Re: using numbers *instead* of names
Compuserve surely? Or AOL do that as well in their early days?
1944 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
I don't know if its really ever going to be practical, but I've had in mind a 'glass' touch sensitive desk as a user interface of the future for some time. Its not really very clear in my mind, but something like a stylus rather than a mouse. I never find a mouse that great for really precise work. I think I'd be happier with an inkless biro that just wrote on the screen. Whether it would replace the keyboard is another matter though.
Perhaps something like docking your mobile device into a slot on the back of the desk and that enables a 3ft by two foot touch sensitive display built into the desk surface...
Big Advertising trying to erode creators rights even more. Asking for legislation where there isn't a problem in the hope of being able to landgrab on the back of the legislation.
Aided of course by the general lawyers desire to make complicated legislation about everything in the hopes lawyers can make more money out of it...
Does seem a bit much for these days, but I'd quite like an electronic view finder.Having both VF and rear body lcd is a chunk of money though. I wonder what the market would be like for an LCD viewfinder and no bigger lcd on the back? Being a *very* amateur/beginner user I hardly seem to use the screen on my DSLR except for checking light levels on the results with an old almost completely manual lens.
That the other side to this story would be very interesting. I've rarely seen fast food staff suddenly decide to assault customers and rip their sunglasses off, although I'm prepared to believe that working at McMornons and dealing with the French public is enough to send anyone temporarly insane.
Something always goes wrong...
It always seems like a rule of nature. Companies build up dominance in a market, people start spouting about how "no-one ever got sacked for buying xxx" and then something goes wrong and they fade again. Yet its something people want to believe...
As is always said: follow the money.
At the moment we have Big Media attempting to enhance creators rights, and Even Bigger Advertising attempting to destroy them. Forget the stuff about individual freedoms and stuff, that's just to confuse the issue. Just follow the money.
If Big Media win then at least some of the money will filter down to creators, and we'll get more content, because what a Big media Exec really wants to do (apart from get rich) is to build and empire with more and more creative stuff, making him look better and better compared to other Big Media Execs
If Even Bigger Advertising wins, then we can look forward to a future in which creators hardly get paid at all, and we drown in endless mediocre home made junk plastered with endless advertising, because even bigger advertising Execs just want to get rich and build an empire by flogging more and more advertising on cheaper and cheaper content.
Neither view looks especially wonderful, but for Big Advertising to win looks a damn sight worse to me. I was never remotely in favour of so called big media companies who pay creators as little as they can get away with until it became clear that the alternative seems to be even bigger advertising, who want to pay them nothing at all.
You'll have to explain to me why they *need* that film.
Don't forget to distinguish "need" from "quite nice to have".
As far as I can tell people still managed to get educated before the internet and photocopiers: indeed I understand there's a school of thought that suggests they were educated rather better in those days.
For example I have a memory of a great english teacher wandering round the schoolroom declaiming extracts from Julius Caesar in overdone theatrical style, interspersed with comments in his own voice about what was going on. It made about ten times more impact than showing a pirated video of Kenneth Branagh or someone would have done...
No company needs an IP lawyer in house: all they have to do is to create all their own content. Need a photo of people in the street - send someone out to take one. Need a sketch - find someone who can draw. Its not hard.
This is just FUD and scaremongering. Maybe its by a shill for Big Advertising (an entity many sizes bigger than any content company), maybe its just what Lenin would call a useful idiot, but its little more than that.
As for extension of copyright terms. Well hell, if the stuff is still saleable and still has value (if only by generating advertising income) why should the only people who *don't* get any income from its sale be the people who did the real work in the first place. What's needed most of all is some sort of registry where if you want to use orphaned works you pay a reasonable fee to the registry and you have a licence.
Disclaimer: I don't work in any IP area myself at the moment, nor do I derive any significant income from IP. What little I have earned in recent years has gone to charity. But I have worked as a semi pro musican, and I have written for nationally published magazines. I am highly sympathetic to the basic proposition that creators should be paid in preference to the millionaire executives of Big Advertising.
> The government maintains it is there to help prevent social disorder, fraud and the spread of
> pornography, but it would seem to any outsider that its key aim is to quell any political dissent and
> keep the party in power.
I'm sure the Government would say that the best way of preventing Social disorder *is* to quell political dissent and keep the party in power.
It all depends on your viewpoint...
on technology issues these days?
And how much law survives very long without government agencies wanting to tweak with it?
So while the technology is rapidly changing its probably sensible to make frequent changes of law idf required. It will all settle down sooner or later.
Well that depends, doesn't it. If undermining the authority of the monarchy results in a civil war where thousands or millions are killed, then I'd regard that as a good deal worse outcome than an amateur bomb plot.
Historically consitutional monarchies have been seen as providing useful checks and balances on the tendency of pure democracies to be taken in by demagogues with no aim or vision other than to get elected again, no matter how much long term damage they do to their countries in the process of pursuing a short term populist vision.
Call me naive, but I rather thought one of the main points of a justice system was to give people an incentive to lead a crime-free life. After all moral exhortations to lead a better life seem to be ineffective in some circles.
Obviously in practice that principle comes in a way behind "to provide congenial and well paid employment to the legal profession", but I think that's how its sold to us plebs.
Its one of life's little ironies that the most rabid opponents of copyright are often a subset of the enthusiasts for the Stallman freedoms, apparently blissfully unaware that copyright is all that makes the GPL possible, especially the redistribution restrictions, as RMS would doubtless tell them if they didn't have their hands over their ears...
And you think we don't?
What you're used to always seems normal, but I bet there are any amount of such contradictions in our society that seem equally evident to someone from a totally different culture, but I'm no better fitted to spot 'em than the rest of you.
(use your own broadband - what else do you think?) - it cause horrendous support headaches. You'd be amazed how many consumer grade routers, for instance, have subtle little incompatabilities that break various VPNs and so on, and as for having to deal with 20 different ISPs "idiot consumer only" helpdesks in order to try and resolve a tricky problem - its a b*****dy nightmare.
And of course IT are opposed to introducing massive non standardisation. because when the board decides they want a BYOD policy I'll bet you any mony you like they don't grant you a great big budget increase to reverse all the savings you made by having the standardisation..
is actully a particularly worthless americanism. The seppos also use it for the bizarre activity of hanging off the side of a larger boat in the "I'm so seasick I don't care any more" position head down with the body folded in half round the wire fence that goes round larger boats.
But its a significant issue, because there are medical problems, particularly knee damage, associated with hanging the body weight out of the side of the boat supported by these "toe straps".
Essentially his decision, not the legal systems? If he hadn't chosen to fight extradition, but got straight on the first plane to Sweden to answer questions, then he could well have been free and clear 18 months ago - provided he is innocent of course, something I have no opinion on.
You know how it goes, I fought the law and the lawyers won.
AIUI the problem with steam turbines was always flexibility: they have a relatively narrow range of rotation speeds where they operate at peak efficiency. Back in the 40s they found that if the set the thing up for peak efficiency at peak power then it was horrendously inefficient at normal speeds, and if they set it up for peak efficiency at normal speeds it was down on power and efficiency at the top end, and they never solved the problem.
Assuming that's still the case, which seems likely, then the problem still stands when developing an electric transmission. The only way would be to store surplus power for when needed, which would either mean dragging round many tons of batteries, or else having some kind of "feed in" of extra power into a "grid". And of course if you have the grid then there's no point in hauling your own generator set about anyway.
Are you sure about that? I always understood that the thermal efficiency of steam locomotives was pretty diabolical.
By far the most efficient use of their biofuel would be to burn it in a power station for electric trains, but that wouldn't get them any headlines.
Mind you historically the biggest challenge isn't so much getting your steam engine up to 126mph, which is at least partly a question of finding the right hill, as producing a design that doesn't destroy its centre big end bearing *every* time it gets up to about 120mph...
Here's my prediction: if we do ever get cheap clean safe energy from fusion it will be massively opposed by the "green" lobby as encouraging use of excess energy.
And *if* human intervention is having a significant contribution to climate change then there might be an argument, because *if* the power were really cheap enough for all nations to be using it by thepower station load, then since generating really gigantic amounts of power from what will probably be called fossil deuterium molecules (or whichever molecule) will produce gigantic amounts of heat.
Tha chances of the greenies sums adding up will approach zero of course, but that rarely stops 'em!
Its quite a new development for WWF I think, but I haven't been paying attention. But it happens to a lot of these sorts of organisations. The really keen people tend to be the ones on the end of the bell curve, and they end up running things because they're the ones who put most commitment in.
Provided you share their world view the logic that "its more important to campaign to stop things going wrong than to act to fix things that have gone wrong" is impeccable. However by and large they still get the money in from people who think they are still shelling out to fix things, and don't share the world view, and that to my mind is somewhat dishonest.
See also...
- RSPCA
- RSPB
- National trust (less far along)
- OXFAM
add others to taste and personal bias....
I dunno, "up there" is an awfully big place isn't it? What's the area (never mind volume" of say the geosynchronous orbit space compared to the area of the planet? Can't be bothered to so the sums, but I suspect its a great deal of, well, space to go hunting the junk in. Bigger project than roaming the streets with the nag crying "any old iron"...
Banks haven't checked signatures in decades. It must be thirty years ago that a kid came into our shop with the cheque from his father to buy a new motorcycle (so reasonably serious money). We didn''t ask for a card: what point. Instead we insisted on waiting for it to clear, which it did . Two months later teh aggrieved father came to see us. The kid had stolen the cheque (messy divorce going on). The signature the kid had put on the card bore not the slightest resemblance to the father's but the bank had cleared it anyway.
against the essential dumbness of having a pair of mains transformers in every damn little unit? You wouldn't do that with a blade, so WTF do we do it with servers. To me an optional replacement for the PSU in the server units that's just a simple minimal distrubition board which takes a feed from a a triply redundant single PSU in each rack.
Presumably something like this one
http://www.corbin.com/bmw/paris.shtml
against an original like this
http://www.cifumotorsports.com/mc/1995bmwpd/images/pd2.jpg
Strange design, that's for sure, and the shape of the aftermarket one is influenced by the shape of the original.
unlawfully or illegally obtained evidence... is yet evidence. If the evidence exists why shouldn't it be used. The law isn't supposed to be a competition between users, its supposed to find out the truth. If illegally obtained evidence helps to find out the truth that's fine by me. Would it be OK if an innocent man went to gaol because illegally obtained evidence that proved his innocence was refused?
On the other hand the person who broke the law to get the evidence in question should still face the law.
or if you look at it from the other direction Labour still haven't forgiven Murdoch/The Sun for advising their readers not to vote for them and you'd be astonished if their side didn't make that accusation. Either way its pretty stupid producing a report split down party lines and expecting us to treat it seriously.
I dunno, do you really understand the advantages of writing good readable source until you have spent a day trying to decipher something truly horrible? You can write decent structured code in Basic., its just that the temptation is not to, and like a number of temptations, if you give intoit you or someone else may suffer horribly in the future. Good lesson for life there really...
Hearing about stuff ups like that is very good for the morale of those of us who have to keep our employee's systems running with 15minutes an day and a monthly budget of 5 pounds and a Mars bar. Thus its a service to undervalued sysadmins. Sitting down with a beer when someone else is in trouble may be reprehensible, but its also very comforting.