Interesting Links for 8-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Radiohead: are they any good? (A sceptic listens to the first five albums - funny and well written)
  (tags: music radiohead reviews)
• The S stands for Simple (Thankfully I don't have to work with SOAP, but if you ever have, this is hilarious)
  (tags: humor xml programming software web soa soap)
• The cowardly fudge behind the rhetoric of Control Orders (This being the bit that worries me about today's speech)
  (tags: law uk rights freedom government)
• Nick Clegg's speech on civil liberties. More of this please - reminds me why I couldn't vote for Labour last time around.
  I'm nervous, of course, of what the actual laws will be. But this is generally pointing in the right direction.
  (tags: uk government law rights freespeech libel terrorism)
• Glasgow pantomime dress broke Geneva Convention
  (tags: law uk)
• Facebook made profits of $350m in 9 months. Valued at $50Bn. Not sure that multiplier makes sense to me...
  (tags: facebook business web2.0)
• Harry Potter plagiarism case dismissed. (They claimed that she copied the idea of wizards travelling on trains. WTF?)
  (tags: harrypotter law books)

Comments

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Plagiarism really doesn't imply exact copied passages of text. Wiktionary has 'The act of plagiarizing: the copying of another person's ideas, text, or other creative work, and presenting it as one's own, especially without permission.' OED gives 'The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft.'

And I'd put the chances of Rowling having read The Worst Witch *much* higher than that. It was certainly a pretty popular series when I was growing up (the first book came out four years before I was born) - Wikipedia informs us 'They have become some of the most outstandingly successful titles on the Young Puffin paperback list and have sold more than 4 million copies.[1] In 1986, the first book in the series was made into a Halloween telefilm.' Given she would have been pretty much exactly its target audience, I'd go so far as to say it would be distinctly surprising if she'd missed it entirely.

You're quite right apart from that, though.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Wow. As I'd never heard of "The Worst Witch" (and am 18 months older than JKR) colour me surprised.