alive

The Magical Universe of Rodney Orpheus

Being the Thoughts of a Modern Dilettante

I am an Ubuntero
calvin genius
[info]rodneyorpheus
I have just received my first karma points for reporting bugs and generally attempting to help on Ubuntu. This makes me rather unfeasibly happy. I feel like I'm finally paying back some of what I owe for the Free Software I use.
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Paulo Coelho
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus

Paulo Coelho is not the literary world's most active Web aficionado, but he's certainly its most prominent. The Brazilian author has sold more than 100 million books, which include 14 short story collections and the novel "The Alchemist." He has been a fan of the Internet since the early 1990s. He spends at least three hours a day online, writing e-mails back and forth with his readers and posting photos on Flickr, MySpace and a blog.

Coelho's online activities also include a somewhat nefarious one: he likes to promote pirated copies of his own books. At the recent Digital, Life, Design Conference in Munich, Coelho told a gathering of tech company CEOs, artists and designers that since 2005 he's been directing his readers to an online site where they can download his books, in languages from German to Japanese, for free. "I always thought that when, at the beginning of your career, you strive to be read, you can't change your mind later and become greedy about it," he said.

Tell that to his publisher, HarperCollins. When reached by NEWSWEEK, a HarperCollins spokeswoman, Patricia Rose, said the publisher knew nothing about Coelho's online activities.

With his announcement Coelho is turning up the heat on an issue that's been simmering in the book publishing industry for years. In supplementing traditional promotional strategies, such as book signings and reviews, with free downloads, Coelho is championing a model that's gaining momentum among his fellow, albeit lesser-known, authors. Writers of technical manuals, academic books and fiction authors, like science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, have been putting their entire books online for free, with the consent of their publishers. Some authors claim that online publishing increases book sales by stimulating word of mouth. Publishers, for the most part, have been reluctant to endorse the practice for fear that it will undermine their sales and contracts for foreign rights and distribution. The trouble is, nobody really knows what effect free online publishing has on book sales, because there's almost no data to go on. "I think the Internet, for [publishers], is a very strange world, still," says Coelho's agent, Monica Antunes, from her office in Barcelona. "They can't make up their minds whether it's good or not good."

Whereas most authors who have embraced online publishing have done so openly, Coelho had been deftly hiding behind the anonymity provided in the digital world. His site, Piratecoelho, culls pirated versions of his books on sites like BitTorrent and eMule. He pays 10 fans scattered across France, Spain, Brazil, Russia and Turkey to find new pipelines for him to gather versions of his books onto the site. Visitors to his blog can click on an image of Coelho, resplendent in a neatly trimmed white beard, scarf and eye patch (he resembles an affable buccaneer in real life as well), and continue on to the site.

Coelho believes his online activities have only increased his already healthy sales. When he first came across a pirated edition of one of his books, in Russian, on the Internet in 1999, he put the link on his site, and the impact was immediate. Bookstore sales in Russia, a market in which Coelho was having distribution problems and where he had sold only 1,000 books, rocketed to 10,000 in 2001. He has since sold 10 million copies of his books, his agent says. His fans have downloaded complete editions of his books, in languages ranging from Spanish to Swedish, more than 20 million times in the past seven years. By publishing online, he says, "you give the reader the possibility of reading books and choosing whether to buy it or not."

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From Thomas Paine's "Common Sense"...
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. WHEREFORE, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever FORM thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them thereto, the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labour out of the common period of life without accomplishing any thing; when he had felled his timber he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the mean time would urge him from his work, and every different want call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune would be death, for though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.

Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which, would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.

Some convenient tree will afford them a State-House, under the branches of which, the whole colony may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is more than probable that their first laws will have the title only of REGULATIONS, and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man, by natural right, will have a seat.

But as the colony increases, the public concerns will increase likewise, and the distance at which the members may be separated, will render it too inconvenient for all of them to meet on every occasion as at first, when their number was small, their habitations near, and the public concerns few and trifling. This will point out the convenience of their consenting to leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would act, were they present. If the colony continues increasing, it will become necessary to augment the number of the representatives, and that the interest of every part of the colony may be attended to, it will be found best to divide the whole into convenient parts, each part sending its proper number; and that the ELECTED might never form to themselves an interest separate from the ELECTORS, prudence will point out the propriety of having elections often; because as the ELECTED might by that means return and mix again with the general body of the ELECTORS in a few months, their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent reflection of not making a rod for themselves. And as this frequent interchange will establish a common interest with every part of the community, they will mutually and naturally support each other, and on this (not on the unmeaning name of king) depends the STRENGTH OF GOVERNMENT, AND THE HAPPINESS OF THE GOVERNED.

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and of reason will say, it is right.


Copying is not stealing, mmmkay?
on stage
[info]rodneyorpheus
I just left this on my friend Richard's blog when he discussed the "copying CDs is stealing" issue. I've been struggling with this for many years (one reason why I haven't made a CD in a while, I'm morally unsure of what it means anymore), but I'm slowly getting to a place where I think I am starting to understand this fully...

"Illegal downloading" is not the same as "stealing" either legally, practically, or morally. If you have a car, and I steal it, then I have a car and you do not. That's the definition of stealing: to take your property and thus deprive you of using it. It is predicated on the law of "scarcity of resource" - that stealing your food means you go hungry, since there's not enough food for both of us. or stealing your money means you can't afford to buy new food.

Digital information, since it is infinitely replicable for negligible cost, therefore CANNOT be stolen BY DEFINITION. Anyone who states that copying their music (or whatever) is stealing money out of their pocket either does not understand this fully, or is deliberately obscuring the real facts in order to profit.

In order to obfuscate this fast, large media corporations have been fighting on several fronts over the past years, such as:
  • creating propaganda to persuade people that replicating an infinite resource is morally wrong (using morally loaded terms such as "stealing" and "piracy" (neither of which it is)
  • paying politicians enormous sums of money to enact laws to make the free use and trade of digital information illegal (ironically often the same people who shout loudest about the virtues of the free market economy)
All of which is the digital version of King Canute attempting to command back the waves.

Therefore the challenge for any artist in the digital age is not how to constrain the infinite replication of their work, but how to profit from it, which is a very different thing. Take Magnatune: you can download stuff for free from there or you can choose to pay IF YOU WANT. Seems to work for them and their artists.

Take Radiohead: they offer their album for WHATEVER PEOPLE WANT TO PAY. So Radiohead are stupid, right? No-one is going to pay for something they are being offered for free... right? Hey guess what: the average payment was something over 2 bucks last I looked.

OK says the traditionalist, that a lot less than the $10 cost of a CD or MP3 from iTunes... but hey, guess what? The ARTIST doesn't GET that 10 bucks YOU pay. The record company does. The ARTIST gets a tiny share of that, maybe about... ummm... wow... TWO BUCKS. So how much money does Radiohead lose by offering their album for whatever you want to pay? Answer: zero. They can give it away and MAKE EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY AS BY SELLING IT FOR TEN DOLLARS.

Welcome to the digital economy my friend: where there's a lot of money to be made by giving things away for free. See GNU/Linux for a shining example.

But wait! There's more... Radiohead haven't just made the same amount of money. They have also given the record away to LOTS of people who would not, or could not, otherwise have paid for it. So NOW they have a fanbase who are massively more numerous than before. That's called GREAT MARKETING, and how much did it cost them? That's right: nothing. So not only have they made the same money as before, they've actually added value to their product!

As Cory Doctorow once said: my problem as an artist isn't piracy, it's OBSCURITY. No-one is going to pay for my work if they don't know who I am. Therefore it's OBVIOUSLY better to GIVE THE STUFF AWAY TO PEOPLE WHO WANT IT, rather than NOT sell it to people who don't know who the fuck I am in the first place.

And of course the WORST POSSIBLE THING I could do is hassle the people who WANT to hear my music: they are my FANS, my success DEPENDS on them liking me. So only an idiot would say that their fans are WRONG FOR WANTING TO HEAR THEIR MUSIC, right? I mean, really, what could be DUMBER than my criticising people for actually WANTING my work. But hey, guess again: THAT'S WHAT RECORDING COMPANIES DO.

Any artist who has a problem with people wanting to hear their music is a fucking idiot frankly.

I could rant about this for another couple of hours, but I have initiations to do... And yeah, I know I haven't written here in a while, Facebook kinda took over for a while there, but I have not fled LJ completely yet... :-)

Mayday weekend
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus
Where to begin to describe the fun of the last couple of days... I'll try to give you some flavour:

Saturday morning we jumped in the car and headed to Glastonbury, which oddly enough is a place I've never previously visited, despite living fairly close by, and having read about it since I was a teenager. We arrived on a lovely sunny afternoon, headed to the marketplace and immediately walked into the handsome Mr. David Rankine walking his even more handsome progeny, and surrounded by admiring young ladies. After a short chat, Kim turned up and we hooked up with the various members of the Cardiff University Pagan Society who were there en masse to soak up the Beltane vibe. We walked up Glastonbury Tor chatting away and then sat in the sun gazing over the Isle of Avalon and feeling extremely relaxed and happy.

After that it was back into town again to hit some bookstores - managed to get some great bargains at the wonderful Speaking Tree, my new favourite occult bookstore ever, including a discounted 7 CD set of Rudolf Steiner lectures on Rosicrucianism, which seemed just too damn weird to pass over.

In the early evening, Kim, Cathryn and I convened at the Chalice Well, where some friends were holding a private ritual. We had a lovely time there, though that Healing Pool was cold. We picnicked in the garden afterwards, and talked to old and new friends, including several from the Priestess book that Cathryn contributed to.

After that evening was drawing in, and the sun's warmth disappeared rapidly, so it was off to the pub for drinks and merriment, finishing off with fish & chips in the local Backpackers' hostel. Then we drove to Cathryns parents' house and crashed out.

Sunday afternoon we met up with explodi and axamendes at a place previously unknown to me (and most other people apparently), Stanton Drew stone circle. It's a beautiful place, the second largest stone circle in the UK, after Avebury. Upon getting close to the inner circle, we noticed a couple laying beside the head stone, celebrating Beltane in the way our true pagan ancestors used to. Clearly the land is now more fertile...

After that it was on to Bristol, and The Invisible Circus! Wow... what an extravaganza that was! Possibly the greatest night out I have ever experienced, words cannot possibly express the entire event. I dressed in a black velvet and gold brocade robe, as befitted my status as Orpheus the Magnificent, Prestidigitator to the Courts of the Crowned Heads of Europe. Highlights of the night included a perfectly recreated Victorian seance, including ectoplasm, a spirit kettle that dispensed absinthe, table turning etc. where our little party fitted in perfectly; a zoo full of furries with personality disorders, turning tricks for peanuts; ghosts walking down walls and scattering cherry blossoms from the sky (which brought tears to my eyes); and me playing ping-pong with Satan (I'm looking forward to seeing the video of that). For six hours we wandered around with our eyes the size of saucers.

So today is a day for sitting on the sofa, watching TV, and recovering methinks...
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holiday?
calvin genius
[info]rodneyorpheus
I was really looking forward to having a very relaxing week's holiday this week; alas it was not to be (at least so far). Problems at college led me to have to go in there for the first couple of days, and other problem have been occupying far too much of my time and mental energy last couple of days.

I thought I'd at least get a day playing some Warhammer 40k which is always fun, and it was, but I still lost twice to Simon's bloody Chaos Marines. Bah.
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Frankfurt Musikmesse
on stage
[info]rodneyorpheus
Frankfurt Musikmesse is the biggest music instrument trade show in the world, by a very long way. Twelve halls of everything from tablas to grand pianos. I've been coming here nearly every year for about twenty years, first as a customer, and then as an exhibitor. This year I could definitely feel the economic woes hit - it used to take me about half an hour to walk from one end of a hall to another, this time it was taking five minutes. However we did damn well, our booth was packed to the eyeballs for the whole week. I did get a chance to get off the stage a few times to walk around. A few highlights:

Prosoniq showed an alpha version of some remarkable new software that allows you to take any fully mixed stereo file and pull out individual vocal and instrument multi-tracks from it. I saw it, I heard it, but I still find it hard to believe you can do that. "It's like unscrambling an egg!" remarked a friend of mine who saw it. If it works it'll revolutionise remixing the day it comes out. Unfortunately it'll be MacOS only, and require a minimum quad core computer to do the processing. Still, very very cool technology.

Watched an interesting demo of the Moog Guitar. Infinite, controllable sustain and a Moog filter on every string. Looked and sounded interesting, but according to a guitar playing friend of mine, sucks totally to play. I didn't get the chance to play it myself, so I leave that open till I do.

Presonus/KristalLabs Studio One. Beyond any doubt the best new music composition software in years. Beautifully designed (by some ex-Steinberg developers), loads of cool features, yet really slick and easy to use; it's the only sequencer I've seen since Cubase 1.0 that I've actually wanted to use.

I ran across Plugiator on the Musonik booth, and it definitely looked interesting. It's basically a programable DSP in a small synth shell. What that means in practice is that you can program it to emulate several different synths and have them all available at the push of a button. If this sounds like what Creamware used to do with their Scope stuff a few years back, that's not odd, because it's basically a spin-off of that technology. It comes with four different things built in:
  1. Minimoog - which didn't impress me too much, but I'm not a huge Moog fan anyway
  2. Lightwave - oh hell yes, it's a wavetable synth like the Waldorf MicroWave. Nice digital sounds, they don't sound that great on their own, but I bet they will really useful in a mix.
  3. Organ - it's another Hammond B-3 emulation. Why do people bother with this? It's a frakin' organ, big deal. On the other hand, if they had stuck some serious distortion on the back of it I could like it a lot.
  4. Vocoder - now this is what will sell it to me. There's a mic input on the back panel, though unfortunately it's a jack, not an XLR, but it is a TRS balanced input. And it's a frakin' VOCODER! We use vocoders live all the time in The Cassandra Complex, so a small cheap, easy to carry box with a good vocoder in it is always interesting. And this one seems really damn good too. Would definitely like to spend more time with it.
So out of that lot, there's two definite pluses, one could be good, and one yeah whatever. But hold on, you can buy four more synth models for it for about 99 Euros! So far there are:
  1. Prodyssey - is a ARP Odyssey emulation. I've always liked this synth, and it's definitely great for Gary Numan impersonations. Would like to play with it a bit.
  2. Pro-12 - now we're talking. I've been a huge Prophet fan ever since the early days. Most of the first Cassandra Complex songs were written on an old Pro-One; and this emulation sounds really damn fine. I really wish this one was one of the basic onboard synths, it's an absolute godsend. I love this synth.
  3. FMagia - another DX style synth. Didn't impress me much from what I heard, I'd like to play a bit with it though. Most preset FM sounds are very boring, but you can do cool things with them if you kick it a bit.
  4. Drums & Bass - loads of drums... and loads of bass. Definitely useful, it basically turns the box into a rhythm machine. So yeah, if you need a box that'll do excellent backing tracks live, this will do it. Unfortunately you can't run the other synth models while you're doing it, so it makes it slightly limited. Still pretty ok though.
You can have all of these loaded into the machine and flip between them on the fly. The Pro-12 is a must-buy, and for 99 bucks you can't really go wrong with the rest either.

I forgot the best part: Musonik do custom faceplates for it! They already told me they'd design a Casandra Complex faceplate for me if I wanted one... that's hard to say no to! So all in all, I could really go for getting a couple of these.

The other contender for great small synth is the new MicroKorg XL. I remember when Korg first showed the original MicroKorg, everyone in the industry said it was junk, but I loved it and predicted it would be a monster hit. I am glad to say that I was more than right: Korg just sold the 100,000th unit, making it the best selling synth of all time. So now they are following it up with a new one, and it's bitchingly good. It looks great, they nailed the 70s vintage look on it. Sounds great too, it's got the Radius engine in it for some killer Korg patches. The microphone is better, and is a real gooseneck with a real XLR socket on the synth itself. Vocoder is improved and it even has Kaoss Pad effects built in. You can edit the sounds with a computer patch editor, and it even reads MS2000 sounds. And it's only 100 Euros more expensive that the original one! Since The Cassandra Complex currently has 2 MS2000s and a MicroKorg that we use live, this synth is looking like a no-brainer choice for us for the future - that's unless we switch to using a couple of Plugiators instead.#

So that's about all I saw that was really interesting to me, but then again, I never even left Hall 5 where our stand was located! I couldn't face two halls full of guitars, or even two full of home organs...

All in all, it was a surprisingly good show. I've got a free day tomorrow so I'm hoping the weather will be nice here so I can explore a bit - I've been coming here for forever and I've never actually walked around here! Back to the West Country tomorrow night, which is good, because I'm missing it.

BSG
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus
Just saw the end of BSG.

Bittersweet. In so many ways.

Goodbye. You were the best show ever on television.
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most sensible thing I've heard in ages...
on stage
[info]rodneyorpheus
At last my thoughts on the digital copying issue have finally been crystallised in this statement from Cory Doctorow, in the foreword to Little Brother:
...here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.

what AIG really lost
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus

(CNN) -- The monumental quarterly loss revealed by U.S. insurance giant AIG of $62 billion is the largest in corporate history, amounting to about $460,000 per minute. The loss caused jaws to hit the floor around the world and left us wondering, what else would $62 billion buy?

1. It could pay off the combined national debts of China, Australia, Mexico and Ukraine, according to 2008 estimates by the CIA Factbook, and still have plenty left over for a good night out.

...

8. Given an average used car price of $13,900 in the United States and an average car length of 5 meters, $62 billion will buy enough of them to create a traffic jam from New York to Beijing AND back.

advertisement

...

10. If you exchanged the $62 billion losses for dollar bills the cash would carpet an estimated 595 square kilometers -- the same approximate area occupied by Baghdad.

quote of the day
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus
From one of my teen Computer Gaming students today:
"Sex is like computer hacking - we all know it exists but most of us don't know how to do it very well."
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The Freedom Bill
liberal democrats
[info]rodneyorpheus

Just got this from the LibDems. Looks pretty awesome at first glance. I encourage every British reader of this blog to read it and sign up.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Rodney

Sign up to back the Freedom BillI don't know about you, but I've had enough.

Restriction of our fundamental rights and freedoms has gone too far. ID cards, more CCTV cameras per head than any country in the world, a database of children's fingerprints, a government that wants to conceal its own record on the disastrous war in Iraq - it's the stuff of fiction.

We need to put a stop to this. The Liberal Democrats are proposing the Freedom Bill: freedom.libdems.org.uk.

I need you to look at the bill and comment to tell me how to improve it. What's missing? What's wrong? Is your civil liberties "hobby-horse" not on our list? If you haven't time to comment, you can sign our petition in support of the bill instead.

Here's a selection of the measures incorporated in our first draft:

• Scrap ID cards for everyone.
• Restore the right to protest in Parliament Square.
• Scrap the ContactPoint database of all children in Britain.
• Remove innocent people from the DNA database.
• Reduce the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 14 days.

You can read the full set on the website.

I need your contribution to make this bill as robust as possible - because it's not going to be easy getting this on the parliamentary agenda. The other two parties won't like it, we can depend upon that.

I want to take forward a bill we can all be proud of. I hope you will join me in making it clear to the government that Orwell's nightmarish 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.

Best wishes,

Chris Huhne
Shadow Home Secretary, Liberal Democrats


at last
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus
Finally...

UK government backs open source

Update: the full report from the government's Chief Information Officer is here. It's pretty amazing stuff. We all knew this would happen eventually, but so strong so soon is really quite stunning:

Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for re–use by others.

This Government has long had the policy, last formally articulated in 2004, that it should seek to use Open Source where it gave the best value for money to the taxpayer in delivering public services. While we have always respected the long-held beliefs of those who think that governments should favour Open Source on principle, we have always taken the view that the main test should be what is best value for the taxpayer.

Over the past five years many government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services.

Note the mention of the NHS. Translated this means "Yes, we now realise that we allowed proprietary software vendors to really fuck up the whole NHS IT infrastructure, and we're going to make sure that doesn't happen again."

Bravo. Probably the only thing the current administration has done right since... well, ever.

#ukgovOSS


nerd, me?
calvin genius
[info]rodneyorpheus

I am nerdier than 94% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to take the Nerd Test, get nerdy images and jokes, and write on the nerd forum!

when even your spies say you are too oppressive...
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus

Ministers 'using fear of terror'

Dame Stella Rimington
Stella Rimington has often been critical of the government

A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism and trying to bring in laws that restrict civil liberties.

In an interview in a Spanish newspaper, published in the Daily Telegraph, Dame Stella Rimington, 73, also accuses the US of "tortures".

The Home Office said it was vital to strike a right balance between privacy, protection and sharing personal data.

It said any policies which impact on privacy must be "proportionate".

Dame Stella, who stood down as the director general of the security service in 1996, has previously been critical of the government's policies, including its attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days and the controversial plan to introduce ID cards.

"It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state," she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years.
Former Irish president Mary Robinson

She said the British security services were "no angels," but they did not kill people.

"The US has gone too far with Guantanamo and the tortures," she said.

"MI5 does not do that. Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect - there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification."

'Take stock'

Dame Stella's comments come as a study is published by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) that accuses the US and the UK of undermining the framework of international law.


legal nonsense
calvin genius
[info]rodneyorpheus
Since The Pirate Bay trial is currently running in Sweden, I have been amusing myself this morning by reading some of the legal threats they have posted on their site. Funny reading, especially if you have a layman's interest in the law, as I have. My favourites have to be the emails that end with things like:
> This message and any attached documents contain information from the
> law firm of OMelveny & Myers LLP that may be confidential and/or
> privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not read,
> copy, distribute, or use this information. If you have received this
> transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply
> e-mail and then delete this message.
Let me get this straight... you write at the end of a mail that reading the mail is illegal? And you call yourself a lawyer? Quite apart from the fact that you cannot make reading illegal, warning someone not to do something after the fact is no legal warning at all. It's absurd, lying bullshit. No wonder The Pirate Bay ridicule people like this, they are unethical twits that deserve it.

City of the Seekers
calvin genius
[info]rodneyorpheus
Dammit, I wish I could be in LA next month for this event. All my OTO buddies out there should sign up immediately.


A truly unique event! Discover five historic sites related to spiritual organizations that took root in Los Angeles in the early part of the twentieth century.

Los Angeles is home to a number of religious sites and organizations, many of which are deeply woven into the city’s history. “City of the Seekers” will celebrate this unique identity and the architecture that embodies it. This special one-time-only tour offers a rare chance to explore historic religious sites not typically open to the general public.

Convention on Modern Liberty
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus
This brief message is a call to all concerned with the threats to our fundamental rights and freedoms. It introduces you to the Convention on Modern Liberty. The Convention is live already in video and writing on the web. It has an amazing list of speakers (see below). It is supported by a growing and surprising mixture of organisations. The latest to join is the Football Supporters Federation. The big day is Saturday 28 February in London and venues across the UK. The aim: to ensure that the State remains our servant and does not become our master – a battle made all the more urgent by the likely consequences of the financial meltdown. here it is!

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.modernliberty.net

Tickets to the London event are selling fast.

Below this brief message you will find a longer press release that tells you more.

Please take a moment of your time now to forward this message to friends and colleagues. Thank you.

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PRESS RELEASE
The Convention on Modern Liberty

This year, the Convention on Modern Liberty will gather in London and six venues across the UK, from Belfast to Cambridge, on 28 February.

It will bring together well over a thousand people, nearly fifty organisations, from the TUC to the Countryside Alliance, from the Football Supporters Federation to the British Instite of Human Rights, and more than a hundred distinguished independent speakers, with widely ranging political views and interests, among them Philip Pullman, Lord Bingham and Shami Chakrabarti, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, Tory Shadow Justice Secetary Dominic Grieve and Labour Minister for Skills David Lammy and Helena Kennedy (full list, see below).

The Convention is a call to all concerned with the threats to our fundamental rights and freedoms – from our own State, from terrorism and the responses to terrorism and from the gathering financial crisis.

From being imprisoned without charge, to bailiffs entering our homes without a warrant, to unlicensed surveillance and officials taking your information from anywhere and passing it anywhere they like – our liberties are being violated.

The Convention organisers will publish audits of these violations, show how they are connected, ask why they are taking place and how they might be reversed.

The Convention’s co-directors, Anthony Barnett and Henry Porter, said “We want three things.

First, we want the public to ask why these violations are happening and see that they are not isolated events.

Second, we want the violations to be stopped in a way that ensures they do not happen again.

Third, by asserting the right to manage our identities and to share between its agencies deep dossiers of information about us the government trespasses on the first claim of democracy: that the State is the servant of the people. We want to ensure that the tradition of public freedom in our country is renewed not suffocated, that our fundamental rights are secured, and that the agents of the state understand their powers exist to serve not control the citizens of Britain. This is all the more urgent as the financial crisis deepens.”

For videos by key supporting organisations, the full programme, press and blogosphere coverage see
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.modernliberty.net

The Convention is sponsored by The Rowntree Trusts, openDemocracy and Liberty. The Guardian is its media partner. NO2ID is a lead organisation partner.

Confirmed speakers:

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Lisa Appignanesi
Mohammed Aziz
Anthony Barnett
Simon Barrow
Peter Bazalgette
Moazzam Begg
Sir Geoffrey Bindman
Lord Bingham
Andrew Blick
Caspar Bowden
Billy Bragg
Victoria Brittain
Tony Bunyan
Jean Candler
Malcolm Carroll
Douglas Carswell MP
Joanne Cash
Shami Chakrabarti
Tufyal Choudhury
Nick Clegg MP
Nick Cohen
Linda Colley
Philip Collins
Tony Curzon Price
Iain Dale
David Davis MP
Andrew Dismore MP
Cory Doctorow
Oliver Dowlen
Terri Dowty
Michael Edwards
David Elstein
Brian Eno
Keith Ewing
Peter Facey
Edward Fitzgerald QC
Liz Forgan
Sabina Frediani
Edie Friedman
John Gardiner
Juliet Gardiner
Edward Garnier QC MP
Timothy Garton Ash
Alex Gask
Pam Giddy
Paul Gilroy
Jo Glanville
Lord Goldsmith
Zac Goldsmith
David Goodhart
A C Grayling
Colin Greer
Dominic Grieve QC MP
Gerry Hassan
Iain Henderson
Georgina Henry
Savitri Hensman
Guy Herbert Becky Hogge
Chris Huhne MP
Sunny Hundal
Murray Hunt
Saghir Hussain
Will Hutton
John Jackson
Simon Jenkins
Vaughan Jones
Mary Kaldor
Yasmin Khan
Sunder Katwala
Helena Kennedy QC
Paul Kingsnorth
Francesca Klug
Satish Kumar
David Lammy MP
Neal Lawson
Paul Lay
Guy Lodge
Caroline Lucas MEP
Ken Macdonald QC
David Marquand
Ehsan Masood
Christopher Meyer
Mujib Miah
Suzanne Moore
Ivo Mosley
Peter Oborne
Tom Porteous
Henry Porter
Philip Pullman
Geoffrey Robertson QC
Alan Rusbridger
Paul Rogers
Meg Russell
Mike Rustin
Laura Sandys
Quentin Skinner
David Smith
Roger Smith
Trevor Smith
Sam Talbot Rice
Chuka Umunna
Geraldine Van Bueren
David Varney
Sarah Veale
Hilary Wainwright
Marina Warner
Stuart Weir
Stuart Wilks-Heeg
Michael Wills MP
Gareth Young
Christina Zaba
Simon Zadek
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kde
calvin genius
[info]rodneyorpheus
You know how you've been hearing how much better Windows 7 will be over Windows Vista? Two Australian gentlemen decided to find out... by showing people KDE/Linux and telling them it was actually Windows 7. And the response was...?

pop goes the weasel
alive
[info]rodneyorpheus
Finally someone else is speaking out on this:

Population: The elephant in the room


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