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

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

J.K. Rowling may not have plagiarized from "Willy The Wizard," but her books are based on a very, very old German fable about a boy who goes to a school for wizards.

It's so old that it's surprising she found out about it, but the similarities are a bit too "coincidental." Since the fable was written before there were copyrights I think she's okay, legally.

Now if someone would just slap her for book 4, 5 and that last piece of crap from the series.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Could you elaborate on this at all?

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

I don't know much more than I've been told. The person who told me said their German grandmother was told the story at bedtime as a little girl, but it seemed to come down through oral tradition more than print, from what my friend inferred.

There may be a copy of the fable in German somewhere. If I could find it, (and I tried,) I would love to read it.