By John | December 31, 2007
The US lobby group for the music industry, the RIAA, has excelled itself this time in its heavy-handed dealing with a customer. They are suing a customer who bought 2000 tracks on CDs and copied them to his computer for his own use. He didn’t upload them to the internet, just listened to them [...]
Posted in Audio, Economics |
By John | December 31, 2007
We treated ourselves to new mobile phones at Christmas:Sony Ericsson T68i, Palm Treo 650 and in the lower row, two Nokia E51 mobilesIn the top row the old ones: Ruth’s Sony Ericsson T68i and my Palm Treo 650; in the lower row, our new Nokia E51s.
By John | December 31, 2007
This calendar is currently at position 539 in the Amazon books best seller list. We got given a block calendar with 365 quotes from GWB last year and enjoyed his muddled quotes so much that we have ordered the countdown calendar for 2008.
Wishing you a great 2008!
By John | December 24, 2007
It’s been cold here for the last week or so. Around -6°C to 0°C. And dry and sunny. A nice change, after having had torrential rain for 2 weeks before that.
The picture is of a local stream that we went past yesterday, when we went for a walk around the neighbourhood.
By John | December 20, 2007
Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic all join the Schengen Zone tonight.
That is the part of the EU where the member countries trust each other enough to abolish the visa- and border controls (But beware! At airports, the new members won’t benefit from the abolition of controls [...]
Posted in Europe, Travel |
By John | December 18, 2007
Picture from Arborsmith Studios website (click picture to visit)Axel Erlandson an American arborsculptor opened an exhibition in 1947 featuring trees which he had shaped by pruning, bending and grafting. The original exhibition, called The Tree Circus had a chequered history, only bringing in a little over $300 in a good year (1955). Eventually 12 of [...]
By John | December 12, 2007
If you are a software developer who likes knitting, you need to take a look at documenting your knitting patterns in XML.
(via Boing Boing)
By John | December 12, 2007
Merriam-Webster has named the word of the year for 2007: w00t!
If you need an explanation of the meaning, they are kind enough to provide one here.
By John | December 9, 2007
The Economist has its regular table showing how property prices world wide have developed:
Graph from this week’s Economist
As you’d expect, given the US sub-prime crisis, the US prices have dropped by around 5% in the last 12 months. More surprisingly, the UK prices, despite the concern in the British press about their property prices, gained [...]
By John | December 2, 2007
Researchers today are capable of building their own viruses:
Thanks to steady advances in computing power and DNA technology, a talented undergraduate with a decent laptop and access to any university biology lab can assemble a virus with ease. Five years ago, as if to prove that point, researchers from the State University of New York [...]
