A Welsh primary school is considering tagging children: "Under the proposed system, an alarm sounds if any of the 350-pupils leave Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Lonlas Primary School, Swansea, at any point during the day."

Hmm.. "The school has had trouble finding teaching assistants due to low pay and unfavourable working hours". Well, I can see a solution that doesn't involve infringing civil liberties and paying for equipment and maintenance to bring about a system that harms the children ("children suffering bullying or accidents will have less protection than before")... why not increase pay for classroom assistants?

As an aside, I wonder how they plan to attach these tags to children?

Steve mentioned this to me the other day: "The EU Software Patent Directive has been or will be scheduled on the agenda of the Agriculture and Fishery Meeting of the 24th of January as an A item, i.e. an item that is to be adopted without a vote."

I don't know much about the workings of the EU, but it strikes me that asking an Agriculture and Fishery Meeting to rule on intellectual property for software isn't totally appropriate.

I was idly flipping through the Orange World menus yesterday evening (because that's what I love spending my Saturday nights doing, of course) and noticed an advert for the Orange Music Player. I'd not heard of it before - other than some vague faffle at Glastonbury last year, where Orange traditionally have a big sponsorship deal - so I thought I'd give it a go. And write about it hear, obviously.

The experience was a bit long-winded. Download the music player (about 180k or so of it, I think - it's a native Symbian app so I presume it's Series 60 only), install it, and start it up... at this point it asks to go onto the network and download some initial stuff, which apparently it'll only have to do once. Unfortunately it doesn't say anything about how much data is being transferred and what (or if?) this'll cost me, but I went along with it anyway.

The app starts up with yer typical menu: don't ask me what the difference is between "charts" and "best sellers" is, or "Artist A-Z" and "Full catalogue"... but all the usual stuff is there.

The app itself is quite slow - even when it's not going to the network to grab stuff; and most choices from the menu lead to it connecting to download some more data. Again, I'm not sure what this costs me but that's a problem with GPRS in general as much as it is this service. Categories of music seem quite arbitrary and I can't help feeling that Orange have missed a trick here - rather than producing a hierarchy of music organised into arbitrary categories ("Golden Oldies Top 15"), I'd like to be able to browse by artist or do a search for something I really like. But maybe there isn't enough music available to allow searches.

Once you've found a track you want, there's a "preview" option which downloads a short clip to listen to. This worked OK but was a tad slow - I'd be interested in seeing how this all works on Orange 3G. Having a small graphic for the track was a nice touch. Then purchasing - £1.50 for a track. Not too bad, but here's where I wondered: what else can I do with this music?

Err - not much. There was no way of transferring it away from the handset built into the Music Player app, so I had a go taking it off using a Series 60 File Manager. The file seems to look a bit like an mp3 (despite the .koz) extension - the UNIX "file" command actually thought it was an mp3 - but nothing on my desktop (iTunes, RealPlayer, VLC) would play it.

So I've paid £1.50 for a track I can play on my phone, but nowhere else; this might be a content owners wet dream, but it's not very helpful for me. I guess I'm expected to pay again for each new device I want to play the music on, or something... It's DRM-by-the-numbers, unimaginative and a disappointing experience.

FWIW the DRM looks like it's supplied by Chaoticom, who I'd not heard of before.

I came across these guys recently, AmbieSense: "...context-sensitive technology is based on the use of context tags. These small electronic tags are a means of capturing and communicating information about the surroundings (i.e. info about the environment). The context tags within AmbieSense are unique as they can store a large amount of structured data and communicate it to mobile computers. "

As it's been explained to me, this is kinda turning the model of mobile on its head: rather than being connected to a wide-ranging network, over which you can access all sorts of data, the data itself is distributed over the physical world via short-range networks. The other obvious comparison is RFID, but Ambiesense seems to be about broadcasting data into the environment (rather than exposing data about a product into that environment) - and large quantities of it, too.

I can't work out what to make of this, but it's refreshing to be reminded that nothing's set in stone...

The BBC on visual radio: ""If you have a Visual Radio enabled handset, when you hear an artist you don't know, or there's a competition or vote that you'd like to participate in, you pull out your handset and with one click you turn on a visual channel parallel to the on-air broadcast you've just been listening to.""