The BBC News 24 team put the wrong man on the air to talk about an IT Court case between Apple Core (the record company) and Apple computers. While this isn’t particularly big news, further amusement is derived from the shocked look on the guy’s face in the interview here and the fact he was only supposed to be going for a job interview (you can see a subsiquent interview with the “wrong guy” and the real guy on the phone on this link). Just shows you have to be careful when visiting the BBC; you may end up on live tv not knowing what to say and with no auto-cue

Was walking past the weir at the Clarence Dock canel connection this morning, and I saw a large number of police officers and a fairly large cordon over 3 bridges and a fair section of the canal around that area. There were police divers entering the canal on the opposite bank and a forensics tent over there as well. I had to take quite a detour to get around it all, but I couldn’t see what it was all about and the officers on duty weren’t saying anything. One assumes it’s some kind of murder enquiry and they are looking for a body. Just speculation of course though.

If anybody knows anything about this or spots an article on the web giving some information, then please post up about it.

I read in the papers today that the French parliment had voted through a bill to force online music stores operating in France to open up their copy protection technologies to allow any player to play the tunes downloaded. An article of a similar nature on the BBC tells the full story.

Its interesting and encouraging to see someone leading the way on this issue. They are fighting DRM from another angle; rather than saying they don’t want it outright they are saying that users desrve the opertuinity to use their purchases on their player of choice, and also, in purchasing a particular player of choice, shouldn’t have to be restricted to the use of just one player.

This is important because thats been half the argument of DRM. Its like codecs; if you don’t have codec, you mind the fact that a system holding media you want uses a different codec. If everything you want to listen to uses the same codec, or everything it’s possible to watch/listen to the media on has all the codecs, its no longer an issue.

Ultimately what consumers want is their fair use rights, and if the new French laws pave the way to meaning regardless of DRM implementation music and movies with DRM must play on all players and not just a restrictive group of them from one company, its certainly a step in the right direction.

It still doesn’t help the open source community of course. Its all very well sharing DRM between companies but then they can just sign contacts of non-disclosure between themselves and keep the net tight, while cutting users of open source systems, such as Linux, and UMS type players out in the cold. Ah well, still work to be done I guess.

Watching the news today, I saw a story covering a recent compilation of data from the office of national statistics indicating several interesting, and in my opinion worrying facts about people’s lifestyles.

The one I focused on in particular was the rise in the number of children born into families with unmarried parents. I have always been aware that the number is on the rise, but when I realised today that it is well over 40% of all children born in Britain, it was a surprise and a shock to me. This figure seems to go hand in hand with the number of people single between the ages of 25 and 45 being on the rise too.

What this seems to indicate to me, is people are increasingly focusing on careers over family, and there is also a growing lack of commitment for people in relationships. The question I ask is this; if you are deciding you are committed enough to a relationship to bring up a child in a stable environment as a couple, why are you not committed enough to get married? After all married couples still get more legal benefits than non-married couples, which can only be of assistance when brining up a child. This is only the start. What about the impression you make on your child? Do you want your child to end up getting married some day, or do you want them to do as you are doing? Most parents have some dreamy mental image of their year old daughter one day growing up and walking down the isle, it’s almost an instinct. The number of hypocrites is worrying though; do as I say don’t do as I do. Well, in my humble opinion (and it is a humble opinion, I admit I’m not the authority on the matter) its not good enough!
It is at this point that people will start flaming me for dragging down single parents, but this isn’t my gripe at all.

Although these figures take single parents into account, its the ones that are still together and doing well I have issues with! Single parents have many reasons for their situation, sadly many are to do with a lack of commitment and relationship breakdown (I won’t discuss my views on having children in an unstable relationship, it would take all day), but if you are in a loving, family orientated relationship, and you want children, for christs sake get married.

Marriage is still romantic, valued and respected by society, and something most people who play the dating game secretly aspire to at somepoint in the future. Less we forget; we owe a lot to our upbringings, and you don’t need to look very far to find statistics to show that children born to married parents have a better chance in life as a whole. Also why not reward yourself and your partner? You’ve taken all that time, or had a lot of luck in finding that special someone for you; you had girlfriends / boyfriends at high school, surely the person you are with now and having a child with is worth more to you than that?

Picked up a paper in the union shop today, and splashed across the front page once more, the words of warning on climate change. It seems to be one of those topics we must all talk about, but once we’ve talked about it it’s ok to forget about until someone suggests its a good idea to talk about it again. So the cycle goes on.

In many ways its a worrying state of affairs; that a government can be so preoccupied with economic wealth, stability and all the rest of it, that they put it before the welfare of the very planet without which economic policy would be meaningless. You keep hearing these elusive “target dates for reduced emissions”. To me it’s all some big farce - yet another way of putting things off. It’s a bit like a small child who knows they will get in trouble for not doing their homework, but all their friends don’t seem to be doing it, so they don’t either. Problem is the child gets to the point where they realise they don’t have time to do it and so end up getting in trouble. We would like to think that our government were a little bit beyond the age of small children, but it would seem in terms of their attitude on climate change, they haven’t even left nursery.

Let us not forget however that one must lead by example. What appalls me more than some government behaviour on the climate change issue is the people who sit there in their petrol guzzling range rovers, driving for 100 metres to get to the shops and blaming the government for not acting on climate change. They should get off their asses and walk; total hypocrites.

It’s our planet, and its up to ALL of us to contribute to it’s welfare. Failing to do so will leave us all very sorry, but with no way of return. I for one, don’t want to be in that position; Lets get it right.

I read in the news today that computer games are being increasingly used by teachers as a “teaching aid” in the classroom. I had to take my glasses off, rub my eyes, put them back on and read it again before I realised I hadn’t misread it. And you’re not mis-reading this post either.

Schools have “teamed up” with computer games manufacturers to try and produce games that work in the classroom, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they are trying out conventional games in class to see what learning benefit can be gleaned from them.

I’d venture to say, nothing what so ever. Except a lot of un-educated children perhaps and maybe some angry parents thrown in. Has the concept of hard graft and *real* learning gone out of the window to be replaced by hours of sitting in front of a screen making pre-programmed things work in a way they were pre-programmed to do? This is not learning, its foolishness of the highest degree.

A child learns by being enthralled by what they are seeing and hearing, by being able to ask questions of their teacher, by being able TO READ things in books and WRITE things down. By going outside and seeing examples in both the written word and the real world of what they have learned. What use is knowledge when it is confined to 17″ across and the thoughts and ideas of a team of programmers who wrote a game to a tight deadline? Knowledge and learning is broad and long and children need to be exposed to this concept from a young age. It is not possible to quantify this in any number of computer games. Knowledge is to be explored, not spoon fed by simply watching events unfold.

I like to think that for a child the sky is the limit, but when their teachers sit them in front of a screen and sell them out to big games corporations I’m not so sure.

It can’t have escaped many peoples attention lately that bird flu has dominated the headlines. Not only that, but concerns over the potential of it spreading, and worse still mutating so it can be passed from human to human, appear to be on the rise.

The point I have to make though is one a little more down to earth and less panic-stricken. To all those people who have been e-mailing the BBC with major concerns about the virus coming to the UK, get a life. If it comes here, so be it, but you’ve just got to deal with these things as and when you are faced with them, after all its not like we all keep a dosen chickens in our back gardens is it? The chances of the virus in it’s current form affecting many humans is so low its not worth mentioning. Let the scientists do their work to ascertain risks etc. before you panic, and if you must worry about something, then let it be the amount of carbon we are shooting up into the atmosphere, third world povety or something of a similar nature.  Those are our real concerns, as they are real, proven and yet we still sit around doing nothing about them. People have died from this virus, and here we are wondering if we can still have a couple of eggs sunny side up on a sunday morning. It’s beyond a joke. People should be a little less selfish, a little more thoughtful and worry a little less, after all life is short - you could get hit by a bus tomorrow; why wait by the road today, worried, wondering if it might happen?

If you haven’t yet seen what this is all about, then hop over and read the article on the BBC first.

I must confess to be surprised by all of this, and now that I’ve heard about it, I do really feel sorry for Kennedy. He has seemingly handled a drinking problem on his own; got the help he needed and put a stop to it. And yet, under immense pressure has had to call an impromptu press conference to confess to having had a problem and also, in some kind of political grovelling match, attempt to redeem himself by re-running for his position of leader in a full leadership election.

Now don’t get me wrong, no party leader or even politician for that matter, is perfect, and this shows in the way some of Kennedy’s fellow MPs clearly feel about his ability to lead the party. It’s all rather interesting though. As the reporter said just before the end of his live broadcast “the public seem to be behind Kennedy”, and this is, from what I have heard round about anyhow, entirely true.

More importantly though I think at this stage, is not the fate of Kennedy, or even in fact who ends up leading the Lib dems, more how much damage this whole episode will do to the party and the votes they receive at the next general elections and indeed local elections (although less so here). Last general election saw the Lib dems gaining a fair amount of ground over the conservatives (statistically anyway), so it should be a concern to any Lib dem or labour supporter at this stage that this business, along with David Cameron’s obvious strength as tory leader may in fact cause the tories to gain a significant number of votes.

I’m sure a few tory voters will be rubbing their hands together tonight though thats for sure. As for the synical side of me, the question I’ve just asked myself is that if the tories and the lib dems are going down the leadership election route, how long before labour does so just to keep up with the times?