This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Vacation.” Here is my entry. When most people think of ‘vacation’ they think of a beach holiday. This image is of Menton in France.
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge. I’m entry number 91.
Vacation
Tag Archives: people
We the undersigned
I found the most brilliant website recently. If used as intended it’s a step forward for democracy, making it easier for people to offer their opinion on subjects that matter to them directly to the Prime Minister. And if not, well, it’s entertaining reading.
I first came across some pretty distasteful stuff calling to ban the practising of the Muslim faith in the United Kingdom. Actually, much of the religious stuff was verging on the comedic. For example, Christian’s are being side-lined in British society. Unless you remember that senior members of the church can still be found in the House of Lords.
There was also a call to ban distasteful views (Ban the British National Party). I don’t agree with that one either — free speech means having to hear things you don’t like too — but at least we’re heading in the right direction.
Best of all are the “comedy” petitions. I have sympathy for the proposer of the petition entitled Give single, employed people with no children a break!, although I’d like to add that married couples without children don’t do terribly well on the tax and benefit front either! My favourite, however, has to be the one that starts “We believe that every child in the UK would benefit from owning an elephant.” I don’t think anyone could disagree with that.
Alcatraz
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[photopress:IMG_3416.jpg,thumb,alignleft]I know, I know. Alcatraz is an obvious tourist destination, as Buckingham Palace is in London or the Statue of Liberty is is New York. Equally, I couldn’t not go.
In the end we chose the evening tour on a Friday. Going later in the day would allow better light and the trip includes a number of thing such as an audio-tour that cost extra during the day.
The trip starts near Pier 33 where there’s a queue for the ferry. At least, that’s what it claims to be. The line is actually for a photographer taking “souvenir” pictures for those customers who simultaneous have more money than sense and no camera. I didn’t see anyone buy a print so in practice it seems to be for people who feel unable to do what we did: join the line after the photographer. Such rebels.
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The ferry circles around the island, allowing views of all parts of it and back to San Francisco and some magnificent sunset views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Once my feet were back on solid ground, the tour takes everyone up hill to the main building in the centre of the island.
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[photopress:IMG_3435.jpg,thumb,alignleft]We first enter the shower room. As the guides are keen to tell us, this is not the shower room that you see in the movie “The Rock.” Here there is no balcony for the guards to look down (and shoot) from. These days this is where you get your audio tour. They tell you to press the play button when you get to a particular sign in the cell blocks.
Given the amount of time that the prisoners would spend each day in their cells, they are frighteningly small. I think I would lose my mind sat in them each day every day. But many of the ex-inmates who provide some of the audio commentary are nostalgic about them. I guess if you spend enough time somewhere is does become home. They also note that the cells were safe from attack from other inmates.
[photopress:IMG_3464.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Once the audio tour had finished there was still plenty of time to wander around, take in some talks by rangers and see some videos. The latter seemed popular but we decided to check out the view of sun-set over the San Francisco Bay.
One “spooky” bit was back inside the main hall. Most of the exhibits had been static during the rest of the tour, but here they opened and closed a whole row of cell doors. The sound is so frightening, even to people who have not been incarcerated, that the effect has been used in many films, including Star Wars!
Overall we were impressed. We were expecting it to be overly cheesy and touristy but it was very well done and gave a good insight to the island. Having good weather only improved things.
What kind of atheist are you?
You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I’m not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.
What kind of atheist are you? |
Double Standards?
Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications ((It amuses me that with all the money that Microsoft has, the best their marketing people can come up with to describe this is “squirting.” At best that sounds comic, at worst somewhat rude. What were they thinking?)). But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.
If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days ((Even this, it turns out, is a simplification. At least one of the major record labels has forbidden wireless sharing of their music entirely. Unfortunately they don’t tell you about this until you actually try to transfer the file yourself. Is this legal? Is it not a case of adding restrictions after the sale?)) but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.
What about movies? Sorry, bad news here. You can’t transmit them at all.
Zune can also store pictures. What limits have Microsoft provided to protect photographers?
The answer, it turns out, is none. You can transfer as many pictures as you like to as many people as you like. Once transferred, they are visible indefinitely and can even be copied to further Zunes.
Er, hello? Double standards?
I imagine that the main argument is that most people don’t have a bunch of professional photographs on their computers but do have commercial music. How far can we get with that line of thinking? Well, in fact, there is a certain logic in that. Most people don’t write their own music, even with relatively simple to use applications like Garageband, but they do have large collections of holiday snaps.
However the argument starts to fall down when you start to think about movies. Do people have only commercial movies and nothing personal? I don’t think so. While it is possible to rip a DVD and put it on your iPod it’s legally dubious, non-trivial (because of the CSS scrambling scheme) and time consuming (transcoding to MP4 takes a long time even on quick machines). Even if you use P2P software to download an illegal copy it’s likely to be is DivX format which cannot be used directly by the Zune, so that time-consuming transcoding step returns. My guess is that people are, in fact, much more likely to have home movies. Of course, if you made the movie you’ll also own the copyright for and are quite likely to want to send to friends and family. Certainly my wedding video has done the rounds and my attempts on a Segway has been distributed fairly widely.
That being the case, then why are the limitations on distributing movies even more severe than that for music? There’s a definite mismatch between desired usage patterns and the programmed restrictions.
So where have the restrictions come from and why do they vary so widely? Maybe a clue can be found in the fact that Microsoft are paying the RIAA $1 for each Zune sold.
Why would Microsoft do that? Clearly, in the US, the RIAA, for music, and the MPAA, for movies, hold a lot of sway. But for photographers? I’m not aware of a single organisation that has the same level of influence.
I’m sure Reuters and PA protect the copyright of their own images, but who protects everyone else? Perhaps this is because while movies and music require large teams, photography is more often a solo activity but certainly it has no relation to the value of the medium.
Ultimately I think this is another strike against the draconian DRM measures that are currently being applied to movies and music. I have nothing against digital rights management in the abstract, but implementations that restrict or remove rights that you already have by law just make the music labels and movie distributors look like money-grabbing opportunists.
When is a pencil and paper better than a computer?
In this article in MacUser Howard Oakley notes that a number of schools have recently banned the use of wireless networks due to the unknown effects of the radio waves used. He then connects this with the declining number of people taking science subjects at those same schools and their ability to understand the likely risks of said networks.
It’s an interesting piece, but what I find interesting is that as the general populations understanding of how the world works dwindles, so our reliance on high technology increases ((As this article asks, in relation to decreasing interesting in science degrees, “do they just totally not care about where things like web search and MP3 codecs and 3D graphics and peer-to-peer protocols come from”?)).
One incredible thing is that sometimes we start moving to a highly technical solution despite there being little advantage in it. Or at least as far as I can see, the advantage is that it is digital and new.
My favourite example is that of electronic voting machines. It’s easy to point and laugh at all the problems that they’ve been causing, particularly in the recent elections in the US. But despite the problems, despite every indication that they often choose who wins an election rather than the electorate, there is still a drive to increase their use.
The main thing that I want to know about the voting machines is this. What problem are they solving? What part of the old system was so broken that it required a complicated, flawed and unreliable new system? ((It’s also worth noting that before the new electronic machines, the US had problems. Remember the “hanging chads” problem with Bush’s first election? That was a flaw in a method of automatically counting votes.))
Some say that the current system is inefficient or labour intensive or slow. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, that’s either untrue or by design. The system needs to be both anonymous and yet track fraud, two ends of the privacy spectrum. The model in use is similar to public key cryptography in that working out who made a particular vote is not impossible. In fact, in principle, it’s very easy. But unless you have plenty of time to manually check thousands of ballot papers it’s going to take a while. This is by design.
Similarly, the effort required to count the votes in the first place is also a benefit. It makes it more difficult for any individual to have a dramatic effect on the final outcome. This is a good thing.
And slow? It’s simple to make quicker: throw more people at it. That makes it quicker and reduces any inherent bias.
I love new technology and gadgets, I’m fascinated by how they work and the effect that some of them have on society. But in the end, you have to use the right tool for the job. And the right tool does not always have an embedded computer.