Thursday, 14 January 2010
RePost: Girlz With Gunz (This post will be illegal under Australian's Clean Feed Filter)
The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.
You will not be able to Opt-Out of this filter, as was previously claimed.
Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home.
What do we know so far?
* Filtering will be mandatory in all homes and schools across the country.
* The clean feed will censor material that is "harmful and inappropriate" for children.
*All "fetish" pornography will be blocked.
*All games intended for people over the age of 18 will be blocked.
* The filter will require a massive expansion of the ACMA's blacklist of prohibited content.
* The Government wants to use dynamic filters of questionable accuracy that slow the internet down by an average of 30%.
* The filtering will target legal as well as illegal material.
* $44m has been budgeted for the implementation of this scheme so far.
* The clean-feed for children will be opt-out, but a second filter will be mandatory for all Internet users.
* A live pilot deployment is going ahead in the near future.
HERE
You will not be able to Opt-Out of this filter, as was previously claimed.
Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home.
What do we know so far?
* Filtering will be mandatory in all homes and schools across the country.
* The clean feed will censor material that is "harmful and inappropriate" for children.
*All "fetish" pornography will be blocked.
*All games intended for people over the age of 18 will be blocked.
* The filter will require a massive expansion of the ACMA's blacklist of prohibited content.
* The Government wants to use dynamic filters of questionable accuracy that slow the internet down by an average of 30%.
* The filtering will target legal as well as illegal material.
* $44m has been budgeted for the implementation of this scheme so far.
* The clean-feed for children will be opt-out, but a second filter will be mandatory for all Internet users.
* A live pilot deployment is going ahead in the near future.
HERE
Haiti quake survivors spend second night in streets
Thousands of Haitians are spending a second night in the open after the country's catastrophic earthquake which may have killed tens of thousands.
Medical aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres reported a "massive influx" of casualties at its makeshift clinics, many of them with severe injuries. The search for survivors under the rubble went on after darkness.
Substantial foreign aid for the three million people said to be in need is due to begin arriving within hours.
The first US aid planes have already landed at the airport serving the capital, Port-au-Prince, and US naval ships are on the way.
 | EYEWITNESS  Matthew Price, BBC News, Haiti Twenty-four hours after the earthquake, and we flew into Port-au-Prince. Just along the tarmac we found some aid trickling in. The airport buildings here have been damaged but not, it seems, the runway. Many of those who can, are leaving. Millions, though, are left behind in a country that can barely function, even without a disaster. The leadership here says 100,000 have been killed. Many of the UN peacekeepers stationed here are also among the dead. This country - so often forgotten by the world - now needs its help more than ever. |
UN peacekeepers, who played a key role in maintaining public order in Haiti even before the quake, have been deployed to control any outbreaks of unrest as reports come in of looting.
The BBC's Andy Gallacher in Port-au-Prince says the situation in the capital is increasingly desperate with no sense of a coordinated rescue effort, scant medical supplies and aid only trickling in.
With many of Haiti's communication lines down, Haitians living abroad have been battling to get through to relatives.
In the main Haitian community in the US, Miami's Little Haiti, people have been meeting to pray and to raise money for relief efforts.
Sleeping among the dead
The 7.0-magnitude quake, Haiti's worst in two centuries, struck at 1653 local time (2153 GMT) on Tuesday, just 15km (10 miles) south-west of Port-au-Prince and close to the surface.
 The luckier survivors have been treated by UN and MSF medics |
BBC correspondents in Port-au-Prince say the night is punctuated with the sounds of people crying and praying.
They have described people sleeping among dead bodies in the grounds of one hospital, and say many streets are lined with corpses covered with white blankets.
Efforts to rescue survivors trapped in rubble have been hampered by the lack of heavy lifting equipment and much of the work is being done by individuals with simple tools or their hands.
Patients with "severe traumas, head wounds, crushed limbs" have been streaming into MSF's temporary structures but the agency is only able to offer them basic medical care, spokesman Paul McPhun told reporters in Toronto.
One of MSF's emergency medical facilities collapsed during the quake while the other two were so badly damaged they became unusable, he said.
At least 1,000 people have sought help at three temporary MSF sites, including some 50 people who were treated for burns caused by domestic gas containers exploding in collapsing buildings.
Hans van Dillen, an MSF worker in Port-au-Prince, reported that there were "hundreds of thousands of people who are sleeping in the streets because they are homeless".
"We see open fractures, head injuries," he said on MSF's website. "The problem is that we cannot forward people to proper surgery at this stage."
The aid agency, which is concerned about the welfare of many of its 800 local employees and their families, said it was dispatching 70 more international aid workers to Haiti to bolster its team.
C'mon everybody: How Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent changed British music for ever
In terms of popular culture, many commentators start the Swinging Sixties with the Beatles in 1963, but the Sixties started swinging in January 1960 itself with the UK's first rock'n'roll package tour featuring the American stars, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Judging by reports in regional newspapers by inappropriate theatre reviewers, the tour was a Grade A disaster, but of course it wasn't. The audiences loved the shows and more importantly, fledgling British musicians watched closely and determined that this was the way forward. Considering there are now films about relatively unimportant moments in rock history, it is inexplicable that there has not been a film about Cochran and Vincent, especially when the story is so colourful.
In 1956, the impresario Larry Parnes had catapulted Tommy Steele to stardom as Britain's answer to Elvis Presley. Steele played along for a while, but he was not threatening enough to be a Presley and his records made with London jazzmen lacked Presley's commitment. As Steele developed into a family entertainer, Parnes tried again with Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, who were more committed to the new music.
The managers of the American rock'n'roll stars had been reluctant to send their charges to the UK as there was more money to be made in the US. Bill Haley had passed his peak when he visited in 1957; and although Buddy Holly toured with success in March 1958, the rest of the bill was end-of-the pier variety. Lew and Leslie Grade promoted Haley and Holly but they came unstuck in May 1958 when a Jerry Lee Lewis tour was cancelled after he revealed the age of his wife.
There never was a sweet Gene Vincent. In 1956, when he was 21, the curly-haired boy from Norfolk, Virginia had stormed to success with "Be-Bop-A-Lula", but his unpredictable behaviour alienated him from his band, the Blue Caps, who complained to the union. By the autumn of 1959, he was banned from many States and reduced to playing small-time dance halls with pick-up bands. His new manager, Norm Riley, thought European dates were the answer as nobody would know of his problems. The TV producer, Jack Good booked him for ITV's Boy Meets Girl and arranged a guest appearance at Tooting Granada on Marty Wilde's stage show.
Gene was super-polite, saying "sir" and "ma'am" to everyone, and performed very well. Parnes set up some tour dates with Wee Willie Harris in January, while Good worked on his image. He loathed Vincent's vivid green suit with "GV" on the pocket, but loved the intense way he would gaze into the distance while he sang his songs. "Gene wore a leg iron," he recalls, "so he hobbled a bit. I was a Shakespeare fan, so hobbling to me meant Richard III. I even thought of giving him a hunchback, and I'm glad I didn't! Then I thought, 'He can also be moody like Hamlet', so we'll dress him in black from head to toe and put a medallion round his neck."...
Continue reading
James Cameron rejects claims Avatar epic borrows from Russians' sci-fi novels
It has grossed more than $1.3bn (£800m) worldwide, wowed the critics, and spawned a new generation of fans, the so-called Avatards, who have taken to painting their faces blue.
But the film director James Cameron was facing claims today that his 3D blockbuster Avatar owes an unacknowledged debt to the popular Soviet fantasy writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Cinema audiences in Russia have been quick to point out that Avatar has elements in common with The World of Noon, or Noon Universe, a cycle of 10 bestselling science fiction novels written by the Strugatskys in the mid-1960s.
It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora – the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.
And while there are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids – the Na'vi in Cameron's epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys' novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.
Arkady Strugatsky died in 1991. Last week Boris, the surviving brother, said he had not yet seen Avatar, which – only four weekends after its release – has become the second-highest grossing film after Cameron's Titanic.
Strugatsky, 76, appears to have shrugged off suggestions of similarities between Avatar and his Noon Universe, and denied reports circulated last week that he was accusing Cameron of plagiarism. On Monday, however, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper devoted an entire page to the affair, and carried out its own close comparison of Avatar with the World of Noon.
Both Pandoras were "warm and humid", and densely covered in trees, the paper remarked. It conceded that in the Strugatsky books two humanoid species live on Pandora, a health resort. In Avatar there is only one species.
Writing on Monday in Russia's leading liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the author and journalist Dmitry Bykov pointed out there were a lot of similarities. St Petersburg's communists, meanwhile, have condemned Avatar as a gung-ho rip-off of Soviet science fiction.
"The Na'vi are unequivocally reminiscent of the [Strugatskys'] Nave,' Bykov wrote. Speaking to the Guardian, though, Bykov said: "My point is that the film is harmful for western civilisation."
Cameron has defended himself from accusations that he has borrowed from other writers in the past, a claim made after the release of his Terminator films and Titanic. He insists the idea for Avatar is an original one. He wrote an 80-page screenplay for the film back in 1994.
Today one film critic said there would inevitably be similarities between Avatar and the Strugatskys' intellectually demanding novels as both were anti-utopian fantasies. The brothers' work sold millions of copies, with many reading their intricate fantasies as a thinly disguised satire on the KGB communist system.
"Avatar is a great technological leap forward. It's a very clever, multi-layered film, and politically highly relevant," a film critic, Yuri Gladilshikov, said. "It depicts the fate of indigenous minorities in countries such as Peru or Venezuela. And there are associations with Vietnam and the war in the jungle."
Asked about the Noon Universe cycle, he said: "In any genre you can find plenty of parallels. Of course there are similarities between the Strugatskys and Cameron. But I think in this case the parallels are marginal."
The Strugatskys' science fiction has inspired several high-profile movies – notably Andrei Tarkovsky's 1977 Stalker, loosely based on the brothers' novel Roadside Picnic. Another Strugastky work, The Inhabited Island – in which a 22nd-century space pilot crashes on an unknown planet, was made into a two-part film in 2008.
There was no comment today from 20th Century Fox, the UK distributors...
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