Several interesting stories have popped up today and as I’m short of thinking time, I’ll just post them for reference and rumination:
What a day out there on the Electron Sea.
I guess Bush Junior has had enough of the decisive, crippling, and highly orchestrated “good PR move(s)” that the enemy is making against him; he’s come out of the closet and declared that he “would like to end Guantanamo”. I’m surprised, actually. It smacks of finally getting tired of trying to defend something that is indefensible. The shameful denial of a proper trial for or even levelling charges on the prisoners there has done nothing to promote the Americans’ cause, and merely makes them easy propaganda targets. It’s all rather depressing that they couldn’t see this from the beginning. It’s even more depressing that our very own PM has chosen to ignore Gantanamo and it’s political repercussions. He, the Government, and the Opposition should have been pushing to get Gitmo closed from the start, and it relects very badly on them (a few individuals and the Lib-Dems aside) that they weren’t.
A tremendous weight has been lifted from me. I confess, I’ve finally managed to give up watching Lost. I simply can’t take any more disappointment; week after week of sitting there hoping that I’d learn something useful about the island, the monster, the polar bears, the others, the timer, anything! But no. Just endless flashbacks about the survivors (who shouldn’t be alive anyway). And now, J.J. Abrahams has even more people for us to learn about to no avail.
I’m just going to go through an episode guide and pick out the ones that sound interesting and watch them, but beyond that, I’ve found my Tuesday evenings between 10 and 11 p.m. again. Free! Free!
That’s my way of saying “The tide is turning”. I’ve said for a while now that the music industry in the UK, and especially in the States, should stop trying to prosecute grandmothers, children, students, and dead people for file-sharing and so-called ‘priacy’, and expend all that effort and money in developing new business methods to exploit the download and P2P markets. There’s no point in trying to put the technological genie back in the bottle; they should be devising cheaper and simpler alternatives to ‘piracy’. People are more than willing to pay for ease-of-use and simplicity, and the money is much better spent – just ask Apple if they think their iTunes is a good thing or not.
Two stories about the same thing on different sides of the Atlantic, come to very different conclusions. Digital Rights Management (for those of you who haven’t heard of it) is the technology that (e.g.,) music corporations hope to be able to use to control what you listen to, when you listen, and how many times you listen. Rather than buying a CD and listening to it as often as you want (because you paid for it), they’d rather make you pay for each time you want to listen. DRM does that, and prevents you from making any copies too.
Just when you think the world hasn’t got much in the way of surprizes left, scientists discover a cave that’s been sealed off by its geology for five million years. Let’s say that again and roll it around a bit: this cave last saw the light of day at a time before humans – the Australopithicenes, brow-ridges, tiny brains, and all, had yet to branch off to form Homo habilis, our modern ancestor. For five million years, creatures and their ancestors have lived trapped in the dark, breeding and evolving, and now they’ve been found. Eight living, completely unknown species of crustacean, their DNA unlike anything alive today, have been discovered.