Sarah has relaunched souldrift.net as a more general blog, although all her old music posts are included. Looks promising, with a thoughtful article on feminism as a start.
Disclosure: Sarah published a short review of Interpol’s “Our Love to Admire” written by me.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | U2 manager ‘wants end to piracy’
In particular, this manager is keen to see the ISP’s pay money to the artists.
If you were a magazine advertising stolen cars, handling the money for stolen cars and seeing to the delivery of stolen cars, the police would soon be at your door
Is it me, or is this completely the wrong analogy? Surely the correct analogy is a council which provide and build roads, or someone who builds a garage. The fact that roads and garages are used by stolen cars doesn’t mean you should sue or even prosecute the people responsible for the roads and garages.
Paul McGuinness has at least partly blamed the record companies. He blames them for the wrong thing, but at least he blames them. Further, he’s actually standing up for the artists, although he might want to start with the contracts that the artists get with the record labels in the first place.
Any thoughts on whether he’s got it right?
I just went out for one of my occasional walks around the campus with my camera, but it was fairly abruptly halted by two security officers.
You can probably see where this is going.
Apparently I need a media pass to take photos or they could fine me if it was reported. They said they wouldn’t report it (thankfully), but I couldn’t take any more photos, since they could give a good idea of the layout to a terrorist. I’m not annoyed with the security folks - they were reasonable and just doing their jobs. But… hooray for institutional bureaucracy!
To misquote the good doctor: If you ever came up with the idea of a media pass, go and donate some money to charity because you are karmically unbalanced.
The university publishes maps of the campus on their website. Need I say more?
Update: Very confusing. I just received an e-mail which stated:
You don’t need a media pass to take photographs on campus, if you’re in a public area and they’re not being taken for commercial gain.
Apparently security think otherwise. I will be printing off a copy of this e-mail and carrying it with me when I go to take photos. I’ll let you know if anything happens.
Update 2: Much better suggestion from Dad - go to the security office and ask rather than waiting for another encounter. I’ll try and get this done tomorrow and let you know the result.
Update 3: Apparently the guards were wrong. The security office wrote down a name on the printed-out e-mail and said that if I was stopped again I was told to say I had seen that person, and it would all be fine. Odd system.
Goodbye Mr Tangerine-Man. You will be missed, in particular with regards to your single-minded mission to destroy your own party and the hilarity that ensues.
cunningtitle suggests a slot as the voice on Celebrity Big Brother.
last.fm has announced a new feature whereby you can listen to any track the whole way through up to three times for free.
last.fm team - you legends.
Long-term readers of cunningtitle (from before the move from .co.uk to .com) may recall a small category of posts labelled HainWatch, since Mr. Tangerine-Man is something of a celebrity for this site after effectively (and fancifully) saying:
I think Guantanamo Bay should close, and the Prime Minister agrees with me [For reference, NOT a direct quote]
Unfortunately it looks like Mr. Hain’s internal demolition of the Labour Party may soon come to an end after an undeclared donation.
This morning one of the BBC’s leading stories was the George Osborne had failed to declare nearly half-a-million pounds to the Commons. To be fair to him, the Commons officials had told him he didn’t need to, but it was clearly being dug-out as an effort to deflect the blame of Peter Hain.
Only it obviously hasn’t worked.
It’s 2:15pm, and now the BBC has replaced the story with another entitled “Cameron warns Hain over donations“. The story about Osborne has been relegated to a few paragraphs at the bottom of this article, and blamed squarely on the Mail on Sunday.
My best guess as to why this change has happened is that the BBC has decided the story is unspinnable, and have just decided to give-up and continue the attacks on Our Orange Friend. It might have something to do with Cameron’s fairly solid defence of Osborne on Andrew Marr, or maybe they’ve just given up hope.
And to those who would say that if he doesn’t declare donations he isn’t doing his job properly, I would point out that breaking rules and mucking things up is Peter Hain’s job. And he is doing it very well too.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Pandora to cut off UK listeners
Once again, congratulations must go to the British music industry for successfully screwing-over (sorry, there’s no politer phrase) the consumers.
In the e-mail sent to all those reaching Pandora via a UK net address, Mr Westergren said efforts to negotiate an “economically workable license fee” had proved “impossible”.
The rates demanded per track by UK licensing authorities were too high to support, he wrote.
Wow. That’s a new one. The music industry (by which, like everyone else, I mean everyone except the artists who get paid very little) trying to squeeze so much money out of people that they give up and nobody can listen.
Get your act together. You’re selling to people something which they enjoy and provokes emotions, not office equipment. They want music, the artists want to give them music. Let them without thinking about your wallet for once.
[As a side note, Rob is a great supporter of last.fm, whose free radio let him discover Interpol and Death Cab for Cutie, both of which he has subsequently bought albums of.]
Many thanks to Mike (@Mike - is this URL current?) for pointing out the Mac app Genius to me.
Genius is freeware (donations accepted) to help you learn things. You pair answers and questions and then plough through them. It is very useful for learning commercial law cases, as I am doing now (what fun).
Walk into my room at the moment and you will find a few new bits’n'pieces: a heater that makes beeping sound not unlike a microwave (appropriate since it will happily cook the room quite quickly), strewn-about bits of paper detailing exactly how direct effect in the EU works (or doesn’t), but most crucially, a shiny new MacBook, dusted to within an inch of its life.
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