to say nothing of some no-doubt imminent class action suits against a certain British oil company
There are potential law suits against a British oil company? I didn't realise we still had any. I know there are former British companies that are now multi-national conglomerates, and I know they're having issues that could lead to legal situations, but I didn't know there was another oil company in a similar situation.
From my American informants, apparently only Fox is still making that mistake and most TV stations have started intentionally correcting themselves;)
"WhichTimes"? This article is really tagged "WhichTimes"? It's the real and proper Times, damnit. The one that's called "The Times" (unless it is a Sunday, at which point it is called "The Sunday Times").
On a more serious note, it's good to see that they're getting large amounts of people abandonning ship for other places, but 10% subscription rate still seems worryingly good and enough for them to keep it there.
Behind the curve? I'm on Linux, which was always the poor cousin in the early days, and Chromium is ahead of the curve because it is the development version (I'm running 6.0.457.0 and saw a site that said I didn't have a "latest version" of Chrome or Firefox the other day because it said they didn't official support development builds).
Re:No successful terrorist attacks since 9/11?
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Top Secret America
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· Score: 1
Why not? For any action to prevent the occurrence of something then it must work all the time. For secret services to prevent terrorist attacks they need to pick them all up before they occur. If a terrorist plants a bomb and it isn't found until after an attempt to detonate it then the attack obviously wasn't prevented, it just failed.
Re:No successful terrorist attacks since 9/11?
on
Top Secret America
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· Score: 1
And the bomb in Times Square? From all the accounts I've read it was given away by the smoke, which seems like a failure to detonate. Yeah, the police "disarmed" it, but since it was a dud and had almost certainly already failed then they wouldn't have prevented it if it had been made correctly.
Except that choosing the later would also make people move to other providers that don't try so hard or who have known loopholes. Either way, whoever makes the first move is going to lose out.
Timed lists are great in theory, but that still requires people to understand them and set them up properly. I suspect that most people's reaction will be "do what with what, now?", "that sounds like too much effort" and "don't go talking all techno-babble at me" when you say "go to this site (the router interface), add the website address and add the time that you want it to be available".
Worse, they'll probably also then blame the router when the kid finds ways round it or finds other sites, even though they only added five sites to the list and then never actually enabled the blocking.
They're like guns. Computers don't hinder education, people do.
So people are concerned about guns hindering education as well as computers hindering education? Sounds like we should ban them both!
On the more serious side of that phrase, it may be the people killing people with guns and not the guns themselves, but guns make it easier to kill people while not making it easier to keep them alive (anyone successfully tried surgery with a rifle that wasn't of the "removing self from gene pool" variety?). Computers, on the other hand, make it easier to improve education as well as being a distraction if incorrectly used.
Re:It's not the frontier, but the mass market
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The End of Free
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· Score: 1
Only a few years ago, cameras in phones seemed like a gimmick; of course people would want separate digital cameras. Now only the cheapest phones come without one, and the quality on the better ones is as good as basic consumer cameras.
It is still a gimmick - the resolution might go up, but will the quality and usability? I'd bet that the quantity of photographs increased as they moved to phones, but the quality of the content decreased. Come on, even five minutes on Twitter and TwitPic shows why some people should be bound, gagged and prevented from communicating to the masses in a way that they think everyone needs to care about.
Also, the inclusion of cameras on just about all phones has its downside. Anyone who has to work on secured sites (like UK Gov't) isn't supposed to have recording devices on-site, so buying a suitable modern phone is a PITA.
Re:Confusing apps and network, with content
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 1
Can I get TV on demand online for a charge? Not as far as I know in the UK.
Erm, BBC have the iPlayer (free), Channel 4 have 4OD (4 On Demand - Free), Sky has the Sky Player and even lets you pay for individual episodes of Bones/House/etc without a subscription or get free stuff based on your Sky package. They probably all use potentially less than Linux-friendly technology (I think BBC and Ch4 use Flash and Sky seem to use Silverlight and used to require Windows Media Player for DRM) but the TV content is there.
It won't, since that's not DRM. DRM restricts what you can do with what you get access to. SSL restricts what other people can see of what you're doing but you can do whatever you want with what was encrypted after you decrypt it (which is part of the transfer process).
The BBC news article I saw seemed to imply that Freeview had done comparatively well, where as DAB had floundered. I think the difference is in what it provides and what people want. As you said, the main benefit for DAB is the odd radio station that some people might listen to (6 Music, etc), where as Freeview gets you about 10x the channels, better teletext, and things like the "Red Button" on BBC that lets you pick various looping broadcasts of news or different views of sports events etc. Comparatively, it's a no brainer - Freeview gives you something of value extra, where as DAB costs more for a radio and doesn't gain most people very much (and radio probably isn't as important to most people as TV anyway)
That was what I thought when I first read it as well - this is some big ISPs using "freedom of speech" and other more emotive topics to say "we don't want to be lumbered with additional legislation and expense that only benefits the big media companies and is a detriment to out profits".
Ah, for the dream of a land where companies did actually care for people...
I once moaned on Twitter that I wanted to leave BT Broadband, they called me and gave me a mac code.
That's where I find it a bit creepy. I complained about eBuyer once on Twitter (because of a delay and mixed information) and eBuyer started following me, and a company who have written software with the same name as eBuyer's internal ticketing system asked if they could help with my problem. From big companies then I find that following and watching of people a bit odd.
Isn't that "do what international aid is supposed to do"?
Also, if you can map genocide in real time then a) why not put in more effort and intervene? b) how do you get hold of the data that quickly? and c) (slightly flippantly) if the answer to b) is people on the scene then your genocidal group aren't doing that good a job anyway.
I think the guy gets it right with the priorities in his quote by making a poor comparison:
'While genocide and other pressing problems relentlessly advance,' remarked contest finalist Daniel Meyerowitz to Wired.com, 'it would seem that Project 10^100 does not.'
Given that most of the major "pressing problems" (like genocide) can't easily be resolved with technology and need simple discussion and agreement, why not ditch the unimportant and stalled competition in favour of putting the money into the pressing problems?
I used to use Qwit before I found Pino, and in its status bar it showed you how many requests you had remaining. I only ever remember seeing it show ~150 at the most (presumably it used a load up in its initial loading, then I missed the rest) and I don't think I ever got below 100, even when jumping back through all of the pages of results I'd missed.
Seriously, what are you doing that needs to be updated so frequently and urgently that you're needing the equivalent of a refresh per second?!? Even if you've got lots of lists you follow, that's still a crazy refresh rate.
Maybe the web can replace a lot of apps, but it can't have completely pointless flashy bling widgets quite as easily as an iPhone. It also isn't quite as "teh coolz" to say "I wrote a web app" as "I designed an iPhone app - now there's an app for that!".
Obviously the UK government just want to be "down wid it" (whatever "it" it is that they're supposed to be "down wid") and waste our money on tailored apps for one specific proprietary (and expensive) platform rather than design something accessible to all from a huge range of devices.
You never know, given that the LibDems say they were against the Digital Economy Bill then we might end up with them at least repealing the Act that it turned into as a "look, we're doing something" action. It'd be better than nothing.
But is MS still the dominant software because it is best for the office or because the new students coming in are indoctrinated in it? 99% of offices could probably drop MS Office and free up all of that money on licenses without any impact to what they can do, but they don't because "people know it", but people know it because it's "what most people use" and so they don't look for alternatives.
Software is probably the same - people writing MS Visual C++ instead of more standard C++ because they're using Visual Studio because that's what college/university teaches because that's what business use because that's what all of their new recruits know.
Let's not forget the detection algorithm's which are really damn good.
By "really damn good" I take it you mean "a little too well so that the big media corps are happy, but things like fair use are prevented because the system can't tell the difference and so just blacklists it anyway". Seems like it is a bit too far to me.
Yeah, I've just had to use Parted Magic recently (great little distro - a utility, but nicely put together and presented) but it sure wouldn't be my core desktop distro.
As for the meta-packages idea, they'd either end up a) having to get included in the core distro and its repos (which will be difficult in Ubuntu, as they'll want a certain level of confidence in it) or b) stashing it in a separate add-on repo that you've got to install yourself after the main install. Either way around, it isn't as self-contained as a pre-configured distro, and I'm sure most of the apps could be or are made available outside the distro anyway.
But a/. page has loads of comments and probably a horrendous amount of HTML for each. If you're talking about an average page rather than an unpaged discussion then 300KB+ should be a lot harder to reach.
As for additional images, I was taking that into account. What's wrong with sub-100KB for all the media on a page? Unless you've got a photo gallery then more than that seems like overkill. That said, I have seen a rise in blog posts that include arbitrary tangentially related images purely for the sake of it, because the author thinks it'd be "cool" and because it pads the post out. They probably once heard that a picture is worth 1000 words, but didn't take into account that they were adding 1000 words of drivel.
Slashdot Mirror
There are potential law suits against a British oil company? I didn't realise we still had any. I know there are former British companies that are now multi-national conglomerates, and I know they're having issues that could lead to legal situations, but I didn't know there was another oil company in a similar situation.
From my American informants, apparently only Fox is still making that mistake and most TV stations have started intentionally correcting themselves ;)
"WhichTimes"? This article is really tagged "WhichTimes"? It's the real and proper Times, damnit. The one that's called "The Times" (unless it is a Sunday, at which point it is called "The Sunday Times").
On a more serious note, it's good to see that they're getting large amounts of people abandonning ship for other places, but 10% subscription rate still seems worryingly good and enough for them to keep it there.
Behind the curve? I'm on Linux, which was always the poor cousin in the early days, and Chromium is ahead of the curve because it is the development version (I'm running 6.0.457.0 and saw a site that said I didn't have a "latest version" of Chrome or Firefox the other day because it said they didn't official support development builds).
Why not? For any action to prevent the occurrence of something then it must work all the time. For secret services to prevent terrorist attacks they need to pick them all up before they occur. If a terrorist plants a bomb and it isn't found until after an attempt to detonate it then the attack obviously wasn't prevented, it just failed.
And the bomb in Times Square? From all the accounts I've read it was given away by the smoke, which seems like a failure to detonate. Yeah, the police "disarmed" it, but since it was a dud and had almost certainly already failed then they wouldn't have prevented it if it had been made correctly.
What? As in 40+ hour "play time"? Is it just me, or do those estimates always seem like rather poor value for money?
Except that choosing the later would also make people move to other providers that don't try so hard or who have known loopholes. Either way, whoever makes the first move is going to lose out.
Timed lists are great in theory, but that still requires people to understand them and set them up properly. I suspect that most people's reaction will be "do what with what, now?", "that sounds like too much effort" and "don't go talking all techno-babble at me" when you say "go to this site (the router interface), add the website address and add the time that you want it to be available".
Worse, they'll probably also then blame the router when the kid finds ways round it or finds other sites, even though they only added five sites to the list and then never actually enabled the blocking.
So people are concerned about guns hindering education as well as computers hindering education? Sounds like we should ban them both!
On the more serious side of that phrase, it may be the people killing people with guns and not the guns themselves, but guns make it easier to kill people while not making it easier to keep them alive (anyone successfully tried surgery with a rifle that wasn't of the "removing self from gene pool" variety?). Computers, on the other hand, make it easier to improve education as well as being a distraction if incorrectly used.
It is still a gimmick - the resolution might go up, but will the quality and usability? I'd bet that the quantity of photographs increased as they moved to phones, but the quality of the content decreased. Come on, even five minutes on Twitter and TwitPic shows why some people should be bound, gagged and prevented from communicating to the masses in a way that they think everyone needs to care about.
Also, the inclusion of cameras on just about all phones has its downside. Anyone who has to work on secured sites (like UK Gov't) isn't supposed to have recording devices on-site, so buying a suitable modern phone is a PITA.
Erm, BBC have the iPlayer (free), Channel 4 have 4OD (4 On Demand - Free), Sky has the Sky Player and even lets you pay for individual episodes of Bones/House/etc without a subscription or get free stuff based on your Sky package. They probably all use potentially less than Linux-friendly technology (I think BBC and Ch4 use Flash and Sky seem to use Silverlight and used to require Windows Media Player for DRM) but the TV content is there.
It won't, since that's not DRM. DRM restricts what you can do with what you get access to. SSL restricts what other people can see of what you're doing but you can do whatever you want with what was encrypted after you decrypt it (which is part of the transfer process).
The BBC news article I saw seemed to imply that Freeview had done comparatively well, where as DAB had floundered. I think the difference is in what it provides and what people want. As you said, the main benefit for DAB is the odd radio station that some people might listen to (6 Music, etc), where as Freeview gets you about 10x the channels, better teletext, and things like the "Red Button" on BBC that lets you pick various looping broadcasts of news or different views of sports events etc. Comparatively, it's a no brainer - Freeview gives you something of value extra, where as DAB costs more for a radio and doesn't gain most people very much (and radio probably isn't as important to most people as TV anyway)
That was what I thought when I first read it as well - this is some big ISPs using "freedom of speech" and other more emotive topics to say "we don't want to be lumbered with additional legislation and expense that only benefits the big media companies and is a detriment to out profits".
Ah, for the dream of a land where companies did actually care for people...
That's where I find it a bit creepy. I complained about eBuyer once on Twitter (because of a delay and mixed information) and eBuyer started following me, and a company who have written software with the same name as eBuyer's internal ticketing system asked if they could help with my problem. From big companies then I find that following and watching of people a bit odd.
Isn't that "do what international aid is supposed to do"?
Also, if you can map genocide in real time then a) why not put in more effort and intervene? b) how do you get hold of the data that quickly? and c) (slightly flippantly) if the answer to b) is people on the scene then your genocidal group aren't doing that good a job anyway.
I think the guy gets it right with the priorities in his quote by making a poor comparison:
Given that most of the major "pressing problems" (like genocide) can't easily be resolved with technology and need simple discussion and agreement, why not ditch the unimportant and stalled competition in favour of putting the money into the pressing problems?
True, especially the way it is normally used, but that won't run on the iPhone ;)
I used to use Qwit before I found Pino, and in its status bar it showed you how many requests you had remaining. I only ever remember seeing it show ~150 at the most (presumably it used a load up in its initial loading, then I missed the rest) and I don't think I ever got below 100, even when jumping back through all of the pages of results I'd missed.
Seriously, what are you doing that needs to be updated so frequently and urgently that you're needing the equivalent of a refresh per second?!? Even if you've got lots of lists you follow, that's still a crazy refresh rate.
Maybe the web can replace a lot of apps, but it can't have completely pointless flashy bling widgets quite as easily as an iPhone. It also isn't quite as "teh coolz" to say "I wrote a web app" as "I designed an iPhone app - now there's an app for that!".
Obviously the UK government just want to be "down wid it" (whatever "it" it is that they're supposed to be "down wid") and waste our money on tailored apps for one specific proprietary (and expensive) platform rather than design something accessible to all from a huge range of devices.
You never know, given that the LibDems say they were against the Digital Economy Bill then we might end up with them at least repealing the Act that it turned into as a "look, we're doing something" action. It'd be better than nothing.
But is MS still the dominant software because it is best for the office or because the new students coming in are indoctrinated in it? 99% of offices could probably drop MS Office and free up all of that money on licenses without any impact to what they can do, but they don't because "people know it", but people know it because it's "what most people use" and so they don't look for alternatives.
Software is probably the same - people writing MS Visual C++ instead of more standard C++ because they're using Visual Studio because that's what college/university teaches because that's what business use because that's what all of their new recruits know.
By "really damn good" I take it you mean "a little too well so that the big media corps are happy, but things like fair use are prevented because the system can't tell the difference and so just blacklists it anyway". Seems like it is a bit too far to me.
Yeah, I've just had to use Parted Magic recently (great little distro - a utility, but nicely put together and presented) but it sure wouldn't be my core desktop distro.
As for the meta-packages idea, they'd either end up a) having to get included in the core distro and its repos (which will be difficult in Ubuntu, as they'll want a certain level of confidence in it) or b) stashing it in a separate add-on repo that you've got to install yourself after the main install. Either way around, it isn't as self-contained as a pre-configured distro, and I'm sure most of the apps could be or are made available outside the distro anyway.
But a /. page has loads of comments and probably a horrendous amount of HTML for each. If you're talking about an average page rather than an unpaged discussion then 300KB+ should be a lot harder to reach.
As for additional images, I was taking that into account. What's wrong with sub-100KB for all the media on a page? Unless you've got a photo gallery then more than that seems like overkill. That said, I have seen a rise in blog posts that include arbitrary tangentially related images purely for the sake of it, because the author thinks it'd be "cool" and because it pads the post out. They probably once heard that a picture is worth 1000 words, but didn't take into account that they were adding 1000 words of drivel.