Francois Hollande, the PS candidate for President du Republique has won today. 6th May 2012.
I am at home in my flat in London.
I also remember when I heard that Mitterand, the last socialist to hold the post won, I was at CPSA conference in 1981, I think it was the Ship Hotel, and Dennis Skinner MP was speaking, he’d just been heckled, he asked what Williams, Jenkins, Owen & Rodgers had ever done for the Labour Party; the reply being they’d left it. He riposted, “I’ll use that next time”. …
I was pounding the streets in Deptford with @VickyFoxcroft and @Joe_Dromey on Thursday, campaigning for Ken in his campaign to replace the Tory Johnson as Mayor for London.
Thanks to all the people I met, those who voted for Ken and the Labour Party, those who campaigned with me, and those who didn’t but remained polite.
It was a close run thing in the end, and I even had my hopes raised between 16:30 and 21:00 when what became three Labour “constituencies” had yet to declare but it wasn’t to be.
I met several people, who just cheered us on in Brockley, but also one in New Cross, who while saying he had voted for Ken, thought he needed,
to remember where he came from
and those who are still there. I did challenge him, as I personally recognise this criticism of many of Labour’s leaders, I didn’t think it included Ken Livingstone. I promised to repeat it, and I shall remember this advice when choosing our next candidate. …
Tomorrow/Today we elect a Mayor and Council in London.
Labour’s candidate is Ken Livingstone, he is fighting to replace the right-wing tory, Boris Johnson.
I was planning to summarise my feelings but if you check out my internet spore, I think you know how I feel. Nicky Gavron, a GLA Assembly Member summarizes brilliantly, why Ken is right for London, and Johnson is wrong in her blog article, Ken v Boris.
The key powers of the Mayor are Transport, Police and Planning. Ken’ll reduce the fares, bring stability to the Police and use the planning powers in the interests of Londoners to build affordable housing.
Johnson will increase fares at above inflation, sack policemen and Comissioners and built 56 houses in the last six months.
There’s only one sensible choice. Vote Labour for London. …
Should have been out on the #labourdoorstep tonight with people, but had family things to do. So I watched last night’s London Mayor debate on bbc iplayer.
I can’t believe that Boris stated the Thatcher Government had to abolish the GLC and that Ken’s original Fares Fair was in some period of pre-history. If he want the pensioner vote he’d better get his London history right, but then he’s not a Londoner. The comment/fact that Boris isn’t a man for detail shone through on the transport/police debates. He hasn’t a clue. He’s increased fares and cut the police. He claims that the money isn’t there to meet Ken’s Fare deal; only TfL who work for him say this, every independent expert says that its do-able. I hope so, every time I pass an oyster card reader, I am reminded of what Johnson’s making me pay. …
It seems the Liberal Democrats are gearing up to oppose the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer. Good. He shouldn’t be extradited; it’s not the asynchronous nature of the Anglo US extradition treaty which is the problem here. In order to be extradited, you need to have a case to answer that you have broken a serious law in both jurisdictions. …
Wired reports that, three days ago, the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal has declared that code is not property and cannot therefore be stolen; there is no intent to deprive the owner of the object’s use. They also ruled that the perpetrator, there is no doubt that the code was removed from Goldman Sachs network, could not be prosecuted under the US Economic Espionage Act since the code in question was not used in commerce. I don’t actually know what the code did, but we can be sure that it was used in commerce, or it was a regulatory compliance program. If it didn’t have one of these two purposes, Goldman Sachs wouldn’t be doing it, and wouldn’t have wanted to keep it secret.
Does this mean that only traded software can be the object of the espionage act? If so I am not sure this is where we want to be.
Part of Goldman Sachs’ problem is that they wanted to keep the code secret and there are many reasons to want to do so. However patent and copyright protection require the intellectual property owner to publish their ideas, or the expression of their ideas. Another part of the problem is that people wanted to see Aleynikov go to prison and breach of employee confidentiality wasn’t sufficient to get him there.
As techdirt.com reports in their article,
Still, the overall ruling here is good, though it could have been more complete.
I wonder if there will be further appeals, but it’s an important stake in the ground. Copyright infringement is not theft.
This was also covered at engadget.com. …
I am standing for election to the Open Rights Group (ORG) Board. I hope to offer experience, knowledge and commitment.
I work in the information technology business and came to ORG via the Open Source and Software Freedom campaigns. I submitted personal evidence to the Government consultation on peer to peer file sharing in 2009, started following the ORG shortly after. …
In Feburary, TechDirt discovered that one of it’s key anti-SOPA polemics had been deleted from Google’s index as a result of a bogus DMCA takedown notice. The article goes onto detail similar dirty tricks on Torrentfreak.
In my article, “More on the Newzbin2 affair”, I comment on BT’s attempt to clarify the initial injunction and the issue of false notifications and liability for acting on them. The judge said there was no evidence that false notification would be significant. Despite the well documented existence of speculative invoicing scams, this would seem to add to the evidence that while accusing innocent infringers is free of consequence, some at least will do it. …
The queue to get into Parliament last week was a bit long, so long I missed the first presentation at Pictfor’s Consumer’s and Creators in the 21st Century Copyright World, although I did take some good pictures. Saskia Wetzel was the first person on, and it’s a shame I missed it; she was the only speaker designated as a consumer representative. … …
I was going to polish my notes from the #Pictor meeting last week, which has published its own precis of events, but the Wall Street Journal and the BBC are both carrying a story sourced from Boston Consulting that the UK’s internet industry is now over 8% of GDP, and grew at over 10% during the period of the study. This is while the UK GDP grew by 0.7% over the last year and there remain fears of a return to recession.
James Firth, at his blog, “Slightly Right of Centre”, tries to evaluate the contribution of the Internet industry vs. the “creative” industry and makes the point that the Digital Economy Act was passed to help and support a very important wealth creator in our economy. It’s a shame, well, more truthfully a point of design, that it almost certainly discriminates against an even more important one. The figure bandied about by BIS at the time the time the act was passed was that creative industries were about 7% of GDP; the internet has overtaken it.
No matter how one does the sums, maybe its time to back a winner! …