Mildly amusing banner on the Yellow Pages site today. Not funny, but definitely amusing.

Today, my understanding of history, physics, dating, sleight of hand, fiction, poetry and Bayesian filtering all changed. Don Juan sent me an email, asking if I’d like to learn his secrets to picking up women. The mind boggles…

Landmark ruling from Ninth Circuit finding that P2P software developers are not liable for contributary and vicarious copyright infringement. The EFF covers most of it. In particular, the most significant part of the judgement for the future of this type of technology is one which the blogosphere has been reiterating time and time again:

From the advent of the player piano, every new means of reproducing sound has struck a dissonant chord with musical copyright owners, often resulting in federal litigation. This appeal is the latest reprise of that recurring conflict, and one of a continuing series of lawsuits between the recording industry and distributors of file-sharing computer software.

[…]

Further, as we have observed, we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation. AT&T Corp. v. City of Portland, 216 F.3d 871, 876 (9th Cir. 1999). The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through wellestablished distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player. Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.

Right, now it’s on. Tony Squires was just interviewing Rebecca Wilson about the opening ceremony, which she helped commentate with Bruce McAvaney, and talking about Costas Kenteris missing his drug test, she said…

…his career is under a bit of a cloud…

I have images of this intermittent cloud that has somehow made it’s way to Greece, and just drifts around looking for athletes over which to hover.

This week is going to be a bit of an Olympics week at our place, much to my flat mate’s chagrin, so excuse me if the focus is a bit sporty for the next few weeks.

One of the annoying things about the opening ceremony, was Bruce McAvaney’s continued use of the phrase “under a cloud” when referring to the careers of athletes currently under investigation for doping. If you’re not in Sydney, then I’m sure you have your own Bruce McAvaney, and most likely your own network’s family friendly version of the phrase “fucked, for cheating”.

The IOC are so strong on doping, that current chairman Jacques Rogge even spent around 20 seconds of his speech on it during the 13 or so hours that was the opening ceremony.

Instead of trying to not mention drugs, our commentators should be making a point of it, particularly for our young sporting kids coming up through the ranks. It is bad enough that drugs are banned, giving them a good marketing boost amongst youngsters, but then not making any reference to them in the actual arena that we’re supposed to be protecting from abuse, is just plain irresponsible.

If it is good enough for Jacques, then why can’t Bruce be a little more open about it? How about saying something like this instead?

The U.S. team of course without sprinter Torri Edwards, whose career is currently under a cloud in tatters because she’s a fucking drug cheat who is bad for the sport, a bad influence on kids coming up through the ranks, and a second rate runner who doesn’t deserve a place at the world’s ultimate sporting table.

Or perhaps something along those lines. The message would then start to sink in a little I reckon.

In fact doping seems to be so rife, well, not that it ever wasn’t, just that we’re now much more aware of it, that there’s even a drug cheats related blog, unofficial of course.

And why do they insist on calling it by the medical term doping? Trying to dumb it down perhaps? Why not call it drugging, taking steroids or of course the ever obvious cheating by shooting up illegal drugs.

And as for the drugs themselves, surely the history of drug use would be enough to turn some folks off, if only it was mentioned in the media. This page on MedicineNet gives a good history of drugs in sport, covering of all things the ancient athletic practice of eating sheeps’ testicles and mixing wine and strychnine. Yum.

The Olympic charter, like most things these days, is online for your reading pleasure, so there’s really no excuse for this kind of behaviour. I particularly like this IOC summary:

According to the Olympic Charter, established by Pierre de Coubertin, the goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.

It is just the atheletes who are yet to actually get it, so perhaps the term under a cloud is quite appropriate after all.

Ten ways to improve the Olympics opening ceremony.

1. Don’t bring on the athletes. The ceremony starts at around 8:40pm. Skip the middle 5 hours or whatever it is, and we’d be all done and home in bed by 9:30pm.
2. Only bring on the women athletes, this way most of the middle east is skipped (I was watching and counting, so don’t bother arguing the point) and we end up with smatterings of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. We’d be home by 10pm, and 90% of the male audience and 10% of the female audience would have something pretty damn fine to look at.
3. Bring on the pistol and skeet shooters first and have them take pot shots at the rest of the athletes as they come on, then we’ll see how many want to march on.
4. Do a full dress rehearsal (the teams don’t get to rehearse usually), video it, then on the actual night of the ceremony, play back on the big screen the part where the athletes march on, but at 8x speed.
5. Only let athletes march on who are at their first Olympics.
6. Leave the centre area flooded with water when the athletes march on, but to make it more interesting, make it deeper.
7. Mark the beginning and end of the athletes marching on with advertising subcodes, so that my TiVo skips it.
8. Fill the artificial lake with oil instead of water.
9. Drug test the athletes, and don’t let them in unless they’re clean. We’d get a dozen at most, and be home by 9:45pm.
10. Don’t broadcast it.

Chinese DVD players manufactured to automatically correct for low quality pirated discs (via Boing Boing); Electracy, the new electronic literacy (via Read/Write Web); Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted (via gapingvoid); and filming the new Charlie and the Chocolate factory, they dropped a US$540 000 camera into a river of chocolate (via Boing Boing).

So yes, we won the St. George Theatresports competition, Adult Section. Sponsored by St George bank, and held at their auditorium, I was amazed that my bank not only supported impro, but was sponsoring it and other arts projects. Amanda was so impressed, she took cash out of their ATM after the show. Tomorrow the kids get to play in several age group competitions, and you know what, I might just head along and check them out as well.

It was a lot of fun playing with Amanda, Jordan and the Fatness of Tony again since they made the big leap to the main stage. Having not really played this year, I’d forgotten how much fun it can be playing with friends. So we had a Death in a Minute where I got to be Merlin from Big Brother 4, although I would have preferred to be Gretel, a Props game where I married a rat, and the story of Noah in the the style of Shakespeare. The tie breaker Speaking in one voice where Amanda and Jordan took over the world was also pretty amusing. Although I’ve yet to see the pinata we won since Jordan snaffled it into his bag…

Excellent article The commercial break by Sunanda Creagh, who has featured here previously with another SMH article about community TV, does a good job of disecting the difference between comedy at the public and private TV broadcasters, and the difficulty in tranferring shows between them.

Speaking of memes, I’m sure this one has been done to death in the last 24 hours, but it’s still pretty funny, if not depressing…

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

While this is amusing enough in itself, the White House’s spokesman Scott McClellan’s comments are even funnier.

[..] just shows even the most straightforward and plain-spoken people misspeak. [..]
But the American people know this president speaks with clarity and conviction, and the terrorists know by his actions he means it [..]

Via SMH