New Copyright Laws

New Copyright Laws

The EU is considering a new Copyright law, its scrutiny committee is JURI (Legal Affairs) and the JURI Rapporteur is the sole remaining Pirate Party MEP, Julia Reda. She has posted her report, on her website here, and commented on a blog article here. She has also posted it to a collaboration site. This immediate debate has shown little support for Reda, which may suggest she has it right, or that her priorities are the troll friendly jurisdictions. …

The end of (British) privacy

The end of (British) privacy

As the dust settles in Paris after the attack on “Charlie Hebdo”, politics in Britain returns to posturing as normal. Cameron states that the Tory Manifesto for the General Election in May will include promises to increase the legal powers of surveillance by MI5 to cover all communication. Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group writes a considered piece on what this might mean. The end of this road is prohibiting encryption for the use of ordinary law abiding citizens.  …

London Bridge

I travelled up to London on Sunday (yesterday), the engineering works at Wimbledon made the rail journey longer, but thankfully, the work at London Bridge doesn’t start until next weekend. I hope that since I am usually travelling to Waterloo against the SE London tide, the additional traffic on the Jubilee won’t distress me too much. In theory, the Jubilee can carry more than during 2012, but it could get messy and its planned for 18 months. …

Is I.T. a utility?

Is I.T. a utility?

The power companies are starting to enable homes to act as power sources as well as consumers. People can sell back any surplus. In the UK, about ⅓ of the power generated is lost during the distribution. The UK consumed[1] 647 Terawatts (1012) in 2013. This implies that 219 Terawatts are generated and lost p.a. with a market value[2] of £20bn. The loss is dependent on the distance travelled and so one policy response would be to build community micro- or meso-generators. On the whole older power stations are  …

Celery

Trip to Raymond Blanc in Pompey. They’d had a delivery problem and were only honouring bookings so that was OK. I should have had the pork, not the steak. The Mont Blanc was underwhelming but the celery soup was excellent as was the service. I was with Mrs. L’s family, not the easiest of customers. …