Eviljaymz: Musings on Everything by a bitter Irishman in London

I am happy to hear that finally that stuffy cow with no respect for peoples liberty or freedoms is finally going. Yes, Jacqui Smith is out. As is Hazel Blears. Both have shown complete ignorance for the populous. Smith has trampled on civil liberties in this country for too long and Blears is one of those people you could slap. Both have been home secretaries and both seem to think that they know best.

It was Smiths refusal to listen to the very board the government have to investigate drugs that led to the purely political decision to re-classify cannabis. Hazel Blears has effectively just thrown her toys out of her pram after Gordon Brown criticized her abuse of the expense system. I feel a little sorry for him surrounded by assholes like this (but a general election wouldn't hurt either).

Cunts like this totally ruin politics and lead to disillusion. I'm glad the bitch(es) are gone but, like someone on reddit mentioned, it is a shame they will be remembered for the abuse of expenses rather than the abuse of civil liberties the pair have inflicted on this nation.

Jacqui Smith / HAZEL BLEARS - FUCK OFF YOU LOATHSOME PRICKS

I absolutely LOVE Trials2 from Indie developer Red Lynx. In fact, its the first game I've actually "gone out" and bought in a long time. I say "gone out", its available on Steam. Anyway, one minor annoyance I had was that although the scores for people are available online and per-track in-game I found it a bit annoying clicking through each page when I got home to see if any of my scores had been beaten by friends.

So I knocked this up. Its quite simple, it uses a combination of cURL & xpath to grab the page for the 2 profiles you're interested in and then simply loads those up into an array. I thought I'd beautify it a bit to fit in more with the Trials 2 site. You can check it out here (/code/comparetrialsprofile.php). It does what I'm most interested in - compare your global ranking per track with a mate. With bank holiday weekend coming up I might flesh it out a bit.

Some things I'd like to add would be over-all summaries and the ability to compare more than one person side by side - maybe grabbing the team members from the team page etc. Hopefully red lynx dont change the layout/format on their site :) Once again, kudos guys on an incredibly addictive/challenging/beautiful game.

I've defaulted it to me on the left & my mate that introduced me to Trials on the right (he's jolly good).

Note: occasionally you might get a timeout and your browser will try and let you save the file - just reload

So I posted this to reddit yesterday (hello there people from the internet) and got a fairly good response :) I 'drew' this at 4am whilst rather stoned and it is perhaps no surprise that I read xkcd thrice-weekly so I was expecting a comparison to that.

I have new found respect for how quick things spread on the internet :)

I should point out that a) the 3d artist is not jewish. That was my attempt to 'liven' it up by adding a crude chunk of hair, not a skullcap. And... b) the IT consultant is not christian, again, that was my attempt to doodle a middle finger gesture. Anwyayz, as sad as it is, I was rather warmed by how all that played out. It made for a fairly memorable 26th birthday...

It has been a few years since something like this happened to me but if you've ever had trouble scoring some green and then drink a lot of beer you have probably had the same great idea. I think the last time I got stung was when I was probably living in Brixton and would take a walk up Coldharbour Lane at midnight. Ever since then I've been more likely to say 'fuck it' than bother risking buying from someone random. Camden was terrible for that sort of shit a couple of years ago, now-a-days its actually not that easy to meet some scummy street dealer. But if you do try that, expect to pay £20 for about £5-8 worth of 'bush' weed.

Haiku #3 - Perils of the street deal...

I have been messing about with some gmail accounts with spam and the like, more as a side interest than anything serious and I keep noticing Google AdWords ad's on the side for all kinds of nefarious sounding schemes. So, treating this throwaway email address like some kind of skanky whore I pimped it out to a number of 'get rich quick' style websites whenever it asked for it (which was right before the 'click here for this mother-fucking life changing information' link).

One of the websites I landed on is to do with an 'internet marketting affiliate' system called Wealthy Affiliate. It offers people W1TH N0 EXPI3RENC£! the opportunity to grow their own e-marketing affiliate and link building scheme. Of course, it sounds reasonable. It offers 75% to 90% on every referral sale. What caught my eye as a nerdy, boring fucking developer though wasn't the obvious scammy-ness/going-nowhere-sales/fucking-appalling-banal-shite of the business model but the somewhat sophisticated guff they used to persuade people that have just managed to launch that first AOL cd in their Packard Bell Windows ME system that they can be a web designer/developer/seo consultant etc.

In fact, and rather oddly, I have to say some of the tools I saw were quite good in some respects, like the above pictured Site Rubix. The Wealthy Affiliate scammers internet marketing entrepreneurs push one particular tool called Site Rubix. Its basically a WYSIWYG HTML editor not a million miles unlike FCKEditor or the ilk. I actually watched the fucking screencast on it (yes, I have so little going on some times that I sit through spam of my own vocation). Its the sort of thing that you can dig up for free anyway but I was somewhat bemused at the effort put into it - the AJAX-ified editor, the table builder, the drag and drop nav system. Of course they've probably just ripped and re-branded an existing CRM editor and this is all academic but at the time I thought 'crap, thats not too bad'.

In any case, dont take my word for it, heres a testimonial from the site from a fucking web developer, who somehow managed to refer to the system he loves and uses daily as Sit Rubix...

Here's hoping I'm never maintaining that motherfuckers code. I've lost count of the number of times I've been so fucking 'refreshed' to use yet another WYSIWYG web editor. Jesus. Anyway, all this nonsense only caught my attention since I'm currently sort of half-building a CRM/doing a fuck-ton of Django work. Django FTW! I ♥ Django/Python :)

Yet more 7-5-7 based literature, this time I was cleaning out my fridge for the first time in months and discovered an alarming amount of half empty packets of grated mature cheddar littering the back. And a whole lot of other stuff I had forgotten about, which is surprising given how small the fridge actually is.

Haiku #2 - Stock rotation is important...

Anyone thats ever been on a London bus before will be familiar with the callous disregard for basic physics that the drivers display. Trying to get from the back of the top floor to the exit when the fucker is in motion is a dangerous pursuit. Drivers seem to accelerate like they're having a fucking drag race and then slam on the brakes twenty meters from the rather regularly stationed stops.

It's like none of these bastards has ever heard of the concept of momentum:

p = mv

And I'm near positive they have no concept of impulse:

I = ∫ dp

When you accelerate up a 7-12 ton mass to 30 odd miles an hour thats a fucking huge amount of momentum. You enter a non-intertial frame til the thing stops, all the while bouncing about the place trying not to collapse into some asshole thats been yapping on a phone the whole time. I have no idea how the elderly or women in 6 inch heels, much less a baked version of me, make it down the stairs in one piece.

How these people pass a fucking test I will never know. Still, its better to endure a Lewis Hamilton wannabe bombing it down Oxford street than forcing yourself onto a tube train. Some cunt used my shoulder as a fucking handrail on Tuesday...

Inspired by Screenwipe's excellent dark yet comedic poetry I thought about haiku's again. I love haiku's. They're accessible, thoughtful and remarkably deep for such a compact form of communication. It's very much an encapsulation of a whole idea. Anywayz, I wasn't unknown for writing snippets of the stuff many years ago and why not start again...

Haiku #1 - Wisdom of the IT guy...

I was watching Channel 4 news this evening and they had a report on the massive amount of personal debt that Britain has and they had a couple of case studies which re-enforced my opinion that I'm far from normal. At least when it comes to this shit anyway.

One woman got herself 4 or 5 store cards, a few credit cards and a fucking loan. In total it was hitting over £10,000 of hardcore debt. Another woman re-mortgaged her fucking property so much that she ended up borrowing over £160,000. This sort of shit blows-my-fucking-mind.

When I was at uni I eventually took out an overdraft and I've had that with me since graduating. I don't mind, it's £2,000 and its handy to have. It's not a huge amount and its not a fucking credit card. I am at a loss to understand these idiots that decide taking out a credit card to buy fucking clothes & shoes is a good idea. When I can't afford to buy something I wait. I save some money and then I go and buy whatever shit it is I need. I do not understand how people don't think 'credit card = money i have to pay back'.

But then I suppose my buying habits are far from normal. I live in a tiny flat, I don't mind, I've come to terms with that fact that I'm living in London and am lothe to spend more than £700 on rent. Fuck that for a game of skittles. If anything I'm only really 'using' my room at the weekend and for 5 hours a night. Sure it would be nice to have a bigger place but fuck it, I can wait til I'm older and earning more.

Secondly I buy very little. I buy a lot of shit, but I have a formula that seems to work quite well:

wages - (rent ∧ shit) ≡ money for (weed ∨ beer ∨ games ∨ blank dvds)

This is a great formula. It would appear that fucking loads of people have however been using this formula:

wages - (rent ∧ shit) + ℑ(magic pony) ⇒ money ≥ ∞

One of the women on the C4 report said 'I know its my fault, I took it, I took this credit' and I thought 'cool!, someone that fucking takes some bastard responsibility' but she then added 'but they gave me it, they let me have it'. Wow. good argument there. Yes I know, banks are cunts but fuck me how the fuck are these people even making it to adulthood when they dont understand credit != free. How the fuck do they not understand its a fucking loan.

Woah... plenty of swearing there. Im so sick of hearing about these people and we've only just started the big bad recession. Righty-oh, time for the last episode of the restaurant... Bollocks. Even less good TV to watch next week.

Yesterday I was on my way home taking the C2 from Regent Street. The reason I like getting that particular bus is that I make it on at the first stop and hence have my pick of the seats. I like the front (duh) and since I'm on the bus for a while I might as well have a good view. One thing that really pisses me off is when people sit on the outside of the seats leaving an empty seat on the inside. I don't understand this behavior but its fucking annoying.

So I always sit on the inner seat and half expect someone to sit next to me eventually... normally by the time the bus is hitting Euston road. Rather oddly more often than not the person on the opposite side always seems to do this 'outer seat' trick and I spend the first ten minutes of my journey muttering under my breath the word 'asshole'.

Thankfully last night the people boarding the bus all seemed to conform to my seat ettiqutte so instead I got wound up by something completely different. This time some girl sat next to me and I swear to god she fucking yapped from the minute she sat down til the time she got off in Camden. When she'd finished one call she preceded to scan through her contacts looking for someone else to talk to. I can't for the fucking life of me understand why people insist on having banal conversations loudly on public transport.

Between Great Portland Street and Parkway I looked in the reflection of the front window and could see 4 or 5 women nattering away to someone that must've given a shit about absolute crap. I don't know if it had something to do with all the weed I got through the previous evening but my brain started going into overload trying to seperate out the individual threads of conversation. In the end it started to give me a headache so I just turned up the music I had on (at that point Ministry - The Last Sucker).

I really wish people would shut the fuck up when they're on a bus. Can you imagine the tube with all these pricks going off on one...

I just discovered (through a mate of mine) the Irish Apprentice. There's been absolutely nothing about it in the UK media so its a real gem of a find. I've watched 1.333 episodes, i.e. Im a bit through the 2nd and its been interesting.

First off, its looking to be awesome and secondly its very obvious the shows producers have studied hard both the UK & US versions. Episode one, selling fruit has a definite 'BBC' feel to it. The task, the setting, even the weather, its very much like the Alan Sugar style UK challenges. Episode 2 however betrays the show's commercial backing and has the feel of the Trump-produced US content.

The Irish Apprentice airs on TV3, which I thought felt a bit strange given that after watching episode 1 I thought it had a very 'national broadcaster' (i.e. RTE-1 much like BBC-1) style but episode 2 with the EA game promo challenge is very much in the style of the commercial version state-side. In fact there was a fairly similar challenge during season 5 of the US version...

The second episode has already had some interesting moments, for one both teams forgoe picking 'Spore' to promote which says a lot given the huge hype of the game over the years and their this is why we should represent this game pitches are hilarious.

Anywayz, its been most excellent :D And some decent viewing to replace the soon to be finished The Restaurant series 2. Thank god for bit-torrent otherwise I'd have never of seen this. As a side note, I find that the 'cheddar' cheese I've had open in the fridge for a week now tastes a lot like some kind of blue cheese after melting it over a potato. Interesting trips to the bathroom later me thinks...

I had the absolute misfortune to be forced to watch an episode of Little Britain USA. I've been avoiding this since I heard about it and it would seem with good reason. The jokes are the same, it's all either gayness, bodily functions or stereotypes. I know the first UK series was applauded as a statire on the nation but after 3 fucking series, spin-offs and now HB-fucking-O lauding them up with cash I see less comedic talent and more worthless bullshit.

If you enjoy unintelligent, repetitive, uninspired comedy then you probably like the original Little Britain and my moaning is unlikely to sway your opinion. If you are tempted to put this on in a moment of weakness... don't.

I have spent the past 3 working days bug fixing google checkout code and it has been, to put it mildly a total headfuck. Fixing bugs & code refactoring is of course the mainstay of the working programmer. It's fun when you're working through something, you can see progress, but bug fixing is like travelling through London. You feel like you've gone miles when really you've only made it a couple of stops and it would've been quicker to walk.

First off it took the best part of an afternoon to realise that the code I was modifying wasn't actually being called. Now I've never worked with googlecheckout before so you can probably chalk a few hours up to that. For googlecheckout you set the callback code in the account preferences for the store's account. Why on fucking earth that can't be passed in the calling code I don't know. After working that out and seeing that the myriad of tests I'd been doing had actually screwed up a live database the majority of the blood drained from my fingers.

The next two hours where spent looking through log files in a terminal prompt. That was fairly thrilling. At the end of the day I felt like I'd done ten minutes work. Thats sort of the problem with fixing bugs, you can spend hours looking at code, logs and status numbers and when you finally find the error, which is probably something easy, the sheer simplicity of the fix and the few lines of code you need to modify make you feel like you've not done much.

So in that way you can kind of compare fixing bugs in source code (especially source code that involves 4 separate processes to actually run) to sex. To get sex you do hours if not days of monotonous, boring work for what boils down to 15 (or maybe 30 if you've had a good meal beforehand) minutes of payoff. Obviously this metaphor breaks down rather quickly since fixing source code bugs is a productive pursuit...

Thankfully, on the third day and several hundred tests later (at one point I charged my card over £600 when I got so used to mindlessly clicking through purchase screens) I started making actual progress. In the end I've probably changed or moved around about 15 lines of code. I'm now a lot more familiar with code igniter and google checkout but I can't help but feel the past few days have been slow going and unproductive. Tomorrow I'm bugfixing yet again but now that I have a setup thats working these last few bugs shouldn't be anywhere near as bad.

One last thing, the documentation for the PHP api of googlecheckout is fucking abysmal.

I've been mucking about with Python of late, well more Django, and one of the ways I've been trying to learn it is by writing small scripts to do something 'real'. Since one of the things I like doing is graphic work my python 'apps' are centered around doing something of use to do with that.

The first python app I wrote let me click on points in a photo to build up an RGB gradient. Writing this for GIMP was ridiulously easy since I could just have a look at the source code that handles gradient files. These GGR files are very simple consisting of just a plain text header & some (decimal) color codes. Photoshop on the other hand uses an undocumented binary file. So my script outputs GIMP compatible gradients.

Fast forward to last night and I was browsing my bookmarks and clicked through to ColorSchemer.com. Its a cool website with user submitted color schemes. Theres a couple of generated graphics on the site for each palette and the option to download the .cs file for it. This file is, like photoshop assets, in binary form but looking at it in a hex editor it's quite obvious where the interesting bits are. It took maybe 15minutes to write a quick python script to convert these into GIMP compatible palette files.

This is one of the reasons why I like open source, information is transparent. I just opened an existing GIMP palette file into a text editor and there was the information I needed to create new files. And I didn't have to jump through hoops or employ some sort of encryption. Nice and easy :D

convertcs.py source code

So I've been at U Dox for just over a month now and my very first task starting from the minute I got my login was to rework the very cool Spine Magazine site from its funky flash to a HTML based layout using Ajax and JQuery. Here's the flash version:

And here's the HTML version:

Look similar? Good! It's meant to. We got a lot of bad feedback because the all flash site had a number of usability problems. Firstly it was impossible to get at old news storied on account of the infinite scroller. It was a cool feature and some awesome AS3 code but for users it was a bit of a nightmare. Spine has over 7,000 articles and hundreds of album reviews so I focused on making sure people could get to and share them easily.

I added in pagination for both and the all important 'permalink'. After being online for only a full day we're already getting positive feedback from our users, which is great! The random email from a reader saying you're doing a good job makes the whole thing worthwhile. The radio player has been kept in flash for obvious reasons but thats been tweaked too to make the archive much more intuitive and easy to use and it no longer automatically starts buffering (you'd be amazed how much bandwidth we go through with 100Mb high quality radio shows).

It's been a great first project to work on and I'm really pleased with the results. I'm sure in the future there will be changes but for now check it out.

If you read slashdot, digg or reddit the chances are you've seen the posters from the Metropolitan police trying to make sure everyone in London treats everyone else with utter suspicion. This latest poster is a real classic. I'll break it down... when I'm not about to pass out since I'm off to work in 9 hours.

I went to see Gamabomb & Soulfly last night at the University of London Union. I was a bit pissed off to find a pint was £3.50, given that its a fucking students union but anyway, the gig itself was pretty good. I was really only there to see Gamabomb, I havent really listened to much Soulfly. I was a big Sepultura (pre Max's departure) fan but never got into the stuff after the divergence.

Anyway, Gamabombs set was really good, some fucking twat behind me was moaning about them and when I turned round to look he was some trendy prick, so his opinion is about as worthwhile as a turd on the street. Aside from the old-skool thrash, Philly is a funny guy on stage, the intro's to the songs get the crowd laughing, songs like OCP about Robocop or Final Fight (the video game) got good laughs when being introduced and my personal favourite was the intro to 'Sentenced to Thrash', a song about being forced to listen to thrash constantly deep in the future as punishment. For some reason it makes me think of the excellent & underrated Fortress film starring Christopher Lambert.

Going to the bogs (which were conveniently placed down the sodding stairs and through a long corridor) reminded me why I hate going to gigs, some fat bastard was storming through the corridor pissed out of his mind and on seeing the queue forming decided he'd piss against the wall in the fucking corridor with everyone around him. Thankfully the line moved a bit quickly as he was unzipping and he ended up just pissing in a sink. Classy stuff.

When Soulfly finally came on the little venue was packed leaving tons of room around the back and easy access to the bar. I'm beyond wanting to be in the middle of all that and would rather chill at the back with a beer in my hand. In any case I was still only about 25m from the stage. Rather weirdly there were a bunch of chavy pricks in addidas tops walking around menacingly, I figure they were just there for the mosh pit, and not in a good 'metaller' way, just for violence. Dicks like that are ruining metal gigs. If your ever in a mosh pit people are actually friendly, if you fall you'll get picked up almost immediately and people will try and help you. Yeah, it is 'violent' but in a chaotic controlled way. Assholes that turn up at gigs just to hit people really fuck me off.

Anywayz, I noticed that Soulfly played more than a couple of 'old' Sepultura tunes, these getting the biggest shouts and 'wooooo' from the crowd which made me think 'is this Soulfly or some Sepultura tribute band thats trying to sneek in their own stuff'. Still, it was good to hear 'Refuse/Resist' and some tracks from 'Roots'. Overall the gig was pretty good, the sound was a bit pants though.

Paramount is quite good on a weekend if you have nothing else to do, they've been running Frasier Season 7 all day today. So after a fairly long night I thought I'd just crash and watch that. Unfortunately whatever fucking moron decided to schedule the channels own adverts seems to think people have the memory of an egg.

After watching 6 episodes in a row the channel was really grating on me. Whatever new 'theme' they're having for the coming week the insist on plugging during every fucking break. The amount of times I've had to listen to the new stand-up season their running on Monday drove me crazy. I don't know who thinks its a good idea to piss off their viewers but of all the channels I watch Paramount are the worst offenders. Dave is bad enough for replaying the same show over & over (ever sit down to watch 6 episodes of red drawf only for the last 3 to be the same as the first?) but Paramount are kings of forcing you to leave the channel at every break.

If the idea is to physically burn their schedule into your mind its got the opposite effect. As soon as the break hits I'm either muting the bastard TV and surfing the web or making excellent use of the 'backwards/forwards' jump button on the remote to switch to the news. The only explanation I have is that the channel is run by one guy in a room with a dvd player that sticks in the Frasier or M*A*S*H box set every weekend and schedules it to play one of 2 ad's every break. If I ever happen to meet this guy the first thing I'll do is scream 'what the fuck are you thinking?' at him...

So after a week I've landed a job at a creative design agency called U Dox. It's a very cool company and its smack in the heart of Soho. The thing I really loved about this place during the interview was that they use whatever is the best tool for the job. If Python makes sense, that's what's used. Ruby/Rails? That too. A lot of the work is ActionScript3 based so I'm excited to get to learn that. Having spent a few days playing around in Flash CS3 I have to say I'm impressed. It's a hell of a lot nicer than AS2. Having had a rather productive week I feel like sharing my experience of landing a web-dev/design job at a really cool agency.

The first thing I did was to put together a portfolio online at PixelReactive. As a web developer it's really important to have a resource like this. Even if you're a coder you should put up some sort of link to example code. It helps to differentiate your CV from all the others. You can just give a list of links if they ask you but it shows you are serious about yourself if you have a collective resource like this that you can say 'if you go to this link there is some sample work and my links'. It also makes your telephone calls easier to rhyme off the one URL.

Since I was keen to get into design as well I put up links to my illustration and sketch work. Anything I did which I felt showed off my skills in a good way I put on that site. Code samples are really important, it means the people interviewing you will have a good idea already how you code and your style. It also means they can see if you're full of shit :)

The other big thing I found was enthusiasm will get you far. This is a very hard thing to fake. It's been something of a dream of mine to go from a 16 year old learning about ActiveX (jesus!) to working at an agency. I have no formal graphics training, everything I do comes from books, free resources like OpenU & MIT, and Google searches. If you want to get into the web-dev field it's very forgiving for those who don't have the right bits of paper. The other thing you might consider is getting certified in your language of choice. I'm taking the Zend PHP5 exam soon, I didn't need it to land a job but I've paid for it already so might as well :)

Finally when you're interviewing at an agency or development shop it's important to be a good fit in the team. This is obviously really hard to 'learn' but if you have a good manner on the phone and in person and you aren't miserable or somewhat aggressive or shy then that will help you a ton. A few years ago I would crap my pants when the phone rang, I'd avoid contacting people as much as I could (which ended up with me in court vs the Inland Revenue after 4 years!) and I was generally very introverted. I still am somewhat shy but after working at Net Root for a bit I came out of my shell and got used to talking to people on phones & in person.

Having talked to a lot of recruitment agents this week the other thing I should say is that I was really impressed with how they work. I got a lot of really good advice from them and they were all really helpful (and nice!). I've read lots of horror stories about people having nightmare times with these guys but thankfully that didn't ring true for me. Partly because of the portfolio (it makes it easy for them to see you're worth their time) I would say. As a side shoot from my job hunting I've got to meet some really cool people that I'll be keeping in touch with.

So if you're looking to get into web development and want to work make sure you have something to show people. It will make your life a ton easier. And learn as much as you can outside your comfort zone. I didn't really need to use CVS or SVN for my projects but I started because thats a useful thing to know about when it comes to team work. Same goes for Python, all my (paid for) development was in PHP but I've been learning Python mainly because I love languages. Little things like this make you more marketable than some fresh-faced grad with a bit of focused experience.

It would appear that 'the big 6' ISP's in the UK are agreeing with proposed government policy to punish file sharers. They're going to identify repeat offenders by IP address and so on and so on ad nauseum. There's loads of detail about this not least on the BBC, Slashdot, ZDnet, The Register.

What I'm more interested (or I should say annoyed) about is the brigade of people that compare bittorrent to actual physical theft. If you read the Have Your Say (BBC) page on the topic its split between people saying it is not theft, its copyright infringement and the others that say 'would you walk into Tesco, take what you want and walk out?'.

Now no matter what your opinion of people downloading movies, tv shows, music, games, whatever for free is, what it is not is theft. We have laws, laws like 'dont murder' and so on and the law says its not theft. People don't seem to understand that. It makes for circular arguments on those sort of discussion forums and I can only read so many pages before I start to go crazy but a few weeks ago one of the BBC's own editors put out a blog post on the Technology section of the site comparing file sharing to theft. When people pointed out in the comments that this isn't legally/technically correct he still proceeded to say:

UPDATE: A few people have questioned my use of the word stealing. Arguing that it is copyright infringement and not stealing. There may be a point here but to my mind this is semantics. It's a bit like breaking into a car, driving it around and then abandoing it. I believe it's called Taking Without Consent in legal parlance. Stealing to everybody else.

No Defence for Stealing Music.

The 'in my mind this is semantics' bit is what annoyed me the most, so much so I actually bothered to complain to the BBC:

Dear BBC,

As much as I find the reporting across the BBC excellent this particular post angered me so much as to write in and express my grievance with which the manner of this particular blog post came across.

There are numerous comments below the article in question that refute the central message of Darren Waters piece but it is his shear ill-informedness that is so perplexing for someone supposedly clued into how technology and presumably law as it applies to the area works.

His comment that, despite the many arguments to the contrary, the notion that copyright infringement and stealing are merely 'a question of semantics' is ridiculous. It is these sort of statements that create mass-confusion with regards to this area. If anything, it is rather irresponsible for someone high-up within the BBC's technology team to have such a warped view of what is legal reality.

I expect to find this sort of rhetoric on a BPI funded blog, not a public service broadcaster.

Thank you for your time in reading this,

Regards,

James

I got a reply a few days later saying it had been noted and added to the pages of internal feedback that gets passed around.

There's this fallacy amongst the people that argue that it's theft that is perfectly demonstrated in Waters' explanation. He compares downloading music illegally to taking a car, driving around a bit and then leaving it as is. There is a problem with that argument though and that is that you're taking a physical possession. When you steal/borrow the car the rightful owner has been deprived of their resource. File sharing on the other hand involves no deprivation to the creator of the work in that sense. That's why its copyright infringement and not stealing. I haven't taken anything from the producer of the media, I'm playing their music unlicensed. Comparing it to taking a physical car is stupid.

What you could compare it to is walking up to your friends car with some sort of replicator device they had in Red Dwarf and make an exact copy with your own materials. In the case of music piracy the materials are the magnetic tracks of your hard drive that when you arrange in a certain order happen to be the same as some crappy bands new album in MP3 format. The only person I'm physically depriving is myself, of bandwidth and disk space...

Note I am not talking about the loss of revenue here, I'm talking about the actual MP3 file itself. This is the problem with people that compare file sharing to full on ram raiding a supermarket. In any case I wouldn't have a problem if file sharing was classed as theft in law, but its not, so don't compare it to nicking a car.