* Posts by Stuck-Record

8 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2011

PETA monkey selfie lawsuit threatens wildlife photography, warns snapper at heart of row

Stuck-Record

Expect legal action from self-triggered CCTV

If the monkey owns the copyright then surely everyone who has ever been caught on self-triggering CCTV does to.

Those burglars who snuck into your garden/factory/shop/government building and were caught on the motion-sensitive camera? Well, do they own the copyright as they 'triggered' the photo?

Might be worth a test case if this wins.

Snowden leaks lack context says security studies professor

Stuck-Record

Re: Disagree

As a non computer programmer there is something that always jarred about the Snowden revelations – at least how they were reported that maybe you can explain?

It seems to be widely believed – certainly amongst the MSM and general public I encounter – that the NSA is recording or caching everything for analysis later. In fact someone in this very comments thread mentions it. Can someone explain how that is possible? Surely the sum of the traffic through the internet is greater than the traffic itself, and to attempt to store it would (very quickly, if not immediately) require more storage than exists. The problem being made worse every second.

Am I misunderstanding this? Thanks.

New driver-snooping satnav could push down UK insurance premiums

Stuck-Record

Norwich Union used to offer insurance where they fitted a hidden GPS to the car which calculated your insurance based on how much you drove on certain roads. It was (with one tiny technical issue*) absolutely brilliant. My insurance, as a London driver was, get this, £110 per year!

For 'some reason' they stopped the scheme and dumped me into a normal insurance policy where every year since, regardless of provider, the premium has been £350 pa.

*The 'issue' was the devices were prone to low level drain of the car's battery if wired incorrectly.

Apple vs Amazon in ereader format smackdown

Stuck-Record

InDesign's interactivity plugin is adequate if you want to make books with pages consisting of discrete units of pic, text, video etc. But it is utterly useless for my field where I need to create a free-form interactive books: highly illustrated children's fiction and non-fiction picture books, where cut-out elements move, interact with each other and transform.

There, the only game in town is still animation tied together with bespoke coding.

There are a few simpler entrants into the market; Moglue and INteractbuilder, to name two. But they are currently too simplistic and quite clumsy products to use. Even drag and drop app builders like Gamesalad are better (though they lack adequate page position tools). There is definitely room for a killer app in this field. Something that links page position with simple animation tools and interactivity.

Everyone I know is crying out for it.

Publishers are currently spending (wasting) a fortune on this 'problem'.

Stuck-Record

The missing link in all these debates is the absence of basic creator software for epub3 books that allow simple interactive elements such as basic animation. Where are the contenders for the InDesign and Quark crown of this nascent industry?

iBooks Author is a start, but is too heavily tied to a formulaic textbook format. Also, the proprietry Apple epub3 add-ons make IBA a non-starter for any major work that will have to be expensively recreated for another platform at a later date (unless someone writes a nice translator that strips out the Apple bit - please?).

Apple's iBook store is also a very odd place at the moment. Feels very much like a WIP.

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

Stuck-Record

Wow, he believes in God!

Wow, he believes in God! I guess Newton, Kepler, Planck et al must be wrong then too.

Save the planet: Stop the Greens

Stuck-Record

Everything you need to know about the Greens...

...is contained in this single paragraph from a BBC Radio 4 program "ARE ENVIRONMENTALISTS BAD FOR THE PLANET?" Broadcast Date: 25.01.10

Solitaire Townsend Co-founder and Chief Executive of Futerra Sustainability Communications: "I was making a speech to nearly 200 really hard core, deep environmentalists and I played a little thought game on them. I said imagine I am the carbon fairy and I wave a magic wand. We can get rid of all the carbon in the atmosphere, take it down to two hundred fifty parts per million and I will ensure with my little magic wand that we do not go above two degrees of global warming. However, by waving my magic wand I will be interfering with the laws of physics not with people – they will be as selfish, they will be as desiring of status. The cars will get bigger, the houses willget bigger, the planes will fly all over the place but there will be no climate change. And I asked them, would you ask the fairy to wave its magic wand? And about 2 people of the 200 raised their hands."