Paul Smith's Blog

France could become the first country to pass a law broadly permitting free downloads of copyright content from the Internet for private use. In a move that could thwart the entertainment industry's attempts to seek legal sanctions for copyright violations, French Parliament members voted 30 to 28 late Wednesday night to accept an amendment proposing such a move. Attached to a broader copyright law proposal, the amendment--roughly translated--reads: "Authors cannot forbid the reproductions of works that are made on any format from an online communication service when they are intended to be used privately and when they do not imply commercial means directly or indirectly....

...and 51% believe fairy tales are real. US public opinion is also extremely hostile to Darwinian theory. In a national poll two months ago, 51% of Americans said they believed that human beings were created by God. Another 30% said God guided human evolution, and only 15% thought that humans had evolved without divine intervention. Nick covered some of this in his recent blog entry. Mine is more of a call to arms....

Windows Media Player 11 rocks, check this new feature out - a visual library, no longer a boring list of files, but the albums displayed with album art and all neatly ordered and with the full range of options to help better visualise your music like Vista has everywhere now. These screens from the WinSuperSite. How long before Apple copies this with iTunes? I give it 6-9 months until they're boasting that they invented this....

Well I don't understand why David Davis didn't win, may be the Tory Party has really lost it, I would of thought Davis had a much better chance of defeating Labour, after all he doesn't reek of the same ol' Tory scum that Cameron does, it's just a shame Ken Clarke always gets knocked out, there's a man no government would like to fight. At least Davis from a presentability standpoint doesn't have Tory stench leaking out of every pore on his body like Cameron....

Had a bit of a discussion with Ruth today (new work type person), she seems to believe that class is an artificial categorisation of people's wages. Class is a natural phenomenon that occurs when their is a surplus product in society. In modern capitalist society there are two grand classes that directly oppose one another, the bourgeoisie (the capitalists, the owners of production) and the proletarians (the workers, whose only ability to live is by selling their ability to labour to the capitalists)....

Oh jeez, while I was at work some woman was having a moan about the Video Recordings Act, and that her children know it's a game and they wouldn't go and bla bla murder people because it's not real etc. OK fair enough, then she crossed the line blaming it all upon "Blair's bureaucracy". Yup a Tory, anyone wearing a coat like she had on had to be one. When was the Video Recordings Act made law?...

Yup, if you're machine has been infected by a Sony music CD, then you're in a big trouble, viruses are now using the rootkit (commonly used by "hackers" to attack a computer) that the Sony music discs install on your system in secret to hide themselves from anti-virus software. This is what the Sony BMG' president had to say about it "most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?...

Recent reports have shown that people attending fox hunting has risen since it has become illegal and I'm sick and tired of these barbaric simpletons bashing "townies" for trying to "interfere" in their affairs. What they are doing is: 1) Barbaric. 2) Not necessary. The objectives for the next big push should be: 1) Remove loopholes in the law. 2) If the House of Lords attempts to block the legislation destroy it....

Back when this post was originally written there was very little information regarding Echelon Song also known as the Song for Voroshilov (refering to Kliment Voroshilov) on the internet, which is why I did a blog entry about it. The song was originally written in 1933 by Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov and was about the railway warfare used in the Don from winter 1917 to summer 1918, ending with the Battle for Tsaritsyn where the White Army was defeated....

I'm republishing another article I wrote back in 2003, this one on how Marxists should operate in regards to the European Union. It has been quite shocking and disappointing for myself with regards to the position of some so called 'Marxist' groups in respect to their policy on the European Union. Seemingly unable to spot how they're falling straight into the hands of the more extreme reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie....