the fourth place

I have decided that on my 27th birthday, Saturday May 13th 2007 I will be sitting on a rock overlooking Machu Pichu. I will have walked there via the Inca Trail or Santa Teresa trail. I intend to take upto a month and do some other walks as well and see a bit of Peru.

It crossed my mind to do it in September this year but I'm just not that rich, or good at planning. Nor frankly have I read the guidebook yet, or any other material, and all that could take 2 months by itself before I'm happy.

The other reason to put it off is fitness. At the gym tonight I felt good, but I want to be properly fit for this. The final nail was that I want to do some practice walks in this country to break in a proper set of boots and I just don't have enough weekends with other commitments.

Shame, but it's going to be great when I do get there.

taking in Peru.

Some scientists put some pictures of eyes on the wall in an office.

Frankly we were staggered by the size
of the effect

Gilbert Roberts

It would be interesting to study the effect of such pictures on the transport system.

WIPO is the international organisation responsible for the determination of intellectual property issues. When you read the quote bellow understand two things:

1. Intellectual property is a trade off between the economic interests of creative people and the culture which they serve.
2. "Floor papers" in WIPO are distributed from a specific desk and form the written notes that accompany oral presentations.

Both yesterday and again today, written statements provided by IP Justice and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which were placed on the table designated for floor papers, were stolen within minutes of being deposited on the table. Additionally yesterday documents provided by the Union for the Public Domain were also missing shortly after being placed on the table.

This morning, many of these documents were recovered from the trash can in the first floor men's restroom. Another set of IP Justice statements as well as copies of the alternative NGO Proposal for a Broadcasting Treaty were recovered from behind a desk on the ground floor. These documents provided by IP Justice, EFF, and the Union for the Public Domain were critical of the Broadcasting Treaty. [...]

we have placed a representative from civil society near the table for floor papers to "guard" these written statements. But clearly this in not an acceptable situation for NGOs or WIPO. We request that you take adequate and effective measures to protect the materials placed on the floor paper table, regardless of the views expressed in those statements.

The photocopying of documents for civil society groups at WIPO meetings has recently been banned.

The name on the screen was Matt Phillips, who Google reveals to be a BPI spokesman. Young chap, black hair. Apparently the BPI aren't going to sue you for copying your own CDs onto your own iPod. Nice of them to say that.

Shame its still, as far as I can tell, illegal to do this in the UK. As somebody pointed out, the BPI are not the people who get to decide whether to sue. Copyright holders do that.

Sky News are worried that an Islamic state might be created in Government-free Somalia.

"Until we get the Islamic state, we will continue with the Islamic struggle in Somalia," Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, chairman of Mogadishu Islamic courts, told a rally of hundreds.

Meanwhile the BBC think the nice militants are just adorable:

The Union of Islamic Courts does not want to impose a Taleban-style Islamic state in Somalia, says their leader.

Sharif Shaikh Ahmed told the BBC they had no political aims beyond enabling the people to decide their own future.

Are the aims of creating an Islamic state and letting the people decide what they want compatible? I guess that depends on the people who get to decide and the reasonableness of those facilitating that decision.

The quote is covered in over 800 places including Associated Press and Reuters reports. I can't find the quote on the BBC website anywhere, which I think is wrong. If the quote is disputed they should report that dispute.

I'm sure there is a lot of rot spoken about Sharia Law but the posibility of another Taliban worries me. Those guys had rules for everything and many of them were downright wrong.

Meanwhile, it seems the Islamic Courts have proven the Anarchists point of view that there need not be a state monopoly on the execution of justice to produce justice. You may not be happy with the kind of justice of they give out though:

There are 11 autonomous courts in Mogadishu, some of which have periodically tried to clamp down on robbery, drugs and what they say are pornographic films being shown in local video houses.

At first they concentrated on petty crime but by the mid 1990s they had progressed to dealing with major crimes in north Mogadishu.

Thieves had their limbs amputated and murderers were executed.

Editor of the BBC Somali Service Yusuf Garaad Omar says that despite protests from human rights bodies, north Mogadishu residents were pleased to enjoy law and order - in stark contrast to south Mogadishu, where crime was rampant.

If you ask me, I'd prefer to pay a little tax for a court system representative of wider (and more liberal) points of view.

Yates says Microsoft hasn't announced any plans to offer Excel online. "We've seen a number of vendors experiment with this for several years now," he says, pointing to programs offered by SimDesk, ThinkFree, and OpenOffice, among others. "There's really nothing new here, except for the fact that it's Google."

Obviously Microsoft isn't able to say this, and the mainstream media are unlikely to but why is it exactly that centralising storage with Google is a competative advantage? It shouldn't be, for the simple reason that retaining control of your own data is important, especially for business. Like I said, it's not like Microsoft can lecture customers on the control of their own data after their reaction to Open Document.

If you want an online spreadsheet that doesn't require a pact with the great organiser then keep an eye out for Dan Bricklin's WikiCalc.

You can't escape the computer

The DVLA (that's the a part of the UK Government, folks) on TV tonight.

They seem to mean it.