Also note the recently published paper on this topic, "Doug Zongker, "Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken", Annals of Improbable Research, 12(5) September-October 2006, 16-21, and the associated presentation.
I don't know where linguists get their ideas from but I wish I had a supplier:-P
Reading the law in question is the easiest way of finding out what the law says. Look up the references if you feel the need to prove their accuracy. What is there to 'prove'?
Now, as to how the law is applied, you will note 'they must convince a magistrate that...' It's pretty damn easy to convince a magistrate that someone's watching TV without a licence - probably too easy, thus your 'previous cases'. If you have evidence that it is applied inappropriately, taking it to your local MP would be a decent first step.
I don't think it's very productive to offer as fact folk-redefinitions of a law according to previous abuses of it. This sort of 'everybody knows...' stuff simply ensures that people do not gain any clear understanding of their rights.
Read the Wireless Telegraphy Act and its fellows before telling us what the law says.
"... instal or use any apparatus for wireless telegraphy except under the authority of a licence in that behalf granted by the Postmaster General...". ... such apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving television programme services, as defined by section 2.--(4) of the Broadcasting Act 1990
So to prosecute, they must convince a magistrate that you used equipment for the purpose of receiving television programme services without a licence. Which is why you can cheerfully own a TV minus licence for the purposes of DVD watching or PlayStation gaming, etc.
Not all that unusual. I was visiting a water treatment/chlorination plant in the UK a few years ago (for complex reasons related to archaeology rather than anything particularly on-topic, so it is likely that we got the Cliff Notes version). They pointed to the computer that controls the water chlorination and said 'we control this via this modem right here'. Presumably there are all sorts of security controls around actually accessing via said modem, given that we are talking about a PC controlling the quality of the drinking water supplied to maybe 20,000 people.
This doesn't matter very much anyway. TFA seems to have confused 'you can connect to it remotely via some mechanism or another' and 'anyone connected to the internet can just ssh right in/DDOS it'. FUD.
Have to completely agree with you here. I can't hear the term 'mashup' without cringing. However, my top least favorite damn fool term of recent years is 'intertwingularity'. It's not that you can't use it in a charmingly vague and self-deprecating sort of a fashion, but that very often people don't. They use it in all seriousness along with words like 'noosphere' and 'ubicomp' in the hope that the result will impress the natives. Which, disturbingly often, it does.
Einstein was the older sibling, as I think is Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler and Robert Oppenheimer - doing fine so far. On the other hand (and merely AFAIK), Blaise Pascal was the second son, Dirac was the second son, Niels Bohr was the second of three, Faraday appears to have been well into the plurals and Ernest Rutherford was the fourth-born child. Van de Graaff had three older brothers, all of whom were into football rather than physics.
All of which may go to suggest only that seventh sons don't necessarily need to sell their scientific calculator and resign themselves to brainless toil quite yet.
As a possibly amusing postscript, I just heard that my 9500, which has been given to Nokia Service Centre no less than eight months ago for the Infamous Hinge Crack problem, was finally replaced by a refurbished model after seven or eight trips to and from the main Nokia Repair Centre in the UK.
I went to pick up said refurbished model at the service centre. The staff there (who are very good, by the way; the one great thing to come out of this whole mess is that I've found the definitive excellent mobile repair shop) unwrapped the replacement, opened the phone - and you probably wouldn't believe this if I told you, so here's photographic evidence (compare with stock photo).
Notice something missing? A certain lack of QWERTY?:-P
Bear in mind that Nokia are aware I've been waiting since November for this repair to be completed. They have accepted that the repair should be done under warranty, and that the phone's warranty is current. They have even released a bulletin stating that this sort of repair should be covered by warranty, because this problem occurs so frequently. They are aware that trading standards have been contacted on this issue. And yet they still send back this diamond-plated 'fuck you'.
As far as I am concerned, Apple will find it difficult not to eclipse the competition in terms of customer service:-)
why an annoucement about a book that has not even been written makes the front page...
Except that the book in question was written ten years ago:
Gaiman said that in 1996 he began working with Michael Reaves on the idea for a story "about a boy who finds himself in the middle of a war between two equally powerful forces, who joins a super-team consisting of versions of himself from different alternate realities to try and maintain the cosmic balance." Soon after, the idea was pitched to DreamWorks and other studios, but was turned down.
Several years later, the duo wrote the novel based on their original idea and once again, pitched it to studios which rejected it. Last year, the authors sent their manuscript to Harper Childrens...
In other words, they wrote an idea, discovered nobody bought it, waited a few years, wrote the novel, discovered nobody bought it, waited, pitched it again and somebody bought it. Therefore it has in fact been written quite some time ago.
FWIW I am looking forward to it, having enjoyed several of Gaiman's novels in the past. Gaiman in the style of a Heinlein juvenile is a nice idea (given that a favourite book of mine as a kid was 'Has Space Suit:Will Travel'). But I'm also not sure why this makes the front page of Slashdot. He announced the news a few days ago on his blog. Maybe this is just Slashdot's way of catching up with the RSS feed.
Amusing. Just as I got around to previewing my response to this comment, my browser crashed:-P
In short: I'm not on any 'side'. I was responding to "mobile browsing will become indispensable to ordinary people in a way that it isn't now (I never use the web on my Winmobile phone because it sucks). If it is indispensable, then site designers will have to code for it".
FWIW I would be happy if the iPhone did force standards-compliant sites to be written. In fact I would be overjoyed if the W3C took to a little light guerrilla warfare in the fight to persuade people not to code IE-only. I just don't think that the iPhone, specifically, is likely to become a major factor in the decision.
I should have pointed out that we were not asking people to code in anything unusual for our device; it merely used the standard of the time, and was exaggeratedly bad at rendering crap HTML. That was pretty much our SDK: please write decent standard-compliant HTML (version 3.something); you're allowed basic JavaScript -- and if you can make it look good on 800x600 that would be ideal. Not exactly proprietary.
At the time, and this was around 98-99, there were a whole lot of very non-compliant pages around. My impression is that it is a whole lot easier to write browsers that deal with compliant content than browsers that can rebuild bad HTML, Myspace HTML if you like. I see two cases here: either you're right that the $ARBITRARY_SITE that you see on your Mac is identical to your iPhone browsing experience, in which case 1) Apple are brilliant, 2) I want one and 3) nobody will move towards standards-compliance for that reason, or $ARBITRARY_SITE will differ visually or in functionality according to platform. If the latter is true then, as I say, I'm not convinced that the iPhone will be motivation enough for designers to code any differently. I very much doubt that it will be a major factor in any such decision.
As a footnote I doubt very much that the user experience will be all that close on the iPhone and on the Mac. Different hardware, different interface, different screen size - they may both be comfortable but they will differ. To overhype is to risk disappointment. Too much is down to the site developer to make this sort of hype particularly safe. What does standards-compliance really guarantee? However, I would like to discover that Apple can provide the perfect mobile browsing experience because, frankly, if they can I'd buy one.
Many years ago I worked for a major European telecommunications company who were convinced that, as they were as yet the only people offering a 'user-friendly web browser/phone', they were therefore in control of their market niche and ought to do rather well. Theirs was the definitive browsing experience.
It didn't fit well with the de facto state of the art at that time, and didn't display all those pages too well at all. The company was aware of this; therefore they 'reached out' to those web publishers who were seen as particularly relevant for the user group of said web browser/phone, and offered what was in effect SDK documentation: 'this is how to optimise user experience'. For some reason, almost nobody ever bothered to read said documentation. The general attitude was very much 'who cares about the id10ts who wasted their hard earned on this embedded crap?'
From this experience I took several lessons. Never assume you're a major enough player in the market to force anybody to do anything, unless you own 80% or more of it, and even then, you would be lucky. Very few people code for specific platforms, even where money is waved in front of them. Nobody except the users cares about user experience, except where it impacts on the bottom line (and in the case of a phone, you've already signed a contract before you start to learn about the little bugs). If you are going to offer any sort of guaranteed user experience, you would be best advised to ensure that you do not guarantee it on third party data.
At last year's WWW conf., there was a panel between various mobile web representatives discussing why the mobile web had not yet taken off. One (the Orange guy, I think?) pointed out that extremely high expectations had built up around mobile browsing. It wasn't so much that the current experience as of today's Nokia smartphone is particularly bad - it's more that there was a huge mismatch between expectation and experience. I get the impression that Apple really ought to talk to guys like this before they publicise the iPhone platform much further. They are making commitments that reality may not reflect -- which is pretty much a classic way of setting yourself up for 'limited success' in this arena.
Seriously - I've only ever had Nokia phones and until three years ago I was extremely enthusiastic about them. However, the problem we've had with these phones is documented and occurs commonly. It wouldn't be a big issue if anybody was interested in providing customer support for the things, but frankly, they're not.
It would make sense for Apple to be cautious about their sales/after-sales care approach in the UK at least.
I say this as someone who bought a couple of upper-crust Nokias (price comparable to estimates of the iPhone's cost) a couple of years ago and had no end of problems. It isn't that the hardware sucked, though there were several design flaws, but it's not like Apple are immune from those. It wasn't even that the software sucked. It was the sheer level of bureaucratic incompetence related to every after-sales interaction. Guarantees that mysteriously lapse on the UK guarantee lookup system. Phones replaced by grey market alternatives shipped in from Saudi Arabia that mysteriously don't qualify under the warranty at all. It is almost entirely impossible to communicate with Nokia themselves. The 'Nokia Shop' system - the Nokia-branded vendor through which these things are bought - are actually Mobile Phones Direct and have no relationship with Nokia at all. And of course the operator from whom one bought the contract holds no apparent responsibility. All this is advantageous to them - call them and tell them your £450 phone has broken and they'll point out that it's just about time for you to renew your contract and, hey, you're eligible for a phone upgrade. It is not in their interest to support the one you've just spent eighteen months paying for.
If I were trying to sell an upmarket mobile phone, especially one as expensive as the iPhone is likely to be, I'd be desperately looking for a way to handle all this which wouldn't equate Apple with the open invitation to open a case with Trading Standards that is the UK mobile industry. For whatever reason, Apple currently have a fairly good name when it comes to expensive-but-neat gadgets. Nothing loses the customer's trust like trying to figure out who in the system of phone operators, retail outlets and repair centres is responsible for fixing a broken mobile.
If it's not obvious from the above I'm actually rather hoping that Apple do take some responsibility for this product; if they do I might be inclined to buy one just to give myself and Trading Standards a break. You know you've got a problem when you discover you've been put on Trading Standards' Christmas card list.
Except that he did contact a lawyer. From the latest post on his blog:
I want to especially thank my excellent lawyer, Adam Gutride, without whose generous moral and legal support I would not have been able to get through the past few months. He put himself at great risk by defending me and, despite this, he insisted on taking the case and invested many hours and much effort into it.
So presumably his decisions were based on advice from said lawyer - unless the lawyer wasn't involved until too late a stage, etc.
It would almost have made sense if you'd meant Violet, though. There was a character in Richmal Crompton's 'Just William' books called Violet Elizabeth, who used to demand to get her own way - something like 'I want an SDK. Get me an SDK or I'll scream and scream until I'm sick'.
So you could always claim to be a closet reader of 1930s schoolkid fiction, who merely has a little quotation aphasia.:-)
I'm wondering if this suicide-attempt-on-film stuff is quite accurate anyway, or if there's an element of urban legend in here. I'm not sure how much it really matters to the main point of the article, but the Guardian had to apologise for making this mistake:
In this article we repeated a series of errors relating to an incident involving a person who, we wrongly said, was shown on CCTV attempting suicide in the centre of Brentwood in Essex. We published a correction and apology relating to the earlier article on August 4 last year. In part, this is what it said: "In fact the CCTV recording showed no evidence of a suicide attempt, but it did show a man carrying a large knife... and it showed the man being disarmed by the police. We accept that and we also accept that the CCTV recording was not sold but released - on the understanding that the individual's identity would be protected - to demonstrate how a potentially dangerous situation could be avoided." We repeat that there was no film of a suicide attempt, Brentwood council did not sell the CCTV footage of the incident, and in addition the police did not calm the person down and rush him to hospital. We repeat our apologies to Brentwood council.
AFAIK, Larry Niven doesn't actually have a PhD in a technical area. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. I believe that Washburn eventually got round to awarding him an honorary doctorate in Letters, but the point stands that had the 80s group worked according to the rules given for this particular group, he would presumably have been rejected as a random writer off the street.
Maybe the PhD isn't the best identifying mark of a fertile imagination...
That would be a pretty fundamental change. At present, the ownership of a TV doesn't require you to pay - you must get a licence only if you use equipment (TV, video, PCI card, whatever) to receive or record broadcast TV. If you don't use it for that, there's no need to get a licence. It's a fine distinction, but one of some importance (IIRC French law works otherwise; just owning something with a tuner requires you to pay the licence).
I see the ghost of Winston Churchill hiding deep in Mr Heckler's speech-writer's soul (always assuming he has a speech-writer, and that such a creature could be said to have such a thing even in the figurative sense)
...we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your ISP, we will firewall it at your PC...
and we will never surrender
Choose the future. Choose frisbee-shaped ergonomics and shopping for hardware in Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazine. Choose restrictive software and operating systems that obfuscate what lies underneath. Choose shouting impotently at a multimedia interface that knows what you want far better than you do. Choose software that spends your money for you, wants equal rights and can only be made to work by flattering its (bad) poetry. Choose electronic rebellion from your fridge, your toilet and your television. Choose news, censored by your intelligent agent to suit your delicate sensibilities, and by the FBI to suit their political agenda. Choose slashdot future. Choose life...
but why would I want to do a thing like that?
Well now, I wouldn't entirely agree with that. I'd totally agree that if this water was prone to evaporating entirely then there could certainly be a problem, but I wouldn't think that merely freezing would be so annoying- it seems that simple organisms can normally survive merely being frozen.
So if you had organisms that had evolved there previously, and they were relatively simple creatures (anything up to bacteria, I'd guess, nothing really sophisticated) they would survive being frozen.
I'd really like to meet a Martian bacterium. Anything that could survive on this dehydrated, frozen planet (humidity equivalent of a hundredth of a millimeter of rainfall according to NASA) must eat sulphur and iron oxides for breakfast...
If there ever was life, I'd expect to find some evidence of it. It's not easy to sterilize anything, assuming it had a chance to evolve in the first place... and even if they are all dead, maybe we'll find them encased in resin somewhere (Jurassic Park II: They're Back, and This Time, They're Martian).
Slashdot Mirror
Reduce the language to just one word for everything and you'll be fine.
:-P
Linguistics is way ahead of you here...
"I'm a linguist. My job is to make communication simpler. I invented a language with no grammar, no syntax, no ambiguities. In fact, it had only one word: CHICKEN."
Also note the recently published paper on this topic, "Doug Zongker, "Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken", Annals of Improbable Research, 12(5) September-October 2006, 16-21, and the associated presentation.
I don't know where linguists get their ideas from but I wish I had a supplier
Reading the law in question is the easiest way of finding out what the law says. Look up the references if you feel the need to prove their accuracy. What is there to 'prove'?
Now, as to how the law is applied, you will note 'they must convince a magistrate that...' It's pretty damn easy to convince a magistrate that someone's watching TV without a licence - probably too easy, thus your 'previous cases'. If you have evidence that it is applied inappropriately, taking it to your local MP would be a decent first step.
I don't think it's very productive to offer as fact folk-redefinitions of a law according to previous abuses of it. This sort of 'everybody knows...' stuff simply ensures that people do not gain any clear understanding of their rights.
Read the Wireless Telegraphy Act and its fellows before telling us what the law says.
...". ... such apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving television programme services, as defined by section 2.--(4) of the Broadcasting Act 1990
"... instal or use any apparatus for wireless telegraphy except under the authority of a licence in that behalf granted by the Postmaster General
So to prosecute, they must convince a magistrate that you used equipment for the purpose of receiving television programme services without a licence. Which is why you can cheerfully own a TV minus licence for the purposes of DVD watching or PlayStation gaming, etc.
Would that be Burt Rutan, or a range of cheerful woven-palm furniture particularly popular for the modern conservatory?
And then I looked up this mistake on Google and found out just how common it is.
Oh well. Can't do anything these days without composite materials...
Not all that unusual. I was visiting a water treatment/chlorination plant in the UK a few years ago (for complex reasons related to archaeology rather than anything particularly on-topic, so it is likely that we got the Cliff Notes version). They pointed to the computer that controls the water chlorination and said 'we control this via this modem right here'. Presumably there are all sorts of security controls around actually accessing via said modem, given that we are talking about a PC controlling the quality of the drinking water supplied to maybe 20,000 people.
This doesn't matter very much anyway. TFA seems to have confused 'you can connect to it remotely via some mechanism or another' and 'anyone connected to the internet can just ssh right in/DDOS it'. FUD.
Have to completely agree with you here. I can't hear the term 'mashup' without cringing. However, my top least favorite damn fool term of recent years is 'intertwingularity'. It's not that you can't use it in a charmingly vague and self-deprecating sort of a fashion, but that very often people don't. They use it in all seriousness along with words like 'noosphere' and 'ubicomp' in the hope that the result will impress the natives. Which, disturbingly often, it does.
Just to commit a plural of anecdotes error:
Einstein was the older sibling, as I think is Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler and Robert Oppenheimer - doing fine so far. On the other hand (and merely AFAIK), Blaise Pascal was the second son, Dirac was the second son, Niels Bohr was the second of three, Faraday appears to have been well into the plurals and Ernest Rutherford was the fourth-born child. Van de Graaff had three older brothers, all of whom were into football rather than physics.
All of which may go to suggest only that seventh sons don't necessarily need to sell their scientific calculator and resign themselves to brainless toil quite yet.
As a possibly amusing postscript, I just heard that my 9500, which has been given to Nokia Service Centre no less than eight months ago for the Infamous Hinge Crack problem, was finally replaced by a refurbished model after seven or eight trips to and from the main Nokia Repair Centre in the UK.
:-P
:-)
I went to pick up said refurbished model at the service centre. The staff there (who are very good, by the way; the one great thing to come out of this whole mess is that I've found the definitive excellent mobile repair shop) unwrapped the replacement, opened the phone - and you probably wouldn't believe this if I told you, so here's photographic evidence (compare with stock photo).
Notice something missing? A certain lack of QWERTY?
Bear in mind that Nokia are aware I've been waiting since November for this repair to be completed. They have accepted that the repair should be done under warranty, and that the phone's warranty is current. They have even released a bulletin stating that this sort of repair should be covered by warranty, because this problem occurs so frequently. They are aware that trading standards have been contacted on this issue. And yet they still send back this diamond-plated 'fuck you'.
As far as I am concerned, Apple will find it difficult not to eclipse the competition in terms of customer service
why an annoucement about a book that has not even been written makes the front page...
Except that the book in question was written ten years ago:
Gaiman said that in 1996 he began working with Michael Reaves on the idea for a story "about a boy who finds himself in the middle of a war between two equally powerful forces, who joins a super-team consisting of versions of himself from different alternate realities to try and maintain the cosmic balance." Soon after, the idea was pitched to DreamWorks and other studios, but was turned down.
Several years later, the duo wrote the novel based on their original idea and once again, pitched it to studios which rejected it. Last year, the authors sent their manuscript to Harper Childrens...
In other words, they wrote an idea, discovered nobody bought it, waited a few years, wrote the novel, discovered nobody bought it, waited, pitched it again and somebody bought it. Therefore it has in fact been written quite some time ago.
FWIW I am looking forward to it, having enjoyed several of Gaiman's novels in the past. Gaiman in the style of a Heinlein juvenile is a nice idea (given that a favourite book of mine as a kid was 'Has Space Suit:Will Travel'). But I'm also not sure why this makes the front page of Slashdot. He announced the news a few days ago on his blog. Maybe this is just Slashdot's way of catching up with the RSS feed.
Amusing. Just as I got around to previewing my response to this comment, my browser crashed :-P
In short: I'm not on any 'side'. I was responding to "mobile browsing will become indispensable to ordinary people in a way that it isn't now (I never use the web on my Winmobile phone because it sucks). If it is indispensable, then site designers will have to code for it".
FWIW I would be happy if the iPhone did force standards-compliant sites to be written. In fact I would be overjoyed if the W3C took to a little light guerrilla warfare in the fight to persuade people not to code IE-only. I just don't think that the iPhone, specifically, is likely to become a major factor in the decision.
I should have pointed out that we were not asking people to code in anything unusual for our device; it merely used the standard of the time, and was exaggeratedly bad at rendering crap HTML. That was pretty much our SDK: please write decent standard-compliant HTML (version 3.something); you're allowed basic JavaScript -- and if you can make it look good on 800x600 that would be ideal. Not exactly proprietary.
At the time, and this was around 98-99, there were a whole lot of very non-compliant pages around. My impression is that it is a whole lot easier to write browsers that deal with compliant content than browsers that can rebuild bad HTML, Myspace HTML if you like. I see two cases here: either you're right that the $ARBITRARY_SITE that you see on your Mac is identical to your iPhone browsing experience, in which case 1) Apple are brilliant, 2) I want one and 3) nobody will move towards standards-compliance for that reason, or $ARBITRARY_SITE will differ visually or in functionality according to platform. If the latter is true then, as I say, I'm not convinced that the iPhone will be motivation enough for designers to code any differently. I very much doubt that it will be a major factor in any such decision.
As a footnote I doubt very much that the user experience will be all that close on the iPhone and on the Mac. Different hardware, different interface, different screen size - they may both be comfortable but they will differ. To overhype is to risk disappointment. Too much is down to the site developer to make this sort of hype particularly safe. What does standards-compliance really guarantee? However, I would like to discover that Apple can provide the perfect mobile browsing experience because, frankly, if they can I'd buy one.
I think this is unlikely.
Many years ago I worked for a major European telecommunications company who were convinced that, as they were as yet the only people offering a 'user-friendly web browser/phone', they were therefore in control of their market niche and ought to do rather well. Theirs was the definitive browsing experience.
It didn't fit well with the de facto state of the art at that time, and didn't display all those pages too well at all. The company was aware of this; therefore they 'reached out' to those web publishers who were seen as particularly relevant for the user group of said web browser/phone, and offered what was in effect SDK documentation: 'this is how to optimise user experience'. For some reason, almost nobody ever bothered to read said documentation. The general attitude was very much 'who cares about the id10ts who wasted their hard earned on this embedded crap?'
From this experience I took several lessons. Never assume you're a major enough player in the market to force anybody to do anything, unless you own 80% or more of it, and even then, you would be lucky. Very few people code for specific platforms, even where money is waved in front of them. Nobody except the users cares about user experience, except where it impacts on the bottom line (and in the case of a phone, you've already signed a contract before you start to learn about the little bugs). If you are going to offer any sort of guaranteed user experience, you would be best advised to ensure that you do not guarantee it on third party data.
At last year's WWW conf., there was a panel between various mobile web representatives discussing why the mobile web had not yet taken off. One (the Orange guy, I think?) pointed out that extremely high expectations had built up around mobile browsing. It wasn't so much that the current experience as of today's Nokia smartphone is particularly bad - it's more that there was a huge mismatch between expectation and experience. I get the impression that Apple really ought to talk to guys like this before they publicise the iPhone platform much further. They are making commitments that reality may not reflect -- which is pretty much a classic way of setting yourself up for 'limited success' in this arena.
Then you are lucky.
Seriously - I've only ever had Nokia phones and until three years ago I was extremely enthusiastic about them. However, the problem we've had with these phones is documented and occurs commonly. It wouldn't be a big issue if anybody was interested in providing customer support for the things, but frankly, they're not.
I still like their phones, though.
It would make sense for Apple to be cautious about their sales/after-sales care approach in the UK at least.
I say this as someone who bought a couple of upper-crust Nokias (price comparable to estimates of the iPhone's cost) a couple of years ago and had no end of problems. It isn't that the hardware sucked, though there were several design flaws, but it's not like Apple are immune from those. It wasn't even that the software sucked. It was the sheer level of bureaucratic incompetence related to every after-sales interaction. Guarantees that mysteriously lapse on the UK guarantee lookup system. Phones replaced by grey market alternatives shipped in from Saudi Arabia that mysteriously don't qualify under the warranty at all. It is almost entirely impossible to communicate with Nokia themselves. The 'Nokia Shop' system - the Nokia-branded vendor through which these things are bought - are actually Mobile Phones Direct and have no relationship with Nokia at all. And of course the operator from whom one bought the contract holds no apparent responsibility. All this is advantageous to them - call them and tell them your £450 phone has broken and they'll point out that it's just about time for you to renew your contract and, hey, you're eligible for a phone upgrade. It is not in their interest to support the one you've just spent eighteen months paying for.
If I were trying to sell an upmarket mobile phone, especially one as expensive as the iPhone is likely to be, I'd be desperately looking for a way to handle all this which wouldn't equate Apple with the open invitation to open a case with Trading Standards that is the UK mobile industry. For whatever reason, Apple currently have a fairly good name when it comes to expensive-but-neat gadgets. Nothing loses the customer's trust like trying to figure out who in the system of phone operators, retail outlets and repair centres is responsible for fixing a broken mobile.
If it's not obvious from the above I'm actually rather hoping that Apple do take some responsibility for this product; if they do I might be inclined to buy one just to give myself and Trading Standards a break. You know you've got a problem when you discover you've been put on Trading Standards' Christmas card list.
Except that he did contact a lawyer. From the latest post on his blog:
I want to especially thank my excellent lawyer, Adam Gutride, without whose generous moral and legal support I would not have been able to get through the past few months. He put himself at great risk by defending me and, despite this, he insisted on taking the case and invested many hours and much effort into it.
So presumably his decisions were based on advice from said lawyer - unless the lawyer wasn't involved until too late a stage, etc.
It would almost have made sense if you'd meant Violet, though. There was a character in Richmal Crompton's 'Just William' books called Violet Elizabeth, who used to demand to get her own way - something like 'I want an SDK. Get me an SDK or I'll scream and scream until I'm sick'.
:-)
So you could always claim to be a closet reader of 1930s schoolkid fiction, who merely has a little quotation aphasia.
Heh :-)
... and it showed the man being disarmed by the police. We accept that and we also accept that the CCTV recording was not sold but released - on the understanding that the individual's identity would be protected - to demonstrate how a potentially dangerous situation could be avoided." We repeat that there was no film of a suicide attempt, Brentwood council did not sell the CCTV footage of the incident, and in addition the police did not calm the person down and rush him to hospital. We repeat our apologies to Brentwood council.
I'm wondering if this suicide-attempt-on-film stuff is quite accurate anyway, or if there's an element of urban legend in here. I'm not sure how much it really matters to the main point of the article, but the Guardian had to apologise for making this mistake:
In this article we repeated a series of errors relating to an incident involving a person who, we wrongly said, was shown on CCTV attempting suicide in the centre of Brentwood in Essex. We published a correction and apology relating to the earlier article on August 4 last year. In part, this is what it said: "In fact the CCTV recording showed no evidence of a suicide attempt, but it did show a man carrying a large knife
This page goes into the case in some detail.
AFAIK, Larry Niven doesn't actually have a PhD in a technical area. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. I believe that Washburn eventually got round to awarding him an honorary doctorate in Letters, but the point stands that had the 80s group worked according to the rules given for this particular group, he would presumably have been rejected as a random writer off the street.
Maybe the PhD isn't the best identifying mark of a fertile imagination...
That would be a pretty fundamental change. At present, the ownership of a TV doesn't require you to pay - you must get a licence only if you use equipment (TV, video, PCI card, whatever) to receive or record broadcast TV. If you don't use it for that, there's no need to get a licence. It's a fine distinction, but one of some importance (IIRC French law works otherwise; just owning something with a tuner requires you to pay the licence).
That mode of interaction seems oddly familiar. Would that be an online (virtual) automat? Buttons next to each item and all.
;-)
Presumably the patents on the automat are well and truly time-expired. So it's definitely nothing like that at all
Choose the future. Choose frisbee-shaped ergonomics and shopping for hardware in Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazine. Choose restrictive software and operating systems that obfuscate what lies underneath. Choose shouting impotently at a multimedia interface that knows what you want far better than you do. Choose software that spends your money for you, wants equal rights and can only be made to work by flattering its (bad) poetry. Choose electronic rebellion from your fridge, your toilet and your television. Choose news, censored by your intelligent agent to suit your delicate sensibilities, and by the FBI to suit their political agenda. Choose slashdot future. Choose life... but why would I want to do a thing like that?
So if you had organisms that had evolved there previously, and they were relatively simple creatures (anything up to bacteria, I'd guess, nothing really sophisticated) they would survive being frozen.
I'd really like to meet a Martian bacterium. Anything that could survive on this dehydrated, frozen planet (humidity equivalent of a hundredth of a millimeter of rainfall according to NASA) must eat sulphur and iron oxides for breakfast...
If there ever was life, I'd expect to find some evidence of it. It's not easy to sterilize anything, assuming it had a chance to evolve in the first place... and even if they are all dead, maybe we'll find them encased in resin somewhere (Jurassic Park II: They're Back, and This Time, They're Martian).