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BBC News: Kindelan ends Khan dream

Britain's Amir Khan took silver in boxing's lightweight division after losing 30-22 to Cuban Mario Kindelan.

The 17-year-old, looking to become the youngest Olympic champion since Floyd Patterson in 1952, took the first round by a point after a cagey opening.

But Kindelan established his dominance in round two, picking off the teenager with supreme counter attacks.

Although Khan closed out in typical aggressive style, he could not stop the Cuban winning a third straight title.

The British public got a little carried away with the success of Amir Khan the 17 year old lightwieght boxing sensation. He'd boxed extremely well throughout the tournament but just didn't have enough to beat the reigning Olympic champion from Cuba, Mario Kindelan.

The good news for Khan is that Kindelan has decided to go out on a career high by retiring unbeaten from boxing. Having beaten the best of the rest in the world Khan looks a very good prospect for the Amateur World Championship and the Beijing Olympics.

Whilst not as big a medal haul as last week the medals won today by Team GB were something special and gave us two of the stand out best moments of the games.

Kelly Holmes won the Women's 1500m, another gold medal to add to the one she won for the 800m. Plagued by injury throughout her career Holmes had never managed until now to succeed to win the gold medals she so richly deserved.

Following individual failure in the Men's 100m and 200m the British sprint team of Jason Gardener, Darren Campbell, Marlon Devonish and Mark Lewis-Francis seemed to have all saved their perfect race for the Men's 4x100m relay. With a US team that included the both the 100m and 200m Olympic champions plus the great experience and speed of Maurice Green the race was thought to have been won before they even started. However poor baton changes by the US coupled with a brilliant performance by the British guys resulted in a win for Team GB.

Finally let's not overlook another medal that was won on the water with Great Britain's Ian Wynne managing to shrug off an ankle injury to take bronze in the men's K1 500m kayak final.

Have you got a lazy assed Hamster?

Well why not put him to work by powering a night light.

Learn how to here.

New Scientist features an article on the bookmaker Ladbrokes who are taking bets on the next major scientific breakthrough to be achieved by the year 2010. Bets will be taken on life on Titan, gravitational waves, the Higgs boson, cosmic ray origins and nuclear fusion.

"We’ve taken bets on life on Mars before,” says Warren Lush, Ladbrokes’ novelty bets expert, “and we wanted to provide something completely different." The initiative follows an approach from New Scientist, and the full 10-page feature, Monsters of the Universe appears in the print edition of the magazine.

They put the odds of the discovery of gravitational waves at 500-1 but Jim Hough at the University of Glasgow is confident that his project the LIGO detector will catch a gravitational wave before 2010. "I would have put the odds between 2-1 and 10-1" he said.

The panel of the offical inquiry into the scandal of US soldiers' mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison has issued a report that lays some of the blame at the door of Donald Rumsfeld.

The Reuters news agency reveals that

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came under fire on Tuesday from a high-level inquiry into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal but a U.S. military judge ruled he did not have to testify at a trial arising from the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

A four-member panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger issued a report accusing the chain of command from Rumsfeld down of leadership failures that created conditions for the abuse late last year that sparked anti-American outrage across the world.

"Military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon share this burden of responsibility."

Labels: politics, totalitarian

British boxing wunderkind 17-year-old Amir Khan has guaranteed himself at least a bronze medal after a emphatic win over South Korea's Baik Jong-sub.

The referee had to stop the match in the first round after Khan had landed a series of powerful blows on his opponent. Khan commented after the fight:

"I didn’t expect to beat him that quickly but I was confident I could beat him.

"I knew he had slow feet and slow hands and I used that to my advantage.

"It’s a great achievement for me to win a medal. Now I’ve got that bronze medal the pressure is off me a bit now.

"I think I can go in the ring more relaxed and more calm and get even better.

"I’m happy to win a medal but hopefully I can go on to make the final."

BBC Sport: Khan guarantees medal

Labels: Sport

Bill Thompson, technology writer and "controversialist" writes a weekly column on technology issues, the latest of which I've reprinted in full below. It is released under a Creative Commons Licence.

Fight for the Right to Copy

It’s somewhat depressing when the mere fact that a court has shown some common sense is newsworthy, but we should applaud the 9th US Circuit of Appeals in Los Angeles for making it clear that file sharing isn’t illegal.

This is just as well since file sharing, which is just copying data from computer to computer, underpins the entire operation of the internet, from email to viewing web pages to downloading the 72Mb of Windows XP SP2.

But of course the argument wasn’t about that sort of data copying.

The court had been asked to rule in a case brought against Grokster and StreamCast Networks over the use of their peer-to-peer networks to make unlicensed copies of copyrighted music.
It’s certainly true that they can be used in this way. I had a copy of KaZaA on my laptop until recently, and a quick search revealed thousands of unlicensed MP3s of songs by a wide variety of artists.

But there is a well-established precedent in US law that just because something is capable of being used illegally that does not mean its manufacturers can be sued or prosecuted.

A peer-to-peer network can be used to share family photos, free software, licensed music and any other sort of digital content. The mere fact that it could in principle be used to exchange dodgy copies of a Britney song is therefore irrelevant.

And since both Grokster and StreamCast’s Morpheus programs are true peer-to-peer offerings, with no central index of files shared and no central node through which requests or data about transfers is passed, the court ruled that the manufacturers of the software could not themselves be asked to stop infringing activities.

After all, they don’t know it’s taking place.

The judge even bothered to point out that just because closing down P2P networks would satisfy “the copyright holders’ immediate economic aims” it might turn out to be bad for creativity and innovation generally, and so any such decision should be left to Congress who can pass new laws if they want to.

This might seem to settle the matter, but the Recording Industry Association of America says it’s going to appeal yet again. And, more worryingly, Congress seems to be thinking about doing what the judge suggested.

A bill introduced by Senator Orin Hatch, a long-term friend of the music industry – and recipient of large campaign contributions from the same industry – would make it a criminal offence to induce anyone to break copyright.

Hatch’s Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act would allow the record industry to sue Grokster because their service makes it so easy to copy music files that it counts as an ‘inducement’.

It would, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, probably allow the record companies to sue Apple for making and marketing the iPod since it indirectly encourages us all to copy our friends’ CDs.

We might think that such an absurd law would never be passed by the US Congress, but it’s important not to underestimate just how much influence the record companies have. They employ expensive lobbyists and make significant contributions to campaign funds, so they may get what they want.

Although this is currently a US copyright battle, the results will affect everyone. European legislation like the EU Copyright Directive is often directly modelled on US law, in this case the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the record companies are just as concerned about protecting their European markets as they are about the US.

It isn’t just an abstract discussion either. The arguments over copyright are the first skirmishes in a serious battle over the shape of our digital world. If the big rights holders have their way then copyright will become a real ‘property right’, like the rights I have over the laptop I am writing this on.

You can’t make me lend it to you, it’s mine forever unless I sell it or give it away, and if you take it from me without asking then that’s theft and you could go to gaol.

Intellectual property is not like that. It was never supposed to be like that: copyright is a time-limited monopoly on certain forms of use of a book or recording, and was not to be treated in the same way as ownership of a house or car or pair of shoes. But persuading the record companies that they can’t expect to exert complete control over every recording, forever, is not proving easy to do.

Perhaps they’ll be persuaded if we refuse to give them our money.

I have never bought a music file online, even though I’m a big music fan. I don’t do it because I don’t want music files which are crippled by the digital rights management tools that every online store uses to limit what purchasers can do with the songs they buy.

I don’t do it because much of the music I want to listen to is available for around the same cost as a CD, and I can then rip that onto my hard drive and download it to my portable music player myself – keeping a safe copy on disk for when my system crashes and has to be rebuilt.

In fact, I don’t do it for the same reasons I don’t eat meat. I’m vegetarian because I don’t want to be part of a system that raises animals in inhumane conditions and kills them with cruelty. And I won’t buy music online because I don’t want to support a system that is trying to lock down our creative heritage, stifle innovation and claim ownership of our common culture.

The Grokster decision has given me hope that the law around copyright is still understood by the judges.

We need to make sure that this does not change, and we also need to make sure that lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic realise that they cannot give the big rights holders everything they want.

Written by Bill Thompson. It is released under a Creative Commons Licence.

Labels: copyright

Barbara Hepworth Gardens
Originally uploaded by lorenzo23.

The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St. Ives, Cornwall is an amazing place that I'd recommend to everyone.

High and lows of Team GB in the Olympics this weekend.

Fucking hell it's super Saturday and Britain has won so many medals today I've lost count.

As has been usual we get the Golden stuff in rowing and sailing but also oddly due to some rule breaking German Leslie Law has been promoted to the Gold medal in the 3 day eventing. The Gold for Chris Hoy in the cycling on Friday has started off a medal grab in this sport also with Bradley Wiggins also getting Gold and others sure to follow.

Shout out for the young Welsh swimmer David Davies. Fucking great performance for the 19 year old in the 1500m freestyle, I think we have a future swimming star here. Gold for Davies in Beijing.

Sunday and what should have been a joyous occasion for Paula Radcliffe turns to sorrow as she pulls out of the marathon a few miles from the finish. After the huge haul of medals on Saturday the country was downcast following this news but we did win a Silver today in rowing with the Women's coxless quadruple sculls team.

Labels: Sport

Whilst writing a piece about terrorism I mistyped the word terrorist at dictionary.com and ironically got this:

errorist

\Er"ror*ist\, n. One who encourages and propagates error; one who holds to error.

Labels: Terrorism

Is global warming a bigger threat than terrorism?

Global warming is now a weapon of mass destruction

Global warming is getting worse - but the message is getting through

Labels: Terrorism

BBC News: Scream stolen from Norway museum

Having previously been stolen about 10 years ago you'd think that the Munch Museum would have improved security to prevent another theft of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream.

A French radio producer who was in the museum at the time of the theft said security was not very tight. "What's strange is that in this museum, there weren't any means of protection for the paintings, no alarm bell," Francois Castang told France Inter radio, the Associated Press reported. "The paintings were simply attached by wire to the walls," he said. "All you had to do is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose - which is what I saw one of the thieves doing." Ms Christofferson said the guards were more concerned with protecting visitors than the paintings.

Labels: Security

The story that wouldn't die. Journalist Annie Jacobsen traveled on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with her husband and young son and was unnerved by the strange behaviour of a group of 14 Middle-Eastern men. She wrote about the incident at WomensWallStreet.com in an article titled Terror in the Skies, Again? A follow up to this appeared in The New York Times which put a different perspective on the events that occurred on Flight 327 by revealing that it was simply a group of Syrian musicians.

The Internet was gripped by the story with a huge amount of discussion appearing on a number of websites, particularly the bloggers who seemed to fall into two opposing camps. A simple Google search for Northwest flight 327 or Annie Jacobsen will find them. Camp one believes that it highlights the flaws in security some even going as far as saying that contrary to all evidence that it was definitely a dry run by terrorists, whilst camp two believe that it was nothing that just got blown all out of proportion by a bunch of paranoid racists.

The official response to the incident was that the Air marshals aboard the airplane felt that no action was needed and that the 14 individuals were thoroughly checked upon landing and were found to be exactly what they said they were, musicians with no links at all to terrorism.

The story doesn't end there though Jacobsen in an effort to claw back her reputation having been exposed as a hysterical overreactor pursues the story some more and discovers some further details such as the fact that members of the band were traveling on expired visas.

Annie Jacobsen's five part story can be read at the following addresses.
Part I: Terror in the Skies, Again?
Part II: Terror in the Skies, Again?
Part IV: Terror in the Skies, Again?
Part IV: Terror in the Skies, Again?
Part V: Terror in the Skies, Again?

A moderate middle ground on this incident needs to be taken I think. Security is a twofold process. Making people safe and secure and making them feel safe and secure. There is a well known phrase 'giving a false sense of security' well the converse is also true 'giving a false sense of insecurity'.

We are currently living in a climate of fear and the Western governments are as much to blame as the terrorists are for that. We are not getting a positive message that reassures us from our government. Instead we get told that an attack is inevitable and we should prepare for it and we are sent leaflets containing common sense advice of how to react in an emergency. The average citizen is in no more danger from dying in a terrorist attack than they ever were, such events are rare occurrences and affect relatively few people in any case. Yet we cannot escape talk of terrorists, they are everywhere - the modern day bogeymen.

The 9/11 attacks and subsequent actions by the US and British governments have created a fear and mistrust of Arabs. That isn't to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were wrong but the inclusion of them into the War on Terrorism was wrong. I think that for the average person whose only knowledge of Arab and Muslim people comes from the media coverage of terrorist attacks and wars it can be difficult not to equate Arab with terrorist.

We are asked by our government to be vigilant and report suspicious activity. But be vigilant for what?

This request only causes the public to become afraid and paranoid, and increasingly xenophobic. We are not trained professionals and so can easily misinterpret innocent activities as being sinister if we are caused to be overly suspicious. This mindless rhetoric that the politicians keep spouting is for their benefit only i.e. to get them re-elected or in the case of leaders like Putin of Russia to further secure their hold on power.

Labels: Security, Terrorism

The wonders of the Internet led me to the greatest paragraph in the history of journalism.

I was at boingboing.net and read this story about the famous neurologist/author Oliver Sacks and his quest for an ingot of Iridium which led me to this Livejournal entry by George Lazenby. Looking around Lazenby's Livejournal leads me finally to the greatest paragraph in the history of journalism.

I would have reprinted it here but I think it works better in context so go read it.

Creatures from the Deep. Warning this is very image heavy so it will load slowly for those people on slow connections.



Mizuta Tasogare carves pencils into odd shapes.



My favourite is Sidewards expansion

International: Isn't 50 years of copyright enough?

Elvis has left the building - time to free his works too.

The international recording industry is preparing to lobby the EU for changes to existing copyright law. But in an attempt to manipulate law for profit, we are being asked to place whole chunks of our culture into a commercial vacuum.

I wrote about this issue in the post titled Elvis: "That's All Right" to end of copyright.

This is clearly a move motivated by money, no one cares about the other music of the fifties that has just entered the public domain in the UK such as 'You Belong To My Heart' by Jo Stafford. But when it's copyright of Elvis that might expire then there must be something wrong with copyright law. This damn loophole must be closed that allows works only to have a limited copyright lifespan.

Yeah right, there is a reason why the creators of copyright law did so with a limitation on the length that each created work would have protection for. They realised that a balance had to be struck between what benefited the author and what benefited the public at large.

The issue is not about getting music for free i.e. with out a monetary cost but about freedom of music.

Labels: copyright

Browsing through the tags that people have used for their photos at Flickr I discovered everything from the everyday to some really quite bizarre ones.

See all the tags or look at what I found.

321 fucked up with a camera

Andrew i'm going to kill you

chill libra

frenships

ha ha taking shots of coffee and look at who has to use her hands

hot construction workers

Indians love Hitler

According to the Wikipedia the national anthem of Vanuatu is Yumi, Yumi, Yumi.

Just watched the opening ceremony for the Olympics and as is typical for such events it was a surreal bizarre affair, but it was beautifully fascinating a depiction of the history and myth of Ancient Greece the birth place of the Olympic games. Starting with the Goddess of fertility a procession toured the stadium finally finishing with a pregnant woman whose belly began to glow with an inner light as she stepped into a pool of water from which rose strands of light depicting the milky way.

Then we have the procession of the national teams in order of the Greek names using the Greek alphabet so we start with Saint Lucia followed by the team from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and in the middle of the procession we get Zambia and Zimbabwe who usually would be at the end. Commentator Barry Davies does his usual exemplary job of commentating on events outside of his normal expertise and presents is with a mix of sport and geography.

Facts by Barry: Australia has the second biggest team again and are one of only 4 teams to have competed in every games. The national anthem of Vanuatu is Yummy Yummy Yummy apparently. British Virgin Islands has only a single competitor. Comoros a country I've never even heard of. Strange. A Korean team which is a joint team of both North and South Korean competitors.

BBC coverage of the Olympic Games starts here.

Labels: Sport

In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.

Following this news, U.S. Military Clears A-Team Of Charges the problem-solving A-Team should be easier to find.

Labels: Security

Readers who are aware of my secret identity will know why this news article made me smile.

Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this column? Me, I'm listening to music, I've got four web browser windows open, reading a couple of weblogs, viewing new photos at Fickr and writing this blogpost.

Folks, this isn't multi-tasking. This is advanced case of Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. I am unable to function at my desktop unless I've got, at least, five things going on at the same time. If your count came close, you're probably afflicted, as well.

I should be in bed by now but I cannot help but carry on with this shouting through a thunderstorm.

The genius behind Wordcount has the best website navigation system I've ever seen at his main site Flaming Toast Productions.

I wish I had the talent, time and inclination to do something like this but I don't. I do make an excellent Bread and Butter Pudding though.

Tiny teen takes on the giant one-eyed monster!

We have located several horny women in your area!

hello, how can i not help you?

The last one is very similar to me at work.

Surfing through the various pictures at Flickr I came across the photos of Roland Tanglao, blogger and prolific photographer with over 2200 pictures hosted at Flickr.

Possibly another Henri Cartier-Bresson in the making who took over 700 000 photographs in his life.

kittypeek Originally uploaded by h.

Is it an indication of the state of the British education system or am I expecting too much?

Two 12 year old girls bored and looking for something do wander into the cinema to find out what we are showing. I tell them and they ask the question "Who's King Arthur?"

Fuck me. I'm dumbfounded. "You know King Arthur, knights of the round table, Merlin the magician, Lancelot."

How can they not know who King Arthur is. But as I say am I expecting too much, how many people in this country actually do know who he is.

So anyway they go in to watch it. About half an hour later one of the girls comes out to buy some popcorn. Because we are so fucking chronically understaffed I have to serve her. She is a little on the chubby size and she knows it because when she asks for a large popcorn I repeat it just to be sure I heard correctly but she replies "It isn't just for me. It's for my friend as well" like I'd implied that she was fat and greedy or something.

Labels: cinema

Though you do have to spend the money wisely in order to achieve it.

How not to buy happiness by Robert H. Frank

Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods–such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job–then the evidence paints a very different picture.

From the White House website: Transcript of remarks by the President at the Signing of H.R. 4613, the Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005.

Exhibiting a trait that he has become renowned for President Bush made an odd slip-up in his speech.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

A mere mispeak or was he admitting to a deliberate policy of damaging the US and its citizens. Critics of his administratyion would argue that its policies have been damaging to the country, although I'm sure no one believes it has been a deliberate policy.

I'm having a bit of a John Connolly addiction at the moment. I read Bad Men a short while ago and thought why not pick up another of his books.

So I got The Killing Kind and was blown away by it. A fucking disturbing but gripping read with the good guys being almost as brutal and merciless as the evil bastard villains of the piece. Connolly seems to have carved out a new niche of fiction here with serial killer crime stories blended with supernatural elements.

Anyway having finished The Killing Kind I immediately went out and bought The White Road and read it and have now just purchased the first two novels Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow.

Father to Son: What I've Learned About Rage

A conversation in print between Norman Mailer and his son John Buffalo Mailer. They discuss President Bush, protests at the Republican National Convention and Karl Rove's proposed Republican led 20 year American hegemony.

As part of the BBC Four on BBC Two series there has been a number of excellent European movies being shown on BBC Two including the German movie Das Experiment, which was shown on Tuesday night.

The film is a thriller based upon the real-life experiment carried out in 1971 at Stanford University by a team of researchers led by Professor Philip Zimbardo. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. Volunteers played the roles of guard and prisoner, and lived in a mock prison. However, the experiment quickly got out of hand, and was ended early.

Interestingly I didn't find it as shocking an experience as I did when I first saw it a couple of years ago. Maybe watching Big Brother and reading the accounts of the abuse suffered by prisoners at Abu Ghraib and in Guantanamo Bay has desensitized me to this sort of thing.

IMDB link for Das Experiment
Purchase the movie from Amazon.co.uk VHS | DVD

The official site of the Stanford prison experiment is at http://www.prisonexp.org/

The article about the Stanford prison experiment at the Wikipedia also makes comparison to the events at Abu Ghraib.

Labels: cinema

Three games that I found surfing the Internet in the last few days.

Walking the drunk home.

Keeping the animals at the zoo.

Bouncing the dynamite in the air.

Shed a tear for Andrea Corr.

Not only do recording artists have tax-free status in the Republic of Ireland but they may soon be able to keep earning tax-free on their music for a longer period of time.

Declan Ferry of the Sunday Times writes

The work of a recording artist is currently protected for 50 years after the material is released, allowing royalties to be collected on sales and other airings. After this the work goes into the public domain and people can use it for free.

The Irish Recording Music Association (IRMA), a lobby group for the Irish recording industry, is now demanding European law fall into line with American legislation, which extends royalty payments to 70 years.

Dick Doyle, the director general if IRMA, said Irish artists wanted "a level playing field."

How about leveling the playing field by encouraging the US to reduce the length of their copyright to a more reasonable number of years.

Labels: copyright

Man defeated by an automatic door.