Archive for August, 2009:
Written on August 25th, 2009 by adminno shouts
Once again we see an unelected member of the government putting the interests of big business before the interests of the electorate.
Peter Mandelson, the unelected business secretary of the government, apparently spent some time with record label founder David Geffen whilst on holiday recently. Coincidentally he has now announced that the government is to be much tougher on illegal file sharers and will require ISP’s to police what their customers are doing online and cut them off if they are found to be illegally sharing music files and other copyright material.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills deny their is any connection. Well, they would say that wouldn’t they. No person with any brain at all would not see some sort of connection there whether it was requested, implied or simply hinted at it is to much of a coincidence not to think there is some sort of connection.
More to the point is the fact that someone who has not been elected is making decisions that affect everyone. Quite how that fits with a democracy is open to question so we have a Prime Minister who never gave the public an opportunity to vote for him as Prime Minister appointing people who have not been elected who then decide what we can and cannot do and all this following a meeting with someone who would like those decisions to be taken because it suits their business. It stinks and doesn’t sound like democracy to me.
Just to be clear on my position on the matter of illegal downloading of copyright material. I think it is wrong but I think the system is wrong too. When we hear music on the radio it is, to all intents and purposes, free for us to hear. Music on the internet should be the same and if they want to use advertising to pay for the licencing costs so be it. They would probably make more money selling an advert for every play than they do from selling a song.
There is a lot of nonesense talked about how much the music industry loses due to piracy. I am sure they do lose out significantly but to suggest that every download is a sale lost is complete rubbish. That is like saying that if I didn’t hear some music on the radio I would buy it and that is simply not true.
Right now I am more concerned about the loss of democracy than I am about the loss of revenue for music publishers.
Written on August 19th, 2009 by adminno shouts
If you happen to find yourself in the Oxford area and in a hurry to get to London you might just think it would we worth catching a plane. Oxford is apparently 60 miles from London and in a lot of places in the world a hop like that would be worth catching a plane.
Incidentally I remember hearing that up in Scotland you can catch a plane from one Island to another where the plane barely gets in the air before it starts preparing to land on the next Island.
So there we are in Oxford wanting to fly to London so we go to the ticket desk and ask for a flight and the result is?…..
The ticket clerk tells you that you have arrived. Yes you are at Oxford airport. Yes Oxford airport is sixty miles away from London but they have recently renamed it to London-Oxford airport. Can you believe the audacity of the people who came up with this idea?
Are they stupid to think they can get away with this or are we so stupid that the idea of getting people to fly to Oxford when they want to get to London, might actually work.
I guess they are only pushing the boundaries back a bit. After all we have stansted airport as an official London airport and that is about 34 miles from London which is a fair distance but sixty miles seems a lot to me. I guess the parking might be cheaper at Oxford since parking at stansted airport is expensive.
Maybe the best solution is to park at Oxford airport and hitch a ride to London. I remember they had a very good park and ride scheme when I was last there a few years ago. Maybe they will do one to central London.
I can see a trend starting to develop here and it is only a matter of time before we hear that Liverpool airport has been renamed Sydney-Liverpool airport. After all, it’s only a 24 hour flight away and that is almost next door.
Oxford is a local airport for Oxford. They should be proud of that. Oxford is a fascinating city well worth visiting for what it offers. They don’t need to pretend they are part of London. Many would say that they are better than London anyway so why do it? No doubt it all comes down to money and profits. The money-men are once again doing what they do best and destroying something good. A local airport for the benefit of local people and the local city.
Written on August 17th, 2009 by adminno shouts
It will come as no surprise to many that some research into the use of twitter has found that a large proportion og tweets are complete rubbish.
The research and analysis group Pear Analytics has found in their report that more than 40% of tweets were what they described as ‘babble’ i.e. pointless messages of little interest to anyone. Conversational tweets between friends came to just over 37% and it would seem that people do use the service as an instant messenger to contact friends.
The percentage of what could be described as interesting news that you might want to share with the rest of the world came out at 8.7% so it would seem that some people do use the service to spread interesting news, a lot more people chat to friends but the largest section is simply junk but I think we would have thought that anyway.
It would be interesting to compare these figures with phone conversations. I wonder if they wouldn’t have similar figures.
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