Posts by Yet Another Commentard 450 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2011
I think the point is that it's all about economics. If I go after Marriott for £3,000 with a lawsuit, I hope they will think "Oh crud. Just ringing the lawyers will cost more than that. This company is worthless, so even if we win, we can't reclaim our costs, so just pay and be dammed."
That's the gamble the IP shark is taking. It may or may not pay off. For the sake of general sanity, I hope it does not.
The "pay on demand" means that the Bank will swap an old tatty, out of date, ripped etc note for the same value of sterling. You can't go and get your gold back.
So if you find an old £1 note that the shops won't take, go to Threadneedle Street and they will happily swap it for a nicely printed new one. If it's one from 1797 they will give you a £1 coin for it, but you would be an idiot as the antique value would be much higher than the face value. Weird. Last time I checked, there was no charge for that service.
Then again, cash is simply an interest free loan from you to the Bank of England, so you are paying for that too.
"But dinosaurs were our ancestors"
No, sadly they weren't. We share a common ancestor with them, about 310 million years ago. So, something like your 15million x great grandpa and grandma could have had both you, and dinosaurs as their descendants.
Notwithstanding that, an interesting article. I recall Winchester drives in the late 70s, I had no idea just how far back their heritage went. I feel duly educated.
Carry on - and have a good weekend all.
"the internet still hasn't beaten TV for serving up breaking news, but it's at least an equal player now, with news organizations trawling Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and personal blogs to find out what is happening on the ground."
Yes, that's right, why bother doing journalism when you can sit in an office and watch a hashtag? the Internet - allowing news Agencies (I'm looking at you, BBC) to report random opinions as fact since 2001...
Even more bizarre is the way they put so much emphasis on Twitter "MP X Tweets..." when there is no need, why not just say "MP X says..." there is no need to invoke the Twitter source except to either advertise Twitter, or show how "down with the kids" you are. It's the same as asking cabbie 43455B his view on the riots, or 9/11, or taxes. It is not proper journalism. Forcing the relevance of Twitter was done quite oddly with the death of Bin Laden. News agencies gushed that the story was first broken by a Twitter user in Abbottabad. Not quite. He had no idea what was going on, he just wrote a line that said something like "that's a lot of helicopter noise, I hope it's not going to kick off". Do we now plan to report every tweet of a helicopter in Pakistan as being a World Breaking News exclusive (to all papers)?
The we have nonsense like the BBC having "live feeds of big events" on its home page. It then goes to the trouble of saying that one of its own journalists has tweeted some inane thing. Why? If he is a BBC journalist can't he file copy at the BBC? Why does the BBC employ someone to post on a different website (goodbye any scoop) and then report that website?
I think my point is that all this Web2.0 stuff has a place in news media, but on the whole it is "truthiness" not proper reporting.
I'll get back to my Sunday now, I feel better for the irony of decrying random website postings via a random website posting.
Indeed.
This is true - at work we have been tasked with thinking of things you could use an iPad for that are work related. A client wants to buy some, but does not know why.
Also - I travel by train a lot. I see a lot of iPads. Typical use is Angry Birds, then read <newspaper> then put away, get out <laptop of whatever flavour including macbooks> to do work.
On the subject of this, as I recall one of the problems with paper was it got wet. Which is clearly not a problem for delicate electronics, them being well regarded in the waterproof department.
A quick google shows it's around 20% for a dead tree retailer. I have no idea how the sale and return side works.
Mind you - a read of "Power Without Responsibility" is heartily recommended, it sets out the complexities of cover price, distribution numbers, and the real income (adverts) for papers. That's how freesheets (like Metro) survive - it's about ads to vast numbers of people. Each Metro is read by several potentials, so it has lots of ad revenue. We'll skip over it being owned by the Daily Mail.
The online world is different. You can get ads to service a "free" website - witness the dear old reg here - but you need to be careful you don't compete with yourself. It is, as ever, interesting to note the cash the Guardian chucks at its website for little return, indeed the group is in financially troubled waters at the moment. Why would I buy a copy when it's there, more up to date, without charge. Also, with adblock, without ads.
The FT is a bit of a special case - many companies have it almost as a Paper of Record (like a pink London Gazette). It's had a paid subscription website for years, quite successfully too, because of the "proper" journalism in it, and access to really useful and accurate market data.
News International chose to do the same, figuring 100 paying subscribers is better than 1,000 freetards. I have never peeped beyond the paywall so I have no idea if ads lurk there or not for the rest of the revenue.
I am curious how the model works for "The Economist" on iPad. A paper subscription includes the e-subscription. It may present to the Jobsian Cult that the electronic subscription (iPad or website) is nil, so nil is due to it.
I think I had a point when I started, but I've forgotten it now. Sorry about that.
In Bermuda there is a small issue with that plan.
It's about 21 square miles, and over 600 miles from anywhere else. Easy to protect.
The Police there routinely pick up smuggled items by sea, even if the smuggler uses a fishing boat to pop out and meet the big boat from the Drugs Baron. There is one airport, and it takes up a surprising amount of the land.
As for a helicopter, as I recall there are none there, so it would be a bit of a spectacle to land by one. Do they have the required range?
Bermuda makes most of its tax income on import taxes. As a result Customs are pretty hot on things. I used to live there, and true to form was stopped every time. You have to produce a little yellow receipt for every item in your case (or if its new a duty paid slip) or it is assumed you are smuggling it, and avoiding tax.
Also, it's strapline used to be "feel the love" which is exactly what you never get at LF Wade airport. Queues, yes. A walk across the tarmac, yes. Sometimes a bloke singing calypso tunes, yes. No cabs, yes. I could go on...
Who gets to "own" whatever is put into the ground?
I mean, if we give (say) £500 million to BT or Fujitsu, so they will put in some cables, do we (as in The Taxpayer) get to charge BT/Fujitsu for their use? Does this mean some of the comms infrastructure going back into Government hands?
Or are we just giving money to a private concern so it can charge us for the money we we gave it?
But I'll bite.
Not being the US renders the First Amendment utterly irrelevant. If you are interested Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights covers this, saying
“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression” but then “The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”
Whilst I am in full rant about it - why do all the txt mssgs I see reported about these riots refer to the Police as “The Feds”?
What I really wanted to say was – we are not the US. We have no first amendment. We have no formal constitution. Our bail system is different. Our policing system is different. Our caution is different. Our prosecution system is different. Just because people say things in films that may be correct about the US it does not necessarily follow it will be correct about us.
I have to agree with Andrew’s analysis here. I didn’t think to look at Al-Jazeera or the other one people are on about up in the 800s.
The BBC seems to report “some bloke on the internet said…” I don’t recall during the Brixton riots years back John Simpson asking some guy in a pub in Walthamstow what he thought about the riots in Brixton.
Is there any financial connection between the BBC and Twitter? It seems it can barely report a story without referencing a Twitter comment (no matter how dubious the provenance or inaccurate it may be). With the riots it seemed obsessed with saying there was a Twitter angle (all for good in the cleanup) but the evil Blackberry was to blame on the rioters’ side. As it has to crowbar Twitter into every story (by company name, not just the name of the Twitterer) does it get paid advertising?
As for memorable broadcasts – Brian Hanrahan saying (something like) “I counted them out, and I counted them back” felt real. He was there, on an aircraft carrier. The radar(s) bleached the signal on each revolution. He was a voice I trusted, giving facts, not opinions.
We have drifted to the point where journalists interview journalists, with a rather pointless image montage over the top of them. Last night, an interview of Nick Robinson telling me what he thought David Cameron was thinking. Not “I asked Cameron and he told me XXX”. That is not news – it’s current affairs. Why is it in the news?
Private Eye (again) mentioned this a few weeks back – because it is a visual medium producers are obsessed with putting pictures on the screen. Whether it’s Brian Cox on a mountain or a 30 second loop of a fire in Manchester.
The other useful thing Sky has is the HD news. The bigger screen allows for a few useful throw-out boxes, and the pictures showed the whole area, not just a window of a burning building.
I used to love the BBC. I loved the intelligent Horizon programmes I had to think about, or go and read up on later. I loved the news and Panorama type programs. Now Horizon seems to be “celeb investigates in a really simplistic way how temperature is measured” or Ragi Omagh walking in a desert, or some other nonsense. I seem to recall that over 20% of the country has a degree – can you make 20% of your programmes at degree level or above please?
"Then after a bit of enforced growing-up, which our schools seem incapable of providing, they can be re-introduced as positive members of our society."
But with weapons and tactical training too, and the benefit of being made really fit into the bargain.
Why not just have them all chained together and pick up litter, clean drains, scrub graffitti, clear the canals, return the plasma TV (and pay for the broken windows)...
etc. Under supervision of the army possibly, but making them the army's problem I don't think is a good idea.
"To reiterate, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone."
A couple of things here. I have not read his (auto)biography, but I am intrigued to know how he thought the "player" of the recording had obtained it legally, and then decided not to run the story. Being the fine upstanding member of the community he is, why did he not contact the police then. He must have known hacking was a dubious activity at the least, or he would have condoned it, surely? Assuming it was not a Trinity Mirror employee he would do no harm to the Mirror. If it was, then he would have been removing a bad apple.
"To my knowledge" is a very interesting turn of phrase. How does plausible deniability work again?
There is an Occam-esque appeal in the simplicity of this.
Not having any physics/rocketry/engineering training isn't going to stop me commenting though.
How tough are the balloons? As they rub on the tube/each other will it make them burst prematurely?
Should one burst at (say) 100 feet, how do we deal with the now crazy angle of the launch tube? Does that matter?
What would the tube be made from?
Do we want to launch vertically, I thought the optimum angle was 45degrees for some reason?
As I recall the PARIS craft froze to its platform - a tube infers a lot of potential contact points, is it likely to freeze in there?
Does one launch these rockets from inside a tube (like a mortar) or from a milk-bottle type thing (like a firework) or does it not matter?
Which sounds great - until - how, exactly were you planning to get all the electricity from the desert to (say) the UK? That is one hell of a long cable to power all of our electric cars, industry, light bulbs, data centres, street lights, ipads, laptops, TVs etc.
If I were a terrorist I could take out the whole planet's electricity supply with one handy 747 (see - the spurious terrorism argument works both ways).
Or we could spend the same cash we've just hosed on the Olympics on, say, fusion, and be done with the problems. After all, the universe is unlikey to run out of hydrogen in the near future.
Depends on the "comparison". Deaths over the lifetime of the plant, lost in the roundings of a coal plant. Radioactive release, also lost in the roundings of a coal plant. There is also an xkcd about radioactive doses I think.
Windmills are not all that radiaoactive, but don't actually generate electricity all that well either, so they are difficult to compare.
This is a nice graph about deaths per TWh - http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-sources
I have not verified the source data in any way - it could be junk.
Is deadly dangerous. See Banqiao Dam. Enviro peeps cannot complain "it was a one off series of problems..." because that's exactly what happened at Fukushima. Same cloth.
Also, more poeple died in Japan as a result of failing dams than have and will die as a result of Fukushima.
No power is 100% "safe".
The problem is when we meet things our neolithic-programmed brains cannot really figure we have to rely on what "feels" safe. Water feels safe. A lump of coal feels safe. Nuclear sounds 1950s B movie scary. Result - unthinking fear.
Surely we need some regulator who will actually do something, not just grumble a bit, and let things continue. It's the same with any regulated field. Maybe we need an OFREG to regulate the regulators and make them do something. Mind you, it would just end up more of the same.
I propose there should be an OFCOM imposition that says simply you pay the proportion of the "up to" that you achieve. So, for example, advert at "up to 10MB for £20 per month" and you only manage 5MB, you pay a tenner a month.
...and what's more, can they sort out throttling and quotas while they are at it.
"When Mr Coulson resigned... by definition he associated his name with hacking. That is simply and blindingly obvious," he said.
Which would, I assume, bring him under suspicion of conspiracy, and merit a visit from one of Sir Paul's staff. Did the MPs ask the blindingly obvious next question?
Did he (or was it another, I forget) not think it "blindingly obvious" when he spent a whole day looking at the rest of the evidence?
"Stephenson said that 17 per cent of his media contacts had been at the NotW, and added that 30 per cent involved News International employees. He pointed out that some 42 per cent of the UK's readership were hooked into NI titles."
It's all a numbers game. I can play too. NI has 42% of readership, from 20% of the available national titles (per The Economist) which means that a 30% "holding" is about 150% of what it should be.
AND ANOTHER THING - why is The Met doing all the subsequent investigation? Why not give it to the City of London, or Cambridgeshire, or somewhere, anywhere other than where it could be tainted by the ghosts of investigations past.
grrrr.
I have read this paragraph about 20 times and I don't understand it:
"Students were asked a string of tough trivia questions, and then tested to ascertain if they had increased difficulty with a basic colour naming task, showing participants words in either red or blue. Response times to search engine-related words suggested they pinpointed search engines as the mode to locate information."
Does it mean "I asked people some tricky questions. Then I asked them what colour ink I'd used for typing out a word. Then I noticed they could see that the word Google written in red was indeed red but the word haberdashery written in blue was described as pink. I therefore concluded that they locate what they need to know from Google." How does one follow from the other, or am I missing something, as usual?
Can somebody please restate it using Very Small Words?
The table in the link looks suspect, unless I misunderstand it (very likely), as it adds up to 147%.
"Search is still well ahead, delivering 34 per cent of traffic as opposed to 12 per cent for Web 2.0, but that 34 per cent is down from 40." we can't tell from the data if Social Networks are up to 12% from 1% or 11.9999999% - it could be a plateau, it could be incredible growth.
In other news Google delivers 92% of 34% (31.3%) and Google in the guise of YouTube delivers a further 20% of 12% or 2.4% - so that's about 37% from one single company. Facebook delivers 50% of 12% (or 6%). Yep, that's clearly got Google on the run... where should I spend my meagre advertising budget?
This makes no sense at all. There are no published accounts I can find for Facebook, but Wikipedia (may or may not be correct) gives it a $2bn income. Google has (same source) an $8bn PROFIT.
Company valuation is difficult, that's the problem. As a user above notes P/E ratios are a good measure, we don't know Facebook's E though. Just assuming (wrongly) it converts all that income into earnings, $1Trillion would be a P/E of 500. If the user above stating a $300M profit is right, that jumps to an eye-watering 3,333 (as another notes). That's a bit meaningless, so let's look at Google's, which is about 14 (future) or 20 (trailing) per Yahoo Finance, which is very close to the mean of a traded company.
At $1T value, and a half-sensible P/E ratio (say 20) it's "profit" of $50Bn PER YEAR. That's $8 for every man woman and child on the planet. Most of whom don't have that much to spend in total. It's 1.5 times ExxonMobil - a company with lots of assets and pretty much a product the world cannot function without.
Still looking sensible at $1 trillion? Even at $75bn it's a P/E ratio of over 200. Feels wrong to me.
When you look at Facebook's revenue - it's banner ads and games (I don't know how the latter works). It's click through rates are very poor compared to Google. That's key - I go on Google and search for "laptop" that's because I want a laptop. If I see "laptop" alongside my Facebook page (harvested from some data of mine) I may well ignore it.
Facebook's user base may well be about as big as it gets, I think it has started to fall, even though Zuch has said he doesn't care (recent Reg article). Its demographic is, I understand, kids. Kids don't have much cash, even though they may click on ads. If you go subscription, they go too.
The article says the success and value is due to it being open source, I think, I may have missed the point somewhere I was laughing so much at the valuation, and that had encouraged developers, which drives the value. Developers seem to help out at that famous open source outfit Apple (see the App store) and another one, say Microsoft.
In short - it's not worth $1 trillion. It's not valuable because of open source.
The value is jumped up by some self interested traders who have sunk billions into it, and want to get the cash back when (if) it IPOs. They must hope The Next Big Thing does not appear before that happens.
Firstly, why is it suitable to populate and disseminate an excel spreadsheet with sensitive data? Surely there is a better/more secure way to do that? Or if you have to, why send the spreadsheet, why not a link to some secure internal shared space? Even if the link gets out - dead URL contained in it.
Secondly what's the point of a Government body fining another Government body? Surely the Council's bigwigs will just shrug this off, it's not their money. Why not fine the directors (or equivalent in public sector bodies) personally, each at this level. The threat of a £120,000 personal fine would mean I'd certainly tighten up all the procedures as a matter of priority.
In the meantime, the good citizens of Surrey suffer either via a Council Tax rise to cover this, or a reduction in services to make up any shortfall. The Council itself, bar some bad publicity, is in the clear.
We tend to forget that all drivers become pedestrians at some point. I assume all the drivers moaning about pedestrians are model pedestrians when they do leave their vehicles, waiting for the green man at pelican crossings, walking the extra 20 yards to the zebra crossing then back again to get to the shop opposite, deciding not to cross when the gap looks just big enough, if taken at a run etc. etc.
All of us rely on various senses for road crossing, including hearing. In Zurich I was nearly hit by a tram (near silent) as being a tad tired (not emotional) and new to the idea of vehicles being on the wrong side of the road I looked the wrong way - it only missed me as I thought to check just in case there was a cyclist ignoring the usual road rules. Does this mean tourists should all be mown down? How about partially sighted people - ban them too?
Surely the road and transport network is there for all of us, and all of should be considerate to each other? Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians all do dumb things from time to time, as the other road users we should be alert to the possibility and simply not hit them. Easy to do if we all follow the rules and drive safely.
I was thinking about this - also that his breathing may have only been sufficient to move air up and down in the tubes, not enough to allow any fresh to come in. That's why those old diving suits needed pumps, or you keep breathing the same air in the tube over and over, and as you note the CO2 bit sinks, being more dense.
Underwater rebreather incidents have CO2 saturation as causing a rapid loss of conciousness, coupled to a severe headache. If he was asleep he'd be in real trouble even if the headache came first and was enough to wake him. Or he may have gotten the headache but been unable to use the phone on account of rapidly losing conciousness.
It's quite tragic he thought this could somehow improve his luck, and he leaves a family behind to grieve too.
He means "pimp your data and lose it in the USA" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7147715.stm
or even "send your personal details to a random somebody else" - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/dvla_data_error/
and then charge you £60....
Some are better than others, and I would guess that one had been caught after she'd collected that pollen. If you sit and watch them come back some barely have any, others look as if they've been dropped in Barbara Cartland's mascara, and some have baskets of pollen almost as big as themselves.
I'm not having a go about animal cruelty or anything (foraging bees are at the end of their lives anyway, not that such a thing makes any difference) it was more an observation that the bees are not just carrying an RFID.
I think (I am not a bee researcher, but I do keep them and have read a lot of books. Most of which contradict each other) they use more visual clues than just far off mountains, including the sun.They do have polarised light sensitivity, so they can see where the sun is through dense cloud, so I would guess that landmarks are part of an arsenal of navigational aids.
Mine are also really fickle about going out. Too cold, too damp, too windy, too rainy and they stay indoors. Perhaps fog is just another one on the list of types of weather to avoid.
That bee also has her pollen baskets full (look on the back legs, the blue balls are pollen) so she has the RFID and a pollen load to carry.
It's interesting, as bees seem to pick up landmarks as they return, not on the outward journey. Moving a hive within about three miles of its old position tends to mean bees returning to the old site - they pick up old clues and head to the old home. Typically they fly in about a two mile radius, hence the three mile rule should remove a lot of overlap. if they are looking at the distant horizon for visual clues we may be losing more than we thought back to the old site.
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