With rights come obligations

iiNet Ruling | Piracy Fight Takes a Body Blow

HOLLYWOOD studios and record labels are being forced to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new way of combating online piracy after the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers are not required to police copyright infringement on their networks.

The music industry says it may have no choice but to sue individuals for illegal file sharing unless the federal government intervenes with a solution to its piracy woes.

Let's just look at the last sentence there. Read it again. What it says is that a large, rich industry that holds almost more copyrights than any other is asking for Government protection because it feels unable to defend its' property and is taking the passive-aggressive line that if it doesn't get it then it will have to sue individuals. If you sue an ISP for "authorising" illegal downloading you may as well sue the power companies as well. After all they provided the electricity, they knew people might be doing it with the electricity they supplied and they too failed to monitor if people were or were not doing so. Suing individuals is what they should have been doing in the first place, they don't want to because individuals are the customers. 

If you have rights, responsibilities come with them. In law when you hold a copyright and you wish to continue to hold on to it you are obliged to defend it. It is not the job of federal government or anyone else - with the possible exception of a an industry body with careful oversight - to police your rights for you. You can report rights violations as a crime and then the actual police will step in.

Warning: it's going to get a bit dull and polemic after this so I've put the rest behind the read more link

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Brewing swiftly on

Happy Christmas, Merry New Year and all that. Flippin' life gets in the way of blogging it really does.

I recently came to the realisation that I have been making beer at home on and off for about half my  life, or about the last 16 years, with general success (I've only ever thrown away 2 batches in all that time). I had been making my  beer either from kits or from malt extract and some fiddling around with hops.  Despite what preconceptions might be of homebrew the kits can make damn fine beer if treated well and I was quite happy with this until The Realisation. With The Realisation came the thought "maybe I can do this a bit better and improve things".

I am a tinkerer and have been ever since my first Lego set and, as anyone who knows a tinkerer will tell you, this thought is normally the kiss of death for anything and can have consequences ranging in severity from a an afternoon of deafening  profanities to a trip to Accident and Emergency. With this in mind, I did a fair bit of research and some exploratory work, I talked to other people about it, I did some experiments, bought some equipment and ingredients. There was a whole day of deafening profanities. A few weeks went by as the beer fermented. There was an afternoon of moderate cursing followed by cautious optimism when I bottled the beer. A few weeks went by until I deemed it time to open one.


Halleluliah gawdallbloodymighty, it was good. It was so good that it made me wonder what I'd been doing all these years mucking around with kits and extract. Em and I finished off this summer wheat-beer in record time and I made a proper English Bitter - the kind it can be a little difficult to find in Oz - that was even better than the first batch.On the surface of it this may seem to be good news but it comes with some big drawbacks.

The first is that just before starting my experiment I had, in anticipation of only moderate success, brewed up about 60 liters of beer I knew would be good so that I would have something to drink no matter what. 60 liters, that's more than 100 pints of beer I now know is not as good as good as it could be. I need those bottles empty to put good beer in, but I'm now  not so keen on drinking it all. DAMMIT!!

The second drawback is that I'm now utterly hooked. As anyone who knows a tinkerer will tell you a tinkerer finding a hobby can have consequences ranging in severity from afternoons at country fairs filled with very boring conversations about obscure technical nonsense, through garages full of car parts, all the way to a fully functioning steam engine in the back yard. I am a geek by nature, I will have to know all about brewing, all about its' history and I'll have to get all the kit and get it working to absolute perfection. This is inevitable, it will happen and there is little anyone can do about it.

In the short term this means I need another fridge, not to put finished beer in but to put fermenters in to control the temperature, so I'll need a thermostat too. Then bottling won't be enough on it's own some of those styles are really meant to be kegged, so I'm going to need a kegging setup with a tap font, drip tray and its own cooling system. Having invested in this much kit I'll need to make sure the beer does it justice so I'll have to build a full Heat Exchanging Recirculating Mash system and get a plate chiller. Clearly all this in't going to fit in a 2 bedroom apartment so I either need a lockup somewhere or a new house....

You see my problem.

Thankfully my hobby mostly keeps me out of trouble, produces something tasty, desirable and that quickly disposes of itself. I may have to work on a way of [legally] - making money out of it so that it pays its' own way...

There will be pictures to go with this post as soon as I get them off the camera

Oooooowwwww!

Full moon over Opera House

Ephemeral happiness

Candles and revelation together at last...

Dead eyed dawdlers, the place is full of them. They have artfully untidy clothes and facial hair. None of them paid to get in, none of them paid for the sugary alcoholic drink in their hands and they certainly wouldn't have asked for a beer especially with the taps covered in tin foil. Is it okay to wear aftershave if you clearly never shave? Maybe but you should definitely dial it down a fraction - my eyes! Yeaahhh, classy. I guess that's what passes for the music press these days.

Pose and preen, we all watch the carefully constructed pop poppet prance with her skintight PVC suited dancers. This is pure display, a show for the media to earn your article. Lips are synced and cameras played to but we're just here to provide some atmosphere. I get a little angry - this feels like a stage managed lie and I don't really like the music that's being used to lie to me.

I look carefully at one of the bar's decorative features in search of some perspective, a birdcage filled with melting church candles, and the context becomes clear. An easily constructed, stylish and safe ornament out of reach of the idiot punters. A hint of fire to catch the eye concealed by bars to prevent any burns. You wouldn't have it in your home but it's not bad on a night out.

Door handles

...on a glass door

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Paper Blogging

Speechification: James Ellroy

If you don't subscribe to Speechification please listen to some of the older posts and consider it. This is just one gem amongst many. I post this one because it will provoke strong reactions - possibly.

Embedded below is James Ellroy on Studio 360. I'll let it speak for itself I think.

Dust storm

This view would normally be of Botany Bay, only there's a dust storm over Sydney this morning.

I haven't coloured this shot either. It's a bit weird.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

And we have convergence...

End of the iPod era

I wanted an iPod but why didn't I buy one? Oddly it seemed like an extravagance at the time and I suppose it still would be. On the other hand I didn't hesitate to buy an iPhone which is several times the price of a top-end iPod even if it is spread over the course of 2 years.

The reason I bought an iPhone 3GS the instant it was available to me is pretty simple. An iPod just plays music. The iPhone is a pocket computer with a phone, camera and an iPod built into it. You can run your life off it surprisingly easily. That only covers the native functions on the device too, the real killer function is the ability to install software from other developers so I now have access to Wikipedia, a dictionary and thesaurus and books in electronic form as well as any number of other useful things. Which is what I wanted but considered unattainable in a mobile only 2 years ago.

It seems rather obvious that once something like this is available that the idea of a regular iPod is going to lose its lustre and that's exactly what's happening. Apple aren't selling too many of the original type iPods. The iPod touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone that can connect to the internet via WiFi and run many of the same applications is selling very well.

Geeks like me call this device convergence. The terminal in your pocket is becoming the single device that you need and it is going to keep collecting functionality. This is both good and bad.

Every time I go past a schoolkid with a rucksack groaning with textbooks I can't help but think that it should be replaced with an iPhone-like device and very easily could be. If that were the case kids would then have always on, on-demand audio-visual learning on a location-aware device. Once you have one of these devices and you begin to think about the possibilities of the thing they become truly staggering. We're only beginning to see the possibilities of the location based technologies in particular. These things are going to change the way we behave and largely, I think, for the better. Mobiles are the information service of choice in developing countries and if access to even low-end versions of this kind of device could make big changes in how information flows around these areas. These are big visions for a small, very expensive thing and it won't happen soon or in an easily predictable way.

There is an obvious downside too. In Japan there is a payment system built into many phones that works like a smartcard that allows you to pay for taxis and other services using your mobile. That's a big jump for a cash-based culture and it will only expand in application. But imagine if you lost it or had it stolen.