Posts by bolccg

I QUIT: Mozilla's anti-gay-marriage Brendan Eich leaps out of door

Re: Animals

I accept that he has views that I don't like - I simply don't like them (tautological but apparently you missed that?). People doing things to others that I don't like affects how I act towards them. Is this depriving them of their right to freedom of speech?

If you believe so, then either you act exactly the same towards everyone, regardless of what they have said or how they have acted towards you or you are a hypocrite.

I'm accusing anyone who wants to deprive gay people of the rights that straight people enjoy simply because they are gay of being homophobic. Doesn't seem especially twisted?

Re: Animals

Oh Jesus, what the hell is wrong with the forumites here? This whole issue has been so dispiriting for the comments it has attracted - apparently the majority of you are raging homophobes.

To move it away from your apparent prejudicial blindspot, imagine there was a guy who gave money to a political campaign to take the the right to vote away from women "because they were too emotional to make sensible judgements". Or to a campaign that declared that Jews were driven by avarice and would put profit above the well being of their fellow man and should therefore not have the right to own or run companies. Or to a campaign that claimed that interracial marriage was damaging to society because it diluted white racial purity and should therefore be banned.

If such a person were promoted to CEO of an organisation and you were a woman/Jew/black person/non bigot would you want him as your boss? If you were a customer would you want to give "him" money? If you were a stakeholder, would you want to build add-ons or supporting tech that enhanced the prospects of his company?

Further, being CEO is rather different to most jobs - he has considerable scope to make hiring and advancement decisions and he is inherently the "face" of the company.

Finally, how the hell do so many people not understand what "freedom of speech" really means? Too many of you seem to believe that it means freedom from any consequences for what you say (and do - he gave thousands of dollars to support these causes!). How can you possibly think that is what it means? Try walking up to your boss and unleashing a bunch of insults and then claiming freedom of speech when he boots you out.

Freedom of speech means that the government will not take action against you for what you say (and even then the legitimate restrictions are legion - national security, safety (fire! in a crowded cinema...), libel, copyright infringement, harassment, even damn noise pollution for starters). It doesn't mean freedom from consequences - you can express your opinion and I can express mine and we can both of course judge each other accordingly. If you try to take away my rights then I can declare that I won't buy your stuff anymore. This is *obvious*.

Hopefully in 15 years you guys will look back on this and wonder how you could ever think that putting an overt homophobe into a CEO role was appropriate. Lord knows your kids will.

Boycott Firefox, gay devs urge as Mozilla appoints JavaScript daddy as CEO

Re: Shakes Head

Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Presumably you don't agree with the boycotts during the civil rights era either?

This bigot is working to deny them their basic civil right to marry another consenting adult simply because he doesn't like their choice. They aren't fire-bombing him - they are simply expressing their disgust that Mozilla would promote a guy with these views. This is **exactly** how it's supposed to work!

How much should an ethical phone cost? An extra penny? Or $4bn

Re: 100,000!

It doesn't really matter that much though, if we know where the $4bn number from? If it's 10,000 suppliers but still $4bn it's not an improvement.

Most of Dread Pirate Roberts' treasure still buried, say researchers

I think it was encrypted

From what I recall the Feds waited for him to log in and enter the decryption password and then hauled him out of his seat.

I've seen comments elsewhere that he should've taken the battery out of his laptop such that he could literally pull the plug if he felt the long arm of the law on his collar but based on reports of his arrest I'm not sure that would've helped much.

Star Trek phaser sells for a STUNNING $231,000

Re: Cost != Value

Ugh, all these sorts of debates seem to overlook something very fundamental:

taste is subjective

If you disagree then you are just saying that you believe that your taste is the "correct" one. Well anyone can say that. I'm sure most of us on these boards have some fairly involved interests, technological or otherwise. It's tedious when someone rolls their eyes at your interests and what you choose to spend your time and money on and so it is when you do it to others.

If this person could afford this sum responsibly then who cares? As long as they aren't hurting anyone, can't we just let everyone get on with it and grow up a bit?

What a Liberty: Virgin Media in buyout talks with telecoms giant

Re: Pointless

Heartily agree here - our "Super" Hub couldn't sustain a connection to a device literally 2" away for more than about 10 seconds (couldn't assign an IP address before the connection dropped). In the end I just canned the wifi and use our old router for that, daisy chained to the "Super" Hub using a powerline network adapter.

It astonishes me how long Virgin have let this situation persist - either it is VM's fault somehow or they wrote the most absurd contract with Netgear that they have been penalised somehow. It's woeful and a seemingly endless source of bad PR.

Re: I'm confused.

Same here - I assumed they were buying when I saw the headline but the numbers involved make it look like they must be the target (as does the bit at the bottom about them seeking takeover partners before).

Out of ARM's way, Brit chip juggernaut runs over analysts again

Genuine question

While it cheers me to see a British company doing so well like this, there is a part of me that worries how long someone bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year can hold off someone like Intel, bringing in tens of billions.

With that sort of disparity if resources, do you think ARM can stay out in front?

BlackBerry: Aaah, Microsoft, we meet again.. for another deathmatch

No offence but

This is a very basic misunderstanding of English. If there is a race between, say, me and my brother and Usain Bolt comes along, is he not " in absolute good shape in order to be a very strong third runner," in that race?

It doesn't mean he will come third or that he expects to come third - it means Ballmer saw the smartphone race for major market share as coming down to iOS, Android and one other system (in his belief, Win Pho 8). Being the third contestant != coming third.

I'm not debating the pros or cons of the various systems nor the likelihood of Ballmer's expectations coming true, I'm just tired of people misinterpreting what he said as statement that he thinks MS will come third (and frankly, from what I know about Ballmer, do you really believe he would think that, regardless?)

Samsung demands Apple's iOS 6 source code in patent case

You obviously lack ambition

"and Apple will be suing them, claiming that they invented the fridge and microwave."

Actually Apple invented cold. Um, and hot. So I guess until Apple came along everything was, like, the same temperature? Uh, yeah, sounds right*.

* You may believe that ranges of temperature existed before Apple invented them, indeed you may even have seen science fiction movies that predicted the basics of things not all being the same temperature many years ago. Perhaps, at your most erroneous, you may believe that you yourself owned thermometers that indicate that others had considered the concept of temperature ranges to not only exist but in fact be blindingly obvious, years before Apple's invention. However, I spoke to twelve people in East Texas on the subject (one of whom was an "inventor" himself) and they tell me that you're wrong.

'SHUT THE F**K UP!' The moment Linus Torvalds ruined a dev's year

Re: you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?

You don't talk about it... It's the second rule too.

US judge SLAMS both IBM and the SEC over bribery settlement

Re: bribery? Nooooooo....

Actually most places specifically disallow fines and penalties as being tax deductible expenses. Can't say for certain but I doubt it.

P.S accounting expense does not always equal tax deductible expense in any case. See deferred tax assets / liabilities.

Sheryl Sandberg offloads $41.5m in Facebook shares in just 6 weeks

Seems very unlikely to me

I don't really buy into the FB hype but I doubt that social networks are a fad - they speak to something very basic within our nature.

On the other hand, if you are talking about the share price, then I absolutely agree - I think that usage will increase as the proportion of the world using the internet increases but I can't see that they can realistically monetise the site enough to be worth the market capitalisation. There may be a great equalisation, therefore, as membership rises and the share price stagnates until the valuation gets closer to being reasonable.

Just my two cents.

Google buys parcel storage service for Christmas

I'd prefer

If you could text *them* a one hour time slot.

Samsung turns screws on Apple, hikes A6 processor price 20%

Wonder how much that price hike brought in?

$1bn, by any chance?

Apple must apologise for its surly apology on its website on Saturday

I disagree

My impression, and based on a sampling of the comments on various tech websites it seems to be the majority opinion, was that they were being dickheads.

Let's not kid ourselves - all of this stuff will be ignored by the vast majority but those who have read about it seem to have generally come away thinking that Apple are being run by children (and poorly behaved ones, at that).

Of course they knew what they were doing - *that's* the problem.

Re: Education

Possibly but tbh I doubt it - most of the people who spend lots more on a device because it is "cool" (ie Apple customers) probably either don't know about this ruling or frankly don't care what a judge thinks.

Some of them may even be a bit put off by the fact that a judge things that the iPad is cool (based on the relatively stuffy stereotype of judges).

Any neutral observer just sees Apple getting spanked in court, behaving in an infantile fashion about it and then being spanked some more because they stuffed it up the first time (with an added helping of "we're so clueless we can't even run our own website" thrown in). I don't claim to be an expert on these things but none of that strikes me as especially cool.

If they'd taken their licks with some dignity in the first place then it would have just faded quickly into the mists of time. As it is, I'm sure I'll not be alone in recalling this pitiful spectacle for some time.

Education

Someone really needs to tell Apple about the Streisand effect. All this dragging it out has just made it more noteworthy and *much* more humiliating for them. Frankly, for a big multinational, the way they've dealt with this whole thing has been an embarrassment and in completely unexpected and bewildering ways even (the "14 days to change our website" thing was a particular low point).

Honestly someone senior in the organisation needs to get a grip on this whole process before the Court really loses patience.

British judge: Say you're sorry Apple... this time like you MEAN it

Re: 14 days?

If I were the judge I'd have been tempted to hold them and their lawyer in contempt right there. That's just insulting to the intelligence.

Monty Python legend Eric Idle and rockstar boffin Cox write a song

Re: Age versus size

Thanks to all for the responses.

Wikipedia has this to say:

"While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be expanding away from each other at a speed greater than the speed of light,"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size.2C_age.2C_contents.2C_structure.2C_and_laws

Which is interesting.

Age versus size

Um, can someone clear something up for me. I understood the universe to be about 14 billion years old. Assuming nothing can travel faster than light, presumably the universe can only be about 28 billion light years across, therefore?

Fans' loyalty questioned as iPhone popularity plummets

Not a big fan of Apple

Quite the contrary in fact, but that still sounds like a very good number, considering many people will not actually switch out and some will switch in from other suppliers?

What sort of percentage say the same from other manufacturers?

Asus gets paid handsomely for swallowing Google's Jellybean

Pfft

You've never used a Nexus 7, I assume? Incredibly priced for some excellent kit. And that's just one Android tablet - there are loads out there and, though I'm sure there must be some weaker ones amongst them, with so much variety there are certain to be some other good ones.

But, meh, you were probably just trolling (an instinct I have never understood).

APPLE: SCREW YOU, BRITS, everyone else says Samsung copied us

Not in the spirit of the judgement?

If I recall, the Appeal judges said that this statement was necessary for clarity and to remove commercial uncertainty. Does this statement really reflect that? I am reasonably up to date on the legal comings and goings in this area and I still found it hard to parse.

just my opinion, but hopefully the court will revisit this and tell them to have a clearer stab at it.

Bloke jailed for being unable to use BlackBerry Messenger freed

Wait but

If I'm reading this correctly, he was still found guilty, it's just that his sentence was commuted so he doesn't have to go to jail? I mean, wtf? Presumably he's now on a sex offenders' register and has a criminal record and such like? If so, this is at best a partial victory.

LONDON iPHONE 5 MADNESS: 'You must be CRAZY to buy Apple'

Re: Ugh

Yeah, that's the travesty - they've ruined a perfect opportunity for a nice low key, well ordered queue! :)

Ugh

This is just weird. Regardless of the phone or product or company or whatever, people need to keep a sense of perspective.

More than anything though, it's just not British, is it?

Virgin Media STILL working on fix for SuperHub corrupt downloads glitch

Our "Super" Hub...

Couldn't sustain a wireless connection for more than a few seconds, even right next to it. I gave up on it immediately and just daisy-chained our old wireless router for wifi. DHCP doesn't work either, which is turn messes up port forwarding.

Complete joke.

DARPA builds faster-than-Usain-Bolt Cheetah robot

Re: Rat Thing

Heh, exactly what I thought of first, too.

Organic food offers basically no health benefit, boffins find

Re: Why it's "better"/

Many people making organic food are doing so for the higher margins it attracts or because they are ignorant of the facts. Look, not saying everyone in the industry is like that but it's a sweeping statement, packed with naïveté to take that as your starting assumption.

Not sure...

...how they were surprised to find this. Organic food and much of its associated ilk has always been a perverse "fuck you" among rich, food secure people to those in the developing world.

Really, taking hundreds of years of advancements in agriculture and junking them, while paying far higher prices than necessary to do so, is so stupid and ridiculous it pretty much makes me rage out every time I think about it. The fact that people are sufficiently clueless to wave this around almost as a badge of honour ("you *must* try this celery - it's organic!") just makes me weap for the state of our collective scientific education.

It's dangerous too, since it sows the seeds (ho ho) of general mistrust of science and particularly other advances in agricultural technologis that are often desperately needed in poorer countries.

Blinkbox to sell Game of Thrones series 2 by stream

Ugh

Just when you think things are looking up and media companies have finally entered the 21st century... standard def and streaming only....

Keep trying guys!

Apple 'offered Samsung $30-per-mobe' patent licence truce

Re: Delenda est Pupillam

I went out with a classicist once - it went downhill when I asked her to conjugate and she declined....

That's not mine - Woody Allen, I believe.

Apple misses earnings targets, Street reacts

Re: No 'slide'

And down heavily on the quater before... hence a slide?

Good grief, this post must rank as exhibit A in any discussion on the effects of fanboyism.

Full disclosure: my first smartphone was an Apple, then I moved onto an HTC Desire and I'd buy a nice Nokia Win Pho if they'd just enable external storage support (my brother has one and seems to really like it).

Microsoft's uncloaks Phone 8 developer preview

Re: The OS also supports microSD storage

Yup, I'm trying out Dolphin now. I think that the issue is really one of the phone being under-powered, though. Every time I double tap to resize it hangs for a few seconds (sometimes up to ten to fifteen seconds on the stock browser, which is deeply tedious).

The OS also supports microSD storage

Amen. My old Desire was the best phone I ever owned but I was ready to give WinPho a whirl only to find it didn't support external storage. That's a deal breaker for me - got a cheap HTC One V instead and am frankly regretting it a bit (the web browser is pretty poor - which is pretty much the main thing I use it for).

Sony slams Nintendo Wii U functionality

Fragmentation

Also, how many customers can be relied upon to have a PS3 and a Vita? Relatively few, I'd wager (certainly compared to the install base of the average Nintendo console) so games makers cannot make that stuff central to the experience nor is it really economical for them to do so anyway.

So the hardware may be better (and more expensive) but it is less likely to be really used.

Facebook co-founder renounces US citizenship pre-IPO

Re: Really?

>>The problem with capitalism is that it's not about what you have; it's about what other people have.

Actually, that's the problem with socialism.

Star Trek's Wesley Crusher blasts Google+ landgrab

Re: Hmm

Awesome reference man!

Am I right? Or am I right? Or am I right?

Euro climate probe Envisat silenced, boffins baffled

Unlucky cosmic ray strike on the electronics?

My completely uneducated guess (although I know they do a lot of work on redundancy and shielding and such like on these things).

Google shows off Project Glass augmented reality specs

Re: Yeah, ooh aah, that's how it starts...

Evidently the concept doesn't appeal to everyone (apparently someone was so against it that they want my wife to divorce me!) but really I see it as inevitable.

Seriously - imagine being a stay behind in a world where people around you have all the world's publicly available information (and much private information) better than at their finger tips. What a huge disadvantage you'd be at to reject it. How could you comptete in the business arena, for example, with someone who "knows" everyone and can pull up every document invisibly? Plus other technology would come to assume it is a starting point of interoperability (sorry, you can't come in on this conference call because none of our desks have phones anymore because we're all chipped...) And then there's the entertainment prospects - truly immersive computer games, movies and what have you (plus songs that will cut out when the announcer on the train tells you you're at your stop!).

Evidently all the above will freak some people out and I mentioned the risks of bugs and security when I put up my first post. But consider this - 30 years ago if you'd suggested networking up all our private networks (including some of the most sensitive systems in the world), lots of people would've said that, aside from the technical issues, the security risks would make you insane to do it. But it's done and it's everywhere and the internet has been revolutionary. People may be concerned about different bits of differnt things about it but it's not going anywhere but forward now.

You could say the same thing about GPS (why would you want your car to track where you are?!), mobile phones (your boss will have the expectation he can get in touch with you anywhere?!!), television (nobody will read!!) and whatever.

The issues with "chipped" or "wetwired" systems or whatever you want to call them are real but, to put myself on the record, I really can't see that this will stop it (and in 50 years, easy, I reckon everyone will have them).

Just my 2 cents (hopefully nobody will drag out and slay my offspring for this...)

Yes please!

I seriously dream of augmented reality vision. My wife thinks it's creepy but I'd seriously go whole hog and have "chipped" vision (c.f. Altered Carbon) with seamless audio and video integration to my perception. Imaging having a built in HUD that could play movies, scroll interesting facts about what you were looking at, highlight the right road to turn into, bring up the names of people you bump into, thus avoiding awkward moments where it becomes clear you've forgotten who they are.

Would seriously alter society though - for example a guy who remembers who everyone is can no longer stand out as a thoughtful and caring chap who knows his secretary's sister has a cat that just went to the vet because for all you know he could just be reading that off his implant. And the importance of learning information would be reduced if it could be called up at will (how do you stop someone cheating in an exam with the capability and, if they'll have the capability in their daily life, is it relevant to devise an exam that doesn't allow it?).

Big problem would be security (hello very irritating spam!) and bugs...

Top Italian OPERA boffin steps down after faster-than-light mistake

I'm with the above (2) posters

Seems a bit much for him to fall on his sword over this? Unless there's more to it than mets the eye, I think it's harsh for him to go.

IBM's Watson gets a job on Wall Street

No wonder it won jeopardy...

its competitors were distracted: "[Watson] beat off human competition"

TicketWeb coughs to email database hack

Not to dismiss the risks here

but as described here this doesn't sound like a very compelling ploy:

"Users received an email that told them their current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader was out of date, and asked them to upgrade to the 2012 version. Within the email was a link to the upgrade that took them to a third-party website where they were asked for personal information, including their card details."

a) why would TicketMaster be telling you that Acrobat is out of date?

b) why would you need to put in your credit card numbers to get an Acrobat update?

Again, not to trivialise this but (unless this was done with a bit more finesse than described here) hopefully relatively few people will have fallen for it.

I guess having your e-mail address stolen for spam purposes (I assume?) is pain enough in any case.

Raspberry Pi ship date slips

Right but

A delay of a week or so isn't exactly the end of the world, is it? I mean maybe they can't speak for the quality yet (but maybe they can if some product has already come off the line) but otherwise it seems like a delay of a few days doesn't exactly invalidate their decision to pick China for the manufacturing.

Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 DNA splice is on - report

MicroSD

External storage is the major deal blocker that has stopped me seriously considering a WinPho. Hopefully they'll add that and give Android some competition when I come to change my old HTC Desire.

Hollywood siren invented key phone tech TRUE

Targets

Hmm, take you point about the article saying she intended to use it to attack "warships" but in the same breath (maybe the previous breath) it says the intention was to sink subs (and she started thinking about it due to a sub attack). Then again most subs in WW2 spent their time almost exclusively on the surface, I believe so I guess it works either way. Doesn't give you much time to steer onto target though, before they dive?

Guess it would've been interesting if the tech had existed to realise it to see how it worked out in practice.

PROVEN: Violent video games mess with your head

What a crock!

I play loads of violent games and they have never affected me in the slightest! These scaremongering stories seem to come out all the frickin time and they make me so mad!!! Makes me wanna track these white-coated morons down and stab 'em in the eye!!!!!!!

For any law enforcement individuals around the Robin Hood Airport region, this is known as irony (ie, a joke)