One further note on the copyright theme: extending copyright to life plus 70, life plus 95, and beyond is very often castigated as a corrupt concession to the interests of Big Media. It is, but I’ve seen few explanations of why it happens anyway.

If a studio spends $100m on a new film, it can collect royalties for the next 120 years. A hundred million bucks might sound like a lot of money, but the studio bets that this is a good deal anyway.

If the copyright term is reduced to 25 years (not an uncommon suggestion for copyright reformists), it can only collect royalties for about a fifth the length of time. For a popular film, that might mean a fifth the revenue, the upshot being that they would only be willing to spend $20m on a new film.

Long copyright terms create a market for creative works which would otherwise be very difficult to finance. You might legitimately argue that $100m+ blockbusters are all worthless crap, but they are nevertheless the most popular type of movie, and although a short copyright term might enable hackers to make a GNU+Linux distribution with a working Flash applet preinstalled, it would mean no $250m Spider-Man 3.

Which do people really want, and should they get it?

Surprise surprise, the PS3 is a big disappointment

Who could’ve guessed that Sony would release a technically impressive piece of hardware with shitty, incomplete, broken, crippled software? And no good games?

Grand Theft Auto 4 - possibly set in London - is just about the only game worth looking forward to, and that won’t be released for another year. The only positive at the moment is the PS3’s potential to win the HD format war, because there is no way to justify buying into either HD system while the future of neither is guaranteed.

I went into Currys Digital (who changed their name from Dixons when everyone figured out the name “Dixons” was synonymous with “could’ve got it cheaper online”) a couple of weeks ago. Not a single one of the big TVs was proper HD - they were all 720p, which the PS3 as launched will not support for HD movies! That’s right, the shiny new 1080i/p content gets scaled down to 480p on 720p sets. Early adopters will be furious when they realise they’ve been conned into buying low definition HD sets. Suckers, I say.

It turns out one page is consuming 85% of my bandwidth, so I added adverts to it. I also added them to the next few most popular pages.

I wonder…

Update 2006/11/23: Not looking good. I will keep the ads on until I receive one click, and see how much I get from it. It’s looking extremely unlikely that I’d be able to cover the hosting costs until I started shill-blogging about pop products.

Update 2006/11/28: Bollocks to that. After seeing this site on a 1024×768 display I remembered the main reason why adverts are bad. Google’s terms of service for Adsense include the following paragraph:

7. Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google’s prior written consent. “Google Confidential Information” includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as “Confidential” or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority.

Since I no longer wish to participate in the program, it is arguable whether I am still bound by the confidentiality clause. It wouldn’t be a very good argument though, especially seeing as paragraph 10 specifically excludes confidentiality obligations and “BREACH OF ANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS” from its liability-for-damages-waiver. However, 7(c) and 7(i) allow me to state the following:

Successful requests: 19,448
Gross payments: $0bn

I watched Channel 4’s Codex the other weekend, for two reasons:

1. Tony Robinson presents
2. It’s billed as a new Crystal Maze

What utter horserind.

Update 2006/11/28: Holy jesustongs! The puzzle designer of both shows replies in a comment below!

The concept is neat enough: a team rushes around the British Museum at night, solving historical puzzles and attempting to crack a code. Tony Robinson has the historical and investigative credentials to host such a task, but it falls down on every other point.

The first thing they show you is the “Codex”, a substitution cipher which is slowly revealed as the team completes tasks. Unfortunately, it’s designed for morons. If you have a PVR, you can press pause and crack it in about 4 minutes before any of the code letters have been revealed. Since that would obviously be too hard, they give you two letters for free.

The mini games which form the meat of the programme are not-even-glorified trivialities that you might find in one of those puzzle magazines on sale at airports, designed to blunt your mind for a 12 hour plane flight.

They do a spot-the-difference using an image and a digitally altered image of an ancient artifact.

They do a memory test by showing you a picture then asking you about it.

They even play a guess-the-weight-of-the-object game to eliminate players.

The only halfway clever part was the what-does-this-symbol-mean test, where you are shown some kind of ancient ideograph that is still pictorial enough to figure out the object it represents. They could’ve taken it much further, say, by matching whole sentences to their translations. Blind translation could be a gameshow in its own right.

At the end, more letters of the Codex are revealed and the loser-players attempt to decipher it in order to tell the potential-winner which of five objects to choose.

That’s it.

The overall structure does seem to be based on The Crystal Maze - walking around themed zones, players being left behind, mini games leading to a final challenge, the victory message (”I cracked the Codex”/”I cracked the Crystal Maze”)… there’s even a genuine link between the shows: Tony Robinson’s Maid Marian and Her Merry Men did an episode parodying The Crystal Maze.

Unfortunately, the big picture similarities are nullified by details so tame that I am personally offended by the comparison.

The Crystal Maze had Richard O’Brien being his own eccentric self. Tony Robinson is sadly subdued, struggling to fill the boring stretches of time as the tasks are mechanically completed.

The British Museum is an amazing location, but it’s not a set, no matter how many blue lights you install.

Most importantly, The Crystal Maze was hard. The mini games had a brutal time limit, and Richard O’Brien wouldn’t hesitate to lock players in if they were a second late getting out. The physical games made players pant and sweat. The mental games asked genuinely difficult questions. The skill games had players banging the controls in frustration. There were no practice rounds and no second chances. A victory in a Crystal Maze game actually meant something.

Codex is heart-achingly dumbed down, and I bet it had a huge budget too. Amazingly enough, The Crystal Maze is currently back on TV at 7pm every weekday on “Challenge TV”, one of those mystery channels that you only ever get to by accident. It’s not listed in most TV guides, and is way, way down the list on NTL’s on-screen guide thingy. It’s channel 152, if you must know.

And you must!