Episode 47 - Ward Cleaver Was Really Into Cock Fighting

Hey, we're back!

If anything gets us back to talking it is overreach by a company with a bit of copyright!

I'm using too many exclamation points!

So, a guy who had bought a movie from Apple went to re download his purchase, and it turns out, he didn't really buy the movie.  He bought a license to download it, depending on its availability in the iTunes store.

Plus, the EU is going all crazy again.....

We talked Dr. Johnson, dystopias, the future of newspapers and the Peninsular Wars.

Enjoy.



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Episode 44 - Churchill as a Service

Look, another episode!

Look, another episode about copyrights!

Look, the EU is being silly again!  Is it censorship?  I dunno.  I'm sure Ken will know much more about this than I, because of his librarianosity.

What if you could make copies of people's consciousness?  Would you?  What about renting out someone's 'soul' to be used as, oh say, a university administrator.

Oh, Ken's daughter graduated from grade 8, congrats to her.

We hope you enjoy our ramblings.



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Episode 39 - It's The Future, Which One of These Knobs Do I Have To Blow?

Follow us again dear listener as we converge tangentially.

Well, we're going to watch last night's Expanse, and before it, who knows, we might record a thing!

First off I'd like to thank both @acedtect and @alkebob for posting a picture of the two of them from Vegas where there was a meet up.  Great pic, which they entitled 'two thirds of the Tangential Convergence audience'.

So, Tesla has an idea for an electric transport truck.  Cool.  Then Nicola Motors (yeah we get it) has decided to sue Tesla for two billion dollars.  Seems legit.  This seems to me to be as sensible as, oh, say TWIT suing Twitter.  (That's happening by the way).  Damn, I should be careful, maybe I'll get sued for mentioning all of this stuff.

This got us all into lots of stuff, look, I'm a shitty writer and that's what I've got.  I'm a shitty writer, but, the library at the university has to pay for y shitty writing.....

Oh yeah, two things, I forgot to use Tom Merritt's excellent line about how Edison Motors should sue Tesla, and, Go Hounds Go!


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Episode 11 - The Authors Guild Is Mad at the Amazon

Amazon.com that is.

With the release of the Kindle 2, the Authors Guild of the USA came out against the text to speech capability of the new kindle. Their "reasoning" is that this capability violates copyright. Yeah, that's right, a computer type voice will stop the sales of audio books. Odd that Amazon would do such a thing, what with them owning audible.com. There is an alternate hypothesis, and that is that it will help the sale of audio books, and that getting content available to people, say oh like blind people (like me) might actually be a good thing. Oh those crazy authors...

We officially welcomed Robin Isard to the show as our third TCer. Both Robin and Ken went to library school and are librarians here at Algoma University, they actually quite like books. (Note the understatement). They got all excited about handling medieval manuscripts, which I would too if I had ever done it.

We talked about the death of paper, and books, and how on Star Trek the captains always seem to like actual books. That led us into a series of Shakespeare references in Star Trek which Isabelle and Madeleine thought quite funny and (hopefully) cute.

We also talked about self publishing, such as Tom Merrit's Boiling Point (which is a really good book) and my friend Dave's book on getting in to grad school.

Welcome Robin, and we welcome your comments. Oh and thanks to Craig and Christian for the Scotch.

Enjoy episode 11.