http://30gms.com/index.php?/permalink/beard_moustache_white_trainers/

This is disgusting. I too have a beard, moustache and wear white trainers. My hair was quite a bit longer up until a month or so ago. But I’ve haven’t been stopped recently. Is it because I have white skin and blue eyes?

The irony is that this guy is working on a site for the Home Office that deals directly with this. I wonder how he can go on working on it with a clear conscience after this has happened to him.

Are you familiar with NAIS? Let me give you a little background. The USDA wants to register the GPS coordinates, name, address, phone, and other data on every farm, home, and other location that has even has a single animal, with a government Premise ID. For this privilege of mandatory registration, you will pay a fee of $10 or more, per year. Next, they intend to tag every single one of your animals with a RFID, or other tag. This will be mandatory. In addition to paying an annual fee and paying for tags for all of your animals, you would also be required to log, track, and report all “events,” such as the birth of an animal, death of an animal, animals leaving, or entering your property. All reports must be made within 24 hours, or you could face stiff fines. Do not expect them to keep your private information secure. In a little “Oops,” the USDA just released the social security numbers of 350,000 farmers.

Big producers, like factory farms, get to use a single batch ID for tens of thousands of animals,to keep their costs down. For them, NAIS is a minor bookkeeping entry that gives them big profits in the export markets to Japan and other countries. Small farmers and homesteaders, with their mixed-age flocks and herds, would be required to tag and track every single individual animal. NAIS is great for big corporate producers, and hellish for small farmers and homesteaders. The cost of NAIS in fees, tags, equipment costs, and time will bankrupt small farmers, and overwhelm people who raise their own food animals. In the end, the consumer will pay – NAIS could add almost a thousand dollars a year to the annual food budget for the typical family of four. By destroying small producers, NAIS will kill the Slow Food and the Buy Local movements, as local farmers are driven out of business.

NAIS is already mandatory in some states, starting this year, including Texas and Wisconsin. In other states, like Vermont, the agricultural commissioner and state vet have said they will tag and track every animal, right down to the back yard level. This means everyone, even Granny with her one laying hen, is going to have to get a $10 per year premise ID, a RFID tag for her chicken, and make government reports on its movements. Texas has implemented a $1,000 per incident per day, fine for non-compliance. What small farmer or homesteader can stand up to that kind of fire power? […]

USDA agents can come to your home, and kill all of your livestock, without a warrant or any legal appeal under NAIS. Once you are registered into the mandatory NAIS system, you effectively lose your rights to your own livestock. You become a serf for the state, worse than in Communist Russia. If you do not believe me, then please go to the USDA web site, and read the draft proposal for NAIS, which is already being implemented in stages, without public feedback or scrutiny. Check out the timeline – we all must start fighting it now, before it is too late. Together, we can stop this fascist move to take away our property and livelihoods. We can still protect our traditional rights to farm, if we act now. […]

Justice William O. Douglas,
U.S. Supreme Court (1939-75)
http://www.eco.freedom.org/el/20060301/walterjefferies.shtml

They have some real problems going on over there don’t they?

American’s wont’t accept a state issued national ID card, so the corporations who are set to fleece every sheepish supjecte have arranged to tag every animal in the USA.

Also, since only 23% of people have passports, they can’t pull the same ‘its not compulsory compulsion’ trick that they are trying here; 80% have passports in the UK, and so the ‘sheering point’ is more accessible.

Animal, Man, its all wool right?

Charles Clarke: Hog-wild UK regime liar

Charles Clarke, the porcine liar and doublespeaking attack-swine, paid off to impliment the scorched-Earth, Orwellian society-rewriting policies of that other infamous fabricator Blair, again displays his true bacon-flavoured colours, this time in assaulting the father of 7/7 victim who dared to actually ask the tinpot regime for an official inquiry into the events of last July that injured his daughter.

Clarke’s distressed and desperate response of “You’re insulting me. Go away. I don’t need to be insulted by you” is of course highly reflective of his disposition and why he’s in the job to begin with.

Underneath those bristly flapping jowls that deliver so many appalling lies is a prissy sissy little ego loyal to his sociopathic regime master.

Of course he had to apologise for snorting this out, and indeed one has to speculate very sincerely, at quite why the regime is so sensitive, petrified and desperate to avoid a full public inquiry into the ‘worst act of terrorism on British soil’, but are more than happy to grandstand off it’s results and use their version as a rationale for delivering their Earth-shattering philosophy of tyranny and enslavement. […]

http://jultra.blogspot.com/

Oh yes!!!

What with all the controversy about occult loans to the labour party leading to nominations for peerages it has been suggested by some quarters that there should be consideration of taxpayers fnding political parties (Bliar and Prescott it seems)

This is entirely the wrong solution and if polls are to be believed thankfully 73% of the country are ‘against’ such moves. Although given that 80% didn’t vote for labour politicians at the election Bliar will probably view this as an ‘overwhelming mandate for reform’.

Firstly the current scandal is not that political parties are receiving large, private donations; it is that these loans are being used by the political parties to cover up their funding and for the government to be perceived to be using loans as a tool of patronage – to repeaat in neither case is the act of receiving private funding a problem and it is not this aspect that requires attention.

Secondly political parties are not required for a (true) parliamentary democracy to exist, the fact that independent members and members of very marginal parties have been elected to parliament show that it is not necessary to have the support of a large party to be elected. Of course parties make easier to identify what sort of promises will be broken by each MP and in any case we are talking about funding and not the abolition of politival parties (now!).

Thirdly if by some tragedy tax funding of politics were to be extended many of the activities that political parties currently undertake such as (commissioning think tank) reports and policy studies could be organised ‘independently’ by Select Commitees rather than political parties, that way we could possibly get less partial findings and avoid replication of spending.

[…]

Prominent people with views that were considered to be associated with Communism, such as Paul Robeson, were once prevented from travelling abroad by the U.S. government. W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the NAACP, was accused of pro-Communist sympathies and denied a U.S. passport. He renounced U.S. citizenship afterwards. However, the U.S. Supreme Court held in the 1958 case Kent v. Dulles that international travel was an inherent right which could not be denied to American citizens. The US government has two primary methods to get around this ruling though. The first is to declare US passports illegal (or “invalid”) to use for travel into or through a particular country by US citizens without special permission. The second is to ban US citizens from spending any money related to travel into a particular country without special permission. Sometimes the two are combined to make it effectively impossible for everyday US citizens to exercise their rights established in Kent v. Dulles to travel abroad freely. The US government can get away with this because the two methods are not technically travel bans since it’s only a ban on using a passport or spending money. Even so, the US State Department still has the right to screen people before issuing a passport and to revoke a passport.

As mentioned before, at various times, US passports have been issued with a list of countries or regions to which the holder is forbidden to travel using the passport without special permission. These countries have previously included Albania, Cuba, People’s Republic of China, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya (removed in 2004), North Korea and Vietnam. In 1957 China protested their inclusion in this list and successfully campaigned for its removal. The US State Department oversees these restrictions, and will implement them usually in response to what they perceive to be clear and present dangers to Americans travelling in the aforementioned countries. Despite this, it is alleged that politics appears to be the actual motivation, as US citizens who have defied passport restrictions and gone to such countries sometimes report no danger whatsoever. When the US State Department bans passports from being used to travel to a certain country, it will usually state in the passport or on government websites that the US passport is “invalid” for travel to the particular country. To legally use a passport for travel to such a country, one must obtain a special endorsement or “validation” from the US State Department. Such exceptions to the passport travel bans are usually given to International Red Cross workers on a sponsored mission, those visiting family in such countries or those whose travel “is in the national interest.” Travellers that choose to ignore the restrictions try to do their best not to get their passport stamped or keep any receipts indicating travel to such a country. As of March 2006, US passports are valid for travel to all countries in the world. Although US citizens are no longer banned from using their passports to travel to Cuba, because of U.S. Treasury Department restrictions on U.S. citizens who visit Cuba, that country will similarly not stamp a passport, as it is now against Cuban law to stamp American passports. Thousands of Americans defy this de facto travel ban by going through third countries like Mexico, Jamaica, or the Dominican Republic. US pre-clerance customs agents sometimes catch and report US citizens getting off Cuban planes in Canada and the Bahamas. They then run the risk of being fined by the US government upon return to the United States. As of March 2006, Cuba is the only country that the US government officially restricts its citizens from visiting.

23% of Americans in 2005 have a passport. Unlike most other parts of the world where one needs a passport just to travel 3 hours in the same direction, Americans can travel passport-free within a landmass roughly twice the size of Europe and a passport is not required to travel to Canada or Mexico. Nor do American citizens require a passport to return to the United States from locations in the Western Hemisphere. However, according to a new law, a passport will become necessary in order to return to the U.S. from these locations by air or ship by the end of 2006 and for entry via land border crossings by the end of 2007. In the meantime, for American citizens returning from locations in the Western Hemisphere, a US birth certificate or sometimes even a US driver’s license often is enough.

[…]

The British Monarch

The British Monarch, who is also the monarch of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera, does not carry any passport, and this is not because of her status as the sovereign of more than one country. The real rationale is that, in a monarchy, passports are issued in the name of the monarch to her subjects, asking foreign governments to grant the passport holders free passage, assistance, and protection. Since the monarch cannot issue a passport to herself – and, in any case, she can personally ask foreign governments for her own free passage, assistance, and protection – she does not carry any passport. […]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport

Does this mean that Her Majesty will be exempt from getting an ID card? If she doesn’t hold a passport, that means that she will never be compelled to be entered into the NIR.

Hmmmm!!!

Here are just a few Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 allows the government to seize and control the communication media.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.

* EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.

[…]

http://educate-yourself.org/nwo/FEMAsecretgovt1995.shtml

http://www.flickr.com/photos/——-/ 

BBC Online

Monday, 13 March 2006, 20:57 GMT

Oyster data is ‘new police tool’

Police are increasingly turning to Oyster travel cards to track criminals’ movements, according to new figures.

The smartcards, used by five million Londoners, record details of each bus, Tube or train journey made by the holder over the previous eight weeks.

In January, police requested journey information 61 times, compared with just seven times in the whole of 2004.

The Metropolitan Police said it was a “straightforward investigative tool” used on a case-by-case basis… […]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4800490.stm

This sounds entirely reasonable, except when you take a close look at the facts.

Oyster doesn’t need to record eight weeks of your journeys in order to do the job it has to do; charge you for using public transport.

Unless of course it has been designed to track you.

All they need to store is how much money you have left on your card, so that when it is swiped, you can be debited and let on the bus or underground. A clean, non orwellian system could do this, and would actually cost them less to run since they would not be storing up all those journey details and making infrastructure available to others to provide access to the data.

And as for ‘case by case basis’ in the MSQL era, case by case means looking at every journey with a search query, or looking at swipes in real time, as they are done, one by one, case by case.

Amazingly, they have not yet put cameras on every Oyster swipe point. Imagine that every time you tap to get on a bus, a camera stuck on top of the reader inside the drivers cabin, takes a photo of you. This would render anonymous Oysters useless, since your face would be linked to the number of your card.

Maybe a feature for ‘Oyster 2.0’.

Oyster is no “straightforward investigative tool”. Surveillance on this scale has never been possible before, and in the past, if you wanted to do it, you needed explicit permission and a real reason to follow someone as they went about their daily business…it used to be called ‘putting a tail on someone’.

Looking into the future, Oyster is going to allow you to buy newspapers and stuff whereever there is n Oyster terminal. They have five million users; a huge userbase to turn loose on the shops of London. They will of course, record all of those transactions as well. The problem is not that they can and will do this; the real problem comes when this is the only way that you can buy and sell anything anywhere.

A state issued currency card, that can be filled up from your bank account, or from other cards via a simple two slot terminal similar to those Chip and Pin machines that are now everywhere, will spell the end of financial privacy. The system operators (the Bank of England) will keep a record of every transaction you make. Barter and any type of trade that excludes money will be made illegal, since they will be ‘off system’. Don’t think this can happen? The outlawing of all other forms of currency in favour of the state currency has already been done at least once; in Las Vegas, people used to use casino chips to buy anything. These chips were all redeemable for cash at the issuing casino so they were as good as money for all purposes. When this chip economy got huge, it was outlawed because private transactions began to dissapear into the invisible chip economy. The response will be the same if a state issued currency card comes into being.

Michael Geist reports that the Alberta government has proposed legislation that blocks the US Patriot act:

The Alberta government last week introduced Bill 20, which is designed to stop compelled disclosures of personal information under the USA Patriot Act. The bill creates fines of up to $500,000 for violating provincial laws governing disclosure of records. The fines arise for violation of the following provision:

“A person must not wilfully disclose personal information to which this Act applies pursuant to a subpoena, warrant or order issued or made by a court, person or body having no jurisdiction in Alberta to compel the production of information or pursuant to a rule of court that is not binding in Alberta.”

With B.C. and Alberta leading the way on this issue, the pressure for action at the federal level should continue to grow.

The link to the Bill will provide more detail. This current Alberta government is interesting as it has always had a perplexing stance on privacy laws. While it writes bills to improve privacy and protection of information for every citizen of the province, Premier Klein has also made a new bureaucratic (new as in the last decade) office solely directed towards the purpose of limiting the public’s access to the goings-on of the provincial government (of course it’s not advertised as such but just TRY to get some information Klein doesn’t want you to get). Quite an interesting paradox because that information is NOT private is belongs to every citizen of the province, including myself.

Also interesting about this rather progressive legislation is that on the other hand, the AB Government’s health care legislation is completely REgressive, aiming to replace our public medicare with US-style profit-based health insurance (the talking heads deny this, but we KNOW it to be true).

Off-Topic, last night I saw the movie for “V for Vendetta,” which while being a watered down version of the great graphic novels, is still a good movie by it’s own right (even though Alan Moore’s name doesn’t appear in the credits, and despite a single innapropriate Wachowski-Brothers fight scene). It provides some great extrapolating of the current ID-and-Surveillance madness in Britain, especially a scene in which V uses Evey’s ID-card to commit a crime, thereby implicating her instead. The policemen on the case know that it’s unlikely she did it, but the government goes along with it because it’s not only easier, but they CAN. Don’t TELL me this wouldn’t happen in real life! Another great scenes involves a routine patrol van canvassing a neighborhood at night, listening to every phoneline and coversation they pass, monitoring and logging any cases of sedition or independant thought. That being said, the fascist National Front-esque government portrayed is still a bit soft compared to what WE know they are capable of.

PS: There maybe should be a category for Film?

I have listened to more of the Mystery Jets since my last post, and some of it not unpleasant, and some of it sounds like there is something there. But….

It sounds terrible.

Now when I say it sounds terrible, I mean that the MP3s sound terrible complared to other MP3s, and I do not mean that the MP3s have damaged the sound more than normal, but that the sound of the recordings is bad. It’s clear, even through the fog of MP3 compression that these recordings are not open; they are stilted, closed, clostrophobic, undynamic…bad. Wether this was done in the mastering or the multi-track sessions I cannot tell, but it’s bad.
Whoever produced the ‘album’ Making Dens (a ‘james ford’ aparently) failed to do the job right. John Leckie; now he always does it right. Believe it or not, Paul Oakenfold could have done it better…there are so many, the point is, without the art of studio recording at your fingertips, the tracks will never cut it, you will be able to tell its all wrong if you have the ears, so, why bother?

Just to reality check, I wipped (yes, ‘wipped’) out some recordings that are around twenty plus years old (as you can see from the playlist below) and the difference, even in the steamed up mirror of MP3 sound, is astonishing.

Still, they are on to something; mentoring. Making sure that you don’t fall into the endless traps that strapping on an electric guitar immediately opens you up to.

The best track so far? ‘Little Bag of Hair’, and by ‘best’ I mean…well, you KNOW what I mean.

What with the cold weather and assorted other things I’ve noticed if I’m not smiling (or on the positive side of neutral) when I’m wearing earphones the sound is much flatter and deadened. It must be because smiling pushes your ears out slightly and changes the resonant space in your ear slightly.
Maybe the ‘iPod effect’ is owners of new toys being happy whilst listening to their music and noticing the improvement in the sound. Maybe it’s not smugness after all, just satisfaction.

Talking of which I think African Head Charge’s ‘Hymn’ must be the happiest piece of music I’ve heard.

Yesterday, when I had a chance to read a free copy of The Independent newspaper I read about a new group called ‘The Mystery Jets’ whose catalogue I am sifting through right now.

I got down to ‘Ageless’ on the Eel Pie Island EP, when BANG: hey WAIT A MINUTE, I know that guitar intro….search search search…

Its LED ZEP, ‘The Rain Song’….. DIE DIE DIE!

The reason why I am mentioning this at all, is because this article said that the group is being mentored by an ‘old’ rockist. This is an interesting idea, get someone who should know better to control a young group, and maybe they wont be shitty. It looks like however, they are just plundering his knowledge and not using it as a ring fence to prevent them from stepping into and sining in the quicksand of pointles duplication.

That review, not that we needed to check at all, was totally innacurate….check it all out for yourself….

Jowell singsong
‘broke licensing laws’

Hélène Mulholland and agencies
Friday March 17, 2006

Tessa Jowell returned to the spotlight today for breaching a law she herself introduced as part of new legislation which MPs say was mishandled by her department.

The beleaguered culture secretary fell foul of regulations under the Licensing Act (2003) when she led an apparently innocent singsong to mark International Women’s Day on March 8.

The Licensing Act heralded a massive overhaul of the regulations for public entertainment and drinking, combining 10 separate licensing schemes into one regime.

Though the terms of the act require a licence for any musical performance in a Royal Park, Ms Jowell did not have one when she lead a rendition of The Truth Is Marching On in front of a statue of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens Royal Park near the Houses of Parliament.

The council’s attention was drawn to the minister’s breach by musician Hamish Burchill, who has campaigned against the act’s provisions on public entertainment.

Westminster city council’s cabinet member for licensing, Audrey Lewis, confirmed that Ms Jowell and her fellow singers had breached the law, but said no prosecution was likely for this first offence.

She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “Technically, to have a performance which was advertised of singing in a Royal Park, which is a premise under the terms of the new Licensing Act, is an offence, because it is not licensed.

“We would not, however, expect to prosecute because nobody has complained about it. It wasn’t a question of disorder breaking out or indeed public nuisance. Having said that, they have had a first offence and if they wanted to do this quite regularly, they would have a warning.” […]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1733278,00.html

The fact is, she is not being prosecuted because she is a minister. That being said, there is something moreinteresing about this story.

I have written before about there being too many laws; we will eventually reach a tipping point where there are so many new and absurd laws that parliamentarians are directly or indirectly affected. When that happens, (in a perfect world) there would be an immediate push for mass reapeal of all bad law. This can only happen when, for example, a ministers daughter cannot have music at her wedding because of some stupid statute.

As for tessa jowel, since we are commenting on a Guardian story, lets put the knife in, in a way that would be guaranteed to be erased from comment is free: What a stupid fucking bitch!

The Guardian has a new ‘group blog’ , called “comment is free”. Instant impressions:

• It is very Guardian-like
• It is very newspaper-like; Its editors pick what is to be given front page prominence (like they know better than the readers what is or is not interesting). That is so 2005/Slashdot. The users decide what is cool and what is not cool.
• It is not blog like
• Its stuck to the left
• It is set in three columns
• No user feedback, other than comments, ie no moderation of stories or comments or user tagging

Read the introduction:

Welcome to Comment is free, the first collective comment blog by a British newspaper website. It will incorporate all the regular Guardian and Observer main commentators, many blogging for the first time, who will be joined by a host of outside contributors – politicians, academics, writers, scientists, activists and of course existing bloggers to debate, argue and occasionally agree on the issues of the day.

Why are we launching it now? Because it’s obvious to us that our major competition for opinion and debate is moving online, and unless we move with it, we’re failing our journalists and future generations of readers. […]

Translation; everyone is getting their news from the blogosphere. They are reading our stories and then spinning them. We are losing influence. The Empire must strike back.

We need to expand and deepen the debate which takes place every day in our newspapers and for which we have an unrivalled reputation. We need to ensure that the Guardian and Observer remain at the heart of the liveliest liberal-left discourse (although we’ll continue our long tradition of carrying voices from across the political spectrum). How? Not only by doing so much more than we can in print, and much more immediately, but by putting our own writers where their real rivals are. Readers, too, need to be at the heart of the conversation, and much more engaged than print allows. […]

The debate is already deepened, thanks to the blogosphere. The fact that it has taken The Guardian so long to do this proves that brontosaurus media is on the way out. Now, had they cloned Digg, this would be an entirely different matter, they might have had their Jurrasic Park style second chance at life, but they did not, and they have missed the next phase of news aggregation, without good reason either. “Readers, too, need to be at the heart of the conversation” Un oh, dinosaur speak spilling out.

Comments will only be allowed with a valid e-mail address and registration, to try and keep the standard of the debate as high as possible.

Why? If the readers are to be at the heart of this mythical paleo babble “conversation” why should we obey this absurd command when we can set up our own blog in 5 minutes and then publish and be read? If everyone wants to read rants, let them, and if not, let the readers moderate themselvs. Editors no longer have a job; this is what the tectonic shift is all about, and its frighetening the shit out of these people.

Please tell us what you think. Post your comments below or email us at comment.is.free@guardian.co.uk.

or how about “post on your own blog and link to us” heh, of course not, because they are for centralized control of thought and agenda, the top of the pyramid being the grand poohbah editor. Posting to your own blog means accepting that other blogs are the equal of any Guardian Blog, diminishing their importance, which is happening quite nicely and naturally wether or not they like it.

Some of the comments on this post are interesting, the first saying “just what is your job Ms editor” the others saying that they dont like their location being attached to their names The editor, finally weighed in with an apology for not commenting on the comments with this amazing text:

Hello again – apologies for not coming back earlier to answer some of your points but it’s been a bit busy today.

Say what? You just launch a new blog, you are the ‘editor’ and you leave your keyboard while the comments are flooding in? You have to pay attention to your blog if you are going to rul0rz it, and to not be there in the first few hours, I mean, honestly, do you KNOW anything about what you are doing?

My role as editor. The central role, as with any editor, is to try and make the site the most lively, diverse, engaging, surprising comment site around.

You arent needed for that. Look at Digg. Be like Digg. Or die. The users make the site lively, they provide the diversity (which is not true diversity if there is a black crow school marm hovering over everyone making sure you dont say ‘Fuck’) they also provide the surprising comment. All of that has nothing to do with editors.

We (the team) will try and ensure that we have a broad range of opinion and that means doing some direct commissioning of particular people on particular subjects, while encouraging a wide range of contributors to blog as and when they want on whatever subject they want. I won’t be doing what I’ve spent my life as an editor on the paper doing – close copy editing and going back and forth to writers working with them to change their pieces, improve their pieces or think about arguments they haven’t thought about. The nature of the blog is that we will have to try and let go a bit and let peple say what they want within the bounds of libel and the constraints of our blogging guidelines.

Pointless. Either let go and destroy the death star, or be a newspaper, not some half assed hybrid snore-fest. We have everywhere else to read; why should we read anything with even the slightest bit of control imposed upon it?

Commenting on pieces taken from the paper: this is something we’ll introduce as soon as possible. It’s purely a technical issue, and we’re keen that everything that appears on the site can be commented on.

Computer illiterates!

Comments: yes, we’ll keep a close eye on these.

WHY? You are not responsible for the comments that users make, if you are legally in the UK, then you need to spin off the blogs to a company in another jurisdiction whose job it is to run the your free speech wing, insulating you from prosecution. You simply cannot do this in the blogosphere, because we will go and read something else, where people are totally free to express themselvs, on the exact same stories, even stories from your own newspaper. This is pretty basic.

We hope registration will help keep up the standard of the debate, but we’ll watch for the ususal libel issues or breaches of our talk policy code.

What a monumental waste of resources; indeed someone has already asked the question:

Does this mean we are finally going to be allowed to comment on the Jowell-Mills saga, or are you going to close down that debate like you did on the Newsblog?

And there you have it. It will be stillborn in terms of doing something really groundbreaking and worth a repeat visit.

Discussions with authors about their articles. I’m encouraging our contributors to re-blog on the reaction to their articles and comment on the comment. Some will, some won’t, and I’m not insisting on it.

‘I’m not insisting on it’. Brava!

‘re-blog’?? ‘conversations’?? ‘upper-positive plates‘??

When Digg launches its ‘other than tech news’ site, it will be very interesting to see how it gets taken up. I have to say that my first impressions of Newsvine were a little dampened. It is completely beautiful design wise, modern, fast etc, but I found that the blogs that people are wrting there interfere with my search for news.

I use blogs to read the facts about news, and for the most part I use news sites to collect the stories initially; bloggers dont have the resources to get many stories together in one place, and so in my mind, I keep these two resources separate; people with the means to gather thousands of stories, and people with a free reign to tell the absolute truth on any subject. Where these two liquids meet in an emulsion is where the interesting things are happening, and what I need is a tool to navigate that emulsion, like Digg.

Newsvine tries to mix oil and water; news sources and blog writers. There is no distinction between the two in that site, and so to me, it is a mess; ‘News Type: Opinion’ is an example of this mess. An opinion is not a news type. Opinions are opinions and news is news; oil is oil and water is water. Digg gets the balance just right, the users set the agenda, control what gets seen, can say whatever they like, and you get to read the news and the first line of cobweb sweeping comments all in one place. It is extremely simple to use, easy to look at and navigate, and fast to get what you need out of it. Newsvine, though beautiful, is a little labrynthine, the headlines are not given equal weght on each page (there is a big headline, and then lots of smaller – read less signifigant – ones, one story has a photo, and thes su stories do not).

It feels like its energy is spread out too much, wheras on Digg, the energy flows neatly down the page from headline to headline into the comments and back again. You can take it all in, and there is lots of it, and it seems like you never miss anything important, since all the tech sites repeat Digg stories after they have been dugg. This is crucial; I feel like I am keeping up to date when I read Digg, whereas with Newsvine, I feel like I am missing something, and the blogs there only reinforce that feeling, because they are taking up space that should be spent on news source fed articles.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The $100 laptop project seeks to provide inexpensive computers to people in developing countries. The computers lack many features found on a typical personal computer, such as a hard disk and software.

“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen,” Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.

“Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Before his critique, Gates showed off a new “ultra-mobile computer” which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.

Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week.

“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.

Gates described the computers as being for shared use, but the project goes under the name “One Laptop per Child.” A representative for the project did not immediately reply to an inquiry seeking comment.

Earlier this year, Google founder Larry Page said his company is backing MIT’s project. He showed a model of the machine that does use a crank as one source of power.

“The laptops … will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data,” according to the project’s Web site. […]

http://today.reuters.com/

Here we see the TRUE face of the ‘philanthropist’ Bill Gates. Here is a man worth billions, but who will not give money to this vital project, simply because they will not use his crippleware OS.

The kernel of true nature of generosity is sacrifice. Giving away money, even in the hundreds of millions is not a sacrifice for Bill Gates, no matter how useful that money is to the recipients.

A sacrifice for Gates would be for him to pump hundreds of millions into the GNU Foundation, to  put his legion of developers at work on bolstering Linux and Open Source – to actually give something away that matters to him, ie, domination of the worlds desktop operating systems.
Gates obviously doesn’t care a damn that millions of children will have internet access on these exxcellent computers, whose screens by the way, whilst being small, are much bigger than the screen of a GameBoy, which takes up the time of millions of children to no good end.

Applications cost nothing when they are licenced under the GPL. This is anathema to Bill Gates. If the price of every child on earth becoming not only literate but computer literate, would it not be an act of greatness, philanthropy, charity and sacrifice for Microsoft to support this project and the free software that is going to be run on it? Or would he rather that all those children remain illiterate, cut off and impoverished, all for the sake of transient market share?

I think the answer is pretty clear. Anyone who is against this project is against literacy, learning and impoverished children.

And that my friends, is pure evil.

And just to correct this article, the laptps will NOT be shipped “without software” , they will also not need a hard disc, since ultra reliable flash drives will do the job of storage, and finally, just what is ‘a huge amount of data’? The smallest flash drives can hold an entire dictionary; if this project can get a laptop into every child’s hands that has an OS, some networking tools and a dictionary, that would be a very cool thing indeed. And of course, when you can get online, the whole internet is your storage medium, so this statement is totally irrelevant to the utility of this device.

LastFM increases its coolness and raises the bar with charts you can make from your account to put into your site, like this:

pulled right from my profile, and available in many different flavours:

Cool-ness!