Seriously, Mr Farley’s work is really good, and I wasn’t aware of it, so I’m grateful for something new to read… I think he’s taken it through to the logical conclusion too.

Open-source warfare… that’ll be fun… and hopefully multi-platform.

I like your compulsive listing of games, by the way, what percentage would you say you’ve completed?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/7471140.stm

Once again, what’s the expectation of privacy?

1. I make my art decent.
2. Reading books makes my art ****ing excellent.

I go through a process called sponge and splurge. It’s pretty self-explainatory. I spend a few weeks burried in other people’s work, music, art, film and television, and then I spend a week regurgitating all of the half-digested ideas before playing around with them. Currently I’m sponging, which is not a euphemism.

Let me know how Electronic Brains is: that one’s been on my list for some time, but it never seems to make it all the way to the top, it always float in the “oh! I’ll read that one soon… maybe next week,” category. Hmmm, maybe I’ll push it up and read it next (though the package of e-books I just found the other day might stop me — everything Gibson ever wrote! Well, save the new one).

I am such a freaking geek.

I imagine Em will get to it before me, although she reads like lightning so will be done with it by the time I get there (estimated next wednesday-ish).

As you might notice, the list is quite non-fiction heavy, about 3 to 1 on average (over my entire list). I get lost in fiction and daydream too much whilst I read it (and by that I mean for the duration of the book, not just whilst I’m physically reading), so whilst I can tear through textbooks and biographies and such, even a short story will dislocate me, thought wise.

Plus the next season’s only FIVE EPISODES?!? DAMN YOUR ASS-BACKWARDS BRITISH TV!

http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/14556/15580/music-band-cctv-music-video.phtml

used our freedom of information act to film their own music video using footage filmed by CCTV.

The Data Protection Act was supposed to ensure that sort of thing, but in reality there’s too much beurocracy attached to it… that and the fact that anyone can set up a CCTV camera.

Information is power and any form of government, whether local or national is going to fight hard to keep hold of the sort of omnipotence they get from high level surveillance.

The thing that really gets me is that you would think with such a high visibility, crime rates would have plummeted, but evidence shows that if it has, it is rarely to do with the presence or evidence provided by the increase in the number of cameras – It’s true that some cameras reduce crime in the immediate vicinity, but putting up more cameras has little cumulative effect in those areas – That suggests that they are obviously mis-managed and perhaps poorly utilised and rather than address this it seems far easier just to stick some more up.

J Gray is right, though: Torchwood would be much less interesting without.

My proposal for CCTV is fairly simple in principle, but probably unlikely to ever fly: allow them to record, and store data in a huge database protected by some kind of independent agency, maybe internationally monitored. All that data is there, but it’s only available with a warrant. Cops can even watch a live stream, -if they have a warrant-. That means there’s judicial oversight on the network, same as if they want to search your home or person, but while keeping many of the security benefits.

Perhaps the reason we have so many is Torchwood… for the continuing output of the BBC, it is entirely necessary to pepper the UK wit surveilance cameras.

The report I linked to up there ^ suggested that a lot of the cameras, brought in under anti-terrorist legislation, are now used to monitor the most trivial things. it would give me more hope to think that they were there to provide easy storylines for British Sci-fi.

Do you watch the doctor?

Your plan… do it have anything to do with Soilent Green?