British Airways announces today a pre-tax loss of £45m for the April-to-June period, blaming both the recent industrial dispute with checking in staff (which left tens of thousands of passengers enduring days of chaos) and falling demand. What I therefore want to know is - why are we even considering the expansion of our biggest airports if our own national carrier is suffering from falling traffic?

Full BBC news story

Court backs thumbnail image linking (but not full-size images)

Search engines' display of miniature images is fair use under copyright law, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, but the legality of presenting full-size renditions of visual works is yet to be determined.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision is a partial win for defendant Arriba Soft--an image search engine now known as Ditto.com--in its case against photographer Leslie Kelly. Kelly sued Arriba Soft in April 1999 for copyright infringement when the company's software had recorded miniatures, or thumbnails, and full sizes of Kelly's digital photos and made them accessible via its search engine.

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Read the full article

Glasgow city zoo (Calderpark) is to close and the zoo has stated that if the 3 elderly Himalayan bears are not deemed "fit enough to be transferred" they will be killed. If enough people protested then maybe they would reconsider this terrible course of action.

In Glasgow they can open new pizza huts and burger kings at a rate of about 1 per second but the city has stated that there's not enough cash around to look after these beautiful bears if they cannot be transferred.

Please email Glasgow city Council and voice your protest ! These creatures are magnificent and deserve a dignified old age.

Glasgow City Council feedback form

Student Busted for PHP Use

Topeka, KS [yes, that's in the US of A] - High school sophomore Brett Tyson was suspended today after teachers learned he may be using PHP. "A teacher overheard him say that he was using PHP, and as part of our Zero-Tolerance policy against drug use, he was immediately suspended. No questions asked..."

Read the full story

Spent the day trying to get Apple's new instant messaging client iChat to function between home (ADSL connection) and work. Found a cludge driver that allows use of some USB cameras (instead of the Firewire ones Apple stupidly insist you use) via VersionTracker. Never did get iChat to work with either video or audio although text worked just fine. Something about firewalls, we guess.

Links:
Apple's iChat (in Beta)
iChatUSBCam Use a USB webcam with iChat AV, even on an old G3

Aviation Gets and Easy Ride states a new report from a committeee of MPs. The Environmental Audit Committee says the government-supported increase in the number of flights will wipe out any envinromental gains made by their pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It also accuses the Department of Transport of overt bias in their calculations to justify airport expansion, saying that the current aviation policy is both unsustainable and unacceptable.

This on top of recent annoucements of massive road expansion and likely cut backs in rail improvements - where are your green credentials now, New Labour?

Source: BBC teletext news

Had a job believing this when I first read it:

Blake's 7 set for hi-tech return

One of the stars of cult sci-fi series Blake's 7 has signed a deal to bring the show back to screens more than 20 years after it ended. Paul Darrow, who played the ruthless anti-hero Avon, is in a consortium that has acquired the rights to the show from the widow of its creator, Terry Nation.

Full story on the BBC website

First photos from the new ice hockey season are from the THF (The Hockey Forum) charity game at Milton Keynes this evening.

The full gallery (lots of photos) is here.

I doubt anyone saw the program 'Apply Immediately' last night on BBC2 - probably not as it was on way past any self-respecting students' bed-time.

"I've seen too many people with sick in their beards" says Grant Squibb after ten years working to get homeless kids off drugs and off the streets. Close to burn out, Grant would like a career as far removed from his current job as possible. Photography is his choice, but thrown in at the deep end at the age of 35, does he have the ability and the desire to succeed?

Well, er, no I think was the obvious answer. Funny thing was that if he'd have stuck to photographing the subjects he already new well, he'd have done ok, but the program wheels in some world-renowned 'social' photographer (probably not the correct term I know) whose name escapes me, with whom he promptly goes to shoot his parents, thus producing, from the both of them, what I considered the most boring photos I've yet to witness from anything on telly regarding photography (hence my somewhat pathetic attempts, which are also mind-numbingly dull). And he didn't even appear to know the first thing about the technical aspects of photography - aperture's affect on depth-of-field and the like. Someone mentioned that he didn't have the skill of the average first year City & Guilds student, let alone a graduate, and yet expects to become a professional virtually over night.

Sadly, I am now sorely tempted to march around our market town tomorrow morning, sporting a fashionably wide lens.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/business/programmes/apply/job4.shtml