Constant Dripping Wears Away the Stone

Although apparently a small matter, I think this story about restaurants refusing to provide tap water for free could have quite wide ramifications.

At one level, it's about restaurateurs being reasonable: if I spend tens of pounds on their food, it's not too much to ask for some water to go with it, given that it costs them fractions of a penny to provide it. If they refuse, it's sheer, bloody-minded greediness - and a good reason (a) never to eat there again and (b) to name and shame them so that others can do the same.

Moreover, as ever, this is not a question of a threat, but of an opportunity for restaurants, which can differentiate themselves through the quality of the tap water they offer - filtered, presented with ice, lemons whatever. Again, the costs of doing so are minimal, but the potential gains in terms of improved customer satisfation great.

But obviously, there's a much bigger issue here too:

Earlier this year, environment minister Phil Woolas condemned the bottled water industry as "morally unacceptable". Mineral water suppliers on average use two litres of water for every litre put into a bottle. Much is transported from overseas, from as far away as New Zealand and Fiji. Four out of five bottles are plastic, most of which end up in landfill despite recycling initiatives, where it can take four centuries to decompose.

Consumer campaigners Which? estimate that the number of plastic bottles sent to landfill each year would fill Wembley Stadium twice over. Which? describes bottled mineral water as an unnecessary drink that costs us £1.68bn a year. The good news is that sales fell by 9% last year, and in the credit crunch sales are expected to fall further. "Our reasons for buying bottled water are drying up," according to Which?

If we all start asking for tap water in restaurants - as I've recently started doing - we will be able to make a direct, if small contribution to reducing the ridiculous environmental costs of bottled water, perhaps start sensitising retaurateurs to the implications of how they choose to run their businesses and, more profoundly, change attitudes to the unthinking privatisation of vital commons like water.

A City of Shared Stories

Now that's what I call a mashup....

The Greening - and Maturing - of Boris

Despite previously attacking the Kyoto Protocol - which regulates international carbon emissions - as "pointless" and saying that anxiety over climate change was "partly a religious phenomenon" Johnson now admits that the 2006 Stern review on the issue had convinced him of the need to act. "When the facts change, you change your mind," he said.

How many senior politicians would dare say that (hello ID cards, hello Gordon)? I predict that we will see far less of the buffoonish Boris, and much more of this grown-up, sensible Boris in the future. Future PM, anyone?

The End of the American Net

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

Yup.

"Piracy" Is Not Theft

For those who find this hard to grasp, here's a picture that may help. (Via QuestionCopyright.org.)

Open Access Day

The (open) social calendar is getting full; first the World Day Against Software Patents, and now the Open Access Day:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

(Via Open Access News.)

Pre-installed Software: A Better Way

PC BOX BUILDERS are thinking of getting rid of the tradition of stuffing your new PC or laptop with trial software that you don’t really want anyway.

The reason is that some retailers, such as Best Buy, are making a small fortune removing the software and charging punters for the privilege.

Well, how about this: instead of loading PCs with a load of junk that users pay to be removed, why not put on a few, good open source programs: OpenOffice.org, Audacity, the Gimp, Blender? No cost to the manufacturer, no rubbish for the end user. Just a thought....

Google Backtracks on Eclipse and Mozilla Licences

Google plays a key role in the world of free software, both indirectly, through the fact that it runs most of its infrastructure on open source, and directly, through its support of projects (not least the dosh it gives to Mozilla). Against that background, its refusal to make certain popular licences like those from Mozilla and Eclipse available to projects hosted on Google Code was curious....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Words Fail Us

linguistics professor and author shares a personal selection from the thousands of languages on the brink of disappearing

How about if we all volunteered to learn an endangered language? - You can put me down for Ket:

Ket is the only Siberian language with a tone system where the pitch of the voice can give what sound like identical words quite different meanings. (Much like Chinese or Yoruba). To add to the difficulty for any westerner wishing to learn it, it also has extremely complicated word structure and grammar.

Ordnance Survey: Right Out of Order

I always thought that the Ordnance Survey had a rather, er, Olympian view of things that was more suited to the top-down twentieth century than the bottom-up one we inhabit. Some fine FOI work by the Guardian has confirmed that they really are as out of order as I surmised:

An extraordinary picture of a state body carrying out political lobbying on the issue of free data has emerged from documents obtained by the Guardian.

The correspondence reveals that Ordnance Survey (OS) is targeting MPs from Westminster and devolved assemblies, civil servants and leading figures in the free data debate. The agency openly attends party conferences and other political events to promote the value of geographical data. However, earlier this year a Parliamentary question revealed that it had paid a company called Mandate £42,076.20 plus VAT since August 2007.

So here we have a state body using *our* money to pay for lobbyists to advise on how to stop oiks like *us* from gaining free access to the information *we* largely foot the bill for.

The one consolation is that if they are prepared to stoop to stupid tactics like this, they are clearly running very scared: anyone remember Eric "pitbull" Dezenhall, another consultant brought in a desperate attempt to stave off open access...?

Mozilla Gets Google's Moolah for 3 More Years

This is important:

Another important element is the financial resources Mozilla enjoys. We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income. We’re also learning more all the time about how to use Mozilla’s financial resources to help contributors through infrastructure, new programs, and new types of support from employees.

The deal with Google is bringing in over $60 million a year: that's a huge resource, unmatched by any other open source project. It lets Mozilla defend the open Web - and dream, with things like this. (Via Standblog.)

A Tortured Relationship

The US state department today warned that disclosure of secret information in the case of a British resident said to have been tortured before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay would cause "serious and lasting damage" to security relations between the two countries.

Nothing like a good, honest threat to bring a poodle to heel...

After the Games Have Ended...

...real life goes on.

Linux-Powered Radios

Linux is already widely-used for embedded systems. Here's another interesting application, from a UK company, too:

EVOKE Flow brings you the huge variety of audio available on the internet, as well as traditional DAB and FM radio and your own digital music collection. All in a stylish portable radio that you can take with you wherever you go.

EVOKE Flow uses the same Wi-Fi technology as portable computers to connect to the internet wirelessly. Through this connection you can access thousands of radio stations from across the world, catch your favourite shows with listen again or enjoy a huge variety of podcasts. You can even use EVOKE Flow to browse and play music stored on a Wi-Fi-enabled PC.

In addition:

EVOKE Flow is powered by Imagination’s innovative hardware multi-threaded META processor and UCC (Universal Communications Core) technologies, which give the product advanced real-time signal processing and 32-bit application execution resources, as well as unique multi-standard high performance communications capabilities. EVOKE Flow is also one of the first radio products in the market to use the Linux operating system.

One of the first, but I predict it won't be the last....

Why Firefox Will Be Ubiquitous

On Open Enterprise blog.

Somebody's Heard the Music

Some people in the music biz are finally getting it:

The music executives behind Kaiser Chiefs and Primal Scream are backing a new website that will allow music fans to invest financially as well as emotionally in hotly tipped new acts.

The venture, dreamed up by a music business lawyer and backed by the founder of Friends Reunited, is being billed as the latest innovative funding model that could provide artists with an alternative to major labels.

Bandstocks will let the public buy a stake in an artist in £10 increments. Once funding reaches a preordained level, for example £100,000, the money will be released for the act to record an album.

Investors will get a copy of the album, a credit on the CD sleeve and a percentage of the profits from its sale and licensing. They will also get priority ticket booking and the opportunity to buy limited edition releases. For the artist, founder Andrew Lewis claimed that Bandstocks would offer a better return than a major-label deal, as well as more freedom and control over copyright.

The Guardian's headline - "Don't just buy the music" is also a sign that people are beginning to realise that there is more than one way to skin a digital cat....

When Will They Ever Learn...?

...not to use Windows:

A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS).

Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.

The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.

“Open for Business” Open for Business

On Open Enterprise blog.

Could Microsoft's Photosynth Have Been Free Software?

On Linux Journal.

Attack of the GNU/Linux Ultraportables, Part 2

On Open Enterprise blog.

Stop European Software Patents (Again)

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Operating System as Prison

Microsoft's OS as prison [according to Linux Foundation's king of kings, Jim Zemlin]:

These prison facilities are horrible. This is the largest, most difficult prison to escape from in the world but the security is horrible. Everyone is stealing each other’s data and you are sharing a cell with an angry 300 pound piece of malware. The prison warden, Steve Ballmer, walks around often claiming he wants a kinder gentler and more open prison, but everyone knows he is lying.

Apple:

Each cell is a plush luxury suite overlooking the ocean. You can get movies ordered to your room all day and the music selection is great. Your cell mates are cool hipsters and they have great parties that last all night long. It is almost like staying at a five star hotel with the only catch being that you can’t ever leave.

Sun Solaris:

This prison seems desolate and strangely empty.

Ha!

Of Microsoft, Retraining Costs, and TCOs

when it comes to the education of kids, there is no mythical "migration" costs, and therefore Microsoft's standard arguments of Total Cost of Ownership studies with retraining goes right out the window. In a few years, Microsoft will become even more expensive because of the "migration" costs from Linux to Windows X, and I wonder if that will be a factor in their TCO studies.

Nice point. The rest of the article - about installing GNU/Linux on 23,000 PCs in the Philippines - is also well worth reading.

PA Consulting? Pah!

Since we now know this:

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has blamed a private contractor for losing the details of thousands of criminals, held on a computer memory stick.

Ms Smith said the government had held the data securely but PA Consulting appeared to have downloaded it, contrary to the rules of its contract.

...it's clear they don't have the foggiest idea about security or managing personal information, giving us yet another reason to scrap the doomed ID card project which they have played a major part in driving.

Copywrong

The Open Rights Group has a great story about an eminent intellectual monopoly academic giving the lie to the current European Commission proposals to *extend* the copyright term granted to sound recordings, when all the evidence suggests they should be *reduced*:

When the European Commission put forward their proposal to retrospectively extend the copyright term granted to sound recordings, locking away vast swathes of our cultural heritage in a commercial vacuum for 45 years, it was clear that they had rejected all the expert evidence in favour of voodoo economics.

Now Professor Bernt Hugenholtz has written a letter to Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso asking why. Huggenholtz, Director of the Institute for Information Law (IViR), which was tasked by the European Commission to look into the arguments for and against extending copyright term, says his team were “surprised” to discover that their studies had been completely ignored, and that statements the Commission have made that “there was no need for external expertise” in drafting the proposal were “patently untrue”.

Love the voodoo economics bit.