Monthly Archives: May 2007

Royalty Exempt From Danger

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Harry Exempt

Prince Harry will not be sent to Iraq because of the “unacceptable risks”, the head of the British army has said.
(Source: BBC News)

Yes, of course. We can’t have our aristos dying in Iraq, can we? Leave that to working class men and women. I’m sure they can give Harry an extremely important detail like counting to ten or perhaps hilariously dressing up as a Nazi again?

I think Reg Keys says it best:

Reg Keys – whose son Thomas was killed while on active service in Basra in 2003 – said he found the decision distasteful and questioned whether insurgents could have told the prince apart from other service personnel.

“It would appear that Harry’s life is more valuable than my son or the other nearly 150 service personnel who’ve given their lives,” Mr Keys added.
(Source: BBC News)

Joost Telly

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Joost

Joost (pronounced ‘juiced’) is a system for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name “The Venice Project”, Zennström and Friis have assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about a half-dozen cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse. Joost’s CTO is Dirk-Willem van Gulik.
(Source: Wikipedia)

Well, thanks to the free invite, I’ve been using Joost for the last few days and…

… I love it!

Okay, it’s still obviously betaware. Yes, there are glitches and the quality of the picture makes NTL Virgin’s mangled delivery look hi-def. But it works! The OSX client is admirably simple and telly-like and it does the most important thing of any mass-market GUI: it removes as many controls as possible.

This is anathema to geeks, of course, because we want to twiddle and fiddle, to fuck around with settings till something falls over and then laugh at it.

However, if telly over the net is ever going to become a mass service, you need a simple, clean, untweakable interface.

Joost

The first channel I tried to watch was, of course, the Sports Illustrated model showcase. Yes. And then I moved onto Total Recall 2070 which I’d never seen before. This was a real test of Joost and I have to admit the picture did block quite horribly in scenes with explosions / gunfights. But I still enjoyed the actual episodes, the disruption wasn’t severe enough to yank me out of the narrative.

Although these are very early days for this form of net TV, I can see it taking off. If I was a conventional broadcaster (with no ISP component to my business), Joost would start me sweating. As it stands, whether I watch their over-compressed transmissions or use Joost, either way I’m paying Virgin NTL since they supply my broadband.

The strength of Joost and every other form of IPTV is the way the viewer can choose how, when and where to watch. Yeah, I know Sky+ and other PVRs can do the same kind of thing but Joost is in another league entirely. The attraction for advertisers is that they’ll be able to target people like me who are drifting away from conventional telly because we’re not interested in Celebrity Badger Baiting or Jordan’s uterus.

Even though I hate advertising, it’s actually more accurate for me to say that I hate adverts for shit I’m not into, which is the vast majority of conventional advertising. It’s all spam to me. So, those companies are basically wasting their time and money. Whereas, when I’m watching vidcasts like dl.tv or Cranky Geeks, I don’t mind the ads at all – hey, they’re for stuff I might actually buy! Joost is nearly there in advertising terms: the HP ads are still a bit intrusive (you can’t skip them) and a bit too generic. I mean, come on! I’m a geek who’s watching Joost, I probably don’t care that Pharell thinks HP laptops are cool. Gimme specs or gimme nothing.

I have little doubt that Joost or something very like it will be how we all watch telly in the future. But don’t take my word for it, if you’ve got a fast connection, sign-up and decide for yourself! :-D

The Canonisation Of Butcher Blair

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Butcher Blair

The Christian Socialist Movement, a political faith-based lobby group in London, praised Blair for speaking openly about his Christian faith throughout his time as prime minister. Despite his strong will to keep religion out of politics, Blair, an Anglican, has been one of the most publicly Christian prime ministers in Britain for more than a hundred years.

“Tony Blair has made no secret of his Christian faith and its importance to him, and Christian values have clearly informed government policies in the area of the minimum wage, giving pensioners, children and working families a better deal, and tackling global poverty,” said CSM Director Andrew Bradstock.
(Source: The Gospel Herald)

Yes, Blair the pious Christian, Blair the great peacemaker who has, according to his own PR, brought peace to Northern Ireland single-handedly.

It’s just a very fortuitous coincidence that he announced his resignation the week of the final peace deals being broadcast. I mean, come on, he didn’t plan it that way, did he? That would be cynical and manipulative. That would be like saying that this country was “45 minutes from attack” by Iraq. Or manufacturing evidence of non-existent weapons programs.

Ordinary human morality cannot constrain Blair: his God whispers directly into his ear. Just like Bin Laden’s God. So, even when Blair is dripping with the blood of 655,000 Iraqis murdered in a crusade for oil, Blair can still sleep at night.

I mean, fucking hell, if I’m horrible to one of my friends, hurt their feelings, I worry about it. I lose sleep.

Not our Tony! He’s made of stronger, more psychopathic material! So those Iraqis are dead – so what? So 3.4 MILLION Iraqis have fled the wonderful peace and democracy that Tony has brought them, the ungrateful swine! So what? So 148 British soldiers have died – Tony doesn’t care!

The most obvious single feature of the Iraq war is that it was not waged by the international community that Blair had celebrated in his first term. It was waged by Bush’s infamous “coalition of the willing” – the US, Britain and a distinctly unimpressive gaggle of minor allies – in defiance of the only body entitled to speak for any international community worthy of the name.
(Source: The Guardian)

He knows he was right. Right to lie, right to illegally invade, right to ally himself with a neo-fascist American program.

But there are some who’ll be glad to see the back of Blair:

This, too, is mild compared to what is privately said in the Foreign Office and MoD. Senior diplomats have told me it would not upset them too much if Blair were tried as a war criminal. But while neither Blair nor any of those who launched a war of aggression and occupation in Iraq have been held to account, a civil servant and MP’s researcher were yesterday shamefully jailed for exposing some of the dealings between Bush and Blair that lay behind the war.
(Source: The Guardian)

Oh yeah – I nearly forgot. At the same time as the mass-murderer Blair was receiving oleaginous tributes from the mass media, two people were jailed for leaking a memo of a meeting between Bush and Blair.

What a world.

US Marine Shot Unarmed Iraqis

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Haditha Massacre

A US Marine who led the unit accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha shot five men as they stood with their hands in the air, another marine said.

Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich then told his comrades to lie about it and blame the Iraqi army, a court heard on Wednesday.
(Source: BBC News)

Does this kind of base brutality from the US military even surprise anyone any more?

As much as the Haditha Massacre will be dismissed, yet again, as a ‘few bad apples,’ surely the truth is of a violent, rapacious occupation in which Iraqis are deprived of all human rights by an occupying force which sees them as less than animals.

Witness the murder of these five unarmed civilians: Wuterich shot them dead. Then another soldier “sprayed” the bodies with more bullets. And then, Wuterich went round and shot them all in the head again.

That isn’t caution. That’s hatred. That’s the hatred Nazis had for Jews.

Of course, the soldier testifying tries to justify their hatred, citing the death of a comrade. So, in the course of the illegal occupation of a foreign country, committing what the Nuremberg Tribunal called a war crime, their comrade was killed. So, vengeance must be taken on unarmed Iraqi civilians. “We illegally invaded your country to steal your oil, how dare you shoot at us!” Yes, that makes perfect sense.

People look at footage of concentration camps and wonder how those German soldiers could have committed such atrocities. How did the world let them get away with it?

Well, look at Iraq now. Torture and murder are being carried out everyday against innocent civilians by an occupying army.

And the world doesn’t do a damned thing.

Meanwhile, apparently a war criminal called Tony Blair left office this week.

The Green Car I Want

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Tesla Car

Mmmm…. who wouldn’t want an electric car that can do 0 – 60mph in four seconds?

The Tesla Roadster is manufactured by Tesla Motors (no actual connection to the famous Tesla, as far as I can see) and their plan is to use the expertise they gain from the high-performance car on less expensive follow ups.

That’s the same model as old-school manufacturers use, testing new tech to the breaking point on race and rally circuits and then, eventually, filtering what survives into your bog-standard family car.

So, as exciting as this car is (and I do want one!), I’m even more interested in the “normal” cars Tesla will release. We all know the oil is running out, we all know that, eventually, our cars will whirr and hum rather than purr and thrum, maybe Tesla will be one of the companies that will help that transition?

Before You Send Us Back…

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Working Lunch

Asian-owned businesses contribute 10% towards the GDP of Britain whereas Asians only make up 4% of the population.
(Source: Working Lunch)

Hello Tories, BNP members and other assorted racists and fascists. Just thought you’d like to work out where you’re going to make up the shortfall before you ship all of us lazy, scrounging Asian immigrants “home.”

And before you answer, please bear in mind that repeatedly saying “I’m not a racist but” and “it’s political correctness gone mad” are not economically productive activities.

Tony Visconti: The Autobiography

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Visconti

I finished ‘Tony Visconti: the Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy‘ last night. Well, this morning.

It was a cracking read. Yes, I’m going to get more out of it than the average reader as I’m a musician, engineer and producer. But even someone with no involvement at all in making music would love all the anecdotes that Visconti (and his co-writer Richard Havers) spills out.

He’s got enough coverage, after all. This is the man who, as it says in the unwieldy title, went from Brooklyn to working with David Bowie and T. Rex. Also Eno, Iggy Pop, Altered Images, The Boomtown Rats, The Stranglers (yep, he produced ‘Golden Brown’), Paul McCartney, Thin Lizzy, The Moody Blues, Hazel O’Connor… well, you get the picture.

This isn’t a flowery book: the style is quite un-adorned and straight-forward. Mostly, this suits Visconti’s breathless narrative push but occasionally, I wish the book would take a slightly more circuitous and poetic turn. I’m probably wrong but I get the sense that some of that more emotional stuff has been held back as being too private. Sure, we get all the important bones of his life, it’s just that I want a bit more meat. Every now and then, you’ll get a sentence like ‘we had an affair – Mary found out’ and that’s it. As a reader, this makes me go ‘woah – what happened? Tell me that conversation!’ But, as I said, he most likely doesn’t want to.

That’s a minor quibble when put in the context of a read that’s both funny and sad, informative and enlightening. I don’t want to give the impression this is a heartless book: it often goes into detail on certain painful events. It’s very touching when Visconti talks about his drink problem and the effect on his kids.

Also laudable is that when Visconti relates incidents which might show people like Bowie, McCartney or Bolan in a negative light, the framing is sensitive. This isn’t a bitter book written to settle old grudges. But I guess if the bloke’s been doing two hours of T’ai Chi every morning since the eighties, he’s probably past all that.

If you’re a fortysomething or older, you’ll probably love this book. If you’re younger but you’re a Bowie / Bolan / retro pop fan, again, you’ll love hearing detailed history from someone who was actually there. If you’re a musician or engineer/producer, I’d say this is pretty much an essential text.

There’s a lot to be learnt from this book!

US Murders Primary School Kids

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US Kills Primary School Children

An attack by a US helicopter against suspected insurgents in Iraq has killed a number of children at a primary school, Iraqi security sources say.

The attack took place in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad, the sources say.

The officer said police had spoken to eyewitnesses and that six children had been killed and six injured but the figures have not been independently confirmed.
(Source: BBC News)

Yet more casualties in the US’ brave campaign to bring peace and democracy to Iraq.

Let’s hope they never try to bring their brand of peace and democracy to Britain.

Unless you particularly want your kiddiewinks strafed to death by trigger-happy rednecks.

BBC Shafts Licencepayers

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BBC Approves DRM

The BBC Trust — the organisation that oversees the BBC’s operations — has driven another nail into the BBC’s relevancy for the 21st century today by giving the broadcaster permission to use DRM on its online offerings.

The BBC has turned its back on its promise to deliver a remixable, DRM-free archive of its video materials to the British public, citing lame excuses like, “It will cost a lot to negotiate rights,” and “It might make us less effective at selling DVDs to Americans.” Instead, it has opted for the “iPlayer,” a crippling technology that infects PCs and makes them incapable of saving and using some of the files on their hard-drives.

The Trustees heard that 90 percent of the respondents didn’t want DRM and especially didn’t want Microsoft DRM. But rather than giving the BBC orders to deliver its free-to-air video in free-to-net formats, they gave it permission to sell out the license-fee payers who are required by law to support the BBC.
(Source: Boing Boing)

So… I pay my licence fee and then the BBC takes that money, makes programmes and then it decides to cripple those programmes so I can’t watch them on the internet?

How does this work? As the excellent Boing Boing article points out, all of the BBC TV and radio broadcasts are totally DRM-free. So why the hell do they have to lock up the net side?

The most galling aspect of this is that they’re totally ignoring the will of the people they questioned about the whole process. I and many others like me went to the BBC website and filled in their surveys, saying no to DRM and asking for open, platform-independent net content.

Why did they bother asking our opinion and wasting our time?

The arrogance and stupidity of this decision is staggering.