15 Dec 2016
The Federal Court has just brought down a decision regarding Foxtel and Village Roadshow’s application to block five popular torrent and streaming sites, including Torrentz.eu and the ever-living Pirate Bay, giving ISPs just 15 days to comply with the decision that these sites must be blocked.
I want to make the case that this is a very poor decision on behalf of the Federal Court.
I do agree that there is a huge problem with piracy in Australia. Take the season 4 premiere of Game of Thrones, for instance; Australians led the piracy race, with a total of 11.6% of the total downloads coming from Australian IP addresses. The Breaking Bad finale, too, had Australia making up for 18% of the downloads. Over the last year, the number of 12-17 year olds pirating media has doubled.
However, the decision to completely block these sites is only addressing a symptom, not the cause.
One of the main problems for Australian media enthusiasts has always been access. Foxtel is in a particularly interesting position here, as households who choose not to subscribe to their costly plan are stuck watching standard definition free-to-air channels, which may not be able to afford the licensing fees for particular TV shows or movies, or which may not be able to get past exclusivity agreements from the big players.
As of the 5th of September 2016, it costs AU$26 per month to subscribe to their basic “Entertainment” plan, which includes a selection of music and news channels, with 8 channels dedicated to TV shows, 3 to interest programming (Lifestyle, Discovery, National Geographic), and 3 to children’s programming. If you want to watch sport, that’s an extra $25/mo. If you want to watch movies sometimes? Another $20. If you want to subscribe to HD channels (and let’s face it, in this modern age that should be a given) that’s $10 extra.
And so on. For a reasonably-sized family with reasonable family-type viewing needs, it could easily cost $100 per month or more, at which point you may as well pay $135 per month for all the channels on offer.
But wait, what if I want to watch world movies, too? Or what if I’m a completely legitimate citizen who doesn’t want to pirate their pornography online? These and other services aren’t included in that $135. And this is just a monthly cost, remember.
There’s no choice but to pay this exorbitant amount, however: up until the release of Australian Netflix, Foxtel had a monopoly on the home entertainment market. I will admit that the number of shows that are broadcasted in a “timely” fashion (same-day broadcasting) has increased in recent years, however there are still a great deal of more obscure markets to which the Australian media just doesn’t cater.
When any given person in Australia can watch anything they choose to watch in an affordable, timely manner, then it’s time to start thinking about shutting down other access. And not a moment before.
Notes
09 Dec 2016
I have been following the Anniversary Manual to Gregg Shorthand over the last couple of days, and I have “finished” the first two units. This has led me to a few realisations:
Shorthand is going to be useless for me in the short term.
I thought that it might have been a good idea to learn to take notes at university, although for a number of reasons this will prove to be a poor thought. Firstly, I will most probably not be able to write fluently (~100wpm) for at least a year, disabling me from copying down speech. Secondly, important medicine-related words such as diverticulitis may be time-consuming to write in time even if I managed to learn to write fluently.
Shorthand is inconsistent.
The manual that I’m following first details vowels as having two possible diacritics: a dot or a dash. These give three versions of the vowel sound (for example, the A vowel can make an [a] sound as in hat, an [ä] sound as in calm, or an [eɪ̯] sound as in came).
However, it immediately then goes on to say that the diacritics are never used because it’s too slow to transcribe them, so reading shorthand back becomes a context-sensitive exercise where there is no salient difference between an earthquake and an earthquack.
Taking notes is time-consuming.
One of the shortcomings of shorthand people seem to mention often is that you can’t really come back to the shorthand notes after a prolonged period of time and expect to be able to read them well. Rs might turn into Ls, Ks into Gs and suddenly “the glass” turns into “the cress”. A solution to this is to type up the notes when you have time later, usually in the same day, but transcribing entire lectures from shorthand is probably not as efficient as transcribing entire lectures from recordings, which are usually given in our technologically-advanced society.
This leads me to the conclusion that shorthand will mostly remain a hobby during university, perhaps becoming a more useful tool for taking minutes of meetings and places where scribing has remained necessary.
Notes
07 Dec 2016
I’m a pianist. And I’m always on the lookout for new pieces to learn.
Recently, I picked up a copy of Shostakovich’s 2nd Concerto, and I’m finding that it’s probably one of the easiest concertos I’ve ever seen. The third movement seems to consist mostly of Hanon’s “Virtuoso Pianist” exercises, and the second movement is entirely sight-readable. So that’s one thing I’m learning.
Another thing that I’d like to learn is the third of Kapustin’s eight preludes, entitled “Toccatina”. Its raw speed and consistent perpetuum-mobile on the same note makes it quite a challenging learn, but I think given enough time I can work up to it.
The last thing that I really want to look at in detail is Poulenc’s two-piano sonata – I learned the first two movements about eight years ago but the third and fourth movements are by far my favourites.
Not really much else to say, other than perhaps it’s time I went back and did some technical work. Scales and the like.
07 Dec 2016
As part of setting up this blog, I had to redirect my existing webpage (ljenglish.net) to point to my GitHub .io page. One would expect this to be a well-documented exercise on the part of GitHub, Inc., right?
Actually, I found myself lost in a maze of documentation with no real direction as to what I should be doing re: DNS records and such.
The moral of this tiny little story is that Stack Overflow is full of people who have done this before, and if you need to set up a custom domain for your GitHub page, don’t ask GitHub. You’ll just get lost.
That having been said, you are now reading this blog post at my homepage! Congratulations to everyone involved.