23rd Feb 2006: Trading Standards

Gervase Markham, the code licensing contact for the Mozilla project, has an interesting blog entry titled You can't just give it away!, linking to his The Times article... it seems that Trading Standards found someone selling Mozilla CDs, and when Gervase pointed out that it was fine by him, she replied "If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation"". It's a shame that Trading Standards don't understand copyright law, really.

5th Feb 2006: You Are Here

I'm just reading You Are Here ("An Updated Dossier") by Bremner, Bird and Fortune of Channel 4 fame. There are many great quotes from it, but here is one I particularly liked tonight (Pages 135,136):

One US Nimitz-class aircraft carrier costs US$21.3 billion. So, like for like, as a trade-in, for half an aircraft carrier you could have the top six axis of evil [ Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Syria ] countries' defence spending for an entire year.

The US had five carriers in the Gulf in 2003 - total cost US$106.5 billion. For the same money America could pay the annual defence budget for seventy-five countries the size of Iraq.

One US aircraft carrier has a fuel tank capacity of 3 million gallons and can travel one million miles without refuelling - that's fifty times around the world.... Fill it up at a BP garage using a normal pump and it would take you seven years

And where are you going to get all that fuel from anyway?

Or is that a silly question?

Was that a rhetorical question?