Blog of Ade

Copyblogger has posted a great overview of the problems with SOPA:

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, written with the intent of more vigorously protecting copyright around the web. The entertainment industry wants to come down harder on file sharing and the theft of copyrighted material, so it lobbied for a draconian law to add to the many anti-piracy laws that are already on the books.

SOPA would be a sweet deal for giant music and entertainment companies. That’s why the law got written in the first place.

But it’s not a good deal for countless small businesses in the U.S., including yours.

Go and read the full thing at www.copyblogger.com/sopa

The BBC News website has today posted a great little tool for contextualising the world’s population growth. Based on UN Population figures, being born in 1977 I was the 4,251,107,985th (4.2 billionth) person alive at the time. As you’ll have seen in the news this week, the population has very recently reached seven billion. This is troubling.

It’s a controversial and complicated subject but I’m firmly of the opinion that we’re in big trouble unless we quickly stem this level of growth (through education and healthcare initiatives, for example). Nine billion is already an inevitability. This is surely the biggest single factor in the battle for environmental sustainability, yet few seem willing to discuss it.

If you’ve not seen it, Hans Rosling’s TED talk on the subject is well worth watching.

Seven Seas of Bullshit, originally uploaded by *ade.

This is part of the latest press campaign from the Met Police.

Great approach guys.

Is it just me or am I surrounded by paranoid babbling idiots? It’s complete bullshit. Whoever signed this campaign off needs a suicide bomb shoving up where only customs officers dare to probe.

This attitude makes me want to leave Britain for good. But where to? It’s a growing global state of mind as insane as that of the fundamentalists they’re simultaneously creating and being afraid of.

I’d like to start an off-world colony. Only intelligent, rational thinkers are invited. Top scientists, mathematicians, engineers, designers and artists get free tickets. Religion and other such dark-ages nonsense is banned. Those are my rules. Take it or leave it.

Recommended viewing: The Power of Nightmares