Over The Counter Culture

Getting a cutting edge Android smartphone for £85

bradley — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:28:18 +0000

I recently sold my old Nokia 5800 on eBay (netting £60) and thanks to an Orange (UK) Pay As You Go customer in my family, was able to get my hands on a brand new ZTE Blade (reviewed here), which Orange sells as the San Francisco for just £85, contract-free, and covered by warranty (which had expired on the old Nokia). In itself, that’s a huge upgrade for hardly any money, but I had no intention of being stuck with Orange, so this post is designed to walk you through getting the deal, liberating the phone from Orange’s clutches, and then really improving the featureset, freedom and reliability of the phone by flashing it (with a new ‘ROM’) to the latest Android version.

1. Getting the offer

You simply get an existing Orange PAYG customer to call up (150 or 0800 079 2000) and say they want the PAYG San Francisco deal. Orange will send the phone and a SIM with £10 (I’ll be using my existing contract on 3UK with the phone; the Orange £10 will be used for Orange Wednesdays 2for1 film or pizza promotions).

—

2. Unlocking the phone so you can use it on any network

The next step is to unlock it. You can do this for free and easily on the ZTE Blade, thankfully. Just head to http://arrtoo.x10.mx/unlockBlade.php , enter your IMEI (which you can get by turning the phone on, ignoring as much of the messages as possible, getting to the dialer, and dialing *#06#) and input the unlocking code when asked for it (after turning your phone off, inserting a SIM from a non-Orange provider, and turning it on again); you’ll get prompted for the code given out at the link above.

—

3. Flashing the ROM to update the phone

Once unlocked, it’s time to get rid of the Orange pre-loaded crap and update the phone to the very cutting edge. Orange sells these phones with Android 2.1 or 2.2. You can get it to 2.3.4 (plus a few additional fixes) through any number of the tutorials here: http://android.modaco.com/category/453/zte-blade-blade-modaco-com/ ; usual caveats apply: you’re not doing a standard operation, there’s a risk you’ll brick it, void your warranty, etc. Follow any instructions to the letter, read around the topic before you launch into it without understanding what each step does, and search for people asking the same questions you have, either on Google on in the Modaco forums linked to above. And back things up from your old phone, obviously; save your numbers somewhere safe, and save them to your SIM card so you easily move them over to your new phone.

Here’s what I recommend doing:

- determine whether the phone you were supplied with is ‘Gen 1′ or ‘Gen 2′ by installing a tiny app called Mr Pigfish: http://www.appbrain.com/app/ask-mr-pigfish/com.apedroid.pigfish

—

- if Gen 1, then download this (or another ROM; newer alternatives come up all the time, you just have to read around the Modaco forums linked to above): http://hotfile.com/dl/124709138/1d6efab/gsf-blade-b15-tpt.zip.html; place it on the SD Card (if you downloaded the file to a computer, not to the phone, then move it over by USB or Bluetooth). This is an all-in-one image for first converting your phone to Gen 2, and then flashing it up to Android 2.3.4. Here are the install instructions courtesy of the maker:

“To install: Unzip the file to the root of your SD card, it will create an ‘image’ folder. Check the integrity of the files you created using AFV (available from android market) to find the nandroid.md5 file in the image directory, then long press on it & verify nandroid backup. Turn off your phone, leave it for at least 30 seconds, then hold menu & volume (up) when you power it on. You should see some green text (may be just a blank screen) then it should reboot & you should see a big android while it is performing it’s first boot (this will take a while). Once it has successfully started up don’t forget to delete the image folder on your SD card, to prevent any accidents.”

—

- if Gen 2, then this is the file to download: http://www.filesonic.com/file/1500072091/gsf-blade-b15.zip (or another ROM; newer alternatives come up all the time, you just have to read around the Modaco forums linked to above); this file will be installed through a clever program called ClockworkMod: this can be launched before your phone boots up into the normal phone mode, for doing things like backing up, flashing new ROMs, etc.

The best instructions I’ve seen for installing ClockworkMod and then flashing the file you just downloaded onto the phone, are the instructions here: http://android.modaco.com/content/zte-blade-roms-rom-customisation/329864/22-may-guide-how-to-install-a-custom-rom-on-the-zte-blade-gen1/ - you should read it all, but the instructions you’ll need are in subsections 1 and 2. Section 2 refers to an out of date ROM file; where it says “r12-update-modacocustomrom-blade-kitchen-unsigned.zip” you should instead read “gsf-blade-b9.zip”; and where it says “cb1718841318a63775b020e6c544edfa” you should instead look for an MD5Sum reading of “174ba19a85ec96258727d12177befa66″.

—

And there you have it. A cutting edge, high performance phone, covered by warranty, nicely unrestricted, and it’ll cost you about £85, minus whatever you sell your old phone for.

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Vast EU research grant fraud uncovered, millions lost

bradley — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:00:48 +0000

I’m surprised I didn’t catch this in the mainstream press

Stifling bureaucracy is often blamed for discouraging scientists and businesses from participating in the research programmes of the European Commission (EC). But the commission’s notoriously cumbersome procedures and rigid control mechanisms have apparently not prevented a criminal syndicate from conducting a brazen fraud that has siphoned off millions in EC grant funds.

Italian authorities and the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) in Brussels, Belgium, have confirmed that they are prosecuting members of a large network accused of pocketing more than €50 million (US$72 million) in EC grants for fake research projects.

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Stewart Brand, on viruses and the scale of things

bradley — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:29:06 +0000

“Everything about viruses is extreme,” Zimmer began. The number of viruses
on Earth is estimated to be 1 followed by 31 zeroes. Small as they are, if
you stacked them all up, the stack would reach 100 million light years. They
are the planet’s most abundant organism by far.

They’re fast. We take decades to reproduce. A flu virus can generate
billions of itself in us within hours. And they evolve
10,000 times faster than us, because they’re creatively sloppy about making
copies of their genomes, and they readily combine genes among varieties when
jointly infecting a cell. Each of us has four trillion viruses on board, in
1,500 all-too-fungible varieties.

Yet they can also be “time stealthy.” You may have a bout of childhood
chickenpox that is over in days, but the viruses may hide in your nervous
system and emerge decades later as shingles. HIV spreads inexorably because
of the lag of months or years between infection and visible symptoms.

The earliest record of a virus in human history is the smallpox marks you
can see on the mummified face of Ramses V, who died in 1145 BCE.
Viruses leave no fossils, but in a sense they ARE fossils, with the ancient
gene sequences of retroviruses buried in the genomes of every creature
they’ve infected over the ages. About 8 percent of our genome—some
100,000 elements—comes from viruses, and some of those genes now work for
us (enabling the mammalian placenta, for instance). One French scientist
revived from our genome a functioning 2-million-year-extinct virus just by
deducing the original code from the current variety in that stretch of DNA.

For billions of years the planet’s life consisted solely of bacteria and
their viruses, the bacteriophages. They became a planet force, and remain
so today, determining the makeup of the atmosphere, among other things. Every
day half of all the bacteria in the oceans are killed by phages. Some of
the carbon from the bodies sinks to the bottom, some is freed up to
fertilize other life. Ocean viruses cart around and transmit genes for
photosynthesis to previously incapable
microbes—10 percent of oceanic photosynthesis happens that way. If some
day we have to geoengineer the atmosphere to manage climate change, we may
want to employ the viruses that are already doing it.

Virology will be revolutionizing science for decades to come. One body of
investigation suggests that the so-called giant viruses may be a whole
fourth domain of life (added to bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). As the
ultimate parasite, viruses were assumed to come along after life evolved,
but they might an instrument of that evolution. One hypothesis is that
viruses took primordial RNA and generated DNA to better protect the
genes. They might have created life as we know it, a long time ago.

–Stewart Brand

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UK government amends data protection and cookies law

bradley — Mon, 09 May 2011 07:49:35 +0000

The heel dragging is over: just three weeks before the legal deadline for the incorporation of EU changes to online tracking and data protection laws (set out in Directive2009/136/EC) expired, the UK government has finally implemented those changes (too little, too late?). There will be a total of three Statutory Instrument delivering the amendments*; the main one, published very recently, is The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 No. 1208) is here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1208/made

What key changes does it make?

Personal data breaches will now have to be notified to the Information Commissioner;
Stronger enforcement provisions; and
Consumers will now have to give their consent for the import of cookies on to their machines

Beyond more obvious data protection provisions, like the definition of a ‘personal data breach’ (and according duty to notify the Information Commissioner and the victim – backed by a £1,000 fine, reduced to £800 if paid within 21 days), they also force service providers to take proportionate measures to protect personal data stored or transmitted against accidental or unlawful destruction, accidental loss or alteration. If your webmail was deleted, for example, this may give rise to a breach of statutory duty by the service provider. It does away with allowance for implied consents largely throughout communications law insofar as it relates to businesses using user data or monitoring user usage of services (express consent is now king).

Regulation 10 makes provision to allow police and the security services to have access to personal data of users of public electronic communications networks and services. It also makes provision to compel service providers to establish and maintain procedures to allow access to that data.

Fines for noncompliance with the regulations are now considerably more severe, as they now reflect Data Protection Act fines (of up to £500,000 for grave breaches).

* The three implementing statutory instruments to look out for are:

The Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Amendment) Order 2011;
The Electronic Communications and Wireless Telegraphy Regulations 2011; and
The Communications Act 2003 (Maximum Penalty for Contravention of Information Requirements) Order 2011

NB: Be aware that, rather unhelpfully, the UK’s main store of legislation (legislation.gov.uk) does not update the text of secondary legislation (such as these Regulations) when they get amended, so it’s unlikely that when browsing the official register of such laws, you’re actually getting an accurate picture of the law. Just saying.

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How the UK Minister for Culture & Media justifies web censorship

bradley — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:47:19 +0000

A paragraph taken from a letter written by (or on behalf of) the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, to a Member of the UK Parliament, who had expressed their voters’ concerns over the government’s moves to encourage ISPs to block websites aimed ‘primarily’ at copyright infringement:

“Many users of infringing sites may be unaware that the sites they are viewing carry content unlawfully, and they may find it useful for such unlawful sites to be less readily available.”

Just… wow. Orwell would be proud of such a literary creation. I thought previous New Labour governments were Big Nanny, but this is just absurd. A website owner does not have full rights to the words on the website. Please, Mr ISP, take an active and detailed concern in what websites I visit, and save me from the commercial horror!

Full letter available from its eventual recipient, Matthew Temple (http://www.mattytemple.com/)

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Giving new life to damaged patented items is infringement!

bradley — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:25:55 +0000

Commentary on the recent case of Schutz (UK) Ltd v Werit UK Ltd [2011] EWCA Civ 303, which held that replacing a tired (unpatented) component out of a patented item constituted patent infringement (making a patented item without a licence from the patent-holder). The anti-competitive aspect of the ruling was considered and dismissed as unimportant to the Court. The implications for repurposing the items we own – especially as the age of 3D printing is soon upon us – is considered by way of conclusion.

Wowzers. Patent law has just given common sense, competition, and sound principles of living a serious left hook. Lord Justice Jacob, who retired earlier this month, has left England & Wales with a stinker. To be fair to Jacob LJ, his fellow judges on the Court of Appeal bench nodded his decision through. And they were applying, as judges should, the law (through precedent cases, specifically, United Wire and Canon v Green Cartridges [1]).

Patent law prevents you from making something that is patented, unless you have the patent-owner’s permission.

This case was about what ‘making’ means. Specifically: if, without seeking permission from the patentholder, you replace bits of something you have already bought, are you making a new object? If yes, you are potentially infringing their patents, having made an unlicensed manifestation of their invention.

The invention in question is a metal cage with a plastic bottle inside. There’s a photo in the judgement. The cage is estimated to last five times as long as the bottle, so once the plastic perishes or is contaminated, you’re going to replace the bottle rather than throw the whole thing out to buy a new one. Reconditioning is as straightforward as putting new plastic bottles in, and scrapping or recycling the old ones. In this industry’s lingo, replacing the plastic bottle from the cage manufacturer (who is the rightsholder to the patent) is “re-bottling”, whilst doing it from a third party is “cross-bottling”.

The straightforward competition between cross-bottlers and re-bottlers drives the cost of repurposing these containers down for businesses in England & Wales. What do businesses do when they don’t want to engage in tiring and potentially expensive free-market competition with others, striving to be the most value for money provider on the market? They turn to intellectual property (or they engage in directly anti-competitive practices, or lobby governments into building regulatory moats around their commercial castle). Holding a patent (a state-granted monopoly) on bottles in metal cages of this design, they sued.

The verdict? Infringement.

And yet Jacob LJ recognised the result of this verdict:

“78. (…) (it) was obviously a concern of the Judge in the present case – that if there was infringement Schütz would, as a commercial matter, have a monopoly in unpatented replacement bottles for their cages.

79. This essentially economic concern is not really an apt matter for patent law. (…)

80. Does it really matter if Schütz has a monopoly in replacing bottles for its cages? One cannot really say whether there is any public interest in the nature of freedom of competition seriously involved. (…)”

Sadly, the Court of Appeal decided to ignore what this leads to, what the parties called the ‘re-stringing problem’. If a tennis racket is patented, does re-stringing it infringe the patent? Or even more absurdly, do I infringe a patent on a photocopier if I re-fill it with Asda-brand paper?

The Court also ignored German law’s approach to the problem, specifically, “whether ultimate consumers of the patentee’s product could, by replacing parts, prolong the life of the product. The German approach is clearly not the same as here”.

Come on. This is the dawn of the 3D printing age: easy reconditioning of everyday items we have spent our hard-earned money on, or bought second-hand, will soon be within our grasp. We also have an ailing manufacturing sector that the efficient and competitive Germans can laugh at. It is simply not acceptable now that neither our courts nor Parliament roll up their sleeves and clip back the barbs of intellectual monopoly to within common sense, economic, environmentally friendly or competitive bounds!

For consideration of the IP implications of 3D printing, see this post over at Technollama.

[1] United Wire v Screen Repair Services [2001] RPC 24; Canon v Green Cartridge [1997] AC 728

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Using viruses to deliver upgrades to your brain

bradley — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:06:09 +0000

The use of viruses to deliver beneficial genes to upgrade your brain is very much a reality: check out this article from Nature this week:

read here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110317/full/news.2011.167.html

Last week saw the news that it is now possible to create superblood by taking it out of the body and using very clever, targeted gene therapy to upgrade the DNA. It’s currently being trialled in AIDS patients, making a subtle mutation to their white blood cells so that they’re more like the HIV-immune cells of so-called HIV controllers – people that can resist HIV attacks because of different ‘flags’ on their cells. Once upgraded, you infuse the blood cells back into the patients where they can start taking on HIV with newfound immunity.

read here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110301/full/471016a.html

The usage is therapeutic so far, but each year sees new approaches to blood doping in the Tour de France. How long until this becomes one? How long until someone creates a safe virus capable of boosting your brain functions, and sells it on the Internet? What happens when not just your organs are modified, but also the DNA capable of being passed on to your children (“germ line” modification) – would you leave them with a trust fund, or spend the money permanently making your progeny handsome geniuses?

So humans can now be patched and bugfixed. How long until we have open-source humans? Jokingly, the time is apparently already upon us – a user of popular software source code sharing, review and editing site GitHub uploaded his genome for ‘patching’. We don’t yet have widespread technology to implement the patches that are being written and suggested, but as gene therapy progresses and gets commercialised (and maybe even amateurised), we one day doubtless will.

What a bizarre feeling it must be, knowing that the open-source crowd can pore over the very blueprints to you and start imagining and coding “You, version 2.0“…

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Hargreaves Reform

bradley — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:49:28 +0000

(I’m posting what should be a comment on this blogpost by @legalbrat (Tim Bratton, legal in-house at the Financial Times) but for some reason won’t go through). Tim knows his stuff and bats hard and well for his employers, but has a fair and intelligent approach to digital content issues. It’s well worth reading his blog and following him on Twitter.

On this issue, we disagree.

—-

Tim – I feel this misses Google’s point almost entirely. How does cheaper dispute resolution help a business that argues that it the reason it could build a billion-dollar business based on creating value for users is that the US doesn’t grant as far-reaching intellectual monopolies as the UK does. It thrives, and employs tens of thousands of people, without relying so heavily on monopoly-backed scarcity, whereas the harder our industries try to do so (no videos on YouTube, unfair, draconian DRM, paywalls, even rootkits), the harder the market has punished them.

I’ll return to this, but I feel it’s only fair to address your suggestion more head-on, first.

If ADR is the solution, we already (post Woolf reforms) have CPR costs biases in favour of parties that want to pursue cheaper alternatives to lawsuits (see this important bit of our litigation rules, the Civil Procedure Rules’ Pre-Action Protocol). So far as I know, this includes copyright, so what can be added? Why is it not working (if indeed it isn’t?)

Would a singular ADR mechanism be better than the free choice of ADR given to parties at the moment? I don’t think it will.

The copyright industries have so far proven themselves to be tremendously capable and ardent lobbyists. A single ADR ‘choke point’ is a wonderful opportunity for focused and (cost-) effective lobbying – especially when, as you suggested, it should be staffed by industry practitioners (and where are the representatives of institutions, academics and other noncommercial/non-market users?). This allows the straightforward corrupting influence of the ‘revolving door’ effect into an ADR process, whereas other ADR is usually overseen by barristers or off-duty judges. I can’t help but allege that other forms of corruption would also find purchase in this suggested system, all the more so because (presumably) the RCP would be protected from legal liability from its decisions, so systematic misrepresentations of the law would go unpunished.

–

Now, to return to the part about the UK’s overstrong copyright system. As I said, Google built a billion-dollar, 20,000-staff-strong business because it wasn’t overly restricted by intellectual monopoly. So pointing them to ADR doesn’t really help, when it says that such monopolies / IP rights are too strong in the UK.

But what ADR suggestions also totally, totally miss is the fact that the once-professional copyright arena is now swamped with millions upon millions of non-market participants. The digital era has made everyone with an email account or an iPhone a publisher. Copyright law *has* to evolve to match the revolution in who it binds. And only block exemption and DRM, not ADR, can meet that need.

I am not going to pay hundreds of pounds to ask a Pearson-staffed panel whether I can send my mum one paragraph or two of an FT article that talks about me. WhatDoTheyKnow is not a business – so it has no business model into which in can fit/attenuate the cost of ADR when a council relies on copyright to prevent WDTK from publishing/publicising FOI returns.

There is no conceivable way in which non-market copyright actors can stomach the cost of either ADR or full-on litigation. Either nonmarket uses are granted appropriate block exemption, or they must be asked to remove themselves from the copyright arena – hand in any device capable of copying text, images, sound or video (or have it taken from you after three strikes).

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NSFW: Oklahoma judge used penis pump during trials

bradley — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 10:35:47 +0000

This is brilliant. Here’s the introductory section of a 9-page Attorney General’s complaint filed against an Oklahoma judge, seeking his sacking for using a penis pump, and shaving and putting lotion on his ding-a-ling, in court.

The whole complaint will leave your jaw on the floor, but the casual use of the English language by the AG who asked for the Judge to be punished will make you wince when you read what sanction he demands:

(read the whole complaint)

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Genetically engineering human tissues enters clinical age

bradley — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:30:59 +0000

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110301/full/471016a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20110303

Here we go, people: medicine based on targeted genetic engineering human tissues is henceforth a reality.

In Phase I (early stage) medical trials, the blood of HIV sufferers was taken out, genetically engineered to make it more resistant to the virus, before pumping the super-blood back into the sufferers’ body.

Thanks to genome sequencing of those lucky few humans that are naturally resistant to HIV, we know that the virus relies on the sufferer having white blood cells that have the CCR5 ‘handle’ on their cell surface to pull itself in, copy itself, and kill the white blood cell (and repeat, ad mortem). So the blood, once extracted, had its CD4+ T cells isolated and their DNA modified by a special “zinc finger” protein capable of targeted gene editing.

We’re not talking about directly engineering adult humans (like Peter Parker’s genetic transformation into Spiderman after the mythical bite) – yet – because such a challenge is ethically very difficult, makes cancer more likely, and is technologically very hard to achieve.

Still – it presumably won’t be too long until this sort of blood engineering becomes the latest Tour De France blood doping scandal.

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Bastiat, the BSA, and the Sun

bradley — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 14:03:47 +0000

There’s very simple but well-delivered blog post by Rob Weir doing the rounds at the moment that counterattacks a recent position adopted by the BSA (Business Software Alliance – a lobby for traditional software providers).

The UK Cabinet Office (a core unit of the government here) declared that it was in everyone’s interests if royalty-free, open technology standards were adopted (encouraging, as they do, interoperability and ease of migration between competing providers, without having to pay royalties just to use certain file formats).

The BSA lobby insists: by preferring technologies “publicly available at zero or low cost” and that have “intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis” (the UK Cabinet Office’s words), the BSA claims that the government “will inadvertently reduce choice, hinder innovation and increase the costs of e-government”. Such courage and brazen ballsiness is rare today, so the BSA’s lack of sanity can only be saluted. They clearly are bold explorers of alternate realities, pioneering a potent melange of absurdity and conviction.

So, back to the blogpost. Luddismm and monopoly are actually pretty old-school. The post revives a clever, ironic piece by Bastiat that reaches through the ages to elegantly skewer the BSA. It dates back from 1845, 5 years before his death. It is an open letter to the French Parliament entitled A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

Plus ca change…

To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

Be good enough, honourable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate. Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle behind all your policy.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, “Yes,” you reply, “but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.” Very well, surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

“But,” you may still say, “the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.” Very well, If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are better founded than anyone else’s would be tantamount to accepting the equation: + x + = -; in other words, it would be to heapabsurdity upon absurdity.

Labour and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labour that constitutes value and is paid for.

If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at half price as compared with those from Paris.

Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: “How can French labour withstand the competition of foreign labour when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?” But if the fact that a product is half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

To take another example: When a product — coal, iron, wheat, or textiles — comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labour than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is agratuitous gift that is conferred up on us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!

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On: riots and distributed denial of service attacks

bradley — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:27:36 +0000

The man who, because of a lack of external enemies and opposition, was forced into an oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom impatiently tore himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed away at himself, grew upset, and did himself damage—this animal which scraped itself raw against the bars of its cage, which people want to “tame,” this impoverished creature, consumed with longing for the wild, which had to create out of its own self an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness—this fool, this yearning and puzzled prisoner, became the inventor of “bad conscience.”

-Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting

Is the recent UK violence engaged in as resistance to an oppressive state (oppressing by cutting welfare, charging more for access to university education, etc) – or are they in fact resistance to a vacuum within society itself? I ask whether they fight to ward off the predictions of Orwell, or Huxley.

The riots don’t make sense to me if it’s the former. I say this because it seems to be to be clear that the modern state absorbs mass protest pretty effortlessly. At least, no possible purpose beyond sussing out tactics of police states, and how to get messages into the media. In other words training in preparation for future war against an Orwellian state). And I don’t think these protests have reached that level of sophistication.

But if it’s about discovering and asserting an identity, discovering energy and violence and comradeship, turning cobblestones into missiles and in so doing, seeing the soil below – i.e. touching wilderness in a world which society and distraction have banished it – well then it makes more sense to me. In that light, rioting then has immediate dividends, in that it draws the mind out of numbness, and long term dividends, in that it is forging a liberal or socialist head of steam within society that will be a force in future politics.

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Johnny Cash cover

Lastly: I suppose the same question can be asked of the cyber-activist movement, Anonymous – possibly reaching a different answer.

See also: Bad Conscience: Reflections on a Riot

Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts I have only offered limited comment on the PBS documentary...

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