Brains working towards machine consciousness

 I've just been reading Cory Doctorow's talk about the copyright treaty negotiations which have led directly or indirectly to France's new laws and the proposed one in the UK which not only introduces the "3 strikes rule" but also seems to me to authorise large media corporations to essentially grab the copyright of works for themselves.

Sadly, given the way we are governed, I doubt there is anything short of an armed revolution which would stop this from getting passed into law.

I have been told that some staff at UK HE institutions are creating fake IDs on Facebook and 'friending' students in order to be able to check up on their behaviour.  Now, this is only 'hearsay' - I haven't seen any hard evidence, but I was told by one student that they had been emailed by a member of staff to tell them that fake IDs were being used.

I have a couple of problems with this, apart from the issue of supposedly responsible adults creating IDs on a social network and actively trying to 'friend' their students...

 Thanks to @shirleyearley for her blog post reminding me about the competition.  I think I might be a bit unusual in this, so it will be interesting to see other entries!

 First of all, I want to say I like Lulu.  It provides good quality printed books, which seem to be at a perfectly reasonable price, to me.  The process of creating a project, uploading a 'manuscript' and designing the cover is all pretty straightforward - usually.  The books arrive quickly when ordered.

However, recently I have run into two different problems with the site.  That in itself is not all that annoying, these things happen.  The quality of the customer support, however, is getting beyond a joke.

Dear Labour Party,

 In the always-beta Web2.0 world, there is a tendency for sites to never be finished.  But the same is true in the world of commercial software, where it is in the owners commercial interest (allegedly) to have a release schedule which provides new functionality over time, requiring upgrades and new investment in the software.

 I blame @DaveOWhite and @FrancesBell for this line of thought, although it had occurred to me some time ago (during the CCK08 course, if not before). 

Over on this site is a lovely little tool which lets you download and use artificially generated newspaper clippings.  I love it.

I decided it was about time I looked at some of the online learning materials for our Graduate Development Skills Programme.  In a way, I knew it would be a bit of a mistake – but also that it would be informative.

Apparently, according to the one on IP, it is wrong to answer a question along the lines of “True/False: it always costs money to use a patented technology” with False, although the explanatory text says “It usually costs…” thus proving the ‘correct’ answer of True to be False (as ‘always’ would be required for the answer to be ‘True’). 

OK, so apart from the small issue of long term forecasts getting less reliable over the last 20 years (at least, so it seems), I have a problem with the BBC’s weather charts on the Web.  They used to be easy to understand, but apparently someone decided they were too complicated, so now you cannot see the temperature on the same chart as ‘general’ and, to make matters worse, this is the key to explain the colour codes used: