Autoplay MP3

Please help, I've Googled this to bits.

Why won't the following code autoplay an mp3?

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.podbean.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/player.swf" width="290" height="24" id="audioplayer6003" autoplay="true">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.podbean.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/player.swf" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="playerID=6003&amp;bg=0xF8F8F8&amp;leftbg=0xEEEEEE&amp;text=0x666666&amp;lefticon=0x666666&amp;rightbg=0xCCCCCC&amp;rightbghover=0x999999&amp;righticon=0x666666&amp;righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&amp;slider=0x666666&amp;track=0xFFFFFF&amp;loader=0x9FFFB8&amp;border=0x666666&amp;soundFile=http://www.castaway.org.uk/clients/voices/sounds/Jonathan_Aris.mp3&amp;autoplay=true" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="menu" value="false" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="autoplay" value="true" />
</object>

Here's the code in action:
http://www.castaway.org.uk/clients/voices/joar_test.htm

Help!
Thanks

2011 Tour Dates

"Love Your Chocolates"

An Evening with Tim Bentinck

(David Archer in "The Archers")

-An Earl Entertains-

Hanger Farm Arts Centre, Southampton	Sun 22nd May
Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds	Fri 10th June
Otley Courthouse, Otley, E. Yorks	Sat 25th June
Watermill Theatre, Newbury	Sun 3rd July
Church Stretton School Theatre, Salop	Wed 3rd Aug
Fulham Town Hall, London	Tues 20th Sept
Drill Hall, London	TBA

Tim Bentinck has played David Archer in The Archers for over 28 years. Join him as he brings his hugely entertaining one-man show ‘Love Your Chocolates' to our theatre, and find out what really happened on that roof! The only Earl currently working as a professional actor, Tim Bentinck brings tales from The Archers, comedy songs, video clips and a live radio lambing!

Windows 7 and HP C4480 problem solved

Ok. Bloody Microsoft again.
New computer with Windows 7 64 bit. Year old HP Photosmart C4480 printer that worked fine with XP. Couldn't install software, got "Fatal Error during installation" then install prog went into a loop. It said the printer was installed and the scanner worked in Photoshop but when went to print, got "Printer not installed". Tried everything online, no joy.
Paid £16 to HP support for an online 'Friend'. Got Nathan. Top man. Here's what we did.
Installed latest Java, Flash, C++ Runtime, MS XML and .NET version 4. Still got "Fatal error during installation" and program looping but....... IT PRINTS.
Now to get on with the rest of my life.
By contrast, when I bought my Macbook and plugged in the printer, it recognised it and installed the driver immediately. WTF?????

On the phone in the quiet coach

(Names have been changed to protect the guilty)

Last week on a Virgin train to Birmingham, someone was on the phone….

“Oh hi yeah can I speak to Jane Davenport please. It’s Andrew Price. Thanks.

JANE! Hi, it’s Andy… Andy Price… it’s Andrew Price, I’m covering the Black Sofa concert in Birmingham tonight? Black Sofa? It’s a band. No it’s not a sofa contest, and they’re not black. We’re trying them out, I think they’re brilliant.”

He goes on like this. Another call, brags to his friends Alan, Blake and Piers about how he was just chillin’ with Jane.

He then lowers his voice, but because he’s been SCREAMING, his lowered voice is merely what we can hear, rather than what we’d been assaulted with. He is driving everyone in the coach to distraction, but no-one says anything. I start plotting.

He rings Steve. “Steve mate, can you retrieve my emails from your computer for me? My login name is the usual format for Universal employees, and the password is las revinu – it’s ‘Universal’ backwards. Clever eh.”

I’m sitting across the aisle from him, doing the crossword, and writing all this down.

In Birmingham, I get to the hotel, get on the computer. I Google Universal and find their email format. Login as andrew.price@universal.com password lasrevinu and at two am email Jane Davenport.

“Dear Jane, Well what a disaster. I was so wrong. They were terrible. All the effort this company has put into Black Sofa is wasted, just like I am actually, wasted that is! Ha ha ha! Seriously though Jane I think we’ve been duped, we’ve been taken for a ride. Although I wouldn’t mind taking you for a ride any day! From a distance Jane you know you’re not half bad looking. Anyway must go, feel my curry’s having an effect. Love ya! Andy xxx”

The next morning I log on with an anonymous email address and copy this email to Andy, with the accompanying message:

“Hi Andy, I sent this to Jane last night. I suggest you get round to Universal straight away. I’ve also sent copies to Alfie, Blake and Piers. It’s cool. Just explain that you shouted out your login details on a train for all to hear. As Abraham Lincoln once said. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. And in future Andy, in the quiet carriage of the train, keep your voice down, there’s a good lad.”

That's what I could have done. If only I had...

2018

2018. Google Brain Implant Spells Death of Pub Quiz.

Tim Bentinck © 2011

A child born after 2000 has no concept of what the world was like pre-Google. Not so much pre-computer, but specifically pre- the instant ability to find the answer to almost any factual question, almost without thinking about it. No-one’s thick or bright any more - you just dip your head to the screen, tap it a few times, and there’s the answer. The need for learning has passed. The accumulation of knowledge, that has been the driving force of civilisation throughout its history has been made redundant, because everybody knows everything.

And in 2018, at the present rate of progress, Moore’s Law[1] dictates that we will have a brain implant that we communicate with by thought alone and that answers us as a soft sound in our ear and an image on our retina, and is permanently hooked up to the net, and, because it’s Google Plus v.6.5, it doesn’t give us a choice, but finds the most pertinent, the most interesting, the cheapest, the best, the most profitable – for you. Because it knows you. It knows all about you.

And if this becomes so, which it must do, what then? What value school? What value learning? What would be the point in cramming facts into young heads? Why should we ‘know’ anything? An exam question that demanded knowledge would be pointless. The very word ‘knowledge’ would cease to have any meaning. Is this the end of education?

Well I hope not, and I don’t think so, but it is absolutely certain that education will have to change to take all this into account. It does mean that everything will be different. The fundamental problem though is that this database knowledge, this accessed knowledge, this ‘ask and you shall get’ thinking is passive. It is only found when asked. It does not reside in your memory when you make decisions, it does not inform your choices based on things you know.

But if the eleven-year-olds growing up like this in the next decade learn as well from the questions they ask their implanted selves as my generation did from reading books and listening to teachers, is there really much difference, as long as they remember what they find? The job of the teacher will be to give a structure to this ‘self-learning’, to give a strong outline of the reference points of every subject and let the student find the facts and figures by themselves. Making relationships between facts will be the key, and whether, given that power, they’ll bother to remember it.

When a University student, lying on their back in the park with their eyes closed, might be editing a movie, reading a book, writing a novel, finishing a spreadsheet, socialising, paying a parking fine or having sex, and doesn’t understand the concept of what life was like before that, we have entered a different world where the only role a teacher can play is that of the inculcator and organiser, the one who tells them what questions they should be asking, from birth.

If this is not a meme in 2011, it will be soon.

---

[1] The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years

Isoworg Speech

Just to finish off this whole re-appraisal of my father's book, here he is giving a speech to punlicise the book in Trafalgar Square on July 18th 1971. In order to create publicity for the novel, he 'invented' the International Society for World Government and attracted three hippies and a few passing tourists, oh and a nutter.

His speech lasted half an hour and I recently found a recording of it on reel to reel tape and transcribed it. It's my Pa. Highly articulate, persuasive and way ahead of his time. The World Government he describes could be the EU today. The latter half of is spech is what he was really about though. He warns of the coming ecological disaster and is so correct when he predicts that the message of people like him, seen in 1971 as green fringe nutcase, would come to be seen as mainstream orthodoxy and people who deny it would be seen as 'the enemy'.

As I say, it's half an hour long, but worth a listen. The first 15 seconds or so are distorted, while the recordist plugs the mike in, but after that it's pretty clear.




It's a good name anyway, so I've renamed my web design service after it.

www.isoworg.com

Isoworg

I knew my father was always ahead of his time, but the Wikileaks phenomenon has made him seem even more prescient. I now realise he invented the Internet, the iPhone, Facebook and Wikileaks - in the late sixties!

In 1971 he published a book called ISOWORG, standing for the International Society for World Government. Its spy hero, Thorne, was able to ring a telephone number which was answered by a computer that spoke with his voice, thought as he did, behaved as he did, but was wired up to a collection of computers around the world that contained the sum of mankind's knowlege. Don't forget he was writing this in about 1967!

"The world's going to get more crowded, more heavily armed, emergent nations more ambitious. No assembly of men could ever be sufficiently competent or sufficiently objective to handle such a problem and the penalty for failure is annihilation. A computerised administration could do it. Isoworg is building up the most powerful computer in the world. It will be able to handle all the information and problems which would occur in the context of a world government. It has memory banks which contain all the information to which you could refer if you knew where to look. Plus, of course, a great deal that it acquires from its own resources. All Isoworg operatives are linked to it, linked together, in the same way that you will be if you join. This means it know what's going on in the lives of all other agents simultaneously. Also, the extent of these memory banks is almost unlimited. You will, as I said, have instant recourse to most of the world's available knowledge."
"How does it work?" asked Thorne.
"It works according to a new principle. Imagine a dish of acid. In one corner is an electrode connected to a wire. All the information about you gets coded into electrical impulses and fed through the wire into the electrode. This causes a growth to occur on the electrode in the acid - it looks like a fern. The more information that is fed in, the more the fern grows. Given your compliance, it will learn you totally - whims, weaknesses, experience, knowledge, the lot. It will grow and become what you are. It will be your alter ego."

So when the Internet started, he, quite rightly, used to jokingly boast, 'Oh I invented that', which, in theory or concept, he had.

The other thing I'd always known, but had thought absurd, was that Isoworg's agents were dedicated to finding every country's state secrets, and publishing them to the world! Their agents were therefore enemies to everyone and would be tracked, hunted and killed by alliances of otherwise mutually hostile governments. For Thorne, read Assange!

"The purpose of Isoworg is to glean top-secret information from all countries and publish it to the world, because secrecy breeds suspicion, suspicion fear, fear tension and tense people press nuclear buttons. It's not only military information, it's political, scientific, trade secrets - anything that inhibits world-wide free intercourse and development."

And the iPhone? Here's how Thorne communicates with his computer:

"There." She pointed to an object like a cigarette case. "It's a mini two-way radio. You can talk to it whenever you like. You can sit and talk to it for the rest of your life, I should think."

I wrote an In Memoriam website after he died, and there's a description of the book here.

It's actually on sale here at eBay too.