Selective quoting? How about this, from the Wikipedia article you linked to:
Proudly declaring himself to be English (rather than British) with "not the slightest wish to integrate with anybody",[60] he stated his admiration for controversial former MP politician Enoch Powell.[64]
Remember that Patrick Moore was quite old (89) when he died. Enoch Powell did come to hold controversial views on race, but he did not always hold them; in the 1950s he positively encouraged black immigration into Britain, and in 1959 he spoke forcefully against racism in parliament. Before that, Powell was the youngest ever professor in the British Commonwealth, and during the second world war became the youngest brigadier in the British Army,. He was a serious, widely admired and interesting intellectual. To have admired Enoch Powell during his early career is not eccentric at all, and is certainly not in itself an indicator of right wing views. Even after 1967 it was possible to admire many aspects of Powell's life without necessarily being a racist - he was anything but one-dimensional.
As for Patrick Moore describing himself as English, that is simply accurate. He was English. There is nothing shameful or necessarily right-wing about being English.
It was my understand that the UK Data Protection Act was created/updated to comply with EU regulations and this act most assuredly DOES apply to businesses.
I'd welcome being wrong if you care to explain how.
It also applies to you, and to the local sporting club/chess society/school choir you organise.
Yes, it's not like it would be a good idea to pay the people who worked on the games you want to pay, you're right.
Seriously, don't get me wrong, the charity thing is great, but if you're saying these are genuinely good games that you genuinely want to play... Fucking pay the developer!
I don't have mod points today, or I'd mod this 'Insightful'. Games don't get built for free. If you want to play good games, pay for them!
Except I am not sure what version of the iphone is built well, every one I have seen and the 2 I have owned have been trash, and I can get a laptop with similar specs to a macbook for half the price and a better warranty.
H'mmm... I'm not certain that's true. I'll start by saying that I don't own and have never owned any Apple product (whereas I have owned, for example, some Microsoft mice). I don't like their approach to software freedom, and I'm not going to give them my money. But when last buying a laptop I seriously considered a MacBook Air (and I've given one to my niece).
As I say, I don't like Apple, and it seemed silly to buy a MacBook and take MacOS off it. Instead, I bought an Asus Zenbook. It's a nice machine, good quality, well built, but not significantly cheaper like-for-like than the Air. Also, there are little detail points where Apple just wins on quality. A case in point is the power connector. The power connector on the ZenBook is a small coaxial plug, and it's very vulnerable if the machine is knocked off a sofa when charging (don't ask me how I know this). The Air, by contrast, has a magnetic charger connection, which if knocked simply disconnects without damage. That is just better design and better quality, and substantially increases the usability of the device. It's one detail, but it's symptomatic of Apple's obsessive approach to design and quality. I don't like them, as a company, but I have to admit their hardware is generally very good.
Also, Apple had complied with the court's order. Obviously, did the minimum they felt they could get away with but any company would do the same thing. The judges in Europe are a bunch of fucking tyrants.
Wasn't Amiga multitasking even before Windows? I mean for a comparable price. SGI Irix and other Unix machines of that time were not "Personal" computers if price is considered.
Amiga (TRIPOS) had pre-emptive multi-tasking. The Acorn Archimedes (under RISC OS) had co-operative multi-tasking, like the later Windows 3.1. Under UN*X, of course, it had pre-emptive multi tasking. Microsoft were, as with everything else, late to the game.
While talking of RISC OS, it had the neatest use of a three button mouse and the neatest use of menus of any GUI I've ever seen - it amazes me that someone hasn't yet done an X11 GUI with similar features.
Isn't that kind of semantic? They have the power to tax. They "own" all of the airwaves. It may not be government by some technicality in law, but to a citizen the effect is the same.
No, speaking as a citizen, the effect is more or less the opposite. The BBC is (or should be, when it's brave enough) a bulwark against the government. For example the judiciary, in the US system, is also paid for out of taxes, but is independent and acts to limit the power of the executive. The BBC is intended (in part) to act analogously, but with an investigatory role rather than a judicial one. Sometimes (for example over the non-existent 'Weapons of Mass Destruction') the BBC has fulfilled that role magnificently - although following their cave-in over the Kelly affair they've been disappointingly timid.
Some might argue that the most important feature of the phone from the perspective of the marker is how well it sells. And when it comes to that, the rounded corners and the way the interface looks and behaves may be much more important than the actual tech that is working inside. People base a lot of purchasing decision on recommendations and advertising, not on reading the full specs.
Look, this is simply silly. If Apple produced a tablet with rounded corners which could not communicate with wifi or with any other wireless network, no-one would buy it. That's what we're discussing here - core wireless patents. From the perspective of the purchaser, what's important about a tablet is that it allows them to browse the web or watch television wherever they happen to be, without wires. Rounded corners come a very long way down the priority list behind that.
The flip side of that is, who'll hire a 50-year old coder, or even keep him or her on the damn payroll? Even at reduced wages it's a crap shoot.
I don't have any problems getting hired. I keep myself up to date with what's current, and I have thirty years experience so I know what not to do; and so I can produce higher quality code faster than people half my age. I can't work as long hours as I used to - I can't hold concentration for seventeen hour days any more; and I value my free time more. But I'm good, and I'm productive, and I'm never short of work.
If you get worse at your craft as you grow older, you're doing something wrong.
If only you were able to selectively revoke permissions you thought an application didn't need!
I mean, when I install an app, I'd like to be shown a list of permissions it wants, just as I am now, and then I'd like to go through that list and toggle some off... and if the app can still run without those things, it should install anyway (and not do the things I've told it not to do). Surely that ain't rocket science!
Serious question. I hear people gripe about this all the time, but I don't know ANYONE who actually carries extra batteries. I only hear of people either carrying a charging cable or asking to borrow one.
I used to carry multiple batteries for my last two phones - an original G1 and a Nexus One. I cycle a lot, and use MyTracks to record my runs; when using GPS neither of those phones could go a full day. My present phone, an HTC One X, doesn't have a replaceable battery, so when doing a long run I have to carry a backup phone - not such a good solution.
Yes, the ideal solution would be a longer battery life in the first place!
Couldn't agree more about your comments on HTC. I have an HTC One X. It's a fine phone, powerful, stylish, well featured. But the HTC add-ons really bring it down, to the extent that I won't buy another HTC unless they sell stock Android.
What he means, you deliberately obtuse dipshit, is that Linux is not suitable for desktop use for about 98% of the general public, and has been in that position since people started proclaiming $year++ to be the "Year of the Linux Desktop."
I acknowledge that you're prejudiced, but that doesn't mean you're right. In fact 98% of the general public can in fact use Linux quite happily, if they're introduced to it. But most of them are never introduced to it.
Which is to say we are not going to see a fully open source desktop anytime soon. Consumers want a unified experience that can only come form a corporate design. That is MS, Apple, Google. Users expect the hardware to be subsidized, and is not going to pay the full price up front for a sophisticated piece of hardware. This was the problem with the original mac and newton. The hardware was expensive, almost no one had a GPU, not that sophisticated a BIOS, but was too expensive.
Speaking for myself, I've been running mainly-open-source desktops since 1999 (BSD 4.2, which was not entirely open source at the time, running Tom's Window Manager), and entirely-open-source desktops since 1993 (Linux 0.99pl11, also running TWM). There was a dreadfully crude graphical shell for DOS back in those days called 'Windows', but you couldn't really do anything useful with it. Over the intervening years Windows has improved, and now the Windows desktop is nearly as productive as contemporary Linux desktops... but I've never seen any compelling reason to switch.
Is it worth taking civilian deaths on our side, through terrorism, to avoid civilians deaths on the other side?
These civilian deaths are not 'on the other side'. They're innocent bystanders. Further, killing them is extremely unlikely to diminish terrorism; it's far more likely to encourage terrorism. It's not just immoral, it's also stupid.
Anathem is one of the best books I've read in years, and if the opening chapters don't grip you you're missing something badly. Having said that, most of Anathem's jokes are based on a strong knowledge of etymology and of the history of western (especially Greek) philosophy, so if you're not strong on those subjects a lot of it will go WHOOOOOSH over your head. But, that's just the same as most of Cryptonomicon's jokes requiring a knowledge of mathematics. Stephenson expects his readers to be well and widely read and to have an intelligent understanding of what they've read; he's not 'easy reading'.
"sell a few thousand"? How much money do you think they've spent developing all of the software running on this device? I bet it's several million dollars at the bare minimum - which represents infrastructure, plus a modestly sized dev/qa team's salaries.
The 'software running on this device' is the Linux kernel, developed at no cost to Google[1]; some Linux user-space programs, also developed at no cost to Google; and the Chrome browser, which Google is developing anyway, so no additional cost to Google. The only costs of 'Chrome OS' are a teensie bit of integration and some testing - and frankly I could do that in under six months of my time, so of the order of US$100,000.
[1] Yes, I know Google makes a considerable contribution to the Linux kernel; but that contribution is not really a cost to the ChromeOS project, it's much more a cost of Google's core infrastructure.
How is this different from any generic netbook that comes out around the same price range (with a x86 processor may I add)?
You get an ARM. Which means you get a battery life/processor power ratio which no Intel machine is going to equal (and, just now, a battery life which no Intel machine is going to equal anyway). And with Ubuntu, that adds up to a really nice machine.
The issue is that serious news gathering, in the old way, is expensive. Keeping a network of reporters distributed round the world in places where news events are liable to happen costs money. Good newspapers have this network by legacy and tradition. They still see value in the networks. So they want to keep them. But as disruptive technologies like Twitter affect the way people consume news, the number of eyeballs on the output produced by those expensive journalistic networks is declining. Because the number of eyeballs is declining, and because other opportunities for advertising are becoming available, the amount that advertisers are prepared to pay for adverts on the 'newspaper' sites is declining. This has precisely nothing to do with search, and it has to do with Google only because Google has made itself a significant platform for advertising. It has to do, fundamentally, with audience share.
What matters is that they take energy and store it in a convenient, portable form. We have many millions of machines which run on petrol, and replacing all those machines with equivalents which run on batteries would require a huge consumption of energy. So there's merit in keeping them going.
Also, this process can take energy for example in periods of strong wind when there's a surplus of 'green' energy, and store it for periods of calm. My home is entirely wind-powered and consequently I have a huge bank of lead-acid batteries as energy storage for calm weather - they aren't very efficient, but they do what's needed. If this 'air (plus electricity) to fuel' process is at least as efficient as a lead acid battery, it's a win.
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Selective quoting? How about this, from the Wikipedia article you linked to:
Proudly declaring himself to be English (rather than British) with "not the slightest wish to integrate with anybody",[60] he stated his admiration for controversial former MP politician Enoch Powell.[64]
Remember that Patrick Moore was quite old (89) when he died. Enoch Powell did come to hold controversial views on race, but he did not always hold them; in the 1950s he positively encouraged black immigration into Britain, and in 1959 he spoke forcefully against racism in parliament. Before that, Powell was the youngest ever professor in the British Commonwealth, and during the second world war became the youngest brigadier in the British Army,. He was a serious, widely admired and interesting intellectual. To have admired Enoch Powell during his early career is not eccentric at all, and is certainly not in itself an indicator of right wing views. Even after 1967 it was possible to admire many aspects of Powell's life without necessarily being a racist - he was anything but one-dimensional.
As for Patrick Moore describing himself as English, that is simply accurate. He was English. There is nothing shameful or necessarily right-wing about being English.
!?!?
Could you please expand upon this comment?
It was my understand that the UK Data Protection Act was created/updated to comply with EU regulations and this act most assuredly DOES apply to businesses.
I'd welcome being wrong if you care to explain how.
It also applies to you, and to the local sporting club/chess society/school choir you organise.
Yes, it's not like it would be a good idea to pay the people who worked on the games you want to pay, you're right.
Seriously, don't get me wrong, the charity thing is great, but if you're saying these are genuinely good games that you genuinely want to play... Fucking pay the developer!
I don't have mod points today, or I'd mod this 'Insightful'. Games don't get built for free. If you want to play good games, pay for them!
Except I am not sure what version of the iphone is built well, every one I have seen and the 2 I have owned have been trash, and I can get a laptop with similar specs to a macbook for half the price and a better warranty .
H'mmm... I'm not certain that's true. I'll start by saying that I don't own and have never owned any Apple product (whereas I have owned, for example, some Microsoft mice). I don't like their approach to software freedom, and I'm not going to give them my money. But when last buying a laptop I seriously considered a MacBook Air (and I've given one to my niece).
As I say, I don't like Apple, and it seemed silly to buy a MacBook and take MacOS off it. Instead, I bought an Asus Zenbook. It's a nice machine, good quality, well built, but not significantly cheaper like-for-like than the Air. Also, there are little detail points where Apple just wins on quality. A case in point is the power connector. The power connector on the ZenBook is a small coaxial plug, and it's very vulnerable if the machine is knocked off a sofa when charging (don't ask me how I know this). The Air, by contrast, has a magnetic charger connection, which if knocked simply disconnects without damage. That is just better design and better quality, and substantially increases the usability of the device. It's one detail, but it's symptomatic of Apple's obsessive approach to design and quality. I don't like them, as a company, but I have to admit their hardware is generally very good.
Also, Apple had complied with the court's order. Obviously, did the minimum they felt they could get away with but any company would do the same thing. The judges in Europe are a bunch of fucking tyrants.
The judge found, and stated very clearly, that Apple had not obeyed his order. Which is why Apple was then faced with a much more draconian second order. You may get to dick around with courts in the USA, but some countries take contempt of court a lot more seriously.
Wow- your nuts too I see.
He works at Apple!
He doesn't work at Apple and hasn't done so since 1987, which is probably before you were born.
Wasn't Amiga multitasking even before Windows? I mean for a comparable price. SGI Irix and other Unix machines of that time were not "Personal" computers if price is considered.
Amiga (TRIPOS) had pre-emptive multi-tasking. The Acorn Archimedes (under RISC OS) had co-operative multi-tasking, like the later Windows 3.1. Under UN*X, of course, it had pre-emptive multi tasking. Microsoft were, as with everything else, late to the game.
While talking of RISC OS, it had the neatest use of a three button mouse and the neatest use of menus of any GUI I've ever seen - it amazes me that someone hasn't yet done an X11 GUI with similar features.
Isn't that kind of semantic? They have the power to tax. They "own" all of the airwaves. It may not be government by some technicality in law, but to a citizen the effect is the same.
No, speaking as a citizen, the effect is more or less the opposite. The BBC is (or should be, when it's brave enough) a bulwark against the government. For example the judiciary, in the US system, is also paid for out of taxes, but is independent and acts to limit the power of the executive. The BBC is intended (in part) to act analogously, but with an investigatory role rather than a judicial one. Sometimes (for example over the non-existent 'Weapons of Mass Destruction') the BBC has fulfilled that role magnificently - although following their cave-in over the Kelly affair they've been disappointingly timid.
Some might argue that the most important feature of the phone from the perspective of the marker is how well it sells. And when it comes to that, the rounded corners and the way the interface looks and behaves may be much more important than the actual tech that is working inside. People base a lot of purchasing decision on recommendations and advertising, not on reading the full specs.
Look, this is simply silly. If Apple produced a tablet with rounded corners which could not communicate with wifi or with any other wireless network, no-one would buy it. That's what we're discussing here - core wireless patents. From the perspective of the purchaser, what's important about a tablet is that it allows them to browse the web or watch television wherever they happen to be, without wires. Rounded corners come a very long way down the priority list behind that.
The flip side of that is, who'll hire a 50-year old coder, or even keep him or her on the damn payroll? Even at reduced wages it's a crap shoot.
I don't have any problems getting hired. I keep myself up to date with what's current, and I have thirty years experience so I know what not to do; and so I can produce higher quality code faster than people half my age. I can't work as long hours as I used to - I can't hold concentration for seventeen hour days any more; and I value my free time more. But I'm good, and I'm productive, and I'm never short of work.
If you get worse at your craft as you grow older, you're doing something wrong.
... and I've gone back to coding. I'm good at it and I know I'm good at it. I'm only 56 now, but I expect to be still coding for a living when I'm 70.
If only you were able to selectively revoke permissions you thought an application didn't need!
I mean, when I install an app, I'd like to be shown a list of permissions it wants, just as I am now, and then I'd like to go through that list and toggle some off... and if the app can still run without those things, it should install anyway (and not do the things I've told it not to do). Surely that ain't rocket science!
And if you're hiking mountains, I would hope you're smart enough to turn the phone off unless you need it...
Or carry a solar charging panel.
Do you actually carry multiple batteries?
Serious question. I hear people gripe about this all the time, but I don't know ANYONE who actually carries extra batteries. I only hear of people either carrying a charging cable or asking to borrow one.
I used to carry multiple batteries for my last two phones - an original G1 and a Nexus One. I cycle a lot, and use MyTracks to record my runs; when using GPS neither of those phones could go a full day. My present phone, an HTC One X, doesn't have a replaceable battery, so when doing a long run I have to carry a backup phone - not such a good solution.
Yes, the ideal solution would be a longer battery life in the first place!
Couldn't agree more about your comments on HTC. I have an HTC One X. It's a fine phone, powerful, stylish, well featured. But the HTC add-ons really bring it down, to the extent that I won't buy another HTC unless they sell stock Android.
What he means, you deliberately obtuse dipshit, is that Linux is not suitable for desktop use for about 98% of the general public, and has been in that position since people started proclaiming $year++ to be the "Year of the Linux Desktop."
I acknowledge that you're prejudiced, but that doesn't mean you're right. In fact 98% of the general public can in fact use Linux quite happily, if they're introduced to it. But most of them are never introduced to it.
Which is to say we are not going to see a fully open source desktop anytime soon. Consumers want a unified experience that can only come form a corporate design. That is MS, Apple, Google. Users expect the hardware to be subsidized, and is not going to pay the full price up front for a sophisticated piece of hardware. This was the problem with the original mac and newton. The hardware was expensive, almost no one had a GPU, not that sophisticated a BIOS, but was too expensive.
Speaking for myself, I've been running mainly-open-source desktops since 1999 (BSD 4.2, which was not entirely open source at the time, running Tom's Window Manager), and entirely-open-source desktops since 1993 (Linux 0.99pl11, also running TWM). There was a dreadfully crude graphical shell for DOS back in those days called 'Windows', but you couldn't really do anything useful with it. Over the intervening years Windows has improved, and now the Windows desktop is nearly as productive as contemporary Linux desktops... but I've never seen any compelling reason to switch.
Is it worth taking civilian deaths on our side, through terrorism, to avoid civilians deaths on the other side?
These civilian deaths are not 'on the other side'. They're innocent bystanders. Further, killing them is extremely unlikely to diminish terrorism; it's far more likely to encourage terrorism. It's not just immoral, it's also stupid.
Or, perhaps they feel using a drone to make an attack, rather than risking American soldiers, is the better choice?
So it's OK to kill women and children, provided they're dark skinned, far away, and can't shoot back?
Anathem is one of the best books I've read in years, and if the opening chapters don't grip you you're missing something badly. Having said that, most of Anathem's jokes are based on a strong knowledge of etymology and of the history of western (especially Greek) philosophy, so if you're not strong on those subjects a lot of it will go WHOOOOOSH over your head. But, that's just the same as most of Cryptonomicon's jokes requiring a knowledge of mathematics. Stephenson expects his readers to be well and widely read and to have an intelligent understanding of what they've read; he's not 'easy reading'.
"sell a few thousand"? How much money do you think they've spent developing all of the software running on this device? I bet it's several million dollars at the bare minimum - which represents infrastructure, plus a modestly sized dev/qa team's salaries.
The 'software running on this device' is the Linux kernel, developed at no cost to Google[1]; some Linux user-space programs, also developed at no cost to Google; and the Chrome browser, which Google is developing anyway, so no additional cost to Google. The only costs of 'Chrome OS' are a teensie bit of integration and some testing - and frankly I could do that in under six months of my time, so of the order of US$100,000.
[1] Yes, I know Google makes a considerable contribution to the Linux kernel; but that contribution is not really a cost to the ChromeOS project, it's much more a cost of Google's core infrastructure.
so what?!
How is this different from any generic netbook that comes out around the same price range (with a x86 processor may I add)?
You get an ARM. Which means you get a battery life/processor power ratio which no Intel machine is going to equal (and, just now, a battery life which no Intel machine is going to equal anyway). And with Ubuntu, that adds up to a really nice machine.
The issue is that serious news gathering, in the old way, is expensive. Keeping a network of reporters distributed round the world in places where news events are liable to happen costs money. Good newspapers have this network by legacy and tradition. They still see value in the networks. So they want to keep them. But as disruptive technologies like Twitter affect the way people consume news, the number of eyeballs on the output produced by those expensive journalistic networks is declining. Because the number of eyeballs is declining, and because other opportunities for advertising are becoming available, the amount that advertisers are prepared to pay for adverts on the 'newspaper' sites is declining. This has precisely nothing to do with search, and it has to do with Google only because Google has made itself a significant platform for advertising. It has to do, fundamentally, with audience share.
What matters is that they take energy and store it in a convenient, portable form. We have many millions of machines which run on petrol, and replacing all those machines with equivalents which run on batteries would require a huge consumption of energy. So there's merit in keeping them going.
Also, this process can take energy for example in periods of strong wind when there's a surplus of 'green' energy, and store it for periods of calm. My home is entirely wind-powered and consequently I have a huge bank of lead-acid batteries as energy storage for calm weather - they aren't very efficient, but they do what's needed. If this 'air (plus electricity) to fuel' process is at least as efficient as a lead acid battery, it's a win.
Mostly because roman gold coins were almost as thin as paper. There is no real weight in Gold in a Roman coin.
Yes, only 4.5 grams in a solidus, or only about £150 worth of gold in each... paper thin, indeed. For some value of paper thin.