The Blog
06 May 2005 Scripting News: 5/6/2005
Dave has cancelled his subscription for Audible because the DRM is tied to both the iPod and PC he was using and both have now gone. This raises an issue I was aware of but I hadn't really considered properly. Let's say you use iTunes to buy and download lots of music for your iPod. All goes swimmingly for a year or so until your iPod dies, or is lost, or the dog ate it. Around that time Creative (or Archos or iRiver) introduce a new machine that is a must have alternative that blows the iPod out of the water. Just one catch, it doesn't play iTunes encrypted AAC. What are you going to do? Music is for life, not just for christmas. I've still got LPs, and even occasionally listen to them, that I bought more than 30 years ago. Can you be sure that whatever DRM scheme you buy into will still work in 30 years? The plain old CD and the MP3 might well still be around. But I can pretty much guarantee that iTMS encrypted AAC won't be. Just Say No To DRM. I Voted For You Because... - Tell them why you voted in the 2005 general election?
This is another nice little site from the MySociety people. It joins:- * WriteToThem.com — Send a message to your Councillor, MLAs, MSPs, MPs and MEPs free, across the internet * TheyWorkForYou.com — Want to know what your MP's been upto in Parliament - from debates to expenses, including elections and interests - all in one place in a nice readable fashion * PublicWhip.org.uk — Want to find out how your MP voted, or even keep tabs on a particular issue and how your MP votes on that? Well PublicWhip is the site for you. * NotApathetic.com — Want to see why other people didn't vote or went and spoiled their papers? NotApathetic has users' reasons and discussions * PledgeBank.com — Want to do something, but don't want to do it solo? Set up a pledge, print flyers, email friends and get doing things: together! These people are doing extraordinarily good work, pretty much for free. I don't know of any other country anywhere in the world that has anything similar. Their next project is "Your Constituency mailing list" which intends to provide a forum for constituents to engage with their MP. A brief mention here as well for my aggregator of UK Political Blogs and feeds. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 06-May-05 9:55am ] 05 May 2005 ::: Holy Moly ::: Cunts Corner :::
Ah, bless. it makes one feel good to be British. like that attitude that says we don't have to be PC because we take the piss out of everyone equally, including ourselves. 04 May 2005 Wired News: Blogs Enliven British Elections is actually just a Reuters fluff piece reprinted without comment. So not surprising they ignored my UK Political Blog Aggregator.
"It is very cynical -- and transparent. Even Blair now has a blog and everybody knows he simply hasn't the time to actually write it. It is just spin," Davies said. Well folks. It ain't a blog if it ain't got a feed. And like most of the official party websites and a lot of the big media sites, there's no feed. So it doesn't make it into UkPoliBlog. This has been the most disappointing side of watching the nascent Uk Politics website and blog movement. Amazing numbers of clueless websites put togther with dreamweaver and notepad as if this was 1998. Iraq
Let me try a little alternate history - 9/11 changed everything. It meant that Bush had to do something. And as many leaders have discovered throughout history, there's nothing like a little war to keep the populace on your side. So Bush is fully committed to regime change in Iraq regardless of the facts. - This then leaves Blair in a tricky situation as soon as he finds out. It's impossible for him to follow France and would potentially do huge amounts of damage economically to the UK's many business interests in the USA. But he can't actually come out and say this. SO he has no alternative but to support the USA - Bush and the NeoCons have already decided they are going into Iraq, but they aren't ready yet to dismantle the UN so everyone searches round for excuses that let them go ahead anyway. - Blair gets roped into this. And unfortunately the complete lack of political opposition means that he has no leverage over Bush to temper the response. So he's stuck on a path of doctoring evidence and intelligence, spinning legal briefs, hiding facts from cabinet and parliament - The rest plays out. So the big lie is actually Bush's but to some extent he's excused by 9/11. Blair's big lie is to go along with this and not to tell the truth which is that the UK cannot afford to go against the USA. Blair's continuing lie is to go on saying the same half truths and story that Bush/Blair cooked up to get them round the UN. Everyone knows this. But nobody can say it, because it would expose that Bush and Blair were going to go ahead regardless. And that's potentially disastrous (even though everyone knows it) because it makes them no different from Saddam. What's worse about all this is that Labour depserately want the whole issue to go away so that they don't ever have to say what really happened. And even though they try and avoid calling the election a referendum on Iraq, you can be sure that if they get a big majority it will be used as after the fact justification for everything they did. Which brings us back to the one big word, IRAQ. The best way of making sure that this doesn't happen again, and that Labour don't feel that the populace have given them carte blanche to do whatever they like is to try to prevent a big Labour Majority. It's OK if they get in, and they are probably preferable to a Conservative government. But it must be with a much reduced and preferably pretty small majority. And the best way to make sure that happens is to keep on banging away at the IRAQ issue for the remaining 48 hours. Labour In - Blair Out An idea for a Skype plugin. I've got people trying to push me to use Avecomm which is a Netmeeting clone (whiteboard, screen/app sharing etc) written as a zero install activex/java application. Unfortunately the voice performance sucks. ISTM that an add on to Skype in the style of the video plug ins could do all the same things but piggy back on Skype's voice, chat, conferencing, file transfer and presence. You'd get all the benefits of SKype's superior performance and add in the missing netmeeting style functionality.
Of course, you run the risk that Skype will eventually include all the functionality themselves. Incidentally, we ended up using Skype's voice and chat simultaneously with Avecomms app sharing. it worked fine as long as you disable voice in Avecomm. I also had problems with Avecomm's java not working with Firefox's Sun Java installation which was cured by switching to IE6. 03 May 2005 01 May 2005 Scripting News: 5/1/2005
Happy 50th Birthday Dave. In the last 10 years, you've been a big factor in turning RSS, Blogging and XMLRPC into mainstream tools[1]. This changed our world, and for that, thanks. Dave also talks about the effects of a lifespan of three score years and ten on the species. "Every seventy or eighty years we do a complete refresh of the species." It's an interesting meditation to consider what life would be like if we lived to 150 instead of 70. If you think that people don't really become mature adults until 30, that's like 120 years of being an active adult instead of 40. Consider also that it takes about 10 years to become an expert in whatever field you choose. So if we lived to 150 we could easily fit in 4 or 5 careers where now it's hard to manage two and most people only manage one. Quite apart from the extra time, I think the world might be a better place with more respect for age and experience. But we'd have to put against that the increased frustration of the relatively young. Ever since I started reading Heinlein, I thought that life extension technologies that allowed an average lifespan of 150 would appear in my lifetime. Now I'm not so sure. As I think Rucker said, everyone has to face the same Koan. "I was not, I am now, I will not be", so what are you going to do when you get up in the morning? This time around. [1]I'm not going to get into whether you invented these and other technologies or not. It's not important. 29 Apr 2005 The Bush-Kerry election was a big deal all round the world but especially in the UK as the Blair-Bush link was seen to be important. There were many UK commentators on the USA elections.
Well now it's our turn. In a few days time, the UK elections happen. And the process is throwing up all sorts of information that ought to directly affect Bush's position, mostly around the Iraq war. So why have I seen almost nothing from US commentators about the UK elections? I know we're just this piddling little archaic nation with a Queen somewhere off the coast of New York but we're also Airstrip One and one of the few nations that will side with the USA almost regardless. Don't you care even a little bit what we're up to? del.cio.us meets Google Maps meets Urban Tapestries in FoundCity.
Use your cellphone to post an email with Tags : StreetName : Comment Later browse tags near you. It's JustOuttaAlpha This desperately needs photos in the mix as well. Is Iraq an issue or not? The Polls all still say not.
 Good grief people. If he had the nerve to do that what do you think he'll have the nerve to do in the next 5 years? Just look at a few of the things Blunkett had lined up for us all. Imprisonment without trial, ID cards, trial without jury, and on and on. The current cover up of the "Ricin Ring" debacle is yet more proof that they'll fabricate evidence in order to achieve their aims. And then hide the evidence when they're found out. And then there's the impending postal vote crisis. In that sense Iraq is not in the past. It's an indication of the future. Oh and by the way, we're still in Iraq. Remember? Labour in - Blair out Now whatever the polls tell you, every seat is a marginal seat this time around. Even if the Lib-Dems fail to get many more seats, every vote will encourage them. And if the Tories and Labour end up neck and neck with a small Labour majority, as Simon Jenkins says in today's Times, the Lib-Dems will hold the balance of power. So vote early and vote often. Did I mention Iraq? Re Ricin Ring, it gets worse. That report from Duncan Campbell is being progressively removed from the BBC, Guardian and others. The problem is in these days of Google caches, the internet archive and suchlike, it's a lot harder to hide the truth. It keeps popping up in the most awkward of places. The most interesting question about the Attorney General's advice document is "who leaked it?" And Cui Bono? Did you hear Tam Dayell on the R4 One o'clock news? He claimed Blair would get in and then the Labour party would throw him out. This one bothers me and I wonder why it doesn't get more press. We're supposed to be voting for a leader who has said he will resign at some unspecified time in the future. A much reduced Labour majority and all the personal negative press against Blair could lead to a very quick leadership crisis in the Labour party. I'm not at all convinced that Gordon is a straight shoe in. I think it's much more likely that several other challengers appear and the whole process gets messy and bloody. This looks increasingly like Thatcher's third election. So who's going to play the roles of Heseltine and Major? I think that process is potentially very bad for this country. Almost as bad as another huge Labour majority. So can we all please get it over with quickly. Did you all watch the BBC debate last night? Interesting that the audience gave Kennedy a pretty easy time, but wanted blood from Howard and Blair. And Blair looked like Nixon in 1960. Sweating like a pig and squirming. But there's that certain arrogance that still lets him argue like a barrister, make the schoolmasterly jokes and asides and use that (mock) sincerity with the bared teeth and raised eyebrows. "Of course you would say that but this will hurt me more than it will hurt you and I did it for the best reasons and I'm going to do it anyway because I know best and I'm Prime Minister and you're not." I think this comes to almost all people when they stay in power for too long. And this one's been in power for too long.  Parts extracted from quite a sensible thread on Ecademy. 25 Apr 2005 BBC NEWS | Technology | Online music lovers 'frustrated' : UK music lovers are getting frustrated with restrictions placed on digital music tracks once they buy them from online stores, says PC Pro magazine.
- Consumers don't like DRM on online downloads of music. - Consumers don't like being told where they can use their purchase - Consumers don't like paying the same for a track on a CD as they do for the "near CD Quality" they get from online downloads. What a surprise. As another poster said "Pretty much, the effect of DRM is not endearing nor encouraging people to purchase online. For one the quality is not on par with the price. There is no reason beyond the mandate that a song cost x amount that it should be so high. In this you see the majors are still practicing price fixing, even after being convicted of such. The DRM basically restricts the buyer and there is no trade off of any sort to make it worth the money." Just Say No To DRM[1]. [1]DRM = Digital Rights Management. It's the software controls that prevent you the consumer from doing what you want with the product you bought. [from: JB Ecademy] Skype Journal: Using Skype for a POTS Denial of Service Attack
Nasty and evil. And inevitable. [from: del.icio.us] What if there was a system like del.icio.us to bookmark people instead of web pages?
I really like this idea but we're back into the digital identity sphere because people don't have URIs. Which pretty much means that it could only be done inside a YASN. Marc's Voice: The elite insider's blogging scene : For those of us who have been paying attention - Joi Ito hasn't attended one of the 'mainstream' power elite A-list blogger thingies in over a year and a half. Neither SuperNova, Etech, Web 2.0, Always On Innovation, BloggerCon, BBS, DIDW, PC Forum, SXSW, blah blah blah - none of them have nee graced with Joi's presence.
This reminded me of something I'd thought at Etech. Almost everyone there was broke! Very roughly you could fit the ETech audience into 4 or 5 stereotypes. - Employees (often BBC). Salarymen, and like almost all salarymen, underpaid. - Industry Commentators. Scratching a living from speaking tours and articles. - Startups. The days of VC funded apartments in NY are over. Especially at Etech, the entrepreneurs were in bootstrap, moonlighting mode. - Unemployable geeks. You know who you are. Too bright (and sometimes too old) to play well with others. - Post-Exit serial entrepreneurs. The few people who'd struck gold. These were the only moderately (or sometimes fabulously) rich. And most of those were on the podium. You can include in here the very few who had made a fortune from options along the way. We've thought at times that Business Networking is psychotherapy for the recently (or soon to be) redundant. Which perhaps explains the large number of life coaches and freelance consultants that haunt business network sites. Perhaps the Blogger - A-list - Tech conferences are psychotherapy for unemployable geeks. 
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