Posts by Dave Bell

EU copyright chief: We could SMASH these infinite copyright contracts... just wait

Re: How about some background?

That sort of distinction certainly used to exist in the UK. If you were a photographer was held by who owned the film. Not a perfect rule, but a simple enough distinction between a newspaper employee and a member of the public. In the age of digital cameras, the difference is less clear.

What matters most of the time is the licensing of the copyright. Why should a social media site need to own the copyright? All they need is a license to use the material?

Some of the stuff, on both sides of the arguments, seems to come from lawyers who know very little of what the technology does.

And at least some of these claims struggle to be consistent with statute law.

The details vary, but the same things keep on happening about different material. The US requirement to register copyright to get any protection ended in the 1970, but you still see cases of companies claiming your work isn't protected, (US registration adds to the protection: for one thing, it proves a date for the work)

And the "(c)" doesn't work. Use "©".

Who needs a ride-on mower when a ROBOT will cut your grass

A scythe is cheaper, but people expect you to grin a lot and speak in small caps.

It's a Doddle: Amazon inks train station parcel deal with Network Rail

Maybe good for commuters, not so good for the rest of us. Locally, the Amazon Locker sustem seems optimised for motorists, but it is not compulsory.

Mind you, I'm not sure I trust Amazon, not when they're using their search, sales, and stock system as a weapon in a dispute with a publisher. Amazon not wanting to sell books? What is the world coming to?

DON’T add me to your social network, I have NO IDEA who you are

Re: Billy 'No Mates' here

Be like Dad, keep Mum.

9 Dark Social Truths That Will Totally Blow Your Bowels!

You forgot the cluster of strange links at the end of the page, with those tempting but misleading headlines.

5 Ways to watch Eastenders on your mobile phone.

The Politician who thinks his family is an "Embellishment".

England Football team wins a matchstick game!

8 Surprising Ways to Delete Your Data!

The big solution to all your Windows problems, from Finland!

Amazon stops selling books!

KA-BOOOM! Boffins blow up mountain to make way for telescope

Remember the wow-factor in even the first, flawed, Hubble images. I'm not sure that the "16-times-sharper" is the only important factor, but wow!

PoW! Academics KO Bitcoin mining mammoths

Think about it

So it's not the Bitcoin technology that is the problem, it's the people using it?

Does this new trick really change anything?

How practical is an electric car in London?

Re: @Rupert Fiennes

There's an argument that solar-electric is close to competing with coal. Whether you get the power when you want it is the big issue, and it hinges on some assumptions about future costs of fossil fuel. But all those cars recharging while parked up for the day would certainly ease some of the wrong-time problem, and the pollution benefit can be pretty big.

(OK, it's the Chinese. They've built something about four times as long as HS2 in under three years. They seem rather better at these big projects than we are, though I am not sure I would want to be getting in their way.)

Tom Hanks NICKED my COPYRIGHTED PIC, claims Brit photog

The term "public domain" has several different meanings. And there is a distinct meaning in US copyright law which seems to confuse a lot of people elsewhere. In the UK, "in the public domain" means (mostly) that the work is widely known. It's nothing to do with copyright. It's about privacy and such.

Women are too expensive to draw and code – Ubisoft

Re: A dev's p.o.v

Thanks for this summary.

I can go for bad planning being a part of this.

I write stuff. It's interesting to look at a character and wonder why I've inserted yet another default man, and often not too hard to change. But you've explained why that change is a huge amount of work in a computer game.

Re: Understandable I guess

That particular game got ported over and released through some download channels, early this year. I don't recall seeing any mention of it until this row exploded into the open. Assassin's Creed: Liberation HD is the title.

I'm surprised it took this long. There's nothing in the genetic memory thing to justify it, and a heck of a lot of women want to play computer games.

Maybe they should check the office fridge?

Re: "Add an extra mesh option with the same animation rigs, and job done"

There's plenty of modeling, for both games and comics, which leaves me with a feeling that people do their research from porn videos.

Re: non story

Oh, it can all be made quite reasonable.

The trouble is that, especially when social media get involved, a great many people start putting out sexist insults. Ask why Ubisoft have done this, and you will be insulted, but only if you're using an apparently female identity.

There is an Assassin's Creed game which has a woman as protagonist. There have been women as recurring characters. So the argument isn't about doing something new. There's a suspicion that the people who made the decisions have a bias. And there is a lot of growing resentment, on both sides. There are people expressing opinions, and there are teenagers.

Some people have been getting verbose about Tomb Raider, and I think a part of the whole issue is that the technology is good enough for the game protagonists to pass as people. Recent instances of these long-running series are becoming quite movie-like, and we want something more than a string of action scenes. Stories matter.

In some of this I am reminded of such things as the Wing Commander series.

But go look at what's on TV. In many ways, something like GTA5, while it makes the criminals the protagonists, is a long way behind TV Drama. How long before we get something that does for games what Lynda La Plante did for TV crime drama?

IPv4 addresses now EXHAUSTED in Latin America and the Caribbean

Re: IPv6 in LACNIC

The only way I can explain the no-apparent-plan attitude from ISPs over IPv6 is basic incompetence.

They should be supplying customers with compatible hardware. They should be installing compatible hardware. When I was still running Win XP, that had IPv6 as an option, which is the epitome of something not being new.

I used to use an ISP who didn't admit to knowing what IPv6 was

My current ISP supplied me with a router which I use. They do have a plan, but they don't need to implement it yet. They have done trials and give instructions for setting up the router. It still looks a bit hairy as an exercise, but it's one of the reasons I picked them.

Even without using IPv6, switching ISPs gave me vastly improved performance. IPv6 looks like a useful indicator for ISP competence.

The Strippers, Unicorn Computers and Martian Watches of Computex

The whole sex-in-advertising thing is provoking commentary, and those pretty girls are part of it. Do we remember the girl or the product?

And why do people think we guys are going to fall for that trick again?

I can think of worse things, but it's a combination of visual noise and signals of a rather unpleasant attitude lurking within society.

What would Sheldon say?

Boffin fights fire with EXPLOSIVES instead of water

Re: Hang on...

Red Adair certainly seemed to have ingenious uses for explosives, even figured out how to use them as a spanner. And the movie The Wages of Fear has explosives being delivered to the burning oil well.

This looks a little more like a WW2 German antiaircraft weapon intended to wreck a plane with the air-blast generated by a fuel-air explosion. They ended up with this sort of effect, but planes were not a good target.

I reckon that a bush fire is just too big.

Titsup Russian rocket EXPLODES, destroys $275m telly satellite

Some satellites, booked for Proton launch, are going to be delayed.

It's not so easy to put a satellite on a different launcher, because of the physical structure that supports the satellite, and the control systems.

And who has launchers spare?

If somebody wants an extra Falcon launch after this, it will take time to build everything, and there is the problem of time on the pad.

There isn't going to be a sudden change.

Google Maps adds all UK public transport timetables

Early days.

Google Maps updated. Check.

It isn't quite working here yet, and I have just used the bus service it doesn't know about. I can see the bus stop sign through the window.

Google Earth on my PC does show all the bus stops.

And, serious caution, there are timetable changes coming into effect this weekend.

Scots team builds SONIC SCREWDRIVER to repair damaged nerves

This is no surprise

Is it even possible in Britain that a piece of boffinry like this would not be called a sonic screwdriver?

Google ECJ case: No commish, it means we don't need right-to-be-forgotten rewrite

Re: Yes but

In English Law (I don't know about Scotland) there is the concept of the "spent conviction". After sufficient time a conviction ceases to be on public record.

It might still have been in a newspaper report. lost in microfilm records in a local archive or the newspaper office, but getting from you to the record is hard.

Now newspapers are being digitised, and you can read a newspaper in Australia over the internet. And then you find a story of the vicar in the village where your father grew up.

Maybe some Australian is reading about my father's one conviction, some fifty years ago. He'll find mention of a right troublesome family, who had a Council House within fifty yards of the local Police Constable.

It doesn't matter to me. It might matter to one of the other people mention by name in a newspaper report. But how can there be any controls if they do not apply to Google and their like?

Or should I have left the text, garbled by OCR of old newsprint. I and my father knew and remembered enough to clean it up. My father is dead now. but should I have let his stories die with him?

But what do I want to see published about me? And if Google can spew my life over the world, lets see all the tales of what those Bullindon laddies were doing.

I visited Oxford occasionally in those days. And friends said I was good at looming.

I think I might have done more than loom if I had run into that mob.

NHS patient data storm: Govt lords SLAP DOWN privacy protections

Re: Talking to Patients

There's a tricky balance here. I've had letters come out of the blue asking for a blanket permission to share personal data with anyone.

It was the local council, not the NHS; they didn't even say it was the Social Services department wanting permission to pass on some info to an NHS clinic to support making an appointment.

And, while I know there can be administrative rules set which add restrictions, the law would allow a GP practice to register under the Data Protection Acts a blanket permission to pass on data for the purpose of providing medical care. It would need to be carefully worded but the Data Protection Acts are not rocket science: is it so hard for a manager to read them and be able to ask a lawyer a sensible question?

Re: These peer fellows...

I was once in a queue with one of the local Hereditaries: we were both collecting parts for combine harvesters. We were both driving rather scruffy Land Rovers.

I can't imagine that ever happening with an elected MP. He has far more wealth than I do, but our worlds overlapped.

(Another near-neighbour once shot a Government Minister, but only by accident.)

Copyright minister: Those missing TWO copyright exceptions? We're still on track

So who gets the money?

As an occasional producer of content; songs, images, and written works; I wonder a little how the income from a levy might be distributed. I am, I suppose, in the same long tail as almost everyone who self-publishes through Kindle. It wouldn't astonish me if a levy system never paid anyone but a few well-known names. Amazon publishes the mean income from ebook self publishing, which is arithmetically valid and statistically worthless as a measure.

We already have this problem with the fees charged for the "performing right", covering the radio or TV playing in an office, waiting room, or workshop. Were I to perform one of my own songs, the fee would become due, and I would not see a penny of it.

Woody Guthrie rightly sang that, "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen."

ARM exec: Forget eight-core smartphone chips, just enjoy a SIX-PACK

I wonder when the 8-core Raspberry Pi becomes the standard.

Norwegians trial Oculus Rift in tanks: The ultimate battlefield simulator

This is just a test

Consumer products are made down to a price, and the tech being used here is likely not tough enough to rely on in a battle. But showing what it can do is a good way to justify the development of the mil-spec hardware. I don't know how the Norwegians get on with cost control, things sometimes seem insane in British and American equipment procurement, but they might have made a good start.

The article mentions a standard PC. It's worth thinking about the cost difference between the machine on your office desk and a similar-performance Panasonic Toughbook (You can Google for that, it's not secret). You think an iPad is expensive? $2800 for a tablet computer?

But this shows you don't have to spend silly money to test the idea and see how much better visibility can be. What can Google Glass be used for? I've seen some very expensive trials for the future infantryman, and suddenly most of the tech to try things out is off the shelf. (or will be, next year)

Remember the parachute jump? Google Glass and GPS and you don't need to mark the drop zone. And you could test it pretty easily.

The big bucks are in the integrated systems, but this sort of work can tell you what the bad ideas are.

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

Re: It's not about the HFT - it's about tax revenues

That's an interesting way of thinking about such things. I know I have sometimes seen something as an essentially noisy signal, and have wondered if the HFT trading is down amongst the noise, profiting from a spread which is less than the noise, and from reversions to the short-term mean.

Remember, it is hard for any trader to beat random choice or (not quite the same thing) the indexes.

And if it is depending on the noise signal, how is anyone actually making money? It must be the spread, but where is the money coming from that they end up paying their bills with?

There's another simplifying assumption being made, and that is that HFT is an all-or-nothing deal. It could be that there will be a reduction in the amount of HFT, depending on the change in the Tick, which in turn affects the Spread. But will either of those relationships be linear?

I make my own assumptions. That M$400 saving is all from HFT. The HFT volume halves because of the changes. If the spread less than doubles, is it costing investors less?

We have economies of scale here. We also have diminishing returns and things such as sigmoid curves which approximate to straight lines locally.

The guys writing this software are better able than I am to understand what is happening, but I hope they're not pointing and laughing at me. I'm less hopeful about some people in this comment thread.

And I have serious doubts about the intellectual capacity of some politicians.

But I will venture to suggest a rule of thumb: if somebody is explaining something with a simple straight-line graph, they are very likely to be wrong. And if all the data is exactly on the line, they are likely to be liars, even if they have used logarithms.

Re: Speculation

Speculators have value in a market. Markets need people willing to buy and sell.

OK, when I was taught about this it was still the old-fashioned stock exchange, slow to make trades and expensive to run. And you are correct that the modern world is insanely fast. And the modern speculation, high speed and based on small price differences, may be people skimming the froth off the top. It may be going too far.

The whole business happens so fast that the distance between computers becomes significant. We're used to measuring ping times in milliseconds. In this High Speed Trading microseconds matter, maybe even nanoseconds. In some ways, this starts to look like a computerised game of Snap.

MPs attack BT's 'monopolistic' grip on gov-subsidised £1.2bn rural broadband rollout

Re: Openness

You're making an argument based on a misconception.

The rural broadband schemes are based on the idea of fibre to the cabinet, not to every individual house.

Fibre is digital. The modulated analogue signal over copper wire is the limiting factor. For me, the wire length drops by ¾, which is enough to notice. There's some wiggle-room from the cable routes between the exchange building and me. It could be a much bigger improvement. It could be a bit less.

The exchange-to-cabinet leg will release a lot of copper, it'll carry all the lines, voice and data, on fibre. But the hardware in the cabinet will need more room. and will need power. Unless you want to have all the phones fail when the mains supply goes down, that means a connection to the exchange, with its battery back-up.

It's hard to see how anyone can provide all this without a local hardware monopoly. And, after a lifetime of dealing with first the GPO. and then BT, and then with ISPs and alternative telcos, I'm left with the feeling that the industry is full of liars.

Re: Incumbent get more cash from incumbent fund

I did a quick check, and that certainly fits with the phrase "swathed in bandages", but the alternative definition develops from grass mowing (the strip of cut grass) into a strip or area of land.

Checking Wordnik, I reckon that the distinction it makes between "swathe" and "swath" has thrown you off. The plural formation is ambiguous, and it is one of those slightly obscure words for most people. It's almost a cliche, a bit of a rhetorical archaism in either sense, and I suspect you'd need a connection to farming to have heard the word in day-to-day use.

And all this points up the risks of relying on a single online source. If you miss the "alternative" spelling pointer in Wordnik, you misdirected. British dictionaries are different. We do indeed have two countries divided by a common language.

No, Minister. You CAN'T de-Kindle your eBooks!

MEGO moments

The Statutory Instrument needs to be read by somebody with legal training and knowledge of UK copyright law, essentially a Barrister.

It's a diff file for the Act.

I know I don't understand how some words are used, and they will also depend on other statutes and court decisions.

Brit game devs WILL get tax relief for, er, EastEnders Game and Legend of Slough

This has some easy elements

One of the rules gives you four points for recording the game-dialogue mostly in English.

How about the original version of The Italian Job?

I recall a BBC series from the 70s called Gangsters.

You can get a good few points just from UK-based creation and production. And Lara Croft is a British character, so it isn't hard to add points there.

It needs a little care, but totting up 16 points doesn't look to need the obvious and slightly risible suggestions.

Research bods told: Try to ID anonymised data subjects? No more CASH for you

Re: La La La La

The people here control the purse strings. When you take out these four sources, you don't have much left in the UK. It's not going to stop corporate profit seekers, and these funding sources are not always going to agree, but pissing-off the Wellcome Trust is a very bad career move for a medical researcher. Who would employ somebody whose actions have killed the funding for a research project?

MPs urge UK.gov to use 1950s obscenity law to stifle online stiffies

I suppose the existence of the Obscene Publications Act is a sign that we don't need new laws, but I am reminded of what happened in 1996, and of the confusion over just what is "extreme pornograpgy".

"During 1996 the Metropolitan Police told the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) that the content carried by some of the newsgroups made available by them was illegal, that they considered the ISPs involved to be publishers of that material, and that they were therefore breaking the law. In August 1996, Chief Inspector Stephen French, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit, sent an open letter to the ISPA, requesting that they ban access to a list of 132 newsgroups, many of which were deemed to contain pornographic images or explicit text."

That affair did lead to the creation of the Internet Watch Foundation.

The sticking point for me is that the French letter had a very wide-ranging list of newsgroups, some of them rather blatantly titled to invite illegal content, and many not. It raises the question of who we trust to make the choices. Often, cases that reached juries have ended with acquittal, but the Police and CPS have been known to choose criminal charges which are not heard by juries, or to have hidden part of the evidence.

The whole business of "making" child porn images is an ingenious interpretation of the legal detail which was aimed at photographic darkrooms and printing presses.

As a safeguard, a jury trial is a good thing, but the cost to the accused, emotional and financial, is high even for an acquittal. There's something ugly about the idea of going back to this old law, which is a struggle to fit with the era of the internet. Looking at how the laws have been used, and at the reputation of the Police, having these people say we can trust them just isn't enough.

ZEPPELINS to replace Goodyear blimps in American skies

If helicopters had the same media treatment as Zeppelins when they fall out of the sky, the North Sea Oil industry would have a few problems.

PAF! MPs go postal over postal location data sell-off by Coalition.gov

Re: Ownership matters

I used to live in a house which was one of three buildings on the street which had a different postcode from the rest. That little group included two farms. The uphill part of the street, a hundred yards or so, was all built during the roll-out of the system, and has the same postcode as the much larger downhill stretch.

It would, in terms of sorting for delivery, make at least as much sense if those new houses had been included with the tiny farm-group. None of them are farms now. All of them are at the roadside. Because of how the roadside footpaths were laid out, there's a natural break in access for a postie with one of those handcarts.

40 years ago, I doubt there was any alternative to sending somebody to have a look, unless a manager was prepared to talk to his subordinates. Now it seems the manager is a few hundred miles away, but at least he has Streetview. I doubt he uses it.

Re: Typical Govt b0llox

If it was supposed to boost the share price on flotation, it just adds to the feeling that the price set for the flotation was way too low. We expect some short-term profit, it's the way these things are done, but that huge jump in the share price suggests a mistake was made.

It was an intentional action, but that doesn't mean it was not a mistake.

Plusnet shunts blame for dodgy DNS traffic onto customers' routers

Re: For me there is a basic question

I have not had any problems with the Plusnet-supplied router, although it doesn't seem to have any way of manually setting the DNS server. For example, the Google public DNS server. That has been occasionally useful.

I'm getting decent performance with some demanding software, so I am not inclined to replace it. Some of the big-name brands are known to sell models which struggle with the software I use. The wifi may have a little less range than my old hardware.

Plusnet seem to pre-set a reasonable wifi and admin-access password.

I wonder if the problem is people who have moved to Plusnet and chosen not to replace existing hardware. They make the changes to login, but leave the rest unchanged. It's a tempting option; I have a couple of things I still need to change the wifi settings on.

I know enough to be dangerous, but I also have a well-honed streak of paranoia.

Psssst. Don't tell the Bride, but BBC Three is about to be jilted

I have reason to suspect that there are ISPs in the UK that do not have adequate backhaul capacity for the growing demand for video streaming.

BT demands end to Ofcom wholesale broadband subsidies for BSkyB, TalkTalk

My experience suggests that TalkTalk has been able to make its huge profits by the simple expedient of not spending money. They don't say anything about IPv6, their network becomes overloaded every evening and weekend (My ADSL connection itself has a rock-solid speed), and packet loss was becoming very noticeable. So I changed ISP a few weeks ago.

I am beginning to wonder if TalkTalk were doing something with the line settings, the relationship between SNR and speed setting, because my ADSL connection is running around 150% of the speed TalkTalk provided, and the data delivery isn't choking at peak times. My new ISP has told me I should be getting an ADSL speed about 300% of what TalkTalk gave me, but I haven't seen that myself.

What I do see is a big improvement on what is delivered. We're expecting FTTC here before the end of the year. The improvement I already have makes me wonder if I need it. I am glad I quit TalkTalk.

MtGox has VANISHED. So where have all the Bitcoins gone?

Re: Time to buy

I wonder if the rise and fall since the last crash are the result of speculation. People buy at the low price, see the price skyrocket, and want to get the money back by the end of the tax year, so they can put it into safe, well-understood, tax-efficient places.

And the sort of business typified by the Silk Road crashes. Not enough people are buying.

It's not a simple binary choice. Some of us, even under stress, can write better than others. And it doesn't need "several hours", if you have had a decent education.

But does this anonymous source have to be a native English-speaker?

Just like Elvis, dead Steve Jobs to appear all over America in 2015

"This is for everyone"

Steve Jobs is somebody people will recognise.

He didn't get to send a message to the world from an Olympics Opening Ceremony

Someone's snatched my yummy Brit COTTAGE PIE – Viv Reding

Re: Some say...

That's a myth promulgated by teachers in the past. Spices were crazily expensive. and humans, for entirely sensible reasons, are very good at detecting food spoilage. I remember being told that about medieval times, and later learning that most of the spices were not avaiable at that time. There were local herbs, but many have gone out of use.

School history lessons are sometimes less reliable than Wikipedia.

Steelie Neelie: ICANN think of more 'credible' rules for internet. (Cough *NSA* cough)

If the NSA, GCHQ, and their equivalents were any good, we'd know who the crooks are who, not ten minutes ago, were trying to persuade me that they worked for Microsoft and my computer had reported that I had a malware infection.

It's all in the metadata they collect.

Google to banish mobe-makers using old Androids: report

My phone came with a 2,2 version but there is a cyanogen version for it. That works well. I have a tablet with 3G that is on 4.2 and it's already different enough from 4.4 to be occasionally confusing.

It's swings and roundabouts. Do you want to use a MicroSD card? Or do you want the latest Android version? Neither is a crazy choice.

Netflix speed index shows further decline in Verizon quality

I have my doubts about these figures. On my own line, there is a clear daily variation, and for about 6 hours, every evening, the connection is diabolical. And I can be pretty sure that streaming video just isn't going to work during those times, so I don't try.

I'm not a Netflix customer, but do these averages make these effects less obvious? And if their customers choose to act as I do, will Netflix even notice the low speeds, or will they assume their customers are watching broadcast TV instead?

I'm changing my ISP. There are other problems with the data flows that leave me thinking the ISP network is struggling. It's not really funny that, as soon as I requested the MAC, I was swamped with offers of engineer visits.

I'd already booked the big yellow taxi.

Patch Tuesday brings Microsoft fixes and Adobe Shockwave update

These things could always be done better. I left my computer running overnight to download some stuff, and woke to find the patches installed. I still had to check the download had completed OK.

There are times when an "evil" protocol such as BitTorrent seems to be a lot more dependable. And it must be difficult for anybody running a computer where they can't leave it on overnight, and the downloads+install eats into the working day.

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

Re: Few CIOs or VP ITs can code

One of the problems is the idea, coming out of the world of the MBA, that the guy in charge of the business doesn't need to know anything about the specifics of what the business does.

They don't need to be experts. They do need to know enough to understand the specialists.

Trials of 'Iron Man' military exoskeleton due in June

Sergeant: You removed that bronze nail in its foot, didn't you, sir.