There are some proposed changes in the Australian copyright law that are just too weird.

Australia has its newish free-trade agreement with the US, and so is now harmonising some of its laws. Unfortunately, things are being tightened without the corresponding “fair use” clauses that are part of the equivalent US legislation, and some flawed US stuff like the DMCA is also finding its way into the Australian proposals… laws have a fairly long cycle. The DMCA may get fixed at some point, but a new Australian law will take years again to pick up any such changes.

So, about the new copyright proposals:

The proposed changes include allowing individuals to record a television program but only allowing a single viewing before it must be deleted.
The proposed laws also make it illegal to lend recorded programs to friends or burn a collection (or library) of favourite programs on DVD or CD to keep.

One could possibly debate over the latter, but that “single viewing” thing is just too weird. Sadly, it’s for real though.

So the question for the Australians among you is… do you want to be a passive consumer, or do you rather want to be an active participant in the world? If you don’t actively speak up, things will happen that you may not like.

• Petition: Don’t Ban Digital Innovation and Consumer Rights!
• Linux Australia – Press Releases
• iownmymusic.org – Australian campaign for consumer control of music
• IDG Computerworld: Copyright fires up Linux
• Rocking in the Free World (music industry example from Canada, similar legislation issue)

Live Online Question and Answer Session with Rusty Russell
Friday 16th June at 8:30pm AEST (UTC+1000) there will be a live Question and Answer session with Rusty Russell about the recently launched petition campaign. Rusty will be live via streaming audio and you will be able to ask questions via irc. The session should last about an hour.

Slides: http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/la-online-presentation/
Listen: http://together.linux.org.au:8000/la_talk.ogg
Discuss: #linux-aus on irc.freenode.net

My good friend Zak Greant spotted a news item at Techworld, where the European Commission appears to have changed its position on software patents.

Have a read, it’s interesting and I hope that it really does indicate a new direction from the commission and not just one loose statement. If it is for real, that’s absolutely great, but let’s not be complacent and think “that’s it”. The pro-swpat lobbyists certainly won’t give up, they have strong interests and stacks of cash driving them.
Of course it’s not helpful to preach to the converted, but encouragement to continue on this path seems like a good idea. I’ll happily give politicians kudos and encouragement when they do good stuff!

Also, if you haven’t yet checked out No Lobbyists as Such, please do. It’s by Florian Mueller, who led what I would call “round one” of this marathon within the European Union, telling about his experiences: how the EU software patent directive was defeated last year, against all odds and against a strong (and rich) opposition.

Just spotted: Microsoft CEO: catching Yahoo, Google to take time

“We are a little bit late in the game,” Ballmer said. “But at the end of the day it is going to be about the ability to create a mass marketplace for buyers and consumers.”
Ballmer said Microsoft would seek to create a marketplace where consumers want to spend their time and advertisers want to spend their money.
It also plans to leverage the popularity of its MSN, Hotmail and Instant Messaging products, he said.
“We are hard at work on our own core services where at the heart we want the users to be in control,” Ballmer said. “There is a whole set of things we are doing to let the user be in control.”

Oh dear Mr Ballmer… users in control will not, at least in the long run, put up with advertising bombardments and being treated like a bunch of consumers in a mass market. That’s not what people really want, and that’s not how the Internet is really developing. You’ll find out.

Arrived in Santa Clara for the conference, so this is my second (groundhog!) attempt at Friday April 21st. I even arrived before I left. Timezones and the intl.dateline are of fun. Should also remember that Europe is now ahead of me rather than behind…

Colin, JD and I went for a good walk, so that might help with the jetlag (sunlight in the right timezone). This worked pretty well for me last year. Didn’t spot any mountain lions, but did see a rabbit, a few deer and a hummingbird. Stewart (cluster dev) also arrived today… it appears most Australians arrived a bit early, a wise move in my experience. And Lars Thalmann (replication dev) from Sweden. Briefly visited our offices in Cupertino, lots of people there also of course.

That car pictured is a pizza delivery vehicle I spotted near the hotel. The driver was quite capable of moving without assistence, but looking at the mangled structure, some invalidity may indeed be suspected anyway.

Had dinner with Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen from Yahoo, and Michael Still from Google. It’s fun to see Yahoos and Googlers poke fun at eachother and tell local anecdotes ;-)

I do always wonder why I have to pick all my sauces, sides, other bits of my meals on American restaurant menus. It’s nice to have a choice in many matters, but I reckon this is over the top. I actually expect a chef to create a menu item with whatever they judge is a good combination. I’m a decent cook myself, so now why would I go to a restaurant if not to actually enjoy someone else’s creation. With these multiple choice menus, a restaurant doesn’t even need a chef, merely some cooks. Perhaps that’s the reason? Hmm…

In SQL RDBMS land, people often talk about relations when they actually mean relationships. Sometimes the meaning is clear from the context, but that’s not always the case; so I thought it might be helpful to know which is which and why:

You may be surprised to learn that: relation = set = table. It’s just the mathematical term for it. The letter R in the RDBMS acronym therefore simply means that it’s a type of database that stores its data in tables. Nothing more.

A relationship, on the other hand, are about two or more tables having a field with common data (generally of integer type, if the schema is decently normalized) used for joins. In its simplest form that’s an implicit relationship, and the database doesn’t worry about it one way or another. You can make relationships explicit by defining foreign key constraints.

A join will work without a foreign key constraint, and a foreign key is still a foreign key without a constraint, it’s just that the server in that case wouldn’t care about you deleting a row from one table while a referring row in another table still exists. That’s what foreign key constraints guard against.