My sister has given birth to beautiful Lily Alice! Obviously I’m using the word “beautiful” in baby terms, she’s all scrunchy and newborn, but probably one of the prettiest babies I’ve ever seen. And I’m relying on photographs to help me form these opinions because they’re 3000 miles away. Which is quite a sad thing. I miss my family. A lot.

On the subject of reproduction, I recently discovered some more malfeasance in the dubious realm of the music/movie copy-protection racket. We came across a DVD that refused to copy to our hard-drive. Copying a DVD to your hard-drive is not necessarily illegal BTW; deciding to watch something later is not a crime. Normally I use vobcopy because it is simple and reliable, but this time it got to 16M of one particular VOB and then hung.

A glass of Google later I had discovered some recent “advances” in copy protection called things like “RipGuard” and “ARccOS”. They sound pretty bloody impressive in the press-releases (Google it, I’m not linking to the twats) but of course in reality they are the same old shit that the industry has been trying to con the public with for years: breaking the DVD in a way that “most” DVD players won’t notice. Just like they tried to do with CDs. If you get one of these DVDs, make sure you inform the vendor that it is damaged and demand a refund.

A reminder to the faithless: this will only penalize the legitimate users. If you buy a DVD that won’t play then tough tits. Whereas if you buy an illegal DVD, the dudes who get paid to crack the crap protection will have rendered it perfectly usable. They have people who can crack this lame bullshit – because they can spend money to buy people who understand how it works. The purchaser doesn’t have these resources. So the legit buyer is being punished again.

It took a very short amount of time for me to work out how to defeat this “Advanced Copy Protection” and I was only doing it out of bloody-mindedness by this stage. I don’t even want to watch the fucking film. BTW, the magic word is ddrescue.

Macrovision, who are, in my personal opinion, an anachronistic bunch of impotent losers, claim that with this “Advanced Copy Protection”

95% of casual users lack the knowledge and/or determination to be able to copy a DVD

Now, this is bollocks in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to start, so I’ll go for two main issues: firstly, “95%” is one of the 88.5% of statistics that are made up on the spot – can we have some evidence to support this dubious claim? Secondly, casual users do not copy DVDs; they get them after the <1% of expert users have ripped them using the multitude of simple tools that are available to them. No-one needs to worry about casual users, they are totally dumb. You don’t need to be an expert to buy a DVD from a woman in the pub or download a rip. By the time it’s available to buy, a single “expert” somewhere has already copied it.

Again, the hackers and crackers are not hurt by copy-protection. Only the buyer. You are buying damaged goods. Watch the movie, then take it back and complain.

If there’s one thing that every country in the world can agree on, it’s surely racism. Black, white, Kufar, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Prod, Jew, Atheist or Quaker [the list goes on], we can all agree that we hate one or more of them, even if we’ve never met them.

At long last the “Tea-party movement”[sic] has started to show its true colours. It started out as your average, rich, right-wing, oligarchical astroturfing effort, and has now become purified by the simple beliefs of the mass supporters. They never really cared about, nor even understood, anything they were vocally berating the current government with – they just hated the idea of having a black president. It was simple racism. And I use the word “simple” deliberately.

Well, it’s refreshing to hear the teabaggers come clean by shouting “Nigger” and “Faggot” to congress. All this will do is unite the genuine racists, and distress the Republicans who are not racists. The latter outnumber the former. You can bang on about Socialists and Communists without understanding what they mean, but when someone drops the N-bomb, you know what they think, and you know they’re stupid. My optimistic side suggests that this will split their cause.

Meanwhile in the UK, everyone is geeing-up for the general race-warelection in May which will let the general public decide between two duplicitous, desperate, power-hungry crooks, and the neo-nazis. Gorden Brown has ensured that the neo-nazis have the best chance of being elected since they formed, by changing the dumb voting system to something even dumber.

In the build-up to the racist fun ahead, there has already been a couple of friendly matches between The UAF and the EDL (the latter being a more closeted set of racists than the regular NF and the BNP).

And let’s not forget the progressive attitudes of Multiculturalism evident in South East London where a Nazi Granny is standing for the BNP. People of Lewisham, please, I beg you, make sure that her voters know what bullshit she is talking, and make sure her pathetic xenophobia isn’t given any credibility by people voting for her.

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.

— Tom Lehrer – National Brotherhood week

Today is St Patrick’s day, and everyone in the entire world is celebrating by wearing green, drinking stupid amounts of alcohol and explaining why they are, actually, Irish.

But why do we celebrate this wonderful day? What is it that we are actually celebrating?

Well sit back and let me explain the complex history behind this monumental holiday.

Let’s travel back 4000 years to soon after God created the earth. Everything was peaceful, and the bounty of God’s earth provided for every living being, meaning that everyone had food, shelter and warmth.

But there was one problem that no-one could have predicted: snakes. Ever since Eve betrayed the trust of Adam (and our Lord God) by eating the apple, Satan became empowered and propagated his evil seed into a thousand snakes. Each snake begat a thousand snakes and each of those begat a thousand more until the Garden of Eden was full of slimy, poisonous, evil snakes.

Theologian scholars have now managed, by advanced theological methods, to trace the original location of the Garden of Eden to what we now call “Ireland”! If you think about it, it makes sense! A beautiful green land, full of magic and wonder. If you still doubt this, then read Genesis and its clear and unambiguous description of Leprechauns.

Around this time lived an Irish lad whose name was Patrick O’Piseadeynnnegan (pronounced “omally”) living in Ireland after the English army had killed all of his friends and family for being Irish. Patrick was well versed in ancient Catholic prayers and realised that the one thing the snakes could not beat was the power of prayer. So for literally hours on end, he prayed for the death of the billions of snakes. And it came to pass, after a while, that God heard Patrick and decided to help him by throwing all of the snakes into the sea. And Patrick did say “you Lord are the most loving of Lords!” and the snakes did drown and leave the holy land of Ireland free. To celebrate, Patrick mixed together some Irish herbs with the green rivers of the emerald isle, producing a healthy, intoxicating drink, which we know today as “Guinness.”

And this is why, until this very day, we still celebrate St Patrick’s day by getting fucked off our tits on Guinness or any other alcoholic beverage we can get our hands on!

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

Here’s a couple more reasons to like Richard Dawkins. By the way, if you’re one of those people, like Jeremy Hardy, who thinks Dawkins is just another “Religious Extremest” then buy one of his books, read it, and then apologise for being wrong.
He currently has a couple of excellent campaigns. Firstly, The Out Campaign which aims to encourage non-believers to come out of the closet and say they don’t believe.

Secondly, Non Believers Giving Aid, aimed at all of those people who erroneously believe that aid can only exist when prefixed by the word “Christian.”

From a little blog on the New York times:

We always risk and often achieve a “I just heard this great new band called Vampire Weekend” moment by recommending Internet Things, but it’s been a hard day…

And I’m going to take the same risk; sorry if you seen this, done this, know this already, don’t care either way, but I’m currently captivated by the simple, powerful, beauty of posterous. It’s been around for a while but I’ve only just appreciated what it does.

If you need to declare, brag, or shout about something and you don’t have a blog, just email whatever it is to post@posterous.com and your email, together with any attachments, get instantly turned into a beautiful blog post. For example: http://veghead.posterous.com/. You don’t need to set anything up, sign anything, or even think about it. Just send an email, and a few seconds later you get mailed back with the url of whatever you posted. Of course, should you wish, you can maintain the url and keep posting stuff to it – just like a real blog – but you don’t have to. Try it!

Whether it will scale, get clogged with spam, or just vanish, we’ll see. But I love to see a brilliant idea brilliantly executed, especially when it’s so simple.

It’s really cheering when a website that is brilliant, although offensive to some, gets shut-down, and then gets resurrected. Whether it was by the power of logic or a clue-stick brandished at the censors, we’ll probably never know for sure. But I’m glad he’s back. Read all his stuff. It’s funny.