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Rebel Code: Linus Torvalds, Open Source, and the War for the Soul of Software by Glyn Moody (V)

Once Stallman had decided on this new course of action - creating a free operating system - he soon made "the major design decision - that we would follow Unix," he says. In retrospect, it might have seemed the obvious choice, but at the time this was by' no means the case because Stallman knew little about the system. "I'd never used it," he says. "I'd only read a little about it, but it seemed like it was a good, clean design [that had some] nice clean and powerful ideas."

But the main impetus for his choice grew once again out of his experiences during the diaspora of the hacker community at the AI Lab. "Digital had discontinued the PDP - 1O" - the last machine on which ITS had run - "which meant that ITS was now completely unusable on any modern computer," Stallman says. "And I didn't want that kind of thing to happen again. The only way to prevent it from happening again was to write a portable system."

Stallman wanted an operating system that could be easily transferred from one type of hardware to another. Because most operating systems had been conceived as the housekeeping software for one type of computer, portability was the exception rather than the rule. "Unix was, at least as far as I knew, the only portable system that really had users on different kinds of computers. So it was portable not just in theory but in actual practice," Stallman says.

Another important reason why Stallman chose Unix as his model, he explains, was that he "decided to make the system compatible with Unix so people who had already written programs for Unix would be able to run them on this system. People who knew how to use Unix would know how to use this system without being required to learn something new." Once again, as he had with Emacs, he was building on something that already existed, but making it better - in this case, by creating a Unix - like system that could be shared freely

Although the project was born at this most unhappy time for Stallman, the name he chose for his new project showed a typical hacker humor. His Unix work-alike would be called GNU, an acronym that stood for "GNU'S Not Unix," and which thus explained itself self referentially. This kind of recursion is often used as a programming technique, and applying it to words is highly popular amongst hackers.

The name GNU also proved a fruitful source of inspiration for similarly self-referential names for many of the programs that went to make up the overall GNU project. Another important virtue of Unix was that its design "consists of a lot of small pieces, often fairly small pieces," Stallman explains; to create a Unix-like system, "what you do is you just have to write each piece. So I sat down and started writing small pieces."

Although this makes the entire process sound disarmingly simple, writing these "small pieces" involved reproducing work that had taken hundreds of people fifteen years - an even harder task than when Stallman matched the team of programmers at Symbolics. In his fight against that company, he was able to look at the source code - the underlying lines of programming - to help him write his own versions: hut with Unix this was not an option.

"I certainly never looked at the source code of Unix," Stallman says. "Never. I once accidentally saw a file, and when I realized it was part of Unix source code, I stopped looking at it." The reason was simple: The source code "was a trade secret, and I didn't want to be accused of stealing that trade secret," he says. "I condemn trade secrecy, I think it's an immoral practice, but for the project to succeed, I had to work within the immoral laws that existed."

Once again Stallman had set himself an almost impossible task that would require an exhaustive dedication and sacrifice - which was perhaps part of the attraction. "I wasn't certain I could finish the job," he recalls, "but it wasn't important for me to know whether I could finish the job; the point was I was going to start it."

The GNU project formally began, in January 1984, when Stallman started working on a replacement for an obscure programmer's tool called Yacc. One reason he chose this was "because there was a similar program available called Bison" - another typical hacker pun - but it wasn't compatible with Yacc; it was missing some features." Stallman obtained permission from the author to make Bison compatible with Yacc, and in doing so, he put in place the first small stone of the GNU edifice.

Having limbered up with this relatively minor task, Stallman moved on to one of the most important. One of the key elements of a Unix system is the C compiler. Programs written in C are text files whose contents are lines of instructions following the rules of the language. Before a computer can obey the instructions contained in the source code, they must be converted into binaries - the sequence of Os and 1s that the processor chip can understand.

This is the job of the C compiler - a kind of mediator between the source code and binaries, which is therefore an indispensable tool for every C programmer. As such, it held a particular importance for Stallman in his endeavor to create a new, freely available version of Unix. A poor C compiler might seriously damage the chances of GNU's being taken seriously; equally, a great C compiler that was free would immediately make people sit up and take notice of the project.

Once more, Stallman tried to build on an existing program to minimize the amount of work that needed doing, and something he had heard about seemed to be perfect for the job. The Amsterdam Compiler Kit was a powerful compiler that ran on Unix and could compile not just C but most of the languages then in use. It had been written by the U.S. academic Andrew Tanenbaum at the Free University of Amsterdam. Perhaps slightly misled by another name for the software - the Free University Compiler Kit - Stallman wrote to Tanenbaum to ask whether he could use it for his GNU project.

As Stallman recalls, [Tanenbaum] said, "The university is free; the compiler isn't. Why don't you give up that silly idea of a free system? I'd like to have some utilities to distribute with the compiler to boost sales. Contribute some utilities to me and I'll give you a share of the profits." What seemed eminently reasonable - generous even - to Tanenbaum, was an insult to Stallman, for whom proprietary software of the kind represented by the Amsterdam Compiler Kit was precisely what he was hoping to combat with his GNU project.

Tanenbaum doesn't recall what he said exactly, but he explains why he was unable to give permission for the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK) to be used by Stallman as part of GNU: "I think we may have already signed a contract to sell ACK commercially via a company in the U.S. and one in Europe," he says. "Our research group needed that money to support graduate students, etc., and as I recall, we were already committed when he came around."

Despite these laudable aims, Stallman saw only Tanenbaum's refusal to aid him in his free software crusade. His response was identical to that he had made to Symbolics a few years earlier: He determined to write his own rival software that would match or beat the offending code.

In September 1984, after an unsuccessful attempt to adapt yet another compiler, Stallman returned to his most successful program so far, Emacs. The code for this new Emacs, which became known as GNU Emacs, had "nothing in common with the original Emacs, which was written in TECO," Stallman says. And in another symbolic act of return to his AI Lab roots, he decided to rewrite most of GNU Emacs in Lisp, that "powerful and elegant language" Stallman prized so highly.

By early 1985, GNU Emacs was able to edit files, and Stallman made it available publicly. This was an important step because it represented the first time people could use and judge GNU software. Even though the free GNU operating system was almost nonexistent, people could still use Emacs: The Unix compatibility that was Stallman's constant guide meant that GNU Emacs could run on any Unix and provide him with a huge potential constituency of users.

First, "people started asking for and writing improvements, and the result was I kept working on Emacs a lot, much longer that I'd expected to, and it ended up much better than I'd originally planned on its being," recalls Stallman. This approach of releasing code and encouraging feedback and modifications from users, although not new - it had formed an implicit part of the entire Unix culture for year - became central to the rapid improvement of free software over the next fifteen years. Its adoption in an extreme form for the development of Linux was one of the key factors in its rapid growth and robustness.

The second consequence of making Emacs available was that Stallman could sell it on tape, the standard distribution medium before floppies; this was alongside free distribution on the Internet because at that time few people had access to this fledgling medium. As well as serving users who might otherwise find it difficult to obtain copies, selling tapes bad the even more beneficial effect of giving Stallman an income. "See," he says, "I had quit my job at MIT to start the GNU project. And the reason is I wanted to make sure that MIT would not be in a position to interfere with making GNU software free in the way I wanted to do it. I didn't want to have to beg the MIT administration for permission to do this and then maybe they would insist on spoiling it in some way."

To its credit, the AI Lab allowed Staliman to continue to use its computers, and to sleep in his former office at 545 Tech Square for twelve years. He was even registered to vote at that address. Stallman did retain one significant moment of those happy times: his log - in ID. To this day he signs himself "rms," his original username for the ITS machine, and most of the hacker world knows him by these initials.

Although Stallman says that he lived cheaply - I would have done so for the sake of this project, but I'd always lived cheaply," money was an obvious concern in those early days of GNU. "I didn't know at the beginning whether I would have any sources of income," he recalls, though "for the first year I think I was paid by LMI to update some manuals from MIT." In any case, "the point is." he says. "I was utterly determined to do this; nothing could have intimidated me at that point."

Fortunately, selling GNU Emacs for $150 a tape - "I just thought it would be a good price," he explains - soon provided him with a steady income. "By the middle of the year, I was getting some eight to ten orders a month and that was enough for me to live on [although] I couldn't have saved any money from that alone."

With GNU Emacs out of the way, and perhaps encouraged by its reception and the money he was starting to receive from it, Stallman turned his thoughts to the other projects, including that problematic C compiler. This time, he decided he would not try to adapt a pre - existing program, but would write it all himself. It proved a hugely complex project. "It was the most challenging program I've ever written." he says simply. "It's one that required me to write plans down on paper rather than just code."

Stallman's general approach to coding is quite different. "I start with a sort of vague idea in my head," he says, "and I find some part of the job I can write, and then having written one part will enable me to envision neighboring parts enough that I can write them; and then I basically go through and end up having written the whole thing." This probably explains in part why Unix was so attractive as a model for his GNU' project: Its use of many small elements meant that Stallman could "find some part of the job" he could write - a utility here, a program there - and then "basically go through and end up having written the whole thing."

Stallman called his compiler GCC - for GNU C Compiler. Even more than GNU Emacs, it helped spread the word about the GNU project because GCC proved to be top - class software. "There was a period of a few years when GCC was pretty much the best compiler available for most of the systems it supported," he recalls. "But that wasn't immediate, it took a while of working on optimization before it got to be the best." As with Emacs, this optimization was helped enormously by the comments Stallman received from users once the program was released.

The new GCC also boosted his income further. It "opened up the possibilities of commissions a lot more. People were more interested in commissioning changes in GCC, and in commissioning classes about GCC, than they were doing similar things for Emacs." Stallman says. "I was very glad to have that source of income, especially when the Free Software Foundation was formed. I think it was October 1985; it took over from me the business of selling Emacs tapes, so I didn't have that income any more."

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) represented an important step forward for GNU. "When I started it out, it didn't have the money to hire anyone. Then it had money to hire one person, and it hired one person," he explains. "The point is just that that enabled us to do more work at the same time because there were lots and lots of programs that were missing." Gradually, more of these programs were written, either by Stallman himself or by the growing band of FSF staff and volunteers. "In the earliest years [there were just] two or three people [helping]," he remembers; "by the later 80s, I'd expect there were somewhere between thirty and fifty people."

Two of the other big projects were to create a shell program and a C library. A shell provides the basic interface to the operating system: "If you want to be able to type any commands, you need a shell," say's Stallman. GNU's program is called Bash, which is short for Bourne Again Shell, a play on the Unix shell called the Bourne shell.

The C library is a chunk of auxiliary code that other programs can call. By separating out an entire set of commonly used functions in this way, user programs can be much smaller. Creating a C library for GNU was therefore a key prerequisite before the GNU operating system could run such user programs and do something useful.

Both the C library and Bash were finished around 1990, along with many other elements of the Unix operating system. Still missing, though, in many ways the single most important program of all: the kernel. As its name suggests, the kernel sits at the very heart of the operating system. It acts as housekeeper (handling tasks such as the screen and keyboard) and judge (ensuring that all the competing calls for attention from user programs are handled correctly). Although many other programs are indispensable for a fully functional operating system - for example a C library and a shell - it is the kernel that defines its essence.

That Stallman had left the kernel until last might seem strange given its central nature. In part it was because he had been distracted by his feud with Tanenbaum and his vow that a C compiler would be one of the first programs that he wrote for his GNU system. In addition, it made sense to develop all the programming tools first so that they could then be used in the creation of the kernel.

There was another reason, however. "I was trying to bypass the hardest part of the job." Stallman says. Debugging kernels is difficult because the standard programming tools depend on a functioning kernel. To get round this, Stallman had been on the lookout once more for suitable software that could be adapted - and he had something particular in mind: "I was looking for a microkernel" he says.

A microkernel is a kernel that takes the idea of a small, central adjudicating piece of software to its logical conclusion; it makes all the other housekeeping tasks normally found in a kernel into programs that are controlled just like end-user applications such as word processing and spreadsheets. The pros and cons of this approach with respect to the classic all-in-one kernel - known as a monolithic kernel - form the subject of what hackers call a "religious war" between their respective adherents that rages to this day.

Stallman was interested in microkernels not for reasons of doctrine but because, he says, "that way we could avoid the job of debugging the part of the software that runs on the bare machine" - the underlying hardware. As usual, he was sensibly trying to save time and effort by taking existing code that had tackled one of the harder parts and building on it. He also thought the design provided some "nice features."

Stallman was lucky - or so he thought at the time. "Eventually we found a microkernel that at least was supposedly already developed and working," he says, "and we just had to write the user programs [that] do the jobs . . . normally done by parts of the kernel" to create that missing heart of the GNU operating system, which was dubbed the GNU Hurd.

Unfortunately, the microkernel he found "wasn't already working totally reliably," as he had believed. Moreover, eliminating all the errors from this code proved much more difficult than expected. "It turns out that the debugging environment we had was hard." he explains. "In effect, the problem with this was it was a research project, and in general my policy was to avoid research projects [and] use tried-and-true designs, because a research project is risky. You may try out an idea and find that it doesn't work very well. Anyway, we tried out this design, and found out that it was hard to get it finished."

In fact, "in retrospect, it seems that developing a monolithic kernel would have been maybe faster and easier and might have been the right thing to do" - the first working version of the Hurd wasn't released until 1996. But Stallman is philosophical about the matter: "You see," he says, "any individual software project is just a piece of the GNU project; the GNU project isn't fundamentally about developing this piece of software or that piece of software. GNU, like any operating system, is a collection of many programs. We wrote some, and we obtained some from elsewhere; in the end, we achieved the overall goal of a complete free system."

As Stallman began writing the components of his GNU operating system and released them to the public, one of his primary concerns was to ensure that the programs he and his fellow coders were creating would remain free and open as they were passed on from user to user; simply putting them in the public domain would not achieve this because someone could easily come along and sell the GNU programs as proprietary products. Stallman needed to do something new and radical, namely, to draw up a software license that did not restrict the user's rights, as most did, but that protected them.

He did this first with the GNU Emacs General Public License, in 1985. "I worked with a lawyer to draw it up," he says; he had to make sure that the freedoms he was trying to perpetuate were watertight legally. Under this new "copyleft" - as opposed to copyright - users could copy the program, modify it, and sell the original or the modified versions. They could not modify the rights granted by the copyleft to any user, however; for example, software based on the program they sold had also to be freely available. Similarly, modifications they made to a copylefted program had to be copylefted - and so freely available. Furthermore, if software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) were combined with proprietary (nonfree) code, the resultant combination had to be released under the GPL. In other words, the GNU GPL "converted" software it was used with to its own license, an extraordinarily clever approach to propagating freedom.

This first GNU Emacs General Public License (GPL) was followed later by a GCC GPL and a similar license for several other GNU programs. But Stallman realized that this piecemeal approach was not only inelegant (a cardinal sin among hackers) but also inconvenient because it blocked certain uses. For example. "you couldn't take code from one [program released under a GPL license] and put it in another." Stallman explains, "so I decided that we had better have a single license that could be used for all of them." This was the GNU General Public License - what Stallman calls "the subroutinised license" because "you could drop it verbatim into any program and it would apply," just as programming subroutines can be dropped into other code to save time - and boost their elegance.

Stallman's intent in crafting the GNU GPL was to protect the newly forged liberties that his GNU software embodied. But the GNU GPL had another consequence that would prove key to the success of later free software projects such as Linux.

The freedom to modify a GNU GPL program means that the source code for copylefted software must be available: If the binaries only - the sequence of 0s and 1s - are supplied, modifying the program is impractical and therefore breaches the license. Part of the GNU GPL's effect is therefore to ensure that the source is always available for a program; this is vital if others are to adapt and - especially - improve the program. More - over, the GNU GPL also ensures that such improvements must be freely available, along with their source code, to enable the community as a whole to benefit from the collective advances of all users.

It also minimizes duplication of effort. Once a program carrying out a function is released under copyleft, others can then take this work for granted when they write similar software. There is no need to reinvent the wheel every time a particular type of program is written as is the case with commercial software.

Stallman created in the GNU GPL a kind of written constitution for the hacker world that enshrined basic assumptions about how their community should function. In doing so, he enabled that world to progress far more efficiently than it had in the past when all these "laws" were unwritten. As the use of the GNU GPL became more common, so its power grew, because the more copylefted programs there are the greater the pool for future such programs to draw on; this eases their creation and the pool of GPL'd software grows yet further.

This enormous efficiency acted as one of the main engines in driving the free software projects on to their extraordinary successes during the 1990s. For this alone, and for his work in putting together the GNU system, the computer community's debt to Stallman is immense.

Yet for Stallman this emphasis on inherent efficiency misses the point about the GNU project and about the GNU GPL. His essential concern is freedom, and the GNU project a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

"The overall purpose." Stallman explains, "is to give the users freedom by giving them free software they can use and to extend the boundaries of what you can do with entirely free software as far as possible. Because the idea of GNU is to make it possible for people to do things with their computers without accepting [the] domination of somebody else. Without letting some owner of software say, 'I won't let you understand how this works; I'm going to keep you helplessly dependent on me and if you share with your friends. I'll call you a pirate and put you in jail)'."

"I consider that immoral." Stallman continues, "and I'm working to put an end to that way of life, because it's a way of life nobody should have to be part of, and the only way you can do that is by writing a lot of software and saying to people, 'Come, use it, share it with your friends, change it to do whatever you want it do. Join us, have fun.' And that's what GNU is for, it's to give people the alternative of living in freedom, and the individual software packages like GNU Emacs and GCC or the GNU Hurd, they're important because they're parts of getting that larger job done."

Stallman has not only devoted much of his time and energy to this cause, he has given his money, too. In 1990, he won a McArthur Foundation fellowship, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $230,000, divided into quarterly installments over five years. "That was a lot more money than I need to live on, and more income than I had ever had before. Rather than spending it, I decided to invest most of it in mutual funds so that I can live on it for the rest of my life while working on free software or another worthy cause."

He has no car: "I live in a city where you don't need to have a car." He rents a room: "I don't want to own a house, I don't want to spend a lot of money. If you spend a lot of money then you're the slave of having to make money. The money then jerks you around, controls your life." Stallman has never married or had children. "That takes a lot of money. There's only one way I could have made that money, and that is by doing what I'd be ashamed of - writing nonfree software. "If I had been developing proprietary software, I would have been spending my life building walls to imprison people." he believes.

Deadly serious intensity aside, Stallman also has a lively sense of humor that manifests itself in a constant stream of ideas, puns, and hacker-type plays on words that courses through his conversations. His personal Web site carries a picture of him dressed as the outrageous be-toga'd Saint lGNUcius - a character he is happy to re-create in his travels around the world with his music CDs and a battered Toshiba portable as he gives talks whenever and wherever he can to spread his message.

And yet many have a different image of Stallman: It is not so much playful mock saint as implacable Old Testament prophet - a kind of geek Moses bearing the GNU GPL commandments and trying to drag his hacker tribe to the promised land of freedom whether they want to go or not. His long hair, which falls thickly to his shoulders, full beard, and intense gaze doubtless contribute to the effect.

This impression arises largely from Stallman's ability to offend even supporters through his constant refusal to compromise. "The only reason we have a wholly free operating system is because of the movement at said we want an operating system that's wholly free, not 90 percent free," he says. "If you don't have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there's some practical convenience in making an exception."

He admits that sometimes he gets tired of hammering home this message over and over again, but believes he must keep on doing it, even beyond the tolerance of most of his audiences if need be. "I'm never sanguine. I've achieved a lot, but it's not whole job. The job is not finished."

When will it be finished? "Well, maybe never," he acknowledges. "In what sense is freedom ever assured for the future? People are always going to have to work to keep a free society."

This is the real point of the self-referential GNU's Not Unix, and of ideas like "copyleft." For Stallman, free software matters not because software is special and deserves a special freedom; indeed, he acknowledges that "there are more important issues of freedom - the issues of freedom that everybody's heard of are much more important than this: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free assembly."

Free software matters because all freedoms matter, and software happens to be the domain in which Stallman can contribute most. "I don't see how I could do something more important in some other area," he says. Stallman's work is significant not only because it engendered many of the key elements and pioneered many of the processes that made the success of what came to be the combined GNU/Linux operating system possible but because it provides an ethical backdrop against which the entire free software and open source storey is unfolding.

Stallman, too, should be seen as more than just the greatest hacker who has ever lived - which he almost certainly is. His example of unswerving dedication to lofty ideals may be too idealistic and daunting for most to follow, but it provides a yardstick of integrity against which the actions of his fellow coders, both great and not-so-great, may be judged.


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A life corrected

· In a new issue of Cahiers Georges Perec (No 7), entitled Antibiotiques, friends and relatives of the French writer take on David Bellos's 800-page biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words (Harvill, 1993). While they admit it is a massive achievement, in the spirit of Perec himself they meticulously list various "inexactitudes", many of them minuscule points of detail.

Also this year, two huge volumes of interviews with Perec appeared (Entretiens et conférences I et II, Editions Joseph K) and his Penser/classer (1985) was reissued by Seuil. As well as "Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table" and "On the Difficulty of Imagining an Ideal City", Penser/classer includes "Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books". Perec reluctantly concludes that no way is satisfactory by itself. "Meanwhile, I move them from one room to another, one shelf to another, one pile to another, and may spend three hours looking for a book without finding it, but sometimes having the satisfaction of coming upon six or seven others which serve my purpose just as well."

· This month Human Rights Watch will announce Hellman/Hammett grants totalling $170,000 for a diverse group of writers in recognition of their courage in the face of political persecution. The awards began in 1989 in honour of the playwright Lillian Hellman and her companion, the novelist Dashiell Hammett. And so, as an antidote to all those summer reading lists, here are some of the recipients:

The Chinese poet, novelist and screenwriter Liao Yiwu was first arrested in 1990 while working on a film about the government's persecution of people involved in the June 4th Movement. He has been confined to numerous detention centres and prisons. In September 1998 he was arrested for compiling The Underground Poems of the Seventies in China and in January 2001 the publisher of his most recent book, Voice From the Lowest Rung of Society, was ordered to recall all copies from bookshops. He was detained again last year after posting his work on the internet.

Iranian poet and essayist Ismail Khoi was one of the first university lecturers to be suspended after the Islamic revolution. The Iranian government has banned his books and prohibited any mention of his name in the media.

Nigerian poet and novelist Chris Abani was arrested in 1985 and spent six months in prison when it was suggested the plots of his novels were coded plans to overthrow the government. In 1987 he was tortured and imprisoned for a year. He formed a theatre group to write and perform anti-government sketches but his play Song of the Broken Flute (1990) - monologues against government corruption - landed him back in prison on treason charges. Released after 18 months, he fled to Britain after several attempts on his life. With the publication of his prison memoir in 1997 the Nigerian government applied to have him extradited to stand trial for treason again. In 1999, when his next-door neighbour (the only other Nigerian in the building) was killed, Abani left the UK for America. IP

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HP hits back after angry letter from Autonomy boss

'Immediate and specific explanations' demanded for what Lynch calls 'highly damaging allegations' made by Hewlett-Packard
Mike Lynch
Mike Lynch left Hewlett-Packard in May seven months after it bought his software company for $10.1bn. Photograph: Matt Lloyd/Rex Features

The acrimonious fallout from Hewlett-Packard's disastrous takeover of Autonomy has continued with a war of words erupting between the British tech firm's founder and the US company.

After Mike Lynch fired off an angry letter to HP's board demanding "immediate explanations" for its "highly damaging allegations" that his company inflated its revenue-and-profit figures before HP bought it, the Silicon Valley company hit back on Tuesday night, effectively saying it would see Lynch in court.

"The matter is in the hands of the authorities, including the UK Serious Fraud Office, the US Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement division and the US department of justice, and we will defer to them as to how they wish to engage with Dr Lynch. In addition, HP will take legal action against the parties involved at the appropriate time.

"While Dr Lynch is eager for a debate, we believe the legal process is the correct method in which to bring out the facts and take action on behalf of our shareholders. In that setting, we look forward to hearing Dr Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury."

Lynch, who left HP in May only seven months after the US firm bought his software company for $10.1bn (£6.3bn), said in the letter that HP needs to explain how it arrived at its figure for the writedown on the purchase. He asked: "Can HP really state that no part of the $5bn writedown was, or should be, attributed to HP's operational and financial mismanagement of Autonomy since the acquisition?"

HP last week announced that it was writing off a total of $8bn in the value of Autonomy and shareholder value impairment, as it released its quarterly figures. Meg Whitman, the chief executive, said that there had been "outright misrepresentation" in Autonomy's pre-takeover accounts – although she stopped short of calling it fraud. She said it had gone on for at least eight quarters before the takeover.

Almost all Autonomy's former senior managers have left the company since the takeover was completed in October 2011. Whitman said that a whistleblower only came forward to allege improprieties in how Autonomy booked revenues after the departure of Lynch and others.

Whitman and the HP board face huge problems in explaining how they approved the purchase of Autonomy at a 58% premium to its stock market value when they made the offer. Although Léo Apotheker – since ousted – was then the chief executive, Whitman was one of the directors who approved the purchase.

It is the third big writedown in less than a year for HP, following purchases of EDS and Palm, where it has spent a total of $26bn and written off $19bn in all.

HP's woes were magnified on Monday as a number of investors filed a class action lawsuit in San Francisco, claiming that HP concealed accounting manipulation at Autonomy between the announcement of the deal last summer and last week, when it took the writedown against the deal.

"At the time Hewlett-Packard agreed in principle to acquire Autonomy, defendants were looking to unwind the deal in light of the accounting irregularities that plagued Autonomy's financial statements," the lawsuit stated. HP said the alleged manipulation of financial performance at Autonomy had not been spotted at the time of the deal, and was revealed only later by a whistleblower. It said $5bn of the writedown was related to the alleged accounting improprieties.

But Lynch has hit back with a number of pointed questions, which HP has not so far answered. He said that "a significant amount of revenue" would have to be involved for a $5bn writedown to be necessary.

He says: "Please explain how such issues could possibly have gone undetected during the extensive acquisition due diligence process and HP's financial oversight of Autonomy for a year from acquisition until October 2012 (a period during which all of the Autonomy finance reported to HP's CFO, Cathie Lesjak)."

HP suggested last week that Autonomy had inflated its revenues by selling hardware at break-even or a loss in order to boost software revenues – to which Lynch responds: "Please confirm that Ms Whitman and other HP senior management were aware of Autonomy's hardware sales before 2012. Did Autonomy, as part of HP, continue to sell third-party hardware of materially similar value after acquisition? Was this accounted for by HP and was this reported in the Autonomy segment of their accounts?"

Whitman said in a phone call last week that HP had not spotted the alleged improprieties ahead of the takeover: "We believe from what we have seen there were internal efforts by certain individuals to conceal these from the marketplace."

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Queen's speech: too much politics?

The Queen's speech should be judged not on its emphasis on electoral goals, but on whether it embodies smart politics
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Queen Elizabeth II reads out the Queen's Speech at the House of Lords
Queen Elizabeth II reads out the Queen's speech at the House of Lords, during the state opening of parliament. Photograph: PA

Party politics in the Queen's speech? Dear God, are there no depths to which this disgraced and disgraceful government will not sink? An absurdly large part of the political class is behaving like the characters in a HM Bateman cartoon today. Bateman would have drawn a glorious "The politician who mentioned the coming general election during the state opening of parliament". There would be the Queen looking as though someone had shot an electric current through her, red-faced Tories exploding with indignation at the disgrace of it, ashen-faced Liberal Democrats reaching for the smelling salts at the shocking cynicism of it, Labour ministers smirking like naughty boys caught telling a smutty story, political columnists hosing down the clouds of burning outrage pumping from their laptops.

There's a line that raises a huge laugh in Alan Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art, when someone says "Why does a play have to be such a performance?" Today's Westminster equivalent would be "Why does parliament have to be so political?"

The test by which the Queen's speech should be judged is not whether it involves politics. It is whether it embodies and expresses smart politics.

The question we should ask is a simple one. Does the Queen's speech – in other words, the legislative programme announced for the final session of the current parliament – help or hinder the electoral interests of the Labour party in 2010?

The answer to this is not as straightforward as the question itself. But that's a clue in itself. These may be horridly unpopular times in the polls for the government. David Cameron may indeed be PM in waiting. The public, fanned by an opportunistic and destructive media, may not want to take politics seriously. And the fifth session of any parliament is always, when we get one, a febrile one in any case. But there is still quite a lot up for grabs and we should not talk ourselves into thinking that the Queen's speech, as an overall event, does not matter. If, starting today, the Labour party manages to make an argument over the next few months that voters listen to and then even take seriously, then the politics of the 2010 election may not be quite such an overwhelmingly foregone conclusion as many now assume.

However smart politics doesn't just require – as some Labour people assume – that the government uses the next six months, in and out of parliament, to establish potent dividing lines between what Labour offers to the nation and what it claims the Tories might do. That's important, sure. But Gordon Brown is too focused on it. It's as if he thinks that, if only he can make one more titanic effort, the scales will suddenly fall from the public's eyes and the Tories will stand revealed as the wicked, malevolent force he thinks they are, and Brown will be bathed in virtuous sunlight as the country's great protector. Brown is entitled to think this. But it's a fantasy. Smart politics ought to have a bigger and more supple vision than that in times like these.

A smart political response to the public spending crisis, for example, would insist that everything about the government's budget plans was framed by the effort to show that ministers would make the bankers pay for the taxpayer bailout that has thrown public spending so seriously off course.

There are some signs of that approach in the Queen's speech measures, and there will be more in the pre-budget report next month, but the note remains an uncertain one. Labour needs a very consistent populist message that it's on the side of the victims not the perpetrators.

A smart political response would also respond much more proactively to the crisis in political credibility. I'm pretty sceptical about whether marginal Lords reform or the promise of future electoral reform for the Commons will be game changers, especially in the time available before the election since the measures would not pass. But why not have a measure to introduce fixed-term parliaments in this Queen's speech? Fixed-term four-year parliaments would eliminate, at a stroke, much of the nonsense surrounding this fag-end fifth session. And why not (no legal change required here) alter the Queen's speech format itself – a long overdue reform – so that the ceremony and the announcement of the legislative/political programme are separated. An annual "state of the kingdom" speech by the prime minister following the state opening would be a modest but bold modernising move.

There are two central themes worth taking seriously in the 2010 Queen's speech. The first is that a lot of it will never see the light of day as law. Inevitably, party politics dominates in a short pre-election session like this. Much of this legislative programme will either fall for lack of time or be jettisoned when the election is called. If the Tories win the election, parts of the programme may be repealed anyway. The programme is important only insofar as it focuses the pre-election political debate between the parties. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not lawmaking.

The second is that this Queen's speech contains many bills on big and important subjects – on finance, on health, on social care, on education, on child poverty – in which intentions and unenforceable guarantees are put into law. This theme has been much derided as an improper use of legislation and in some ways it is. But it is certainly novel. For that reason it could mark an important watershed in the workings of the British state. November 2009 may mark the moment when central government's use of targets to enforce the improvement of public services is replaced by legal obligations which, if they are genuinely enforceable, would mark a new phase in the attempt to reform public service delivery. For at least the past 12 years, Whitehall departments, co-ordinated by the Treasury and No 10, have tried to improve delivery through strict targets. Now, possibly, that task is gradually being passed to local authorities and the courts. If the Tories win the election all this will be overtaken. But if Labour stays in power the new approach could signal an important change. If it takes root, this new rights-based approach to delivery may be the unintended consequence of Brown's obsession with trying to prove to the public that the Tories are really as wicked as he thinks.

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Sports fandom and other misplaced optimism

It's true – men are more often identified as sports fans than women are
It's a boy thing: sports fans are more often identified as male
It's a boy thing: sports fans are more often identified as male. Photograph: Paul Currie/Action Images

Despite being blessed with a colourful name, Professor Christian End demonstrates that one can make significant discoveries by looking at unglamorous questions.

End, based at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, specialises in exploring the psychology of sports fans. In the year 2009 he blew past his professional competitors, who generally confine their interest to the living. Together with three colleagues, End published a study in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills called Sport Fan Identification in Obituaries.

They examined 1,101 obituaries in 19 American and Canadian newspapers. For each, they noted whether the deceased was identified as being a sports fan. (They give this example of a clear indicator: "She was a fan of the Red Sox".) And they noted whether the individual was a man or a woman.

The End team was testing a novel theory. "It was hypothesised," they write, "that a greater proportion of men's obituaries than women's would mention the deceased individual's sport fan identification."

They learned that 24% of the dead males were celebrated postmortem as being sports fans, but only 7.7% of the women were accorded that distinction. Thus, End and his co-authors report, their hypothesis was proved correct.

End sub-specialises in a rather different aspect of sports fandom psychology. It is epitomised by his 2003 monograph (done with another three collaborators) called Perceptions of Sport Fans Who BIRG. BIRG, the study explains for readers not familiar with this branch of psychology, is an acronym for "basking in reflected glory". The End oeuvre includes at least two other published studies that delve into the multidimensional puzzle of sports fandom BIRG.

The inquiries of End extend far beyond sports fandom.

In a 2007 study called Unrealistic Optimism in Internet Events published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, he and another three collaborators "assessed the tendency for individuals to be unrealistically optimistic about internet-related activities" such as downloading music, "using maps", "finding a bargain" and "finding a sought item".

The report's major discovery was that "heavy internet users" are more optimistic than "light users" about succeeding at those tasks.

In 2010, End broke new ground. Working with yet another combination of three colleagues (one of whom, Shaye Worthman, also laboured on the obituary study), he published a monograph called Costly Cell Phones: The Impact of Cell Phone Rings on Academic Performance.

College students were asked to watch a video and take notes. Then the researchers tested the students on the video, and evaluated their notes.

For some individuals, the video session "was disrupted by a ringing cell phone". Those students (1) "performed significantly worse" on the test than the ones who were not interrupted, and (2) took crappy notes.

Thus came the researchers to their great discovery. In their words: "The hypothesis that the cell phone rings would impair performance was confirmed."

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize


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La Liga roundup

Atlético Madrid stay top by beating Villarreal 1-0
But Barcelona and Real Madrid maintain their pursuits
Raúl García celebrates
Raúl García, centre, celebrates scoring Atletico Madrid's goal against Villarreal at the Vicente Calderón. Photograph: Andres Kudacki/AP

Atlético Madrid ensured they would stay top of the Primera División for another week with a 1-0 win over Villarreal at the Vicente Calderón, but Barcelona and Real Madrid kept up the pressure by winning their games on Saturday evening.

Villareal, however, made Atlético sweat for the three points after the hosts' captain for the day, Raúl García, headed in the only goal after 14 minutes. Atlético created few further opportunities and spent the latter stages holding on. They survived a scare in the final minute when Toby Alderweireld diverted a cross just inches wide of a post.

With the top scorer, Diego Costa, and Arda Turan injured and the captain, Gabi, suspended, Diego Simeone had to pull together a makeshift side, giving starts to Cristian Rodríguez, Diego and Mario Suárez, and Alderweireld deputised for Miranda in defence.

Atlético, though, took an early lead, García appearing at the near post unmarked to nod in a Koke corner. Villarreal thought the goal should have been disallowed as García had pushed Mario Gaspar in the back before heading in his ninth league goal of the season.

Villarreal grew into the game in the second half and Atlético were unable to trouble the visitors' back line after the break. Home hearts were in their mouths when Alderweireld's attempted clearance went across the face of the goal in the closing stages.

Lionel Messi scored twice for Barcelona in a laboured 3-1 home win over the bottom side Real Betis as the champions stayed a point behind Atlético with six matches left including a clash between the sides at the Camp Nou on the final day of the season.

Barça were well short of their best against a Betis side who showed impressive fight despite being eight points adrift at the bottom and virtually doomed to relegation.

Messi scored his first from the penalty spot in the 15th minute after Jordi Figueras brought down Alexis Sánchez. Barça were unable to convert long periods of possession into goals and were fortunate to go 2-0 ahead when Figueras deflected the ball into his own net in the 67th.

Betis set Barça nerves jangling two minutes later when they hit back through the substitute Rubén Castro before Messi scored his second four minutes from time after the defender Antonio Amaya handled in the area and the referee awarded another penalty.

The goalkeeper, Antonio Adán, saved the Argentina captain's initial shot but Messi put the rebound into the net for his 25th league goal of an injury-disrupted campaign.

Gareth Bale's long-range goal helped make sure Real Madrid did not miss Cristiano Ronaldo as they cruised to a 4-0 win at Real Sociedad, staying within three points of their local rivals, in third place.

Real put together a no-nonsense performance that nullified Sociedad's early pressure when Asier Illarramendi scored a rebound from Karim Benzema's shot just before half-time. Just after the hour Bale pounced on a scuffed goal kick 30 metres outside the area before unleashing a blistering left-footed strike. Pepe swept in Madrid's third in the 85th minute before the substitute Álvaro Morata scored late on.


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Sam Stanton's late goal earns Hibs vital point against Partick Thistle

Hibs' Sam Stanton, left, celebrates his 6
Hibs' Sam Stanton, left, celebrates his equalising goal against Partick in the Scottish Premiership at Easter Road. Photograph: Sns Group Alan Rennie/SNS Group

In the context of a season they will want to forget about pretty quickly, Hibernian may cherish this late point claimed against Partick Thistle. The fact Terry Butcher's men earned that draw with 10 men also illustrated there is at least spirit within the much-maligned Easter Road dressing room.

Hibs have won just once in 17 outings but edged that little bit closer to avoiding the Premier League's playoff berth thanks to Sam Stanton's 88th-minute header. Earlier, Michael Nelson had been dismissed on account of two bookings. Hibs huffed and puffed without stretching a well-drilled Partick defence too much, a first-half spell aside. Still, on the balance of play alone a draw was a perfectly fair outcome.

If there is to be a silver lining alongside this Hibs relegation battle, it may come in the form of increased scrutiny from supporters as to the way their club is run. Others have become so disillusioned with events at Easter Road that they refuse to turn up.

Hibs have been in on-field decline for years, with the tendency of those in boardroom positions to hold balance sheets aloft as if they were trophies hardly helping that situation. There has been both a lack of continuity and a shortage of appropriate focus throughout the football side of Hibs.

Now, fans seem finally of a mind to realise this. It should never be deemed acceptable for one of Scotland's most prominent clubs to scrap for top league survival year on year. Not that Butcher is blameless.

The ex-England captain's management career has proved inconsistent, similar to his team selections since his time in this job. Since the turn of the year, it has been perfectly easy to infer that the Hibs players are not in tune with their management team. Continually in defence, Hibs lack the basic organisation which arrives from strong coaching; there was glaring evidence of that again here. Yet within four minutes, the hosts should have been ahead. Stanton's burst from midfield was impressive but less so his attempted pass to Jason Cummings. Partick duly cleared, but this was an example of Hibs' vibrant start to the game.

What followed rather typified why Hibs are in their current predicament. Comic cut defending saw Kris Doolan meet a Kallum Higginbotham knockdown before scoring with an effort which spun into the net via the Hibs goalkeeper Ben Williams. Doolan actually looked like he was tackling Williams, as opposed to shooting.

Hibs' run of not scoring first in a match since mid-February had continued. There was almost even more cause for home unrest on the 15-minute mark, as a terrific Thistle counter-attack resulted in Stuart Bannigan's shot being blocked by Lewis Stevenson.

Hibs had their chances to restore parity. And some. The lively Cummings played in Liam Craig, with the captain's low shot batted away by Paul Gallacher.

The Partick goalkeeper produced two stunning saves within as many minutes, denying Stanton and then Michael Nelson. In between times, Cummings struck woodwork. Something had to give, hadn't it?

It should have done; at the opposite end. Seconds before the interval, another rapid Partick counter resulted in a brisk one-two between Chris Erskine and Lyle Taylor. Erskine should have scored, thereby leaving Hibs two down at half-time for a third game in succession, but blasted his shot straight at Williams.

The second half was considerably less engaging. Nelson's foul on the marauding Taylor saw the centre-back depart with 10 minutes to play.

Hibs salvation and relief was to come, though; Stanton met James Collins' initial header to nod home from close range with two minutes remaining.


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Upmarket papers go 'pop' on Jackson

It was no great surprise that the redtops went overboard for Michael Jackson. The story had everything: celebrity, money, drugs, race, possible suicide or even murder, child abuse, disputed paternity, ambiguous sexuality. But were the upmarket papers right to go big on it? Both the Times and Guardian came out with "souvenir supplements" and the Independent gave Jackson the first 11 pages of its Saturday paper.

Jackson may have been the greatest popular musician of his generation but figures of equivalent distinction in areas that you might expect "quality" papers and their readers to prefer - the recently deceased John Updike and Harold Pinter, for example - got nothing like this coverage.

Even the Financial Times (which was naturally interested in the money) put Jackson's picture on the front page three days running. Only the Telegraph papers kept their heads. Front-page pictures and a page or so of news, yes, but no splashes, supplements or leaders. The Sunday Telegraph clearly thought Armed Forces Day was more important.

Some Guardian readers and contributors complained. "Not the Guardian too!" ran one comment on its website. "The whole front page devoted to this one story." In his blog on MediaGuardian, Roy Greenslade, returning from holiday (in Los Angeles, as it happens), thought it "all way over the top". But, as Daniel Finkelstein noted in the Times, we are talking culture wars here.

To the baby-boomer generation and its successors, regardless of social class or even personal preferences, it is a sin to look down on popular culture, particularly popular music. Rather, you should express a lifelong dedication to one or more pop singers (though not Cliff Richard), as well as to a football team. You can deride Jackson only if you confess to an alternative loyalty to, say, Led Zeppelin or Radiohead, as James Delingpole did in the Times. On no account should you suggest pop music in general is unworthy of notice or attribute greater value to a Pinter than to a Jackson.

Being a politician, Boris Johnson understands the point perfectly. "We may not feel a sudden gap, a strange hollowness, in our lives," he wrote in his Telegraph column. "But some people do. Lots of people do."

Upmarket papers hate to appear stuffy, uncool or narrowly bourgeois.

Equally, they do not wish to associate with the unsophisticated and capricious celebrity worship expressed by the redtops. When a Michael Jackson dies, therefore, they call on classy, literary writers and cultural studies academics, thus reassuring readers that they are still buying a paper that distinguishes them from the common herd.

For the Guardian, Gilbert Adair struck the right note by comparing Jackson's face to the Mona Lisa - though not as shown in Leonardo's painting (which redtop readers may have heard of) but "as rhapsodised by Walter Pater". Germaine Greer was better still. "In the light of Jackson's blazing star," she ruled, Nijinsky and Nureyev were candles. Jackson's concept of dance was "utterly 20th century, extravagantly multi-dimensional, and not in the least middle-class".

So that's all right, then.

Though the bookmaker Paddy Power last week quoted him at 10-1, hardly anybody mentions Fergus Shanahan, the Sun's executive editor and former deputy editor, as a candidate to succeed Rebekah Wade in the chair. But Shanahan clearly takes himself seriously and is making special efforts to catch Rupert Murdoch's eye.

In his weekly column last Tuesday, he recalled how, in Atlas Shrugged, the futuristic novel by the American rightwing author Ayn Rand, bosses of companies that refuse to share inventions with rivals are tortured under a leftwing US government. Shanahan drew comparisons with Ofcom's proposal to cap the price at which Sky TV sells sports and movie channels to other companies. "This ruling means firms like Sky, who invest money, take risks and spend years building a customer base, can have everything stolen from them by the state."

That's just the kind of fearless, independent judgment that Murdoch values in his editors.


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If you told someone you were worried because you find your job boring, chances are they would look at you with a "You're quite mad, really, aren't you?" expression on their face and tell you it's nothing to worry about - that work just is boring.

And to some extent, they're right. Even megastar film actors complain of getting bored. OK, so they're talking about endless hours sitting in first-class cabins of continent-hopping jet planes, tedious mornings in the trailer on set with only a masseur and four PAs for company or the snooze-fest that is the Oscars. The point is, for actor and actuary alike, days that are repetitive, uneventful or devoid of anything are boring. And if your office is a grey wasteland of mindless drones staring into the void of their computer monitors then, yes, chances are you'll be bored slightly more often than, say, Jake Gyllenhaal.

Resigning yourself to your fate, however, should not be on the agenda. Boredom isn't your destiny. "We can sell ourselves short," agrees Jenny Ungless, career coach for the website "We tell ourselves that work is boring, we just do it to pay the bills and that's that. But there's no reason why we can't have jobs that we find fun and interesting."

The first step is to check your attitude. "The easiest thing to do is to whinge and moan and never take any positive action," cautions Ungless. "You've got to be really honest about the way you approach things."

So, go and think about that for a bit. All right? Resolved to take positive action? Good. Here's the next step. "Try to pinpoint exactly what isn't working," says Ungless. "Is it that you're not being stretched and your work presents no challenges? Is it because you have no rapport with your colleagues and you need more social stimulation in your working life? Or are you just fundamentally not interested in the area you're currently working in? You have to get specific and be totally honest with yourself."

Once you have completed this process, you should have a better idea of what might need to be done. And don't panic - the solution doesn't necessarily involve scouring the job ads. "There is probably scope within your company, even within your current role, for making your job more what you would like it to be," says Ungless. "Think about what you do enjoy about your job. Is it the people? The values of the company? The working environment?

"That could give you some idea of ways to make your job more satisfactory. You could expand your role to take on more responsibility - for mentoring new recruits, for example - or just to increase your workload. Or maybe you'd like to shift the emphasis of your work, move to a different area of the company or be considered for promotion."

Of course, none of these things are going to happen without the agreement of your boss. But you'll get a more positive response if you present your plans as a proactive move, not a complaint against your current job. "Once you're clearer on your aims, that's the point to go and talk to your line manager or HR. But be positive and imaginative. Take solutions and answers, not just complaints."

It may be, however, that it's not the work that's the problem, but the place you do it. But again, you have to be the force for change. "Be the person who makes work more sociable," says Ungless. "Why not introduce the practice of opening a bottle of wine on Friday afternoon, to talk over the week just gone and the one to come?" If you think that sounds a bit soft, remember that even the most mindnumbing of tasks can seem a lot less dull if they're done in the company of people you know and like. There isn't a law that says you have to hate your colleagues.

Of course, your dreams of creative fulfilment may stand no chance of being realised in your current job on the production line at a cardboard box factory. If all else fails, you may just have to look elsewhere. "You've got to face the fact that changing your working life might mean some serious adjustments," says Ungless.

"Even to the point of retraining or getting some new qualifications. But if you make the decision to move on, you have the chance to really decide what you want your job to be, and go for it."


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Fundraising reality is streets ahead of the myth

It has been dubbed 'chugging' - charity mugging - and accused of being aggressive and unregulated. Sue Brumpton argues that street fundraising is far from either

Street fundraising has been getting an unnecessarily bad press recently. Claims that fundraisers are aggressive, the industry unregulated and the medium a bad deal for charities are not only unfair but untrue.

The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association has been established since 2001 to provide regulation for street and doorstep fundraising. It is a charity-led organisation that works to ensure high standards of quality, integrity and transparency in the sector. We also work in partnership with local authorities to establish site agreements that clearly define when and where teams can visit and how many personnel can recruit donors without causing a nuisance to the public.

Face-to-face fundraisers work to a strict code of practice that requires that they maintain polite and courteous behaviour at all times and never put pressure on any member of the public to sign up. The PFRA's mystery shopping exercise showed that 97% comply with this code. We have also found that companies and charities that employ fundraisers are very quick to take action should any member of staff behave inappropriately.

It is not in the interest of any charity to waste money or damage their reputation and those charities that choose to use face-to-face fundraising do so because it helps them to recruit committed donors and raise awareness of their services.

Any form of fundraising costs money, but some charities find that for every pound they spend on face-to-face fundraising they raise £5 back. Last year, our members signed up 600,000 donors who will collectively give £210m to good causes via monthly direct debit donations. Giving this way is very secure and cost-effective for both the donor and charity. Fundraisers have the opportunity to explain Gift Aid and invite donors to join the scheme, which allows the charity to claim back the tax paid by the donor on the gift, a further boost of 28% to the charity. Unlike cash donations, a direct debit can't be misdirected and if a mistake is made the direct debit guarantee makes sure that it is put right quickly. Giving a small amount regularly also helps donors to budget for their gift.

The charities bill is a welcome move and the hope is that the law will reflect much of the regulatory framework already in place and reassure the public that giving to charity is still worthwhile. The PFRA is very pleased that the lead authority proposal, requiring charities to apply to the local authority in which they are based for a licence to fundraise, has been dropped in favour of issuing certificates of fitness to fundraise from the Charity Commission.

The bill's acceptance that there are no physical capacity issues for door-to-door fundraising is also very welcome. There are concerns at the lack of clear guidance on how local authorities will assess capacity for street fundraising, but we look forward to working with the Home Office and other stakeholders towards resolving this. The amendments to the 1992 Charities Act with regard to fundraisers' remuneration are still not clear about what the public should be told, which is also a worry and we would like a recommended form of words to be published in the guidance notes.

As the PFRA has been involved in shaping the bill there is unlikely to be a dramatic change to the way in which fundraisers interact with the general public. We hope that the existence of clear legislation encourages the public to reject the negative and inaccurate reporting of face-to-face fundraising and embrace the medium as one of the many ways in which to show support to their chosen cause.

· Sue Brumpton is chief executive of the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association.


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Apps rush: Fish Fight, Adobe CreatePDF, Edinburgh Fringe and more

What's new on the app stores on Tuesday 9 August 2011
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has something fishy for iPhone-owning fans Lisa Carpenter

A burst of 17 apps for your consideration

Fish Fight

Celebri-chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall has worked with Channel 4 on Fish Fight, an app designed to help people buy and cook sustainable fish. It includes more than 50 recipes, with Selfridges and the Marine Conservation Society also involved, while the app was developed by KEO digital.

Adobe CreatePDF

Adobe has released a PDF-creating application for Android smartphones and tablets, using the same technology found in its Acrobat software. It can convert a variety of file formats to PDF, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint docs and a range of image formats.

Augmented reality firm Zappar has released a preview version of its app for Android, showcasing the company's technology. For now it's fairly basic in terms of features, but more features and content are promised for the coming months.

Rome: DK Eyewitness

Dorling Kindersley has released its latest travel app for iPad, and this time Rome is the city in focus. It has offline maps, lists of sights and attractions, and DK's signature cutaway illustrations for key buildings.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe apps

There are three official apps for this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe: for iPhone, iPad and Android. The mobile apps offer listings (including half-price ticket discounts), and the ability to buy tickets from the phone. Meanwhile, the iPad app has the full Fringe programme, and also the daily guide publication.
iPhone / iPad / Android

Mega Mall Story

Buzzed-about Japanese developer Kairosoft – of Game Dev Story fame – has released its latest iPhone game Mega Mall Story. It's all about building the biggest and best shopping centre, with hints of popular iOS game Tiny Tower.

Goings On: The New Yorker

The New Yorker magazine has launched a culture and tourism app for its hometown, offering events listings and recommendations from its team of critics, as well as restaurant reviews and audio tours.

Vevo for PlayBook

Music videos service Vevo is already available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone as apps. Now it has a BlackBerry PlayBook version too, offering 720p HD streaming, TV-Out and the ability to stream videos while doing other tasks on RIM's tablet.
BlackBerry PlayBook

Guitarist Presents: Blues Guitar Heroes

Guitarist magazine has published its latest iPad app, with a special issue focusing on the world's best blues guitarists – Muddy Waters, BB King, John Lee Hooker, Eric Clapton, Paul Kossoff and more.

Kids Closer to Nature

This branded app from Aria Foods and the Forestry Commission offers suggestions for summer walks in woodlands, parks and forests, with location features to show the nearest places.

Card Scanner Pro

Readdle's latest business app is all about scanning physical business cards to store details in your iPhone's address book. It claims to be fast, scanning cards in less than three seconds, and also smart, filling in contacts fields automatically.

Dora & Diego's Vacation Adventure HD

Dora the Explorer returns to iPad with a new book-app, as she explores with her friend Diego. The app offers a mixture of storytelling and virtual stickers for young fans to place wherever they like in the scenes.

Game Guardian 2.0

Remember the good old days of computer and console cartridges that let you hack into popular games and give yourself infinite lives? Game Guardian is that idea, but for Android games – a "hack/alteration tool" that promises to let you "modify money, HP, SP, and much more". What we're wondering is whether this can be used for freemium games too: something that could be controversial to say the least.

Published by mobile industry veteran Buongiorno, Proximitips claims to be a "real-time, hyper-local social magazine" app for iOS. That means a mixture of social updates, tips and offers for local hotspots.
iPhone / iPad

Cell and Cell Structure

This educational app for iPad focuses on biology, and specifically cells, their structure and function. Aimed at middle-school students, it mixes animation, videos and interactivity.

Playagram claims to be "the best Instagram experience on a tablet today" – specifically the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. The main problem: Instagram's API is read-only, so users can only look at pictures, not upload them.
BlackBerry PlayBook

PressReader for PlayBook

iOS and Android app PressReader offers more than 1,900 newspapers from around the world to read on tablets. Now it's available for the BlackBerry PlayBook too.
BlackBerry PlayBook

You can follow Guardian Apps Blog's Apps rush on delicious

To suggest links, tag articles on with "guardianappsblog"


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Christian registrar to appeal over same-sex ceremonies

Lillian Ladele says London council unfairly expected her to conduct civil partnership ceremonies against her beliefs
Lilllian Ladele
Lilllian Ladele says she suffered discrimination by being required to conduct same-sex civil partnership ceremonies. Photograph: Christian Institute/PA

Controversial claims that Christians should not have to condone homosexuality will be made in the court of appeal today, as a registrar says she suffered discrimination by being required to conduct same-sex civil partnership ceremonies.

Lillian Ladele, 48, has said she was treated unfairly in her role as a registrar for Islington council, which expected her to carry out the ceremonies despite her beliefs that they were "contrary to God's law".

"If this decision is allowed to stand it will help squeeze Christians from the public sphere because of their religious beliefs on ethical issues," said Mike Judge, a spokesman for the Christian Institute, which is backing Ladele's appeal.

"The rights of Muslims and homosexuals are protected, but the rights of Christians always seem to be on a lower level," he added.

Today's hearing comes two years after Ladele was disciplined for refusing to perform the ceremonies, following complaints from two gay colleagues that her actions were contrary to the council's dignity for all policy.

Two other registrars at the council, one Muslim and one Christian, also objected to the ceremonies on religious grounds after the Civil Partnership Act came into force in 2005.

Ladele, who brought a discrimination claim in 2007, is appealing a ruling by the employment appeal tribunal last December that Islington council had been entitled to view her conduct as amounting to "unacceptable discrimination".

"[Ladele's actions] offended some gay employees and involved discriminating against third parties making use of the services of the council," the tribunal said.

Although Ladele's lawyers will argue that religious views should be allowed to co-exist alongside the rights of gay people, campaigners said the case was part of an increasing pattern of homophobia based on religion.

"This case is part of a homophobic fight-back by Christian fundamentalists who resent the removal in law of their right to discriminate against lesbian and gay people," said human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

"Faith can never be a legitimate reason to seek exemption from the law and the moral obligation to treat other people with respect and equality," Tatchell added.

"The issue is very simple. Gay people have no right to discriminate against religious people, and religious people have no right to discriminate against gay people."

The case comes after Pauline Howe, a grandmother who wrote a letter complaining about a local Gay Pride march, attracted widespread media coverage after she received a warning from police.

Howe, 67, whose case has also been taken up by the Christian Institute, received a warning letter from Norwich City council and a visit from Norwich police stating she could have committed a hate crime.

"When people express robust beliefs, it doesn't mean that they hate other individuals, just that they are concerned about the behaviour," Judge said.

"People can express strong views without any expression of hatred. I'm just concerned that the police are beginning to apply policies which do confuse these two things."

Although gay rights group Stonewall have said they agree the police acted "disproportionately" in Howe's case, human rights groups say that the rights of homosexual people must be protected from religious views.

"Liberty fiercely defends freedom of conscience and religion, including its reasonable expression in the workplace. But other people have rights and freedoms too," said Corinna Ferguson, legal officer at Liberty, which is intervening in the case.

"Ms Ladele is entitled to her views but not to pick and choose who is worthy of public services."


text:
Pope dismisses 'petty gossip' of sexual abuse allegations

In Palm Sunday address pope says faith in God leads 'towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated'
Pope Benedict XVI waves as he arrives in St Peter's Square at the Vatican Palm Sunday mass
Pope Benedict XVI waves to pilgrims as he arrives at Saint Peter's Square in the Vatican to celebrate Palm Sunday mass. Photograph: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images

Pope Benedict, facing the worst crisis of his papacy as a sexual abuse scandal sweeps the Catholic church, declared today he would not be "intimidated" by "petty gossip", angering activists who say he has done too little to stamp out paedophilia.

Addressing crowds in St Peter's square during a Palm Sunday service, the pope did not directly mention the scandal spreading though Europe and engulfing the Vatican, but alluded to it during his sermon. Faith in God, he said, led "towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion".

As Benedict spoke, the president of Switzerland, Doris Leuthard, called for a central register of paedophile priests to keep them away from children. In Austria, the archbishop of Vienna announced the creation of a commission funded by the church, but without church representatives, to look into Austrian abuse claims.

Benedict came under attack after it was revealed that he had been involved in dealing with two cases of abuse. In the first a German priest in therapy for paedophilia returned to work with children while the pope was archbishop of Munich. In the second, in the late 1990s when Benedict was a senior Vatican figure, his deputy stopped a church trial against a Wisconsin priest accused of abusing deaf boys.

Church officials say Benedict was unaware the German priest had returned to work and the Wisconsin case was reported to the Vatican 20 years after the fact.

The Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, has accused the media of a "clear and ignoble intent of trying to strike Benedict and his closest collaborators".

But activists said they were angered by Benedict's talk of intimidation today. "I hope this doesn't fit into a pattern where the media is to be blamed," said Sean O'Conaill of Voice of the Faithful, a group that has campaigned for abuse victims. "The real courage needed here is to face issues the media has revealed."

A letter from the pope to Irish Catholics apologised for abuse by priests in Ireland but did not specify punishments for Irish bishops who covered up for their crimes.

"The evidence of Benedict's knowledge of abuse is mounting," said Maeve Lewis, the Irish director for the child abuse campaign group One in Four. "The problem here is the protection of children and whether the pope has the credible leadership to push the church towards that."

About 30 protesters waved placards stating "Pope Protects Paedophile Priests – Resign!" outside Westminster Cathedral in London today.

A prayer read during mass at St Peter's in Rome today asked God to help "the young and those who work to educate and protect them". In his sermon, Benedict said man could sometimes "fall to the lowest, vulgar levels" and "sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty".

Yesterday, the Vatican appeared to backtrack on talk of a media plot, claiming that the church's response to the scandal would be "crucial for its moral credibility". A spokesman noted that most of the cases now emerging occurred decades ago.

But activists in Italy are building a list of more recent scandals and plan legal action against a bishop over alleged abuse in 2001. Father Ruggero Conti is standing trial, suspected of molesting 30 children. Interviewed by a magistrate in 2008, Gino Reali, the bishop who oversaw Conti's parish, said he had ignored complaints "because you hear so many rumours".

"If this priest is convicted, I plan to press charges against the bishop for aiding and abetting," said Nino Marazzita, a lawyer and anti-paedophilia campaigner.


text:
The Los Angeles river lives again

LA's concrete storm drains conceal a living, breathing waterway that has rarely been explored – until now
LA river under Burbank Boulevard.
Concrete jungle: the LA river flows under Burbank Boulevard. Photograph: Michael Owen Baker/Los Angeles Daily News/

A scorching morning in the San Fernando valley and I am driving up and down Balboa Boulevard, parks and fields either side of the motorway, lost. The talking GPS on my dashboard has lapsed into silence, defeated by an arcane destination with no zip code. I spy a park attendant emptying a bin and pull over to ask directions. He eyes me, baffled. I wonder if he is deaf and repeat the question. He still looks confused. "Did you say river?" Yes, I reply. Where is the river? He shakes his head. "What river?"

I find an elderly woman with a straw hat walking her terrier and ask the same question. She looks puzzled. "What river, honey?" The river I am supposed to kayak, I reply. She looks at me compassionately, as if I have sunstroke. "I don't think you're in the right place."

But I am. Swishing below, all but invisible from the park and motorway above, is the Los Angeles river. A river with water, fish, tadpoles, birds, reeds, banks, a river that flows for 52 miles skirting Burbank, north Hollywood, Silver Lake, downtown and Compton and empties into the Pacific Ocean at Long Beach. A regular river, except that to most Angelenos it's a secret. I ask three other people and receive the same blank looks until finally a park ranger confirms that, yes, there is a river at the bottom of a ravine all of 150ft away.

There, amid the reeds, bob a dozen little green and red kayaks, and people wearing helmets and lifejackets are clambering inside them. It is the inaugural season of LA River Expeditions, a pioneering effort to reclaim a waterway that vanished from the city's consciousness almost a century ago. "Welcome," says George Wolfe, the group's founder. "I hope you're ready for adventure." We push off into the current.

Until recently this excursion would have been considered not just mad but illegal. City authorities encased the river bed in concrete in the 1930s, turning it into a flood-control channel that was a byword for contamination and forbidden to boaters. For decades it languished all but forgotten, save for Hollywood using its storm drains in films such as Grease and Terminator 2. Now, however, it has formally opened to boating tours, specifically kayaks and canoes. Activists hope it is the first step towards transformation. "It's a milestone, and hopefully there are more to come," says Charles Eddy, a board member of Friends of the LA River, and part of this expedition, as he navigates his kayak through brambles. "If you think of the river as a blank palette, people will create all sorts of wonderful things."

Kayakers in Los Angeles
Kayakers paddle under the Woodley Avenue bridge in Los Angeles. Photograph: ZUMA Wire Service / Alamy/Alamy

The kayak excursions are the latest twist in California's water wars, a saga immortalised in Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown, a neo-noir exploration of intrigue and treachery with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway set during the state's 1930s battles over land and water rights. The river, fed by streams from the Simi hills in Canoga park, originally provided food, water and transport for Gabrielino Indians and Spanish settlers. After the US seized control from Mexico the city's water needs outgrew the river. An aqueduct completed in 1913 directed water from the Owens river in the Sierra Nevada mountains to LA, ending dependence on the LA river. Disastrous flooding prompted its conversion – desecration, some critics would say – into a glorified drainage ditch. And so it remained for decades, a butt of jokes, a rubbish dump, out of sight and mind except when used as a backdrop for Hollywood car races and chases.

Its nascent revival this summer as a source of recreation and environmental awareness comes amid a renewed water battle. The diverted Owens river is no longer enough – LA county is home to about 10 million people, not to mention vast farms further south clamouring for irrigation. Governor Jerry Brown is championing a proposed $14bn (£9bn) tunnel system to divert water from northern California to southern California's parched cities and farms. Two tubes, each 33ft wide, would direct part of the Sacramento river – up to 9,000 cubic feet a second – to existing pumps and aqueducts, supposedly ending the water conflicts that Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a string of other governors failed to resolve.

"This thing is never going to be free of controversy and conflict," Brown told a press conference last month. "But we know a lot more today than we did then. Here we are, 30 years later, with a lot more knowledge and a lot more science." The US secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, said the new tunnels would end "the epic water wars that have plagued this state for decades".

Maybe, but the plan will have to overcome resistance from environmentalists who say it will kill salmon and farmers who complain about costs. Some analysts think the water wars will drag on, with southern California seeking ever more desperate remedies for its water shortages.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day
LA as a "soulless, dystopian metropolis": Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Photograph: Tristar/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

The Los Angeles river, once the city's lifeblood, is a sideshow to the latest high-powered struggles for water. But to a coalition of artists, historians, environmentalists and outdoors enthusiasts its fate symbolises an attempt to make LA, branded by critics a soulless, dystopian metropolis, a kinder, gentler, more integrated city.

"We have to start thinking in new ways, and using words differently. If you call it a sewer ditch you treat it like a sewer ditch. Call it a river and you treat it like a river," says Wolfe, the expedition leader, as our group paddles upstream through a gorge. An advertising copywriter with a passion for canoeing, Wolfe and some companions made the first journey down the entire river over three days in 2008. It was technically illegal – the city did not want anyone in its drainage ditch – but they rebuffed police challenges with a (legitimate) filming permit, a magical pass when dealing with the LAPD, and made it to Long Beach.

The voyage obliged authorities to admit that the waterway was navigable, something previously denied, and created a legal wedge to demand public access under public trust doctrine, a concept dating from Roman law. Eddy says 80% of the water was treated sewage, most of the rest groundwater with modest contamination. "My dog has been drinking it for seven years and he hasn't got three tails."

Inch by inch, authorities yielded, allowing Wolfe and his friends to take 300 people down the river in a pilot project last year. After nobody drowned or contracted a hideous disease, LA River Expeditions was allowed to start running regular, scheduled trips this summer for around 2,000 people. Tickets – $55 (£35) each – were snapped up within minutes of going on sale. "So here we are," says Wolfe, as the group of mostly novice kayakers bump and splash in his wake along a narrow stretch of surging water. The mood is giddy. Like the park attendant and dog-walker, until recently some of us did not even know there was a river, or where it was, or that it was usable. "I've lived near this river almost all my life and I've never been on it. I jumped at this chance," says Gloria Barke, 77, a retired events organiser, as her partner Robert Finkle, 81, a copyright lawyer, paddles from the back.

The LA river will never compete with the Danube or Seine or Thames as an attraction for stressed city-dwellers. Nor will it inspire many poems or novels. It is too meagre, too hidden, to ever be fully part of the city. But advocates are on to something when they say it can transform perceptions of LA.

After passing a concrete bridge with graffiti-daubed arches and a shopping trolley half-buried in mud, we enter a wilderness that seems a world removed from the freeways and urban sprawl above. "We call this the Grand Canyon," says Wolfe, showing his flair for advertising, as we paddle through a mini-gorge 15ft tall. Nature slowly asserts itself. To our left are wild fig trees, descendants of those planted by the Indians, to our right potentially deadly ricin-producing plants. Further on, hallucinogenic jimson weed. "Around the next bend is the Apocalypse Now bit," says Wolfe. We encounter "fish sticks": improvised traps made by unknown hands to trap carp, tilapia and other species. A discourse on how to make the traps is drowned out by a passenger jet roaring low overhead, briefly breaking the spell.

The sense that this is something special returns as we moor our boats and slosh ashore, inspecting plants, a turtle shell, a cascade, before resuming the journey. It is difficult to believe that the 405 freeway, the gridlocked bane of LA motorists, is just a mile away. Three hours later we return to where we started, a swampy bank, and moor the kayaks amid some ducks. The tour is over. We saw nothing that would excite David Attenborough. But we glimpsed another LA, one not consumed by automobiles, or turned into a strip mall, where nature and human optimism thrive in a watery realm, an ever so slightly mystic river.

This article was amended on 3 September 2012. The original referred to hallucinogenic gypsum weed. That should have been jimson weed, or Datura, and has been corrected.


text:
Prominent Syrian comedian killed in Damascus

  • AP foreign,

Associated Press= BEIRUT (AP) — A prominent Syrian comedian has been killed in Damascus after apparently being caught in the crossfire between rebels and government troops.

The SANA state news agency says Yassin Bakoush was killed Sunday by a rebel mortar round that landed on his car in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus.

The anti-regime Syrian Observatory for Human Rights activist group says Bakoush was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade launched by government troops slammed into his car.

The part of Damascus where Bakoush was killed has been hit by fierce clashes between rebels and regime forces in recent months.

The 75-year-old Bakoush was known for playing characters that were likeable but naive and dim-witted.

SANA said Bakoush is survived by11 children.

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text:
Lobster fishermen say catches down

Eric McCarthy, Journal Pioneer
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Steve Clements, left, lifts lobster pans as Steve Clements Jr. and Leon MacDonald move the catch Monday in Howard's Cove.

ALBERTON — They were short on actual numbers, but lobster fishermen say Monday’s lobster catches were better than they were on Saturday, the first fishing day of the new season.

Fishermen on both sides of Northumberland Strait set their gear Friday in rough seas and while they were permitted to fish their traps that day the majority elected to leave them until Saturday, and then found a lot less lobster in the traps than they expected.

Howard's Cove fisherman David Clements came closest to providing a number, indicating his Monday catch was about 450 pounds better than Saturday, but described the two catches combined as "way down" from previous starts.

West Point fisherman Paul Wood, fuelling up before heading back out to fish the rest of his gear, described the catch as decent, although down from a normal start. He's hoping the price will be up to help make up the difference.

Fishermen remained optimistic the lobsters will trap better once weather conditions improve.

Royal Star Foods manager Francis Morrissey said the low catches on Saturday were to be expected because of the windy weather conditions and strong tides Friday and Saturday.

He noted weather conditions look much more favourable for this week. He commended fishermen for proper handling of their catches, noting that the lobsters were well-iced and the quality looks good.

Besides the rough start, weather-wise, fishermen pointed out they were dealing with some of the strongest moon tides of the year.

Organizations: Royal Star Foods

Geographic location: West Point

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Recent comments

  • Prudent Observer
    August 15, 2014 - 15:26

    These fishermen had over 2000 pounds on Monday and they still complain that lobsters are down.What does it take to satisfy them? The reason they won't give you a number because if you wrote some of them had over a ton of lobsters, how could they say that lobsters are down? The past two years have seen record catches , yet they still say lobsters are down. What a bunch of whiners.

  • J
    August 14, 2014 - 08:47

    BooHoo, could make it tough for that E.I. check for this winter, just imagine might have to go out west to work.

    • Abe Sherman
      August 15, 2014 - 09:07

      That attitude say a lot about your character.


text:
Easy .22 Semi for New Shooter?

August 9, 2003, 12:30 AM
I've been teaching a friend of mine the ins and outs of firearms for a little while now. We started with a simple, bolt-action .22 rifle, moved to a semi-auto rifle of the same caliber, and have recently covered .22 and .38 SPL revovlers. I'd like to introduce him to the workings of a .22 semi-auto pistol, but I haven't looked at them in so long I don't know what to check out seriously.

I have a Baikal IZH-35M Standard Target, which might be a little much (top hammer pin, adjustable grip, etc.). I'm looking for something with a decent ease-of-use and ease-of-cleaning - the Baikal requires removal of both wood grips and a rather complicated slide removal as well.

It doesn't have to be the most accurate thing in the world, nor does it have to meet any other stringent criteria. Just something easy and simple, with a traditional semi-auto action.

Any recommendations?

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Drifting Fate
August 9, 2003, 12:37 AM
I know a lot of people of love the Ruger MkIIs, but after owning multiple copies of each - my vote goes for the Browning Buckmark.

The Ruger is an excellant pistol, but the Buckmark just seems like it's more fun to use. And, in particular for you, novices always seem to prefer it.

August 9, 2003, 12:37 AM
I like the Ruger & the Browning Buckmark. They may not be the most simple, but they are fun & reliable and as an added bonus...ACCURATE ;)

August 9, 2003, 02:00 AM
I love my Ruger Mk II. Also hear good things about the Browining Buckmark. Folks gripe about the Beretta Neo trigger, but it sure feels nice in the hand and looks cool. Cool is always a plus for gaining new shooters.

August 9, 2003, 02:04 AM
I like to recommend revolvers to new shooters. :)

August 9, 2003, 02:10 AM
Any of the Ruger MkII variants will work. :)

August 9, 2003, 07:58 AM
Ruger MarkII or the Buckmark. You'll enjoy either one.

August 9, 2003, 08:26 AM
I'd also suggest Ruger MkII or 22/45 ...... but would add that IMO for a newbie ... something like a Single Six is also a good starting platform ..... even tho a revo.

Tropical Z
August 9, 2003, 11:56 AM
Ruger .22lr's are great guns but can be a real pain to sucessfully take apart and get back together.I love my Beretta Neos and its a piece of cake to take apart and put back together.Reliable too!

August 9, 2003, 12:57 PM
I picked up a Walther p-22 to teach the kids with and love it. Basically a smaller version of the p-99. DA\SA operation, easy takedown and a whole lot of fun to shoot. Comes with either a 3.5 or 5 inch barrel or as a set with both.

August 9, 2003, 01:02 PM
Which gun listed is easiest to field strip and clean?

I've heard bad stories about the 22/45.

Chris Rhines
August 9, 2003, 01:52 PM
Lots of people seem to have a hard time reassembling the Ruger MkII. I don't exactly know why - it's not hard. A small piece of brass tubing comes in handy for prying up the dissasembly latch without maring it. The MkII is accurate (I've shot 1" groups at fifty yards off a bench with mine), easy to shoot, and very reliable.

The Buckmark I always recommend against. Every one I've ever seen (four) has been unreliable in high-volume shooting. They're easier to field-strip and reassemble than the Ruger, but they also have many more small parts. The triggers are generally pretty poor (conversely, I've been pretty impressed with the out-of-the-box Ruger triggers lately.)

- Chris

August 9, 2003, 03:26 PM
All repsonses are appreciated. I know I can get my hands on a Ruger to get the feel for it, but I'm not sure about a Buckmark. The Walther is tempting as I have lots of experience with a friend's P99, but I'd prefer something with a manual safety for a beginner. I like to get them into the habit of engaging the safety when it's there.

I also thought about a .22 conversion kit for my Colt 1911 or my HK USP Tactical (if available...I haven't checked). Any thoughts on that?

August 9, 2003, 03:48 PM
A couple of ideas, but neither is really inexpensive.

1) The S&W M41, especially used. Really easy field strip and a manual safety that works like a 1911. Not to mention all of the polished blued steel and walnut. I use my M41 with a red dot sight for new shooters because it allows them to get on target quickly with no recoil. It is hard to shoot an M41 poorly, so it makes new shooters happy. Happy makes them come back for more.

2) The Marvel .22 LR conversion kit. I have one, and it is Bullseye accurate. This also has a really easy field strip.

August 9, 2003, 03:51 PM
p-22 has a slide mounted safety. I forgot about that difference with the p-99. p-22's is about the same position and operation as the ones on 92 series beretta's but is not a decocker.

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text:
Jay Leno Rips Michael Richards

by at . Comments

Despite an apology on The Late Show with David Letterman, Michael Richards should probably expect the backlash to continue for awhile.

Letterman's rival, Jay Leno, held nothing back in his monologues this week. A sampling of Leno's barbs:

Obama and Leno

I had a horrible gig last night: I had to follow Michael Richards at The Laugh Factory.

As you know, Michael Richards said some very offensive things at a comedy club the other night in Hollywood. People were booing, yelling, some got up and walked out. Of course, people waiting outside for the second show had no idea what was going on. They just assumed Carrot Top was on stage.

Until something such as a Britney Spears sex tape takes over the news, the man known as Kramer can probably expect to dominate headlines for awhile.

His racial slurs have even overshadowed the fact that Santa Claus is having an affair with both Katharine McPhee AND Sienna Miller. That's quite the feat.

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