Irony...
"I have been a regular customer of Apple since the summer of 1984."
You couldn't have picked a more ironic year, given the circumstances.
1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
This is actually why we need the traffic shaping.
There are multiple use cases for the internet.
Some of these need near-instant response speeds -- eg VoIP.
Some of these require large transfers over a more flexible timeframe -- eg downloading Linux ISOs.
Some are less fussy -- eg surfing (your download time is now very often shorter than the browser rendering time).
Traffic shaping allows us to dedicate the resources that each needs. We dedicate the voice bandwidth to voice users at the cost of longer download times for other uses -- shouldn't voice users pay for that?
"It is of course puzzling why Rosenberg did not use the evidence of her own eyes to decide Google Maps' instructions were best ignored.
Almost as puzzling as why she has set the lower bar for suing the world's biggest ad broker at a mere $100,000."
Her lawyer probably figures that given that she ignored the law and (presumably) at least one "no pedestrians" sign, she has a better chance of winning a claim centred on direct costs than punitive damages.
The idea of a HD mux is flawed if there's going to be simulcast HD/SD channels. Popping BBC1 HD on the same mux as BBC1 SD would allow them to broadcast shared audio and red-button data streams.
The promise of digital TV was greater flexibility and interactivity, and clever use of bandwidth. This fails to fulfill that.
There should be one BBC1 "channel" on a single mux, broadcasting "in HD (where available)" with non-HD sets receiving an SD stream.
The current state of affairs is a weak hack, nothing more.
Are these aimed at people going au natural but without natural pointiness, or are they designed to go on top of bras and reinstate lost nipplage while allowing for extra support and shaping?
I know, I've thought about this too much, but it's Friday and my most trusted source of news is talking about lady-bumps.
Copernicus was never considered a heretic, and Copernicus was buried (as the article says) in a Christian grave like any other person of his standing.
The stuff that happened later with Galileo Galilei was a battle of scientific egos and bad judgement on GG's part -- the then-pope was a then-well-reknowned-but-long-since-forgotten scientist (most of the popes of that era had come through the university system, which at that time was still part of the monastic tradition) and Galileo basically picked a fight with him.
The scientific establishment has a history of dismissing ideas because some influential bigwig disagrees with the theory. The only difference here was that the pope had a great deal more power than the chairman of the Royal Society, and anyone who effectively accuses the most powerful man in the world of being thick is really heading for trouble.
Of course, the fact that the pope was more than a little vindictive about it doesn't say a great deal of good about the Catholic church, but that's a different matter.
OK, so you need to lose lift as you lose weight in fuel. So what if your fuel was your lifting agent? This takes care of itself.
That means one thing and one thing only: hydrogen. Unsafe, you cry? Well they keep trying to put it in our cars, so it can't be that bad.
Anyway, a hybrid helium/hydrogen airship could be very safe, with an envelope-in-envelope design.
Have an outer inflation chamber (or series of chambers) filled with helium, and an internal chamber filled with hydrogen. In that way, if the hydrogen cell ruptures, it leaks into a 100% inert atmosphere and cannot explode. For hydrogen gas to escape, there would need to be a total failure of the entire balloon system, which would probably mean a fatal plummet anyway, so the added risk from the hydrogen is negligible.
Besides, the Hindenberg exploded because of a fault in its skin and problems with sparking from static electricity -- modern materials aren't as succeptible to such problems, so a leak would simply be a leak. Explosions are unlikely.
"As far as I can tell it spunks its money up the wall on football rights and overpaying for TV programmes that have built a faithful audience on terrestrial."
Grrrr.... yes.
That is so effing irritating. It's like a weird messed up sort of bait-and-switch where Channel 4 becomes the bait, the viewer is the fish and Sky is a big hairy fisherman who snatches you out on a Lost-shaped hook.
They also screw you over with the bundles -- it's impossible to buy the channels you want without paying for half-a-dozen Murdoch channels you *don't* want.
This is where all the money comes from. ITV makes its money from rubbish people watch, Sky makes its money from rubbish no-one watches and funnels it all into a handful of flagship programs everyone wants to watch.
" there's nothing to say that the same exaggerated terror of weapons application wouldn't stifle fusion the way it is stifling fission. "
While the whole weapons-grade fuel thing is worrying, many reasonable people will do a quick risk-cost analysis on potential problems at the power stations, and work out that the potential damage done by purely accidental failure (and the damage already done by previous accidental failure) really is too high to accept even if the risk of failure was lower than it is.
And before you say it, all the "lessons learned" at Douneray, Windscale/Sellafield, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are valueless, because the lessons we have allegedly learned are all in the realms of "avoiding the same mistakes", not in the realm of "avoiding making any mistakes". All of these were at root the result of sloppy management, so even if you address the actual physics/mechanics/engineering of the fault, there's still the whole culture of corner cutting that has to be addressed.
And I know that we don't officially "cut corners" anywhere in UK business, we officially "trim the fat", but that only leads to us hiding the corners we want to cut behind a chunk of fat...
"water ice left over from the solar system's origin 4.6 billion years ago"
So it would seem that water formed in the birth of the solar system. The sun is, after all, made of hydrogen and the birth of the solar system created oxygen, so it had to happen.
The water came from the sun, at the dawn of the solar system.
"Small, bright point sources of light do a lousy job of 'jamming' CCTVs and the like. It'll work if you strap a car headlight to your hat, perhaps... nothing else is going to be really powerful enough to dazzle the camera."
I don't think he's talking about dazzling the camera -- rather he's suggesting that the pattern matching may rely on patches of light and dark not in the visible spectrum, so use of IR masking and/or emission would change the image that the computer sees into "not a face" without affecting the image a man looking you in the eye would see.
I have a MIPS netbook that just can't handle full-fat Facebook. As a travel gadget it's dead handy, though -- reasonable battery, optional wifi etc. Facebook always refused to let it use the mobile interface and redirected me to www. -- I couldn't be bothered faking the browser string so I gave up.
Given the "getting stuck in lite" thing, I didn't attempt it.
So I just don't use Facebook on the road.
I think what he's trying to point out is that with unmetered access, unicast IPTV is as "cheap" as broadcast TV to the punter on the street, or even cheaper, if you don't currently have a Freeview box or sattelite receiver. The benefit of IPTV is the availability of on-demand viewing. It is therefore a "better product" at the same price point, so the way things are at the moment, the bedroom PC will start to be used as a replacement for the bedroom TV. I don't have a Freeview dongle for my laptop, for example -- I just use iPlayer and 4OD. I even use iPlayer sometimes when I'm watching live.
So by having unmetered access we discourage people from using the efficient, robust and well-developed broadcast infrastructure and instead consume the internet's finite resources. Not only do most people not realise that there is no "broadcast" on the internet, but even those who do (eg. me) don't really care enough to conserve.
So we wouldn't expect the metered family to run up £600 a month -- we wouldn't expect the capacity requirements of a metered internet to be anywhere near as high as that of an unmetered one.
Ask yourself this. Many phone companies offer unlimited free calls. Would they continue to do so if people started listening to radio over the phone? Would they have the capacity?
Same idea.
I've just realised that I don't own a digital PVR. I've never really thought about it, because I've never needed it, because I've got iPlayer. But 10 years ago I was quite happy to set the video for things that were on while I was out.
If the internet was metered, I would have bought a PVR a long time ago, and I would be sitting with a TV guide in front of me (an online one, naturally) once a week and "harvesting" everything I wanted to watch for later viewing. But it's cheaper for me to consume finite "commons" resources than tap into the broadcast network.
...Tim Brown, that is.
Yes, the tag cloud is designed to help you find the salient points in a textual data set -- they are metadata only, and any serious analysis has to be done on the data, not the metadata.
If they're not going to follow the tags as "links" to the data, well they may as well simply count up the letters and say "like most of the country, Gordon Brown favours E over every other vowel, so must be a man of the people". Then follow up with "like most of the country, Nick Clegg favours E over every other vowel, so must be a man of the people" and "like most of the country, David Cameron favours E over every other vowel, so must be a man of the people"....
According to the Met Office, there are only 7 VAACs worldwide. London VAAC is operated by the Met Office, naturally, as they are the guys with the wind modelling tech. It is the control centre for the zone including Iceland, and it is in charge of some of the busiest airspace in the world (most transatlantic travel whether by sea or air tracks away from the equator to take advantage of the reduced circumference of the Earth). It may not be needed every day, but it's a massively important role.
http://metoffice.com/aviation/vaac/index.html
Have none of you commentards ever heard of Google?
"They're locked up, they're constantly guarded, they're beaten up and b**f***ed regularly, they only get to see their loved ones in short pre-programmed slots, but hey -- they get free TV, a free bed and free food!!!! So what if the food's rubbish and the bed is slightly too hard and they share a cell with a chronic snored, it's free!!!! They've got it easy, not like us that have to walk through the park to get to the office in the morning, and have to pay for our juicy fresh steak sandwiches or have the choice to go to the cinema when there's F all on TV. They don't have to pay for their bedding, and they don't have to go to the shop to buy it. Yeah, they don't get a choice, but hey -- it's free! They've got it easy, sure 'nough."
"Here in the Cleveland, Ohio area, we had some guy trying to park downtown last week for a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game who tried to park in a handicapped space, and when confronted by the lot attendant he pulled a gun out of his car trunk and murdered the attendant.
"A friggin' parking space is worth someone's life?"
And this is your evidence that the death penalty is an effective deterrent?!? It didn't even stop a man who was just in a hurry to get a seat!!!!
All it suggests to me is that allowing people to buy and carry guns is a Very Bad Idea.
The Indomitable Gall Research Projects Agency would like to announce our latest project to be put to tender.
IGRPA will give a prize of £10,000 and a 5 year contract to anyone who can produce an instantaneous matter transporter that can be manufactured for under £23.95 by the year 2020. The device will be capable of transporting a human 5 light-years in under a second, with the power draw of a Bayliss wind-up radio.
"According to the Sun and the Telegraph, one cop insisted the crims "can't pull the wool over our eyes forever","
Ah, you see I thought they spoke Spanish in Argentina, but clearly they actually speak English, because that's an English expression, that is!
If more men believe in aliens, and men are more intelligent than women, then there must be aliens walking among us.
So either there are advanced superbeings from beyond the stars on the planet, or women are more intelligent than men.
It's a Morton's fork between Catch 22, a Pyrrhic Victory and Hobson's Choice -- whatever choice I make, men are no longer the most intelligent creatures in the universe.
The collective hatred of offshoring is massively unjustified. They do the same job as onshore outsourcers but cheaper.
The collective dislike of onshore outsourcing is usually justified. The loss of productivity for a one-day outage is usually higher than the savings incurred in not having an internal IT department twiddling their thumbs most of the time.
But once we move the outsourcing offshore, the savings actually due make up for the loss of productivity.
Yes, workers, sometimes it genuinely is better for your bosses when you don't do any work.
Unless of course every single member of your staff has deadlines every single day of the week, every single week of the year, like, I don't know, newspapers?!?!?
I work for a notable outsourcer, and while I don't know if we bidded or not, I'm pretty confident our bid guys would have proposed an on-site solution as the only suitable answer....
Liddle's assertion was not that people of black African/Carribean origin are more likely to commit violent crime, but that the majority of violent crime is committed by people in that demographic.
The fact is that what he said was a lie. The fact that there is a truth that is as bad as the lie doesn't make the lie true!!!
"Not longer after the iPad's January introduction, it emerged that iBooks might not feature on versions of the tablet sold outside the US because of licensing limitations imposed on works still protected by copyright law.
Such restrictions - who is allowed to publish what, and where - don't apply to public domain, out-of-copyright works of the kind digitised and made available by Project Gutenberg."
While this is technically correct, it is more than slightly misleading because it glosses over the simple fact that many of the works made available by Project Gutenberg are still protected by copyright law in many countries.
This is more than a mere technicality -- some companies may shortly find out that it is a rather expensive oversight.
I recently bought an particular model of ereader from a high street bookshop, and it has several eBooks preloaded. One of these was a Beatrix Potter book. Potter died in 43, so by my reckoning that means that her writing is protected in the UK until 2013. The copyright has expired in the US, and Gutenberg states the following:
"Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook."
It would appear that the importer of the device failed to carry out due diligence and could get a bit of a nasty surprise when the Potter estate catch onto this.
I'm sure this isn't the only time such things have happened, and the Apple store is a much more visible target than a white-label far eastern device.
"Presumably someone, somewhere printed off the same several thousand pages of text in umpteen different fonts, carefully measuring the ink use for each run."
Hopefully they used a virtual printer driver to produce bitmaps simulating printouts, because not only would it be greener that way, it would also be much quicker to measure with a little program counting dots....