Keys Corner

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 on his own computer.

I can’t imagine anything more stupid that RIAA could do. The only thing we can do as consumers is to switch from buying CDs to downloading tracks directly from the artist’s websites and their online download services, cutting out the established music industry completely.

Here are a some possibilities that cut out the greedy record companies and pay their artists fairly:

• CD Baby
• Magnatune
• Or use the RIAA Radar to check if the album you plan to buy is issued by an RIAA member company (And yes, you can find music by artists who don’t release their music via RIAA members!).
• Or chose from the RIAA Radar Amazon Top 100 chart list and support the top artists whose labels are not RIAA members (updated daily).

Update (2008-01-01):
Looks like the original story may have been wrong, although the RIAA has shifted its position to claim that MP3s ripped from legally owned CDs are illegal copies.

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.

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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!

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.

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 until the end of March in 2008). In the member countries of the Schengen Agreement, when crossing the border to another member country you don’t need to show your passport or ID, and don’t need a visa to enter the country. It speeds up arrival at sea- and airports and means there are no border controls on road links. The member countries also share data on criminals via the Schengen Information System and their police forces cooperate with each other to fight crime.

The new members bring nearly all of the European countries into the zone – even some non-EU countries such as Norway and Iceland are members, and Switzerland joined in 2004, but will actually implement the changes in 2008.

You can probably guess that the only major European country which will then not belong is the same country where a leading national paper is alleged to have run the headline “Fog In Channel: Continent Cut Off“. Well, that’s not quite true – as well as the UK, the Republic of Ireland has not implemented the reduction of border controls either.

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 the original trees were bought by Michael Bonfante for his amusement park, Bonfante Gardens, in Gilroy, California. We’ve been to California a number of times, but didn’t know about these trees, unfortunately.

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)

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.

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 about 7%.

Meanwhile in Germany, the DAX has continued to hover at near-record levels for months and hardly a squeak has been heard in the press about the development of property prices locally, although they fell by 4% in the last year. I suppose, since the majority of Germans still rent rather than buy property (Germany has the lowest rate of home ownership in the EU - around 40%), that is not considered newsworthy.

On a related note: there is an interesting paper comparing the German and the Dutch property markets, which are surprisingly different, here (PDF file, size 124 KB).

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 at Stony Brook “built” a polio virus, using widely available information and DNA they bought through the mail. To test their “polio recipe,” they injected the virus into mice. The animals first became paralyzed and then died… ...Then, two years ago, after researchers had sequenced the genetic code of the 1918 flu virus, federal scientists reconstructed it, too.

In fact, it is possible to reconstruct viruses which have been extinct for millions of years (perhaps Jurassic Park wasn’t so far fetched?). This is exactly what is now happening, in a bid to find an effective AIDS vaccine. Pan troglodytes endogenous retrovirus (PtERV) – a virus related to H.I.V. has been extinct for millions of years, but researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have resurrected it as part of a program to try and find out why humans 4 million years ago were apparently completely resistant to PtERV although chimps and gorillas were susceptible to the virus. On the other hand, today humans are susceptible to H.I.V., but the apes aren’t affected by it, although they carry the infection. There’s an 8 page article in the current New Yorker about virus research, which describes the research. – interesting reading, but it does make you wonder whether we aren’t increasingly likely to make ourselves extinct when the inevitable mistake is made in a research lab.