Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
> sounds plain dumb.
Only if you're too deaf to hear the difference between "er" and "ar", and too dumb to look up the origin of the word, which is Scandinavian and has no connection with the Spanish word 'negro' meaning black.
That's the same sort of stupidity that leads to people burning paediatricians out of their houses because they can't hear beyond "peed..."
Define "real".
If it makes your radio buzz, so you have to move the radio to the other side of the room, maybe no big deal, but it's "real".
Then put 10 Spectrums (Spectra?) in a classroom, and discover that it causes patterning and noise on the TV upstairs where they're watching a schools broadcast. Is that "more real".
Then you get the really awkward ones, like when it upsets the hearing aid of the deaf kid so (s)he can't use the computer lab.
You ned to draw a line somewhere, and enforce it.
I used my phone QR code reader, but only to check that the QR code on our tradeshow booth pointed where it should (it did). I didn't actually follow the link, just looked at it and declined the "browse to address?" request from my phone. Do other phones just jump straight there? That's daft...
Public Domain isn't a licence. When you place something in the public domain you are taking a very specific legal step, you are gifting that something to the whole world. From that moment you have surrendered all rights to it because you no longer own any part of or interest in it, so you can't license anything related to it.
It's a very nice thing to do, but very few people actually do it.
One of our highly paid and supposedly computer-literate directors once phoned the sysadmin to report that his PC wouldn't boot, and there were no errors showing on the screen. Since he was only down the corridor she popped along to take a look. Came back a few minutes later, and managed to close the door before collapsing in giggles. She'd had to walk all the way down the corridor, just to turn the brightness up on his monitor...
Overheard from a colleague a few desks away, known as a true gentleman, but with a short-ish fuse.
"Ah, I see"
<sound of gritting teeth>
"Did you not think that perhaps the smoke might have indicated a problem".
...pause... hangup phone gently.
Then the air turned blue all round his desk for a good 5 minutes.
One of the problems with this sort of "hang 'em high" mentality is that the victims of sexual assault can usually complain, and identify their attackers. If you make the penalty for rape (adult or child) the same as that for murder you risk encouraging attackers to kill their victims. That seems especially likely in the case of young children who are less able or likely to fight back.
No doubt a sexual assault can be life-changing, but children can be amazingly resilient when given the right support. I think that few children (and fewer of their parents) would prefer that the child be killed than 'just' (emotive word, I know) assaulted.
If you accept that such attackers must eventually be allowed back into society, you have to accept that sciety needs a way to cope with them without demonizing them into "what the hell" recidivism.
Vigilantism can also result in such people dropping out of sight of everyone, including the authorities who could be expected to keep a watchful eye on them. If they feel that they'll be persecuted no matter what, there's little reason for them not to re-offend.
Granted, when I see someone as clearly ill-educated as "Robert Corbett" it makes me want to smack his fat head back to school, which biases me somewhat against him and his opinions.
Curiously, on the "maps" view of Google earth (web version at maps.google.com), the island comes and goes depending on the level of zoom, but on the satellite photo view there is clearly an object there, although it looks like someone has redacted it it with badly-drawn large black stripes.
True. The comment
> the plucky biz has no legal method of exclusion
also effectively means that there is no illegal method. Cue the mercenaries with big guns, winner takes all.
Sadly what this probably means is that the Satellite TV rights to the coverage will be worth more than the mined metal.
