Technovia

"The krona is dead"

Iceland joining the EU:

"The krona is dead. We need a new currency. The only serious option is the euro," said a senior Icelandic official.

I wonder how long it will be before the government admits the same is true of the pound?

Free and crap

O'Reilly signals Free Web 2.0 party is over? - broadstuff:

"What O'Reilly is talking about here is a typical example of what happens if everything is free - in those sort of markets, there is no way to extract extra value from delivering quality, so cheap-to-produce cr*p drives it out. "

This is worth saying, repeatedly.

Why the DRM industry is clueless about consumers

Guy Tennant, chief operating officer of Entriq, a company that helps online stores manage DRM'd products, thinks that a company terminating your use of music is just like when you lose a CD:

"Tennant says he doesn't want to sound unsympathetic but reminds digital-music buyers that CD owners don't demand a refund from stores when they lose their discs. As for backing up songs to a CD, people should just accept the loss of quality because the only other alternative is to lose the music entirely, he said."

It's stupidity like this that makes me think the music industry is determined to commit collective suicide. Of course it's not the same: turning off DRM key servers is the equivalent of coming round to my house, breaking in, and stealing back the CDs you sold to me in the first place.

Idiot.

Oh dear, Mr Brown

Link: BBC NEWS | Politics | Brown targets 'problem families'.

"More than 110,000 "problem families" with disruptive youngsters will be targeted as part of a crackdown on knife crime, Gordon Brown has said.

They will get parenting supervision, with the worst 20,000 families facing eviction if they do not respond"

This, of course, is a joke. Eviction from what? From their council house - when, as families, they will immediately get rehoused? Or from the property they own? In which case, that's a pretty neat extension of government powers...

An example of bad, sexist summary writing

Stewart Butterfield and his wife?

Referring to Caterina as "his wife" is pretty lame. Have we gone back to the 1970's, when women were defined by their relationship to men rather than their achievements? I really would expect better from The Guardian.

Kid Rock: Copyfighter

Link: BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Kid Rock boycotts iTunes over pay.

"The performer - whose real name is Robert Ritchie - said his record company Atlantic had asked him to "stand up for illegal downloading" a few years ago because it told him "people are stealing from us and stealing from you".

"And I go: 'Wait a second, you've been stealing from the artists for years. Now you want me to stand up for you?' I was telling kids - download it illegally, I don't care. I want you to hear my music so I can play live."

How green is your Apple?

In December 2006 I wrote a feature for MacUser UK on the environmental impact of computers, and in particular Macs. MacUser doesn't put its features online, so I've decided to put this one up. This is the full, unedited version, so any mistakes are mine rather than MacUser's.Some of the rights for this article belong to Dennis Publishing: please do not republish this article anywhere else.

Everything that we do has some kind of impact on the environment, from breathing through to burning millions of tonnes of crude oil. However, one of the cultural trends of humankind during the 21st Century is a striving to reduce this impact, and preserve our natural environment as much as possible.

Although the detrimental effects of large scale industry like cars has been known and closely followed for decades, a more recent centre of attention has been that icon of the last twenty years, the personal computer. Computer makes have come under attach from environmental campaigners for their manufacturing processes, while computer users have started to wonder whether using a computer – particularly one that's on 24 hours a day, seven days a week – is worth the undoubted effects on the environment.

Apple in particular has been the subject of some dedicated campaigning, in particular from Greenpeace. Over the past year, the veteran environmental group has attacked Apple, claiming it uses hazardous substances in Macs – substances that other manufacturers have abandoned.

But what's the truth about the impact that our addiction to computers has on the environment? Is computing sustainable, or will there one day be a crunch, when we're forced to either slow down our pace of technological change or just abandon computers completely? And where does the responsibility lie: with manufacturers who churn out ever-faster machines that must be replaced every three years, or with consumers greedy for the latest and greatest PC? And, should the environmentally-conscious consumer be choosing something other than Apple if they're looking for the greenest PC?

One reason Kazahkstan won't be joining the EU soon

I'm an atheist, but I believe absolutely in freedom of religion, something that's enshrined in Article Nine of the European Convention on Human Rights. It's worth remembering that, not very far away, states make it compulsory to register religions, and in Kazahkstan there's a new law going through which requires new levels of registration:

"Among its controversial articles, the law currently in the drafting stage, would require all religious organizations to reregister meaning that even religious organizations fully registered at this time and in full compliance of all laws would have to go back through the registration process. It would mean that 1) all religious organizations would become illegal until they reregister and it would also allow the law to have retroactive force. In other words, a religious organizatio fully established in Kazakhstan which didn’t meet new requirements would have to pack up and leave."

Yet another Iraqi blogger murdered

In all of the arguments over data portability, the pros and cons of FriendFeed, and everything else tech-geeky, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that blogging tools have made it possible for more voices around the world to be heard - if you're willing to listen. There are many such voices in Iraq, writing personal experiences that sometimes cost them more than just the time it takes to write. One such person, known as BlogIraq, was murdered this week as he tried to get some documentary evidence of corruption in a USAID office in Baghdad. It's worth remembering that this is actually what blogging is really about: discovering stories which would otherwise never be told.

Fair use for the 21st century: if it adds value, it's fair; if it substitutes, it's not - Boing Boing

Link: Fair use for the 21st century: if it adds value, it's fair; if it substitutes, it's not - Boing Boing.

"Tim busts out a great working definition for fair use that simple enough to understand that it can be reliably followed by casual remixers and users of content, but not so simple as to be idiotic: if it adds new value, it's fair use; if it substitutes for the original, it's infringing."

The problem with this is what amounts to "adding new value" - and, more importantly, adding value to what? Does sampling a record and using it, uncredited, in a remix "add value" to the original? No, of course not. In fact, using it credited may well not add value either.

Does Gawker's use of the Tom Cruise scientology video "add value" to the original? Of course not - if anything, it removes value, both to Cruise personally and to the CoS. Of course, you can say that Gawker's using it is fair use as it's newsworthy - but that adds a second rule to what is and is not fair use.

If, of course, what Cory and Tim mean by "adding value" is simply "creating something of value from the copyright material" then that's a different matter - but it means that virtually any use of copyright material is permissible. If I take one of Cory's books, put it in an original cover, print it and sell it I've "added value" - so it's fair use, and I don't have to pay anyone. Right?