Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Toshiba tight-lipped on Blu-ray player plan

Disection!

If the latest generation of iPods has a suspiciously SD-sized gap on the edge of its PC, consider it confirmed!

Tasered Oz man bursts into flames

@Alan B

Unfortunately you're falling for the same old trap of "he's not ethnic, I am".

Dave could be making one of two points:

1) Everyone is of *an* ethnic origin. There is no such thing as a human being with no ethnic origin.

2) When talking about the population of the UK, "ethnic" would by default mean "ethnic UK", and anyone else would be "of foreign/overseas ethnic origin".

Of course, the situation is the other way round in Oz where the dark-skinned people *are* the ethnic population.

Using ethnic to mean "non-white" demonstrates a very racially compromised view....

Nissan ponders Pré-like cordless charging for e-cars

It'd be like...

...you know, the pit lane in F-Zero.

Ah, sweet memories.

EU calls hearing over Google 'orphan' treatment

What I don't get is...

..as another poster alluded to, the settlement states that members of the USAG and AAP won't sue for orphaned works. However, surely all members of the two stated bodies are known, therefore not the owners of *any* orphaned works.

Furthermore, it then follows that the owner of an orphaned work cannot join the USAG or be printed by a member company of the AAP without foregoing his legal right to sue Google for every penny they're due him.

So the settlement disadvantages all non-member published authors -- they're well and truly forked: sign up (with either USAG or AAP) and write off legitimate intellectual value; don't sign up (with an AAP member company) and not be able to reach a wide enough audience to realise the full intellectual value of your work.

So technically, a non-member author could sue Google not just for the value of the misappropriated intellectual property (the illegally scanned and redistributed book), but for damages against the future loss of earnings induced by not being able to have the work published by an AAP member company....

Apple sued over shrink-wrapped Mafia death threats

Poor show, El Reg

Let's all laugh at the crazy man, eh?

The least you could have done was remove his name. No legal obligation to do so, you say? So what? The story would have been as funny/disgustingly tasteless (delete as appropriate) but it would have at least been easier for the guy to get over it when this has all been resolved one way or the other.

Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen Kindles

If you don't want to buy a whole stack of physical books, I have one word for you.

Library.

Lawyers claim ringtones are public performance

Loons?

I don't think so.

A ringtone is designed to be played in public ("mobile" phone). There's a hole in the legal coverage, and the sad fact is that these gaps are never plugged proactively -- it takes a lawsuit for them to be sorted.

There will be a settlement, and it'll mean that royalties are divided differently.

Hopefully it'll make music ringtones expensive enough that people opt for "bring bring" in future.

Police told to use Wikipedia for court preparation

I have just...

...made cannabis legal in the UK. I will take a printout of the wiki page to court with me as proof.

Yesssssssss! Off the hook!

UK DVD sales plunge...

Ban the Wii!

Clearly it's families playing Wii Sports that's killing movie sales.

I mean, a Wii game costs the same as two films, but two films last 3 hours. A Wii game lasts weeks!!!

Ban the Wii so that George Clooney can earn an honest crust!

Trading Standards calls for online knife sale ban

Re: Under-age Credit Card holders?

Erm... you can now pay on-line with "prepay" payment cards and some accounts for minors issue debit cards. Not to mention PayPal credit, which I'm told the hip kids get their pocket money in these days.

Russian's Bulgarian airbags burst mid-flight

Myth...

..."bust"ed.

Rogue Atlantis knob removed by hand

Re: Unbelievable

@JC 2

"As for the American car joke, it's a few decades too late for that misinformed stereotype. Americans cars are now BETTER than the average European car"

What, you mean the quality has improved now that the US car companies are all bankrupt and have ceased production?

No Dr No rights for Bond owners

Glad to hear it.

As far as I knew, the standing convention in most of the EU has always been that a series title can be a trademark, but not a film or episode title. Losing that to a new precedent would have been a disaster for the public domain.

Just imagine if the original publisher of a book trademarked the title just before copyright expired: how would the public be able to exploit the now public domain work if they weren't allowed to use the title?

As I understand it, US law, as always, is one stage of weird ahead of us. The original Wizard of Oz book (and Baum's own sequels) is out of copyright, but the world of Oz is a trademark. This means that Baum's books can be distributed for free, but no-one can write new books except the trademark holder.

Joost gives up the ghoost

Inevitability

Everything was always going to end up in-house -- surely the head guys in Joost knew that the time would come when every TV-station and his dog would be serving their own video.

I submit to the jury that Joost was essentially a massive self-funding public beta with the aim of produce a stable licensable platform.

Pirate Bay website sinks as 'sell out' accusations fly

6 years of free work

7.7million, minus fine, split between four...

that's still $195 000 (US) a year. I'd hardly call that "free work".

Dutch clotheshorse menaces plastic surgeon

The wonders of modern medicine

Cosmetic surgery is unnecessary. It's invasive and it distorts the self-image. Operating on anyone is morally dubious -- operating on someone with a documented emotional disorder is negligent.

Eurostar tunnels through UK border ring of steel

So what he's saying is...

So the advance passenger information scheme for flights going to the USA is illegal for flights departing from Paris and Brussels then? Interesting....

Copyfraud: Poisoning the public domain

Re: This is why you need the GPL...

@AC

No, the point of the public domain is that anyone can use it in any way they want, including producing a "closed"/"proprietary" derivative product -- eg the film version of Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp. Just because it's based on a public domain work, doesn't make it a public domain work.

Eicher's article falls on its face when it chastises the small publisher for profiting from public domain works -- isn't the point of the public domain that anyone can do what they like from it -- and as others have said, many of these books have actually been retypeset to provide a clean, modern, legible version rather than the grubby scans and flaky OCR coming off Google's virtual presses. The high price is not just about having a monopoly, but is an attempt to offset the cost of that typesetting against the small number of customers.

Brit firm stops anti-tank warheads with cloth

@Wolf

"is it just me or is a simple work-around to this just to fire an incendiary round first to burn the shit out of the cloth layer, and THEN hit it with an RPG?"

One might imagine that an armament manufacturer might base such a technology on a non-flammable textile...

Opiate-crazed wallabies create crop circles

Ah, now I see.

So a developed country grows 50% of the world's medicinal opium, a non-indigenous crop (or so I am led to believe) which is having a notable effect on the local fauna

Meanwhile, impoverished, underdeveloped nations where opium poppies *are* indigenous are quota'ed into a small corner of the market and impoverished farmers turn to the black market.

Middle-east: lower labour costs, lower transport costs.

Australia: higher labour costs, higher transport costs.

Smells like protectionism to me.

'Overweight' people live longer than those of 'ideal' weight

Re: @Raspy

@AC

"Actually, studies done on American Football players suggest that muscle weight is just as bad for you as fat-based weight so in this respect BMI is valid."

And does that necessarily have anything to do with muscle mass, or might it be related to any of:

* high incidence of steroid abuse among the demographic

* high incidence of brain-jarring, bone-shattering and soft-tissue-mangling injuries due to the use of safety gear as an assault weapon in the sport

* diet

* recreational drug use

All research into American footballers shows us is what American footballers are like.

Prof: Global windfarm could power entire human race

@Liam Johnson & @Lewis Page

You've missed the point that people who said "you've missed the point" made.

They are suggesting that the authors of the report didn't set this out as a proposed solution to the world's problems, they simply worked the figures out for what scale of windfarm would be required to power the world.

The paper calculates the "Global potential for wind-generated electricity", and he is using the scientific meaning of "potential", which is a scalar value rather than the tabloid meaning ("it could be done). Just because the authors do not state explicitly that the required infrastructure is absurdly complicated and impractical does not mean that they do not believe it to be so.

However, these academics are to be applauded for doing something that is increasingly rare in the field of climate science: working out the relevant figures -- and ONLY the relevant figures -- and not trying to spin them.

Now we know from a scientifically dispassionate and objective standpoint what it would take to power the world by wind, we can make our subsequent *political* decision based on the figures... rather than making passionate and subjective political decisions and making our figures to fit them.

Lewis,

Shame on you. I thought one of your biggest bugbears was the love of spin over science. This report is pure science.

Re:What about the ice caps?

@Hans

" Presumably the SHAPE of the polar ice caps don't matter because, as all gents will tell you, its size that matters. So if we build them upwards instead of outwards we could have fabulous ski resorts whilst we bathe in global warmth. "

No, a much more important factor is surface area.

Take a look at any satellite picture. Water looks black from directly above, but the ice-caps look white. The ice-caps reflect light into the sky, and similarly infra-red (heat) radiation. Water doesn't.

A wide, thin replacement ice-cap would start a cycle of cooling, thus freezing more water and thickening itself, until it started to cause sea-levels to drop.

People just not that into Blu-ray

Withnewspaper and I

The "buy all your favourite films... again" bandwagon has arrived at platform 2.0, Absurdville station.

I bought a newspaper a week ago for a free copy of Withnail and I. What was on the back of the DVD sleeve? "Buy this film on Bluray from the whateverth of June/July".

Yes, they actually gave away the *entire film* on DVD as an advert for the Bluray disc.

Student leader demands lectures be 'put against the wall'

Theatre?

Did TV destroy the theatre?

Is all our high culture beamed to the goggle box?

No.

The TV is stuffed full of Big Brother and World's Most Dangerous Fluffy Animals.

Clearly there's still some magic in things happening for real in front of you.

Nurse Lovelace gives hardened lag 55-hour stiffy

Re: Re: And?

Sarah,

Why does an article about 55 hours of "hard time" make you think of Miley Cyrus...?

London's e-van drivers club together

Nimbyism

Isn't this e-London nonsense just 21st century nimbyism? Let's improve the environment -- zero emissions in London! Stuff the vast inefficiencies of batteries, transmission losses etc. The most important environmental issue is a wee bit of smog in my garden!