They must be joking

It always amazes me the things they say on the BBC. Take for example, this article...

The offensive quotes:

Around seven million people in the UK are involved in illegal downloads, costing the economy tens of billions of pounds, government advisers say.

Researchers found 1.3m people using one file-sharing network on one weekday and estimated that over a year they had free access to material worth £12bn.

What's so bad about this? Well, lots.

But lets look at the Really Big Number They estimate that these downloaders can access 12 Billion pounds worth of stuff. That's a LOT of stuff. No, really.

If we said that an hours TV was worth £1 per hour - and given that the average season of a TV show on amazon is less then £25 for anything that isn't the Last Season Gone this is a fair assumption. Lets say we've had 200 TV stations broadcasting new material for the last 60 years, 24/7, saved it and that it's all available on line, thats...um....60*365*24*200=105.12 million hours of TV.

Or about 1% of the 12 billion total.

Lets assume that there are 1000 films made every year for the last 60 years, at about £10 per film. Given they seem to be selling most for less then £6 of late... thats 1000*60*10 = 0.6 million - not enough to even worth putting into a percentage of 12 billion.

Music - lets call it 10,000 tracks a year...no...100,000 tracks a year, for 60 years, at £1 a track - aka typical ITunes prices - that's 6 million.

Books...for sake of argument, say that 4 times the number of books in project guttenburg covers the period to 1900 (so about 100,000), and since then 1 million a year for 110 years, at £5 per book. Thats (100,000 + 1,000,000*110) * 5 = 0.5505 billion pounds worth.

So with a bunch of assumptions so large I could fly the Starship Enterprise through them I can just, almost, make 1 Billion Pounds of media. Well, maybe 0.7 billion.

Assumptions like:

*All this material is available
*300 music tracks are made a day
*3000 books are written a day
*All TV content is only shown once, ever
*All TV content is worth £1 - including commercials, 24 hour news, blue peter

I'm not sure there's enough media on the planet to actualy come to £12,000,000,000 total.

Apologies...probably not happening any time soon.

Almost every time someone - let's be honest, some man - in the office takes a few days off due to a cold or flu like bug the same things are always said.

"It's only man flu" is the start and the comments proceed downhill from there. You very rarely hear the reverse, men commenting on the time off women have. It just doesn't happen.

But I saw this article on the BBC the other day.

In brief:

Men really do have an excuse for supposedly being wimpy about coughs and colds - their immune systems are not as strong as women's, research suggests.

A Canadian study indicates that the female sex hormone oestrogen gives women's immune systems added bite

And while I would quibble with the word "wimpy" in this context (if you're actualy suffering more how is that wimpy? If you were suffering less and complaining more, that's wimpy.) what it says is clear - all else being equal, a man will suffer more while suffering from the same infection.

Well, till the next study comes out saying the reverse. But for the moment, we have clear evidence that "man flu" is no laughing matter.

Think we'll get an appology gentlemen?

I doubt it...

Have on going net problems

Rather like the ones here

I am not happy with Demon.

Not one bit.

I'm going to work shortly, but...

Ah hoy, pirates!

After loosing the court case, the pirate bay have found a new type of web attack.

Denial of Dollars - Do$. Much more painful then a Denial of Service - a typical techie attack. Quote from their site, here:

Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm (aka anakata) recieved a bill for the 30 million SEK that he, along with Peter Sunde (aka brokep), Fredrik Neij (aka TiAMO), and Carl Lundstrom, was fined in the verdict of the Pirate Bay trial just over three weeks ago. The bill inspired anakata to devise a plan involving sending money to Danowsky’s law firm, but not to pay the fine of course which they say will never be payed. Anakata’s clever plan is called internet-avgift, internet-fee in English. Anakata encourages all Internet users to pay extremely small sums around 1 SEK (0.13 USD) to Danowsky’s law firm, which represented the music companies at the Pirate Bay trial. The music companies will not benefit from this, instead it will cost them money to handle and process all the money.

The plan can be called a Distributed Denial of Dollars attack (DDo$). The plan is an away-from-keyboard DDoS attack. DDoS attacks involve lots of users overloading the victim with internet traffic damaging their ability to provide services. Money, instead of Internet traffic is used in this case. The victim is Danowsky’s law firm which represented the IFPI at the Pirate Bay trial.

A friend of anakata told Blog Pirate that the bank account to which the payments are directed has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder. Any internet-fee payments made after the first 1000, which includes the law firm’s ordinary transfers, will instead of giving 1 SEK, cost 1 SEK to the law firm. Since Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå is a small firm, all the transactions are handled by hand. Handling all payments will be time consuming, costing the law firm in productivity. Maybe it will even affect their success in other cases.

Make direct payments to
Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå KB. Plusgiro 79 31 21-5.

Additionally if after paying the internet-fee you determine that your payment was erroneous, Swedish law states that you can request the money back, putting an additional load on Danowsky’s law firm.

I think this is absolutely genius.

But...well...asking for a refund.

That's just class.

State of mind

There are some people who really shouldn't be allowed out without a minder. (No, I'm not one of them.) Here's an example, here...

Quick summery of Prof Julian Le Grand's position, quoted from the article...

Without having to undergo a public ceremony or take any vows, they should simply be regarded as married in law as soon as the child's birth is registered, Prof Le Grand, Tony Blair's former Downing Street health adviser, said.

Those who later decide to separate would have to go to court to seek a divorce in exactly the same way as a couple who had married formally in church or a register office.

The London School of Economics professor, who is also chairman of Health England, argued that the idea would make family units more secure...

"There would be a benefit to the child as it would make separation that much more difficult," he said.

"There would also be benefits for the woman, particularly, who would acquire rights that many cohabitees think that they have already but actually they don't.

"There are no such things as common law wives although people think that there are."

Now - as yu can probably see by now - there's rather a lot I could attack here. But I'm not going to, because people tend to complain. (Anti-women, etc)

And there's a better attack I can make.

It goes like this. There is a fundermental difference between married couples with children and unmarried couples, tempory couples and short term pairs (such as one night stands).

That difference is the state of mind. Both have committed to each other and any resulting children. They've commited to this before witnesses, the state and the law - and quite possibly the church, their families and friends.

They have a host of reasons to work through any issues. Marriage is a state of mind - a long term view.

The state simply declaring that a couple are husband and wife changes nothing but a tick box on a form. You can't create good parents - or a good family life - with tick boxes.

This proposel wouldn't work. I don't know what affect this will have on society - although I can think of a few. What I promise you is that it will fail.

And you won't like the side affects.

Star wars day

Blogging is light, because I've been busy moving boxes.

However, May the 4th be with you.