This is stupid. If you’re a DJ and you want to record all your stuff to your laptop and play a set off it you have to pay a £200 a year licence.

[royalty collection agency] PPL said many DJs wanted to play from laptops or MP3 players instead of records or CDs, despite the fact it was illegal without the permission of the rights owner.

Business affairs director Peter Leathem told Radio 1’s Newsbeat: “Rather than saying stop it, don’t do it, we’ve actually tried to embrace what people want to do and come up with a licence to be able to do that.”

Licensing ‘sting’

He said the £200 charge was “reasonable”, adding: “You don’t actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we’re saying that if it’s not worth your while spending £200 then don’t do it.”

What the fuck are they on about? If the DJ has bought the song on vinyl or CD to play it in public (and already paid for a public performance licence) then why do they have to pay again?

BoingBoing has more information. This is bloody stupid and just another sad attempt to wring money out of people.

Technorati tag: PPL, DJ

Probably built in a shed somewhere.

BAE Systems have unveiled the UK’s first stealth unmanned plane, called the Corax, (or the Raven).

I should be posting this to the UAV blog, but I’ve lost my password.

Technorati tag: UAV, BAE

www.crossroadsappreciationsociety.co.uk/

Technorati tag: Crossroads

I’ve decided to set myself a challenge. A single sided DVD-R holds about 4.4 gigabytes of data. I’m going to fill one with free music.

Not pirated music, but tracks that are being given away free by artists. I’m going to see how long it takes to fill the DVD. If anyone has any suggestions for sites, please leave them in the comments.

Technorati tag: Music, Free

A map has been found that adds further credence to the theory that China discovered the Americas long before Columbus. Here’s the review I wrote of 1421: The Year China Discovered the World-

What if Europeans weren’t the first outsiders to discover the Americas? Could some other great culture have come ashore in search of trade and materials?

Former Royal Navy submariner Gavin Menzies started pondering these questions whilst studying an old map. Turning his sailor’s eye to islands long considered fanciful or misplaced he began to see familiar shapes in their coastlines, matching them to islands in the western Atlantic supposedly undiscovered when the map was drafted. Further maps showed sections of coastline which had yet to be “discovered” by Columbus and his contemporaries. Digging into the legends of the great European explorers revealed whispered tales suggesting they had set out knowing exactly what they would find.

Where had these maps originated? Tracking their provenance, Menzies deduced that they were copies of documents drawn up by the chinese on great voyages that have since been forgotten, much first hand evidence destroyed.

In 1421 China was at the height of its power. Emperor Zhu Di, wishing to spread trade and extend influence, ordered a great fleet of junks to sail to all the corners of the Earth. There they would meet new peoples and trade Chinese silks and treasures for natural resources, diplomatic ties and strange creatures. The greatest empire known would, through bribery and awe, secure links with all the peoples of the world.

However, whilst the fleet was on its two year voyage, great changes took place in China. Disaster befell the royal palace and reduced Zhu Di to a shadow of his former self. The bureaucratic mandarins used this opportunity to wrest power from him and close the borders. When the remnants of the fleet straggled home their logs and maps were destroyed, leaving only secondary information and what had been garnered by other nationals who tagged along on the journey or were encountered on the way. And wrecks, treasures and genes spread across the globe to be found by a determined researcher.

Which is what Menzies proceeded to do, circling the globe and discovering ever more compelling evidence for Chinese landings in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand and the mapping of Antarctica and circumnavigation of Greenland. Presented as finding atop finding, with even more between the original book and this printing, it’s very convincing. It appears to be an accepted theory now, as I recently saw a documentary where modern travellers traced the path of Zheng He, the admiral leading the fleet.

If nothing else, this epic journey offers great scope for “what if?” stories. What if the Chinese had maintained contact with South American cultures? Imagine what would have happened if the Conquistadors had come up against Mayans with gunpowder. What if the great mythical cities in the US’ heartland were real?

Further information is being added to a dedicated website- www.1421.tv as more people read the book and find its thesis resonates with local myths and finds.

(Cultural Imperialism appendix: the US version of the book is subtitled “The year China discovered America” because everyone knows the rest of the world doesn’t matter.)

Also interesting- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

via Digg

Technorati tag: China, 1421, Book review

A step in the right direction from an oil hungry country. The Energy Policy Act allows tax credits worth up to $3,400 for hybrid owners. Other vehicles eligible for credits include fuel cell vehicles, alternative fuel vehicles, and hybrid heavy trucks.

via Digg

Technorati tag: Hybrid car, tax credit, USA

Just bookmarking this link so I can go back and download it when I get my new computer.

Technorati tag: CD, DVD

Take a tour through this meticulously constructed dolls house version of Frodo Baggins’ home.

via BoingBoing

Technorati tag: Dolls House, Lord of the Rings

The Guardian has case studies of a number of independent local shops and the methods they have used to stay afloat.

Technorati tag: Corner shop

The author of White Spider and Seven Years in Tibet died this week. Here’s what I had to say about his account of climbing the Eiger after reading it a couple of years ago-

The author of Seven Years in Tibet was also part of the first team to climb the North Face of the Eiger. Here he relates the history of all the attempts on the face up until 1965. A catalogue of endurance and disaster, including some horrendous deaths- those who fell off the cliff were the lucky ones. Slightly stilted, possibly in the translation, and heavy on the facts, but gripping none the less.

The BBC has an article about the mountain’s continuing allure.

Not really the meaning of Thomas Friedman’s piece, but you get the gist of it. Our leaders are content to carry on with the same old same old, pretending that minor variations on old policies and moronic shows strength are new and brave. If they really cared about the future they’d be joining us in looking for new ways to live with minimal impact on the environment.

[W]hen it comes to what is actually the most important issue in U.S. foreign and domestic policy today – making ourselves energy efficient and independent, and environmentally green – [Bush and Cheney] ridicule it as something only liberals, tree-huggers and sissies believe is possible or necessary.

Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence – that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.

Living green is not just a “personal virtue,” as Mr. Cheney says. It’s a national security imperative.

via Treehugger

Technorati tag: Green, Petrolism, Friedman

Utilising the convenience of Orange Wednesdays I’ve been to see a lot of films in the cinema in the last two years- not quite one a week but very nearly- for half price. This is the only one I’ve cared enough to pay full price for. Pre order the DVD now for February delivery.

Technorati tag: Serenity

Who’d have thought librarians were so stressed.

Others enjoyed fulfilling careers that offered new challenges, interaction with a variety of people and room for advancement.

“Although police officers and firefighters find themselves in stressful situations, they are at least able to get out and about, and there is much more variety in their work.”

Librarians, on the other hand feel stifled by constantly stamping and stacking books in silence day after day.

“It seems they are sick of being stuck between the same shelves of books all day. They also found their work repetitive and unchanging, and overall had very little job satisfaction,” said Saddiq

As a result, they were most likely to cut work and take their frustrations out on their families at home.

Technorati tag: Stress, Librarian

The respected futurologist explains some of his ideas for the future. Some of these ideas merge quite well with my ideas for Mongrels, a webcomic I’m planning.

What’s the future of the computer itself? Once we get past Moore’s Law, we’ll use 3-D molecular computing. [In the late 2040s], one cubic inch of nanotube circuitry will be 100 million times more powerful than the human brain. On the software side, machines [in the 2030s] will be able to access their own source code and improve it via an ever-accelerating, iterative design cycle. So ultimately, these systems will be vastly more intelligent than humans and will combine the advantages of biological and nonbiological intelligence. I don’t see this as an alien invasion of intelligent machines; this is emerging from within our civilization.

Well before that, computation will be a worldwide mesh of computing elements, and anytime you want, you’ll be able to, for example, access 1 million computers for 400 milliseconds.

Early in the next decade, images will be written directly to our retinas. How can you make screens really tiny but big at the same time? Put them in your eyeglasses and beam images directly to the retina.

What do you mean when you say computers will “disappear”? They’ll make their way into our clothing and into the environment, and they’ll be very tiny. We’ll also move away from the idea that the computers we use are spokes into a network but not part of the network, to where every device will be a node on the network, meaning that not only will you be sending and receiving your own messages, you’ll be passing on other people’s messages. It will be continually self-organizing, so that all communication links will be continuously finding the most efficient path.

via GeekPress

Technorati tag: Futurology, Kurzweil, Singularity

Those accident compensation guys were out in force in town today. What would happen if one of them caught you by surprise and caused you to fall over and injure yourself? Would they take your case?