Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1744 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
" 1) The video camera (if any) has a hard cover that has to be slid aside/opened before filming. Will protect the lens and also make it very obvious to bystanders whether you're recording or not "
No it won't -- there are plenty of AR apps that will could make use of the camera without recording being on -- real-time text translation, for example.
" another 5 years or so of miniturisation before anyone can make a pair of AR sunglasses indistinguishable from ordinary sunglasses, that's when Apple will release a product* "
Except that sunglasses are currently getting larger, specifically because designers need them to be big enough to carry a brand and be recognisable. Apple want to be visible and recognisable, so getting right down to sunglasses size isn't strictly necessary....
The "uniquely British solution" for any problem is to make lots of disparaging jokes about the French, then realise that they own half your infrastructure.
Thus I conclude that Cable is suggesting privatising city councils, and selling them off to French-led consortiums.
I can't help feeling that this is a very odd bit of clothing. It looks like a swimsuit for when you're not... well.. swimming, but it fact it's really a T-shirt that goes between your legs in order to avoid wrinkling or rising. Why would anyone put up with a constant wedgie from a T-shirt, just to avoid a wee bit of wrinkling?
It's not just the ISPs proper that are scared -- it's a fairly big issue for MacDonald's and Starbucks too. If you do any amount of travelling, a recognisable chain which advertises free wifi in all its outlets can be very appealing. It's certainly easier than going into an unknown local café and asking about wifi, particularly if you don't know the local language.
A knock-on effect of keeping municipal internet services fee-paying, is there can be no free municipal wifi. Municipal wifi is a great leveller, because with it, we know we can get online literally anywhere, so we don't head to the multinational chains....
" The Star Wars prequels are similar to Starship Troopers (the movie) in the sense that most people criticising them do entirely miss the plot. Don't see the wood for the trees, so to say. "
Not the right cliché. The plot was tiny, and hidden behind all the distracting fluff tacked on (which is not what vignettes are, incidentally. I'd say the plot was a clearing, which you couldn't see because the viewer was outside an Endor-sized forest with a whole moon's worth of trees between the viewer and the clearing.
The theme held promise -- the corruption of power -- but the overall plot was ridiculous. Episode I in particular had a lot of people moving about for no clear reason. Episode II had two people who appeared more robotic than R2D2 deciding not only that they understood the concept of "love", but that they were in it. Episode II gave the opportunity for a good tragic twist when the Trade Federation told Kenobi that they were building the Death Star to fight against Darth Sidious, but then Lucas chickened out and made that a lie. The Greek-level tragedy of Obi-Wan destroying the galaxy's last hope against the founding of the Empire and personally delivering the plans for the Death Star to the future Emperor would have been a fantastic plot twist.
And in the end, even the political intrigue needed a figure of ridicule to pull it off. It should have been someone we liked who messed up.
" As for why the lightsabres might get more spitty. Well, let me think... hmm three seconds later I came up with the idea that possibly it's because all the other Jedi/Sith are dead and the couple who are left lost the previously refined art of constructing lightsabres and are trying to work it out from the beginning again, hence the technology is messier. Obviously three seconds thinking is too difficult for you. "
If you'd thought three seconds more, you'd have remembered that Luke Skywalker's Return of the Jedi light saber was built by Luke himself, seemingly after the death of Yoda, so with no ancient Jedi blacksmiths left to pass on the knowledge. Luke's entire Jedi training appears to have consisted of a week with Kenobi and a few months with Yoda, so it can't have been that hard.
"if the state budget declines, so too may artists’ remuneration. "
This is not a problem. Consider:
The state remuneration is to compensate for lost sales in implementing a right to "space-shift" recorded media. This is important because increasing consumers' rights over recordings retroactively changes the value of the product. The industry can say "but we could have charged more if we'd known," which is true. So they are compensated.
However, look at where we are now. We now know that people will copy files across devices. It is expected. Therefore, the labels should be accounting for it in the price of first sale.
It follows that the revenue in artists' compensation schemes should drop year on year as the industry adapts.
Everyone's happy, no?
Note also the fact that mobile operators are "unable" to block premium rate numbers. I appreciate that call charges are different on landlines and mobiles, but... WTF?!?!? I mean, how is it technically feasible to block premium calls on landline exchanges, but not mobile ones? It's the same bloody thing! The only difference is that the operators have CHOSEN not to implement such call barring. Their choice, their negligence, their responsibility... surely?
Indeed. No historical society has institutionalised individualism and thrived in the long term. Modern society is a corruption of earlier family-like tribal structures. Individuals have used positions of trust (head of the household) and slowly mutated them into positions of "authority". Domination etymologically meant little more than running a household, patriarchy was just doing as your father said. But now these words have been corrupted by office-bearers to mean something more controlling and sinister.
This sort if self-interested individualism killed Rome. It was the increasing servitude of feudalism that triggered the French Revolution and the birth of modern democracy. Industrial capitalists' lack of altruism led to trade unionism and communism, but they only stalled the march of the current individualist wave which is set to bring our society tumbling down.
Spoken like a politician. Politicians love criticism to be accompanied by a counter-proposal, because then they can attack the counter-proposal rather than having to defend the flaws in the current system (and no system is wihout flaws). This leaves us with a "disposable politic society" where we throw away all our policies and start from scratch on new policies, instead of mending only the broken parts. Nowhere is this clearer than in education, where every 30-ish years we swing between strict grammar-spelling-and-times-tables "basic skills" teaching, and let-them-be-free-to-create "holistic" teaching, instead of integrating the two (NB lots of individual teachers do go work resolving the two ideologies into a coherent whole,but it's never institutionally codified).
So it's good to go into some depth about the problems without confusing the debate by introducing one of an infintite variety of possible solutions.
@Peshman
" but if a signal is broadcast on a particular frequency then how do you stop that particular frequency from being hijacked? Or there is nobody capable of spoofing a satellite transmission signal to bork your bit of hardware? "
If that's really a concern, then the best trick would be to use a parabolic receiver, which is traditionally used to isolate a particular signal from a particular point in line-of-sight -- in common parlance, a "satellite dish".
Obviously not all satellite receivers bother with the parabolic dish now (GPS, most satellite phones) but if interference is a genuine concern (and it will be if you're operating on a band that isn't specifically reserved by the ITU) then you'll be wanting that dish....
"has this fuck actually contributed to science or has he just passed a load of exams?"
The former. Exams finish at MSc level, and you get a chair (professorship) based on your academic weight. You can look up some of his papers, if you like. I don't know what the ATLAS project is, but I'm pretty certain he's using the LHC at CERN for more than just high-energy Scalectrix...
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/23398545
@DougS,
" If you add everything it needs to be used on a modern mobile device, it will no longer be minimal and lightweight when compared to Unix. "
Not necessarily. A lot of the cruft and bloat in modern operating systems is legacy material that can't be removed due to backward compatibility issues, or simply for fear of unintended consequences. Building direct from "back then" to "now" while skipping all the in-between stuff should result in a lighter, quicker OS that modern *n*x variants.
That said, it still wouldn't be worth the bother. Some people might find it useful for embedded work, but it's not going to set the world alight....
Mike Brown:
"Without a very effecient, and small battery these suits are going to very limited in range: the length of the power cord."
This is why the only market I can think of for the initial units is for steadicam operators. A full steadicam rig typically weighs around 50kg, and I've seen steadicam operators who don't weigh much more than that to start with. A lot of the time the cameras will be on an umbilical anyway rather than battery power, so the power lead won't be an extra burden if it's bound into the same "snake" as the camera power and signal cables.
By increasing the weight capacity of the operator, they'll be able to use heavier cameras still, and I'm sure you all know what that means.... Yep, that's right: seasickness-inducing stereoscopic steadicam 3D!!!!
So making a full-length Star Trek fan movie is, well, fans dicking around not-for-profit, but a machinima/live-action hybrid set in a universe that has no story of its own is piracy on the high seas?
There are Star Trek fan movies out there with the blessing of the copyright holders, and these are alright, because they have the permission. There are parodies that exist under the US provisions that protect parody, so these are alright. If they weren't alright, they wouldn't be there, because those guys have lawyers like you wouldn't believe.
Last I heard he kept sheep and llamas on his plot of land in Wales, but no yaks.
(Actually, I recall being told that yaks can't survive at low altitudes because the air pressure would kill them... I wonder if this is an urban myth...
...google...
Wikipedia says they "do not thrive at lower altitudes", so it's not instantly fatal, but also that they begin to suffer heat exhaustion at 15 degrees Celsius.)
(Goddammit... I need to get a job.)
Horses for courses, pal.
Restrictions on game mechanics have knock-on effects in level design, and as long as the two are considered in parallel and feed into each other, there's no problem.
The most valid way to complete a game is by learning and mastering the game mechanics. If you have no save points, à la 80s and 90s gaming, that means there will be a lot of replaying to be done. If you replay, you will be constantly improving your base skill level before hitting the new stuff, so the game difficulty can ramp up pretty quickly.
If, however, you never need to replay a completed section, the next section can't really assume you've mastered the mechanic, and you're forced to make the next level only very slightly harder. This means you've got to write more content to get the same overall learning curve and final mastery level for the game. However, it also risks the designers slipping into "very obvious" mode for a lot of the levels, where the solution to the next difficult bit relies directly on the new trick that you've just picked up.
If you add a save option into a well designed game that had no saves, the game will become boring. If you take the save games out of a well designed game with savegames, the game will become boring.
The two things are different.
"The definition of "Enough work to exempt it from the GPL" is "Enough for it to constitute an entirely new work in its own right, aot a derivative work based on an existing copyrighted work".
Funnily enough, nobody seems to have any problem with this concept when dealing with old-fashioned, closed copyrights (the kind which the GPL specifically forbids you to apply to derivative works of GPLed works)."
A headache that's yet to be resolved....
Cos after all, when a GPL project discovers they're carrying code that ísn't GPL compatible, they "rewrite" the code -- no cleanroom, just "delete code and add something that does exactly the same thing" -- and then they tell us that it's not a derivative work of the very same code that they were directly recreating....
@AC
" That is bloody weird, I know plenty of people married to a non-EU citizen, and they have no problems getting a Visa for the UK, last I checked its EU law they have to grant her access unless there is a valid reason to refuse.... "
You've not been reading the newspapers -- the Home Office have been refusing residency left, right and centre, even to people who have been resident, married and working in the UK for years. Poster examples include the Australian NHS mental health worker who was kicked out, and the US man who was the sole teacher in a Scottish rural school, as well as the sole carer for his critically ill wife, and was told where to go.
The thing about EU law is that it often only determines how you treat people from other member states. So the UK has to grant access to a foreigner who has gained EU residency in another state, but it doesn't have to grant UK residency (and hence EU residency) to anyone directly.
So lots of British people are now emigrating for a year to get an EU-registered marriage to their non-EU significant others, so that they can come home.
Immigration laws in the UK are really the pits.
@Joe Gurman
" It just seems strange to this liberal (by US standards) that a government thinks its citizens can't be trusted to buy what they want "
What I want isn't available.
I went a long time without a tablet, because Android couldn't do real-time audio processing like iOS can, but the iPad isn't compatible with my plethora of charging devices, or my case full of SD cards. (I have all sorts of cameras and audio gadgets in my drawers).
I individually do not have the power to change that.
So you'll say we need collective buyer power... and you know what? That's what government is supposed to be -- collective power.
" and note this is an economic issue (presumably less expensive micro-USB vs. more expensive proprietary connectors), not a safety one, as there's ample anecdotal evidence of people being incinerated by using cheap knockoff copies of either proprietary or "standard" connector chargers. "
It is economical and environmental -- if chargers are proprietary, we keep binning them, and electronic waste is a huge (and growing) problem.
Besides, while nobody ever claimed it was about safety, safety may actually be improved as a happy side-effect: those faulty connectors you mention... do they have a CE mark? I doubt it -- EU safety regs are pretty damn good.
You will never be able to stop people importing their own unsafe super-cheap chargers, but when you break the proprietary monopoly, and there's a CE-tested charger available for a fiver at a local shop, why are you going to leave yourself waiting up to a month to get a £2.50 charger shipped from Taiwan?
"assuming we're still part of the EU."
Here's hoping we're not..
Yeah, did you hear that those nasty Eurocrats were trying to feed our starving poor?
Those pinko Guardianistas don't seem to get it:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/17/government-under-fire-eu-funding-food-banks
They just don't understand that if we don't starve families to death, people won't have any motivation to develop entrepreneurship skills and become the sort of self-employed go-getters we love: contract cleaners who draw minimum wage for 3 hours' work a day, and can be ditched the moment they take a day off for illness. It's the flexibility of these heroes of industry that makes Britain great.
Utter tripe? {citation required}
There have been various cases in the US which have established that two things that might be considered individual "works" are only considered individual works if they have been conceived independently. I'm thinking mostly lyrics and tune here -- there have been several cases where lyricists have claimed royalties for instrumentals, because the tune is merely a part of the "work": the song.
So while I am arguably wrong, I am not undoubtedly wrong. If I was a lawyer (I'm not) and you were a lawyer (I'm pretty sure you're not) and we were arguing against each other in court, I hope you wouldn't address my arguments with "utter tripe". (Actually, scratch that, it would be nice for my opponent to be found in contempt...)
I'm not against people proving I'm wrong, but proving requires proof....
Sorry, what makes them "increasingly 'establishment'"?
The fact that they're trying to maintain a personal artistic decision on how and when their music gets used? As opposed to that typical "anti-establishment" tendency to license it out for big spondoolicks to all comers for their TV spots?
Or maybe it's the fact that they're using the legal process to seek remedy rather than kicking down the offender's door and defecating in his fireplace?
Plenty of anti-establishment figures have used the judicial system to protect their anti-establishment stance. Those that don't aren't just "anti-establishment", they're anarchists. And anarchists are often just thoroughly antisocial selfish people by another name.
