Posts by Michael Nidd 41 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2008
How about "Average Exit Latency", defined as the number of stops required to get from the average passenger position to the outside of any exit. When it gets above about 2, the crowding near the doors increases non-linearly because people are trying to get position before all of the next three stops although two thirds of them don't want the current one.
You have spotted exactly the point. It's not natural to want to be competitive, it's natural to want to crush your opponents into dust if they are vulnerable, which is why "anti-competitive practices" are banned with government enforcement for the sake of retaining a robust free market. Just like it's natural for a boxer to want a horseshoe in his glove, so we make rules about glove composition and agree the sport benefits from these rules. The general consensus is that consumers would suffer if regulators did not detect and punish anti-competitive practices.
"first time a real (not novelization) set of books comes out after a movie"
That wouldn't be the case for the earlier books in the series. I read the first one twenty years ago, and liked it, but I agree that they are slow to come out. By the time the fourth was published, I had lost interest. According to the internet, Bantam released the third in 2000 and the fourth in 2005, which sounds about right, but it also looks like the HBO series was first broadcast in 2011.
I would understand if you had used a sarcasm icon, but the plain text in the balloon had been read and posted about by several people before your post. If you want to use the boffin icon, you will have to acknowledge that bias depends on your data source. In this case, a bias towards values between 0110 0001 and 0111 1010 would lead me to expect more than 50% 1s.
The main innovation over mosaic (that I remember) was that Netscape could display the text without waiting for all of the graphics to load. That made it massively more responsive. It seems like a simple idea (multiple simultaneous sockets and revise the layout as new objects are received) but that's why most people I know switched to Netscape. The main complaint was the unilateral extensions to HTML.
I'm not sure I understand the various quotes about the FCC wanting to control the internet to benefit a few well-connected corporations. The argument sounds like it's in favour of preserving equal access by avoiding laws that require net neutrality.
Why aren't any of those right-wing individuals you quoted making the more standard argument: the person who owns the network hardware can decide how it is used, and if the customers don't like it they can go with a competitor? I know that assumes fair competition exists, and there are lots of arguments against it, but at least it makes some sort of sense.
I know it's not strictly polite to pre-filter survey results, but what would they look like if you threw out every set that had a wrong answer for "software?" Any of the 11% who thought it was comfy clothing have a long way to go before it makes any difference whether they know what USB and motherboard mean.
Alternatively, that 11% might also be the people who know a silly survey when they see one, and were really just going for the most entertaining answer each time. I wouldn't blame them, but their results should still be dropped.
"Appelbaum claimed that over time, gamers' ability to process visual stimuli becomes better and better."
Or people with good ability to process visual stimuli are better at video games, and people who are crap at video games tend to find other things to do. Without a "before" version of this study, it doesn't really say much, does it?
> So, may or may not warrant a trademark, but what they're doing is definitely better than what everyone else is.
Actually, that would kill it. Something that gives a functional advantage cannot be trademarked. Patents are for useful innovations; trademarks are to distinguish something in the mind of customers. That's why the Coke bottle shape is a trademark, but an electric razor with three rotating heads is not (any more).
The mail was sent to undisclosed recipients. It seems unlikely that there was confidential content in an e-mail to their practitioners network, so I think the effort "to have the data retrieved and destroyed" is referring the list of recipients itself, and the only cleanup required (except the apology for a bit of time wasted) is the department that received the wrong list needs to erase their copy. It was a little mistake with no leaked personal information.
Is there an icon for "Move along. Nothing to see here." ?
... when you stop paying for the storage, anything you leave in there can be disposed of by the storage company
I think this case is more like you paid for self-storage, and the self-storage company was closed down by the police for illegal activity involving some of the lockers. In those circumstances, the legitimate customers would expect to be able to collect their stuff.
I don't think this is about intellectual property. If he wants to sell photocopies or scanned images of the book, he's probably OK. From what I can see, the conflict is about the physical book. The statement refers to "items from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs." Who would get licensing royalties if images of the book are reprinted might be round two of the discussion.
Ok, let's pretend the solution is technically possible across all potential end systems, and fantasize that the privacy aspect can somehow be handled securely.
Does Tiziano Motti have a disk drive or tape manufacturing company based in his home town? Never mind explaining how the key can be stored by the user; who's storing all that traffic detail, on what, and who bought all that equipment? It might be inexpensive to operate (it wouldn't be really, but theoretically it could be), but what about to buy and install?
If the system were just going to store hashes, then I expect the sites they are worried about would install something to regularly modify their content enough to change the hash values. Somebody will need a permanent record of what the content actually looked like at the time of the download, so he's not just going to back up the internet, he's going to retain regular backup snapshots for months. Or did I miss a detail?
Not just sure that it hasn't been altered, but also confident that all the people who read it have seen the same thing. If you are sending an invoice in Euros, you don't want to find out that one reader had his viewer configured to automatically convert that to Yen at the current exchange rate, because your quote is for Euros. I know that sort of configuration would count as a bug, but it's a lot less likely when you send a PDF. For some things, what you actually said is more important than what you meant, and fewer filters/conversions is better.
I think people might be misreading a comment. To claim the laws are too "prescriptive" suggests that they try to handle privacy with a collection of very specific conditions, and should be amended to be more generally applicable (and therefore more useful as the underlying specifics evolve.)
To say that a category of laws should be less prescriptive does not mean that they should be "relaxed," but rather that they should convey their intent with minimal reference to the current technologies to which they are seen to apply.
Prescribe: to lay down a rule
Proscribe: to condemn or forbid as harmful
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