Guido loves Wikileaks. They are like a risk management tool for bloggers. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science blog hosted an MP3 excerpt of an LBC show where a presenter, Jeni Barnett, gave an “irresponsible, ill-informed, and ignorant anti-vaccination campaigning that I have ever heard on the public airwaves.” MMR jabs are a subject of intense debate in the Fawkes household. Mrs Fawkes is in the don’t-care-if-it-is-irrational camp, consequently Guido is in the forced-to-cough-up-£300-for-single-shots camp.

LBC threatened to sue Ben Goldacre for breach of copyright.* Big mistake. He took it down and in his place others put it back online. It has probably now been heard online by more people than originally heard it broadcast. Download it via Wikileaks (MP3).

Distributed defiance of lawyers is something the Dead-Tree-Press can’t do. Bloggers are the free press.

*In any event Guido is under the impression that damages in copyright cases are limited to the financial loss caused by the breach of copyright, which in this case would presumably be very limited.

The Tories have announced they plan a spending cap on IT projects in view of the NHS super-computer disaster, where the budget has gone from £2 billion to £13 billion. Which is a complete joke considering that is more than Google will spend on research and development. The charge of waste must be hitting home, if this report from a co-conspirator is anything to go by:

I shared a train carriage today with Alan Johnson. He was having a loud telephone conversation overheard by the whole carriage telling everyone how worried he was the Tories would attack them over the lack of progress and tax payers money spent on the new computer system for the NHS. “We have only actually spent £3 billion, rather than the £12 billion we planned, so taxpayers are actually getting value for money….” were his very words.

On that basis the last charge of the light brigade was not a complete military failure, since some of the calvarymen survived.