Posts by Gav 682 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007
This is true of all early TV productions. The actors all learnt their craft on stage and the the performance best for TV wasn't yet appreciated. Actors who'd done films were better equipped. But the best of them wouldn't wish to do cut-price children's TV productions, which is what Dr Who was. Consequently some of the acting, "stagey" or not, was pretty dire.
That's not going to stop me eagerly waiting to see some of these new finds.
Closing it down was not only the practical thing for him to do, but also the perfect and 100% legal response to the NSA.
If he's let it continue operating while the NSA held the keys to everything, then he'd also be providing them with perfect blackmail material that could ruin his company and his reputation forever should it ever "accidentally get out". He would be forever the NSA's bitch.
The idea that a secret law could be enforced to make his action illegal would have been laughed at a year ago, but now seems depressingly and scarily possible.
You do realise that waving the feebly derogatory "liberals" stick around just damages any point you might want to make? Even if you want to qualify that with a "modern liberals".
A few points of clarification for you; Making up insulting names for those you disagree with is for school children. Those who support Obama are not "liberals". I'm not sure what you'd call them, but "supporters of Obama" or "Democrats" might come close.
The thing is that those planets discovered by Kepler are only those on a tiny portion of the visible sky, and only those where the planet orbits are angled in just the right way that we can detect them. So that means that we've only just started looking in 0.25 percent of the sky.
There's a long, long way we can go yet.
Tell me what you want to do?
I'm not sure. There's that thing that let you take a file and change it. You know, I'd recognise it if you'd show me a menu. You know, like you used to when you were a computer, instead of this useless, fake person that annoys the hell out of me. You were good as a computer, why pretend to be something you're not?
Yup, I guess if you are prepared to accept any old shit, based on the personal thoughts and experiences of some anonymous guy on the internet, you can increase the number of editors.
The visual editor was ok, but occasionally it seriously screwed things up, that others would then have to go fix manually using the previous editor. If you're going to practically force it on new editors, who don't know their edit has messed things up, and wouldn't know how to fix things even if they did know, then it needs to be rock solid first.
" targets non-US citizens and so is less legally contentious"
They are only dredging the data of innocent non-Americans. So that's all right then. Remember guys, it's not people that get unalienable rights; it's *American* people. That's what Thomas Jefferson was talking about, wasn't it?
Talk about your 1st world problems.
I know someone who hasn't managed to updated their iOS. As long as no-one notices on the train, and the embarrassment kills him, he may see out the week. Beyond that I don't hold out too much hope. For the love of humanity Apple, do something for these helpless wretches!
And what a completely pointless waste of time and energy for all concerned.
Is it beyond someone to come up with a better system, rather than having customers physically park themselves outside the shop for days, waiting for a completely arbitrary date & time when they have to physically walk through a door? Just thinking about it shows just how ridiculous the whole charade is.
Apple is supposed to be a tech company, but is reliant on a stupid and outdated method of throttling initial market demand.
It's a massive misunderstanding to think these trillions could ever exist in actual liquid cash. It's all estimates of the value of assets, and that value is only as much as anyone is prepared to pay, which is in turn reliant on how much is getting sold.
If the "400 upper-crustaceans" attempted to sell their assets, in order to give anyone on the planet three hundred bucks, who would they sell it to? Who has $2.02 trillion to spare? No-one. But that's not a concern, because as soon as they started selling their assets, the value of them would plummet. The market becomes flooded, everyone is wondering why you are selling, economies crash, the actual trillions of dollars become worth far less than they were the day before, everyone loses in the resulting chaos.
The fact is these guys are only "worth" $2.02 trillion as long as they never, ever, try to realise their worth. Which is not to say they aren't very rich indeed in a material sense. But the actual figures bandied about are little better than guesses and estimates of a scenario that could never happen.
Apart from that; if you give everyone in the world $300, inflation immediately makes everything cost $300 more. You only make people richer by creating assets (products, services, skills), not by converting them into cash.
And what definition are we using for "correctly" filtered. My definition of what is "correct" may differ from that or the ISP's or the government's.
Here is the nub of the problem, in that you are giving the power to make that decision to either some drone in a commercial company, (where arse-covering is the watchword) or some drone in government, (where either vote-appeasement or political dogma is the deciding factor). Neither should be trusted to decide what is "correctly" filtered.
But that's the slippery slope that apparently some are eager we approach. Once the method of filtering is in place and working, how long before the ISP or the government start "tweaking" the criteria to suit themselves? How long before the ISP decides that certain traffic is an inconvenient drain on their resources, and might possibly be considered by some as maybe a bit scary to small children? Plonk it on the list then, problem solved! How long before the government decide that a website they don't like "promotes terrorism" (the magic words!), and must, ipso-facto, therefore be child unfriendly? Onto the block list with it!
So only those without the filter get to annoy the ISP or read what the government doesn't like. But that doesn't matter, because we've already established that they are all deviants that need kept an eye on.
As long as they are informed. Some of these crowd-sourced projects give the impression that they're just a few months away from shipping a final product. So naive people think that their investment amounts to effectively the same as a pre-order.
It may be a relatively small amount of money, but the risk is significant. They need to understand that they may never see the promised product, or their money ever again. And they can't sue or complain to anyone.
The point is that some small companies/websites do not accept payment in any other way. I'm not an online retailer, so I don't know what its advantages are to them. But I suspect that paypal, because it got into the online payment market early, perfected an easy way of handling secure payments before the credit card providers got their act together.
Done properly, I still find paypal convenient. More so than some credit cards and some of the nonsensical hoops they make you jump through.
As for criticism about them making money out of it; well duh. Name one financial organisation that doesn't.
Unfortunately it's even more messed up than that.
Thinking that the detector *might* detect a lie, even when they are telling 100% truth, may be enough to increase some people's stress levels and give a false positive.
Other people may find the whole process stressful, regardless of whether they are telling the truth or not, but on occasions manage to calm themselves at all the wrong questions.
Other people may still be worrying more about their last answer, than the current one.
Other people are pathological liars who can sail though any lie without a slightest flicker.
Other people can be totally delusional and think they are telling the truth, when it's entirely false.
The whole process is such complete bullshit and full of holes that it is worthless.
Ahh, the old "that's just the way it is" argument. I think Bruce Hornsby wrote a song along those lines, except that was about excuses for racism.
The issue here is not that a 9 year old girl would be "offended", which I doubt, that's just not how children's minds work. It is that she would leave the conference thinking "Well that industry is clearly just a bunch of silly men obsessed with looking at women's bodies. Not for girls like me then. It kind of makes me feel uncomfortable." That is the tragedy. That's what *I* find offensive.
If grown men want to be stupid frat boys then let them go do it in stupid frats. Not at developers' conferences.
The reason fighting back against a bully usually ends in the victim getting punished is all to do with knowing how far you can push it.
Bullies usually have years of experience. They know when and where to bully, and how far they can take it before authority has no choice but respond. Ultimately they are cowards, of course, but that makes them very wary of facing up to responsibility for any bullying. In short; they're good at bullying.
The victim, on the other hand, is usually useless at it all. They don't know when to respond, where to do it, or how far they can go. They're response is usually fuelled by desperation and rage and not calculated. It gets noticed, they cross the line where authority has to respond. End result is they get punished, when the bully doesn't.
What's sad is that the authority responsible is too bureaucratic, thoughtless or stupid to look at the bigger picture. Just what makes an otherwise meek pupil, who is never in any trouble, suddenly decide to take a swing at the class thug? Who is most likely to have initiated this situation? But they don't care, an example has to be made.
Who said anything about funding? This is about policy and IT systems. This proposed system is only going to be implemented in England.
And the figures you are quoting are totally false. From the document you quote:
England; £99,249bn (83%)
Wales; £6.065bn (5%)
Scotland; £10,821bn (9%)
Northern Ireland; £3,790bn (3%)
How many days you think would pass before a way of stripping the watermark was freely available online?
My estimate; maybe 14, tops. At that point your suggestion becomes useless.
Some MP3 sellers already do something similar to this, by embedding a code within the MP3 tags. But it is simplicity itself to remove it.
What happens if someone hasn't stripped their watermark, and then the file is found copied all over the internet? They get prosecuted? "Not my fault. My MP3 Player was stolen with my entire MP3 library. Someone hacked my computer and copied the lot. Prove that I uploaded them..."
Again, useless, as nothing can be proved.
They get paid "when no actually doing anything" because most of the value of what they do is not realised at the at time they do it.
You'd be as well arguing that programmers shouldn't get paid when someone buys software they coded, because they're not actually doing anything when the software is used.
"Type code, get paid."
Seriously? People are still trotting out these excuses like they are at all relevant?
>1) Cheaper albums.
You can get albums online for as little as £5. How much cheaper do you want?
>2) Free digital copies when purchasing a CD.
Amazon do this. Every computer equipped with a CD player can do this. If you are buying a CD you already *have* a digital copy.
>3) DRM-free music when purchased online.
You mean you can still find places that sell music online with DRM? It must take a special kind of determined stupidity to buy from them.
Totally a strawman argument. No-one has ever suggested that climate fluctuations can only be the result of human activity.
I'm also puzzled about your identification of a U shaped valley. Are you a geologist? And even if it was U shaped, it's already well known that there has been more than one period of glaciation, and plenty of opportunity for this valley to have gone through the process you suggest.
The solution to all this is obvious;
- don't put stuff on Facebook you wouldn't want them to use
- don't believe a word Facebook says about your privacy. Anything they say that may be true today, is likely to be false tomorrow.
- don't "like" anything provided by any commercial company. Or by anyone you don't know personally. If you really like something, and really must tell everyone, write it out in words in a status update.
- lie to Facebook at every opportunity. Feed them misinformation whenever you can.
I prefer the tactic some American guy had (you'll find it online somewhere).
Inform the caller that they have just phoned the scene of a murder and they are now a "person of interest" to the investigation. Demand to know their name, address, relationship with the victim, and whereabouts last night. Intersperse the interrogation with shouts about not walking through the blood and "don't touch that knife!"
Undoubtedly there are some tasks that need a computer, being either impossible or difficult on a tablet/phone/console/media centre/internet radio/device.
But for these things that computer can be an ancient workhorse. No need for speed. No need for the latest whizzy OS and graphics. No need to be buying a new computer.
Even I, as a IT professional, am finding I have less and less need to boot my PC of an evening. I can do what I need in a handful of other devices. The average, non-gamer, end-user must be finding even fewer reasons for using or buying a PC.
Nobody is forced to use touch, but so many of the design decisions were clearly biased towards touch. End result; an OS that felt it was only grudgingly providing mouse and keyboard functionality, because it had too. For a system overwhelmingly used on desktops that's madness.
Microsoft thought they were going to ride in on a wave that changed computing forever. They wanted to be at the forefront of the change in the way people thought about computers, like the iPhone changed mobiles. But the problem was no-one liked Windows 8's ideas enough. There's nothing to excite. Nothing that made people want to change. All is has is innovations that annoy more than delight, and a nagging feeling that you're being told to change to suit Microsoft, not you.
In 10 years time maybe we'll all be seeing Windows 8 as a glorious failure that was before its time, but I doubt it.
I remain mystified why anyone, ever, sends money to a spammer. For anything. Can't get my head around that level of idiocy.
The hint is in the spam, people. They lied to get you to read about their pills. That's a pretty big clue that everything else they say/do is likely to be a lie/fake too.
This is kind of the same argument as "if you have nothing to hide..." argument.
The NSA, I would think, have no interest at all in my data. But the point is that isn't stopping them collecting it, just in case, or giving themselves the legal right to collect it at any point they like in the future. I have to just like it or lump it, and trust that the governments never ever use it for any other "War Against ... " project they dream up in the future. And by that time it will be pointless to complain, it will already have happened.
The time to put at stop to it is now.
I'm with Microsoft on this one. Google are playing games to throttle the Windows Phone and Microsoft know it.
Why do they know it? Because Microsoft practically wrote the book on how to kill competition by restricting access to APIs. Years ago. If anyone knows how to recognise when it's happening, it's Microsoft. It doesn't make it right, but there is a certain satisfaction to be had seeing Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine.
Actually It's more like getting a court order against Joe Bloggs of 12 Winsome Drive, when in fact your beef is with Joe Bloggs of 18 Arcadia Avenue. But you never bothered to check you had the right address, and the court just took your word for it.
Next time anyone has reason to sue someone, please, just for a laugh, put their address down as 10 Downing Street, London. Apparently the courts don't bother checking before granting you permission to send the bailiffs round. That would be funny.
Well, the good folks of Bomont did warn y'all about this kind of criminal behaviour. Once you allow youngster to have their morals wiped clean away by that jungle rock and roll music, and the shameless dancing, it was inevitable that it would lead to phishing and the stealing of twitter accounts.
It's amazing how much less of the world you can travel when you're handcuffed to a federal agent in the back of an American air force plane.
With our VIP membership you don't have the check your luggage in, queue at the depart gate, or worry about customs! You step out of your runway side limo and straight into your own personal flight! Down sides are you don't get much opportunity to peruse the duty-free, and you always end up with the middle seat. And flights are one way only; direct to US home base airports only.
To get these special privileges you just have to join our US Government VIP Flyer Scheme, and leave your rights behind. Join now!
"Are you stupid or are you deliberately being thick?"
" join the real world, where unreal pressures are put on our young people for them to conform and be accepted by any means that they feel is possible."
No pressure, but I'd like you to read back to yourself the two phrases you wrote above, and consider where they might be at odds with each other. Thanks.
If you have low self esteem, especially about your appearance, you hate being photographed and you hate looking at photos of yourself. The last thing you want to do is send photographs to others, or peruse them yourself. (The self-hate sessions are what mirrors are for.)
So I cannot imagine low self esteem being a reason for having compromising selfies on your phone.
Vanity, on the other hand ...
Plenty of apparent reasons. Here's some.
* Attention seeking, all be it anonymous
* Exercising power - very attractive if you a powerless loser.
* Exercising power with nearly zero consequences - you get to be vile, and there's no comeback.
* Peer approval - if you have friends as sick as you
* Standing up for what you think are your rights - without all that tedious actually standing behind them
* You get to pretend you're some kind of uber-cool online activist, protecting cyberspace, subverting the man who just doesn't get it
Trolling is trolling. One person's "barrel of laughs" is another person's harassment. I expect some behind these bomb threats are treating it partially as a joke, but that's because they have belligerent and warped minds.
The key distinction is the anonymous element. If someone you know has a dig about something you are touchy about (like bombs in your front garden), you have a lot to put it into context. Was it a joke? Was it serious? Do you care what they think/do? But when it's some Anonymous Coward you have nothing to put into context. You do not know whether you are dealing with a serious nutter. You do not know how far they are prepared to go, both in real life and online.
And being over-sensitive about One Direction does not give everyone a free pass to deliberately set out to wind you up. Particularly total strangers who are not in anyway affected by you.
"the worst, most insultingly poorly designed and misfeatured, piece of software I've ever had inflicted on me since getting my first ZX Spectrum in 1983: Zune"
You've never tried using Samsung Kies, have you? Same function as Zune, a whole new level of suck. I refuse to believe Zune can possibly be worse Kies. It's not physically possible.
Always, always use a false date of birth. Too many other companies still use your DoB as some kind of proof of identity, so you should treat it as sensitive information. Any website that has no good reason for knowing my DoB, other than "proving" I'm over a certain age, gets a made up date.
One side effect of this is now that Facebook sends begging messages around your "friends" telling them to come wish you happy birthday. On the wrong date. Frankly, any well wishes that has to be prompted by an automated third party are of no value. And delivering them on the wrong day just confirms that.
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