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Today the English language Wikipedia will be blocked out for twenty four hours to protest against the SOPA and PIPA acts that are currently going through the US congress. The background to the blackout, and some information on the acts themselves can be read on the anti-SOPA blackout page.

I must admit that I haven't read the details of these acts. Probably 99% of congressmen haven't either. But we all know that they will read as though they were dictated to Congress by the US media industry, particularly the Hollywood studios, and as a kind of last stand defence, the recorded music business which stands as an ever-present reminder to Hollywood of what might happen to them if these bills are not passed.

What will be conspicuous by its absence is the case that this IP will actually deliver economic rents to the studios resulting from their control of an artificially scare resource: the distribution network that they control, that is now being challenged by alternative channels available through fast internet connections.

The economic and political case is not entirely one-sided. People like to watch Hollywood films, because they have high production values which are partly the consequence of the high profits the studios can gain from their control of content and its distribution.  In effect they can obtain monopoly profits, because if you want to see Pirates of the Carribean 5 the only place you can get it from is Walt Disney Pictures. Of course a large part of these monopoly profits is diverted into the pocket of Johnny Depp, because he controls the supply of that essential ingredient of the franchise, namely Jack Sparrow.

Anyway, these acts will create new offences and give additional powers to the holders of this IP to support their position relative to what it would be without them. This takes power away from consumers and gives it to producers. In a democracy it seems odd that the democratic will of the consumers who would presumably overwhelmingly prefer these measures not to go ahead, is overriden. The resolution to this paradox was given by Mancur Olson in his book The Logic of Collective Action (the link is to Wikipedia which, of course, will be unavailable if you are reading this on the 18th, ironically).

Olson realised that because the return per capita on lobbying by small groups of vested interest was so great, and that organising large groups was so difficult, the small groups would progressively hijack the democratic process. Basically in large groups everyone assumes that someone else will make the effort - the famous 'free rider problem'.

Since I came across Olson's ideas I have realised that they have terrific explanatory power. When I see any proposal for a new piece of legislation I now ask myself: 'which industry/professional body will benefit from this?'. Invariably  the industry/profession will be heavily represented in the body of experts called upon to draft the legislation. Of course one group benefits from almost all new legislation: they lawyers themselves. Is it surprising that so many politicians are lawyers?

Related articles

• Wikipedia SOPA/PIPA Blackout Pages (webpronews.com)
• Let's bury SOPA and PIPA (piedtype.com)
• Wikipedia to black out all 3.8 million English-language pages to protest PIPA (digitaltrends.com)
• Wikipedia to shut down for 24 hours (ausocial.com.au)
• Wikipedia goes nuclear against SOPA: founder confirms site blackout (venturebeat.com)

PC's are expensive. They are amazingly powerful and complex pieces of equipment, and they are worth the money, but they do represent the consumption of a lot of resources.

These are the rules I follow when buying a PC. Others may work for you, not least because you may be reluctant about installing a new operating system, upgrading the memory of your laptop, or replacing the hard disk. If you are willing to have a go at doing these things you can save a lot of money:

1. Think about buying a second-hand machine. There are a lot on the market, and some have been well maintained,
2. don't disregard processors made by AMD or designed by ARM,
3. don't be worried if the hard disk has failed - this is usually easy to replace, and quite cheap,
4. don't be worried if the computer has no operating system. If the PC has a COA then you are entitled to install a fresh Microsoft operating system. In any case you can install Fedora or Ubuntu, which will probably serve you just as well,
5. eBay is a great source of ex-lease laptops. Sellers will usually have very high feedback.
   
6. think about buying the sort of boring computer corporations typically lease - i.e. not Alienware or Mac,
   

   Image via Wikipedia

7. don't be put off buying from abroad - you can escape the VAT (possibly) and it's easy to get used to a US keyboard (I prefer them) or if you don't like that you can still use a UK-style keyboard, you just have to remember where the £ key is,
8. get as much memory as you can afford. I think that a 4GB PC is just much nicer to use, even if the processor speed is a bit slow. It's fairly cheap to buy extra memory from a specialist supplier like Crucial  but it's probably going to be cheaper to buy the PC with the extra memory already installed,
9. always google for reviews of the particular PC before you bid. Amazon is good, but sometimes ordinary buyers will give a low rating because the item was delivered damaged, or doesn't do something it was never designed to do,
10. think about what you need the PC for. If you are going to connect it to a modern PC or monitor, then an HDMI connector is very important (DVI or display port may be an cheaper alternative if you're prepared to buy a slightly more expensive adaptor cable).

These are my top-ten tips. I am sure there are other things to look out for. Send them to me on Twitter and don't forget to tell me how you get on! My latest purchase was a Dell Latitude E6400 with 4GB RAM which I managed to pick up for under one hundred and sixty pounds from PC Efficient in Shefford (driveable from me, so I save the delivery cost!).

 

Well, my blog is back. Actually it took all of 2 minute to recover it. All the entries remained visible, and hence my PR was probably unaffected, since Google doesn't care about formatting anyway.

I haven't been saying anything here. I've been using Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz (which I still rather like) and Joomla recently, plus creating the Knebworth Parish Council Website using Google Sites (aka Jot Spot).

Joomla is very frustrating to use. I'll say which site I've been working on later, maybe, but it's not live yet, and I don't want to encourage anyone to go there until the client has given the 100% OK. It is however pretty powerful and I'm sticking with it. I am using Dreamhost, which is a pretty good hosting company, although I'm sticking with Google for email servers.

I've been looking at EPOS and General Ledger systems. Not very informedly though. If you know anything about these subjects, please give me a ring.

I have had a bit of a play with Amazon's EC2 service. I set myself up a micro instance and found that I had a fully-functioning virtual machine, out there in the cloud, running on Amazon's infrastructure completely free. This is pretty awesome.

If you want more info on any of these techy type things feel free to google for them. Alternatively drop me a line and I'll be happy to bore you about them.

I see that a few of you have managed to leave comments. Thanks for showing that it is possible. A few of you whom I know personally have brought up things I've mentioned in my blog in real life conversations (yes, I do actually get out to the pub from time to time). Why don't you say 'hi' in the box below? You can also do so through FB as I think I've linked this blog to my page via RSS Graffitti, which is a much better app than the default FB notes app. that is supposed to be able to import RSS but has never worked for me.

For practically the whole of my adult life I've been using computers. When I was at school we had a teletype rigged up to an acoustic coupler to the City Hall computer, some kind of ICL machine with a magnificent 128K of core store. Unlike most people of my age, I don't consider them anything more frightening than a TV or radio.

I instinctively value digital information more highly than physical, tangible stuff. When I think of filing something, I think of putting it into a database. Communication is most easily retrieved when it was sent by email. Music is best transferred as an MP3 file. Most institutions, and people, I have concluded, just don't feel like that. They may use an Amazon Kindle, but they much prefer to hold a real physical book, or a paper newspaper or magazine.

People also prefer to interact with people in person. A video link is preferable to a telephone conversation is preferable to an instant message chat is preferable to email. A face-to-face meeting is preferable to them all. We are governed by people coming together in rooms to talk, with paper agenda and minutes as props. Important decisions require physical meeting.

I recently read Tony Blair's autobiography. Famously he had never sent or received an email, at least until he ceased being prime minister. Gordon Brown spent hours every day writing notes by hand, in his execrable and illegible handwriting, rather than using a keyboard.

The other day we held a sort of party. Lots of young people were here. A good number of hand-written thank-you cards and notes were sent. Nobody sent an email expressing the same thanks. Even amongst those who have never known a period before email in the home, it's somehow a cultural given that thanks are expressed by something tangible.

This is all incomprehensible to me. Debates in Parliament could much more efficiently be conducted via Google Wave. MPs could sit at home, or in their offices. Considered, checked and grammatical contributions to the debate could be depended on. Oh, but no, Google has abandoned Wave, because nobody used it, in spite of its manifest potential for saving the planet by rendering travel to meetings obsolete.

The desire to physically touch things, and come together physically remains a mystery to me, but, it seems to me it must be something to do with extra information transmitted above and beyond the factual content of the conversation. The subtle indicators of, well, something beyond me, anyway. This is fine, but it does make me feel excluded. Not only do I not receive this information, but those who do don't seem to be able to communicate to me either its content or its function. All very odd... You can leave comments you know!

View Stuff in Cardiff in a larger map

I'm really not quite sure why this has always seemed to be such a problem. If one goes to 'My Maps' in Google Maps (probably the link is only there if one is logged into Google Services) then one can create a new map, complete with markers and routes, and pick up an iframe link to embed in a blog entry, much as you can see above.

I have been on a few enjoyable walks around Hertfordshire recently, and made a record of them on my new GPS enabled phone. Expect them to appear here fairly soon.

This is really quite straightforward and there are loads of pages out in the Interweb Thingy that explain how to do this, but I still screw it up whenever I try to do it from memory. The idea is explained here for Ubuntu and here for Windows+Putty ("Putty makes Windows usable").

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths University Enterprise Network. So now you know. You can find out more at stem-uen.org.

The idea of a UEN is to strengthen links between universities and industry and to promote entrepreneurship. Yes, it is a quango and as such has a lot of equality, diversity and inclusiveness rhetoric.

Currently the website is fairly sparse, but it's likely to collect a lot more content in the coming months.

I have had the good fortune to be related to some people, particularly Guy Yeomans Hemingway, who produced the Hemingway Family History in the 60's, helped by my dear friend Geoff Dart. This gives an idea of what it is about.

Kathie put some effort in researching our immediate family at St Katharine's House in the 80's, when all the records were still in dusty files. I combined this information in a GEDCOM file, which has gathered its own virtual dust on my hard disk ever since. I posted it to RootsWeb, here.

I am extremely bad and lazy about data. Once I get a piece of code working, I always think that it is simply for users to sort out the data. As far as I was concerned, the best way of doing this was in something like a wiki, where everyone who was remotely interested could create and monitor their own leaf of the tree. I looked around at the options for this and eventually decided that the cheapest option was phpGedView. I was slightly hesitant about getting it installed on my web server as my days as a serious programmer/administrator are well behind me. However I discovered that a combination of beautiful coding on the part of the developers, and excellent web-based administration screens provided by my hosting company, pair.com meant that I could get the interactive Hemingway family tree up and running in an absurdly short time.

Really it's only interesting if (i) you are related to the individuals on it and (ii) created as an individual user by me. I can't do anything about (i) but I can certainly sort out (ii). Just email me at steve.hemingway@gmail.com and I'll set you up. I think that you can just send a message to the administrator via the hosted tree as an alternative to sending me an email, but I can't see why you would want to do that.

While I am writing this I should own up to damaging the tree. I somehow tried to merge in a couple of incompatible trees of the Pullen/Palmer/Verrall/Houde families, which resulted in some awful confusion. Because I am only extremely distantly related to these families I have never bothered to invest the time to sort things out. Please help!

At the beginning of the snowy weather I fell over and dropped my phone, the excellent HTC G1 Android phone. It showed now obvious signs of damage, but later it refused to start, and was later pronounced unrepairable by Phone Touch. I therefore decided to buy a replacement. I originally thought about getting another android phone, but I was tempted to try something completely different. After spending far too long reading specifications of all sorts of phones I decided on something completely different, a
The Sony-Ericsson P1i.

This is a complete change of strategy for me as it means that I'll be moving back towards a MS operating system: Windows Mobile. My last two phones were Linux-based: the excellent Motorola A1200 and the even more excellent HTC G1, the latter being an Android version. I am not sure whether Windows Mobile has a future, but with the price of the P1i much less than half the price of a high-quality hardware phone with Android I couldn't resist.

My main concern is that I can get Google Sync to work. I have found Google Calendar on the Android phone by far the most useful feature of a smart phone. If this works and I find that I like Windows Mobile the next thing you know you'll see me installing Windows 7 over Ubuntu on my laptop!

We've been setting up vacation messages on our email servers for a long time. We give some fixed message to our correspondents that we're away and will not be able to respond for a while. Sometimes we will set up some rules, for example that we will send the message only to people who are already in our address book.

This idea could be taken a lot further. I seem to spend more and more time telling people and computers my date of birth, my mother's maiden name, the name of my first pet, my first motor car and a whole raft of other personal identity, allegedly for my own security, but clearly to make it easier for others to pay out if my money is stolen. It would be fairly easy for me to build up a comprehensive (within the universe of questions asked by banks) database of answers which some automated system could reveal to those with suitable credentials.

This kind of thing could be extended further with access control lists for part of the information controlling access from others, maybe family or friends. The great thing about this is that these questions could keep being answered after my death. Perhaps the set of questions and answers could be extended to those related to my wishes for how my funeral should be arranged, who should be invited, and who should not.

It will be quite tedious to write all this information in a rigid format, but a general computer analysis of my writings and statements could be used to infer my answers to all sorts of questions, even to the extent of my voting preferences. A virtual me could be constructed that would be almost as good as the real thing, although this virtual me would not be of much practical help when it comes to DIY or giving lifts. I'm sure the system could be designed to answer questions in my distinctive, if not literary, style of English. I'm not sure how the system would cope when I've expressed diametrically-opposed views in the past. Maybe some kind of time decay could be incorporated, giving more weight to recent assertions. These are mere technical details!

Currently we try to specify rules for financial arrangements after death. We might specify some rules for the management of trusts and bequests. Writing this in paper form will give rise to lots of problems of interpretation. Some format capable of being analysed by machine, like a programming language, would surely be preferable. Perhaps computers will, at last, provide us with life after death, if only in a limited way.