- Welcome to the unofficial dark side of the Bar -

GD's Night Club

- Refreshment for Naughty Goodsouls -

We serve filthy booze in the midnight hour It's a bit Gorgeous  

Come inside, be wild and free, drink yourself silly!

-Feel the spirit of the lost one inside your head?-

Through the locked door behold the secret cavern that holds the stored booze - anyone seen the damn key?

- The Booze Bar Wine & Beer list -

The Beer selection:- (hic)We are always fully stocked with the finest boozePoochies BoddingtonsHoltsMarston Pedigree - Better Brewed in WoodBank's dark mildStormC Guinness Visit Realbeer.comThe Wine selection:-Lilac wine (from the Cafe lilac tree)Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte 2000DP VIN '96 Mighty Micro specialityMumm Napa Blanc de Noirs Vintage 1996 Sterling Vinyards Three Palms Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon (purple velvet!!) Ridge Vineyard's Cabernet, from their ramshackle winery high in the hills above Palo Alto.Niebaum-Coppola's Diamond Zinfandel, goes well with the bread and cheese

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The Bunny food menu- we love Bun buns    | | GD's Club Photo Gallery   Ye Ol'Fish and Chips - cod, haddock and plaice available Mushy peas for those so inclined Ditto baked beans Followed by: Ye Ol'Apple pie and cream For those anti-fish either baked beans or mushy peas on toast can be whipped up for you ;>) Lastly NO requests for chip butties, let's try and be a bit healthy! (Service not included - so serve yourself!!)

Half cremated steak please Bunny, salad nice for a change, once or twice a year! large pot of tea then I must do some WORK.

Once or twice a year Opto for salad! What are you like?? LOL
No gateaux? That's unusual..

No bun fights over MT please gentlemen - only just cleaned up
after the last one in here.

you where just unlucky jeff when you bought,i am sure we would all go with others now,6.5 is that right.

at least we have the wooden spoon.

Would you like steak and salad with that Dave? ;>)
And ask Fundy what he wants would you, can't read his writing on this order.
Hey at the end of the day it was only a game :>)

i go on then,thanks it will have to be quick,football calls,

he will have the same , and your right its only a game!!!!!!!

and they say girls are more trouble.

Ah.. we can be 'priceless' Dave ;>)
I've sent Fundy's over to the horsey-tips area.

SSE + 14.5p KEL - 11p Pot of tea please and a piece of choccy gateaux

Thanks all

The filter is empty, the washing machine is under a year old so I 'phoned and was promised an engineer on Sat.

I wouldn't be surprised that the problem is to do with the paper handkerchiefs that the females in our house persist in storing up their sleeves. According to 'she who thinks she should be obeyed' if I am left to put a load on I should check all the sleeves for snot filled paper and its my fault if everything comes out covered with disintegrated tissue! Striking a blow for male liberation I refuse to accept responsibility on those occasions. If the pump is full of paper pulp I will probably be blamed for that too!

Tissues are a nightmare in a washing machine - not pleasant checking
T-I-M but possibly cheaper then not, as you will be having an engineer
out frequently otherwise..Another 'delight' I have found is ATM receipts
that my eldest tends to stuff in pockets - that I do check - but at times
miss the odd one. They don't fall apart as dramatically as tissues but
still do a fairly messy job to a wash load. Brightly coloured sweets like
Smarties are good fun too especially if they melt in with a whites load!

Give the engineer a fiver and ask him to say a wire had come off.

LOL Opto!
I am ignoring SSE - or trying to as I have the word PROFIT in large
neon lights flashing in my head (I know I am seeing a Dr. LOL) but
trying not to sell it, it's just a matter of mind over button ;>)

I'll get that other pot of tea then Opto :>)

Yes please Bunny, News From KEL HSBC has over 3%. Doesn't say wether they have bought or sold or how many involved. Useless news when it is so incomplete!

That's odd it normally tells you that, oh well.
Dow looking a 'bit sick' down a lot more then the FTSE currently,
whats the betting we drop to meet it, rather then it rising to meet us?
Bourbon biccie?

Out for a while now, bye

P2P music (eg Kazaa) downloaders should possibly be aware of this article from today's NY Times. Registration is free.

Hello all, We're all wandering around like zombies and I've goit ther mother of all hangovers still. Tried all the recipes, nun work.

Same probs in our house today as Jeffers has but then again we eat food not flowers; there still seems to be people lolling about who should have buggered orf hours ago [last night actually] and they're now talking of wanting food again..

Think the poolman seems to have cleaned it up pretty well so may risk a livener of a dip as that might just work; expected out to dinner in under 2 hours time, bloody hell.

Enjoy the rest of your day everyone...

Hils
cant be asked to register, can you be a honey and cut and paste please

Panel Considers Copyright Bill
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Published: September 30, 2004


Just over a year ago, the recording industry unleashed its first barrage of lawsuits against people who share music online - a move that appeared to curtail illegal file swapping briefly. But in the months since, activity on file-sharing networks has recovered and grown, prompting the music and movie industries to try legislating the file-sharing beast into submission.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is now considering a bill that stands at the center of the file-sharing debate - the Induce Act, or the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004. It joins a torrent of other bills introduced in Congress and in state legislatures to address piracy of copyrighted materials. Negotiations on the bill's language are expected to continue today. A vote could come as early as next week.

Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed a bill that would charge file swappers in the state with a misdemeanor if they fail to include a valid e-mail address with the files they trade. On Tuesday, the United States House of Representatives passed the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, which would provide stiff penalties for copyright violators, including up to three years in prison. A similar measure passed the Senate in June.

Unlike other bills, however, the Induce Act is aimed at the makers of peer-to-peer file-sharing software, rather than at those who use it. Supporters of the bill say it is needed to curb abuses of intellectual property rights. Opponents contend that its broad language will stifle innovation.

The fight has brought together some unusual alliances. The American Conservative Union, for example, has joined with advocacy groups, like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to challenge the Induce Act. The group has begun running ads, citing what it sees as a potential tsunami of lawsuits that would follow should it be signed into law. "Compromising property rights and encouraging predatory, costly litigation is not a conservative position," the ads say.

In a letter sent to the Senate this month, the National Taxpayers Union called the Induce Act "the legislative equivalent of trying to rid a house of termites by burning it to the ground." And the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group, produced its own study of peer-to-peer file sharing last month, concluding in part that this kind of legislation might well threaten "a huge range of legitimate activities."

Months of haggling have yielded alternate drafts, yet little in the way of middle ground. Still, critics and supporters appear to agree on at least one point: regardless of whether this particular version of the bill is passed, distributors of file-swapping software like Kazaa may not be able to escape legislation for long.

Whether this or any law can ultimately stymie illegal peer-to-peer networking, however, remains an open question. After all, at any given moment, roughly seven million people are exchanging digital content on peer-to-peer networks, according to industry trackers. Much of it is pornography, most of it is music, and nearly all of it is illegally shared.

At its heart, the Induce Act is the music and film industries' response to a court victory won by two peer-to-peer software companies, StreamCast Networks, the maker of Morpheus software, and Grokster. A federal appeals court in August upheld the notion that a technology capable of legal uses cannot be held liable simply because some - or even most - of its users deploy it to violate a copyright. That decision relied heavily on the principles of a 1984 Supreme Court decision popularly known as the Sony-Betamax case, which gave makers of electronic devices crucial legal protection against claims of copyright infringement.

The Induce Act, said Markham Erickson, the director of federal policy for NetCoalition, an Internet policy watchdog group, "would make Sony-Betamax irrelevant."

The language of the bill would hold liable anyone who "intentionally aids, abets, induces or procures" copyright infringement. The bill was introduced by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and is supported by a bipartisan coalition of 10 senators, including Democrats like Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barbara Boxer of California, as well as Republicans like Bill Frist of Tennessee and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina.

Supporters contend that in the absence of tough legislation, commercial enterprises like Kazaa and Grokster will continue to reap profits from rampant illegal behavior on the peer-to-peer networks.

"Music, movies, books and software contribute well over half a trillion dollars to the U.S. economy each year, and support 4.7 million workers," Senator Frist said in remarks supporting the bill's introduction in June. "When our copyright laws are blatantly ignored or threatened, an enormous sector of our economy and creative culture is threatened."

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Mitch Bainwol, Senator Frist's former chief of staff and now chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, which is leading the charge on the Induce Act and the thousands of lawsuits that have been filed against individual users, puts it more plainly.

"Napster was shut down because it had a centralized server," he said, referring to the father of peer-to-peer file sharing that was forced to shut down in 2001, and later reopened as a pay service. Soon after Napster's initial collapse came the decentralized peer-to-peer networks that are now at the center of the debate. "These decentralized systems exploit a loophole. They make money on advertising and their business model is based on theft."

While that may be true, opponents of the Induce Act say that the bill's language is so sweeping that many other technologies may be in danger of being caught in its grasp. They argue that innovations as common as the VCR - or Xerox machines or the iPod - would never have come about if their inventors had toiled under the threat that some users might misuse the technology.

"This is not just closing loopholes," said Susan Crawford, a professor of Internet law at the Cardozo School of Law in New York. "They're creating nooses."

That concern has generated a frenzy of activity among trade groups and Internet advocates on one side, and the recording industry and their supporters in Congress on the other. Several drafts of the bill were generated and discussed by the groups, including versions from the federal copyright office, which has supported the bill, and the Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group that sought to codify the principles of the Sony-Betamax decision and minimize the bill's repercussions by focusing the language squarely on peer-to-peer technologies.

While supporters of the bill have characterized the negotiations and language-tweaking over the last several months as free and open, opponents say the process has done little to address their concerns.

"We said, 'If you're going after the peer-to-peer networks, then you define it that way,' " said Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association. "So we gave them a piece of legislation and it was totally ignored."

"We're intensely paranoid about this," he added.

Other opponents point out that peer-to-peer technology is not something that can be successfully constrained by new laws. A company can be prevented from making commercial gains with a product that uses peer-to-peer networking, but how would a law stop the tinkerers and programmers who know how to create peer-to-peer software and willingly share their innovations on the Internet?

"You might as well ask yourself, 'Why couldn't the World Wide Web ever just go away?' " said Adam Toll, a co-founder of BigChampagne, a company that tracks peer-to-peer usage. "It would take a totalitarian concentration of resources to make such a thing happen, and you'd have to take away the thinking that resides in millions of brains around the world."

Eric Garland, the chief executive of BigChampagne, predicts this battle will be a blip in the evolution of the music and film industries. "This is really not so different from what happened with radio over 70 years ago," he said.

The current legislative and legal battles, Mr. Garland said, are merely the desperate attempts by the content industries to hold on to an old business model that affords them a remarkable amount of control over how and when their products are consumed. Once they accept the new paradigm, "these types of technologies are eventually going to make people in the creative chain a lot of money," Mr. Garland said.

Perhaps so, but Mr. Bainwol of the recording industry suggests that the illegal file sharers need to be dealt with first. "There's no way to have a vibrant peer-to-peer market place so long as you have a rampant illegal market place," he said.

All huff and puff. Hope you will visit me in Rykers Prison.

Did you install Kazaa?