FAQblog

In my last post, I wrote about the benefit of hindsight and what some politicians have said about their new colleagues.

Here’s a wonderful spoof video of Sir Ian Bowler VS Alastair Campbell:

NSFW!!!

Ah, the things we say without realising that some day it will all come back to bite us.  Generally, we’re lucky enough to get away with it – most people I know aren’t in a high profile position which means that people will go back over what I said a while back and hold me to account over it.

However, let’s see what some of our new leaders have said about their new partners in the past…

2008, and David Cameron is asked what his favourite joke is.  He responds “Nick Clegg, at the moment.”

March 2008, and Nick Clegg is making his speech at the Lib Dem Spring conference, and discusses coalitions and alliances.

So I want to make something very clear today.

Will I ever join a Conservative government?

No.

Final quick one – February 2010 and Vince Cable discusses the then shadow chancellor Gideon Osbourne:

“Osborne’s latest economic commentary shows just how out his depth he is when it comes to the important economic issues.

Just in case it didn’t get read, Vince also tweeted about it here:

So, the question is – when did Osbourne suddenly learn to swim?

I read somewhere recently about what does a hung parliament / coalition mean for the country.

Apparently, in the event of a hung parliament, here’s what we can expect:

• Gordon Brown will still be Prime Minister.
• The parties will get behind closed doors and horse-trade between each other over posts and power.
• There will be haggling between politicians rather than any clear leadership.
• This will bring delay and indecision leading to a drop in confidence, a fall in the pound and an increase in interest rates.
• We will have to choose a new government in another General Election within a year.
• Help!

Scary thoughts, indeed.  So far, the only one to be completely wrong is that Gordon Brown has gone.  Possibly, the coalition will last for a full five years, and so the penultimate point proves wrong as well.  But the rest certainly occurred – how bad a hung parliament is!!

Oh – and the source of those points was a Conservative Party election leaflet:

According to The Telegraph this week, BT and Talk Talk have already raised concerns about the Ofcom proposals regarding the Digital Economy Act and how it might distort the market.  Their main complain seems to be that since the initial proposal is that only ISPs with over 400,000 subscribers will be targeted, there will be some impact on the top 7 UK ISPs that is not felt by others (until all ISPs are hit).

Ofcom’s draft code (whilst not address such minor points as disconnecting infringers), explains the procedure that copyright owners should take to notify ISPs of alleged infringement, the process for ISPs to inform the subscribers and the rules for maintaining a Copyright Infringement List by the ISP.  The Act provides that ISPs need to keep track of the number of reports about each subscriber.  Complying with the Act and the Code will not be a simple, straightforward process for the seven ISPs that are impacted initially, which gives a competitive advantage to every other ISP with less than 400,000 subscribers.

Additionally, there is the potential for customers who are determined to download illegally to move to an ISP which is not covered by the Ofcom rules, further impacting the business model of the bigger providers.

Still – it’s only a draft document, so there’s still a chance to get it modified.  And failing that, if that nice Mr Clegg gets into power, he’s promised to repeal the Act….

---

In a completely unrelated move, Spain is considering introducing their “Sustainable Economy Law”.  A recent survey of internet users aged 16-55 showed that 95.6% of all digital music in Spain is acquired illegally.  83.7% of all digitally acquired films are illegal downloads, and 52.3% of games are likewise illegal downloads.

It would be interesting to know what the figures would be if they surveyed Internet users between, say 13 and 16 to see how much illegal activity is undertaken by a slightly younger demographic.

Linky.

Wow – I thought this had to be a hoax, but it’s not.

Perhaps in a subtle swipe at the one-man Apple support team that is Steve Jobs (see here, here, here or create your own email from Steve here), AT&T responded to a customer sending two emails of suggestions to their CEO with informing him that they would consider a cease and desist order if he continued to email them!

Engadget has asked the question about why they took that course of action, and no doubt at some stage, a PR spin story will come out about either (a) they want to avoid their CEO being hassled by the great unwashed so that he can focus on delivering real value to the company; or (b) this was a mistake by a junior employee who has since been retrained in how to deal with that kind of situation again.

You can hear the threat here.

An interesting move from the EU this week, regarding data retention rules.

At a time when Google is being hounded for “accidentally” capturing public wi-fi traffic when it was photographing the streets, the EU is asking for search engines to retain search history for even longer than they do at present.  Just in case any law enforcement folks want to have a trawl through it to look for anything incriminating.

Of course, it’s only to protect the children – will someone please think of the children!!

More on Slashdot.

Yesterday, I wrote about #fruitbatgate (as it seems to be known on Twitter).

On May 17th, the university published a fuller statement, which can be found (with the correspondence) here.

The whole correspondence makes interesting reading – it is particularly disturbing if a precedent is set that university colleagues in the same department are now forbidden from discussing peer-reviewed research that has been published in established and respected journals.

Last November, I wrote about scientific research that showed that fellatio in fruit bats increased the sexual performance of the male (in terms of copulation time).  Thankfully, I don’t work for University College Cork, which has disciplined lecturer Dylan Evans with a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling after discussing the paper with one of his colleagues.

A week after showing the paper to a female colleague, he suddenly found himself accused of sexual harassment.  Despite the fact that he was cleared of the charge, he has had a censure imposed by the university’s president Michael Murphy.

The whole curious saga is discussed in New Scientist.

There is a good piece in The Guardian today by Cory Doctorow about why the DEA just won’t work.

In short – the DEA will move more surfers to do their surfing and downloading using a VPN or other anonymous methods of surfing such as SSL-based proxies to make it harder to track their downloads.  This was exactly the point that the security services were making when the Act was being debated in parliament (how ever briefly!) – driving more normal / casual downloaders down the anonymous route, this makes their job harder since the volume of encrypted traffic is increased.

Makes interesting reading.

I can’t even remember how I found this one – Spanish artist faces hefty fine for cooking Christ.

TV station interviews artist five years ago, and shows stills from video that he made in 1978 – and now they face fines of 192000 EUR (for him) and 144000 EUR (TV station) for doing so.

It’s just the whole bizarre notion of “cooking Christ” that gets me – here’s the video of it:

Enjoy!