Re: Is it "fair use" or is it intellectual property theft?
"...might be legal in say 150 years?"
Not if Disney get in on the act.
1188 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2013
The main customer for this is going to be the scam call centres that India is riddled with. When 'Peter' from Microsoft calls to inform you that a virus has been found on your computer, the Indian accent often prevents proceedings going the way the caller desires and this is not for any racist reasons.
This software has only one purpose, to deceive, and I sincerely hope the backers lose out in a big way.
I sincerely hope that 'user consent' puts paid to the 'maybe later' or 'not now' buttons used by naggy pop-ups trying to persuade you to change browser or install some unwanted feature. There needs to be a flat refusal option that prevents the pop-up from ever appearing again, after all, it's not as if a refusal now would forever deny me the opportunity to install Google Chrome if dementia set in and I changed my mind.
I'm sure the fine will be paid promptly. Plain biscuits instead of choccy on the tea trolley for a couple of weeks should save enough cash. Then they can get down to apologising for their misdeed. A quick email to say sorry to all concerned and explain they only did it because their marketing emails really are too good to miss out on.
The electronics block in Edgware Road had disappeared many years ago, but one of the stalwarts started a second shop a block further North and on the opposite side as their original shop was rather small and cramped. Henry's Radio was the name and it was still going last time I passed through the area (a couple of years ago).
One of the few retail outlets for many Sinclair Radionics products.
Amongst his many early products, one which I had (and it worked really well, too) was a matchbox sized radio. I remember having a good laugh when some film director decided that its miniature size and futuristic styling made it an excellent communications device for secret agents. I can't remember the name of the film, but I think it was Patrick McGoohan that was speaking into the tuning dial of the device!
It was ingenious penny saving tricks that were a feature of many of his products and a prime example was the use of the earphone jack on this radio. On many radios the earphone jack also featured a metal contact that would break the circuit and silence the speaker when the earpiece was plugged in. This little radio did not have a loudspeaker, so it was a stroke of genius to bend the contact so it made rather than broke the circuit and use this as the on/off switch for the device.
This, together with some other component saving tricks, enabled the radio to be sold in kit form for the princely sum of thirty-nine shillings and six pence if memory serves (it often doesn't these days).
Thank you and RIP Sir Clive for this, the calculator, the 81, Speccy and QL, which provided years of pleasure.
Something like an unused variable warning should not be trivialized. I have come across a case where a variable was declared for a specific purpose but the code accidentally used a similarly named variable that was being used for something else. Turns out that two different values don't fit into one storage location.
The only reason this is such a pain now is that -Werror wasn't the default from the start and things have accumulated over the years. I hope that a slow cleanup can take place with a view to eventually allowing -Werror to be the default for ALL builds. If it turns out that there are some truly trivial warnings, this is a good opportunity to either remove them or downgrade them to observations.