Sairah's new favourite joke

A history professor and a psychology professor are sitting outside at a
nudist colony.

History professor - "Have you read Marx?"

Psychology professor - "Yes, I think it's from the wicker chairs."

BBC NEWS | File-sharing ruling fuels worries

Over in the States, the Supreme Court has overturned an earlier ruling, and has ruled that file-sharing networks are liable to their users copyright infringement. Which is a step in the right direction, provided this same statute is applied to weapons manufacturers and the tobacco industry, I feel. Otherwise, there will be a bizarre situation:

• A company profiting from software used for copyright infringement can be sued for billions of dollars by, um, companies who already have billions of dollars.
• A company profiting from the manufacture and/or distribution of small, easily concealable guns used for muggings and murders, or of semi-automatic assault rifles used for the systematic destruction of (say) a school's populace, have nothing to fear.

There's something wrong there... just can't think what.

Vote for Juanzo

Awesome.

Cliff Arnall is full of [redacted due to a request from Cliff Arnall]

Back in January, I emailed Cliff Arnall, asking him to quantify his 'equation' proving that 24th January was the most miserable day of the year. His equation didn't scan, wasn't formatted correctly and was full of unquantifiable factors like "the need to take action" and others that were quantifiable in different manners, like "time since Christmas" (in scientific terms, that should be measured in seconds, but there's no mention of the scale used in his PR exercise in-depth scientific research.

The part-time lecturer didn't respond.

And now, today, I find he has another of his magical scientific 'equations' published on the BBC News website, who now credit him as a professor, (Note: I complained about getting this fact wrong, and they changed it - but they didn't when I complained about using the made-up plural 'octopi', which means they put facts ahead of grammar. And yes, I'm a sad bastard for complaining on both counts.) and - surprise, surprise - it's as comple bollocks again.

The equation Dr Arnall devised to find the happiest day, in work commissioned by ice cream maker Walls, was O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He.

Within that, O stands for being outdoors and outdoor activity, N for nature, S for social interaction, Cpm for childhood summers and positive memories, T for temperature and He for holidays and looking forward to time off.

Okay Cliff. What is a unit of measurement for "positive memories"? Is the temperature in Celcius or Kelvin? How should one represent "looking forward to time off"?

His incredible scientific proof says today is the happiest day of the year. Tell that to the people who've lost everything in the torrents at Glastonbury, or the people recovering from being trapped in a train for hours on end.

A quick Google "Cliff Arnall" returns a pile of results to do with his previous press releases, and little else. In it, I discovered another one of these bloody equations of his, this time proving that May 18th is a great day for New Year's Resolutions.

His official formula of positivity reads, M x O + BH/(H+R) x S.

And it translates as, motivation (M) multiplied by opportunity (O) plus bank holiday proximity (BH) over increased hours of daylight (H) plus reflection of time (R) multiplied by success (S).

Once again Cliff, do tell how you reach this formula. Quantify everything. Show us your notes. Prove that you do more than send out a press release every so often, saying, "Hey, look at me, I'm GREAT because I can prove without a shadow of a doubt that this day coming up is the best day to attempt home waxing!"

Or... why not work out - scientifically, mind - the best date to [redacted] yourself through the [redacted] with a [redacted]. And then prove it. And leave off the sub-GCSE pseudo science, Scientologists do it better.

Update: Following some boo-hooing from Mr Arnall himself, upset that Googling his name found this blog entry at the top and the title saying he was full of something unpleasant, I've been a gentleman and voluntarily redacted some words which, if his story is true and he doesn't want his kids to see people being mean about him in a crude way, should be enough. However, for us grown-ups who suspect it's more likely that a new ego-placating puff-piece is on its way, the content still makes clear my impression of Cliff's previous masterpieces of bad science and unquantifiable maths. My money's on the next equation including the viscosity of angel tears in a vacuum and the sense of foreboding to two decimal places.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Doctor Who third series confirmed

I am sooooooooo excited =) And I'm a 30 year old man! And the spoilers make me even more excited! Aaaaaaaaah!

Tulip E-Go

Tulip have unveiled their new 'lifestyle' laptop, the E-Go. Designed more for women with a whole load of cash (especially the $350,000 diamond encrusted model), being modeled on a handbag, I can't help wanting one as well. Not only are they the first PC laptops to look genuinely sexy, they've got a hell of a lot of poke under the bonnet, as they say...

"Cats use fax as toilet and spark house fire"

From Reuters, and reproduced at Yahoo! UK & Ireland News...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Two kittens picked the wrong place to relieve themselves when they urinated on a fax machine, sparking a fire that extensively damaged their Japanese owner's house.

Investigators in the western city of Kobe have concluded that the fire in January was caused by a spark generated when the urine soaked the machine's electrical printing mechanism.

The fire damaged the kitchen and living room before it was put out by the house's owner, who was treated for mild smoke inhalation, said Masahito Oyabu, a fireman at the Nagata fire station in central Kobe.

The kittens quickly ran to safety, he added.

"If you have a cat, or a dog for that matter, be careful where they urinate," Oyabu said. "Especially keep them away from electrical appliances and wires."

BBC NEWS | France holds 'Chameleon' impostor

This news story is fantastic, not because Frederic Bourdin was caught, but because of his earlier adventures. From the article:

Bourdin was jailed in the US in 1997 for posing as a couple's long-lost son.

The Texas couple's 14-year-old blue-eyed son had disappeared three years earlier and they travelled to the US embassy in Spain to meet "Nicholas Barclay".

Bourdin convinced them that he was their son, despite his brown eyes and strong French accent.

He lived with them for three months before his deception was exposed by a journalist and confirmed by a DNA test. He was jailed for six years.

Now, I realise three years had passed, but really... I didn't look that much different at 17 than at 14, and my eyes certainly didn't change colour!

But now he's been arrested again, because 31 year old men don't go to school. What an ace nutter.

Copying Protected Audio CDs

I have an issue with (so-called) Copy Protected CDs. If I go out and buy an MP3 player, I would like to use it to play files made from my legitimately purchased CDs, and to have record companies attempt to stop you - so you would have to buy the tracks from an online store, covered in DRM and lacking the quality that you would choose, to listen to them on a mobile device - is little short of extortion.

Of course, as has been mentioned before in various forums I can't be bothered to track down at this moment in time (so just trust me), Copy Protected CDs can generally be copied quite easily, and the only barrier it puts up is against some regular CD playing aperatus (like in-car CD players, and my old Goodmans MP3/CD player). So record companies are spending a fortune on a technology that is designed to break things, but is actually (more often than not) a broken technology itself.

Case study: Some Cities by The Doves

I bought this for Jayne, because both the singles from it have been excellent and their reputation for big, sweeping, atmospheric songs was set by The Last Broadcast (their previous album). It's great, and we want a copy for in the car (I have no intention of carrying around a whole load of original CDs in the car). But - uh-oh - there's the black logo on that sticker, saying that it's Copy Protected. Sure enough, as usual, my MP3/CD player can manage about 8 seconds before the errors that they introduce into the audio to try and throw CD-ROM drives results in it locking up, unless I turn off the anti-shock mechanism which means that it will just jump like a bastard.

I start my ripper of choice, CDex, and get the CD info from the free online database freedb.org. Up comes the list of tracknames, so CDex can do the filenames properly. Normally this would be for the ID3 tags in MP3s, or for OGG Vorbis tags (the two formats I use) but seeing as this is going to end up being an audio CD in a few minutes time, this time I go for uncompressed WAVs.

CDex in action. As you can see if you click for the original, so far all the stuff they introduce into the audio stream to try and bugger things up for ripping the CD has failed - there's a big list of 'OK's for all the tracks that have succesfully been extracted.

At the end of the rip... one error has occured, in the last track. As I was watching the entire process of this last track, the error only occured at the very end of the last track, presumably as it was about to swing into the data section for the heavily compressed and DRMed audio that they try and fob computer users off with. So I listened to the track carefully, with headphones on, and you know what? There's no problems on there at all - it sounds perfect.

For reference, the equipment used was an NEC DVD+-RW drive on an Athlon XP PC running Windows XP. I've had similar positive results with Samsung drives, but negative results with Philips and Teac drives, so I'll stick with the drives I know work well. The software used was CDex, which is open source, and I've been using for about 6 years now.

The lesson of this is... well, apparently I've circumvented a copyright protection system, which is a bad thing under the DMCA (the American anti-freedom act), but we don't have that in the UK. And to circumvent a copyright protection system, surely you need to have a copyright protection system that acts like one, rather than the CD equivalent of a Post-It Note saying "My milk, hands off".