Archive for June, 2005
Scotland bans cheap booze in supermarkets
DEALS and offers on alcohol sold in supermarkets and off-licences will be banned after new licensing laws were given the go-ahead.
The Scottish Parliment has unanimously backed the move which will end certain types of promotions ahead of a drinks law shake-up.
Ministers had already announced constraints for drink promotions in pubs and clubs, but deputy finance and public services minister Tavish Scott said the Licensing (Scotland) Bill would be amended to cover off-sales.
Turn yourself into a South Park cartoon
Dumb fun for a rainy day: South Park Studio.
Is someone nicking your words?
The gorgeous, pouting Chris Mitchell has found a fantastic resource for bloggers: CopyScape. It’s a search engine that enables you to see if people have ripped off your blog entries, online articles or other text.
Chris writes:
I idly put in my Laos: Plain Of Jars article and discovered it’s been ripped off wholesale by a tour operator in Vietnam and that a single paragraph has been lifted by a tour operator based here in Bangkok. I’ve sent a polite cease-and-desist order to the latter to see what happens. This sort of thing really irritates me, not just because of the lack of courtesy of lifting my work without asking permission or providing a back link, but more that I have to waste my time arguing with them when they are irrefutably in the wrong.
I agree. I’ve spotted a few of my blog entries on commercial sites, reprinted without permission or credit, and I’ve had ongoing battles with site owners who don’t understand what “non-commercial use only” means. The money (or lack of it) doesn’t bug me; it’s the rudeness that gets my goat.
TonyK on 12A
In his typically incisive review of Batman Begins, TonyK goes off on a brief tangent to discuss the menace of the 12A certificate. For those of you outside the UK, 12A means that a film isn’t suitable for children under the age of 12, unless their parents decide otherwise. The result tends to be a cinema full of toddlers.
I think that it is our duty to campaign to have the 12A certificate revoked. I’m sick fed up of going into a cinema only to find loads of very young children that just won’t SHUT UP throughout the film. Even worse, is the fact that when they then burst into tears because the film is under no circumstance suitable for someone that young, the parents don’t even have the decency to take them out of the cinema. Down with this sort of thing.
My first experience of a 12A movie was, I think, Spider-Man. It’s not something I’m in a hurry to repeat: there were toddlers screaming, four-year-olds running up and down the aisles, loud demands for sweets in any quiet moments, and so on. It was more horrific than any horror film could be.
The rationale behind 12A, I’m sure, is that parents are the best judge of what their kids should and shouldn’t see. That’s a nice idea, but if you’ve ever been in a video shop while a 5-year-old tells his dad which horror movies they’ve already seen then you’ll know that some parents don’t give a shit - and the 12A certificate means they can inflict their poor judgement on everyone else in the cinema too. I can’t help but wonder whether the real purpose of 12A is to ensure that as many children as possible are exposed to movies with merchandising tie-ins.
Going on holiday? Watch out for SPIES!!!!
MI5 is warning British tourists that they are at risk from spies abroad and it has published advice on its website on how to thwart their efforts.
The site claims that even something as seemingly innocent as a smile or the offer of a little old-fashioned hospitality could be an attempt to recruit the unwary Brit.
Full story in today’s Guardian.
MI5’s advice, which includes:
avoid taking any protectively marked (classified) or commercially sensitive information with you
“A misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print”
No, that’s not a book review - it’s the author of the infamous Anarchist’s Cookbook publicly disowning his book on Amazon.
Contrary to what is the normal custom, the copyright for the book was taken out in the name of the publisher rather than the author. I did not appreciate the significance of this at the time and would only come to understand it some years later when I requested that the book be taken out of print…
Unfortunately, the book continues to be in print and with the advent of the Internet several websites dealing with it have emerged. I want to state categorically that I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued.
[Via Waxy.org]
How touts get their tickets
There’s an interesting article in today’s Guardian that explains how the online ticket touts manage to snap up tickets before most of us even knew about the concerts in question:
According to an Office of Fair Trading study the more sophisticated traders use “high-speed dialling equipment and other methods” to get tickets before ordinary customers.
Touts also use various credit cards and identities to bypass restrictions on the number of tickets that can be purchased by one person, and join clubs and societies that receive preferential mail order tickets. They also trade tickets between themselves and scour online sites for bargains.
Customs moves in on cut-price CDs, DVDs and games
According to The Inquirer, HM Customs isn’t too chuffed with companies such as Tesco setting up offshore CD/DVD/games shops to dodge VAT. A crackdown seems inevitable; expect Bittorrent downloads to go up, then…
Update, 27 June
The Inquirer reports that Jersey’s authorities are moving to close the tax loophole.
Feed me, feed me, feed me
I was updating my big list’o'links this morning and realised something: of the sites I’ve linked to, I’ve barely visited the ones without RSS feeds. It’s not intentional, it’s just that when you get used to newsreader software you spend less and less time using your Web browser.
I wouldn’t go as far as Microsoft’s Robert Scoble and suggest that every site needs RSS, but if you’re blogging it might be a very good idea to enable your blogging software’s RSS export. After all, the whole point of scribbling online is that you want people to read it - so if you don’t have RSS, you might not be getting as many readers as you might wish.
Incidentally, Lifehacker’s come up with a good solution to the “if I run a full-content RSS feed, nobody sees the ads” dilemma facing commercial sites: its feeds now come in two flavours. If you want the full-content feed you have to endure text ads; if you don’t want the ads, you can subscribe to the partial-content version instead.
eBayers strike back
Today’s papers mention that Bob Geldof is appalled by the online touts flogging Live 8 tickets on eBay, but what the stories don’t mention is that the eBay community is already doing something about it. While a search for tickets uncovers hundreds of listings like this:
Most of them now look like this:
This isn’t a new technique - you see lots of it when people try to trick people into buying a photo of an iPod while under the impression they’re getting an iPod Photo - but it’s still a nice reminder that not everyone on eBay is an amoral, profiteering arsehole.