It ain't necessarily so. I might use that light source more. I might use more of them and light things up more. I might use entirely new applications, like the little solar cell and battery driven LED lights that people put in their yards and gardens.

A new study suggests that if we extrapolate historical and pre-historical trends, we arrive at, not great energy savings, but rather greater use of light sources. And that will mean greater human productivity and greater human enjoyment of life.

In this paper, we provide new projections of the consumption of light and associated energy. Rather than assuming that consumption of light is insensitive to the cost of light, we assume a sensitivity consistent with simple extrapolations of past behaviour into the future. In addition, we analyse the interplay between lighting, human productivity and energy consumption. After all, lighting is consumed not to waste energy, but to increase human productivity—energy consumption is simply the cost of that increased productivity. That this has been so in the past is self-evident; that it will be so in the future is not unlikely.

Which means that new lighting technologies won't necessarily lead to energy savings, less carbon, etc. So all the puritans who want us to live in some fantastic pseudo-primitive ascetic idyll are pushing technologies that will lead to increased and more conspicuous consumption.

A group of young environmentalists is helping voters turn the tables on politicians.

The Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) has set up a website that allows voters to deliver an automated telephone message to their local federal MP.

The messages, known as robocalls, are more commonly associated with presidential campaigns in the United States.

I don't suppose it calls their home phones? Or their mobiles? At three in the morning?

Vivien Kellems would likely approve.

In the 1970s, Connecticut Republican governor Thomas Meskill made a back-room deal with the Democrats that he would sign a state income tax into law if they would give him some other things he wanted. On the last day of the session, the legislature, dominated by the Democrats, passed the income tax and Meskill signed it. Kellems, already disenchanted with the federal income tax, went into high gear. She started calling people, who called people, etc. And they called their state legislators. At 3:00 AM. (Recall, this was before caller ID and before answering machines became ubiquitous.) They snail mailed their legislators used teabags.

Gov. Meskill called an emergency session of the legislature, and they repealed the state income tax. Thanks to Vivien Kellems, her tea bags and her phone calls. To add ignominy to insult, Meskill did not seek the Republican nomination for re-election because of the income tax and the back room deal that brought it in. Meskill later admitted that the income tax was the greatest political mistake of his career.

You don't suppose the botnet controllers were running Windows, do you?

Users of Firefox on Windows should note that the botnet code has hooks for Firefox. So maybe Firefox on Windows isn't all that much more secure than Internet Exploder on Windows?

"Patent trolls" were bad enough. Now there are "copyright trolls," and one in particular is suing anyone who has quoted content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (LVRJ).

So says "Brad" at Wendy McElroy.com in the first of two articles. Apparently, seen how well patent trolls like SCO have done, companies are buying up the content of web sites and suing people who quote them.

Now you would think (if you aren't a lawyer) that quoting the articles in controversy would be "fair use". But fair use is an "affirmative defense", meaning it's up to the defendants to raise the issue, after they've been sued and shelled out the big bucks for attorneys and other costs. So in many cases it would be cheaper to buy a license to the material than defend a law suit. Hence the term "copyright troll".

In response "Brad" and Ms McElroy are boycotting the LVJR and other sites where the copyright is owned by copyright troll company Righthaven LLC. (No, I'm not going to link to them.) "Brad"'s second article deals with how to boycott the LVRJ and other Righthaven sites. You, gentle reader, might do the same.

One effect of their boycott is that Ms McElroy, a leading libertarian thinker and writer, is now unable to link to columns for the LVJR by Vin Suprynowicz, another leading libertarian thinker and writer. The irony being that libertarians generally uphold property rights. If you want to see some of those columns, sorry, you'll have to google for them.

Now, what happens when they go bankrupt? The database to which you have contributed is an asset of the bankrupt company. It will go to the creditors. And they are not bound by any privacy policy. Worse, often the original credits have sold the debt to debt collection agencies, who often have all the moral compunctions of a shark.

All the more reason to keep your sensitive data to yourself.

Call centre spivs get dose of their own medicine

A small telco has decided to turn the tables on irritating unsolicited calls by setting up a block of dummy phone numbers that play messages to trick marketers into lenghty and pointless sales pitches.

The wheeze is the work of Andrews and Arnold (AAISP), a small business provider, and was prompted by a deluge of unsolicited calls to its office lines over the past month.

The firm has reserved a block of four million VoIP lines for the prank. All are registered with the Telephone Preference Service, so any unsolicited marketing calls they get are likely to be the result of illegal use of autodialler software.

So says the Register. Not having four milion spare lines handy, my policy is a bit different. Still, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of jerks.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes on its blog:

In its suit against Power Ventures, Facebook claims that the tool violates criminal law because Facebook's terms of service ban users from accessing their information through "automated means."

Er, isn't using a computer "automated means"? What about using a Perl script and a cron job to update one's facebook account? How about using a front end for several social networking sites, like gwibber, found inter alia on Ubuntu 10.4 "good buddy"? Never mind that Facebook supplies a means of automating access through its API.

But that's a mere cavail. The EFF continues:

This is not an esoteric business issue, because the legal theories Facebook is pushing forward would make it a crime not to comply with terms of service.

The EEF's amicus brief in the case argues:

Amicus believes that merely providing a tool to assist an authorized user in accessing his or her own data in a novel manner cannot and should not form the basis for criminal liability. To hold otherwise, as Facebook urges this Court to do, will create a massive expansion of the scope of California criminal law, hinging liability on arbitrary and often confusing terms chosen by websites in the contracts of adhesion they present to users or in their cease and desist letters, thus giving these private parties immense power to decide when criminal liability attaches. This creates both legal uncertainty and the risk of capricious enforcement.

Exactly so.

Anyone can write a cease and desist letter. Sending one does not create any criminal liability. It is at most a threat to sue, i.e. a threat of civil action.

Facebook argues that it is criminal for Power to continue to scrape Facebook's web site because Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to Power. But it isn't Power using the "automated means" to access the user data, it is Power's end users. Has Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to Power's users? I suspect not.

Not that I need one, but this seems to me to be a sufficient reason to avoid using Facebook.

Thanks to WendyMcElroy.com for bringing this issue to my attention.

• Better handling when the GPS receiver going AWOL, say from the user unplugging it.
• More and better error messages in the progress bar.

Now Google joins the parade. It appears Google has built the ability to yank an application into its telephone OS, Android.

But Android is based on Linux. How long before someone writes a "kill switch killer"? And if someone did, would you put it on your phone?

There are any number of arguments one can make for Linux. Technical superiority. Security. etc. But there is a much deeper one, which Slate's Dan Gillmor articulates as follows:

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells -- and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has "made mistakes" in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The "enlightened dictator" is fiction. And dangerous.

"[A] direct repudiation of its own history…", indeed. Recall that the Apple II was an open system. The peripheral connectors were documented. The OS was well documented. Anyone could and did write software for the thing. Your correspondent ported Forth to it. Apple competed with S-100 bus computers, which were, if anything, even more open. What killed both of them off was time, technological growth, and the IBM PC, another very open product.

The first Macs were closed boxes. No expansion slots, and no choice in operating systems. The IBM PC competed rings around it, which Apple effectively admitted when they added NuBus expansion slots and later went to Intel's PCI bus.

The PC was so open that IBM lost control of the thing, and smaller, nimbler, more innovative companies out-competed IBM in a market IBM created. IBM's attempt at a command-and-control ecology, the PS2, failed so miserably that you can be forgiven for thinking that "PS2" stands for "Play Station 2".

It will be interesting to follow Mr. Gillmor's adventures. But I wonder if he will apply the lesson more broadly, from computer and software markets to whole economies.