Idle State

Here's one little feature of Firefox that falls into the category of "it's pretty good - but it would be so much better if it could read my mind". AutoFill needs a quick and easy way to manage it's entries - such as About:AutoFill which would be a page allowing you to edit/add/remove various entries. As others have mentioned, after a while AutoFill gets too many entries to be useful.

It turns out the less than obvious Shift + Delete removes entries if you are focussed on them. This was recently pointed out courtesy of Winds Of Change.Net and MacLive.NET.

While we're on the subject of Firefox features - "I want a Firefox Extension to" lists loads of extensions so you can go crazy.

By the way, if you don't use Firefox as your browser already, click on the button below to make the switch:

I've just finished reading Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" - basically the book of the film of the slide show. I randomly picked it up while wandering about the shops the other day. Actually - "reading" is a bit of a stretch. Perusing is probably a better verb since there isn't actually that much text in it. It's more a sort of printed slide-show.

It's an interesting "read". Actually - the pictures are great and the slides just as compelling as the film. [Hold that thought while I go and change my incandescent lightbulbs over to compact fluorescents.]

Two things surprise me about the book.

Firstly - it's printed on nice glossy paper. At a guess, I'd say that this is not the most greenhouse-gas-emission friendly produced paper. It's nice to touch though.

Secondly - I bought the book in Qatar (actually - it's available at The One). Qatar isn't the most fastidious country I've been in with regard to emissions reduction, concern about global warming and caring for the environment... far from it. I was driving around the north west beaches of Qatar a few weeks ago and found the amount of refuse along the shoreline staggering and saddening. That's an environmental disaster in it's own right. I wonder how many copies of the book will be sold in Qatar?

If nothing else, it's a pretty coffee table book, a relic of what will shortly be pre neo-environmentalism [Google Shellenberger and Nordhaus' Break Through on post-environmentalism].

In a RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) Court Case a jury has ruled against single mother Jammie Thomas, in favour of Capitol Records. The damages amount to US$ 222 000 or $9250 per song that Thomas illegally downloaded.

The RIAA Lawyers stated: "This does send a message, we hope, that both downloading and distributing music is not ok."

The full story is available on ars technica.

In the US, copyright infringement, such as downloading music illegally using programs such as Limewire and then allowing other people to download the music from you can generate statutory damages for Copyright Infringement of up to US$150 000 per song.

It seems to me, however, that something is desperately and morally wrong with the scale of these kind of statutory damages. If I were, for instance, hit by a car being driven by an RIAA lawyer and I were to sustain permanent injury to my leg, I could make a claim for, say, ball park, AU $230 000. A severe spinal injury and perhaps, the loss of a toe, might get me, say, AU $250 000.

The problem here, is that the real damage and loss to the RIAA and the Copyright Owner is considerably lower - as some have calculated. The jury in this trial have set the damages, seemingly arbitrarily, which give the damages this kind of equivalency to say, a permanent leg injury which is nonsense.

When will sense prevail?