What if a company offers POTS connection through a switchboard/extension type system - instead of you actually getting a real phone number, you get an extension number. People call a main number for that VoIP company and then enter the extension - is that technically regulatable? Not sure how it would work for dialling out...
Ahh, well then its a phone company - if someone using a 'real' phone dials a 'real' number and is somehow connected to you then the company that somehow routed that call is a phone company. What this phone company effectively does is rents a phone line on your behalf which actually goes to their office, then they patch that phone line onto an Internet connection which you then happen to pick up. It would be exactly the same as if they had ran a length of cable to your home from their office or connected it to a walkie talkie... so whats the big deal here?
Kinda confused about this VoIP crap - if a company is offering a service, for a price which involves you having some sort of phone-like device plugged into a socket in your home, then it is a phone, no-matter if it goes through the old phone system, the cell-system, the Internet, a satellite or some sort of magick pixie communication system. If you're talking about some sort of free software that connects to someone's IP directly using your existing net-connection or uses distributed routing or whatever than thats basically instant messaging with some voice-feature, what are you going to regulate? AIM?
It looks exactly how i imagined - rounded corners (white i presume) and a screen that goes as far to the edge as is technically possible - just like it should be. They should stop pissing about with iPods and all other electronics manufactures should stop wasting time designing new phones and crap, this is where the future is, a plain star-trek pad-like device with a few sockets, wireless, hard-drive, touch screen and a plug-in keyboard if you want it, coming in a range of sizes/shapes from watch to phone/pda to full tablet, every gadget should look like this, buttons are so 2004. Ok so we've had pad like devices since the 90's but so-far they've all had stupid buttons on them, and for some stupid reason (batter life or something) mobile-phones have tiny screens that don't take up the entire area.
Actually there's already a system that does this, it uses two cameras above and below the screen (they can be cheap cameras) and it merges them together to create an image where the person looks like they're staring at you - i think it was developed for web-cams but the principle could be the same for phones, problem with this light system is it won't be real-time until someone develops a very high frame-rate camera and projector and some major computing power
Everything in that article is a load of crap, "viruses of the pirate sites" what? iPod plays mp3's and thats pretty much the single most popular (lossy compressed) digital audio format on earth right now (not including audio CD's, DAT, MiniDisc and the like). If the most popular format on earth is not good enough for this woman then what the hell is? The absolute fact of the matter is a) ripping from CD is not hard and b) if you own the CD you are entitled to fire up a decent P2P client and type in the song/album name and see as it easily and speedily downloads, without a single virus in sight, and probably at a higher bit rate than iTunes etc.
I don't know about switching from Windows, Linux certainly isn't usable on the desktop yet (ducks) but OpenOffice and Firefox are, and they are drop-in replacements for Word and IE, there's no reason not to switch.
This is my tax money being wasted, this governments IT department is given as much money as they want and told to waste it on everything from buggy new medical record systems, to notebooks that get used for solitaire and 'new age' recognition software that really shouldn't have left the lab yet. Meanwhile there are so many useful projects that would cost next to nothing for local councils to do - how about linking the Bus tracking system to the net/phones so psychologically people will be motivated to wait for the Bus for example?
Why is it that in America you have the right to shoot anyone on sight if they're trespassing, but in your own home you don't have the right to take out a screw-driver, open up your DVD player and tinker around?
As pathetic as this system is I don't think it should be banned. It needs to be regulated tho - someone has to be fully legally responsible for whatever happens (is it the owner or the user?) and obviously the gun should be on your property (clearly fenced and marked with warning signs like military ranges) and mounted to some standard (fixed arc of rotation etc) so that where ever it fires its guaranteed not to endanger anyone outside. Apart from that this whole law seems pointless, more deaths will occur each year from stupid idiots with loaded un-safe guns in their pockets - most of them under 18. The whole idea is going to raise a generation of fat lazy c^Hhunters but its probably safer because the idiot won't be able to have an accident.
A country is only as good as its people and if there are people who want to murder and rape then they will, the only thing a death penalty or more cameras will do is scare them a bit and MAYBE if your lucky, scare them enough not to kidnap some school girl and dump her in a ditch, what it certainly DOES NOT do is turn said person into some sort of angel, cured of whatever mental illness or anger they had before, they are still a loose cannon and a danger and know one will ever know until its too late. The only deterrent to violent crime is to raise a decent society - if murder was taken off the law books tomorrow and the police were dis-banded, would you go and kill someone? no because you're a good person (i hope). All these tools can do is help catch people or make them move to an area without cameras (and there will always be an area without cameras) catching criminals is only half the solution and deterrents are never a cure no matter how harsh they are, the only way forward is to educate a decent society and to accept that there will always be one or two crazies.
You bet we are! All I can do is hope these new systems arn't being abused, the data protection applies to CCTV etc as well as personal records so you have a legal right to see the data they have on you and know what it will be used for. The congestion charge ring for example (Ken Shitface Livingstone) scans every license plate entering the city as basically a toll gate, using it for any other purpose would be illegal IMHO so if they get found using it for anything else I hope some prision time is in order, fortunately the camera network is designed only for cars, the high-res cameras are fixed at the point in the road where the number will go past so they cant just add software to automatically track faces, it would have to be done with another CCTV camera.
Do'h just realised if there was low pressure above and high pressure below, the passenger wouldn't be able to breath. Also, didn't lifts with hand doors die in the 50's? fitting a sliding door to that sucker doesn't sound like an easy task. So again, why the fuck would anyone want this?
It seems like a really pointless bit of technology - i can understand that its main use is for places where you don't want to dig a shaft for a pneumatic lift and maybe don't have room for a motor on top and a counter weight, but this is just over the top! Ok so it has emergency breaks should the pressure fail, but cable lifts have always had very simple, very reliable locking mechanisms. If the door on an upper level is opened or its seal fails for some reason, the lift won't work. Seals like that don't last for ever. If the glass/plastic is broken for some reason you'll get a possibly hazardous implosion and if the roof of the cabin was to fail the person inside would suffer from explosive decompression. A simple motor and pulley is surely much more reliable and easier to maintain than a full scale vacume pump system? and as for control - well it didnt exactly look precise from that video, im not sure why the sucked-out air from the top was not fed into the bottom to make it a little more stable (it says the bottom is at atmospheric pressure, i guess it would mean building the tube to withstand low and high pressure. Making this lift any bigger (for more than 2 people) would seem like a big challenge, as would extending its range, so you have to ask the question: why would a lift company invest in a technology that was inherently restricted to a few floors and a couple of people (and barely a wheelchair)?? Why not take a cable lift and try and fit the whole package into something similar to this - they could keep the tube and have a fully circular counter-weight, which would look pretty cool. This technology doesn't seem to make sense unless you have a discount on turbines and plastic tubing, and clients who want to send non-wheelchair bound people up 2 floors one at a time...
I doubt it would come to that - if a plane has to have a black box by law then there's bound to be some sort of specification it has to follow, the people responsible for the plane will have to pay whatever it costs so that the engine data is properly (legally) recorded, if they can't afford it, then they can't fly the plane. Same goes for any other rules and regulations about instrumentation - they either have to pay this company whatever it costs, or find a way to do it themselves, or not fly. Now if they pay and something goes wrong and its shown that a poorly written encryption module caused some computer to crash then the company will be in the deep shit they deserve for not keeping it simple.
It was probably cheaper to pay a telegraph operator to send your 160 character message (which would arrive in real-time) than it is now to pay the fucking lazy phone company to route it at untra-low priority and let it arrive on someone's phone 3 hours later.
I know this is off topic and im going to get shot down like a kite over Bagdad, but the Windows GUI/environment is faster than many X setups ive seen, im not saying its Linux, im not saying its X, im not even saying its KDE (ok maybe i am), but my point remains valid, Windows might be expensive, crash-prone, bug-ridden, lacking of features and full of security holes, but it can still hold its own on speed in some arenas and im just saying _maybe_ its possible that Apache or Linux or someone in that chain is not pulling their weight.
How dare Microsoft think they can hold the British government by the balls. The government needs to basically say "Ok, we're going to use Microsoft software for some things and other software for other things, if you don't like this arrangement we are quite happy to use other software for all things and to maybe start sharing these ideas with your other customers."
millions of people who expect that format, will tell you they can't open anything that's not in that format, send you everything in that format and tell you to go away if you make a fuss about that format and tell them you won't send in anything but your format. Its the way the real world works - you're replaceable.
Actually OpenOffice doesn't open word 2000 properly and word 2000 is considered the absolute de-facto must-open format, like it or not. The bugs are a non-issue for simple files, but anything with graphics gets messed up in my experience, thats why i use word 2k for any documents with graphics and OOo for anything else. If they fixed the file compatability even for just office 2000 there would be absolutely zero excuse for 99% of schools, universities, offices and homes to waste their money.
"The Bonjour Printer Wizard will only discover printers being shared by the Mac OS X "Printer Sharing" feature when the Macintosh is running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later."
Can you name me more than 3 people on this planet that have a Mac based printer server? And whats with the IE plug-in? why would anyone even write an IE plug-in??
Slashdot Mirror
1) find a patriotic bill that no-one could disagree with eg the 'increased police money to find paedophiles bill.
2) attach something that has absolutely nothing to do with the bill what so ever.
3) claim you're all for 'smaller government' and an end to filibustering (which is the only thing stopping your even worse crap getting through).
4) be fucking retarded.
What if a company offers POTS connection through a switchboard/extension type system - instead of you actually getting a real phone number, you get an extension number. People call a main number for that VoIP company and then enter the extension - is that technically regulatable? Not sure how it would work for dialling out...
Ahh, well then its a phone company - if someone using a 'real' phone dials a 'real' number and is somehow connected to you then the company that somehow routed that call is a phone company. What this phone company effectively does is rents a phone line on your behalf which actually goes to their office, then they patch that phone line onto an Internet connection which you then happen to pick up. It would be exactly the same as if they had ran a length of cable to your home from their office or connected it to a walkie talkie... so whats the big deal here?
Kinda confused about this VoIP crap - if a company is offering a service, for a price which involves you having some sort of phone-like device plugged into a socket in your home, then it is a phone, no-matter if it goes through the old phone system, the cell-system, the Internet, a satellite or some sort of magick pixie communication system. If you're talking about some sort of free software that connects to someone's IP directly using your existing net-connection or uses distributed routing or whatever than thats basically instant messaging with some voice-feature, what are you going to regulate? AIM?
It looks exactly how i imagined - rounded corners (white i presume) and a screen that goes as far to the edge as is technically possible - just like it should be. They should stop pissing about with iPods and all other electronics manufactures should stop wasting time designing new phones and crap, this is where the future is, a plain star-trek pad-like device with a few sockets, wireless, hard-drive, touch screen and a plug-in keyboard if you want it, coming in a range of sizes/shapes from watch to phone/pda to full tablet, every gadget should look like this, buttons are so 2004. Ok so we've had pad like devices since the 90's but so-far they've all had stupid buttons on them, and for some stupid reason (batter life or something) mobile-phones have tiny screens that don't take up the entire area.
The new photos confirm that this device is a touch-screen Apple tablet. You can see it here.
Guess again..
Actually there's already a system that does this, it uses two cameras above and below the screen (they can be cheap cameras) and it merges them together to create an image where the person looks like they're staring at you - i think it was developed for web-cams but the principle could be the same for phones, problem with this light system is it won't be real-time until someone develops a very high frame-rate camera and projector and some major computing power
Everything in that article is a load of crap, "viruses of the pirate sites" what? iPod plays mp3's and thats pretty much the single most popular (lossy compressed) digital audio format on earth right now (not including audio CD's, DAT, MiniDisc and the like). If the most popular format on earth is not good enough for this woman then what the hell is? The absolute fact of the matter is a) ripping from CD is not hard and b) if you own the CD you are entitled to fire up a decent P2P client and type in the song/album name and see as it easily and speedily downloads, without a single virus in sight, and probably at a higher bit rate than iTunes etc.
I don't know about switching from Windows, Linux certainly isn't usable on the desktop yet (ducks) but OpenOffice and Firefox are, and they are drop-in replacements for Word and IE, there's no reason not to switch.
This is my tax money being wasted, this governments IT department is given as much money as they want and told to waste it on everything from buggy new medical record systems, to notebooks that get used for solitaire and 'new age' recognition software that really shouldn't have left the lab yet. Meanwhile there are so many useful projects that would cost next to nothing for local councils to do - how about linking the Bus tracking system to the net/phones so psychologically people will be motivated to wait for the Bus for example?
Ah, so if the pedophile lobby had enough money...
The rules need to make sure a senator cant so much as take a shit without it being logged: where, when and who paid for the toilet.
Why is it that in America you have the right to shoot anyone on sight if they're trespassing, but in your own home you don't have the right to take out a screw-driver, open up your DVD player and tinker around?
As pathetic as this system is I don't think it should be banned. It needs to be regulated tho - someone has to be fully legally responsible for whatever happens (is it the owner or the user?) and obviously the gun should be on your property (clearly fenced and marked with warning signs like military ranges) and mounted to some standard (fixed arc of rotation etc) so that where ever it fires its guaranteed not to endanger anyone outside. Apart from that this whole law seems pointless, more deaths will occur each year from stupid idiots with loaded un-safe guns in their pockets - most of them under 18. The whole idea is going to raise a generation of fat lazy c^Hhunters but its probably safer because the idiot won't be able to have an accident.
No, if your car is stolen, _you_ personally have a right to know if it was logged entering/leaving the city because that is your personal data.
A country is only as good as its people and if there are people who want to murder and rape then they will, the only thing a death penalty or more cameras will do is scare them a bit and MAYBE if your lucky, scare them enough not to kidnap some school girl and dump her in a ditch, what it certainly DOES NOT do is turn said person into some sort of angel, cured of whatever mental illness or anger they had before, they are still a loose cannon and a danger and know one will ever know until its too late. The only deterrent to violent crime is to raise a decent society - if murder was taken off the law books tomorrow and the police were dis-banded, would you go and kill someone? no because you're a good person (i hope). All these tools can do is help catch people or make them move to an area without cameras (and there will always be an area without cameras) catching criminals is only half the solution and deterrents are never a cure no matter how harsh they are, the only way forward is to educate a decent society and to accept that there will always be one or two crazies.
You bet we are!
All I can do is hope these new systems arn't being abused, the data protection applies to CCTV etc as well as personal records so you have a legal right to see the data they have on you and know what it will be used for. The congestion charge ring for example (Ken Shitface Livingstone) scans every license plate entering the city as basically a toll gate, using it for any other purpose would be illegal IMHO so if they get found using it for anything else I hope some prision time is in order, fortunately the camera network is designed only for cars, the high-res cameras are fixed at the point in the road where the number will go past so they cant just add software to automatically track faces, it would have to be done with another CCTV camera.
Do'h just realised if there was low pressure above and high pressure below, the passenger wouldn't be able to breath. Also, didn't lifts with hand doors die in the 50's? fitting a sliding door to that sucker doesn't sound like an easy task. So again, why the fuck would anyone want this?
It seems like a really pointless bit of technology - i can understand that its main use is for places where you don't want to dig a shaft for a pneumatic lift and maybe don't have room for a motor on top and a counter weight, but this is just over the top! Ok so it has emergency breaks should the pressure fail, but cable lifts have always had very simple, very reliable locking mechanisms. If the door on an upper level is opened or its seal fails for some reason, the lift won't work. Seals like that don't last for ever. If the glass/plastic is broken for some reason you'll get a possibly hazardous implosion and if the roof of the cabin was to fail the person inside would suffer from explosive decompression. A simple motor and pulley is surely much more reliable and easier to maintain than a full scale vacume pump system? and as for control - well it didnt exactly look precise from that video, im not sure why the sucked-out air from the top was not fed into the bottom to make it a little more stable (it says the bottom is at atmospheric pressure, i guess it would mean building the tube to withstand low and high pressure. Making this lift any bigger (for more than 2 people) would seem like a big challenge, as would extending its range, so you have to ask the question: why would a lift company invest in a technology that was inherently restricted to a few floors and a couple of people (and barely a wheelchair)?? Why not take a cable lift and try and fit the whole package into something similar to this - they could keep the tube and have a fully circular counter-weight, which would look pretty cool. This technology doesn't seem to make sense unless you have a discount on turbines and plastic tubing, and clients who want to send non-wheelchair bound people up 2 floors one at a time...
Erm... maybe im stating the obvious but.. a cable??
I doubt it would come to that - if a plane has to have a black box by law then there's bound to be some sort of specification it has to follow, the people responsible for the plane will have to pay whatever it costs so that the engine data is properly (legally) recorded, if they can't afford it, then they can't fly the plane. Same goes for any other rules and regulations about instrumentation - they either have to pay this company whatever it costs, or find a way to do it themselves, or not fly. Now if they pay and something goes wrong and its shown that a poorly written encryption module caused some computer to crash then the company will be in the deep shit they deserve for not keeping it simple.
It was probably cheaper to pay a telegraph operator to send your 160 character message (which would arrive in real-time) than it is now to pay the fucking lazy phone company to route it at untra-low priority and let it arrive on someone's phone 3 hours later.
I know this is off topic and im going to get shot down like a kite over Bagdad, but the Windows GUI/environment is faster than many X setups ive seen, im not saying its Linux, im not saying its X, im not even saying its KDE (ok maybe i am), but my point remains valid, Windows might be expensive, crash-prone, bug-ridden, lacking of features and full of security holes, but it can still hold its own on speed in some arenas and im just saying _maybe_ its possible that Apache or Linux or someone in that chain is not pulling their weight.
How dare Microsoft think they can hold the British government by the balls. The government needs to basically say "Ok, we're going to use Microsoft software for some things and other software for other things, if you don't like this arrangement we are quite happy to use other software for all things and to maybe start sharing these ideas with your other customers."
millions of people who expect that format, will tell you they can't open anything that's not in that format, send you everything in that format and tell you to go away if you make a fuss about that format and tell them you won't send in anything but your format. Its the way the real world works - you're replaceable.
Actually OpenOffice doesn't open word 2000 properly and word 2000 is considered the absolute de-facto must-open format, like it or not. The bugs are a non-issue for simple files, but anything with graphics gets messed up in my experience, thats why i use word 2k for any documents with graphics and OOo for anything else. If they fixed the file compatability even for just office 2000 there would be absolutely zero excuse for 99% of schools, universities, offices and homes to waste their money.
"The Bonjour Printer Wizard will only discover printers being shared by the Mac OS X "Printer Sharing" feature when the Macintosh is running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later."
Can you name me more than 3 people on this planet that have a Mac based printer server? And whats with the IE plug-in? why would anyone even write an IE plug-in??