Posts by Dave Bell 2133 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007
Caution here: There may be distinctions in law between physical property and copyright. Tje term "intellectual property" can be very misleading.
You would think that the Theft Act covered motor cars, but they still have to use "Taking Without the Owner's Consent" for a lot of cases. Even clearly physical property is not that simple.
I'd be inclined to look closely at the law on fraud.
I'm puzzled here
If somebody has posted images to a service such as flickr, don't they have to have an account, with a contact email address and all that?
So how can $_CORPORATE_PIRATE claim due diligence if they don't get in contact with that account holder?
I can see how a failure to answer can be too easily be taken as proof of an orphan work, but not even trying would be a clear step too far. This is going to depend rather a lot on how the courts decide such details, it still looks like a bad thing, but are people missing something? Is it data in the image file, or does the context matter? Is a notice on my web page sufficient?
As I recall my 20th Century history, corporate capitalism is a component of fascism, but fascism needs a few other things. It does seem to be adding up. The ECHR was constructed partly as a barrier to Fascism, so the way the government seems to be talking it up as a threat to freedom is a bit worrying. There are other signs.
We're on the road.
We can still turn back.
I've seen a few web pages on this theme, and the recipes can look rather good. But I'm not sure the pricing is realistic. Price an egg according to the cheapest supermarket price for a box of 30. Have a recipe with component prices taken from four different supermarkets.
How long before all this feeds into the shirking benefit skivers meme that plagues the press in the UK?
Because of pack sizes, food storage, and transport costs, this can become an intellectual challenge rather than any practical assessment. And I recall that J. Hickory Wood made comedy out of the idea, over a century ago, with an account of how a young man may live in London on a minimal budget.
The only DRM system I routinely engage with is the BBC's iPlayer system. This depends on Adobe AIR. I can download files which (usually) expire after 30 days, which is plenty of time to watch them.
I have twice this year seen an Adobe AIR update make unusable the files which are stored on my hard drive, waiting to be viewed. Reinstalling from scratch is sometimes necessary to get things working at all.
The BBC has a pretty decent set of rules they apply. There is iPlayer software for all my devices. But the basic reliability is not there. And that turns BBC iPlayer into the biggest advert around for the benefits of digital content piracy. And who can claim that anyone loses money from pirated content being preferred to the BBC's free service?
I'd noticed that Ubuntu used to work well on my old netbook, and doesn't any more.
Hardware graphics acceleration needed...
I shall have to give Lubuntu a try, I suppose.
I am, I am afraid, a little old-fashioned in my tastes and not without reason. I have seen enough instances of new UI shiny that seem to do little useful, and maybe divert resources from design elements that arguably need fixing. Such as a program locked to one rather bad colour scheme which can be described as "shit-brown" is its predominant shade.
Isn't that particular company buying adverts on TV?
Just where does their money come from? I'm a bit doubtful that they earn a huge wodge of wonga from Google-supplied adverts on their web-pages. And I know that some insurance companies, in their adverts on TV, make a point of telling us that they don't appear on price-comparison websites.
At least those meerkats are fun.
It was around a quarter-century ago.
There were a couple of Dutch police officers at the Lincolnshire Agricultural Show, with their vehicle.
A Porsche 911
I expect they had been picked for the visit, but my later experiences in the Netherlands suggests that their Police are much less inclined to confrontation that they have become in the UK.
Maggie Thatcher's claim that there is no such things as society would be loudly mocked by the Dutch, though the context of her claim is a little bit more subtle than the way it gets reported now.
So, a tablet has a screen comparable in size to early netbooks, but where's the keyboard?
The first netbook I bought is still running, and still a useful machine.
Tablets do some things better, but need extras to do some of the most basic jobs computers are used for.
A netbook was a good choice for the schools market, something that a child could carry around and use, but I have heard a few stories about Linux-hostility from teachers. The ultra-cheap computers don't seem to be enough, and are tablets going to be any use?
They'll call them something else, and they will have more power, but that cost-niche for portable keyboarded computing isn't going to go away. Looking at how Ubuntu has changed, we seem to have thrown away a few good ideas that came from the netbook boom.
During WW2, there were a heck of a lot who saw action. Some were captured.
Under the rules which applied then, Officers were better treated than NCOs and other ranks. They could spend their time planning and executing escape attempts from Germany. The Sergeants were not badly treated, but could be put to work. In this country, German non-officer PoWs were working on farms.
Churchill is on record as saying that Sergeant Pilots were a mistake. They should all have been given commissions, but he had allowed himself to be persuaded otherwise.
Two of the Lancasters on the Dams raid were wholly crewed by Sergeants.
Iain is a very typical Science Fiction Fan. Like many of the writers, he was also a Fan. I met him several times over the years, often in the bar and both of us part of an incredibly diverse conversation. I could say much the same about other well-known SF authors, and some of them were old enough when I first met them that their deaths were no great surprise. We all die.
This death will be far too soon.
Those exotic prices are likely to be the result of uncontrolled automatic pricing.
Seller A has his pricing robot set a price at, for instance, 98% of the most expensive.
Seller B chooses to advertise at 105% of the most expensive other seller, and buy a cheap copy if anyone is fool enough to buy.
Neither, alone, is a stupid rule, but in combination, the price keeps increasing indefinitely.
I'm running an LTS Version, and the jump to the most recent is huge, with all the changes around the graphical UI which have happened.
With two versions per year and the chance of some real crud in whatever the latest version is, nine months feels too short. I hear what people are saying about sticking with LTS versions for serious use, but if this change reduces usage of the intermediates, is the development process going to get enough feedback?
It is, alas, possible to see this as a sign of Canonical becoming rather uncomfortably arrogant. Those big changes to the graphics: there is a reason Mint is out there. Are Canonical listening enough to the users?
You've hit on part of this. Visa in Europe is a distinct company, licensing the brand. Mastercard is the world-wide monolith, and apparently has a tendency to try to stop merchants from selling certain sorts of lawful goods. The different banking regulations in different countries would have some effect.
Paypal in Europe is also a distinct company, operating under European regulation (Luxembourg's implementation of the relevant Directives, I think). I would think that snooping on purchase details would be regulated. I don't know if Google Wallet is even available in Europe, yet.
It is pretty obvious that Paypal supplies info that identifies the final destination of the payment to the credir card system, because it ends up on the statement, and Paypal tell you what this tag will be, so that you can identify the transaction. How much more info do Mastercard and Visa want? Do they want the itemised list from the supermarket?
Nevertheless, having seen how US merchants seem to lag behind Europe in the security features they use, I feel a little more comfortable going through Paypal in Europe, rather than feeding my account details to another US-based operation.
Wild guess, maybe, but it might mean that Windows 8 doesn't exist, this time next year.
I've noticed several things which Windows 7 does better than previous versions, mostly under the bonnet. Can we separate the in-your-face changes such as Metro from the hidden stuff? To be honest, I doubt that. Linux can do better, but it doesn't escape the concept that the designers know best.
It is rather obvious to me that 3D Printing, of one sort or another, could make a big different to metal casting.
The two main options are actually making moulds, and making the master-models from which the mould is made. Depending on the particular process, those parts can be damaged or destroyed at later stages.
Can a 3D Printer make the sand-based moulds for casting iron? I doubt it, and I doubt whether developing the tech to do so would be worth it.
Could 3D printing make the master model for a process such as lost-wax casting? It seems pretty likely to me, and it is a process for high-value cast metal items.
And there are in-between processes, such as what Games Workshop does. Put a 3D printer in the chain from designer to production, and it might lead to changes in what the business can do.
This method seems to stop you making big losses, but you need to be able to match the other players.
$33 Million in Eight hands? And how many players? Was that winning eight hands out of more being played, or one big win? What gave the stunt away?
Either it was the technology that raised an alarm, the player was too good, or his style of play was suddenly very different. And that last might be why the VIP Host is out of a job for not noticing.
And, yeah, you wonder about the other players.
Anyway, even on the vague reports, I can see there being a film made from this. Don't set it in Australia. Don't have Chinese gamblers.
Don't play poker against somebody who looks like Geoge Clooney.
While there are a few known ways of winning in certain games of chance that don't depend on accessing secret knowledge--any player can count the cards in Blackjack--a casino is set up against the players. They bias the odds they pay out. so that some money sticks with them. But when enough people play the unusual events happen. It's like tossing coins: getting ten heads in a row is very unlikely to happen, but it does.
Another factor, and we go back to Blaise Pascal for the math on it, is that even in fair game, the player with more money has an advantage. If it's a dollar a play, and you only have one dollar, you have to win that first game.
We can talk about the banks being the insanely wealthy predating on the rest of us. Casinos are the predators on the insanely wealthy.
It's one of these American things. It isn't really secret, it does several distinct jobs, and they are the Federal experts on investigating computer crime, rather than the FBI.
It's one of the older parts of the US System, and I have no idea of why the got the Computer Crime job. Maybe the politicians were wary of giving the FBI too much power.
I am not in Lincolnshire, but next door. There's stuff going on, but I've net heard of any contract yet.
I know where the local cabinet is. It's not nearby and the "wet string" takes a roundabout route.
The existing wet string between cabinet and exchange is longer, and since the cabinet is next to the local school, I suppose we will get some benefit. I'm sure the council would want the fibre to that particular cabinet.
I get the feeling that if the routing were designed from scratch, most of us would get a better service, The local layout goes via the older part of the village, and then doubles back to what was built in the 1960s. Current ADSL also seems to suffer weekends and evenings: all this fibre is going to be pretty useless if the back-end links aren't upgraded to match.
There's a difference between pretty pictures and serious aerial photography. I'm not sure just where this guy is in that range, I get the feeling that he could be doing the sort of thing that involves selling people aerial photos of their homes and businesses, or he could be a bit further up the scale.
Either way, the possibility that the proposed law could destroy a photographer's protection for his work seems pretty real to me. And I find myself wondering just what might happen at EU level, because the web is certainly EU-wide, and pulling a stunt like this would certainly come under the original trade provisions. It's not about the EU trying to supplant national governments this time. If the guy is still protected in Germany, the British Government is asking to for an EU spanking.
This cynical commenter reckons the issue will come to a head just at the right time to be used to create an anti-EU scare story before a referendum.
Some of the first efforts to use rocket braking were tried during WW2. It didn't quite work, partly because of the effects of the rocket blast on unprepared ground. The Soviet Union deployed a solution that involved a parachute, with the rocket pack between the payload and the parachute.
I've seen film of those WW2 tests. The rocket blast was excavating a crater, which was reflecting an asymmetric gas flow which flipped over the payload.
If SpaceX want to use the rocket landing approach, they have to be able to land on ordinary open ground, and they have to pretty accurately steer to a safe area. The Dragon capsule might be more stable, less likely to topple or flip, than a booster stage, but what size of target area will they need?
Water landings ain't easy, but the sea is big, and a lot more uniform. There are no trees and no sticking-up boulders.
I reckon that a lot of the arguments for using COBOL in teaching are about the same as the arguments for using BASIC.
And, yes, I know BASIC allows people to do some rough stuff. That's what a teacher's red ink is for.
Maybe Pascal would be better. And being exposed to a variety of languages is definitely a good thing. Anyway, recruiters ask some stupid questions about experience such as expecting new programmers to have language experience that pre-dates the existence of the particular language. How can we rely on what is being said here?
I gather that keeping Spitfires flying supports a component manufacturing industry which can supply all the parts you need to build your own Spitfire. So for DIY spy-in-sky stuff, go for the Spitfire PR Mk XIX. Not only do you get good pictures, you get to fly a Spitfire.
Nothing else comes close.
I write books and no way am I self-publishing through Amazon. You have to work through their USA subsidiary and deal with the US taxman. That's on top of all the weird tricks they can pull because of their market dominance.
So what sort of deal will Tesco offer? And will their ebook suppliers, of whatever size, be able to make money?
(The horse meat? Tesco contracted with suppliers, specifying where the meat came from. Some of the suppliers ignored that. Who can you trust? It's crooks all the way down.)
From my own experience, I am coming to think that the old disks were more reliable than the current tech. If there is a reduction in reliability as data density increases, there is one of those awkward engineering tradeoffs.
How does a home user back-up the current generation of drives? Will people fork out the cash for a RAID array in their laptop? How do you sell multiple drives. How do you support them?
I've had enough awkward things happen with Adobe software that I'd be happy to try this. But Firefox isn't my primary browser. A Diverse population of browsers it, I reckon, a good thing. Likewise, not depending on Adobe to read a .pdf. There is always the chance that what Adobe does interacts badly with what your favourite browser does. If it happens now, we know who made the mess,
I shall wait and see before I switch, I like the promise here, but what will the delivery be like?
Since the link to the original report simply puts up a log-in page, I confess to feeling a bit wary about this.
What I wonder is where the raw data came from. Is it somebody jumping the gun, or what? Knowing how politics can warp what comes out of the think-tanks, I wonder what pushed this story out.
US Trademark law is different. The PSF would have a prior claim--what gets called a "common law trademark"--that would protect them against a claim such as this one. It's a term that was used by Games Workshop too.
The European system doesn't have that.
The lawyers seem almost incompetent to this non-lawyer. Don't they realise that the differences matter?
According to the IPO, there are also Moral Rights which can be claimed, distinct from the Economic rights. But this doesn't apply to computer software. It's arguable that a part of the function of the GPL is to fill that gap, allowing the economic rights to be given away, without losing the credit to the authors of the software.
I remember, getting on for twenty years ago, driving a vehicle with a fuel consumption meter. It was a Renault 25, and getting on a bit even then. My father's driving was far less fuel-efficient than mine. I think I was regularly getting 50% more miles per gallon, but partly that was longer runs that got the engine warmed properly.
Tesla and Broder both seem to be forgetting that drivers vary. Just some better anticipation of road conditions ahead, easing off on the throttle rather than hard braking, makes a difference.
In my experience, even a basic hand-held GPS from the Nineties can give a good check on speed. If I were testing a vehicle of this sort, I would be inclined to use a tablet with GPS to log the journey, independently of the vehicle instruments.
Checking my Nexus 7, I have GPS, accelerometers, a gyroscope. and magnetic sensors. A magnetic compass in a vehicle is unreliable, but surely there must be an app that can log what's happening. A motoring journalist can record a lot of hard facts, if he wants to.
Tablets tend, I think, to be at their best as media players. Though, if you spend the extra money, you can use a decent Bluetooth keyboard. The Nexus 7 is maybe missing a few useful features but, like the iPad Mini, it's a good balance between screen size and pocketability.
I doubt I would spend money on a smartphone. I have a mobile phone, but it's not something I use a lot.
Some of the tablet fanbois are talking about stuff that, as far as I can tell, depends on having more energy storage than the average hand grenade. Boeing Dreamliner, I mutter. Some are making wild assumptions about continuous access to the internet: even in the cities there are black spots.
And, while I have decent broadband, I am not convinced that the internet in San Francisco and Silicon Valley can be relied on as an example of what the actual paying customers have available.
While the number of jets might be an issue, it's quite normal for companies to charter them from operating companies, so the comparisons might be misleading.
As for why, a private plane sidesteps the security procedures that airline passengers undergo, and even without that, getting from airport gate to 'plane is faster. There's more than that, but private jets have become so pervasive in the USA business world that not using them could be seen as a bad sign.
One of the more interesting problems of the time was that if you used the wrong explosive, the shock of impact could detonate it, outside the armour. The Germans apparently fixed the problems. The Royal Navy was still using Lyddite at the start of the war: I'm not sure what they had at Jutland.
And, please, the Navy was never controlled by the War Office. It was the Admiralty.
Before the weekend, I saw a message from an American company I deal with, asking for certain information from anyone experiencing DNS errors. Gave a good procedure for reporting the address of the DNS server the computer on my desktop is using.
I'm glad I am not having problems, because the DNS Server my desktop uses is at 192.168.1.1
And that particular box gets its DNS from Google's DNS server system, rather than through the automated set-up system run by my ISP. But if I was having problems, the info this company was asking for wouldn't tel them anything of that.
It is not the first time I have wondered if people based on silicon topographical features are using the same internet as the rest of us.
A lot of sales, yes, but how many people are using them as a sole computer?
In terms of price, tablets and smart phones might have had a big effect on the netbook. Laptop computing might have become a usable alternative to a desktop machine for many people, And there could be good reasons not to have an optical drive on every machine in the office.
And how long has the desktop PC been around? Are we getting any visible benefit from the previous habits of regular upgrades. Does the extra power do anything we notice? Tablets are still in the bottom part of the usual sigmoid curve. Desktops are near the top. And the recession is making people with good existing hardware wonder whether they need to spend on a replacement.
I have a tablet, it does useful stuff.
I have a huge amount of unused hard drive space, internal and external. How would I expect to fill it? (Wild guess: a drop in HDD sales is a symptom of successful anti-piracy campaigns.)
This isn't simple, and by the time the figures get through one of these forecasting outfits and into the hands of the media they will have been simplified beyond all significance. The Register does a better job than most media outlets, but too many reporting channels can turn a couple of hundred thousand into four million without apparent embarrassment.
Streaming media... Have these people looked at the load that it putting on the internet? They're looking from a rather privileged position, in terms of their access to high speed, reliable, data transfer.
Yes, you can have it if you can pay for it. We're in a world where more and more people have less and less income. There's a clash between the growing need for internet access, and the total cost.
My connection, the actual wire coming through the house wall, would take a couple of hundred hours to download the equivalent of a Blu-Ray disk, running full speed all the time. At busy times of day, I get a quarter of that across the ISP's network. The streaming vid can use more recent compression standards, and there are other improvements, but the Royal Mail is faster at delivering data. They can even deliver more than one padded envelope at a time.
It looks as though the "children" these people want to protect are mostly what would be called teenagers.
They need protecting, but I wonder if they were encouraged to do anything that they wouldn't have done in private anyway? I reckon this is something that would be better handled by sex education than by a panic over internet threats to our precious bodily fluids.
I have been getting a few documents from lawyers as MS Office files.
I can load them fine into Open Office.
I am pretty sure that they are a couple of MS Office versions behind the bleeding edge, maybe more if you want to count the new release.
Format compatibility is important enough in the real world that businesses are not going to rush to install the new version. With such things as court cases spanning several years of documents, lawyers need to be able to handle quite old documents. PDF is useful for that.
What I have seen, support for digital signing might be one feature that makes a difference, but looking the what the UK government says about how it can be done, we would have to purchase digital certificates. The web-of-trust approach that developed through PGP seems to have been ignored, although everyone seems willing to accept ink-squiggles without any real checking.
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