Maybe they've blurred the line on who profits, but Apple does not maintain any communications infrastructure. Nor do they own any spectrum. So they're _clearly_ not a carrier.
But it doesn't work well for other things like books. Writers don't tend to do live performances, but they still need to eat.
And yeah, I know that in some rare cases like Cory Doctorow people have managed to build an audience by giving their content away for free and monetize it later, but these are rare cases.
Out of curiosity, how do you barter that stuff? I've got a couple of reasonable older machines that I'm looking to get rid of in the coming weeks, and I'd like to get something back for them, even if it's only a few £s or £s worth of services.
Oddly enough, there are still countries where it is unlawful for you to fill your own vehicle tank. Every time I go to SA on holiday, I'm normally out of the car and heading for the pumps while a horde of attendants bear down on me before I remember I'm not allowed to fuel my rental car:)
That only tends to happen once per trip before I start remembering:)
What's not innovative about Kinect ? A lot of people seem to be doing very interesting things with it, and none of their competitors ever put anything like it into the consumer market.
Well, that is illegal in the UK. I'm a hardcore criminal in this country - I've committed hundreds of crimes by ripping CDs to iTunes. I've also committed multiple crimes (under the EUCD) by ripping DVDs to the family media player.
On the plus side, knowing that I'm a criminal and eligible for years of jailtime from the crimes I've committed doing these things, it's a lot easier to not give a fuck about any other laws I might break.
> Yes, I'm sure 5-10 years of saving 75% of your lighting costs is going to get eaten up by one drive.
One drive? Try 1 40 minute drive every 8 weeks. These bulbs do not last as long as they are advertised to.
> When I switched 10 years ago, it took a few tries to get the right light-bulb, and even then it still looked odd at first. After less than a year, I stopped even noticing that I had CFLs through my whole house.
That's lovely. For you. How much color correction work do you do out of curiosity ?
> Five minutes??? What type of cheap ass bulbs did you buy? Even in cold weather, mine are usually warmed up within 30 seconds.
Did you not read my post? I've tried bulbs from all of the UK main suppliers. What more do you want from me?
Our council (municipality I guess? County is too big) are the ones responsible for garbage collection. This is part of the service we receive in exchange for our annual council tax.
There are rules on what we can and can't dispose of in our recycling bins and our general refuse bins. From time to time, they'll take some random samples and inspect them. If you're caught breaking any of the rules, you can face a fine.
More and more councils are banning the disposal of CFLs in the recycling bins, and you have to take these to a dedicated recycling centre on your own time and at your own cost.
Really? We sure seem to like a lot of their elfin safety directives. And when the government like the directive, our laws that implement it are among the toughest and most thorough in Europe.
It's only when the government hears things that they don't like that we become anti-Europe. Things like not changing visa rules on people already here on visas (HSMP to Tier 1 debacle), not keeping people's DNA indefinitely, not allowing for registers that you are automatically added to and can never appeal. Those things they'll fight back on.
London's congestion charge... Let's revisit that shall we...
When it was first brought in, we were told that the roads of London were too congested and the city was griding to a halt. This is why we needed the charge.
As a concession to people who used green energy though, all LPG vehicles would be allowed in. Sure, they still cause congestion and take up the same amount of space, but by conflating two taxes in one, more support could be had.
Later, things changed and loads of people who'd paid hundreds or thousands of pounds (and lost their spare wheels!) to convert to LPG found they'd got screwed - they'd no longer be exempt.
As the 'congestion charge' evolved (and I use quotes here because it's now more of a green tax than anything else) new rules about emissions came in. Now there are at least 4 cars you can drive through the zone without paying an charge at all. I'm not sure of the exact models, but there's a Fiat 500, a VW of some sort, one of the Minis and something else.
All of these cars take up space and run pedestrians and cyclists over (problems that the original charge was partly designed to address), but because they don't pollute as much as other cars, they can take up this space and run down these people for free.
Several years on, average journey times through London have actually increased. Congestion is just as bad, if not worse than when the charge came in, the western extension was canceled and IIRC for the first few years, very little if any money actually went into public transport because operating costs were higher than expected. There was a London bailout at one point of the company running the project.
I wouldn't look at the London Congestion Charge as a shining example of success.
it's about pushing the public towards better lighting
No. It's about pushing the public to better lighting in one particular area. In many other areas it's bloody horrible.
My council won't take energy saver lightbulbs in my recycling, so I have to drive somewhere to dispose of them and I'm pretty sure that this offsets the energy savings I'm making by using these. I can only get bulbs that output the colour light I want in one type of fitting - thick bayonet. But all of my lamps are screw fittings, so I have to modify all of them. A lot my lamps need a bulb that now sticks out the top and looks retarded. Nice use of a lamp I paid good money for.
The bulbs in the right colours take forever to warm up. They start off dim and get brighter over about 5 minutes. I can get bulbs that come on almost instantly, but they're a horrible sickly yellow colour.
My wife is really bugged by what she perceives as flickering although I can't see it. But I've read reports of other people with similar problems so I'm guessing it's not just her. But nothing we've tried that looks halfway decent doesn't give her headaches.
We've tried every brand of bulb available at Robert Dyas, B&Q, Homebase and Tesco. Just the driving around to get all of these and test them probably blew through a year's energy savings but since we haven't found a single bulb that works right for us, we've not had a choice.
Good news recently though - I found a shedload of 100W screw in bulbs at Robert Dyas. They're the right size for my lamps, the colour is perfect and they had 50 in stock. I now have 20 and that should last me 5 years or so. I can recycle these easily, my council won't refuse to collect my recycling and all is well in my world.
In a lot of ways, this is about pushing the public to use worse lighting.
That really _isn't_ what the big boys do. I work for a fortune 500 company. We have about 800 developers and very few of them develop on anything that looks remotely like the target environment for a large number of reasons.
What they do though is develop locally, test and then check-in to a SCM. Our CI then pulls the code from the source repo, builds it and runs all of the tests. If the tests pass, the code is made available for deployment to staging - this is done with the click of a button, but there's no way to get to that button if the tests don't pass. If the tests fail, we just remotely detonate the developers machine as a lesson to everyone else. Or we should. But other than exploding desktops, the rest is how we do it. We have guys developing on Windows for Windows, RHEL and Solaris.
From QA, it becomes an ops issue - we don't let devs deploy to prod for regulatory reasons and common sense.
Well, CentOS are AGES behind their original schedule on the CentOS 6 release. 5.6 is well behind as well. That's not a basket I'd be putting eggs in right now.
On the other hand, satnavs with speed camera warnings seem to be legal, but in that case you can argue that the aim is to help you keep your speed down in dangerous areas
But by that logic, flashing your lights in the area of a speed trap could also be aimed at helping people keep their speed down in a dangerous area. The area _must_ be dangerous, because the traps are officially "safety checks" not speed traps. So by setting up the trap, you've admitted that the road is dangerous. The man in your example was punished for warning people of a dangerous area and trying to save lives.
But hey, with the british justice system, you can still be walking around with over 100 convictions against you if you have a good scumbag lawyer, so I fully expect them to crack down on mostly harmless people - they're the only ones that the courts have the balls to push around.
I've read his sig 3 times now, and unless he's changed it, I'm missing something. He doesn't say that he hates Apple - just that Mac users turn people off of Apple. Nothing about that statement precludes him from being an Apple user.
Uh, I'm pretty sure you can. Legally. In the UK at least.
No, no - not hunt nuns with a crossbow - drive after 2 pints over an hour. Most converters I've seen put you at 0.08 BAC which is the legal limit after around half an hour after 2 pints at 5.4% ABV. After an hour, that is less.
Lucky you. You clearly live in a privileged part of the world (although, even your own libraries are struggling for funding). I've found every UK public library that I've visited to be worse than the one in Brakpan, South Africa and that wasn't exactly a big city or anything.
Libraries are disappearing and unless we get a new set of political overlords, we need to find alternatives.
We can do that - just don't expect anyone behind a corporate firewall to ever be able to reach your site. Most companies restrict the ports you can connect to from within their network.
The problem is that some people still respect the law. No matter how stupid that particular law is, people who respect the law will still balk at breaking it.
I mean, really... Doesn't he learn from all the times he's been wrong?
Does anyone remember that crazy 'right to read' screed he wrote? You know, about having your books tied to your ID on a single device and not being allowed to share those with another person without special permission from the publisher, and how if the publishers changed their minds they'd just delete stuff from your reading device even if you'd already paid for it and were busy reading it? I mean, has _any_ of that craziness come to pass?
Oh... wait... That pretty much describes the Kindle. Yet at the time he wrote it everyone called him nuts and said that future would never come to pass. Sure, we still have paper books to fall back on, but almost everything he described (with the exception of the love story and the happy ever after ending) HAS come true.
The thing is, you don't change the world by being agreeable. You don't get compromise by being 'reasonable'. Most negotiations end up somewhere in the middle. So if your starting point is reasonable and you meet the corporations and the power brokers in the middle, you're just ever so slightly less screwed. But if you start from an extreme position, no matter how misunderstood you'll be by most people, at least that half-way point of compromise is better for your future.
Slashdot Mirror
Get better family and friends. There are some really stunning photos out there taken with an iPhone 4. Just check flickr.
Maybe they've blurred the line on who profits, but Apple does not maintain any communications infrastructure. Nor do they own any spectrum. So they're _clearly_ not a carrier.
But it doesn't work well for other things like books. Writers don't tend to do live performances, but they still need to eat.
And yeah, I know that in some rare cases like Cory Doctorow people have managed to build an audience by giving their content away for free and monetize it later, but these are rare cases.
Out of curiosity, how do you barter that stuff? I've got a couple of reasonable older machines that I'm looking to get rid of in the coming weeks, and I'd like to get something back for them, even if it's only a few £s or £s worth of services.
Oddly enough, there are still countries where it is unlawful for you to fill your own vehicle tank. Every time I go to SA on holiday, I'm normally out of the car and heading for the pumps while a horde of attendants bear down on me before I remember I'm not allowed to fuel my rental car :)
That only tends to happen once per trip before I start remembering :)
*you're
Doh!
What's not innovative about Kinect ? A lot of people seem to be doing very interesting things with it, and none of their competitors ever put anything like it into the consumer market.
> I rip my CDs and play them, is this legal?
Not in the UK and multiple other countries. So I guess the rest is illegal because it all starts from an illegal act.
Well, that is illegal in the UK. I'm a hardcore criminal in this country - I've committed hundreds of crimes by ripping CDs to iTunes. I've also committed multiple crimes (under the EUCD) by ripping DVDs to the family media player.
On the plus side, knowing that I'm a criminal and eligible for years of jailtime from the crimes I've committed doing these things, it's a lot easier to not give a fuck about any other laws I might break.
> Yes, I'm sure 5-10 years of saving 75% of your lighting costs is going to get eaten up by one drive.
One drive? Try 1 40 minute drive every 8 weeks. These bulbs do not last as long as they are advertised to.
> When I switched 10 years ago, it took a few tries to get the right light-bulb, and even then it still looked odd at first. After less than a year, I stopped even noticing that I had CFLs through my whole house.
That's lovely. For you. How much color correction work do you do out of curiosity ?
> Five minutes??? What type of cheap ass bulbs did you buy? Even in cold weather, mine are usually warmed up within 30 seconds.
Did you not read my post? I've tried bulbs from all of the UK main suppliers. What more do you want from me?
Dick.
Our council (municipality I guess? County is too big) are the ones responsible for garbage collection. This is part of the service we receive in exchange for our annual council tax.
There are rules on what we can and can't dispose of in our recycling bins and our general refuse bins. From time to time, they'll take some random samples and inspect them. If you're caught breaking any of the rules, you can face a fine.
More and more councils are banning the disposal of CFLs in the recycling bins, and you have to take these to a dedicated recycling centre on your own time and at your own cost.
Really? We sure seem to like a lot of their elfin safety directives. And when the government like the directive, our laws that implement it are among the toughest and most thorough in Europe.
It's only when the government hears things that they don't like that we become anti-Europe. Things like not changing visa rules on people already here on visas (HSMP to Tier 1 debacle), not keeping people's DNA indefinitely, not allowing for registers that you are automatically added to and can never appeal. Those things they'll fight back on.
London's congestion charge... Let's revisit that shall we...
When it was first brought in, we were told that the roads of London were too congested and the city was griding to a halt. This is why we needed the charge.
As a concession to people who used green energy though, all LPG vehicles would be allowed in. Sure, they still cause congestion and take up the same amount of space, but by conflating two taxes in one, more support could be had.
Later, things changed and loads of people who'd paid hundreds or thousands of pounds (and lost their spare wheels!) to convert to LPG found they'd got screwed - they'd no longer be exempt.
As the 'congestion charge' evolved (and I use quotes here because it's now more of a green tax than anything else) new rules about emissions came in. Now there are at least 4 cars you can drive through the zone without paying an charge at all. I'm not sure of the exact models, but there's a Fiat 500, a VW of some sort, one of the Minis and something else.
All of these cars take up space and run pedestrians and cyclists over (problems that the original charge was partly designed to address), but because they don't pollute as much as other cars, they can take up this space and run down these people for free.
Several years on, average journey times through London have actually increased. Congestion is just as bad, if not worse than when the charge came in, the western extension was canceled and IIRC for the first few years, very little if any money actually went into public transport because operating costs were higher than expected. There was a London bailout at one point of the company running the project.
I wouldn't look at the London Congestion Charge as a shining example of success.
it's about pushing the public towards better lighting
No. It's about pushing the public to better lighting in one particular area. In many other areas it's bloody horrible.
My council won't take energy saver lightbulbs in my recycling, so I have to drive somewhere to dispose of them and I'm pretty sure that this offsets the energy savings I'm making by using these. I can only get bulbs that output the colour light I want in one type of fitting - thick bayonet. But all of my lamps are screw fittings, so I have to modify all of them. A lot my lamps need a bulb that now sticks out the top and looks retarded. Nice use of a lamp I paid good money for.
The bulbs in the right colours take forever to warm up. They start off dim and get brighter over about 5 minutes. I can get bulbs that come on almost instantly, but they're a horrible sickly yellow colour.
My wife is really bugged by what she perceives as flickering although I can't see it. But I've read reports of other people with similar problems so I'm guessing it's not just her. But nothing we've tried that looks halfway decent doesn't give her headaches.
We've tried every brand of bulb available at Robert Dyas, B&Q, Homebase and Tesco. Just the driving around to get all of these and test them probably blew through a year's energy savings but since we haven't found a single bulb that works right for us, we've not had a choice.
Good news recently though - I found a shedload of 100W screw in bulbs at Robert Dyas. They're the right size for my lamps, the colour is perfect and they had 50 in stock. I now have 20 and that should last me 5 years or so. I can recycle these easily, my council won't refuse to collect my recycling and all is well in my world.
In a lot of ways, this is about pushing the public to use worse lighting.
That really _isn't_ what the big boys do. I work for a fortune 500 company. We have about 800 developers and very few of them develop on anything that looks remotely like the target environment for a large number of reasons.
What they do though is develop locally, test and then check-in to a SCM. Our CI then pulls the code from the source repo, builds it and runs all of the tests. If the tests pass, the code is made available for deployment to staging - this is done with the click of a button, but there's no way to get to that button if the tests don't pass. If the tests fail, we just remotely detonate the developers machine as a lesson to everyone else. Or we should. But other than exploding desktops, the rest is how we do it. We have guys developing on Windows for Windows, RHEL and Solaris.
From QA, it becomes an ops issue - we don't let devs deploy to prod for regulatory reasons and common sense.
Well, CentOS are AGES behind their original schedule on the CentOS 6 release. 5.6 is well behind as well. That's not a basket I'd be putting eggs in right now.
On the other hand, satnavs with speed camera warnings seem to be legal, but in that case you can argue that the aim is to help you keep your speed down in dangerous areas
But by that logic, flashing your lights in the area of a speed trap could also be aimed at helping people keep their speed down in a dangerous area. The area _must_ be dangerous, because the traps are officially "safety checks" not speed traps. So by setting up the trap, you've admitted that the road is dangerous. The man in your example was punished for warning people of a dangerous area and trying to save lives.
But hey, with the british justice system, you can still be walking around with over 100 convictions against you if you have a good scumbag lawyer, so I fully expect them to crack down on mostly harmless people - they're the only ones that the courts have the balls to push around.
I don't recall if he appealed, but I wish he had!
I've read his sig 3 times now, and unless he's changed it, I'm missing something. He doesn't say that he hates Apple - just that Mac users turn people off of Apple. Nothing about that statement precludes him from being an Apple user.
I always feel guilty after drinking. That doesn't make me an alcoholic - it makes my wife a nag ;)
Uh, I'm pretty sure you can. Legally. In the UK at least.
No, no - not hunt nuns with a crossbow - drive after 2 pints over an hour. Most converters I've seen put you at 0.08 BAC which is the legal limit after around half an hour after 2 pints at 5.4% ABV. After an hour, that is less.
The cake is a lie!
Lucky you. You clearly live in a privileged part of the world (although, even your own libraries are struggling for funding). I've found every UK public library that I've visited to be worse than the one in Brakpan, South Africa and that wasn't exactly a big city or anything.
Libraries are disappearing and unless we get a new set of political overlords, we need to find alternatives.
We can do that - just don't expect anyone behind a corporate firewall to ever be able to reach your site. Most companies restrict the ports you can connect to from within their network.
The problem is that some people still respect the law. No matter how stupid that particular law is, people who respect the law will still balk at breaking it.
I mean, really... Doesn't he learn from all the times he's been wrong?
Does anyone remember that crazy 'right to read' screed he wrote? You know, about having your books tied to your ID on a single device and not being allowed to share those with another person without special permission from the publisher, and how if the publishers changed their minds they'd just delete stuff from your reading device even if you'd already paid for it and were busy reading it? I mean, has _any_ of that craziness come to pass?
Oh... wait... That pretty much describes the Kindle. Yet at the time he wrote it everyone called him nuts and said that future would never come to pass. Sure, we still have paper books to fall back on, but almost everything he described (with the exception of the love story and the happy ever after ending) HAS come true.
The thing is, you don't change the world by being agreeable. You don't get compromise by being 'reasonable'. Most negotiations end up somewhere in the middle. So if your starting point is reasonable and you meet the corporations and the power brokers in the middle, you're just ever so slightly less screwed. But if you start from an extreme position, no matter how misunderstood you'll be by most people, at least that half-way point of compromise is better for your future.