Have to say, the new iTunes flip-through-covers function is bloody marvellous. I’ve just packed all my jewel cases into boxes and put them into storage, and this has put back the only thing I might possibly miss about never thumbing through my CD collection.

It’s five years since the single most memorable terrorist atrocity committed on American soil.

Here are three things that the current American administration has been up to in the last year, in the name of the War On Terror that you might not have heard about, especially if you live in the US.

US operatives have tortured people to death.

The Pentagon has taken yet more steps to ensure that it can’t be held accountable by journalists.

A Haliburton subsidiary has been paid quite of lot of money for building detention camps in the US.

Remember: if it’s done in the name of dead civilians, anything goes.

Unless the dead civilians are foreign, obviously.

I don’t really like animals. In my mind, the non humans kingdoms of the world divide down more or less like this:

Animals (food) – I have no desire to coo over anything I might one day eat. This, I should add, would include human babies, were cannibalism legal and safe.

Animals (dangerous) – Anything that might leave me in pain, really. I don’t want to admire that at a distance, because you never know when one of the bastards might have snuck round behind you. Or worse: behind the sofa. Nature documentaries are just a cunning hunting ruse, invented by a particularly lazy lioness, you know.

Animals (allergic) – This pretty much covers the all the smaller land mammals, who I basically loathe and or fear.

Animals (aquatatic) – I don’t like fish. They are in league with Cthulhu and are not for eating. No.

Animals (avian) – basically boring. They have nothing to say to me, and I nothing to say to them. Except for a few of the smarter parrots, and even then, my interest will wane once the thing has learned how to swear properly.

Animals (creepy) – I am suspicious of things with more than four legs, unless they are Strandbeest.

Animals (a few of the smaller reptiles) – Which is more or less everything that’s left.

On the day John Peel died, a quick script I ran up this afternoon to check the archive counted 22 mentions of him on my friends list.

Already today, 23 people have mentioned Steve Irwin dying (yes, I know I have just made that number 24 – fuck off). The day is some hours from over.

This is, I feel, indicative of the sick, sad state of the culture we live in.

I recently vowed to watch no more TV that pandered to my worse instincts. Nothing that appealed to my sense of snobbery, or schadenfreude. Nothing that humiliated people, or pandered to the proletarian. I shall be quite happy to drift further and further out of cultural touch.

There’s a project I’ve had in the back of my head for a while now, and I’ve kind of been spinning my wheels on it a bit.

This isn’t what I intend as it’s final form, but If you visit http://alasdair.vox.com/, you’ll find the first of a collection of works tentatively entitled “Fables and Photomancy”.

I make no promises about how often I’ll update it, but I’m aiming for between 12 and 25 rough cuts at the moment, before I start trying to get them into their final forms. Think of them as first drafts.

Oh for fuck’s sake. It turns out that writing code is now something you can be held liable for. (I am, I admit, putting the cart before the horse. It is possible that the case will get thrown out. Except that the US courts have not shown an appetite to do that in recent years.)

In short: in addition to suing the a company that made P2P software, it’s suing two of the developers individually. If it succeeds, it means that developers can be held personally liable for the use that their code is put to. Suddenly, the open source movement would be in serious trouble. Hell, I personally would have reservations about releasing software to clients, since there is a remote possibility that their use of it might break laws. There’s nothing in any CMS I’ve written that would prevent a client using it to distribute copyright material, and there’s no practical way to make sure there is. And it’s not just their business, or even my employer that’s liable. It’d be me, personally, as the bloke that wrote the code.

Apparently is this case it is the guns that kill people, and not people.

Can anyone please explain to me how this might considered a decent thing to do? I mean, I know there are lawyers reading this journal. And while I understand that they have a responsibility to their employer, do they not, as humans, have a much fucking broader responsibility to not file suits that have the potential to fuck *everyone* in the ear?

I’m not being rhetorical here – somebody, please, answer the question, because I’m utterly fucking stumped. I honestly don’t know how someone can possibly thing that holding developers personally liable for the uses to which the code is put can be a good idea. Can frankly, be anything other that mind-numbingly malevolent stupidity.