Don’t let the Government rush draconian internet laws through Parliament before the election: write to your MP! I did.

Witnessing this is pretty cool from a “making things” point of view. Shame it’s happening right outside our flat.

In honour of the Functional Programming eXchange, on a bus to which I am writing this.

 (a (program (writtenp :in 'lisp))
     (may 'be (and (simple) (elegant) (crisp)))
     (but (cry '(C pros) "too *fancy();"
             "for (i; simply(); &cant++ + ++see)"
             "{ the code; for (;;) { the parenthesis; } }")))

My MP, Meg Hillier, was kind enough to respond by post to my email about the proposed “three strikes” legislation in the UK. The main content of her response was to forward me a letter she received from Stephen Timms, the Minister for Digital Britain (his actual job title, I’m not making this up), to “clarify the Government’s position on this issue”.

The forwarded letter mostly just rattled off the party line - illegal file sharing is illegal, artists need to be compensated, the usual unjustified claims of urgency - but it did mention the recent report by the UK Intellectual Property Office, awkwardly entitled © The Way Ahead, which is actually pretty encouraging reading: I will discuss it in a separate post soon.

My previous email focused on problems with the “three strikes” approach. Since the Digital Economy Bill was published we’ve discovered that “three strikes” is only one of several nasty tricks up Mandy’s sleeve. Therefore, and because I felt from her letter that Ms Hillier hadn’t really taken my concerns on board, I wrote back.

Reading Patrick McKenzie’s excellent practical example of metaprogramming, I came across a line of code I didn’t understand:

caller[0][/`([^']*)'/, 1]

That line taught me three new things about Ruby:

An email I wrote to my MP (using the very handy WriteToThem) regarding the UK Government’s so-called “three strikes” proposals to combat illegal filesharing.