You know, the thing with blogging, is it’s all about just remembering to blog - clearly I’ve remembered that today.
So just a quick one (via the CC Blog). An bunch of Australian Film makers have produced a film, Insecurity. Which I’m yet to watch but I’m sure is fantastic.
But the great think about it is that it’s CC licensed and free for you to download (can you see the blank look in Hollywood’s eyes can’t you, “for free?”).
I really enjoy stories like Eric Lee’s as they mirror my really positive experience with Linux. Like me, Eric is a Unionist and runs the fantastic website, Labour Start - a site that should be in the bookmarks or RSS feeds of every unionist.
Anyway, have a read of his experience with Ubuntu after one year of using it (I’m not sure how long I’ve been using Ubuntu but I started with LTS 6.06):
As I discovered entirely by accident, today marks the end of my first year using Linux.When I began, I wrote a number of updates for my blog with titles like ‘Linux: the first nine days’ or ‘Day Eleven: The experiment continues’. I think I was amazed that it could go on like that, day after day.
There were probably two reasons for my own surprise at how well it has gone.
First, I’d had a bad experience using Linux in 2002. And second, I hardly knew anyone who used Linux on their desktops. (I still don’t know of a single trade union anywhere that has moved over to open source — unfortunately.)
After one year using Linux, I can say with confidence that I’m never going back to Windows.
Chris Bowers, over at Open Left is running an interesting anti-McCain campaign. He’s trying to get people to link to 9 articles on McCain in order to boost them in Google’s rankings.
The aim is as follows:
Searching for John McCain is a massive, online activism campaign designed to make at least ten million non-partisan, poll-tested, on-message voter contacts that reveal the damning truth about John McCain entirely through mainstream news reports and McCain’s own words.
Doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. Some have accused it of being a little unethical but as Bowers himself says:
Obviously, it is manipulating, but search engines are not public forums and unless you act to use them for your own benefit, your opponent’s information is going to get out there
So here’s my bit:
There’s been a lot of talk about fuel prices at the moment with the opposition winning voter approval (it would seem) over it’s plans to reduce the fuel excise levy buy 5c a litre. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, the opposition seems to have finally realised that it is just that, an opposition, so a few members have even touted a 10c to 20c reduction… providing they can cost it of course.
There is the over arching feeling for me though, that in the context of climate change, it’s almost a relief to be paying more as we get closer the real cost of this fuel.
I heard Tim Flannery speak at the Communities in Control conference last week. Flannery made the point that a blanket reduction in the fuel excise is obscene. Because at the root of all these issues is the issue of equity. If you reduce the fuel excise you give everyone a tax cut, whether they are unemployed or millionaires. Where’s the equity in that?
But the elephant in the room is surely peak oil. It’s something I’ve kept my eye on since watching the film, A Crude Awakening.
What triggered this thought is these two BBC reports. The first one is interesting simply because of how vastly different the coverage is to the coverage we’ve been receiving in our local media. It actually talks about OPEC and it’s comments on Nigera are fascinating. Something I hadn’t about (although I must confess to be consuming a little less news at the moment for a variety of reasons).
Prices were also kept high by news that Nigerian oil fields operated by Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell remained shut after they were attacked last week.The attack on Shell’s installation at Bonga, 120km (75 miles) out to sea, was the first time militants had struck at an offshore oil site, and the move cut a 10th of Nigerian oil production in one go.
This is something I’ll have to look into further but it sounds like a health dose of “get out of my country corporate pig dog” - a sentiment I can sympathise with.
The second report is an explanation of why prices are so high. It rightly points out that we don’t have a clue. But what is not discussed is the energy return on investment. Even if Oil hasn’t peaked, extraction of oil is getting harder and increasing the amount of energy required to extract it. This forces the price up. Everything I read seems to assume that it is just as easy to extract oil as it has been. But the days of enormous Oil wells is over. I suspect Oil has peaked.
If you’re interested in keeping up with the issue of Peak Oil I recommend the web site Life After the Oil Crash.
Update: and just like that the latest edition to my RSS feeds fills the gap I said I wanted filled earlier in this post. Over at Jeff Vail’s Rhizome we have Nigeria - Significance of the Bonga Attack.
It’s not a new argument but an important one. Read it here.
How relevant is it to declare oneself to be “for” or “against” copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), to be tabled at next month’s G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the “Pirate Bay killer” that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.
I’ve been out on the streets 4 or 5 times protesting the Iraq war.
I supported calls for a complete withdrawal of troops at all stages over the last five years and three months.
So I was relieved to read the front page of the paper today.
Finally, Australian combatant troops are being withdrawn. The fact that it is only 500 troops makes the move largely symbolic but that’s fine with me. It means that a lot of families will be reunited, and sends the clear message that this is an unjust and winnable war. I guess we just have to hold out for Obama to be elected before it’s really over.
Somehow it seems like an anti-climax.
However, what is more important here is that this is the result of Australian’s voting for change at the end of last year. I don’t think Rudd is our savior, but he was elected on the basis of people feeling a need for change. And we seem to be getting it, albeit in a largely symbolic sense so far (it troop withdrawal, apology to Stolen Generation etc).
…now let’s do a LOT more about climate change Mr Rudd.
(via Slashdot):
“The Obama campaign’s CTO is hiring LAMP-biased geeks for the Boston office to help elect the Senator in the fall. This got me to wondering, what if he instead announced a SourceForge project toward the same end? What would such a project look like? Tools that both sides could use ‘equally’ would not achieve the desired end. And philosophically, could the Open Source community support one side in a competition such as this? What other issues does this raise?”
I’ve often thought that if we had a mutli-million dollar foundation behind the Centre (rather than a handful of very attractive members) that we could hire a Linux developer to develop Linux-based tools for activists and add our little bit to the open source community.
This isn’t far off that and really quite an exciting development.
As for giving the opposition access to these tools - would that be a bad thing?
There is no doubt in my mind that Bill Henson’s latest exhibition which has lead to allegations of child pornography is art, and quite good art at that. It’s little wonder that Australia is such a Nanny State when the police have to intervene to prevent the opening of a show at a gallery.
Anyway, there are people that know about this sort of thing a lot better than me - the Creative Australia 2020 Summit representatives.
They are quoted in Crikey today:
As members of the Creative Stream of the Australia 2020 Summit, we wish to express our dismay at the police raid on Bill Henson’s recent Sydney exhibition, the allegations that he is a child pornographer, and the subsequent reports that he and others may be charged with obscenity.The potential prosecution of one of our most respected artists is no way to build a Creative Australia, and does untold damage to our cultural reputation.
The public debate prompted by the Henson exhibition is welcome and important. We need to discuss the ethics of art and the issues that it raises. That is one of the things art is for: it is valuable because it gives rise to such debate and difference, because it raises difficult, sometimes unanswerable, questions about who we are, as individuals and as members of society. However, this on-going discussion, which is crucial to the healthy functioning of our democracy, cannot take place in a court of law.
We invite the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, and the NSW Premier, Mr Iemma, to rethink their public comments about Mr Henson’s work. We understand that they were made in the context of deep community concern about the sexual exploitation of children. We understand and respect also that they have every right to their personal opinions. However, as political leaders they are influential in forming public opinion, and we believe their words should be well considered.
We also call on the Minister for Environment Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, to stand up for artists against a trend of encroaching censorship which has recently resulted in the closure of this and other exhibitions.
We wish to make absolutely clear that none of us endorses, in any way, the abuse of children. Mr Henson’s work has nothing to do with child pornography and, according to the judgment of some of the most respected curators and critics in the world, it is certainly art.
Read the rest of it - it’s worth while.
Van Thanh Rudd’s piece Special Forces (After Banksy) has been pulled from the Ho Chi Minh City Young Artists Exhibition put on by the City of Melbourne because they found it offensive. I’m not going to comment on it’s worth as a piece of art, that’s for art critics and the City of Melbourne to decide.
What alarms me is this: “Legal assessment had also indicated it might infringe trademark and copyright provisions”
So copyright law, laws that are designed to protect people’s creative outputs, once again stifles creativity in favour of a multinational corporation.
How can this be a good thing?
I thought this article was worth a read.
When the industry finally capitulates and realizes that they can no longer charge a meaningful amount of money for digital recorded music, a lot of good things can happen.First, other revenue sources can and will be exploited, particularly live music, merchandise and limited edition physical copies of music. The signs are already there - the live music industry is booming this year, and Radiohead is releasing a special edition box set of their new album for £40.00 simultaneous to the release of their “free” digital album.
Second, artists and labels will stop thinking of digital music as a source of revenue and start thinking about it as a way to market their real products. Users will be encouraged (even paid, as radio stations are today) to download, listen to and share music. Passionate users who download music from the Internet and share it with others will become the most important customers, not targets for ridiculous lawsuits.
The price of music will likely not fall in the near term to absolutely zero. Charging any price at all requires the use of credit cards and their minimum fees of $0.20 or more per transaction, for example. And services like iTunes and Amazon can continue to charge something for quality of service. With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus. Or a poor quality copy. Many users will be willing to pay to avoid those hassles. But as long as BitTorrent exists, or simple music search engines like Skreemr allow users to find and download virtually any song in seconds, they won’t be able to charge much.
