Elite (1980's 8-bit wireframe space trading game) used only 48 bytes to carry names, descriptions, positions and trading data on hundreds of star systems spread across 8 galaxies (see Elite Faq question 13).
Elite used Fibonacci Numbers with a eight 6-byte seeds, plus a few dozen bytes of look-up tables, to achive this. The principle was very similar to MojoWorld's use of fractals, but Fibonacci series are considerably quicker to process, particularly on an early 80's home computer.
Reality Master 101 Agnostic: You take the position that the existence of God is not knowable. This IMO is the most intellectually honest position.
No, an Agnostic is someone who takes the position that the existence of god(s) is irrelevent. I'm a millitant agnostic evangelist myself (although I put down Jedi Knight on the census to make a point- that asking a non-provable question on a census is a waste of time).
Think about it. All the useful bits of religion are actually morality and philosophy- "stealing is bad, being nice is good". All the useless bits are the theology and myths- "god is a bull with wings, god created Earth out of nothing" etc.
Agnostics know that you can keep the morals and the philosophy whilst ditching all the fluff about magical beings and supernatural forces.
For instance, I think that stealing (as in beer) is wrong because it is detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. I don't need fear or love of a magical being to re-inforce that understanding.
Suppose the existence or non-existence of god(s) were finally, definitively proven.
If a god was known to exist, would that mean you would suddenly stop stealing? Of course not, because you didn't steal anyway because you already knew it was bad, for other reasons.
If gods were known not to exist, would that mean you would suddenlty start stealing? Again, of course not. You don't steal because you know it's wrong for other reasons, not because you have some fear or love of a god.
Therefore we have proven that the existence of gods is irrelevent.
in modern life in general typing is becoming more and more of a critical skill unless you wanna stuff tacos for a living
Surely exactly the opposite is the whole point of the article?
The claim is that sufficient alternatives to keyboard input exist, not that sufficient alternatives to using a computer exist.
Which having seen my friend's ponderous progress with an on-screen keyboard and voice recognition, I have to say that's also bollocks, but that still isn't the same as what you were saying.
Yes, it is different where I live.
on
Adobe Backs Down
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· Score: 2
lildogie: Is it any different where you live?
If you mean "do you live in a country that doesn't jail people for explaining why some types of encryption are weak" then the answer is YES, it is different where I live.
If you mean "do you live in a country where reverse engineering is legal" then the answer is YES, it is different where I live.
Yes, it is different where I live.
How very ironic that your American forefathers left my country of Britain over three hundred years ago because they feared prosecution over free speech, yet now I am frightened of visiting your country because I fear prosecution over free speech.
Fuck me, yes. Yes, yes, yes. It is different where I live.
Those of us who were born and live here have the duty to try and improve the place.
Yer not wrong there, mate.
What worries me is that you (plural; Americans as a whole) don't seem to be doing a very good job of it.
America, the country of free trade, is preventing my company from trading freely with your country, because I'm not allowed to visit my customer and explain why they might be about to choose a poor copy protection system.
That isn't just YOUR problem. It's mine too.
But I can't vote in your country. So all I can do is tell my boss that I can't visit our customer, and just hope that the message gets through.
You have *no* idea how helpless this makes me feel.
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Boycott America- Not Worth The Risk Of Visiting
on
Adobe Backs Down
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· Score: 3
Ephraim: A human being, through no fault of his own
I'd say it was his fault.
It was his fault for visiting a country with a repressive regime.
As an agnostic, if I visited the Iran, I would expect to be punished.
As a programmer who practices reverse engineering, if I visted the USA, I would expect to be punished.
I don't see what the big deal is. I just have to refuse to go to the USA until they repeal the DCMA. There are a whole host of third world countries with daft laws to prosecute foriegners. The USA is just another to add to this list.
Heck, I heard from a friend that they still practice the death penalty over there! What do you expect from those types of countries? Duh.
Unfortunately I work for a UK software house that has a large US oil conglomerate as a customer; I have previously had to travel to the US on business, and I am expected to travel there again soon. I'll just have to say no.
Even if it means loosing my job, it simply isn't worth going to the US to risk the chance of being imprisoned.
Laserjet: I would get a little runabout boat and do some fishing when time permits
Have you SEEN the North Sea?
It's very cold. Fall in it and you generally die within hours. Usually they don't bother with search parties after 4 hours.
It's very wet. In addition to the billions of litres of water involved in the actual sea itself, it is almost always raining a storm out there.
It's very grey. This is not a sunny part of the world. British people go on foriegn holidays a lot for a damn good reason.
And, most importantly...
It's not very full of fish. The fish stocks are so depleted that fishing is banned for most of the year (dwindling fish stocks caused partly by industrial pollution, and party by industrial over-fishing- god only knows how the industrial fishing vessels get away with it, can you imagine industrial "hunting" of cattle?). You may think that Sealand's independence protects you from this, but I can assure you that various European naval fishing patrol vessels, manned by short-tempered teenagers operating mounted heavy artillery, will think otherwise.
This is a cold, wet, grey, industrial and environmentally shattered part of the world. The North Sea is not somewhere you go on holiday.
--
What anthropologists say when they don't know
on
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devphil "Hey, there's nothing to the west that we can see; it's gotta be better than what we know right now, let's invent legends about it." Okay, so I would've made a lousy anthropologist.:-)
Judging by the way most anthropologists and archaeologists classify anything they can't understand as "Religious Significance", I'd say you have a very fine grasp of the subject.
In a few thousand years' time, I expect most of the freebie merchandise handed out at computer exhibitions will be classified as being of "Religious Significance". All hail the mighty Dust Puppy and praise to the Novelty Mobile Phone Holder.
One wonders what anthropologists and archaeologists would make of an entirely agnostic or aetheist society. Speaking as an agnostic myself, I really irks me that long after my death, people will be slapping "Religious Significance" labels over my property.
Erm, aren't the GPL etc. governed by US law? And since when did China subscribe to that?
It just goes to show that anything other than PUBLIC DOMAIN is not truly free information. And, more importantly, anything other than Public Domain is unenforcable in an international environment such as the Internet.
The GPL isn't worth the paper it's written on. It presumes a whole heap of US-centric crap which is unenforable outside all but a handful of countries.
That something as US-centric as the GPL could be written by those who style themselves as "pioneers" of the Internet is very telling. They're not pioneers of anything, they're just Uncle Sam apologists trying to enforce the same old Uncle Sam rules in a world that doesn't give a toss about the US.
Brody: what does some flying windows or clouds tell you exactly??
well... if they freeze you know your computer has crashed.
No, it tells you that Windows installs every frickin protocol under the sun when you pop in a new network card, and it just sitting there waiting for a nonexistent DCHP server.
Lally Singh: Linus was just saying that *NON-INFORMATIONAL* messages are just a waste, and that they shouldn't be done. Information related to DEBUGGING is logged. Error messages are still printed. Relax and get over it.
Well, Linus is wrong.
Error messages only occur when there's an errror.
What if there's no error, what if it just HANGS on boot?
How the hell are you supposed to diagnose a hang if you can't see what's running?
Depends how you define "commercial". Sure, the Univac 1 was the first computer built by a company and sold, but the actual computer did not perform commercial transactions- the owners, the US Census Bureau, were a government organisation, not a business.
The computer that performed the world's first regular routine office job was the LEO Lyons Electric Office in the UK. As well as the Lyons catering firm, LEOs were used by Ford.
This pilot episode was rejected and never broadcast.
This pilot episode is now being webcast. There are still no plans to broadcast the episode on radio.
There are no official plans for a new Dr Who series on TV nor radio, nor another film, although as always with Dr Who there is plenty of speculation.
If you have digital terrestrial TV (OnDigital), cable or satellite you can catch old episodes of Doctor Who on UK Gold at 8am on Sundays (last Sunday's episode was Invisible Enemy which featured Tom Baker, leather-clad Leela and the first appearance from K9).
Sodakar: Small island + tons of antennas = great coverage
Works for us here in the UK too!
The rest of the western world really does see the USA as the poor man of the current wave of wireless technology (I'm not talking about 3G, I'm talking about what we in Europe and Japan can do RIGHT NOW). You don't have 95%+ GSM coverage, you still use analogue phones, you pay for incoming calls, you can't get ISDN in rural areas, you are way behind on GPRS/UMTS, you don't have digital terrestrial television through an aerial...
What really brought it home was on a recent trip to Houston where, during a business meeting, the boss of Very Important US Company said to me "Imagine if you could follow a football game, being able to dictate to the cameras to follow your favourite football star around the field or switch to the camera behind the goal, on demand."
I looked at him kind of surprised and said "In the UK we can already do this, such services have been available nationwide for nearly two years". His pride seemed to take a bit of a knock.
HOWEVER, what we in the UK, Japan etc. really don't get is the sheer HUGENESS of the USA. The flight from London to Houston brought this home to me- we really don't have a handle on just how big the USA is, and how comparitively tiny its population.
In the UK it would be considered a breach of emergency services if mobile phone coverage was not available on A and M roads (highways and interstates). Not just "a bit annoying"; people would be writing to their local member of parliament complaining about how unsafe this would be. And if mobile 'phone coverage wasn't available in a village of more than 50 people, you can bet there'd be plenty of irate letters to the telcos. 60% of British people (including children) own digital mobile phones. We expect to use them everywhere, including rural areas, not just in towns. Heck, we expect to use mobile phones especially in rural areas. If we need to make an urgent/emergency call in a town, there are phoneboxes; hanging off the side of a rocky hillside or lost in a woodland, there are none.
Oakley's Law: In an emergency, telephone boxes approach zero as wilderness approaches one.
Therefore, the need for wireless communcations in rural areas is far greater than in urban areas.
But in the USA the kind of coverage this would require is simply unrealistic. It's something we can only begin to understand from the window of an aeroplane; most of the USA is empty forest and desert, and nobody lives there.
From a wireless perspective, the USA has more in common with Africa than it does with Europe or the Orient; a few very large cities, mostly on opposite coasts, spread across a vast thinly populated continent.
Yet we in Europe are constantly trying to compare the US wireless experience with ours, and, frankly, have a laugh at the American's expense.
This is just not a fair thing for us to do. The USA has an enormous physical hurdle to overcome before wireless can really take off; and with such a large landmass and relatively thin population (made thinner by concentrating what few people you have in huge mega-cities), there is no way any company or government in it's right mind is going to want to push technology which requires a transmitter every five or ten kilometres for a continent like the Americas or Africa.
As an outsider to the game, and a British citizen, I'm somewhat uneasy about a game that is set in Britannia and a bloke who claims to be Lord British.
Britian is a real place. We don't live in castles and we don't carry swords. Most of us have boring office jobs just like everyone else in the western world.
"Lord" is a real title and denotes a real member of a real government.
I'm sure lots of Americans would be up in arms if I started calling myself "Senator America".
BluedemonX: especially not jiggling bits of female anatomy
So basically you're saying that the inclusion of any female in any action show is sensationalist and that all female action stars are there merely as sex objects?
What a load of chauvanist bollocks!
Breasts do jiggle, even small ones. Get over it. Having breasts doesn't make a woman a bimbo, it makes her a woman.
This is an obvious hoax, maybe just the astronauts winding up the journalists.
What the heck use would a table be in zero/micro gravity?
A cupboard or a drawer, fine. But a table? Why? You can't put things "down" on it, you can't chop anything, mix anything or lay crockery on it.
In the article it is stated that the table is made from aluminium and duct tape so you can't even use it for magnetised items. You can't even use it to play cards or board games.
If the table was made from a more conductive metal for magnets, or covered in some velcro-friendly fluff, fine. But an aluminium table covered in duct table? In space? WHY?
...and it's way beyond time that we introduced a zero-tolerance policy towards *all* religions.
Religions are by their very nature a screwed value system. They demand that you believe things which are neither provable nor logical, and worse than that, demand that you live your life by those non-ratifiable beliefs.
People should stop pointing the finger at the school administration (which thankfully in the US, unlike here in the UK, is refreshingly religion-free), and instead have a good look at parents. Hindu, Christian, Islam or Pagan, it's about time we stamped out this nonsense which is ruining people's lives.
There was a time when the world was ruled by religion- it was called the Dark Ages.
It may be many bad things, but definitely not theft nor burglary.
Theft is the intention to permanently deprive someone of physical property. It does not apply to IP such as grades or computer security.
Burglary is theft plus breaking a physical barrier (eg. picking a lock, smashing a window). Again it does not apply to IP such as grades or computer security.
Us spods need to fight this whole concept of "software theft". Theft permanently deprives someone of something tangible. Software is not tangible, and copying it does not deprive anyone of the original. Grades are not tangible either, and changing his own or others who have paid/asked him does not deprive anyone else of theirs.
Seizer: We have the Data Protection Act in the UK, which requires companies to have your permission before they pass on any data at all about you to third parties
The Data Protection Act would not apply here.
The DPA applies only to personal data held about you, for instance your employee records or purchases made privately on your own credit card.
It doesn't apply to data held about companies or actions taken by employees as part of their work for a company, for instance bulk purchasing PCs for the company offices.
In short the DPA rules when you're using your home address and sucks when you're using your work address.
But since the Microsoft article seems to only be interested in companies breaching site licencing, rather than the odd bedroom warez CD, I don't think anyone really gives a toss.
Cabby: Seems CCTV footage is now covered by the UK Data Protection Act... Mark's taken this to the obvious conclusion by hosting a competition for the most creative short film
The DPA specifically excludes creative works. Any camera owner can refuse to hand over footage of creative works.
From the DPA CCTV guidelines (Introduction), actually linked from the Mark Thomas website (for fuck's sake, he obviously hasn't even bothered to read the DPA guidelines linked from his own site):
It is not intended that the contents of this Code should apply to: -
...
Use of cameras and similar equipment by the broadcast media for the purposes of journalism, or for artistic or literary purposes.
Mark Thomas' journalism is purile schoolboy smart-arse childishness of the most pathetic kind. He constantly claims to be fighting The Man but invariably his shows revolve around taking the piss out of some poor doorman, security guard or receptionist on minimum wage. Mark just makes easy jokes about headlines and never actually bothers to read the small print, as this cock-up demonstrates.
We Britons find it offensive that the US criticises us for having too many cameras whilst at the same time the US is repeatedly mopping the brains of their schoolchildren off the floor.
shunryu: Which minority would this be, according to statistics, Latins outnumber whites, and blacks are just slightly under whites as well. I guess you meant the Chinese, or something.
Um, don't the Chinese make up one quarter of the world's population, the biggest race in the world? China has CITIES bigger than the entire population of the USA. So in what way are the Chinese a minority?
Sealand has no courts, it is a dicatorial monarchy. If you have a problem, you talk to the guy who owns the island (the "Crown Prince") and if he agrees with you, the people who have annoyed you get chucked off the island. That is the entire legal process in Sealand.
Let me try to help you understand:
Suppose the Crown Prince of Sealand passed a law saying that chocolate was illegal in Sealand.
Would that make chocolate illegal in the USA?
NO!!!
Equally, laws made in the USA or as part of an international convention (such as the Berne convention on copyright) do not apply outside the USA or outside those countries which signed up to the convention.
Sealand is not a signatory to the Berne convention.
So, FIRSTLY, there is no law for anyone to sue with and SECONDLY there are no courts to take your case to.
I'd say that makes suing a fairly unlikely option (note: this is what us Brits call "sarcastic understatement").
Slashdot Mirror
Elite used Fibonacci Numbers with a eight 6-byte seeds, plus a few dozen bytes of look-up tables, to achive this. The principle was very similar to MojoWorld's use of fractals, but Fibonacci series are considerably quicker to process, particularly on an early 80's home computer.
No, an Agnostic is someone who takes the position that the existence of god(s) is irrelevent. I'm a millitant agnostic evangelist myself (although I put down Jedi Knight on the census to make a point- that asking a non-provable question on a census is a waste of time).
Think about it. All the useful bits of religion are actually morality and philosophy- "stealing is bad, being nice is good". All the useless bits are the theology and myths- "god is a bull with wings, god created Earth out of nothing" etc.
Agnostics know that you can keep the morals and the philosophy whilst ditching all the fluff about magical beings and supernatural forces.
For instance, I think that stealing (as in beer) is wrong because it is detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. I don't need fear or love of a magical being to re-inforce that understanding.
Suppose the existence or non-existence of god(s) were finally, definitively proven.
If a god was known to exist, would that mean you would suddenly stop stealing? Of course not, because you didn't steal anyway because you already knew it was bad, for other reasons.
If gods were known not to exist, would that mean you would suddenlty start stealing? Again, of course not. You don't steal because you know it's wrong for other reasons, not because you have some fear or love of a god.
Therefore we have proven that the existence of gods is irrelevent.
Surely exactly the opposite is the whole point of the article?
The claim is that sufficient alternatives to keyboard input exist, not that sufficient alternatives to using a computer exist.
Which having seen my friend's ponderous progress with an on-screen keyboard and voice recognition, I have to say that's also bollocks, but that still isn't the same as what you were saying.
If you mean "do you live in a country that doesn't jail people for explaining why some types of encryption are weak" then the answer is YES, it is different where I live.
If you mean "do you live in a country where reverse engineering is legal" then the answer is YES, it is different where I live.
Yes, it is different where I live.
How very ironic that your American forefathers left my country of Britain over three hundred years ago because they feared prosecution over free speech, yet now I am frightened of visiting your country because I fear prosecution over free speech.
Fuck me, yes. Yes, yes, yes. It is different where I live.
Those of us who were born and live here have the duty to try and improve the place.
Yer not wrong there, mate.
What worries me is that you (plural; Americans as a whole) don't seem to be doing a very good job of it.
America, the country of free trade, is preventing my company from trading freely with your country, because I'm not allowed to visit my customer and explain why they might be about to choose a poor copy protection system.
That isn't just YOUR problem. It's mine too.
But I can't vote in your country. So all I can do is tell my boss that I can't visit our customer, and just hope that the message gets through.
You have *no* idea how helpless this makes me feel.
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I'd say it was his fault.
It was his fault for visiting a country with a repressive regime.
As an agnostic, if I visited the Iran, I would expect to be punished.
As a programmer who practices reverse engineering, if I visted the USA, I would expect to be punished.
I don't see what the big deal is. I just have to refuse to go to the USA until they repeal the DCMA. There are a whole host of third world countries with daft laws to prosecute foriegners. The USA is just another to add to this list.
Heck, I heard from a friend that they still practice the death penalty over there! What do you expect from those types of countries? Duh.
Unfortunately I work for a UK software house that has a large US oil conglomerate as a customer; I have previously had to travel to the US on business, and I am expected to travel there again soon. I'll just have to say no.
Even if it means loosing my job, it simply isn't worth going to the US to risk the chance of being imprisoned.
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Laserjet: I would get a little runabout boat and do some fishing when time permits
Have you SEEN the North Sea?
It's very cold. Fall in it and you generally die within hours. Usually they don't bother with search parties after 4 hours.
It's very wet. In addition to the billions of litres of water involved in the actual sea itself, it is almost always raining a storm out there.
It's very grey. This is not a sunny part of the world. British people go on foriegn holidays a lot for a damn good reason.
And, most importantly...
It's not very full of fish. The fish stocks are so depleted that fishing is banned for most of the year (dwindling fish stocks caused partly by industrial pollution, and party by industrial over-fishing- god only knows how the industrial fishing vessels get away with it, can you imagine industrial "hunting" of cattle?). You may think that Sealand's independence protects you from this, but I can assure you that various European naval fishing patrol vessels, manned by short-tempered teenagers operating mounted heavy artillery, will think otherwise.
This is a cold, wet, grey, industrial and environmentally shattered part of the world. The North Sea is not somewhere you go on holiday.
--
Judging by the way most anthropologists and archaeologists classify anything they can't understand as "Religious Significance", I'd say you have a very fine grasp of the subject.
In a few thousand years' time, I expect most of the freebie merchandise handed out at computer exhibitions will be classified as being of "Religious Significance". All hail the mighty Dust Puppy and praise to the Novelty Mobile Phone Holder.
One wonders what anthropologists and archaeologists would make of an entirely agnostic or aetheist society. Speaking as an agnostic myself, I really irks me that long after my death, people will be slapping "Religious Significance" labels over my property.
--
Erm, aren't the GPL etc. governed by US law? And since when did China subscribe to that?
It just goes to show that anything other than PUBLIC DOMAIN is not truly free information. And, more importantly, anything other than Public Domain is unenforcable in an international environment such as the Internet.
The GPL isn't worth the paper it's written on. It presumes a whole heap of US-centric crap which is unenforable outside all but a handful of countries.
That something as US-centric as the GPL could be written by those who style themselves as "pioneers" of the Internet is very telling. They're not pioneers of anything, they're just Uncle Sam apologists trying to enforce the same old Uncle Sam rules in a world that doesn't give a toss about the US.
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No, it tells you that Windows installs every frickin protocol under the sun when you pop in a new network card, and it just sitting there waiting for a nonexistent DCHP server.
--
Well, Linus is wrong.
Error messages only occur when there's an errror.
What if there's no error, what if it just HANGS on boot?
How the hell are you supposed to diagnose a hang if you can't see what's running?
--
#include pedantism;
#include friendly_uk_us_rivalry;
Depends how you define "commercial". Sure, the Univac 1 was the first computer built by a company and sold, but the actual computer did not perform commercial transactions- the owners, the US Census Bureau, were a government organisation, not a business.
The computer that performed the world's first regular routine office job was the LEO Lyons Electric Office in the UK. As well as the Lyons catering firm, LEOs were used by Ford.
My dad worked on a LEO.
--
There have been many Dr Who audio adventures made by Big Finish Audio Productions since 1999, sold on cassette and CD. "Death Comes to Time" was comissioned by the BBC speach network Radio 4 from Big Finish as a pilot episode for a proposed new radio series.
This pilot episode was rejected and never broadcast.
This pilot episode is now being webcast. There are still no plans to broadcast the episode on radio.
There are no official plans for a new Dr Who series on TV nor radio, nor another film, although as always with Dr Who there is plenty of speculation.
If you have digital terrestrial TV (OnDigital), cable or satellite you can catch old episodes of Doctor Who on UK Gold at 8am on Sundays (last Sunday's episode was Invisible Enemy which featured Tom Baker, leather-clad Leela and the first appearance from K9).
--
Works for us here in the UK too!
The rest of the western world really does see the USA as the poor man of the current wave of wireless technology (I'm not talking about 3G, I'm talking about what we in Europe and Japan can do RIGHT NOW). You don't have 95%+ GSM coverage, you still use analogue phones, you pay for incoming calls, you can't get ISDN in rural areas, you are way behind on GPRS/UMTS, you don't have digital terrestrial television through an aerial...
What really brought it home was on a recent trip to Houston where, during a business meeting, the boss of Very Important US Company said to me "Imagine if you could follow a football game, being able to dictate to the cameras to follow your favourite football star around the field or switch to the camera behind the goal, on demand."
I looked at him kind of surprised and said "In the UK we can already do this, such services have been available nationwide for nearly two years". His pride seemed to take a bit of a knock.
HOWEVER, what we in the UK, Japan etc. really don't get is the sheer HUGENESS of the USA. The flight from London to Houston brought this home to me- we really don't have a handle on just how big the USA is, and how comparitively tiny its population.
In the UK it would be considered a breach of emergency services if mobile phone coverage was not available on A and M roads (highways and interstates). Not just "a bit annoying"; people would be writing to their local member of parliament complaining about how unsafe this would be. And if mobile 'phone coverage wasn't available in a village of more than 50 people, you can bet there'd be plenty of irate letters to the telcos. 60% of British people (including children) own digital mobile phones. We expect to use them everywhere, including rural areas, not just in towns. Heck, we expect to use mobile phones especially in rural areas. If we need to make an urgent/emergency call in a town, there are phoneboxes; hanging off the side of a rocky hillside or lost in a woodland, there are none.
Oakley's Law: In an emergency, telephone boxes approach zero as wilderness approaches one.
Therefore, the need for wireless communcations in rural areas is far greater than in urban areas.
But in the USA the kind of coverage this would require is simply unrealistic. It's something we can only begin to understand from the window of an aeroplane; most of the USA is empty forest and desert, and nobody lives there.
From a wireless perspective, the USA has more in common with Africa than it does with Europe or the Orient; a few very large cities, mostly on opposite coasts, spread across a vast thinly populated continent.
Yet we in Europe are constantly trying to compare the US wireless experience with ours, and, frankly, have a laugh at the American's expense.
This is just not a fair thing for us to do. The USA has an enormous physical hurdle to overcome before wireless can really take off; and with such a large landmass and relatively thin population (made thinner by concentrating what few people you have in huge mega-cities), there is no way any company or government in it's right mind is going to want to push technology which requires a transmitter every five or ten kilometres for a continent like the Americas or Africa.
--
As an outsider to the game, and a British citizen, I'm somewhat uneasy about a game that is set in Britannia and a bloke who claims to be Lord British.
Britian is a real place. We don't live in castles and we don't carry swords. Most of us have boring office jobs just like everyone else in the western world.
"Lord" is a real title and denotes a real member of a real government.
I'm sure lots of Americans would be up in arms if I started calling myself "Senator America".
--
So basically you're saying that the inclusion of any female in any action show is sensationalist and that all female action stars are there merely as sex objects?
What a load of chauvanist bollocks!
Breasts do jiggle, even small ones. Get over it. Having breasts doesn't make a woman a bimbo, it makes her a woman.
--
--
Religions are by their very nature a screwed value system. They demand that you believe things which are neither provable nor logical, and worse than that, demand that you live your life by those non-ratifiable beliefs.
People should stop pointing the finger at the school administration (which thankfully in the US, unlike here in the UK, is refreshingly religion-free), and instead have a good look at parents. Hindu, Christian, Islam or Pagan, it's about time we stamped out this nonsense which is ruining people's lives.
There was a time when the world was ruled by religion- it was called the Dark Ages.
--
It may be many bad things, but definitely not theft nor burglary.
Theft is the intention to permanently deprive someone of physical property. It does not apply to IP such as grades or computer security.
Burglary is theft plus breaking a physical barrier (eg. picking a lock, smashing a window). Again it does not apply to IP such as grades or computer security.
Us spods need to fight this whole concept of "software theft". Theft permanently deprives someone of something tangible. Software is not tangible, and copying it does not deprive anyone of the original. Grades are not tangible either, and changing his own or others who have paid/asked him does not deprive anyone else of theirs.
an insult to academic integrity
Starting with the dictionary... :-)
--
The Data Protection Act would not apply here.
The DPA applies only to personal data held about you, for instance your employee records or purchases made privately on your own credit card.
It doesn't apply to data held about companies or actions taken by employees as part of their work for a company, for instance bulk purchasing PCs for the company offices.
In short the DPA rules when you're using your home address and sucks when you're using your work address.
But since the Microsoft article seems to only be interested in companies breaching site licencing, rather than the odd bedroom warez CD, I don't think anyone really gives a toss.
--
An example of my point exactly - most people in the third world CAN'T read.
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Refers to USE BY not OWNERSHIP OF.
And the Mark Thomas Comedy Product definitely counts as use by the broadcast media.
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The DPA specifically excludes creative works. Any camera owner can refuse to hand over footage of creative works.
From the DPA CCTV guidelines (Introduction), actually linked from the Mark Thomas website (for fuck's sake, he obviously hasn't even bothered to read the DPA guidelines linked from his own site):
It is not intended that the contents of this Code should apply to: -
...
Use of cameras and similar equipment by the broadcast media for the purposes of journalism, or for artistic or literary purposes.
Document is here (MS Word) and is linked from this page on Mark's own site about a third of the way down, link entitled "CCTV Code of Practice guidelines".
Mark Thomas' journalism is purile schoolboy smart-arse childishness of the most pathetic kind. He constantly claims to be fighting The Man but invariably his shows revolve around taking the piss out of some poor doorman, security guard or receptionist on minimum wage. Mark just makes easy jokes about headlines and never actually bothers to read the small print, as this cock-up demonstrates.
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As a deterent to crime, which would you prefer:
We Britons find it offensive that the US criticises us for having too many cameras whilst at the same time the US is repeatedly mopping the brains of their schoolchildren off the floor.
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Um, don't the Chinese make up one quarter of the world's population, the biggest race in the world? China has CITIES bigger than the entire population of the USA. So in what way are the Chinese a minority?
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Sealand has no courts, it is a dicatorial monarchy. If you have a problem, you talk to the guy who owns the island (the "Crown Prince") and if he agrees with you, the people who have annoyed you get chucked off the island. That is the entire legal process in Sealand.
Let me try to help you understand:
Suppose the Crown Prince of Sealand passed a law saying that chocolate was illegal in Sealand.
Would that make chocolate illegal in the USA?
NO!!!
Equally, laws made in the USA or as part of an international convention (such as the Berne convention on copyright) do not apply outside the USA or outside those countries which signed up to the convention.
Sealand is not a signatory to the Berne convention.
So, FIRSTLY, there is no law for anyone to sue with and SECONDLY there are no courts to take your case to.
I'd say that makes suing a fairly unlikely option (note: this is what us Brits call "sarcastic understatement").
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