How would you feel if someone stole your IP?

Thought Thieves - short film competition

Thought Thieves is about people stealing and profiting from your creation or innovation. Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else? What would you do?

As I said to Dave and Miles over email a while ago, I swear, I am so tempted to enter this competition just so I can make a film which expresses the advantages of the opening your ideas to the world. IP is not a black and white issue, I very much douht many of the videos will speak in favour of opening thoughts. I could be wrong though… Honestly if I won, I would get myself a decent DV camera and then give away the rest to my previous college.
Were not the only one who noticed the thought thieves competition, NTK.net are running there own competition off the back off thought police, umm I mean thieves.

The 1400-word terms and conditions for MSN.CO.UK's strong-IP “Thought Thieves” film competition are quite the read, even if you're not the 14-17 year-old they're intended to be read and understood by and complied with in their therein bywhich entirety. Entries must be the “sole work and creation of the person submitting the film” (no sharing your precious intellectual property fluids with your cameraman, Mr Auteur); must not “use third party intellectual property rights” (no furniture, no architecture, only clouds as background); the entry form additionally specifies “Should I be selected as a finalist […] I will formally licence on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so”. But what we made us wonder was: where exactly did Microsoft get this “Thought Thieves” idea from?
The idea that people can “steal your thoughts” is surely not original. We're hoping for a class-action by paranoid schizophrenics, who we think came up with the idea that others are stealing the very THOUGHTS FROM YOUR MIND a good few years before Microsoft started losing theirs.

http://www.msn.co.uk/thoughtthieves/
– send us a copy of your entry. We'll do prizes.
http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/excerpts/index.shtm
– Lessig's book starts at the exact point the T&C gets ridiculous

Are you shitting me? Indeed, I love the category Copyfight put the competition under, yep IP Abuse. P2P weblog suggests the winner will end up on Bit torrent, which would be poetic justice in some odd way. There was or is some discussion on Channel 9 but its not exactly saying much we didnt know. It also seems it was slashdotted along with boingboing'ed (is that the right name for it?) at some point in the past according to Loren.
I'm sure this will not be the end of the thought police thievies.

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xbox 360 baby!

Being away on holiday without a decent connection had its disadvantages. I knew and saw the MTV preview trailer for xbox 360 online a few days before I left london and knew sometime friday all would be reveled. But it wasn't till I got back on the road and enter Devon again that i could get a decent 3g connection and get my email again. Tony sent me a email titled xbox 360 baby!

Xbox 360,

Boy oh boy!, Roll on November…………

Xenon 3.2Ghz with 3 Cores WHAT!!!!! and 512 Ram this will surely piss on the PS3 or PS4 or PS9999.

I can't wait to pre-order one.

Cheers Tony

Well well, triple core 3.2ghz cpu and 512 meg of system memory for the next xbox which is going to launch late this year. What is triple core? Well I guess its 3 xeon (my mistake from when the details were still a little short in cornwall) IBM G5 type processors sharing the same level 1, 2 and 3 cache across the whole processor board. Certainty in any case the cpu sounds quite amazing. After some time I was able to get online and check out Full coverage of everything xbox 360 at team xbox

  • Xbox 360 Watercooled
  • Microsoft's Official press release
  • Fact sheets, online specs and Peripherals details for the xbox 360
  • Nice selection of xbox 360 screenshots
  • Poster for xbox 360
  • Lots of links surrounding the launch of xbox 360
  • Microsoft's disruptive marketing researched and papered by Forrester
  • Yuk! The official website of Xbox 360
  • Engadget covers the MTV launch

    • Some under played news around the xbox 360 launch. Neon the light synthesiser by Llamasoft will be built directly in the rom of the xbox 360. Wicked stuff which I'll look forward to playing with. I actually bought some earlier light synthesisers (Trip a Tron and Colourspace) for my Atari ST all that time ago, the Atari Jaguar was the last console to see a decent light synthesiser.
    Sony Reaction to Xbox360 Unveiling could mean Playstation 3 or Playstation Cell will be released sooner that later.

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    Geek dinner with microsoft

    My first official Windows XP

    Ok so I rushed home to vote today, then disappeared down to a location between bank and moorgate stations for a geek dinner. Nice but difficult to find thai restaurant. Anyhow, turned up fashionable late in my brazil football shirt. Can hardly blame me, it was nice and warm in london today, even while I write this on my ipaq on the way home at 2300 its still warm enough not to wear a coat. Anyhow everyone else seemed quite dressed up in shirts, so I guess I was weirdly dressed. But it didn't matter everyone was very friendly. Anyhow it seemed about 66% of the people there were from Microsoft! I believe there were about 12-15 people eating in total. After dinner which was paid for by Microsoft, there was a free prize draw and everyone non-microsoft won something. Prizes ranged from One Note 2003 to a Samsung Personal media player. Yep guess what I won? Yep as you can see in my pictures, Official Windows XP Professional with sp2 included. Wow, I dont believe I have ever held a boxed version of XP Professional. And I certainly have never owned a copy.

    After the dinner people started make there way home which was strange because usually people in London tend to stick around and have drinks or something. But it was good because I'm off on holiday tomorrow and needed to pack (but instead I'm blogging – whoops). I had some interesting chats with some people and swapped some business cards. I was assured that Internet Explorer 7 will have RSS support and that Longhorn may do (best I could do). There was lots of general talk about Languages and RSS at one point but we got stuck into the media centre version of xp before that. One of the guys working on Media Centre edition seemed a little surprised when I asked about the threat of the xbox media centre and hacked xboxes, he replyed with a usual Microsoft answer but admitted to that fact (it being a official answer, not being a threat) then moved the subject on to the media centre abilities which may be in Xbox 360 (yep he used that word not myself). I also had a very interesting talk with a lady from Microsoft about me thinking of swapping my tabletPC for a Apple Power book. She was shocked I would consider doing such a thing, and said I should consider getting a newer one which is lighter and without the keyboard.

    Generally it was good night out and thanks to Microsoft for paying the dinner tab. Although most of this can be seen as suspect, I have to say all companies do this. I mean you only have to look at the way Apple went over the top on the tiger launch. You can also listen here. And honestly its good to see Microsoft trying to get down from its ivory towers and listening to the developers of the world (ok London at least). I'm looking forward to making this a regular monthly meal and I look forward to the next one.

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    I’m loving Konflabulator

    Konfabulator is one of those things which I have been meaning to check out for quite sometime. Since seeing the Dashboard idea in OSX 10.4, I have thought it was a pretty good idea. For example, the amount of times I'm sitting at my laptop and I want to quickly do a complex sum with the built in calculator. Well I have to click start menu, find accesssorys, find calculator. Yes I know I could assign a keyboard short cut but come on. So using widgets in Konfabulator, I am able to click a hot key and get my calculator in without doing any navigating or finding. But thats only the start of things… Theres this really nice widget (UK Train Timetable) which grabs the latest train times from the official Train timetable website and displays any delay's or cancellations.

    So from own understanding, Konfabulator is using the Mozilla javascript engine on top of the operating system which allows widgets to be built in the same way as you create applications on the web. This is very interesting when you consider the real push behind dynamic web applications like google maps. Ajax or as I prefer remote scripting creates a inituative user interface to underlined webservices. With widgets in konfabulator its easy to imagine taking applications right into the operating system. I understand this is exactly what the Avalon/XAML idea in Longhorn is meant to do. But you know what, its available now and being built on Standard Javascript/DOM is good idea. I have been meaning to improve my Javascript/DOM skills for quite some time now, this is the perfect reason why. I wonder how easy it is to connect to the web and the file system? Does it use xmlhttp or something else? There are a;ready plans in my head to talk to cocoon and other web applications. How hard would it be to read a xvid file on my filesystem and search for the informaton for it on IMDB.com? I'm sure the interaction with the user interface and filesystem is limited but not that limited surely? I mean for example there is a nice wireless strength indicator which can be downloaded. For it work, it must plug into the operating system and read that information in some way? There are also many system monitors which to me indicates that access to operating system information must be easy or at least flexable.

    There are performance issue with layering a Javascript engine over an operating system, sure. On my 1.3ghz Tablet PC Konfabulator realisticly takes about 2 secs to switch on my button switch. I have about 8-10 widgets running. While on my desktop 1.8ghz Athlon box it takes nothing more than half a second at very most. Bar Avalon and somewhat Dashboard, what else could be used instead of the javascript engine? Java? Python? what else? See this is the thing, Javascript drops the entry level down real low, you do not need to learn a while programming language to create widgets. This is good! Yes performance is one of the trade-offs but come on a widget is meant to be small and simple. For example there is a nice little search box which I have as a widget, it simply converts my string entry and passes it on to the locally installed web browser. Makes sense. It wouldnt be too difficult to send the request to google search webservice and get results back in the widget as a small list. Cool, but why bother? Unless your building a browser as a widget, just pass the query to the browser at the start.

    Not trying to do a lazy web, but heres some thoughts for future widgets.
    Del.icio.us adder – What ever webpage you happen to be on can be added to del.icio.us through a widget instead of the browser. There is already a firefox extention which I use which does the same but it would be cool to see a widget too.
    Upload to Flickr – Uploading to flickr is simple and there are 2 ways to do so right now. Download a application or do it via a webform. What about a widget which allows you to drag folders of files to be uploaded. Once its finished it opens a webpage where you add the metadata. Or you could do it from the same application too I guess (I prefer not to).
    Blogging it – I like wbloggar and other blogging clients but come on, its all heavy weight for posting to a blog. My blog software already has a javascript bookmarket for posting, so why not a widget too? Actually it would work quite well because maybe it can accept drag and dropping urls and files too?
    Tell me a route – I use transport for London's Journal planner all the time. It would be so cool if I could just put where I am and where I'm going and it could send the request to TFL. Then chart a route or send the response to the locally installed browser. This would also work with Google maps.

    Following on from my last post about RSS and Azureus, I'm thinking once I finally get XML or something structured out of Azureus and its completed or in progress queue. I should build a widget which shows me the latest TV shows downloaded or in progress. Yeah I know Azureus has a little download bar but its too abstract and through cocoon I could get updates for in the same way even when I'm not on my local network but at work or even roaming. Pretty powerful, you have to agree? Yes all I'm doing is reformatting what comes out of cocoon but hey, it can be alot more with a lot more time and coding. Instead of just a list of whats downloading and whats done with percentages. How about a tv lookup so you get a image and nice small percentage instead? Simple and effective.

    So generally, yeah I do not think Konfabulator is the best thing since sliced bread, but I do rate it. I will have a better feel for how I rate it once I get into writing widgets of my own. I may be so wrong and widgets could be based on a twisted version of javascript and requires super human knowledge to write. Maybe connecting to the web is difficult and reading machine or operating system information almost impossible. But on first judgement its good and effective. I'm happy with it for now. There was another program which I downloaded but didnt end up testing called Samurize. Its open source which is good because konfabulator is payware but quite cheap at only 30 dollars.

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    Automated Torrent TV with RSS and Azureus

    So finally I have fully setup Azureus to automaticly download almost all the media me and sarah watch weekly. This includes the Daily show, Twenty four (only set it for the rest of this season), etc. I was testing TV RSS a while ago but after seeing Jon's RSS+Torrent entry, I switched to using a RSS feed plugin for Azureus on my windows workstation. I have to say its pretty damm good and the only difficult thing is getting your Regular Expression query tuned so you dont collect reposts, same media from different rss feeds, etc. I'm using a program called Regex Coach to test stuff out before applying them to Azureus. I highly suggest using a system like this as its automation is really quite good now. I'm hoping to get a RSS feed out of Azureus sometime soon, so I can keep an eye of whats going on without being at the actual machine.

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    Latest 24, brings even more head shaking

    CTU agent takes out a suspect
    Spoiler alert! I have watched up to episode 20 of the show 24, if you are watching on TV in the UK and do not want to know whats happening in 24. Please do not read this entry.

    Well after a whole week of ranting and raving about how Fox has turned 24 into nothing more than American government propaganda. I subjected myself to another thrilling episode of 24 last night. I said I would watch the rest of the season and I will do that at least. Sarah is not as convinced and decided to watch Star Trek on her laptop instead. Anyway, episode 19 didnt come up with many suprises.

    Everybody thinks (on screen) John Kerry Presendant pussy is even more of a (choosing my words very carefully) left leaning, jewish, gay black librial commie than ever before (I hope I didnt offend anyone). Basicly the writers have there perfect token democrat and they wont give it up for anything. This time he takes offence to Jack over ruling his words and sends the secret service out to arrest him. While the not so secret service go after Jack, he his hunting down the head terriost and is only moments from capturing him when the secret service mess up the operation. What a dick, presendant pussy is what everyone on screen is thinking (I'm thinking what a load of bollox to cover up the government propganda). Anyhow they end up calling for Ex-Presendant Palmer to give advice to him for the rest of the season. Did anything get solved from last time? No, actually the above was used to prove Jack was right and that tourture is correct. They certainly smoke filled the screen with all this rubbish about John Kerry to cover the mess Fox has made of it.

    Anyhow the highlight of the hour was one of the CTU technical operations agents (Chole) being sent out with 2 other unknown agents (you know these two are dead even before they leave for the mission) to follow up there one and only leads. Anyhow, a suspect comes along and starts to chase Chole and the witness (dont ask, its so stupid!). And after a lot of phone calls about what the combination of the in the car gun was finally the CTU agent kills the suspect. The funny thing is the agent in question is prune face Chole and if you know anything about Chole, shooting a weapon certainly isnt her thing. Chole up to this point has been yes a pain in the ass, but at least she hasnt said any Government Prop as of yet. But I got a feeling Chole will be following suite from this moment onwards. Shame, I believe she seems to be the only one left with a mind of her own.

    In the end I didnt publish the video for 24 mainly due to web space and copyright considerations. The clip would have started at 25:00 exactly and end on 43:08. But I do have a nice audio clip summing up the whole thing by 2600 writer/owner Emmanual Goldstein. On his weekly show Off the wall, Emmanual gets equally pissed off with 24. It was broadcasted on April 19th in America but there is a mp3 file on the 2600 site which you can listen to. Otherwise check out my 3.6meg Mpeg3 or 2.6meg Ogg Vorbis audio edited versions which has only his rant which lasts almost 9mins in total. Enjoy!

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    April brings some nice XBMC changes

    Ok first major thing which is now added the core of xbox media centre. Yep Audioscrobbler support! At long last well after I suggested it here on this blog and here on the official forums. This is all timely with me adding the what I'm listening to, on the side of this blog now. It grabs the RSS feed from my audioscrobbler page and does some simple XSL transfromations to generate the side panel for this blog. Expect to see much more entries now my xbox can also add music I listen to during the weekend.

    The other major change is the sad news that the Project Mayhem I and II skin support will be dropped. As I commented, I respect move to the newer Project Mayhem III skin but its too dark and I believe not as good version 2. I'm hoping to use version 2 for quite some time to come, and who knows I may keep on adding extras to it if no one else is interested.

    There is also interface sound in the latest beta which I have played with but am not totally sure of. I grant you some people will like it but for me the start up sound was all I needed. Since the early April versions there has also been a lot of new scripts added, including a script which will check for the latest versions of scripts. One of my favorate scripts now I got 1meg broadband is consumption junction which streams nicely and makes me and sarah laugh, hurll, scream and gape. Scary place, its advertises its self as – new fresh sick free adult humor, tasteless dirty jokes, and free video clips. Anyhow its all fun and makes using xbmc even more great to use.

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    Microsoft interested in interaction ideas

    Windows logo

    Via Ben Metcalfe's blog, I hear Microsoft are opening interaction/deign Competition to design and share a vision for the next Windows. I assume they mean Longhorn? Anyhow I agree this is a good move for Microsoft, even I will enter. This is also a interaction design students dream competition (hint hint). There is a entry kit which is quite a few word files, pdf's and a jpeg. Although, the site's design is a little touchy when it comes to accessability, at least RSS updates is a good move. Maybe Microsoft are really starting to get it? This is quite funny when you read Kevin Rose's entry titled Microsoft, please copy Apple. I douht Microsoft will fully take these ideas submitted on, but would the white castle walls of Apple make such a move? Maybe, maybe not?

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    Safari RSS automatic discovery woes

    What did I learn today? Well thanks to Kelvin. I learned if you want Safari RSS (Safari 2.0) to automaticly discovery your RSS feeds which you have put into the head of a html page. You will need something like this…

    < link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/?flavor=rss2" />

    Important things to notice. If you use a type of application/rdf+xml Safari will ignore it. Do not put Alternative as the rel attribute if you want it to work. The funny thing is every single other RSS reader I have used and seen finds rdf feeds using application/rdf+xml no problem. Even Firefox does not have a problem with this attribute type. I have yet to test Safari RSS with ATOM feeds, but I'm deeply concerned that application/atom+xml will not be acceptable for Safari either. Well its only days till OSX 10.4 offically launches here so we shall find out more then. Apple, the little things you always got to do differently…

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    Tiger RSS screensaver

    Engadget RSS Screensaver

    Kelvin was talking to me about RSS in the new Safari RSS browser. And I mentioned the buzz about the new RSS screensaver, which I forgot to ask him about last time. Well he sent me a link to a quicktime movie of the screensaver in action. Although its quite wanky, I love it! My pocketpc has a passive RSS section for the today screen which works for grabbing you eye once in a while with new news. Well this is the logical conclusion of the same idea. There has been lots of talk about its usability, but you know what I got a RSS reader on my xbox and its works in the same way. Just passively grabbing your eye when something interesting comes along.

    So I'm not getting a mac anytime soon, so what can I do? Well with some searching I found this which RSS screensaver quite nice. Accenture also has one, which I have yet to try. This tutorial also looks quite useful. I give Apple the fact that these screensavers are no where near as juicy as theres but I'm sure someone will do something simlar soon. I was actually thinking, if you combine a VRML screensaver with a XMLhttpRequest and some well thought out XSL. You could build something quite striking.

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    Structured blogging, semantics and tags

    I have been meaning to blog about the structured blogging idea for quite some time now. The idea is this…

    Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that – formatting blog entries around their content.

    On another level, it’s a bit more complicated – what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers – other programs, sites, and aggregators – better understand the content.

    Yep great can not disagree with that. Greg from Blogdigger has been thinking about this too. The overall concept is a interesting one for myself, but I see lots of connections with the semantic blogging idea which has been pioneered by the great guys at HP Research Labs, for quite some time now. Generally Semantic blogging for me seems to be adding machine readable meta-data to the content of the blog entry. Blojsom for ages has had meta ability for years now, which I have not really made full use of yet. But theres lots of work already moving ahead in this area around FOAF, XFN and Tagging or Folksonomy.

    With Friend of a Friend (FOAF) its easy to put a link to a persons name and there FOAF profile. I'm sure it would be trivial to add a rel attribute to the link for more context. Which leads nicely on the XFN idea which is exactly that. Using rel attributes and a classification of types to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. Works well but I would like to get rid of the classification and go more fuzzy like tagging. The best examples of tagging full stop has to be Del.icio.us, Flickr and others but tagging on personal blogs is still quite new. Oreilly's radar points to whats possible with a little time and lots of meta-data in entries. Technorati makes this possible via there site. For example I have tagged and in this entry and sent them a ping to make sure they pick it up. Theres nothing special in the links besides the rel attribute which is set to tag.

    I also have to agree with Greg about what happens to the meta-data beyond the blog. I really want to see RSS feeds with the same meta-data making its way towards aggregator via namespaces and rdf. GRDDL is good and well worth looking into for the future. But once again this is all covered in the semantic blogging ideas. It has been a long time in coming but I disagree that the time is right. Blogging Clients need to change to reflect these changes otherwise no one except a handfull of people are going to manually put in meta-data into there posts. I will because i'm jazzed about meta-data and semantic blogging, others will not. Even if the benefits are different looking entries on there own blogs.

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    The importance of open data

    Xtech 2005 conference

    Miles sent me the link to the O'reilly Radar which I have never seen before. Anyhow the Tim Oreilly talks about the xtech conference which I'm also involved in and how open data is a wee bit more experimental than the other tracks. The BBC and RSS is mentioned which is good for myself, Kevin and Joel.

    If you are going to Xtech 2005, please let me know. I'm really hoping to soak as much in as humanly possible. Edd's been doing some interesting things already in the name of Open data. On Saturday he turned the Xtech 2005 schedule into xml and asked people to remix it. The file can be found here as a grid.xml. However Dan Connolly was quick on the take and converted the raw xml into a ical which can be pulled into a modern calendar application. So cool, and all the XSL's are available for anyone to pull apart and learn more. I love remix culture.

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    The Last season of 24 for myself

    Call in Richards, its time for torture!

    Spoiler alert! I have watched up to episode 19 of the show 24, if you are watching on TV in the UK and do not want to know whats happening in 24. Please do not read this entry.

    OK I'm putting my hands up! This is the last season of I will be watching unless a U-Turn is done in the last 5 episodes. Sarah wrote a entry about this exact issue but I got my own unique way of covering this area. But first let me explain why me and Sarah are so pissed off with 24

    This season of has highlighted torture in ways which previous seasons have never done. Yes they had torture but in season 4 they have gone too far. I mean they are torture everyone who is supected of being a terrorist. But in episode 18 they went a step too far, a suspect which was captured with a supected terrorist was pulled into CTU (counter terrorism unit) and was about to be torture when Amnesty Global steped in and stopped them. Yes thats right Amnesty Global and they were called by the head terrorist when the suspect was captured as a way of stalling CTU from getting information out of him. (I mean this is so wrong on so many levels). Then this lawyer was poirtrayed as smug and getting in the way of the justice process. (yeah and some people actually believe this?). According to Sarah, this lawyer played a similar smug role to the one he played on Sex in the City (Evan Handler). (this could be pure chance or more likely a thought in the producers when hiring him). Anyhow, most of the CTU staff saw Amnesty international sorry, global (yes its so obvious that you cant help but accidentally say it – more on this later) getting in the way. Then the camera turns to Jack, who is the star of the show who just came in from one of his mini missions and I thought for one moment Jack would put them all right. But I was so wrong, yep so wrong! Jack turns round and can not believe this smug lawyer is getting in the way. He actually at one point questions the lawyer and comes to the conclusion that with the 10mins of capturing the suspect and this lawyer turning up, Amnesty international global must have had there strings pulled by the terrorist (make of the link what you will).
    Anyhow, they never quite finished the issue as Jack came to the idea that letting the suspect go and leaving his job would be enough to allow him to torture the suspect without a link back to CTU. So when the suspect finally left CTU (yeah even he spelt the trap and wanted to stick around CTU) without the lawyer, Jack was waiting and broke his fingers till he told him the information he wanted to hear. In which sidestepping the political mess they had got themselves into earlier in the episode. Clever but in which opening up a can of worms about taking the law into your own hands.

    Anyway, this certainly isn't where it ends. Me and Sarah are going to edit 24 and put it online for people to see and decide for themselves. If all goes well, we may also start going back through previous episodes and start pulling out previous tortures. This is all very timely when you have the tortures of Abu Ghraib. And lets also not forget the mass beating in our jails and prisons everyday. Yep as Sarah says, 24 has made its final steps over the line and into strictly Government Propaganda. There free to do what they like, but I do not need to watch no more.

    Some reaction to 18th Hour/episode of 24.

    Only 6 more hours…

    Some things I learned from last night's 24:
    1) It's okay for the government to torture maybe-terrorists to gain information
    2) Amnesty International is able to help protect said maybe-terrorists
    3) Keifer is total badass. Okay, this isn't new. I already knew this. But I think I heard about 12 fingers breaking when he was torturing Joe Prado. Is that possible?

    Ryan wrote Why I hate Fox, Fox has ruined 24. He sounds honestly more pissed off that even me and Sarah.

    Aside from the very, very obvious dig at Amnesty International, a well-respected NGO that works to stop persecution and torture around the world, Fox is clearly pushing the agenda that American agents should be free to use torture whenever and wherever they see fit.

    He goes on and talks about Abu Ghraib and extreme situations. But then turns his attention to something which me and Sarah noticed but didnt get around to talking about because we so outraged with the torturing.

    If this wasn't enough, the new President is essentially a poorly-done caricature of John Kerry. I think the only way they could've painted him as a weaker, more indecisive character would be if they had him begging the terrorists not to hurt him. It was brutal. Oh, and of course he agreed with “Amnesty Global”, so he's clearly the enemy of freedom.

    Robert puts it bluntly, 24 – a right winger's wet dream.

    Since the beginning of this season, I've noticed Jack Bauer's increasing bloodlust when it comes to torturing possible terrorist suspects.

    Last night, the right-wing, fascistic neocon agenda was crystallized as never before.

    Air Force One has been shot down, and the president is in critical condition. The 25th amendment has been invoked and the VP sworn in. The new president is portrayed as weak, fearful and indecisive — and his worst crime seems to be that he wants to check the legality of the issue before allowing Jack to torture an American citizen who hasn't been charged with anything. Why, that weasel! I was waiting for them to reveal that he's also gay.

    But the first of the two really evil characters in last night's episode was the slimy “Amnesty Global” lawyer (read: ACLU) who wants to protect the terrorist; after all, it's clear that the ACLU hates America and loves terrorists.

    Oh, and don't think we didn't catch the plot point that it was the terrorist leader who called in the ACLU, I mean, the “Amnesty Global” lawyer in the first place, because we all know that the ACLU is controlled by terrorists.

    The other evil character was the unnamed and unseen “two-bit judge” who issued a restraining order that the American citizen who hasn't been charged with anything should not be tortured or have his Constitutional rights violated. Because we all know, after all, that judges love terrorists and hate America, that's why we simply MUST do away with an independent judiciary.

    Malvolio joins in the kicking of Fox. Okay, 24 just jumped the shark.

    But even more so, this is an obvious dig at all lily-livered liberal wimps who would rather protect evil people's rights than destroy terrorism. Except in Fox's fevered wingnut paranoid view of the universe, this could never happen. No judge would issue such an order without a hearing. Most judges, actually, defer to government (and then there's that secret Federal Intelligence Court that almost never turns down any requests for wiretaps or search warrants). This is complete bullshit, except on Fox.

    Others talk about some of the other mistakes made in the previous 24. Some random 24 Thoughts

    Jefferson City Iowa? There is no Jefferson City Iowa.
    So they send in 15 agents to arrest one potential terrorist, but they send in only Jack to pick up the nuclear codes?
    The Secretary of State /images/emoticons/laugh.gifick Cheney look-a-like) stated that the convoy was struck in mountain area….in Iowa? Really?

    . He also highlights the fact the liberal lawyer gets into a Mazda Miata, which indicates he could be gay too? Sarah also shouted at the TV when they suggested an area between Illinois and Iowa which has mountainous terrain.

    Anaxila Babbles outlines the plot of the last 20mins better that I did.

    1. the good guys caught the bad guy down “by the pier” and
    2. transported him back to their field office in the middle of LA, where
    3. they prepared a nice menu of torture but were
    4. interrupted by the arrival of a pesky Amnesty International (excuse me, “Amnesty Global”) lawyer* – in person – who was
    5. waving a court order from a Federal judge requiring that the lawyer be present for any conversations with said prisoner.

    And leaving the best to last, found through my search in Blogdigger. television without pity's take on hour 18.

    Hey, you! Yeah, you. Are you opposed to your government using torture to get information on terrorists? Do you think that organizations like Amnesty International actually do important work? Do you believe in the rule of law, due process, civil rights, and the Constitution? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the writers and producers of 24 would like you to know that you're a fucking pussy.

    I like Monkeys and Typewriters thought there could be some wicked twist to the whole thing going on in 24, but like him/her episode 18 pretty much blew that out of the water. 24 is turning lame, its lost its edge. From the mistakes there making about mountains in Iowa (even I have been there and witness how flat that state is) to the stupid hyper time its taking people to get from one place to another, its getting silly! But if it was only that I could dump it and fill my time with something far better. bring in Richards is being used far too much and the politics is getting crazy now! The fine people at Amnesty International must be dumb struck at this lame attempt of American Government Propaganda. I dread to think whats going to happen next week, but I'm sure John Kerry, vice…, chicken…, damm it! Presendant pussy will do something very unpopular and maybe be overruled by Dick Cheney, I mean his look-a-likey….

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