Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Thursday, 24 July 2008

Some facts aren't.

On my visit to London Today I bought a couple of cheap animated Batman DVDs. Inside one of them was a postcard-sized advert warning me against DVD piracy. Now I don't support or condone piracy but something struck me about this bit of propaganda. It states boldly "90%* of all pre-release pirate DVDs are filmed from the back of a cinema with a camcorder". Now leaving aside the question how they can possibly know this, there is the question of that little asterisk by the quoted figure. At the bottom of the page it says. *Source:FACT: The federation against copyright theft.

Who produced this document? Glad you asked. The Federation Against Copyright Theft, of course. So they quote a doubtful figure and then cite themselves as the source. I've long been annoyed by the pointless and misleading adverts that used to appear at the start of videos and now appear in an unskippable form at the start of many DVDs (and get shown before movies in cinemas), but this method of quoting statistics is sheer duplicity. You can take my word for it, a massive 94.6% of people agree with me.*

*Source Bob Hale Invented-On-The-Spot Statistics Limited.

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