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Friday, April 29, 2005 |
Independent: "Families of some of the British soldiers killed in Iraq said they were preparing a legal case against the Prime Minister, based on the leaked document."
SMH: "The so-called global war on terrorism does not exist, a high-ranking army officer has declared in a speech that challenges the conventional political wisdom.
In a frank speech, Brigadier Justin Kelly dismissed several of the central tenets of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, saying the 'war' part is all about politics and terrorism is merely a tactic.
Brigadier Kelly said modern war could be defined as 'conflict, using violent and non-violent means, between multiple actors and influences, competing for control over the perceptions, behaviour and allegiances of human population groups'."
How do you compete for control of the population? One of the most important things is the suppression of truth. There are a number of techniques for suppressing the truth.
10:48:18 AM 
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BBC: "People who 'pirate' music and movies on the internet in the US face up to three years in jail under a new law signed by President Bush on Wednesday."
You must be a war criminal to be so tough.
Whenever people buy a blank data carrier, like a CD or DVD, they pay extra for copying fees; in some countries even iPods could get extra copy-taxing. This means that you have to pay several times for the right to copy: once when downloading music from the regular sources, once when buying blank CDs or DVDs and once for your storage drive. That is really theft.
And do the Celine Diones and her likes live in poverty? Are those copiers taking the bread out of her mouth? Most of their music was sampled from other artists, anyway. Stolen, so to say. Consider the price of music CDs, they are really a rip-off; huge profits are made on them.
When in the Netherlands the law is passed to tax storage devices, wouldn't that give every owner of such a device, like an iPod, the right to download anything, even illegal music, as they would have paid for copyright twice?
A slightly different problem is that of the RAW-files made with digital cameras. Companies like Nikon have their proprietary file format to store digital pictures. These can only be processed by Nikon's own picture management programs or those of companies with a licence from Nikon. Any software developer should have the right and format-access to make programs to process and manage raw files.
RAW files are the backbone of digital photography. They are used as film negatives earlier. Whenever you have to make a copy for the web or a print, you need the RAW file for a good quality copy exactly suited to the purpose of the picture (web or print). They are the best way to archive your pictures.
Why must a company like Nikon restrict the rights and possibilities of raw data files? Those pictures and raw files are the property of the photographer and the raw file format should be an open and accessible file format without limitations posed by firms like Nikon to the processing and management of these files.
10:32:09 AM
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