Month: July 2005

The BBC has been attacked by classical music record companies for it’s release of Beethoven’s nine symphonies on it’s website for people to download freely.

There is the obvious issue that it is devaluing the perceived value of music. You are also leading the public to think that it is fine to download and own these files for nothing.

Correct me if I’m wrong and I’m not but it is fine for the BBC to offer it’s recordings of Beethoven as performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for free.

It was a limited offer, the recordings are no longer available, and I believe that it will have introduced the excellence of Beethoven’s work to many individuals who wouldn’t otherwise have experienced it. There are likely to be people who wouldn’t normally buy classical music who would have been tempted by this offer just to see what it was like and will now seek out other recordings that are available for purchase.

The very companies that are attacking the BBC are likely to be the very companies that will benefit from the increased interest in classical music. I believe that the BBC in doing this is fulfilling it’s charter of creating greater access for the general public to a wide range of culture.

Tags: BBC, music

According to A Big Stick and a Small Carrot Charles Kennedy had the audacity to mention Iraq yesterday and was attacked for his naivety for what seems like a fairly measured statement in comparison to say George Galloway.

“I am not here implying some causal link between Britain’s involvement in Iraq and the terrible terrorist attacks in London last week. Not at all. The mass murderers who attacked London last week did not need Iraq as an excuse. The blame for the deaths in London falls firmly on their shoulders and on their shoulders alone.”

But it would be hard not to link the war in Iraq to the bomb attacks in London as our political leaders themselves link the war into the wider War on Terror.

If we truly are at war with the terrorists then this latest attack may be seen by many especially those who support the actions of the terrorists as a retaliatory strike. I believe that Britain would still have been targeted even if our government had decided not to participate in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and that in time the majority of population of Iraq will be a lot better off than they would have if Saddam Hussein had remained. But there is no escaping the fact that war has resulted in many innocent Iraqis losing their lives thus aiding those people who wish preach hatred of our country.

In the end we may never know why four seemingly normal lads from Yorkshire decided to blow themselves and many innocent Londoners up. But to think there may possibly a link between the events in Iraq and the attacks on London should not be considered a thoughtcrime. Most of us are thinking it anyway but I don’t think that the bomb attacks have at all changed our opinions on Iraq whichever side of the debate of whether we should have invaded or not we place ourselves.

Tags: politics, terrorism

Wasps’ Nest
Originally uploaded by electricinca.

Found this wasps’ nest a couple of days ago and had to get the man from the council to come and exterminate them all.

Tags: photography

The police and security services have managed to track down those responsible for the attacks in London and it appears that they were four young men from the Leeds area all of whom died in the resultant explosions.

It is not the result that people were expecting. It was theorized that the attackers may have been outsiders or perhaps Britons that had trained in Afghanistan and it was thought that they had planted the bombs and then left as the Madrid bombers did so that they could attack again in future.

But now we know that it was four seemingly normal young men who had somehow become radicalized in this country to the point of becoming suicide bombers. Questions are sure to be asked about how this came to be. It’s quite likely that there was some outside influence on them, who organised them and supplied them with the explosive material, but perhaps we are deluding ourselves about this just because we cannot understand how these four men could do what they did.

Tags: security, terrorism

Computational complexity theory is part of the theory of computation dealing with the resources required during computation to solve a given problem. The most common resources are time (how many steps does it take to solve a problem) and space (how much memory does it take to solve a problem).

In this theory, the class P consists of all those decision problems that can be solved on a deterministic sequential machine in an amount of time that is polynomial in the size of the input; the class NP consists of all those decision problems whose positive solutions can be verified in polynomial time given the right information, or equivalently, whose solution can be found in polynomial time on a non-deterministic machine. Arguably, the biggest open question in theoretical computer science concerns the relationship between those two classes:

Is P equal to NP?

In a 2002 poll of 100 researchers, 61 believed the answer is no, 9 believed the answer is yes, 22 were unsure, and 8 believed the question may be independent of the currently accepted axioms, and so impossible to prove or disprove. A $1,000,000 USD prize has been offered for a correct solution.

More…

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Complexity classes P and NP”.

I’m a big fan of the novels of China Miéville particularly Perdido Street Station, a book so crammed with wonderful ideas you worry it might be burdened by the number but somehow it works perfectly.

There is an in depth recent interview with him here.

Tags: books

The one thing that the Wikipedia does better than any other side is to tackle current events. They are the authority to go to for those seeking information about the bomb attacks on the London transport system on Thursday 7th July.

I may not be a Londoner but I share the sentiment expressed in this letter to the terrorists.

I was going to write on Thursday that I believe that due to London having the greatest concentration of CCTV cameras of any city in the world that the bombers will have little hope of escaping capture. The Wall Street Journal has a good article about that very thing.

Tags: terrorism

I had quite a bizarre dream last night.

For some reason I had decided to meet my dad for lunch on the Isle of Wight (odd because it is over a hundred miles from where I live and even further for him). Anyway we meet up and go to have lunch together in an apartment building that I’ve never seen before which had huge glass windows.

I forget what happens next but we end up deciding to leave the island and have to wait at the dockside for the ferry to come back to pick us up. In real life I think the ferry is a huge thing which carries cars but in the dream it was tiny and could hold only about ten people in it. So we are waiting there and decide to spend some time at the fairground until the ferryboat returns.

Looking around the fair I spot a game where you have to throw balls to knock small wooden blocks off a shelf. Now the blocks were really small about the size of a matchbox and were quite a distance away so everyone that tried their arm was missing and not winning a prize.

So I decide to give it a go and manage to knock two blocks off the shelf the guy running the game then brings the blocks to me so I can read what prize I’ve won and inscribed on each block is a number which indicates the amount of money I’ve won.

Amazingly it appears I’ve won in total about £30 000 but the bloke doesn’t have that sort of money on him so he needs to leave and will come back later with my money. Sometime later he returns and he doesn’t have it, all he has is about £1500. He offers to make up the difference with a lot of other crap like some cuddly toys and some free turns on the different games at the fair. Now I’m really pissed off and the ferry has just arrived so seeing I’m never going to get the money I’m owed I just leave with my dad and the £1500.

Tags: dream, me

Breaking news on multiple TV channels indicate there have been explosions in a number of different locations in the capital following news that the London underground system has ground to halt after an apparent electrical surge.

As you would expect there has been a lot of jumping the gun and suggestions of bombs and mentions of 9/11. It’s too early to say if the explosions are due to bombs or if they are in any connected to each other or to the London underground situation.

BBC News: Several injured in London blasts

Eyewitness accounts

With the G8 summit being held in Gleneagles it must come as no surprise that there may be terrorist activity being planned in the UK to coincide.

Tags: terrorism

Boing Boing: Euro Software Patents are DEAD! w00t!

You have won the fight to keep software patents — America’s disastrous, failed system for awarding exclusive rights to mathematical instructions — out of Europe. Despite the other side’s nonstop dirty tricks, subversion of democracy, and outright lies, the will of the people has been upheld in the Euro Parliament. The day was carried because of the tireless efforts of orgs like the FFII, FSF Europe, and EDRI — and because of your tireless support in writing and phoning to your elected reps. You should be very, very proud. Congrats to all the copyfighters who’ve busted their humps on this!

The European Parliament voted 648 to 14 to reject the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive.

The bill was reportedly rejected because, politicians said, it pleased no-one in its current form.

BBC News: Software patent bill thrown out

Tags: intellectual property