(Cormac McCarthy’s venerable typing machine)

This is a heavily worn Lettera 32 – it’s an Olivetti portable typewriter. It’s clearly seen some heavy use. I find it hard to imagine just how much use it’s seen though — about 5 million words across 7 books and numerous smaller works.

I’ve blogged about my own Olympia SG-3 earlier in the year and this is the absolute opposite end of the scale. The portable typewriter is a smaller, lighter, portable option. It’s not at all dissimilar in its intended use to the laptop of today:

(There’s a really good photo showing how a portable typewriter is used in the same way as a laptop on the BBC News site but it’s a getty image and I’m not going to risk embedding it here – BBC link)

That’s the very good thing about the portable typewriter. They really are portable. They are designed specifically to fit into a bag and be light enough to carry around. You could even get cases which allowed you to carry files, accessories, supplies along with the typewriter etc — very much like a laptop bag.

My big model sits on a desk in my room and stays there until I get someone to help me move it. In return it’s a considerable chunk of springs and gears which can do some amazing things with no more than a cunning use of gears and springs (decimal tabulation anyone?) and is pretty hard to hurt. It’s really up to the user — you wouldn’t say that a laptop is better than a desktop to type documents on. It may have different features but at the expense of portability, for example. If you only need to type notes any typewriter will do that fine.

I can’t possibly afford Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter but I think I’m content with my current typewriter altogether. It’s given me a good few months of reliable, handy service so far and long may it continue.

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Short story

They’re not, they’re appointed.

Long story

I’ve been noticing a number of Supreme Court related search queries in the blog stats and thought this was a good question to be searching for because the Supreme Court is a new and critical part of our constitutional framework. I’ve studied the House of Lords reasonably well for mooting etc but I’ve read very little on the Supreme Court because it’s just not yet bubbled down to me. Therefore, pinch of salt should follow.

The Supreme Court is a horizontal shift for the House of Lords. It doesn’t actually gain any new powers but the judges get new emails, a new building and court room and they lose their robes and wigs (which I think is a shame).

There are 12 Justices of the Supreme Court who have simply stopped being Law Lords and started being Justices of the Supreme court one day. It’s really probably the best way to get your bench of venerable and well experienced judges from one court to another.

I think that elected judges are a pretty dangerous situation. You don’t actually want the guy who can literally send you to jail trying to appeal to people who read the Daily Mail, you’re not going to measure up. You end up with situations like the US where judges need to differentiate themselves through how tough they are on criminals. It makes wonderful headlines but it’s not exactly Baron Hume. I think there are considerable problems with the appointment model, it appears to be self propagating etc, but it is a better curtailing measure against concentrated state power (a very New World ideal) than if they and the legislature were both chasing after the same votes from the same voters. I think you really want a little bit of heterogeneity in your government.

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I’ve found myself reading the artofmanliness.com (links to a competition thread – very best of luck to anyone clicking it) over the weekend. I happen to think that it’s a really good idea — it’s a blog dedicated to the idea that it’s good to be manly, in a self-reliant and skilled way rather than a boorish or overly FHM way. I agree with this, I think it’s a good model for someone to aim to be. I actually think that’s a fairly good model for everyone to aim to be, just to be modern.

The blog mainly divides into posts about how to be manly — how to camp, how to put up shelves, that sort of thing — and things that are manly — the pocketknife, hats, Frank Sinatra, that sort of thing. In the second category lies the Saddleback Leather Company’s products, their site is frankly one of the most tempting boutique shopping sites I’ve ever seen. Generally I can look at boutique items and say “right, it’s lovely but it’s wholly impractical as well as very expensive” but in this case I’m looking at leather satchels and bags built to last for generations and thinking “it’s lovely and dammit that’s probably quite practical too.” I do like the idea of buying a bag that’s just not going to wear out, and I say that as someone with a cracked laptop from hitting pavement after a zip on a backpack burst.

I think the idea of me buying a briefcase just now, as an undergrad, would be a massively presumptuous act and I think the smaller items are disproportionately expensive compared to the bags to consider buying one – I think the $140 leather document wallet is a particularly shocking act of pricing that frankly reflects badly on the other items but that doesn’t change the central issue: those are some lovely looking bags. They’re too much money for a student to spend on a single bag in my view (I get by very well with a beaten up Berghaus daypack at uni – you just need something that holds your books) but I think these might be worth looking at when money is less tight even if just because they’re quite pretty.

Edit: I’m at the “know enough to be dangerous” stage of my tax education just now. Would someone get a letter from the revenue if they imported one of the $519 (small) – $607 (large) briefcases?

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He lodged a complaint with the WIPO under the UDRP against a domain name owner he said was violating his trademark (see what I did there). An American individual registered a domain name which linked his name with various criminal acts — however the site didn’t accuse him of doing the acts, they just wanted to know why he won’t come out and publicly deny the serious allegations, a satirical reference to Beck’s own interviewing style — Beck promptly took legal advice and this led to the WIPO hearing. The extra-legal Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy is not perfect, it’s been widely criticised from the very outset for issues of accountability and bias not least in that the initial source of the policy is the World Intellectual Property Organisation and asking the WIPO how you should deal with copyright disputes between trademark owners and domain name owners is a little bit like asking the KKK how you should deal with disputes between white people and black people.

On the other hand, this dispute is quite a reassuring note that in the case of fairly clear situations the process does work. The UDRP deals with trademark violation and this is not a trademark violation so the action can’t succeed and that’s what’s been decided, although on a different ground because the domain name was held to be similar enough to be confusing.

It’s the specific details of the dispute which are quite entertaining. The reason behind the registrant registering the specific domain name he did is because it’s an Internet meme. It’s not the registrant making false allegations of felonies by Glenn Beck, he’s just copying a joke that’s on FARK. The third pillar of the test requires the trademark owner to prove bad faith so this is a huge deal. The thing is that Internet memes are elements from a (primarily American) subculture and it’s impossible to assume that any particular WIPO panel sitting in Geneva will know a lolcat from a rickroll. This means that the respondent’s submission needed to include a potted history of the Internet meme in between naturally quite dry analysis of relevant precedent and procedural (as opposed to legal) argument. It’s inordinately awesome to read about Leroy Jenkins on letter headed paper.

Perhaps most hearteningly of all is the statement released by the registrant after the decision was made – in the statement he gives Beck control of the domain (despite the panel ruling in the registrant’s favour) and says that the only reason he even disputed the point was to defend the American Constitution’s protections of free speech from Beck. It’s a surprisingly powerful and elegant declaration of patriotism for a dispute that came out of an Internet in-joke.

Arstechnica have a good, factually oriented review of the dispute that’s worth a read.

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Earlier, in the back to school period, I discussed the benefits and costs of going paperless as a student. I think it’s a really worthwhile choice which has a lot of benefits down the line. My main concern is simply the high initial cost of converting from paper to paperless which means that it is a better option for people who are making money from doing it as a job because it will severely cut into your beer money.

I think it’s hard to talk about people going paperless in 2009 without mentioning the eBook reader, the new group of devices which are being marketed as a way to replace the printed book.

The science bit

The market has pretty much expanded from very little into the next big thing based almost entirely on the invention of a small (but growing) American company that worked out how to make very small magnetic objects reliably rise and fall in a grid pattern. Unlike the great majority of modern technology this relies on moving part because once you’ve moved the parts to where you want them you can leave them there with no extra energy use. This means that the ereader expends energy “printing” the page – putting the eInk particles where they’re supposed to be – but then doesn’t need any more to keep the text on the page.

This differs from a traditional display because earlier technologies do not create a fixed image – a CRT monitor draws images onto the screen with a scanning electron beam on a phosphor screen and an LCD monitor uses an arrangement of gates which produces a coloured filter for a backlight to shine through. That electron beam and that backlight both require continuous power to operate. The main benefit of a fleeting, dynamic way of generating images is that it can be very good for conveying moving images, whereas eInk is limited by the physical speed of the particles. That’s bad for movies but text has never moved in its life and that means the technology is good for dedicated book readers.

This is really all by to the by, because how the underlying technology works rarely affects how good it is for users.

Ebook readers

The message to take away is simply that because it’s not a continuously operating device means that you don’t measure the battery life by how long it can be on for (because the device is only on for short spurts) but by how many times the display changes. That’s why the Sony Pocket Edition is rated as having enough “battery life for nearly 6,800 page turns.” The amount of time that is depends on how quickly you can read that number of pages.

Ebook readers have the option of, generally, being used to display books licensed from the sponsoring bookseller’s shop which is great if that’s how you buy books (it isn’t personally). I think it has great potential for updateable textbooks which apply their own errata and apply the differences between editions if that’s the way publishers want to play it. Right now I think the potential lies in the ability of these devices to display your own documents. I think the ability to load up an ereader with a load of case reports and then read that on the bus is paradigm shifting.

This has additional benefits in that because the image is static it doesn’t cause headaches from forcing people to squint at flickering displays and because there’s no backlight you aren’t forced to stare at a light.

The competition

Just because the underlying technology is well suited to displaying text this doesn’t mean that you should buy every product which uses it and displaying text on its own is something that computers have been able to do for a very long time. Ebooks readers are not the only option available here.

Your laptop

The obvious alternative is just a laptop – it will read any format you should care to name, runs off a battery, is portable, does more than just text and you probably already have one. It’s not ideal for reading on the bus, the LCD screen is backlit and the battery won’t last particularly long. But it does so many other things as well and it is likely to be a product that many people will already own, and that makes it practically free to use as an ebook reader.

The mobile phone

An unexpected new contender is the mobile phone, people have been using PDAs to read text for many years and the phone is converging on the same areas. These are good because they’re so much smaller and more portable and have long battery lives. On the other hand, this all depends on the quality of the screen. One of the most often recommended devices for reading books is the iPhone, which has an undeniably pretty screen, on the other hand it is an excruciatingly expensive way to read on the bus. It’s a good product and if you use it as a phoning, mobile emailing, mobile webbing, app running device then it’s really good. If you’re only using it to read Westlaw PDFs on the bus, though, the initial cost and monthly fees make it a difficult purchase.

The photocopier

A good photocopier costs many thousand pounds and weighs an unbelievable amount. It is beyond the dreams of any student to own. However, many facilities give you access to such a photocopier for around 3-5p a sheet. That means that you can have a 5 page report to read on the bus in black and white for about 25p, and the truly frugal student will take steps to get that price down further – by printing on both sides of page or by fitting more than one page onto each physical page. I think the photocopier is the main enemy of the ebook reader because you need to print between 3600 and 6000 pages before you would have saved money by buying Sony’s cheapest ebook reader (the Pocket PRS-300). That’s a really long term investment to save a bit of paper. I think you’d need to really need the extra advantages of the ebook reader to make it a more convincing option.

Reasons to buy right now

This is the hard thing, I don’t see a reason to buy just right now. I think the technology is extremely impressive and I think the datapad from Star Trek is nigh but at present buying one is a huge expense, particularly because you know it will get better and cheaper as time goes on. It’s hard to justify the expense when centralised photocopying exists. Once prices come down I think we’ll really reach a point where it’ll be hard to tell why you’d ever print a document out but we’re really not there yet.

The main reason to buy now is simply if you want one, it’s not long til Christmas, but I imagine this will rapidly change as prices come down (and they will).

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The Pirate Bay is a great source of material for blog posting. Oddly enough this isn’t about the issue of, you know, their big court case. This is actually about their rather entertaining “Legal Threats” page. The Pirate Bay has (had?) a policy whereby if you found someone had posted a torrent with your copyrighted material on the Pirate Bay tracker / search engine you could write to the Pirate Bay and they… will promptly ignore it. Or they’ll send you a cheeky reply.

They post the letters they get on this page. Generally what they have are copies of emails which are very simply the plain text listings of the emails, generally with lots of lawyerly signatures including the words of “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” etc. However, one of the documents is interesting because it’s a PDF. The Pirate Bay took this and replied back with a 1 megabyte image in .BMP format which looked a lot like this:

“I can use annoying formats too” they say. But is PDF annoying? I’m not so sure.

With my techie hat on I know that the best form to find text in is simple, human readable plain text, the sort of thing you’d get if you typed it in Notepad. It’s just the words, you can do anything with it, you can copy and paste it into any other program and every computer can interpret it in such a way as to let you see it on any computer you can find. However, with my (law) student hat on I happen to really like the not so humble Portable Document Format.

What is PDF?

It’s probably worth talking about what PDF is by comparing it to the other options for text.

1) Plain text

Examples, created by: Notepad, Text Editor

Pares everything down to the words themselves. There is no option for formatting, fonts, colours, pages, anything. All you do is type a long sheet of contigous text. The great thing is the sheer efficiency of what you produce. The document provides all the substantive content of the fancier formats but without messing with formatting issues.

Pros

1. Very lightweight
2. Easily transferred
3. Easily modified in many different programs running on many different systems
4. Easily adapted into other forms, not burdened by extra code put in for formats etc.

Cons

1. No formatting, at all. Need to use things like *bold* or /italic/ to distinguish formatting
2. No diagrams. It’s possible to do using letters and symbols but no chance for images in the text
3. Can be hard to set out – things like footnoting and tables of contents pretty much need to be set out by hand in the vast majority of plain text editors.
4. Can be very elegant, can be very crude.

2) Rich text

Examples, created by: MS Word, OpenOffice

Pros

1. Most common kind of text – every web page and every Word document are rich text.
2. Allows visible formatting – select text and make it bold, italic etc. Allows fonts
3. Allows image imbedding, depending on the specific format this can be within the file itself (eg, Word documents) or through referencing (eg web pages)
4. Can be very feature rich – templates, automated footnoting, automated table of conents etc are all possible.

Cons

1. Extra features means compatibility suffers. Documents created in MS Word may have compatibility issues when opened in slightly different programs, eg. OpenOffice, Word Perfect, Abiword.
2. Although you can choose various fonts for your documents these fonts will only appear on other people’s computers if they also have the same fonts installed. If they don’t they’ll see a fallback option which you may not have chosen. There are ways around this.
3. Will not look the same on every computer, settings will vary and the resulting document can be affected.

3) Image

Examples, created by: Paint, Photoshop

I might surprise some people by including this option here but I really do think that image formats are a real option (of sorts) for conveying text on a computer. The flexibility that allows the same picture format to contain a picture a funny cat or a world famous old master also allows it to hold the shape of words.

Pros:

1. Document looks exactly as it did on your computer for everyone
2. Very easily shared between users – every modern computer can understand the common picture formats, so no need for specialist software to view it.
3. Very, very good for diagrams. Will look exactly as intended, allows full colour and photorealistic images to included directly with the text.
4. Very flexible layout – not bound by justification or layout tags, can put elements in anywhere on the document

Cons

1. Very big files for email etc (the Pirate Bay image was 1 megabyte for 7 words)
2. Can be hard to edit, and editing it well requires specialist software that’s hard to use
3. Can be hard to add extra pages
4. Not actually text – only an image so can’t be copied and manipulated like a text document

4) Device Independent formats

Examples, created by: Acrobat, Foxit, TeX

Pros

1. Will look the same on every computer (is device independent). Designed to be transferred between computers
2. Allows you to rely on page, line numbers because it is identical to each user
3. Allows direct embedding of images, allows for diagrams to be laid in text exactly where intended by the creator
4. Is still text, so can be copied and pasted as text. Possible to also have original image as well as text, for example if scanning a book, in the same document
5. Can be pretty immutable, so provides quite a good historical reference. (eg, harder to edit a PDF report from Westlaw than an RTF)

Cons

1. Can be “annoying” – that is if you’re browsing the internet and you come across a PDF document your browser will need to load an external reader.
2. Can be expensive. PDF is officially created by Acrobat and that is not cheap. On the other hand DVI,free PDF and so on are open-source and can be produced by many different formats.
3. Can be pretty immutable, it can be difficult to just change something in a PDF document.

Now, if I point you to 4ii) I think I will show you a huge reason to like PDF (and other device independent formats). The reason here is to look at the ability to rely on the page numbers – so that useful summation of a case’s ratio at the bottom of page 4 is at the bottom of page 4, on everyone’s computer.

I can’t really understand why you would email someone a PDF version of a letter instead of writing your message in the email itself. I find that strange but I don’t think that means that the format is annoying. Feel free to use these formats in your own workflow. They’re good.

ASA Adjudication British Sky Boardcasting Ltd t/a Sky – 16 September 2009

Sky ran an advert claiming that their customers were not going to face a reduction in speeds at peak times, they said that BT would. Naturally BT complained about this. That is hardly unexpected, they’re allowed to complain to the regulator if they disagree with an advert. The ASA then has to take a look at the advert and decide if it actually goes against any rules.

The ASA have uphead their complaint and Sky are not to run their advert again – despite BT admitting that they throttle users’ connections at peak times. How is this possible?

BT use a Fair Use policy — this is the thing that makes the unlimited internet packages economic for the ISP. If you use the service heavily they will slow you down, if you don’t draw too heavily on the service it comes at you quickly. “Effectively unlimited” is the language used.

Fair use policies are marketed as a fairness issue — they’re to stop certain users hogging it for everyone. The complaint to this is that they’re used to hide the fact that the ISP is trying to spread too limited resources between too many users. Heavy users of P2P software are likely to run into fair use policies at some point but other users may also, depending on the strength of their policy. For example, and this is the sort of thing that Sky was talking about, users on Option 1 have their video streaming throttled at peak time. That’s iplayer,

This is an example of fine distinction – the reason that the advert wasn’t allowed was because that it suggests that every BT user would be throttled at peak times (quite an image) rather than the fact that it says that BT throttles users at all. I think the best response to this would be along the lines of Ryanair’s “Sooo sorry” adverts in which, having been ordered to stop saying they were 5x cheaper than a competitor and to apologise, conceded that they were only roughly 4.5x times cheaper and said sorry. Sometimes the letter of the law is the only way to go.

Economy Gastronomy is a recessionary BBC food programme which basically has the central principle of “avoid throwing food away.” This is frankly not a bad thing. I think a person really should be looking to avoid wasting all that much food in their life, both to save money and just for ethical living. The case studies they use in their programme are really quite over the top though – with groups of people who really show quite galling wastage of food. I’m not talking about them not going as far as using brains and connective tissue in their food, I’m talking about throwing a quarter of it away. You really do get the sense that they end up saving the people on the show money would be more down to giving the people a right good slap than teaching revolutionary food preparation techniques. I was speechless when one child threw away a three egg omlette because he’d folded it unevenly — that was his dinner

Regardless of what I or anyone else thinks of the particular people involved the principles being taught are extremely worth while. It relies on having access to long term food storage and being able to cook large amounts so it may not be suitable for all students but for people sharing flats with groups of people it might be a sensible way of splitting the expense of food. It’s cheaper to live off shared, home cooked dishes than to keep separate shelves in the fridge and fight over crumbs. It’s not going to be suitable for everyone’s situation and awkward flatmates can ruin this but its advice of planning out meals, using what’s left after a meal to make a new meal instead of throwing it away, processing past prime fruit into smoothies and spritsers and so on is all sound advice

The BBC Food site is available here

There’s a fairly straight forward seeming employment law issue brewing in Walmart Arkansas, the law suit argues that a straight up and productive senior consultant was fired into a poor economy with a bad review a little while after after his co-workers didn’t want him to use the company washroom to prepare for his daily prayers. That’s basically the sort of religious discrimination action many would sell children to be able to represent. It seems a pretty hamfisted handling of the situation by Walmart. Regardless, it will run and run, the case is still in early days yet and Walmart has its right of reply and so on. The interesting thing is the sort of reaction these stories get in terms of anonymous comments: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/09/wal-mart_deloitte_civil_rights.php

There are two main sides to the discussion in the comments thread. Very few people leaving a comment don’t have some sort of opinion on the topic. There are two lists, one is comments from people who give if definitely not their real or full name and the other are people who give a not a name as their handle. I’m cherry picking for the two lists but I think it’s a trend I’ve noticed by other users anonymous commenting. Remember, all of these people had the choice (and may have) to leave a false name. Why do the people who leave a name not advise that the Muslim worker commit suicide while those who leave a handle do?

I blog anonymously, I really like that I can make infantile, ill-thought out comments on law without a future employer googling my name and discovering that, back in 2007-2008, I knew pretty much nothing about whatever topic. I’m not particularly right wing, if you’re not liberal when you’re young you’ve not got a heart, so it’s not really comparable for my sort of anonymity but my plan is to avoid writing anything on the blog that I can’t defend in real life discussion.

Examples of the first list:

Simon says:
“Wudu is the process where muslims clean themselves up(face,hands, foot, mouth rinse) with water from any dirt or germs that they may have collected during work or any other activity. This entire process takes less than 5 mins. Being a businessman and handling 74 employees i can’t think of any burden/complexity/hardship this process can bring to the employer. Shame on Walmart.”

David Ross says:
“Just terrible. Why can’t Muslims enjoy the same rights and freedoms in America that Christians and Jews enjoy in Saudi Arabia?”

blutenhalbmond says:
“A Muslim prayer is essentially a few minutes (5 minutes max) devoted to gloifying the Lord and he/she emerges after that short experience cleaner, more relaxed relieved of tension, anger and hostility, in short, with a more positive attitude to one’s workplace. This is why the afternoon prayer is ordained and the corporate world should in fact welcome it.

The “wazu” or wudu (former spelling is more common in Non Arabic countries) is a psychological gesture of purification as well as a good reason to clean up. Its a healthy thing to do. We all should at least once in the middle of our work should rinse their hands up to the elbows, splash some cold water on our faces and behind the necks, gargle and clean our throat and noses of junk that may have accumulated therein. A most commendable hygienic habit if you think rationally, laying your angers prejudices aside for a moment.”

Examples of the second list:

kidding? says:

“Kidding right? What if my religious beliefs required me to spend a few minutes upside down each day at work? Or required me to smoke some dope? Or, what if I walked the aisles praying aloud to my God of choice in whispers? What if I chose to wear a dull sword or a light wand to symbolize my religious faith?

This is medieval superstition, pure and simple, whether the guy is a Muslim or evangelical Christian or a devotee of Thor or Wohan. If people want to delude themselves by talking to some non-existent being, they are free to do so at home. Tolerance of religion is not a virtue, it’s a regress into the past. Just like the dumb-ass judge who wanted to hang the 10 Commandments in his courthouse, this foolishness ought to be rewarded with a good-bye, please work elsewhere.”

Good Riddance says:

“I think it’s good he was fired.
Fundamentalism should not be tolerated.
If he is unable to integrate into a secular society(work a whole shift without being disruptive) then he should move to Pakistan.”

US Citizen says:
“His religion prevented him from doing a standard professional job. Walmart should hold its ground here. If they don’t, Walmart will lose my respect.

If he wants to be a Muslim, he can go back home. Or he could kill himself, which would be much better.”

On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. But they might guess you’re just a tiny bit racist.

“If this tape is broken or if the package is damaged, check entire contents in front of carrier and sign carrier’s cheet in accordance with actual condition and quantity of contents. It is not sufficient to sign “Unexamined.” Written complaints must be made to the carriers and the senders immediately, otherwise no claim can be entertained.”

No claim can be entertained? Really?

This was written on some packing tape wrapped around a new computing purchase and it caught my eye because I believe it is simply unenforceable. I’ve not given the retailer a right of reply so I won’t identify them here but I thought I’d take the opportunity to give a bit of consumer advice. You have a right of rejection which you only lose at the point you accept the goods. That lets you return the goods for a refund, a replacement or a repair. Acceptance is a legal term which has a legal definition beyond the normal one.

The legislation someone should point to if they’re directed to this sort of sticker is s35 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979. This talks about what acceptance actually means. In particular, point them at subsections (2), (3) and (5) and which gives you, as a consumer, the statutory right of a reasonable time to examine the goods after they are delivered and the protection as a consumer against losing your rights “agreement, waiver or otherwise.” The retailer simply can’t change legislation by putting a message on the parcel, and even if they were trying to, it needs to be very, very clearly pointed out on the parcel. This is slightly different for people who are purchasing in the line of business but you’re still allowed to catch your breath before your right of return expires. If you don’t examine a parcel that’s delivered to you you should write “unexamined” – it’s the truth.

Obviously if your carrier brings a half destroyed, collapsed and burnt box with the tape broken you should check it right there on the door and not sign until you confirm that it was delivered to you in such a sorry state. You should because that protects you from assertions that it was delivered to you fine and you broke it. You don’t need to though, your contract involves the goods inside the package — not the parcel itself and your statutory rights are not affected.