Behold the PC world’s first stab at replicating the Mac mini. According to the Guardian Online Blog it costs £699 inc VAT with no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse, no speakers and no wireless. A Mac mini with a comparable spec would cost somewhere between £359 and £429. So you pay extra for all those viruses, worms, trojans and other Windows-enabled vulnerabilities. Weird. If it had been priced at, say, £199 then you could understand the logic.
File-sharing and downloading is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s really happening is that the old-style, RIAA-approved music industry is on the slide for a good old capitalistic reason: it’s losing touch with its best customers. There’s an extraordinarily perceptive article by Laura Barton which explains how guerrilla gigs, the Net and fan-friendly bands are enabling music lovers to reclaim the charts — and the industry. Excerpt:
This has been the year fans have increasingly taken music into their own hands, rejecting the over-processed diet served up by many major labels in favour of something a little more homemade. In the process they have notched up numerous high-profile successes, including Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spinto Band and Nizlopi.
Enabled largely by the internet, bands have been able to record and promote their own music, and fans to revel in it and pass it on – without the aid of major label backing, stylist and towering billboard advertisements. Furthermore, fans are finding it ever easier to interact directly with their favourite bands, rather than seek nourishment from the insubstantial publicist- approved quotes given in interviews. The result, of course, is that the charts in 2005 have become imbued with a rather joyous and friendly anarchy.Arguably, it was the Libertines who set the pace; the baton then passed to Babyshambles and imminently to Carl Barat’s new band, Dirty Pretty Things. Characteristically, Libertines gigs (and those of their circle) eschewed the overpriced ticketing, over-priced ale gig-going conventions that had become standard in the Clear Channel era, and instead guerrilla gigs were played ad-hoc in bizarre venues, such as rooftops, farms and the London underground. Fans were informed of the “venue” hours before in a flurry of emails, website postings and text messages, and would travel from all over the country to congregate at the elected hour and see their favourite band play inches from them (and probably go to the pub with them afterwards). Pete Doherty allowed fans to bed down in his flat if they missed the last train home.
This must be the oddest story the Guardian‘s political editor, Michael White, ever wrote.
Forget about the conventional wisdom that parents influence the way their children vote. A new paper by two British academics yesterday upturned a longstanding western idea to suggest that it was the other way around. What’s more, daughters make families vote Labour or Lib Dem.
“This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more leftwing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more rightwing … the paper ends with a conjecture: leftwing individuals are people who comes from families into which, over recent past generations, many females have been born.”
A US judge has banned so-called ‘intelligent design’ from being taught in science lessons in a Pennsylvania school district. Report from this week’s EducationGuardian:
A courtroom battle seen as a test case for the teaching of science in America ended in a decisive victory for evolution yesterday when a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach “intelligent design” in biology class.
In a 139-page decision that was scathing about the area school district and dismissive of the science of “intelligent design”, US district judge John Jones III ruled that the school district of Dover, Pennsylvania, had violated the constitution by ordering teachers to read a statement which challenged Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Yesterday’s verdict concludes a trial that was seen as the most important legal review of science and religion since the 1920s. It arrives at a time when the teaching of evolution is under attack in school districts from Georgia to Kansas and when the school district in Dover was seen as the cutting edge of a new effort by the religious right to inject its views into America’s state school system.
Needless to say, the ID nutters are not deterred. This one will run and run, but the careful nature of the judgment suggests to me that they are on a hiding to nothing. The US may currently be run by religious maniacs, but the Constititution firmly separates religion and state and I can’t see even a Bush-packed Supreme Court changing that.
We must always be grateful for them. For example, this report in the Guardian.
Monaco has declared Sir Mark Thatcher persona non grata because Prince Albert wants to shake off its reputation as a haven for shady businessmen.
Margaret Thatcher’s 52-year-old son has fallen victim to the attempts by the mini-state’s authorities to put “ethics at the centre of life” there and has been asked to leave when his temporary residency card expires in just over six months’ time.The decision has dashed Sir Mark’s hopes of settling permanently in Monaco. It is the result of a determined effort by the recently enthroned Prince Albert to clean up the principality’s reputation.
Sir Mark is said to be on a list of undesirables who include money launderers, tax dodgers, drug dealers and the mafia.
Hmmm… If I were a money launderer, drug dealer or mafia boss I would be contemplating suing for defamation on the grounds that one’s reputation would never recover from being publicly associated with Thatcher fils. In the meantime, given that he has been refused permission to settle in the US, he will just have to live in the UK and pay tax like the rest of us.
You can? I don’t believe you, I’m afraid. Just visit dontclick.it to see how difficult it is not to click. Thanks to Pete for the link. (Er, you need a Flash-enabled browser to play, btw.)
Truly, Doug Engelbart has a lot to answer for.
From The Register…
Hackers have developed a sneaky technique for installing pirated movie files on Windows PCs infected with the lockx.exe rootkit. Doctored copies of BitTorrent are loaded on infected machines and used to download Disney movies or the film version of Mr. Bean.
The motive for the bizarre (and short-lived) attack, linked to a Middle East-based group in control of the network of infected machines – remains unclear. FaceTime Communications, the firm which uncovered the attack, reckons the assault is an experiment which might be applied to far more malign purposes in future. The trick creates a scenario where an infected users might be accused of sharing copyright-protected contact without ever using file sharing software.
Tut, tut. A useful way of blackmailing someone, though. Another reason for avoiding Windows boxes.
We’ve learned a valuable lesson, I hope, from the music industry: if somebody doesn’t give people what they’re looking for, then someone else will fill that void. If I hear a song on the radio, they don’t say, “Oh, and in four months you can buy the CD.” Right? They say, “Hey, download it to your iPod today!”
Todd Wagner, CEO of 2929 Entertainment, the company (cofounded by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban) that’s experimenting with the “simultaneous release” program for movies. From an interview with David Pogue of the New York Times.
The kids and I went on the London Eye today. This was the view from the top, looking towards Westminster Bridge. It was very hazy, and difficult to shoot through the glass of the capsule.