Tonights program of ABC’s Foreign Correspondent had a moving report on the Music Maker Relief Foundation, a charitable organisation set up by Tim Duffy to help older unrecognised blues artists who are over 55 and earning less than US$18,000 a year, and to record, save and promote their music.
They even have complete track samples of some of the music from the 45 odd CD’s that you can buy online to support them.
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Update: You can read the original takedown notice to Linux Australia here. |
Linux Australia has been threatened by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) telling them to take down the copyrighted movies Grind and Twisted from the Linux Australia website according to this report from Builder AU and another report at Ars Technica.
The only problem is, there are no films on the website, just some free software!
Twisted is a Python programming language framework for writing networked applications and Valgrind is a most excellent memory debugging tool.
It looks like the MPAA may have just been doing keyword searching and hit the site with a spam take down notice based simply on this, possibly further misled by the mention of the Linux.Conf.Au 2004 conference DVD of videos of presentations made freely available by Linux Australia.
Linux Australia’s president Pia Smith is quoted as saying
“This seems to be a huge misuse of resources, an infringement upon various global spam laws, an infringement upon our own Copyright Act under Section 102 and needless stress and cost upon small Australian organizations and companies” and have asked their legal counsel to contact the MPAA with regards to this matter.
Of course, now I’ve mentioned all this here I wonder if I’ll get similarly spammed ?
Today is obviously a day for wierd news..
“Mr Squares said he suspected something was amiss when he spotted his obituary in the newspaper.”.
Man walks into a show yard dressed as a Port Adelaide supporter and gets chatting to the salesman who went into his office. A couple of minutes later the salesman returns to find no supporter and no AU$60,000 Massey Fergusson tractor.
Police are looking for a man with a black painted face and blue hair on a red tractor. According to police he should “stand out”.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried..
This is pretty bizzare, according to the BBC News people a Swede who’s never been to Warwick has been fined for parking his snowmobile illegally in Warwick in mid-summer.
A rather neat trick if you ask me..
Alec Muffett’s blog has a funny entry about a new PC in a keyboard design, and how it’s so amazingly reminiscent of some classic computers such as the Commodore VIC 20 and the first "standardised" home computers in the form of the MSX family of computers from Japan, which still has a following!
We went to the cinema tonight to go and see The Corporation, a film about corporate culture and, as in the US corporations are legally individuals under the 14th Amendment, what sort of a person are they ?
The results is a diagnosis of psychopathy, although they seem to imply they’re using DSM IV, it’s interesting to note that Psychopathy isn’t included there, the nearest being Anti-Social Personality. The film gives a lot of disturbing examples, some of which you’ll have heard of and some you won’t.
There’s a couple of good reviews knocking around the net and I suggest that if you want to see what corporations can get up to, along with an example of a corporate CEO who has seen the light on sustainability then go see it.
It’s a long film, but I’m suprised that although I knew it was over 2 hours the end arrived sooner than I thought it would.
We had a friend over last night for dinner, and he brought with him a rather nice dessert wine called Noble Taminga from Trentham Estate up in NSW.
According to the bottle and a Trentham Estate PDF file about the wine it was originally developed by CSIRO and owes a lot of its taste to the fact that it’s suited to Botrytis infection which gives the grapes the sweet taste.
Hoorah, finally a US government report from 13 agencies admits that humans cause global warming according to New Scientist.
Of course, having admitted there’s a problem the question is how long will it take them to get around to doing anything about it ?
This is a really neat idea, a 40GB Lacie USB Hard disk with an installation of Mandrake Linux 10.0, ready to plug into a PC and go.
They even ship it with a mini-CD so that you can boot it on systems that won’t boot from USB, which is a neat idea.
This is taking the Knoppix bootable CD idea to its logical conclusion, now you can carry your entire PC with you without needing to carry a PC with you, if you see what I mean. 🙂 Now all we want is something that will detect the architecture and boot the relevant bootloader for the system, so you can run it on a Mac, etc, too.