Well one of them, I generally prefer the Shooting Star - about 200 yards further down the hill these days (as it has a better pool table). Over twenty years I have been drinking at the Hobbit. Last night a group of my friends all gathered there for a drink in the mistaken belief they could do something about this.
I don't think anybody is going to argue the film is not infringing copyright, even in the early 90s there were posters of illustrations from the book on the walls. They introduced a range of cocktails based on characters in the books (Gimli, Legolas and so on). When the films were introduced they brought in pictures from the films and hung them on the walls. They make "The Hobbit" T-Shirts. They have a life size statue of Aragorn from the movies in there. So discussions on the "hobbit" being an English word and prior art are irrelevent - they have posters and paintings from the film and book in there.
The point is that they have been called The Hobbit for a very long time and this lawsuit has popped up only because of the new film coming out. And SZC has probably been trawling the net looking for targets, I think that after the first trilogy films came and went and there was no mention of it there was an assumption things would remain the same for ever - I do remember a conversation at the time about copyright and the name of the pub. Among my friends there is a huge amount of anger about this because The Hobbit has been a bit of an institution in the alternative/student scene in Southampton as long as anybody can remember.
Having said that - nobody believes that anything they can do will change this and there are probably already re-branding plans on the horizon. The best possible outcome now is that they use the massive publicity to their advantage and choose a similar style of name - I have heard "The Camelot" mentioned as a possible option (and I don't think anybody can claim copyright over the Arthurian legends). Stella - the landlady - is not an idiot, I'm sure she's looking at all options. But from a legal case it's pretty clear where the law stands and there is no fighting that.
Suddenly one of these is looking tempting for my tablet needs.
I did have an ASUS transformer for a few months but I sold it to a friend as I was unhappy with the way Android does things. I have an iPhone and whilst I think iOS is very clever I'm not convinced I would want it in a larger form factor. I want to be able to write code, play with software and be the master of my own system to a level that Android and iOS does not seem to happy with. I was wondering is an ARM Win8 tablet was the way forward - but this seems to rule of that option:(
I admit some Linux bias as I only use it at home and coding on it (armel linux) forms a large part of my job as well.
I assume Digia are after commercial licensing fees, service agreements and support contracts for Qt and will attempt to build up the user base.
Kinda sad to see Nokia vanish into a death spiral though. I really cannot see Windows based smart phones gaining traction against iPhone/Android unless they are really something special or are heavily discounted. I find the whole business tactic fairly incomprehensible to be honest, but I am assuming other people know more than me here.
Given Nokia's position what else could they have done to preserve the market share? Any Ideas?
reminds me of this satire that was created by some university friends of mine in the 90s, it was picked up by the main stream news and they were interviewed, linked constantly. It was, of course, a joke - and eventually bogged down the the constant phone calls and links they were freely saying so on their site and begging for it all to stop...
I'm guessing that one possible reason is whilst encryption is moderately rare - then they might assume that any encryption means a greater chance of something to hide and hence they can focus on it.
And of course that unencrypted stuff is easier to track though less immediately suspicious.
Anybody work in forensics and can give us an insider viewpoint?
The first thing that crossed my mind is that all these species are localized to one particular area and hence rather vulnerable if the environment changes in any way.
You only need to introduce 1 badly chosen predator and its the Stephens Island Wren all over again.
I agree with the other posters, this should be preserved. Or at least the 1st one.
Anybody else remember "First Footprint City" from the BBC SciFi series Earth Search?
If there is a real compelling scientific justification to see how the materials have survived then designate one of the other landing sites that is deemed less important and send the robot there. After all several Apollo missions went to the moon.
Sending one for Apollo 11 sounds more like a badly thought out publicity exercise then anything else.
I think that when any technology - be that DVD, FaceBook, Internet Explorer - reaches a mass audience and is perceived to be good enough to meet the users needs it is more or less impossible to dislodge even when there are technically superior products out there.
The only way a new product will ever dislodge a entrenched rival is when they offer something unique and compelling or are readily interchangeble with the old one.
I kind of get what they are saying, but I see more evidence of entrenched mass market products that are seen to have reached an acceptable level of functionality and ease of use.
Interesting, I did not know of this. In the UK I think she would of had more success with the courts.
In any case it is common sense to watch what you post online. Once you click that mouse its gone, and you can never be sure that you can retract or recover.
Really? Ouch. (I'm in the UK btw, so that's news for me)
So they cannot even explicitly do it in the license/instructions?
In that case Panasonic's actions kinda make more sense - bad batteries can cause nasty damage. Hmmm, maybe I change my tone a bit. But I still do not like it at all. Its the same argument as printer cartidges.
A better solution would of been "This firmware update identifies the use of 3rd party batteries and alerts the user to the risk of using them. It monitors the voltage output and shuts down the camera if it determines that the battery is insufficient or possibly dangerous. And invalidates the warranty too". This would of left open the choice to the user - after all there are a great many very good 3rd party batteries and they have saved my bacon in the past.
By monitoring the voltage I mean the camera can detect an abnormally fast voltage drop against its usage that might mean a defective or damaged battery - naturally it cannot detect if the battery is about to get white hot and set fire to the camera, but hey the user was warned and the warranty invalidated. I would expect the manufacturer to check the damaged camera EEPROM and say "aha! according to our data log you used not panasonic batteries, thats no repair for you!".
By removing the element of choice they raise the natural suspicion that this decision was taken on commercial grounds, not safety and risk a consumer backlash and dissatisfaction.
My first thought was to laugh myself silly with a touch of indignant rage.
But actually I take this a bit more seriously.. There is a well known phenomenon (that I am sure somebody else knows the name of) where people tend to believe what they read and we are not the target audience of this advertising tripe. Many people who will read this (and do not know better) will believe it and follow it and pass it on. And that irritates mes.
In this fraternity we all sit back and mock the ridiculous claims and statement in their FUD and sales - but at the end of the day they are quietly winning the war with one ill educated person swayed towards their cause after another.
I sure have no answers, but I do not feel like mocking this kind of crap anymore.
At work I use FF - but I am forced to use IE for the corporate portal because apparently only IE can possibly work on the portal, so they paid somebody to edit the script to reject all "non-approved" browsers. That is the end result of ill informed high up decisions based on fluff like this.
Are the conservative estimates an example of the Scotty factor. In other words if the team is 90% confident that the mission will last 5 months do they then quote 3 to management - that way if they mission carks it after 4 then they are still covered? I would imagine even the scientists and engineers are very concerned about managerial aspect like project tracking and meeting specification now.
More to the point, how do they estimate such a difficult and unpredictable mission parameter anyhow? I mean somethings like battery life, wear and tear and so on must be quite well understood, but others like the stress of launch, damage, and the great "other" option must be much harder to predict.
What I notice is that the primary mission has finished and I just bet that the men in suits are circling the project with their budget cutting shears - but then we get new data, stunning imagary and confirmation of old predicitons.
This just goes to show that given the cost of assembling and launching this missions it makes absolute sense to supply funding until the mission carks it. What would of happened if the budgets for the two Mars rovers was removed after the (very short) planned life cycle was finished?
So, does anybody know how long term budgets are assigned, reviewed and extended to cover missions that exceed their predicted life span? I'm kinds interested.
I'm not dead! I feel fine! I think I'll go for a walk! I'm getting better!..
Honestly, its like the monster that will not die, nothing works - garlic, holy water, silver bullets, stake, decapitation, fire and even the BFG9000 could not finish it.
Just stay down, everybody will be much happier and we are all waiting for the party.
I wish them the very best of luck - thats a very powerful business lobby with a lot of politicians in pocket that they are going after.
Still, its very clear why he chose to represent her - the publicity on this high profile case could make him and give his career a hell of a head start.
Its sad that my first thought was this:
the very first private venture to the moon will probably sell the Apollo and unmanned probes as the ultimate collectible artifacts to the highest bidder - and there is nothing that can be done about it.
of course, I then started thinking more about the logistics as lifting a landing module off the moon and retuning safely and realized it was not going to happen yet, or any time soon. but the point remains that they could and there is nothing that can be done to stop them.
I was ~12 and I had just understood looking ahead - so in my naivety I made something that was capable of looking ahead for pretty much the entire game.
it annihilated me.
Still it amused my family who mocked my pain as much as they could. Still, I was heartened to see that none of them could defeat Frankenconnect4 either.
Ever since I wrote my first connect 4 game in the 80s - and was totally thrashed by it, I never beat it - its been clear to me that the trick is to degrade a computer player in most circumstances to the level that it appears to have human flaws and play in a more human fashion.
Of course this logic only goes so far and some games require a search space so vast or a completely different programming model that even now a computer cannot beat a competent real human (Go is an excellent example of this).
The point is that it is easy to program a computer to win, the hard part is to program is lose convincingly.
Slashdot Mirror
Well one of them, I generally prefer the Shooting Star - about 200 yards further down the hill these days (as it has a better pool table). Over twenty years I have been drinking at the Hobbit. Last night a group of my friends all gathered there for a drink in the mistaken belief they could do something about this.
I don't think anybody is going to argue the film is not infringing copyright, even in the early 90s there were posters of illustrations from the book on the walls. They introduced a range of cocktails based on characters in the books (Gimli, Legolas and so on). When the films were introduced they brought in pictures from the films and hung them on the walls. They make "The Hobbit" T-Shirts. They have a life size statue of Aragorn from the movies in there. So discussions on the "hobbit" being an English word and prior art are irrelevent - they have posters and paintings from the film and book in there.
The point is that they have been called The Hobbit for a very long time and this lawsuit has popped up only because of the new film coming out. And SZC has probably been trawling the net looking for targets, I think that after the first trilogy films came and went and there was no mention of it there was an assumption things would remain the same for ever - I do remember a conversation at the time about copyright and the name of the pub. Among my friends there is a huge amount of anger about this because The Hobbit has been a bit of an institution in the alternative/student scene in Southampton as long as anybody can remember.
Having said that - nobody believes that anything they can do will change this and there are probably already re-branding plans on the horizon. The best possible outcome now is that they use the massive publicity to their advantage and choose a similar style of name - I have heard "The Camelot" mentioned as a possible option (and I don't think anybody can claim copyright over the Arthurian legends). Stella - the landlady - is not an idiot, I'm sure she's looking at all options. But from a legal case it's pretty clear where the law stands and there is no fighting that.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/01/new-kde-tablet-to-liberate-linux-enthusiasts-from-walled-garden.ars
Suddenly one of these is looking tempting for my tablet needs.
I did have an ASUS transformer for a few months but I sold it to a friend as I was unhappy with the way Android does things. I have an iPhone and whilst I think iOS is very clever I'm not convinced I would want it in a larger form factor. I want to be able to write code, play with software and be the master of my own system to a level that Android and iOS does not seem to happy with. I was wondering is an ARM Win8 tablet was the way forward - but this seems to rule of that option :(
I admit some Linux bias as I only use it at home and coding on it (armel linux) forms a large part of my job as well.
Well, I now have an invite.
And it's demanding a phone number for verification before I proceed.
Call me paranoid - but there is no way in hell Google will ever get any of my phone numbers. Also I'm not willing to give one of my work numbers.
So that appears to be an impasse.
Hmm, lets see what happens when they stop restricting the supply to stoke demand...
jlgoogleplus@btinternet.com
yes, I did just create that for the purpose and create a google account around it.
call me paranoid... but I'm wary of giving any social media too much of an idea who I am.
I assume Digia are after commercial licensing fees, service agreements and support contracts for Qt and will attempt to build up the user base.
Kinda sad to see Nokia vanish into a death spiral though. I really cannot see Windows based smart phones gaining traction against iPhone/Android unless they are really something special or are heavily discounted. I find the whole business tactic fairly incomprehensible to be honest, but I am assuming other people know more than me here.
Given Nokia's position what else could they have done to preserve the market share? Any Ideas?
http://totl.net/Spud/
reminds me of this satire that was created by some university friends of mine in the 90s, it was picked up by the main stream news and they were interviewed, linked constantly. It was, of course, a joke - and eventually bogged down the the constant phone calls and links they were freely saying so on their site and begging for it all to stop...
and of course, they were slashdotted: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/21/1947222&mode=thread
I'm guessing that one possible reason is whilst encryption is moderately rare - then they might assume that any encryption means a greater chance of something to hide and hence they can focus on it.
And of course that unencrypted stuff is easier to track though less immediately suspicious.
Anybody work in forensics and can give us an insider viewpoint?
The first thing that crossed my mind is that all these species are localized to one particular area and hence rather vulnerable if the environment changes in any way.
You only need to introduce 1 badly chosen predator and its the Stephens Island Wren all over again.
I hope this means I can soon buy my Zardoz projector ring.
I agree with the other posters, this should be preserved. Or at least the 1st one.
Anybody else remember "First Footprint City" from the BBC SciFi series Earth Search?
If there is a real compelling scientific justification to see how the materials have survived then designate one of the other landing sites that is deemed less important and send the robot there. After all several Apollo missions went to the moon.
Sending one for Apollo 11 sounds more like a badly thought out publicity exercise then anything else.
Give me a wall screen TV or a whole ceiling panal light and I'll be impressed.
It has no real purpose unless somebody sells something from it...
...."ALIENS!"
My favorite game of all time for gameplay?
Tie Fighter the original when you play as an Imperial pilot to take down the rebel scum.
Graphics? Terrible, but the Gameplay? second to none. That really got you involved.
I'm probably in a minority here though :)
I disagree.
I think that when any technology - be that DVD, FaceBook, Internet Explorer - reaches a mass audience and is perceived to be good enough to meet the users needs it is more or less impossible to dislodge even when there are technically superior products out there.
The only way a new product will ever dislodge a entrenched rival is when they offer something unique and compelling or are readily interchangeble with the old one.
I kind of get what they are saying, but I see more evidence of entrenched mass market products that are seen to have reached an acceptable level of functionality and ease of use.
more info
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202429677896
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/court-your-myspace-page-isnt-private.ars
And the court summary..
http://fsnews.findlaw.com/cases/ca/caapp4th/slip/2009/f054138.html
Interesting, I did not know of this. In the UK I think she would of had more success with the courts.
In any case it is common sense to watch what you post online. Once you click that mouse its gone, and you can never be sure that you can retract or recover.
Really? Ouch. (I'm in the UK btw, so that's news for me) So they cannot even explicitly do it in the license/instructions? In that case Panasonic's actions kinda make more sense - bad batteries can cause nasty damage. Hmmm, maybe I change my tone a bit. But I still do not like it at all. Its the same argument as printer cartidges.
A better solution would of been "This firmware update identifies the use of 3rd party batteries and alerts the user to the risk of using them. It monitors the voltage output and shuts down the camera if it determines that the battery is insufficient or possibly dangerous. And invalidates the warranty too". This would of left open the choice to the user - after all there are a great many very good 3rd party batteries and they have saved my bacon in the past.
By monitoring the voltage I mean the camera can detect an abnormally fast voltage drop against its usage that might mean a defective or damaged battery - naturally it cannot detect if the battery is about to get white hot and set fire to the camera, but hey the user was warned and the warranty invalidated. I would expect the manufacturer to check the damaged camera EEPROM and say "aha! according to our data log you used not panasonic batteries, thats no repair for you!".
By removing the element of choice they raise the natural suspicion that this decision was taken on commercial grounds, not safety and risk a consumer backlash and dissatisfaction.
My first thought was to laugh myself silly with a touch of indignant rage.
But actually I take this a bit more seriously.. There is a well known phenomenon (that I am sure somebody else knows the name of) where people tend to believe what they read and we are not the target audience of this advertising tripe. Many people who will read this (and do not know better) will believe it and follow it and pass it on. And that irritates mes.
In this fraternity we all sit back and mock the ridiculous claims and statement in their FUD and sales - but at the end of the day they are quietly winning the war with one ill educated person swayed towards their cause after another.
I sure have no answers, but I do not feel like mocking this kind of crap anymore.
At work I use FF - but I am forced to use IE for the corporate portal because apparently only IE can possibly work on the portal, so they paid somebody to edit the script to reject all "non-approved" browsers. That is the end result of ill informed high up decisions based on fluff like this.
Are the conservative estimates an example of the Scotty factor. In other words if the team is 90% confident that the mission will last 5 months do they then quote 3 to management - that way if they mission carks it after 4 then they are still covered? I would imagine even the scientists and engineers are very concerned about managerial aspect like project tracking and meeting specification now.
More to the point, how do they estimate such a difficult and unpredictable mission parameter anyhow? I mean somethings like battery life, wear and tear and so on must be quite well understood, but others like the stress of launch, damage, and the great "other" option must be much harder to predict.
What I notice is that the primary mission has finished and I just bet that the men in suits are circling the project with their budget cutting shears - but then we get new data, stunning imagary and confirmation of old predicitons.
This just goes to show that given the cost of assembling and launching this missions it makes absolute sense to supply funding until the mission carks it. What would of happened if the budgets for the two Mars rovers was removed after the (very short) planned life cycle was finished?
So, does anybody know how long term budgets are assigned, reviewed and extended to cover missions that exceed their predicted life span? I'm kinds interested.
I'm not dead! I feel fine! I think I'll go for a walk! I'm getting better! ..
Honestly, its like the monster that will not die, nothing works - garlic, holy water, silver bullets, stake, decapitation, fire and even the BFG9000 could not finish it.
Just stay down, everybody will be much happier and we are all waiting for the party.
I wish them the very best of luck - thats a very powerful business lobby with a lot of politicians in pocket that they are going after.
Still, its very clear why he chose to represent her - the publicity on this high profile case could make him and give his career a hell of a head start.
Its sad that my first thought was this: the very first private venture to the moon will probably sell the Apollo and unmanned probes as the ultimate collectible artifacts to the highest bidder - and there is nothing that can be done about it. of course, I then started thinking more about the logistics as lifting a landing module off the moon and retuning safely and realized it was not going to happen yet, or any time soon. but the point remains that they could and there is nothing that can be done to stop them.
Sadly not!
I was ~12 and I had just understood looking ahead - so in my naivety I made something that was capable of looking ahead for pretty much the entire game.
it annihilated me.
Still it amused my family who mocked my pain as much as they could. Still, I was heartened to see that none of them could defeat Frankenconnect4 either.
I'll ignore the shameless plug.
Ever since I wrote my first connect 4 game in the 80s - and was totally thrashed by it, I never beat it - its been clear to me that the trick is to degrade a computer player in most circumstances to the level that it appears to have human flaws and play in a more human fashion.
Of course this logic only goes so far and some games require a search space so vast or a completely different programming model that even now a computer cannot beat a competent real human (Go is an excellent example of this).
The point is that it is easy to program a computer to win, the hard part is to program is lose convincingly.