Date: 01 May, 2011
Posted by: admin
In: copyright
Initial musings on UK copyright law in response to a piece of the negatives of ebook readers.
On ebook copies
A quick opinion
I came across this statement in a comment attached to a post about reasons not to buy an ebook reader.
3. Software upgrades or obsolesence could force you to buy your library all over again
[Anonymous]
Copyright law [here in the UK] should be changed to enshrine format shifting and to ensure that purchase of a copy allows a person to use a copy of the work, not just the specific physical instance. Just as one might make a DVD backup to allow one to keep a pristine original of your toddlers favourite (which is currently unlawful in the UK) one could retain a backup of an ebook in case you lose the device. Or in case you need to change to a new device you could run a format change operation on the ebook allowing you to still enjoy it with your new device.
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If like me you listen to Eddy Mair’s PM progam on Radio4 then you’ll have noted his mention of timhetherington.com.
Unfortunately for me that site is running slow, it’s also really hard to navigate IMO.
If timhetherington.com is running slowly for you too then try this http://timhetherington.com.nyud.net/mentalpicture/portfolio/ mirror. Use the tiny little faded spots on the left of the page to choose an image to view, images appear on the right.
The website is flash based sound may be largely unusable for many of you.
Apparently, according to a FoaF’s post today on FB nuclear power produces CFCs (Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons poster child of global warming terror in the 90s). Here’s a little research I did on that claim. Note this is not properly written up, as yet, but simply a record of sources found and my notes along the way.
Does nuclear power production produce CFCs [aka Freon]?
There is much in the news recently about nuclear power and I’m conscious this post could appear to be bandwagon-ing. I’m not attacking nuclear power generation, simply trying to educate myself about a facet of it that I haven’t considered before, that in the enrichment of uranium substantial amounts of CFC might be produced at a significant cost to the environment. Is this true, read on and perhaps we’ll find out …
Or, if this looks like one huge pile of text to get through then skip to the Summary or TL;DR at the end, thanks.
Mark Shuttleworth announces the new Ubuntu name for version 11.10 as Oneiric Ocelot, no really.
Weird Ubuntu names
Oneiric Ocelot: is this the strangest?
Dreamy - an oneiric ocelot by Pelican
My opinion is that the oddball names for Ubuntu releases aid greatly as search markers.
“10.10″ is not a great differentiating search term in computing whilst “maverick” (or indeed “meerkat”) doesn’t often appear alongside “wifi setup” (or whatever) except in pages referring to Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu or whatever.
Too far?
“Oneiric ocelot” seems to be going too far in searching out little used vocab though – who knew how to pronounce or spell oneiric before this announcement? It’s literally true you do learn new things every day, thanks there to Mr Shuttleworth, I think.
Pronounciation of Oneiric
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St.Davids Day, 1 March 2011, is the national Saints day for Wales. “Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus!” simply transliteraties as “day saint David happy” and is the traditional greeting as you wave your daffodils and wolf down a few dozen welsh cakes.
Happy St.Davids Day /Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus!
Saint David’s Day
| Saint David’s Day |
St David |
Saint David’s Day (Welsh: Dydd Gŵyl Dewi) is the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and falls on 1 March each year. The date of March 1st was chosen in remembrance of the death of Saint David on that day in 589, and has been celebrated by followers since then. The date was declared a national day of celebration within Wales in the 18th century.
A poll conducted for Saint David’s Day in 2006 found that 87% of the Welsh wanted it to be a bank holiday, with 65% prepared to sacrifice a different bank holiday to ensure this.[3] A petition in 2007 to make St. David’s Day a bank holiday was rejected by the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.[4]
In 2006 Saint David’s Day was officially celebrated on 28 February by Roman Catholics and on 2 March by the Anglican Church in Wales, because 1 March 2006 was Ash Wednesday, which is a day of penitence on which feast days are not celebrated.[1][2]
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Just discovered deborphan and have used it to clean up some cruft from my Kubuntu system, this should work for any .deb based system that uses apt.
Removing unwanted packages
List packages with no dependencies
deborphan -a -n -z | sort -nr
Will give you a list sorted by install size (-n) with largest first (-r) of all (-a) packages with no dependencies, ignoring recommendations and suggestions (-n) and listing the sizes (-z). This is a useful list to work through and see if the packages are needed or not. There is also a gtkorphan package that allows for removal directly but it has a few dependencies so I stuck with the console version ;0)>
Remove unwanted config files
for i in $(deborphan --find-config) ; do sudo aptitude -y purge $i ; done
This looks at the list of orphaned configuration files, picks the package name and then uses aptitude to purge the config files. I just wrote this up myself so check it, no warranty, YMMV. I used the highlighted -y flag on aptitude to skip being asked if I want to purge each package but this is probably not wise. Do a dry run first without this.
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