…

John,

I appreciate you will have had hundreds of emails in the past couple of weeks, but I had some dialogue with you around six weeks ago regarding the digital economy bill and I got this address.

Firstly, congratulations on retaining your seat. I voted for you – although there was some oddity where the BBC declared your seat as a labour gain I was very happy to see you retain your seat (And incidentally, very happy to see Jaqui Smith lose hers).

I wish to voice my concern over a Liberal Democrat / Conservative coalition, which seems to be the general thrust of this morning’s discussions.

The young, politically engaged people who have voted lib-dem this time round (With the numbers pulled in the popular vote, you appear to have been a victim of boundaries historically favourable to the other parties) are vehemently opposed to Tory government and *will not* forget this.

I, and my friends (all young urban living professionals, 18-40, counted in the dozens) who have almost unanimously voted lib-dem are becoming bitterly disappointed that Mr. Clegg is not calling loudly and directly for election reform.

Last night’s election was not a positive result. Handing government over to the Torys because they seem to expect it is very, very wrong.

Please; today, push for reform. Don’t let it slip through the cracks.

Yours

Tom Bradshaw

’nuff said.

The new Lurpak slogan is ‘You don’t measure taste with a spirit level’.

True.

You can, however judge beauty with your tongue.

That’s why the current Miss World tastes like bacon, personal tragedy and fear.

Well, the cocking thing passed, as was expected. Clause 43, relating to orphaned works and of much consternation to photographers, was deleted in its entirety. Which is good news.

18, regarding governmental blocking of websites deemed inappropriate by the government was also removed, only to have its meaning reconstituted into another clause, the number of which escapes me at the moment.

This morning I got another email from my MP, John Leech:

Dear All,

Apologies for the mass email but so many of you have been in contact about the Digital Economy Bill, I wanted to update you on last night’s events.

The vast majority of the emails that I have been receiving were regarding Clause 43 of the Bill which dealt with ‘orphan works’ – images for which the legal owners ‘could not be found, through a reasonable search’.

The Liberal Democrat team were keen that some sort of orphan-works provision was written into law, though the Government’s proposals were not what we wanted at all. We absolutely accepted the legitimate concerns of photographers about the effect the proposals would have had on them. Our Shadow Culture, Media and Sport team were in frequent contact with photographers throughout the Bill’s passage, and raised their concerns at every opportunity.

Such provisions would have needed a lot of fine-tuning, which is simply not possible in the last days of a Parliament. As changes to our satisfaction were not possible we were prepared to withdraw our amendments and vote against the Bill in its entirety, which is how it all seemed by yesterday afternoon. In the eleventh hour and under pressure from individuals and industry groups, the Government indicated that they would delete Clause 43 completely, which they subsequently did.

In regards to proposals for site-blocking, we had always been sceptical of its efficacy and concerned about the implications such measures would have on civil liberties and data protection. We recognised the significant damage to the creative industries of downloading from illegal websites and initially sought measures to address this. However, there was limited time for consultation and even less time before final decisions were made. We did not believe that measures to address site blocking could reasonably have been included in the Bill and did not support any such measures.

We pressed the music, film and video-gaming industries to work more urgently to develop easy and affordable ways to legally access their products in the hope that, combined with “soft measures” and an effective education campaign, disconnection will never be required.

Overall, the Bill was an opportunity to deal with important areas such as improving our radio and broadband infrastructure, acting against copyright infringement and implementing unified regulation of video games, to name but a few. These issues are unlikely to be a priority for a new government so it was extremely important that the Bill was given adequate debate and deliberation for it to fulfil its potential, and not be rushed through as the Government seemed so intent on doing.

There were no votes expected at the Second Reading on Tuesday but I returned to London on Wednesday to vote. As you will no doubt be aware, the Bill was passed, despite strong opposition from me and my colleagues. Some people are wondering why I am not listed as having attended the vote- my name will not be showing up in a list of Members who voted as I was a Teller, counting the votes – but I certainly did vote against. The Public Whip website will have full details shortly.

Thank you for getting in contact over the past few months on this issue. Your emails demonstrated the strength of feeling and concern over the Bill’s proposals, the importance of which might not have come to my attention otherwise. I was happy to represent so many of my constituents in Parliament.

Kind regards,

John Leech

So I replied…

Mr Leech,

I appreciate your contact, both today and yesterday.

The news for clause 43 is very welcome, but the most important part of the bill from a civil liberties bill, regarding governmental blocking of sites has just moved to another amendment.

What are the options for fighting this piece of legislation from this point on?

Meh. Democracy is for ass-hat clowns. At some point I’m going to get some real power, and the only laws will be those that men create for themselves with a rusty spike.

Right, I got very, very angry and wrote to my MP over the digital economy bill, with a side helping of a kicking over always harping on about cocking families.

Mr John Leech,

I’ve been looking over yesterday’s debate on the digital economy bill.

You didn’t turn up.

So you’ve lost my vote, and I’m going to spend the election run-up telling my friends to not vote for you.

And here’s for why:

The digital economy bill was drafted by a group of people who, frankly, do not understand the web and inter-networks. They were pushed into crafting penalties for crimes that cannot be proven with certainty by a creative industry that already has consumers in a vice-like grip of licensing agreements and has spent the past ten years making their product less and less appealing to consumers through DRM and unfair practices.

Allowing the government to censor websites that *may* allow access to copyrighted content will. not. work. Technologically minded people will find a way around any blocks enabled, and these solutions will find their way into the mainstream within days.

Such blocks also erode the free nature of information flow and are ideologically no different from those imposed by China et al. – if the government doesn’t want you to see it, you don’t see it.

There are other problems with this bill. Clause 18 will allow business to bully government into changing the law whenever they feel their current, obsolete business models are threatened.

I am a software developer and part time photographer. Several times I have had to email various websites for using either my software (Not everything written on your own will come with a license) or photographs without acknowledgement or payment. Clause 43 (relating to orphan works) of the bill would mean that any content distributor could use my work, in theory after being unable to contact me, but in reality, as I my work is not widely known, and I am “small fry”, I doubt they’d bother trying to find me.

I am an important part of the so called “Digital Economy”, and frankly, this bill will harm my living, my hobby, my free access to information and clobbers my rights in favour of those of big business.

Finally, away from my anger at your ignoring of this very important bill, I am tired of politicians endlessly campaigning for “families”. I choose to live on my own, choose not to marry or have children and I am tired of both government and opposition ignoring my existence in favour of endless measures for one section of the population.
Yours,

Tom Bradshaw

I reckon it might be an idea for everyone who give a shit to find their MP and give them a piece of your mind. If you don’t give a shit. Meh. You’re retarded and I don’t care.

I got a reply in like, 15 minutes. click here for the extra

Now I know quite a lot of you are going to be tarred with this brush, but fuck it. You need telling.

IF YOU BUY ‘KILLING IN THE NAME OF’ WITH A VIEW TO STOP SIMON COWELL FROM GETTING A CHRISTMAS #1 THEN YOU’RE A TOOL FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS

1. Why be pissed at Simon Cowell for being a rich smug cunt, yet gift an extra (Cowell’s bands and Rage being on the same label and all) couple of million to Sony records, who are a major part of the music industry being fucked anyway?
2. You’re not taking any money away from the swarthy impressario bastard – if anything, MORE ten year olds are going to buy his shite to try stopping you, making SC MORE MONEY.
3. You’re also giving money to Steve Jobs, and bearing in mind that an iPhone costs $200 to make and is sold in the US at $599, and in the UK at £599 (contract free), the smug turtle-necked bastard has enough money from social trending morons.
4. I’m pretty certain, that despite all the talks of “neck and neck” sales, there are more stupid 14 year old girls than there are people who sort of pretend to have a sense of humour and just do what their friends and alt-media tell them to.




5. It’s totally different to get bought up into the Rage against the machine hype bullshit, as opposed to the X-Factor hype bullshit. I mean… It’s COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!.




6. Lastly, and most galling to me – Do you people buying ‘Killing In The Name Of’ even give a crap about music charts? No, chances are, you don’t. You’re trying to stick it to a repellant little man (which I understand), but it’s a battle you’ve lost, he already has the whole thing sewn up, and has done for years. Music charts = dead to real music. Let him have it, your actions are undignified.

This doesn’t include all the hate I have for legal MP3 downloads and Rage themselves, but those’re a whole different set of issues.

FFS, people…

Just a quick one. The database for my company’s main software product uses M$-SQL, since every two bit company in the universe has a license for it kicking about somewhere, and while adding my changes to the migration script I discovered that the ‘GO’ keyword makes declared variables go out of scope, thus:

DECLARE @ID uniqueidentifier

SELECT @id = FOO.id
    FROM DataEntityExtractors FOO
    WHERE FOO.id = 'id'
GO

PRINT @ID
---------------

Error: Must declare the scalar variable "@ID".
SQLState:  S1000
ErrorCode: 137
Error occured in:
PRINT @ID

To make it work you need to move the ‘GO’ to a point in the script where you don’t need the variables anymore:

DECLARE @ID uniqueidentifier

SELECT @id = FOO.id
    FROM DataEntityExtractors FOO
    WHERE FOO.id = 'id'

PRINT @ID
GO

Is a version of the first query that will work.

Goddamn I hate M$-SQL. Hate it so very, very much. No idea why you need to second guess the query compiler before you can get stuff to work.

Meh.

Not much going on in Bradshaw land at the moment. Working on a whole heap of logically interesting bugs that just use standard-ass java constructs, so there’s not much to update. I just spent an hour shouting at Hibernate over something I really should have known before, but somehow managed to avoid learning.

If you want to do an ‘IN’ query on an object that has a Collection as a field you need to use the “elements” keyword: thus.

SELECT
  foo
FROM
  Foo foo
WHERE
  :bar in elements(foo.barList)

Woo!

Not really a development thing, but whatever…

Everyone who uses Linux on the command line will hit this one at one point or another – You ‘cat’ something, discover it’s a binary file, then discover it’s completely fucked your terminal, thus:

Not so very long ago I used to close and restart the terminal, for I am very, very lazy. Then I discovered what the fix was because I am awesome.

There are two solutions to this problem:

1. Use the ‘reset” shell command

% reset [return]

OR

2. Issue the following set of commands (working blind)

% cat [return]

% [ctrl o] [return]

% [ctrl d] [return]

Shazzam:

Just for the record, if you feel like breaking it again, run the same set of commands listed above, replacing Ctrl-o with Ctrl-n

So. Two asinine celebrities down and everyone, (including me, to my unending and eternal shame) sit round and gape with mouths open. Still, life goes on.

I’m back, mainly because I paid my server bill after a whole sodding year, and don’t have to duck my virtual landlord any longer.

Got all kinds of tips and tricks on the way. Watch this space.

Now, I’m not sure if I qualify as a Linux fanboy (I think Microsoft is utter bullshit, everything they do is substandard and available in a better for form, for less money, or free, somewhere else. Doesn’t have to be Linux, but it’s the best of the current crop, imho…), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the level of wankface tosspot Microsoft fanboi-ism You’ll see here.

And I know why this is… These people are just plain thick. Not unintelligent, just. Fucking. Thick. How can you validate that something is properly put together if you can’t see *how* it’s put together, but instead let someone with a vested commercial interest in that thing tell you it’s better than ever, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

To put it in context, this is like a restaurant charging you for an apple pie that tastes remarkably like dogshit, but the restaurant advertises so much that you’re convinced it’s a good one. You know you’re not allowed to ask to see the recipe, but the manager tells you it’s made from only the finest apples.

Six months later, you go back to sample a new refinement of the pie and discover that it still tastes like shit. But this time it’s horse shit. You’ve been told that the recipe is better, and they made some ice cream once that you thought was OK, so you’re inclined to believe them.

Over time, you gradually find yourself thinking of apple pie as tasting like shit, to the level where you just can’t wait to wolf down that next stinking nugget.

The restaurant allows you to rent their equipment to make more recipes that they will sell in their restaurant, but because it’s their restaurant, everything you make still tastes of shit. Horseshit, batshit, panda shit, and most of all bullshit.

Eventually, a friend of yours tells you about a different restaurant, where you don’t pay for the food, but you can work off your meal in the kitchen. You don’t know how to cook, those guys are kinda hippies and your palette is screwed from eating all that shit, so you pass. Then you laugh about food that doesn’t taste like shit, because you’re convinced that actually, it’s really, really tasty. The manager, radio, TV and some of the other part time chefs told you so.

I mean, everyone eats there, right?