Digital Copyrights in Canada

Canadians pay a surcharge on all blank media we buy, whether it be cassette tapes, CD/DVD-RWs, or VCR tapes. This money is supposed to be paid to an organization which manages national songwriters and musicians rights and which will redistribute the money pro-rated by popularity, in order to offset losses from 'illegal' copying. (Once you are compensating the artitsts, the illegality of it becomes open to question, but thats a rant for another day.) I have no idea if the money is actually being redistributed -- but this was the announced plan when the tax was put in place.

Up until recently IPods and other MP3 players with flash-memory also had a surcharge on them, but this has just been struck down by the Federal Court of Appeal, saying that the units don't fall under the category of 'blank media'. If this get taken to the supreme court it could open a big can of worms about the entire idea of the tax. If it is let stand, it calls into question whether flash memory counts as blank media. Either way, I think this is going to lead to interesting times in Canadian IP law.

Good Article on Climate Change.

I'm in the skeptic's camp when it comes to the whole question of human-induced global warming. Its not that I don't think that there are strange climactic shifts happening around us. I just don't buy that we're able to model the climate well enough to attribute this change to human activity. There are too many variables, and I've looked at the fudge-factors snuck into too many computer models to believe that we yet have any idea what's actually going on. Now, it MAY be that we've managed to do enough environmental harm that we've shifted off of a fixed point in the climate, or it may be caused by a change in solar output, or it may be due to a natural long-term oscillation in the planet's climate. We simply don't have enough knowledge or information to know for sure, despite what folks on both sides of the debate are hotly claiming.

Anyway, here is another interesting data point, that says that the climate got abruptly very wonky about 5200 years ago, and that similar things seem to be happening now. Its easy to imagine that they have a common cause (which would pretty much rule out humans as the culprit), but its just as easy to imagine that different perturbing forces can cause the same response form the planet's climate system. We just don't know.

Bad Science - 2004

The Guardian has released its list of top Bad Science winners for 2004. The award is given yearly in the life sciences and, as usual, the problem was in finding the worst of the worst among so many bad examples.

Off-The-Record-Messaging

I haven't read the whitepapers yet, so I don't know HOW its done, but when Ian Goldberg says a new crypto messaging system has the following properties, I'm inclined to believe him:

Encryption

No one else can read your instant messages.

Authentication

You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.

Deniability

The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to make them look like they came from you. However, during a conversation, your correspondent is assured the messages he sees are authentic and unmodified.

Perfect forward secrecy

If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised.

This is an interesting set of features, and I'm looking forward to reading the papers on the Off-The-Record-Messaging Website when I get a chance.

Dual-GPU SLI Graphics Card.

Me WANT. At first I was thinking that it was a nice card, but that I would rather have a ATI 9800, since that can fit into an AGP slot, which is what I have on this motherboard. Then they pointed out that Gigabyte is willing to bundle it with a new motherboard to handle their device, at a combined cost LOWER than a high-end ATI or NVidia card. Yum!

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Note that while I think that SLI is a nifty technology, I think Alienware's idea of its Video Array technology that allows arbitrary PCI-Express cards to be used in a heirarchy is MUCH better.

American Gods.

I finished reading "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman yesterday. It was a very good book, much better than I expected, as I had been somewhat dissappointed by Neverwhere and (as Gaiman readily admits) the whole 'modern life of the gods' has been done before, a lot. Still, Gaiman brought many new ideas into the mix and its quite clear that he's put much research and much imagination into his gods, both the traditional and the modern ones. I also enjoyed guessing who some of the gods were, who were only described in passing. Some I figured out correctly, some I just had to shrug about. I also enjoyed the fact that I didn't manage to figure out what was going on any faster than the hero, despite the clues being well-presented. I thought at first that wouldn't be the case because I figured out who the Hero's boss was the moment he was introduced, while it took the hero another chapter or two to work it out.

The only disconcerting element was that some sections in the middle were so reminiscent of baronscartop's writing style that the omniscient narrator took on his voice for a few chapters.