According to the product photos, the other beers on the company's website use clear ABV labelling. I don't know if the squirrel has a label. Maybe it has a handwritten tag tied with string to its foot or something.
The problem here is that this is a European product, being written about by a US-centric website whose content then gets distributed worldwide, and whose authors don't realise (or perhaps don't particularly care) that they're using units that mean different things to readers in different countries.
Like the US gallon isn't the same as the old Imperial gallon, and the US ton isn't the same as the old Imperial ton.
Hell, before the metric system led to the inch being redefined as 2.54 millimetres, the US and British inches and feet were different, too.
These sorts of local mismatches are one of the reasons why most of the rest of the world went over to the metric system. If you check the brewery's website, they avoid this archaic country-specific crap by specifying the alcohol content for their beers scientifically, as a percentage by volume (as opposed to using the local version of the "proof" system devised for whiskey, which I seem to recall was calibrated according to how high a cannonball went when you mixed the drink with gunpowder).
It is thought of as distillation because IT IS distillation, atleast by any definition of distillation that I know of.
A chemist or engineer would disagree. Technically, distillation is a specific process that involves evaporating a mixture of liquids and separating them by their different condensation temperatures. It's like what they do in oil refineries. The idea is to extract and isolate a particular desired chemical from the mix (in this case, ethanol).
The process that//these// guys use to concentrate their beer by eliminating some of the water isn't distillation, it preserves the miscellaneous gunk that distillation leaves behind, and it's a method of water removal rather than alcohol purification (the increase in alcohol content is a desirable secondary effect). The idea is to try to keep the subtle mix of compounds created by the beer-brewing process, and reduce the water content without using any heating processes that might destroy the flavours.
If you're in the brewing industry, you might be tempted to think of anything that reduces water content as being a form of "distillation", but that's not the correct scientific term for what's happening.
Consider distilled water. If you buy distilled water for your car radiator, you expect it to have been evaporated and recondensed to leave behind all the nasties, if someone comes up with some other fancy water-purification method, then they aren't allowed to call the results "distilled", unless it really//is// distilled.
I suppose that you might be able to get away with calling it "freeze distillation", because "freeze" would be a prefix qualifier that warns the consumer that the following word may not be literally true, like "sugar mice" aren't real mice, "rock salmon" isn't really salmon, and "prairie oysters" aren't really oysters. "Freeze distillation" isn't technically distillation, and if you tried to use the freezing process instead of "proper" distillation to make whisky, I doubt that you'd legally be able to sell the results as "real" whisky, because the process is different, and the chemical mix that ends up in the bottle would be different, too.
Ideally, someone needs to come up with a fancy new name for the ice process.
I tried to log into YouTube yesterday using my YouTube ID. System wouldn't let me. It spotted that I had a logged-in GoogleAccount, and every time I tried to log into YT with my YT account details, it diverted me to a page where I could decide whether to merge the accounts now or later. "No thank you" wasn't an option.
Complete pain in the arse.
The only way that I could get into my YouTube without agreeing (explicitly or implicitly) to merge the accounts (which I really didn't want to do) was to visit a GA page and explicitly log out first, and then go back to YT.
I haven't visited YouTube for a while. I really liked the core product, and used to use it a lot (as did everybody else), but then they started forcing me to go through a nag screen every time I visited to try to get me to localise the account to "improve my experience" and find "more appropriate" material for me based on locale. I didn't//want// search localisation, I//like// the fact that the internet is global, and I wanted to be able to see science/geometry videos ranked independently of their source country, so I always used to click the "no thanks" button.
And every bloody time I came back, they'd ask me again. And again. And again. And it really began to bug me. YT was a site that I used for fun, and the nag screen was turning every attempt to access that fun into an annoyance, so after a while I simply stopped using YouTube unless I had something specific to look up. Corporate-level optimisation strategy meant that for me, the parent company managed to wreck what was otherwise a great site, and stop me visiting.
Yesterday's experience was even worse. It was Google trying really hard to twist my arm to get me to agree to something that I didn't want to do, to the extent that I was effectively locked out of my YouTube account until I agreed, or until I logged out of my Google account to avoid triggering the "Do you want to merge now or later?" page.
From a consumer POV, this is crap behaviour. If Google users want a more Google-integrated video sharing page, they already have one. It's called GoogleVideo, and it's not hugely successful, partly because a lot of people prefer the more focused YouTube approach and branding, and they prefer sense of independence that YouTube managed to hang onto after the takeover.
I like Google, and hope that they continue to do well, but some of their executive people don't half do some stupid things sometimes. I worry that Schmidt may have his eye on Facebook's success, and see Facebook as a role model for integration, while forgetting that Facebook's history has included episodes that weren't just morally dubious but downright illegal. Facebook's business practices are almost exactly the sorts of things that Google's "Don't be Evil" motto was supposed to keep Google safely away from.
And yes, the advertisers probably love Facebook, and the anti-FB protestors haven't managed a mass FB boycott... but Google don't have a Facebook/Apple/MS-type business model with customers that are locked in by their investment. Plenty of people who loathe Microsoft still use MS products on a daily basis, and plenty of people who dislike aspects of Facebook don't leave, because it's now their social network hub.
The Google products (apart from Android) don't have that same corporate lock-in, and that's one of the reasons why people like them so much -- knowing that you can leave Google at any time means that it's the safe default option. You can export your calendar details out of GCal at any time, and to switching to an nearly-as-good search engine takes seconds. Google have to stay sharp, and liked, because they're constantly living on the edge of the abyss.
So... all it takes to "break" Google is for some daft executive to enviously eye up the sort of heavy-handed corporate playbook strategies that have been so financially successful for MS/Apple/FB/Yahoo/AOL, and say, "Well it makes a l
Its relevant because if you allow yourself the option of doing//anything//, then you risk doing things that you really wish that you hadn't. And again, you leave yourself open to external manipulation.
If you reserve the right to nuke a country, then you'll have protocols saying when you do and don't nuke. Outsiders will know this, because there's no point in having a deterrent if you don't tell people about it. And you then need the protocols to provide an understood framework for use, because otherwise you get President Sarah Palin with her finger on the button nuking some small state because she's having a bad day and a leader laughed at her hair.
As soon as you have the protocols, you have a system that says that you pretty much have to respond in certain ways in certain situations... if everyone knows that a President//can// act in a certain way in certain emergencies then there's pressure for them to do comply with the expectations.
And that means that if you're a power-gamer, and you want to produce that extreme response, you essentially have a blueprint for how to cause it to come about.
Taking away the legal right to respond in certain ways doesn't mean that you won't respond in those ways under duress, but it removes the element of predictability that allows malicious outsiders (and malicious insiders) to exploit the system. International politics these days is a multi-player game, and being too predictable in how you apply extreme responses means that you risk being a pawn in someone else's strategic gaming.
RunRev offered to drop their cross-platform support and instead export their app to 100% native code.
Apple's reply was apparently, no, the new terms and conditions require that the app is//originally written// with their tools.
See, insisting that people use their tools isn't just about the code that the tools generate... it's also about the user-agreement that the authors have to comply with as a condition of using those tools. If Apple's user-agreement says that you aren't allowed to use their tools to generate apps for other competing platforms, then it means that authors aren't allowed to take apps that they've written for the iPhone OS and convert them to other devices. If the original source code is written on non-Apple tools and exported to the Apple tools, then that means that there's a version of the app source code out there somewhere that precedes the "Appleised" version, isn't governed by the Apple tools user agreement, and can be ported to other platforms.
By making it compulsory for companies to//originate// their code for the iPhone on Apple tools, Apple effectively get the ability to ban those companies from producing non-iPhone versions. If a company says that they authored their apps with the Apple tools, then they aren't allowed to port, if they say that they CAN port because they have an earlier parent copy to port from, then Apple can automatically ban the app from their store for being "externally" authored. If they say that they used the Apple tools, but they're gong to port anyway because it's their code not Apple's and to hell with the small print, then Apple can use the company's violation of its "tools" agreement as reason to shut down that company's merchant account with the app store. Remember, Apple can change the terms and conditions of the app store at any time.
This isn't about quality control, it's about enforcing exclusivity. Apple know that developers are being advised to hedge their bets and start supporting other platforms like Android, because Apple aren't to be trusted as a market-owner. They also know that as soon as the customer-base thinks that you can buy exactly the same "iPhone apps" for any other mobile platform, they'll tend to buy the machine with the best spec/cost ratio, which often won't be an iPhone.
So what they're doing is giving developers an ultimatum: keep your apps 100% exclusive to the iPhone, or face being banned from the Apple store and being unable to sell your iPhone apps to iPhone customers through normal channels.
1. Don't ship crap. Say what you will about the iPad/iPhone... the hardware and software is definitely not crap.
Oh, some of the software included with the iPhone is most definitely crap. A "notes" editor that doesn't support bold or italics or bullets of headings, can't sync its pages as text files, and can only transfer its text files to a Windows PC if that PC has MS OneNote installed? A contacts manager that puts all its contacts onto a single scrolling list, and doesn't let the user create categories without an external computer? A picture app that doesn't let you delete photos? A "desktop" on a variable-orientation device that (until v4.0) only worked in portrait mode? An analogue clock app whose non-resizable dial display is a massive 13 millimetres high?
The user-interface//looks// pretty and has those gorgeous animated bounces and accelerations when you scroll, but underneath the gloss, some of this is unfinished, beta-quality software. The user interface is inconsistent. There's no proper file-synchronisation API. How long did it take them to implement cut/paste? The web browser and mapping software's nice, and there are some great third-party apps, but some of the onboard stuff written by//Apple// is embarrassing. And seriously, Apple couldn't write and bundle a basic ToDo list manager for their pocketable 'puter? They gave these to all their employees for feedback and testing, and nobody suggested that an onboard ToDo List manager might be useful? I think that just about every NON-smart mobile I've owned has had one of those onboard, but if you blow five hundred quid on an iPhone... sorry, no list manager. And if you download a third-party list-manager app, you can't sync it over the sync cable to your mac/PC, because the sync portal doesn't understand any of the relevant file formats.
The OS3.x iPhone's onboard software is pretty but stupid. Its saving grace is that you can use other companies' software on it, to get around the limitations that Apple have either deliberately engineered in, or haven't been able to engineer out.
Some aspects of the hardware are pretty nice. But you've got no card storage, insufficient buttons (on the iPT), and the aerial sensitivity on my iPT is the worst of any wifi device I've used. Everything else in my place seems to pick up about fifteen local networks, my iPT sees about three.
Clearly, you should be using the standardised iPhone UI gestures for Cut/Copy/Paste. Oh, wait, they don't exist.
On the Palm, you moved your fingernail to the text region and did swipe-X, swipe-C, or swipe-V (the equivalent of CTRL-X, -C and -V on a Mac or PC keyboard).
On iPhone OS you have pinch and stretch, and you expect//something// to happen when you press-and-hold, but you're not always sure what. There's no standard gesture or symbol for "Help", or "extended functions", or "Options". Hell, there's not even a gesture for "Home", the only way to exit an app is by pressing the single clicky button (the "Arrgh!" button)... if that button fails, you're screwed. So after missing buttons off the Newton entirely becauase they represent a mechanical failure point, they do this?
Oh yes, and becuase you only have one button, and because you can't reassign it to be anything else (becuase there's no alternative way to go back to the home screen), you can't click a "hotbutton" to go straight to your mail or addressbook or some other favourite app. Apple say you only need one button -- two or more buttons would be confusing. So when they implement multitasking, to get to the additional features, you have to//multiclick// the single button... sigh.
America's message to the rest of the world should be that if you come at us, we will come after you and you have no idea with we will be bringing with us.
Trouble is, if Small State A and Small State B hate each other's guts, B can then wipe out A without getting involved in a costly and dangerous war themselves, by attacking the US, and making it look like A did it. Then they sit back and watch the emphatic US response destroy A.
Afterwards, even if the truth comes out, it's too late. The US can't then accuse B, because that means admitting that they just blitzed an innocent country, and they can't then also blitz B, because after blitzing A, that'd make it look as if they were indiscriminately killing everyone in the region for no good reason (which would then make the US look like evil murdering psychos and motivate the genuine terrorists who want to attack the US for realm out of righteous outrage).
So not only does B get the US to use the most expensive high-tech weapons available to kill their enemies for them, B also gets the US to participate in the resulting coverup, and make it a matter of US national security that nobody blabs about the real story. They get away with it.
If you strut about a dangerous neighbourhood with a Big Gun and a hair-trigger, smart locals are going to use you to settle their private grudges. They're going to hide in the bushes and wait until someone they don't like is standing behind you, then they'll use a peashooter to hit the back of your head with a pea, and watch and you whirl around and blow their hated neighbour's head off. If their neighbour's family then want revenge, they'll be taking it against you, not against the person with the peashooter. All you can do is bluff it out and pretend that the person you shot really WAS a threat.
The paradox of the escalated hair-trigger response is that although it works in a two-player game (Mutually Assured Destruction), in a multi-player game it actually makes you more likely to be attacked. If you can be counted on to respond immediately and predictably (and irrevocably), it makes you a useful pawn in other people's wargames. Your military is at their disposal, and your population is vulnerable to their enemies' counter-attacks. You become a puppet enmeshed in multiple wars that you don't really understand.
Also, forty-foot shipping containers have an excellent radar signature and a very distinctive characteristics, due to the standardised size and geometry. If Iran ever starts lobbing standard forty-foot rectangular shipping containers at the US from Iranian launchers, AI defence systems should have a fighting chance of recognising them, and anti-missile systems should have a fighting chance of hitting them.
Blow a hole in the side of an airborne forty-foot shipping container travelling at Mach 3, and its structural and aerodynamic integrity collapses, and it disintegrates into a shower of corrugated metal sheeting.
Actually, the Japanese already prototyped that, in WW2.
They made little balloons and sent them up into the jetstream current, which whisked them over to the US at high speed, where they'd fall out of the sky. It was going to be the basis of a germ warfare delivery system. Simple, cheap, no engines or navigation required. Paper plus weaponised pathogens. Trouble was, I think most of the test balloons ended up landing somewhere unuseful like Oregon.
Two people, locked together in an airliner cockpit, day after day, for hours at a time, undisturbed, with nothing to do but watch the autopilot and gaze at the sky...
(cue Barry White music)
At least if one of them's banging the steward/ess, it means that the other one's free to fly the plane.
Still, it's not as bad as when Gloster produced Britain's first jet fighter, and decided to call it the "Meteor".
As in, "Those things that, every time you see one, it always seems to be falling out of the sky in a screaming ball of flame before smashing into the ground".
An ISP who tampers with the information stream risks losing the legal protection that they normally get for being a simple telecoms carrier who just "supplies the wires".
The usual argument is that an ISP isn't legally liable for the information that they carry (as long as they comply with some basic rules), because their whole business model is based on them being a dumb carrier. They don't edit, they can't edit, it's not their job to edit, and if they tried, they'd be failing their customers and be wrecked as a business. If someone emails a piece of child porn across their network, they aren't guilty of aiding and abetting, because it's not their job to read or alter content.
So if an ISP has decided that it might be able to make a bit of extra money by deciding to divert search requests and exercise editorial control over what their customers are able to access, then... bad news... they've just broken that principle, stopped being a simple carrier and started to be an edited service. And with editorial power comes editorial responsibility. And that means that if someone goes on a killing spree and their family decides that they were influenced by content they found on the net, then if the person's ISP felt entitled to edit out Google, but not to edit out gun retailer sites or extremist political sites, the family's lawyer can now try to sue that ISP, on the grounds that the ISP has already discarded the principle that it doesn't filter content.
Any time an ISP pulls a redirection stunt like this, don't complain to their technicians: write a polite little note to their board of directors, or to their technical director, asking whether the shareholders understand that they're risking operating a corporation without legal "pure carrier status" protection. This is potentially a "shareholder alert" situation. Does the company's prospectus inform shareholders that the company is operating outside the usual "dumb carrier" rules?
If they're making extra money on the side by stealing Google business, by "diverting the flow", ask them if their legal department has estimated how much they stand to lose if they get sued. Not by Google, but by the mother of some kid that got murdered after meeting someone they shouldn't from an internet chatroom.
Simple "carrier" ISP's don't edit for a reason. By deliberately firewalling themselves off from editorial powers, they give themselves a degree of immunity from being liable for what they carry. That's not something you throw away lightly. And if I was the CEO of another ISP, I'd be wanting to ring the CEO of this ISP, and ask them what they hell they thought they were doing, and whether they were trying to bring down the entire industry.
Well, an iPhone/iPad isn't exactly the most macho-looking bit of hi-technology, is it?
Every time I see a woman carrying an iPhone, it seemed to be bulked up with big chunky covers and accessories, presumably because otherwise it just looks too girlie.
If you look at it, and track back the design vocabulary of the back and the rim and the little round button, the design ethos is essentially classic ladies jewelery. The silver-backed iPod Touch looks like what you'd expect a Chanel silver-backed ladies' hairbrush to look like with the bristles removed.
"... we knew that these galaxies were out there, we just hadn't spotted them yet. "
Agreed. This particular news story isn't directly relevant to the "dark matter" debate.
" Besides, we've seen dark matter much closer to home. When galaxies collide, the gas pressure stops the regular matter, while the dark matter keeps moving along at the same speed. The dark matter has mass, so it creates a gravatic lens. We have seen these lenses, with no visible matter to create them, when galaxies collide "
Mmm... alternatively, if there's no dark matter, that'd suggest that Einstein's general theory isn't totally reliable for calculating galaxy-scale gravitational effects. In that case, there's no guarantee that our current GR calculations are correct for the lensing effects associated with the large-scale distortions that might arise when two galaxies collide, either. Gravitational shockwaves associated with forced deceleration (due to collision) aren't stopped by EM radiation pressure, and should keep moving, too.
So we still have at least two interpretations available. If we assume that Einstein's general theory is perfect, then perhaps we have to invoke something very like dark matter to explain why the predictions//appear// to fail for rotating (and colliding) galaxies. On the other hand, if we were to assume that there was no such thing as dark matter, and that Einstein's general theory was simply failing, period, then the failure in the collisional case as well as the rotating case might just mean that the theory is failing//consistently//.
Europeans aren't as familiar with HFCS as a food ingredient, because we don't have the same government corn-growing subsidies as they have in the US. Similar situation for cottonseed oil, if we saw that on the ingredients list for an eatable we'd be "Huh? That's//food//?"
Glucose-fructose syrup does sometimes show up on ingredients, though... I've seen it listed on dirt-cheap "value" lemon curd (at something like 25p a jar). It's just not as common here (other than on imported soft drinks).
I had a cheap (circa ~GBP 15) Samsung MP3 player that someone gave away as part of a deal. It didn't function as a USB storage device, and had its own special syncing and indexing software that ran on the host computer. Like Apple.
Seems that that's why Samsung had to get rid of the stock by jobbing it out to a company that used them as promotional giveaways. People kept bringing them back to the shops and demanding refunds, on the grounds that a fifteen quid USB MP3 player wasn't fit for sale if it didn't show up as a standard storage device when you plugged it into a USB port. Samsung them brought out a firmware update that let you ignore its expensive proprietary synching and indexing software and just dump folders of music onto it, and people were happy (other than the Samsung engineers, who still seemed convinced that their approach was better, and a little put out by the threats of physical violence from aggrieved customers).
Yep. I agree that the Ippy (iPhone/iPod Touch) doesn't block aps from displaying those formats... it's just that transferring those formats onto the Ippy's memory from your computer using the cable isn't supported, because you have to use iTunes to synch your device, and iTunes is very fussy about what it lets you load onto the device. If you have a PDF reader application on your ippy, and a PDF file on your PC, and you want to put the PDF file ONTO the ippye, to take it with you... forget it.
On the Palm platform there was a proper set of synchronisation protocols, so that an app could synch its files to a parent computer regardless of the file format. On the iPhone, the necessary infrastructure for sychronisation isn't in place, so the only things that get synched are a restricted set decided in advance by Apple.
If a platform doesn't have a properly developed synchronisation system, then, yes, the ability to use it as a USB drive toload up and resave files is a nice workaround... which the iPhone doesn't have. Or you could put your data onto a card slot... which the iPhone doesn't have. Or you could synchronise and send contacts, data and files via bluetooth... which AFAIK, doesn't work on the ippies (at least, not with anything I own). I haven't had a chance to try this with a pair of ippies, but certainly with an ippy-and-something-else, the bluetooth only seems to be there to support bluetooth headphones, the ippy will recognise and connect to all the other bluetooth devices and puters I have, but it won't exchange datafiles with them.
Maybe if you jailbreak it you should be able to load up and resave your files that way, but I haven't tried that yet.
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Now, on the plus side, one of the things that they're supposed to be changing with the iPad, is that the iTunes synching software should also let you synch files whose suffixes correspond to the major MS Office file formats, plus PDF, rtf and txt, and probably a few ebook formats, so with the iPad you now will be able to plug into your host machine, click "sync", and all those files (if they're in the correct folder location) will be copied onto your machine, to go.
It'd be nice if they retrospectively added that freedom to iTunes when its used with an iPhone oriPod Touch, but... we'll see.
I suppose that you might be able to fool iTunes into allowing any file type onto the iPhone if you, say, had a zip folder and renamed it with a JPG suffix and secreted it in your pictures folder... but I don't know whether or not iTunes checks the internal file structure of things it synchs, for legality.
I suppose that what you could try to do is write a transfer app that uses the iphone camera to OCR what's on a second iPhone's screen, or you could perhaps get the screen to flash and use that as a low-bandwidth replacement for infra-red transfer.
There's an external camera interface accessory for the iPad that gives USB and cardreader support, but since they're not saying exactly what the specs are, it leaves open the possibility that it might only have read-only support, and/or might only support the same restricted set of allowed formats that's registered with iTunes.
I'm going to have to try the jailbreaking route soon, partly because I've just had to uninstall iTunes from my WinXP PC - something in the iTunes suite (perhaps Bonjour?) was making Explorer use 30-100% of my processor ticks even without any apple gear present. God knows what it was up to, but I don't think I can afford to have the iTunes software installed on a PC that I actually do work on. I guess that if you use a Mac, more of these gripes will have been ironed out.
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I think that the Linux community should consider adopting it as their beer of choice.
According to the product photos, the other beers on the company's website use clear ABV labelling. I don't know if the squirrel has a label. Maybe it has a handwritten tag tied with string to its foot or something.
Gut it, Dremel out most of the front panel, and use it as a stylish designer aluminium box with handy handles, for holding newspapers and magazines.
Not in Scotland, where this beer is brewed.
The problem here is that this is a European product, being written about by a US-centric website whose content then gets distributed worldwide, and whose authors don't realise (or perhaps don't particularly care) that they're using units that mean different things to readers in different countries.
Like the US gallon isn't the same as the old Imperial gallon, and the US ton isn't the same as the old Imperial ton.
Hell, before the metric system led to the inch being redefined as 2.54 millimetres, the US and British inches and feet were different, too.
These sorts of local mismatches are one of the reasons why most of the rest of the world went over to the metric system. If you check the brewery's website, they avoid this archaic country-specific crap by specifying the alcohol content for their beers scientifically, as a percentage by volume (as opposed to using the local version of the "proof" system devised for whiskey, which I seem to recall was calibrated according to how high a cannonball went when you mixed the drink with gunpowder).
A chemist or engineer would disagree. Technically, distillation is a specific process that involves evaporating a mixture of liquids and separating them by their different condensation temperatures. It's like what they do in oil refineries. The idea is to extract and isolate a particular desired chemical from the mix (in this case, ethanol).
The process that //these// guys use to concentrate their beer by eliminating some of the water isn't distillation, it preserves the miscellaneous gunk that distillation leaves behind, and it's a method of water removal rather than alcohol purification (the increase in alcohol content is a desirable secondary effect). The idea is to try to keep the subtle mix of compounds created by the beer-brewing process, and reduce the water content without using any heating processes that might destroy the flavours.
If you're in the brewing industry, you might be tempted to think of anything that reduces water content as being a form of "distillation", but that's not the correct scientific term for what's happening.
Consider distilled water. If you buy distilled water for your car radiator, you expect it to have been evaporated and recondensed to leave behind all the nasties, if someone comes up with some other fancy water-purification method, then they aren't allowed to call the results "distilled", unless it really //is// distilled.
I suppose that you might be able to get away with calling it "freeze distillation", because "freeze" would be a prefix qualifier that warns the consumer that the following word may not be literally true, like "sugar mice" aren't real mice, "rock salmon" isn't really salmon, and "prairie oysters" aren't really oysters. "Freeze distillation" isn't technically distillation, and if you tried to use the freezing process instead of "proper" distillation to make whisky, I doubt that you'd legally be able to sell the results as "real" whisky, because the process is different, and the chemical mix that ends up in the bottle would be different, too.
Ideally, someone needs to come up with a fancy new name for the ice process.
Complete pain in the arse.
The only way that I could get into my YouTube without agreeing (explicitly or implicitly) to merge the accounts (which I really didn't want to do) was to visit a GA page and explicitly log out first, and then go back to YT.
I haven't visited YouTube for a while. I really liked the core product, and used to use it a lot (as did everybody else), but then they started forcing me to go through a nag screen every time I visited to try to get me to localise the account to "improve my experience" and find "more appropriate" material for me based on locale. I didn't //want// search localisation, I //like// the fact that the internet is global, and I wanted to be able to see science/geometry videos ranked independently of their source country, so I always used to click the "no thanks" button.
And every bloody time I came back, they'd ask me again. And again. And again. And it really began to bug me. YT was a site that I used for fun, and the nag screen was turning every attempt to access that fun into an annoyance, so after a while I simply stopped using YouTube unless I had something specific to look up. Corporate-level optimisation strategy meant that for me, the parent company managed to wreck what was otherwise a great site, and stop me visiting.
Yesterday's experience was even worse. It was Google trying really hard to twist my arm to get me to agree to something that I didn't want to do, to the extent that I was effectively locked out of my YouTube account until I agreed, or until I logged out of my Google account to avoid triggering the "Do you want to merge now or later?" page.
From a consumer POV, this is crap behaviour. If Google users want a more Google-integrated video sharing page, they already have one. It's called GoogleVideo, and it's not hugely successful, partly because a lot of people prefer the more focused YouTube approach and branding, and they prefer sense of independence that YouTube managed to hang onto after the takeover.
I like Google, and hope that they continue to do well, but some of their executive people don't half do some stupid things sometimes. I worry that Schmidt may have his eye on Facebook's success, and see Facebook as a role model for integration, while forgetting that Facebook's history has included episodes that weren't just morally dubious but downright illegal. Facebook's business practices are almost exactly the sorts of things that Google's "Don't be Evil" motto was supposed to keep Google safely away from.
And yes, the advertisers probably love Facebook, and the anti-FB protestors haven't managed a mass FB boycott ... but Google don't have a Facebook/Apple/MS-type business model with customers that are locked in by their investment. Plenty of people who loathe Microsoft still use MS products on a daily basis, and plenty of people who dislike aspects of Facebook don't leave, because it's now their social network hub.
The Google products (apart from Android) don't have that same corporate lock-in, and that's one of the reasons why people like them so much -- knowing that you can leave Google at any time means that it's the safe default option. You can export your calendar details out of GCal at any time, and to switching to an nearly-as-good search engine takes seconds. Google have to stay sharp, and liked, because they're constantly living on the edge of the abyss.
So ... all it takes to "break" Google is for some daft executive to enviously eye up the sort of heavy-handed corporate playbook strategies that have been so financially successful for MS/Apple/FB/Yahoo/AOL, and say, "Well it makes a l
Damn, you beat me to it.
If you reserve the right to nuke a country, then you'll have protocols saying when you do and don't nuke. Outsiders will know this, because there's no point in having a deterrent if you don't tell people about it. And you then need the protocols to provide an understood framework for use, because otherwise you get President Sarah Palin with her finger on the button nuking some small state because she's having a bad day and a leader laughed at her hair.
As soon as you have the protocols, you have a system that says that you pretty much have to respond in certain ways in certain situations ... if everyone knows that a President //can// act in a certain way in certain emergencies then there's pressure for them to do comply with the expectations.
And that means that if you're a power-gamer, and you want to produce that extreme response, you essentially have a blueprint for how to cause it to come about.
Taking away the legal right to respond in certain ways doesn't mean that you won't respond in those ways under duress, but it removes the element of predictability that allows malicious outsiders (and malicious insiders) to exploit the system. International politics these days is a multi-player game, and being too predictable in how you apply extreme responses means that you risk being a pawn in someone else's strategic gaming.
So for these new lightweight tablets and mobiles, perhaps what we //really// need is a mobile-optimised version of XP?
Just wondering ..
Apple's reply was apparently, no, the new terms and conditions require that the app is //originally written// with their tools.
See, insisting that people use their tools isn't just about the code that the tools generate ... it's also about the user-agreement that the authors have to comply with as a condition of using those tools. If Apple's user-agreement says that you aren't allowed to use their tools to generate apps for other competing platforms, then it means that authors aren't allowed to take apps that they've written for the iPhone OS and convert them to other devices. If the original source code is written on non-Apple tools and exported to the Apple tools, then that means that there's a version of the app source code out there somewhere that precedes the "Appleised" version, isn't governed by the Apple tools user agreement, and can be ported to other platforms.
By making it compulsory for companies to //originate// their code for the iPhone on Apple tools, Apple effectively get the ability to ban those companies from producing non-iPhone versions. If a company says that they authored their apps with the Apple tools, then they aren't allowed to port, if they say that they CAN port because they have an earlier parent copy to port from, then Apple can automatically ban the app from their store for being "externally" authored. If they say that they used the Apple tools, but they're gong to port anyway because it's their code not Apple's and to hell with the small print, then Apple can use the company's violation of its "tools" agreement as reason to shut down that company's merchant account with the app store. Remember, Apple can change the terms and conditions of the app store at any time.
This isn't about quality control, it's about enforcing exclusivity. Apple know that developers are being advised to hedge their bets and start supporting other platforms like Android, because Apple aren't to be trusted as a market-owner. They also know that as soon as the customer-base thinks that you can buy exactly the same "iPhone apps" for any other mobile platform, they'll tend to buy the machine with the best spec/cost ratio, which often won't be an iPhone.
So what they're doing is giving developers an ultimatum: keep your apps 100% exclusive to the iPhone, or face being banned from the Apple store and being unable to sell your iPhone apps to iPhone customers through normal channels.
Oh, some of the software included with the iPhone is most definitely crap. A "notes" editor that doesn't support bold or italics or bullets of headings, can't sync its pages as text files, and can only transfer its text files to a Windows PC if that PC has MS OneNote installed? A contacts manager that puts all its contacts onto a single scrolling list, and doesn't let the user create categories without an external computer? A picture app that doesn't let you delete photos? A "desktop" on a variable-orientation device that (until v4.0) only worked in portrait mode? An analogue clock app whose non-resizable dial display is a massive 13 millimetres high?
The user-interface //looks// pretty and has those gorgeous animated bounces and accelerations when you scroll, but underneath the gloss, some of this is unfinished, beta-quality software. The user interface is inconsistent. There's no proper file-synchronisation API. How long did it take them to implement cut/paste? The web browser and mapping software's nice, and there are some great third-party apps, but some of the onboard stuff written by //Apple// is embarrassing. And seriously, Apple couldn't write and bundle a basic ToDo list manager for their pocketable 'puter? They gave these to all their employees for feedback and testing, and nobody suggested that an onboard ToDo List manager might be useful? I think that just about every NON-smart mobile I've owned has had one of those onboard, but if you blow five hundred quid on an iPhone ... sorry, no list manager. And if you download a third-party list-manager app, you can't sync it over the sync cable to your mac/PC, because the sync portal doesn't understand any of the relevant file formats.
The OS3.x iPhone's onboard software is pretty but stupid. Its saving grace is that you can use other companies' software on it, to get around the limitations that Apple have either deliberately engineered in, or haven't been able to engineer out.
Some aspects of the hardware are pretty nice. But you've got no card storage, insufficient buttons (on the iPT), and the aerial sensitivity on my iPT is the worst of any wifi device I've used. Everything else in my place seems to pick up about fifteen local networks, my iPT sees about three.
It is, however, very shiny.
On the Palm, you moved your fingernail to the text region and did swipe-X, swipe-C, or swipe-V (the equivalent of CTRL-X, -C and -V on a Mac or PC keyboard).
On iPhone OS you have pinch and stretch, and you expect //something// to happen when you press-and-hold, but you're not always sure what. There's no standard gesture or symbol for "Help", or "extended functions", or "Options". Hell, there's not even a gesture for "Home", the only way to exit an app is by pressing the single clicky button (the "Arrgh!" button) ... if that button fails, you're screwed. So after missing buttons off the Newton entirely becauase they represent a mechanical failure point, they do this?
Oh yes, and becuase you only have one button, and because you can't reassign it to be anything else (becuase there's no alternative way to go back to the home screen), you can't click a "hotbutton" to go straight to your mail or addressbook or some other favourite app. Apple say you only need one button -- two or more buttons would be confusing. So when they implement multitasking, to get to the additional features, you have to //multiclick// the single button ... sigh.
Maybe we should just all learn Morse code?
Well, they're certainly "unclean" after they've exploded.
Trouble is, if Small State A and Small State B hate each other's guts, B can then wipe out A without getting involved in a costly and dangerous war themselves, by attacking the US, and making it look like A did it. Then they sit back and watch the emphatic US response destroy A.
Afterwards, even if the truth comes out, it's too late. The US can't then accuse B, because that means admitting that they just blitzed an innocent country, and they can't then also blitz B, because after blitzing A, that'd make it look as if they were indiscriminately killing everyone in the region for no good reason (which would then make the US look like evil murdering psychos and motivate the genuine terrorists who want to attack the US for realm out of righteous outrage).
So not only does B get the US to use the most expensive high-tech weapons available to kill their enemies for them, B also gets the US to participate in the resulting coverup, and make it a matter of US national security that nobody blabs about the real story. They get away with it.
If you strut about a dangerous neighbourhood with a Big Gun and a hair-trigger, smart locals are going to use you to settle their private grudges. They're going to hide in the bushes and wait until someone they don't like is standing behind you, then they'll use a peashooter to hit the back of your head with a pea, and watch and you whirl around and blow their hated neighbour's head off. If their neighbour's family then want revenge, they'll be taking it against you, not against the person with the peashooter. All you can do is bluff it out and pretend that the person you shot really WAS a threat.
The paradox of the escalated hair-trigger response is that although it works in a two-player game (Mutually Assured Destruction), in a multi-player game it actually makes you more likely to be attacked. If you can be counted on to respond immediately and predictably (and irrevocably), it makes you a useful pawn in other people's wargames. Your military is at their disposal, and your population is vulnerable to their enemies' counter-attacks. You become a puppet enmeshed in multiple wars that you don't really understand.
Also, forty-foot shipping containers have an excellent radar signature and a very distinctive characteristics, due to the standardised size and geometry. If Iran ever starts lobbing standard forty-foot rectangular shipping containers at the US from Iranian launchers, AI defence systems should have a fighting chance of recognising them, and anti-missile systems should have a fighting chance of hitting them. Blow a hole in the side of an airborne forty-foot shipping container travelling at Mach 3, and its structural and aerodynamic integrity collapses, and it disintegrates into a shower of corrugated metal sheeting.
They made little balloons and sent them up into the jetstream current, which whisked them over to the US at high speed, where they'd fall out of the sky. It was going to be the basis of a germ warfare delivery system. Simple, cheap, no engines or navigation required. Paper plus weaponised pathogens. Trouble was, I think most of the test balloons ended up landing somewhere unuseful like Oregon.
(cue Barry White music)
At least if one of them's banging the steward/ess, it means that the other one's free to fly the plane.
As in, "Those things that, every time you see one, it always seems to be falling out of the sky in a screaming ball of flame before smashing into the ground".
The usual argument is that an ISP isn't legally liable for the information that they carry (as long as they comply with some basic rules), because their whole business model is based on them being a dumb carrier. They don't edit, they can't edit, it's not their job to edit, and if they tried, they'd be failing their customers and be wrecked as a business. If someone emails a piece of child porn across their network, they aren't guilty of aiding and abetting, because it's not their job to read or alter content.
So if an ISP has decided that it might be able to make a bit of extra money by deciding to divert search requests and exercise editorial control over what their customers are able to access, then ... bad news ... they've just broken that principle, stopped being a simple carrier and started to be an edited service. And with editorial power comes editorial responsibility. And that means that if someone goes on a killing spree and their family decides that they were influenced by content they found on the net, then if the person's ISP felt entitled to edit out Google, but not to edit out gun retailer sites or extremist political sites, the family's lawyer can now try to sue that ISP, on the grounds that the ISP has already discarded the principle that it doesn't filter content.
Any time an ISP pulls a redirection stunt like this, don't complain to their technicians: write a polite little note to their board of directors, or to their technical director, asking whether the shareholders understand that they're risking operating a corporation without legal "pure carrier status" protection. This is potentially a "shareholder alert" situation. Does the company's prospectus inform shareholders that the company is operating outside the usual "dumb carrier" rules?
If they're making extra money on the side by stealing Google business, by "diverting the flow", ask them if their legal department has estimated how much they stand to lose if they get sued. Not by Google, but by the mother of some kid that got murdered after meeting someone they shouldn't from an internet chatroom.
Simple "carrier" ISP's don't edit for a reason. By deliberately firewalling themselves off from editorial powers, they give themselves a degree of immunity from being liable for what they carry. That's not something you throw away lightly. And if I was the CEO of another ISP, I'd be wanting to ring the CEO of this ISP, and ask them what they hell they thought they were doing, and whether they were trying to bring down the entire industry.
Well, an iPhone/iPad isn't exactly the most macho-looking bit of hi-technology, is it?
Every time I see a woman carrying an iPhone, it seemed to be bulked up with big chunky covers and accessories, presumably because otherwise it just looks too girlie.
If you look at it, and track back the design vocabulary of the back and the rim and the little round button, the design ethos is essentially classic ladies jewelery. The silver-backed iPod Touch looks like what you'd expect a Chanel silver-backed ladies' hairbrush to look like with the bristles removed.
It's all a bit Paris Hilton.
Agreed. This particular news story isn't directly relevant to the "dark matter" debate.
Mmm ... alternatively, if there's no dark matter, that'd suggest that Einstein's general theory isn't totally reliable for calculating galaxy-scale gravitational effects. In that case, there's no guarantee that our current GR calculations are correct for the lensing effects associated with the large-scale distortions that might arise when two galaxies collide, either. Gravitational shockwaves associated with forced deceleration (due to collision) aren't stopped by EM radiation pressure, and should keep moving, too.
So we still have at least two interpretations available. If we assume that Einstein's general theory is perfect, then perhaps we have to invoke something very like dark matter to explain why the predictions //appear// to fail for rotating (and colliding) galaxies. On the other hand, if we were to assume that there was no such thing as dark matter, and that Einstein's general theory was simply failing, period, then the failure in the collisional case as well as the rotating case might just mean that the theory is failing //consistently//.
Glucose-fructose syrup does sometimes show up on ingredients, though ... I've seen it listed on dirt-cheap "value" lemon curd (at something like 25p a jar). It's just not as common here (other than on imported soft drinks).
I had a cheap (circa ~GBP 15) Samsung MP3 player that someone gave away as part of a deal. It didn't function as a USB storage device, and had its own special syncing and indexing software that ran on the host computer. Like Apple.
Seems that that's why Samsung had to get rid of the stock by jobbing it out to a company that used them as promotional giveaways. People kept bringing them back to the shops and demanding refunds, on the grounds that a fifteen quid USB MP3 player wasn't fit for sale if it didn't show up as a standard storage device when you plugged it into a USB port.
Samsung them brought out a firmware update that let you ignore its expensive proprietary synching and indexing software and just dump folders of music onto it, and people were happy (other than the Samsung engineers, who still seemed convinced that their approach was better, and a little put out by the threats of physical violence from aggrieved customers).
I thought, "Well, I'm not going to be piggybacking on THAT".
On the Palm platform there was a proper set of synchronisation protocols, so that an app could synch its files to a parent computer regardless of the file format. On the iPhone, the necessary infrastructure for sychronisation isn't in place, so the only things that get synched are a restricted set decided in advance by Apple.
If a platform doesn't have a properly developed synchronisation system, then, yes, the ability to use it as a USB drive toload up and resave files is a nice workaround ... which the iPhone doesn't have. Or you could put your data onto a card slot ... which the iPhone doesn't have. Or you could synchronise and send contacts, data and files via bluetooth ... which AFAIK, doesn't work on the ippies (at least, not with anything I own). I haven't had a chance to try this with a pair of ippies, but certainly with an ippy-and-something-else, the bluetooth only seems to be there to support bluetooth headphones, the ippy will recognise and connect to all the other bluetooth devices and puters I have, but it won't exchange datafiles with them.
Maybe if you jailbreak it you should be able to load up and resave your files that way, but I haven't tried that yet.
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Now, on the plus side, one of the things that they're supposed to be changing with the iPad , is that the iTunes synching software should also let you synch files whose suffixes correspond to the major MS Office file formats, plus PDF, rtf and txt, and probably a few ebook formats, so with the iPad you now will be able to plug into your host machine, click "sync", and all those files (if they're in the correct folder location) will be copied onto your machine, to go. It'd be nice if they retrospectively added that freedom to iTunes when its used with an iPhone oriPod Touch, but ... we'll see.
I suppose that you might be able to fool iTunes into allowing any file type onto the iPhone if you, say, had a zip folder and renamed it with a JPG suffix and secreted it in your pictures folder ... but I don't know whether or not iTunes checks the internal file structure of things it synchs, for legality.
I suppose that what you could try to do is write a transfer app that uses the iphone camera to OCR what's on a second iPhone's screen, or you could perhaps get the screen to flash and use that as a low-bandwidth replacement for infra-red transfer. There's an external camera interface accessory for the iPad that gives USB and cardreader support, but since they're not saying exactly what the specs are, it leaves open the possibility that it might only have read-only support, and/or might only support the same restricted set of allowed formats that's registered with iTunes.
I'm going to have to try the jailbreaking route soon, partly because I've just had to uninstall iTunes from my WinXP PC - something in the iTunes suite (perhaps Bonjour?) was making Explorer use 30-100% of my processor ticks even without any apple gear present. God knows what it was up to, but I don't think I can afford to have the iTunes software installed on a PC that I actually do work on. I guess that if you use a Mac, more of these gripes will have been ironed out.