The cinema hosted Michael Eavis on monday for a screening of the documentary movie Glastonbury which he introduced for us. To advertise this screening the following photo featured in the Bath Chronicle newspaper.
We look bored as hell but that’s how the photographer wanted us.
The Guardian reports that a cross-party select committee is to recommend that the UK should adopt a US-style terror alert system.
A cross-party committee investigating the background to the July 7 bombings is expected to recommend a transparent official public warning system for the threat posed by terrorist attacks. It would be similar to the kind that has proved controversial in America.
The idea, which is likely to be one of the conclusions in the intelligence and security committee’s annual report next month, has caused consternation among the security services. The issue is at the heart of an intense debate involving MI5, the Home Office, and the committee, in the wake of the attacks on London.
Of course such a system has worked so very well in the US to date and US citizens know exactly what each level of alert actually means and how their behaviour should change accordingly. Well actually no that isn’t true at all and so obviously we should adopt such a clearly useless system here also.
The very well respected security consultant Bruce Schneier wrote an excellent analysis of the US alert system in October of 2004. The most telling passage of his analysis is below.
In theory, the warnings are supposed to cultivate an atmosphere of preparedness. If Americans are vigilant against the terrorist threat, then maybe the terrorists will be caught and their plots foiled. And repeated warnings brace Americans for the aftermath of another attack.
The problem is that the warnings don’t do any of this. Because they are so vague and so frequent, and because they don’t recommend any useful actions that people can take, terror threat warnings don’t prevent terrorist attacks. They might force a terrorist to delay his plan temporarily, or change his target. But in general, professional security experts like me are not particularly impressed by systems that merely force the bad guys to make minor modifications in their tactics.
I really don’t think that the public really need to be informed of every alert as without any guidance as to how they should respond once they have been alerted it just causes a state of anxiety.
It makes sense to inform people to evacuate a building when there has been a specific threat against that building. But to issue an alert when intelligence has revealed a few scant details about a vague threat to a building in the London area clearly helps no one especially if the advice is to continue about your daily business as usual.
If the government is causing terror to it’s citizens then they are doing the job of the terrorist for them. The terrorist would never need to ever follow through with any of their threats to achieve the same effect in this scenario.
New Scientist: Print me a heart and a set of arteries
SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was “printed”, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.
Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his “bioprinting” technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of “bioink”, clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.
This is amazing that it works and yet it seems like such a simple idea. It is probably many years off but with the advancements in 3D printing techniques couple with this technology then we could almost literally have new organs on demand.
Tags: science
The Terrorism Act 2006 powers has come into force today.
The Terrorism Act 2006 allows groups or organisations to be banned for those offences and covers anyone who gives or receives training.
The act designates nuclear sites as areas where trespass can become a terrorist offence.
Human rights campaigners argue the law is drawn far too widely and it faced stiff opposition in the House of Lords.
Via SpyBlog, which notes “that one of the most controversial parts of the Act has not commenced today, i.e. Section 23 Extension of period of detention of terrorist suspects to Section 25
which extends the period of “pre-charge detention” from 14 days to 28 days has not been commenced i.e. has not yet been brought into law ?”
Bird flu could kill 100,000 British children: report
There are so many ifs and buts with the bird flu thing that it really isn’t something people should be worrying about. It’s totally irrelevant that there has been this one case in an isolated part of Scotland, it doesn’t mean that Britain is any more peril than it was 2 weeks ago.
Plus the headline talking about deaths of children but a pandemic is likely to affect all ages in fact if a pandemic was to occur that’s anything like the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic then fit and healthy adults will be just as likely to be killed by it.
If this H5N1 strain of Avian flu ever does cross over and become infectious from human to human then would be the time that people might be justified to feel a little panic, but at the moment it is just sensationalist bollocks.
London’s High Court has ruled that The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown did not infringe the copyright of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.
The claim was clearly without merit as copyright law only protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. Also if the idea itself is one which the authors claim is historical fact that would surely undermine their case further, but whether or not that is truly the case is pretty irrelevant.
Worryingly Jon Silverman a BBC legal affairs analyst does not think that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom.
But to suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far.
The judge himself acknowledged that nothing in the plaintiffs’ case would have stultified creative endeavour or extended the boundaries of copyright protection.
I wasn’t at the court so I don’t precisely know what the plaintiffs’ case actually hung on. Was it just idea theft as was portrayed in the media or was there claims that passages of their book appeared in virtually the same form in The Da Vinci Code?
I think that if the judgement had come down on the side of the plaintiffs and extended copyright law to cover ideas as well as the expression of those ideas then creativity would have been stifled. Corporations would start a landgrab of ideas and we’d find ourselves in a situation where every single new literary work would have to license the basic ideas from the corporate owners of those ideas.
But this is a nightmare situation that I believe is unlikely to come to pass as even corporations that otherwise lobby for extension to copyright protection could see that this would be an extension too far, it would be damaging to their own interests.
A High Court judge condemns the detention of a Serbian couple, saying the Home office showed an “unacceptable disregard for the rule of law.”
Via BlairWatch: The Home Office Under Charles Clarke Strikes Again.
Tags: politics
In a follow up to yesterday’s piece about John Reid’s comments concerning whether the Geneva conventions are still adequate to cover all eventualities in today’s world he offers this rebuttal.
I am relieved by this clarification of his motivation. Or at least I would be more relieved if his words in today’s rebuttal more fully covered what he actually said in his speech and if I believed that the threats posed by terrorism or rogue states as outlined in his speech were as significant as he would have us believe.
He expresses the need for intervention to prevent mass killings or genocide – illustrated by Rwanda and Sudan among others. But then appears to go to say that such things are already covered under the conventions. The only problem then surely is the political will then to actually intervene in such situations.
John Reid’s original speech, which was given to the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies is available here at the MOD’s website.
I am still concerned by the issue of ‘imminence’ and under what conditions does he believe the British military should be allowed to pre-emptively strike against another nation.
Whilst John Reid seems to be further widening the gulf that exists between Britain and the Middle East there are those who are seeking to reach out to the younger generation in a shared interest of Welsh sheep.
Or to be more specific the Welsh children’s TV series The Baaas, which concerns a multiracial Welsh sheep family, and which has just been bought by the TV Station Al-Jazeera. It is to be broadcast on the station’s Children’s Channel, which can be seen in countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Not to mention Iraq.
“The important thing is that the programme is about how we get on with each other and although there is some bickering in the Baaas’ household, they always work things out in the end,” said the show’s producer Nia Ceidiog when the series was announced.
A valuable lesson indeed.
Tags: Al-Jazeera, TV
