Meanwhile on change.org...
More than 450K people have signed a petition to reverse the decision.
https://www.change.org/p/save-your-uber-in-london-saveyouruber
(Not saying I agree - just mentioning it...)
86 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jul 2009
Strangely, this patch doesn't show up for me on Windows Update (running Windows 81). Or maybe it did install it, but I just don't know what to look for... But there has been no indication of any Critical Update being available or installed in the last 3 days.
Anyone know what I should be seeing?
This seems insane, yet I can't see any articles about this anywhere. Apparently the High Court (in response to an action by the record companies) has overturned the relaxation on the law that prevented you from putting copies of your CDs onto your MP3 player/Phone/Whatever.
http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/uk-high-court-outlaws-cd-and-dvd-ripping-again-1299568
Stupid judges....
>And if it was only a few people affected why was their customer phone line in meltdown such that I've never seen before with any other company of a similar size? If they can't deal with the calls coming in then that suggests the impact is far bigger than you think it is.
It probably affected a sizeable percentage of their customers. Anything more than 10% is likely to cause customer phone line meltdown. But it was far from all of them. (I'm in Scotland, and obviously it didn't affect us up here.)
>>Looking at Britain, which has one of the toughest sets of laws controlling guns in civilian hands in the western hemisphere. Astonishingly the use of guns in crimes including homicide has increased steadily since the passage of those laws.
Oh yes? Have a look here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-winning-battle-against-inner-city-gun-crime-8463957.html
From which I quote:
"Firearms offences have fallen by more than 40 percent in less than a decade, with the rise of “gun culture” in Britain’s inner cities apparently reversed because of improved police intelligence.
Figures out next month are expected to confirm the long-term decline in gun crime which resulted in 39 people shot dead in 2011/12 compared with a high of 96 ten years earlier."
0.3% increase? And inflation is what, just now (worldwide)? So music sales are still on the way down...
> Where are the Pink Floydds? The Queens? The Guns n Roses?
There's still a lot of big (as in, can play to full stadia) bands going, but whether they are to your taste or not is a different matter. The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Muse, Coldplay (not my cup of tea mind), The Killers, Florence and the Machine, Radiohead (still touring!) and Jack White to name but a few.
The main effect would be one of cooling. All those winds blowing around eventually end up as thermal energy - unless they are converted into some other energy first. A lot of the wind energy currently gets converted into wave energy, but even that eventually gets turned into thermal energy.
While I fully understand many of the comments here, I still do feel a bit for the artists who create the stuff that everyone thinks they should get for free (or at least, be able to buy once and then sell for the same amount).
I suppose the market is just changing - artists should make their money from touring, right? Although, I'm not totally clear how authors will make much money doing that, but the likes of the Arctic Monkeys should be ok!
(Yes, yes, I know that the big companies get by far the biggest slice of the pie, but I assume the writers get something - but that will be much reduced if people don't pay for as much stuff. Artists/Writers = Good, Big Companies = Bad, but stealing from the Big Companies = stealing from the artists and writers too. :( )
>Why no giant botnets or other malware on iOS with its larger market share?
There *IS* malware on iOS. The thing is that you need to jailbreak your device to load apps from anything other than the Apple app store. With Android, you just need to go to settings and enable sideloading to load apps from the SD card.
However, you still do need to explictly go and enable that setting, and when you do it pops up a big warning message saying something like: "ATTENTION: Your phone and personal data are more vulnerable to be attacked by applications from unknown sources blah blah blah".
>>Errr, because the kickstarter types don't know anything? I'd like to see them prise ten million smackers out of a >>red blooded private equity investor for this tat.
But a load of people have ALREADY PAID FOR THEM BECAUSE THEY WANTED THEM! It doesn't matter if "kickstarter types don't know anything". They still wanted the watch, didn't they? Which clearly means that it is not true that no-one wants them. Surely this is trivially obvious?
The article wrote: "But that begs a question about just why anyone is targeting a market with products it seems no-one wants?"
No-one wants? If that's the case, why did the Pebble Bluetooth Smart Watch kickstarter gain more than 70,000 pledges and more than $10,000,000 in funding?
Personally, I'm not interested in them - but to say that no-one wants them is clearly untrue.
>>The metre is defined in terms of physical constants.
>>The litre is defined in terms of metres.
>>One litre of pure water weighs 1kg.
>>Where's the problem?
One problem is that a litre of pure water AT STANDARD TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE weighs 1KG,
Pressure is measured in Pascals, which is defined in terms of Newtons - which is itself defined in terms of Kilograms. And there's the big problem - you are trying to define a kilogram in terms of something that is (indirectly) defined in terms of kilograms. Clearly, that's totally bogus.
Well, it seems a little obvious to me. In the physical world, you can make something bigger by stretching it, or smaller by compressing it - like the design on a balloon. The pinch gesture is an obvious analogue for a touch screen. I realise that double-tapping can also work, but it doesn't make the pinch gesture any less obvious.
* Disclaimer: I clearly know feck-all about patenting things. ;)
I programmed in C++ from 1987 until 2005, when we switched to C#. I still do have to maintain our old legacy C++ code from time to time.
My personal opinion is that switching from C++ to C# was the best thing we could have done! Most of what we were doing was UI code, and C++ is frankly totally crap for that. It's pretty good for device drivers and graphics libraries and other low level stuff. But for anything else, it's truly awful. And I say that from a position of having a GREAT DEAL of C++ experience.
Yes, I read - and understood - the seminal C++ books "C++ Templates" (Vandevoorde/Josuttis) and "Modern C++ Design" (Alexandrescu). Oh. My. God. To think I used to think it was all so cool - now I just think the language crawled up it's own arse and died... ;)
Nah, I don't get any eye strain at all. I spend all day reading computer screens - I'm a software developer!
I tell you what I do find makes the most difference - using a 10 inch tablet rather than 7 inch ones (including the Kindle). Reading on my wife's Nexus 10 is amazingly better than reading on a Kindle.
I can read on my Nexus 7 for more than 12 hours (reading, not playing games of course).
That's more than 6 times as long as time you mentioned...
I personally don't suffer from eyestrain when reading backlit text (I'd have a nasty time doing my job otherwise), but I do find it easier to read ebooks. I'd have thought the solution to that problem would be to, you know, not sit reading in a dark room?
However, does anyone read actual real books in darkened rooms? With some kind of magic see-in-the-dark eyes?