But yeah, this is the strange thing. Most people agree we should natiolise the rail service, the NHS is mostly a good thing, to keep the post office public, renationlise the Utlities, greater demcrascy, greater freedoms of liberty, womens rights, gay rights, etc etc. Yet here are living in an ever more Capitlist society. With less liberty and less public ownership then ever before! An age of farse you might say, a time where we give billions to the bankers who caused the mess we’re in and then we cut out our own vital public services to pay for it. It’s quite insane, no one agrees with this, yet it happens.

I frequently have this circler argument with my father. I assert we clearly don’t live in a demcrascy but he believes simply becase we have a ballot box that means we live in a decmrascy. I point out what I have just pointed out…”well yeah but why is nothing actually like the way most of us want it to be then?” “What about the millions and millions it takes to wage a poltical campaign?”

Of course to a certain degree it is correct. It would theoretically be possible to start a party and do all this. But the ones with power of course would not go down without a fight. You only need to see the insane war waged agaigst the Labour Party when it was a sort of Labour Party during the 30s by the mainstream media. Or in a whole host of countires when Socialist Parties have taken some sort of power. From smear campaings to all out war resulting in the deaths of millions.

So my point, people are not alone in thinking what they do. We all want a better world. The problem is if we have any chance of creating this better world we must organise and organise well. With strong solidarity through a new workers party. It’s simply uniting, if you never fight you certainly will never win, if you do fight, hey you might win! They will try and demoralise you. I was reminded of this recently during the Postal Workers Strikes. The BBC ran a whole segment of people talking about past struggles that failed, saying what’s the point, we never win. We don’t win all the time, it’s a war, you win some battles, you lose some. But, you must keep fighting as they will come back at you again and again until there’s nothing left to take. There are so many examples of the people winning, we still have an NHS, Universal Suffrage, the weekend! And many others. Workers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains

Fighting for Democratic Unions

Was a very good talk from Rob Williams who, most in the movement will know well. If not, check out his background here. Also Linda Taffee Spoke. The talk was a good one and outlined the outrageous actions of certain trade union leaders in the movement, the more I hear the more I can’t believe it. It makes you wodner why they joined the movement in the first place. The problem is bad trade union leadership tends to raise in dark days, which the 90s certainly was for socialism as well as trade unions. However we are now enetering a time that if we hope to stay above water, we need a fighting trade union leadership! The role of a leadership is to communicate to workers why action is important. No one wants to take action, strikes mean a loss of pay and a risk of losing. But, the bosses will forever come back at you so if you don’t fight you will lose, if you do fight you might win! You might not want anything to do with poltics but it’ll take a big chunk out of you if you like it or not!

The amazing thing is that in so many cases it’s the workers saying to leaderships we want to take action while the leaderships try to talk workers out of it, quite rediclious. Of course there are exceptions, the Prison Officers Association (POA), Fire Brigade Union (FBU) and the RMT are three examples of good unions, and by the way seeing massive growth in membership while the Unite and Unison Dinosaurs leadership fading away, and if we’re not careful taking the movement with them!

Saturday Rally

The rally on Saturday evening was good. It included three trade union leaders. The head of the POA and member of the Socialist Party, Brian Caton. The General Secretary of the FBU, Matt Wrack.  Bob Crow, General secretary of the RMT. Peter Taaffe, General Secrtary of the Socialist Party as well as Irish Socialist Party Member of the European Parliament Joe Higgins spoke.

All very good, passaniate speaches, esspially from the trade union leaders. Which, is always good! Bob used the S word too! That being socialism, I believe for the first time! Also he seemed pretty sure that the Union and Left Party Collation that started with the No2EU Campaign (under a new name of course, thank god!!!) will be seeding candiates in the General Election next year!

In Defence of Trotsky

On Sunday morning I went to a talk on Trotsky by Peter Taaffe. This was a very interesting talk, the Russian Revolution is a partcilar interest for me. Robert Service, a British Historian on Russia at Oxford University recently brought out a book on the life of Trotsky. Which is hard to find a truthful line inside it! It is nothing more then an ideological attack. Totaly indefensible, which has been proven. He refuses to engage the Party in any sort of debate on the accuracy of his book, and recently when he found out General Secretary of the Socialist Party Peter Taaffe was going to be speaking at the same conference as him in Russia, Mr Service pulled out! Another example of how we as Socialists have the truth on our side. We maybe small but we do have that! Our opponents refuse to engage us in debate and rather use their power and resources to rubbish us instead. You can crush a man but you can’t crush an idea!

What now for the German Left

Ok, I probably shouldn’t say this but… by the time I got to this talk I was very tired as I hadnt slept much the night before, coupled with drinking much more then I thought I had… I really couldn’t take anything in from this talk, so errm, yeah. I’m sure it was good though …

Final Rally

Had woken up a bit by this time, some good speeches from mostly Union representives including Rob Williams, Janice Godrich President of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). John Denton, Regional Secretary of Communication Workers Union (CWU), London. Mark Smith from the Vestas Struggle. Sean Figg from Youth Fight for Job Campaign and finally Hannah Sell the General Secreary of the Socialist Party.

All good, I was esspially interested to hear what John Denton from the CWU had to say with the recent call off of strikes for the time being. He seemed to be saying that the managers of Royal Mail have learnt their lessons and expected major victories for the Union when they go to negotiate again. I’m a little concerned though if calling off the strikes was a good idea, even if it might just be for a short period. I think these strikes poteitally could have been as major as the Miners Strikes in the 80s. You had a work force who were willing to do whatever it took, if the CWU don’t win everything they demanded then I worry what this could mean in the future, but we will see, I guess!

All round fun weekend, looking forward to Socialism 2010!

Since the explosion of Napster in 1999, file sharing has rarely been out of the news. It is usually demonised, yet according to some estimates around 8 million people in the UK use file sharing networks.

History and Philosophy of the Internet
The Internet was developed in the 1960s by universities and the US military, it consists of networked computers exchanging information over large distances. One of the first uses of it was to send academic papers back and forth over networks for fast peer reviewing of research, so file sharing has always been a part of the Internet. In the 1980s when the home computer became popular, newsgroups became very popular. These forums for discussion were places where anyone could freely discuss and quickly and cheaply spread media quickly to anyone else in the world who was also connected to the Internet.

The Internet is based on Open Source technology, which is “software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification.”- Oxford Dictionary. This means the creators consent to remove the ‘all rights reserved’ that exists under current copyright law. The Internet has spread to almost every nation, across multiple languages and alphabets, can be accessed on PCs, Macs, phones, and TVs, and use a variety of different programming languages. Despite this, it is incredibly stable and works remarkably well. The software that manages the hardware and keeps it all ticking over was built by collaboration, for free, for the good of us all. This is undoubtedly a strong argument against the need for a profit incentive.

The 1990s saw a major commercialisation of the Internet, allowing capitalists to exploit and profit from a publicly-funded creation. Another example of the costs being socialised and the profits privatised! Since then, the Internet has become progressively less free and more closed.

Other Mass Media
When the printing press was invented it was seen as a heresy. Before this, information was scarce, and there were instances where books were actually chained to posts and guarded! The printing press allowed information to be produced and distributed far more quickly and cheaply than before. Eventually, as the technology developed, printing presses became more expensive, and so a democratic invention came to serve the rich and powerful.

The Internet is denigrated as the early printing press was, from scare stories about the security of email to attacking file sharers as stealing from artists. It is also a democratic medium that the rich and powerful would like to own and control.

Net Neutrality
One of the founding principles of the Internet was the concept of ‘net neutrality’. The internet is the ‘world wide web’ which, as the name suggests is like a spiders web, with lots of nodes (servers) connected to each other – a network. When we connect to the internet we are connected to everything else on a equal basis.

However, the capitalists are now seeking to rip up net neutrality and allow Internet Service Providers to restrict the flow to some servers and increase to others. For example, The Sun could pay BT to allow full access to its site and slow access to other sites down to a trickle, so no one would bother with the slow stuff and go to The Sun website instead. This hasn’t quite happened yet but many ISPs already restrict or totally block access to file sharing networks. Many ISPs also have their own media download services which they will allow unrestricted access to, while restricting other media access during peak times. Reflecting this trend and thinking, the head of Virgin Media recently stated that ‘net neutrality is a load of bollocks…’

History of File Sharing
1st generation file sharing networks consisted of finding a file on a server and downloading it, a long and tedious task. The 2nd generation, with the advent of Napster, allowed people to share a small part of their hard disk drive and then search everyone else’s shared drive for a file they want and then download it. The problem was that the indexing of who had what file was all done centrally on the Napster server, so the operation could easily be shut down by chopping off the head (the Napster server)! 3rd Generation networks were an improvement as they became decentralised so they couldn’t be shut down very easily by authorities. This had the unfortunate side effect of slowing down searches for media. The 4th Generation improved the speed of finding files.

5th Generation networks like BitTorrent greatly increase the speed of file sharing by allowing you to download one file from several servers at once. Files are spilt into thousands of fragments (packets) so you can download some packets from one server and some from another and it can put it all back together again when finished. So instead of relying on one server and its speed you can download from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of different users. The more everyone shares the more powerful the networks become, making it almost impossible to stop without draconian laws to disconnect users from the Internet, which Peter Mandelson recently proposed. As a recent study showed that access to the Internet is fast becoming as essential as any other utilities, this is quite a serious suggestion which can be seen as another New Labour attack on civil liberties.

Ethics of File Sharing
File Sharing opens up a world of limitless, fast, free digital media, not just to download but to create and share as well. It allows ‘mash ups’ in which the skill is to take as many different sounds from as many different genres of music and try to make something that sounds good. Mash up is a genre of music that flourishes on file sharing networks but is almost impossible without them because of intellectual property restrictions. File sharing also solves the problem of a lack of availability due to being sold out, not sold in shops, or deleted. Anything and (almost) everything can be found on a network, somewhere.

But what about the artist? Artists could be benefiting from these new media outlets, but the record labels prevent this. With a similar royalty system to radio (but far more fair and balanced because of the technology) a fee could be integrated into file sharers month internet access charge which would then be split amongst artists. People could use file sharing networks as now, and artists would make money. It seems so simple, so why doesn’t it happen? The record industry is why. Such a change would make them redundant. Anyone can upload an MP3 and allow the networks to organically spread the media, whereas distributing old media like CD in shops is a long and expensive process, but a process which can be used to make profits by exploiting artists and ripping off music fans. Music can be downloaded legally from iTunes and Amazon at the same cost of a CD, at lower quality, without the artwork and not on the file sharing networks. This is centrally controlled by the record labels and allows them to continue to exploit artists and rack up massive profits.

By downloading music from file sharing networks, you can help break the parasitical recording industry and help artists. In the current system if an artist isn’t able to sell half a million records they are working for a pittance. Deducted from even the tiny cut they get from the sale of their music are promotional and tour costs and the interest fees they have to pay on the studio advances they get to live on whilst recording records. As an additional insult, the record companies take the artists copyright from them and have total control over what the artist produces.

The capitalist media portrays this as an issue about whether file sharing is stealing or not. This is a distraction. The real issue is who controls the production and distribution of media. We, the people, or the large corporations like Sony, Apple and Universal. This is a fight about who controls the Internet, us or them. This is a battle that we must fight as in five years time the Internet could be like newspapers and television, dominated by a few large corporations, which would be a very sad thing indeed.

File sharing networks allow for people to easily and freely download an artist’s music, decide whether they like them, and if they do, spread the word to friends and strangers all over the world and then support the artist by going to see them live, which is how artists make their living. Comrades, download and share as much media as you can. We have nothing to lose but corporate control of music and the Internet!

On the whole I’m pretty happy with MobileNavigator, the only thing, I suppose, that annoys me a little is how it doesn’t take the full post code (bit like a zip code but more precise I think) which can be annoying if you don’t know the street you’re going to. But having said that it’s not really been an issue like I thought it would.

The interface is nice to use, it’s got a good database of services, restaurants, garages, pubs, shops, etc etc, and allows you to find the nearest one during a journey.

They have also recently provided a free update that gives us text to speech voice guidance, automatic day and night (not sure I understand the point of day and night modes though full stop…), integrated ipod control and the ability to send your location via email.

Overall I think it was a good purchase, nice to use, gets you from a to b and was cheaper then TomTom. I’ve not really used the TomTom much so I suppose not a totally fair review, friends who have it seem to like it. Don’t think the interface is as clear though I have to say!

ImmInst have their own team within this, which you can find out more about by clicking here

Wish someone would make me a cup of tea, I don't think it's going to happen however #

@myinfamy no sugar, sweet enough in reply to myinfamy #

ooooooo fun 39 minutes and I will have all the remastered Beatles albums…that's how long it'll take me to walk to the shops btw #

Powered by Twitter Tools

A short film by the LifeStar World Health Initiative, with some rather exciting ideas, will they come true? Who knows but I sure want to find out, don’t you!? If possible this stuff seems to important not to support as much as we can.

More info: www.lifestarinstitute.org

British scientists have developed a stem cell technique which is being used by patients to avoid hip replacements, in a major medical breakthrough.
A patient’s stem cells was used to rejuvenate his dead hip bone, using purified cells from bone marrow extracted from the back of his pelvis. Photo: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Doctors in Southampton are using the pioneering technique, where a patient’s damaged bones are repaired using their own stem cells.
Patients hailed the treatment, after many found they could walk normally again without any pain and without the need for hip replacement surgery.

Link

@Researchlight fair enough (assuming you're right), so you do have some logic, now apply that to nationalism in reply to Researchlight #

@myinfamy thanks in reply to myinfamy #

Powered by Twitter Tools

The best torrent site on the planet "filetype:torrent [insert what you want]" at google.com #

Hmm I wana watch 30 rock but i have watched them all, how sad #

just voted "Agnostic! " on "Show Us Twitter's Religious Diversity." vote too ? http://bit.ly/LIJ8G #

@myinfamy smokings bad for you in reply to myinfamy #

Powered by Twitter Tools