ITWeb reports that a letter has been sent to the police, half the government oversight committees and the presidency, in which fraud and kickback accusations related to the hiring of staff in South Africa’s Department of Communications are alleged.

It quotes the official opposition’s Dene Smuts:

It has been clear for some time that the quality and qualifications of many of the department’s personnel – with notable exceptions like Dr Harold Wesso – is not up to the standard one expects from a key government department which can make or break SA’s communications sector. If [the allegations] are found to be true, it would explain the poor quality of the appointments.

The department’s heavy-handed management of the telecommunications sector has failed dismally. It has led to sky-high pricing, underdevelopment, and lack of service to poor areas, largely because it confused mere privatisation with free market competition, as described in this damning report by Robert B. Horwitz and Willie Currie.

It may once have been worth giving the policy of “managed liberalisation” a chance, but it’s been clear for some years now that the system is broken, and that big-bang liberalisation couldn’t possibly be worse than the mess the Department of Communication has wrought. Let the regulator do basic jobs like policing spectrum use, and leave both existing and new operators free to build whatever networks they want.

The story notes that the department has a 37% vacancy rate. Here’s hoping that this scandal will make it 100% by Christmas.

The intention was to design virtual reality goggles that turned what the user saw into ASCII art. Then this Russian fellow figured he might as well add the whole gamut of image filters to the device, so now you can see your world posterized, as a moving pencil sketch, Matrix-like ASCII text art, or as an impressionist painting.

As this post says, totally useless, but somehow cool.

An interesting article by Patrick Ross reminded me of a website to which I recently linked, which contains a collection of articles and resources about green issues. The site itself isn’t very interesting, but I was a little taken aback by its “fair use” notice:

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, and so on. It is believed that this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

This is, to put it bluntly, so much self-serving bull. In what way is the reproduction of full copyright works “fair use”?

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