will be leaves, and to prevent everybody becoming instant billionaires they have to start cutting down all the trees.

The restrictions here will only affect legitimate users of the churchyard. Those willing to misuse it can easily circumvent the access control measures.

There's something seriously wrong with the Double Viking video player. You'll find a watchable version on YouTube.

From item 7:

Smiths' LCD-3.2e is not a liquid crystal display; it’s a lightweight chemical agent detector. It can detect a wide array of chemical-warfare agents, including nerve, blister, blood and choking agents as well as toxic industrial chemicals. It weighs just more than a pound and is designed to be worn on the belt of a soldier or emergency responder. The LCD's exhibitor said it's difficult to sell the LCD because some of the substances it detects are classified. We hope he's joking.

Further proof that secrecy is weakness. How is anyone supposed to identify, let alone deal with a threat if the information on the nature of the threat is kept hidden? Concealing this information actually makes it more dangerous!

Workaround: Find someone whose name is Ed Stelmach, or something like it (Edwina Stelmach, Eric Daniel Stelmach, etc). Sell the domain to them, then buy it back. Presumably Mr Stelmach would like to have that much control over the domain so it stands to reason that anyone whose name naturally reduces to 'edstelmach' should also have that right.

Fix: Here in Ireland the local TLD is controlled to the extent that one can only register something significantly resembling a business name (with a registered business ID number) or one's own name (with suitable ID).

So how does one perform an SQL injection attack on the universe? I wonder what the table names are?

Perhaps a buffer overflow would work better. If we reproduce enough we might get someone written outside the population memory.

It looks like they survived.

More pictures here [linuxno.de] about halfway down ('_medium_DSCN7830.JPG'). I've had a quick random pick through them but I still can't figure out what the point was. Those wacky German gamers...

Looking at this I thought of something Sanjeev Bhaskar recalled about driving in India. He said that people have a habit of driving at night without headlights, either because they're broken or they don't want to "wear them out". He was driving one night with his cousin and had to stop when he saw a light approaching ahead. The problem was he didn't know if it was a scooter or a truck with a broken headlight. He described the dilemma to his cousin who added "...Or two scooters transporting a wardrobe."

Ah, here it is [YouTube]. About 5-6 minutes in. There are some other funny observations about Indian road safety. Worth watching.

Missing link to TechBlog post.

It does seem a pity the player isn't trapped in two dimensions and only able to aim up and down.

If I build a house and leave that house to my children, then they control that property. Just as they should control my intellectual property. It's only fair.

I realise this seems like a simple analogy but all it does is conflate communicated concepts with physical property. Is this house infinitely reproducible? Can it be transmitted around the world in a matter of seconds? Is it fair that your kids can prevent people from living in a copy of your infinitely reproducible house because they can't pay, despite the fact that it costs nothing to make a copy?

Personally, I don't think that's fair at all.

Here's the thing, Crash, for a while now capitalism and art have enjoyed a happy little dance together, making art and making money. In the age of analogue big business still enjoyed control of the means of production and so were able to make money from reproducing works of art and then paying the artists for those works in proportion to their popularity (one would reasonably hope). However, this system has proven incompatible with the digital age.

In this age any individual can reproduce a work of art endlessly and distribute it globally at virtually no cost. Since the monetary value of anything is inversely proportion to its availability, this means that the asking price for these digitally reproduced works is as close to zero as makes no odds. The only logical conclusion then is that this is no longer a valid method of doing business.

Big business does not see it that way. For years now they have been trying to recreate the limitations of the analogue age in this digital world, producing entirely artificial barriers to independent digital reproduction and distribution. They started with technological means, and have now moved on to legal means. Ten years ago it was laughably inept, today the fallout of these ham-fisted efforts are simply horrifying. To enjoy music and movies we are forced to buy deliberately faulty machines. We are told that these machines and the media they play don't really belong to us and that it is illegal for us to tamper with them. We live with the threat of ubiquitous surveillance, not from totalitarian governments who fear their own citizens but from commercial corporations who fear they own customers. We live in a world now in which matters between private individuals involving nothing more than the exchange of numbers are considered criminal offences.

So here are the choices: hundreds of thousands of artists losing their traditional mode of making money and forced find alternate means, or billions enslaved by corporations, their own culture stripped from them, carved up, digested, filtered, and fed back to them in measured doses, if they can afford it.

Take your pick.

Yes, there remain questions about how exactly artists can be reimbursed for their work. But you will note that it is not the businesses trapped in the existing model who are trying to answer these questions. Why? Because they know as surely as we do that any answer will exclude them from the equation (remember you and I now control the primary means of reproduction, you're sitting in front of the equipment right now, so we can do their job for them).

My personal favourite alternative is the Independent Democratic Blanket License, a model in which broadband users pay a flat license fee for the right to reproduce and redistribute works at will, and can reward particular artists through voluntary voting to shift the balance in the distribution of the resultant funds.

There are ways forward, and all of them are scary for artists. All there is to be observed is that some of these ways involve freedom, while others involve slavery. The choice is being made for us right now, and it's not freedom.

"How can artists make money?" Unless we stop asking this same question again and again, unless we start answering it, we are going to find ourselves trapped in a system that makes criminals of us all.

If escaping this future means the weakening or even destruction of copyright, then so be it.

Thanks Mr The Third, this will make us all feel so much safer.

BTW, how many CDs will that come on?

Ultimately, Amazon occupies the same position that the recording industry held in the 90s: committed to the concept of physicals in the face of impending digital. They are sitting there watching their business environment evolving rapidly and drastically and only making the slightest twitches in the direction of changing their methods.

Once true open source eReaders hit the market, and someone contributes plans for a Lego book scanner to Make, I fully expect this company to start raving about so-called pirates like an ergotic dog chewing on stones. They've felt secure for all these years behind their fortress walls of paper and plastic and are obviously unwilling entertain the concept of a world in which all that material is suddenly worthless.

And so we will see more DRM and more lobbying for laws against circumvention, against innovation and invention, more corporate Luddism. And all of it emerging from the vain and destructive delusion that they can somehow halt or even reverse technological and cultural progress, or at the very least can carry over a system of distribution into an environment for which it is no longer fit. Commercially the information they are selling now will soon be barely worth the electricity used to transmit it.

Using the device you are reading this with, and despite the content industries' best efforts, all that media is infinitely available, endlessly reproducible, and globally distributable, at virtually no cost.

There is no business in reproduction or distribution any more.

Sell now.

It is certainly not unreasonable to question the morality of 'hurting' an apparently animate object.

The only evidence any of us have that the living things around us are capable of feeling anything is that they react in the same we do when we feel something. You flinch when you feel pain and therefore it is reasonable to assume that when someone else flinches under the same conditions that they also feel pain. When we see someone suffering, and feel uncomfortable ourselves, it may be that we are projecting our sense of self, applying the condition of our own consciousness into the object that acts as we might.

If we take it that our understanding of "other" is based solely upon this comparison with our understanding of "self" then it is not unreasonable to see appearance as the definition of consciousness in others - a person is suffering if they appear to be suffering, an animal is suffering if it screams in pain or terror. Further, if we define our humanity as our ability and willingness to react to the suffering of others then our reaction to the simple "appearance" of suffering is merely evidence of this quality.

So what could it be that would excuse "hurting" this machine? Is it the knowledge that this is just a machine and its reactions to harm are therefore insignificant, or at least acceptable? Would this be the same "knowledge" that allows us to kill and consume the flesh of animals who are as apparently capable of suffering as we are? Is it, perhaps, the same "knowledge" that allows one human being to kill another for their own personal gain, for money or for pleasure?

Were we to see a group of people hurting an animal simply for the sake of witnessing its apparent suffering we would think them inhumane. This is despite the fact we have no evidence that the animal is capable of feeling pain other than its reactions to the stimulus. Were we to see the same group damaging a plant simply to witness it being damaged we may think it odd but not inhumane. We have no evidence available to our senses that the plant is capable of feeling pain, it does not react in any comparable way. Were the plant to scream and cower there can be little doubt we would feel differently.

How then should we react when a machine screams and cowers when apparently suffering? Is it acceptable because we known that an engineer can repair it, after all it's just metal and plastic? Is it acceptable to hurt someone because we know a surgeon can heal them, after all it's just meat and bone?

Mark, your reaction to the tortured machine is evidence of your humanity, nothing more or less.

But what then is evinced in this video by the individuals who "hurt" this machine simply to witness its apparent suffering?

I have little doubt that our future holds a reckoning in our relationships with machines. But perhaps it will not be the metallic conflagration dreamt of in Terminator or The Matrix but something far more subtle, something that we can only resist at the peril of our own humanity.

@#2 I loved The Great Egg Race, the predecessor of shows like Scrapheap Challenge and even Mythbusters.

The BBC at it's height: decades ahead of the curve.

So how is this Super Rubes going to be a reality show? I think I'm beginning to lose track of the identifying features of that genre, perhaps because it's becoming ingrained as the default mode for all TV.

Wonderful.

All they need now is an Operating System designed by a 7-year-old.

British ministers and parliamentarians should be afforded the same respect and dignity at USA airports that we would bestow upon our colleagues in the Senate and Congress.

So what about ordinary innocent UK and US citizens? Is it okay for them to be thrown into the gears of the terror-mill while those responsible for the mess bypass the whole thing?

A better man would have been more inclusive:

Innocent travellers should be afforded the same respect and dignity at USA airports that we would bestow upon our colleagues in the Senate and Congress.

Perhaps Banksy was right.

www.banksy.co.uk

When scanning by that picture my first thought was how unwise it was be to have in IED-themed pumpkin decoration for Halloween.