but why go public without just complaining to your agent/publisher/whatever first?
I don't know if this is what happened here, but the normal process is to email or phone the agent/publisher/whatever, and you get absolutely no response. Rather than wait for them to (maybe) consider returning a call, I might go public. Then someone at the agency/publisher/whatever says "oh fuck!" and then makes a conciliatory response. By that time, of course, it's too late, but whose fault is that?
That's news to me. I haven't lived in the UK for many years, but I remember my car being clamped on a few occasions. It never bothered me much, though. I used to be a blacksmith in another age, and I still have my tools. I just treated the clamps as a scrap metal donation.;)
No-one really wants DRM except for some of the bigger and nastier corporations. And as TFS mentioned, it does nothing to make sure the artists get paid for their work.
The best way to ensure that is for them to either distribute it themselves or to sell it through one of the less-evil marketplaces (for instance Magnatune comes to mind). I personally prefer the former, since I like the warm fuzzy I get from the feeling that I am paying the artist directly, but I completely understand if they can't be bothered with the learning curve involved.
Bullshit. Most users are perfectly happy with the device [...] but sitting on a flaw for your egoistical reasons is a bad reason.
Hmmm. OK, so a minor correction here: most Mac users are happy with the device. Sure, Apple might have originally spearheaded the current smartphone genre, but they are now trailing in the dust of Google and Samsung because they have done no innovation whatsoever in the last 5 years, other than to make their product skinnier.
I have my doubts about the usefulness of changing passwords often. If your password is sufficiently strong, and there is no likelihood of inadvertently passing it on to a third party, you shouldn't need to change it that frequently. If the password can be scraped from the target system at any time, then you're fucked in any case. This is simply a reason to have an array of memorable (but strong) passwords for ranges of sites, where the smallest range is for critical things like banking(*) and the largest range is for inconsequential sites like Slashdot.;)
* Ironically, banks always seem (at least here in.au) to have the servers supporting only the weakest passwords, limiting the number of characters and not accepting punctuation or whitespace.
Since the system now requires users to choose passwords that aren't memorable
Not really. There are lots of ways of constructing a strong password while still making it memorable. For instance, one can take one of the (arguably) most memorable opening lines in a novel:
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me. (Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers)
...and use that as Iwt4om81stb,aIwibwmcwAattahc2cm.
This is not one of my passwords, and it does seem pretty cumbersome, but I just pulled it out for effect. If any computer is sufficiently literary to deduce that password, it well and truly deserves the privilege of accessing my data.
Yea, I'd say that's actually the direction we're heading.
True, which is why we need to step back a bit. Yet another car analogy might apply here. We would all be safer drivers if we were strapped to the front of our cars like Aztec sacrifices [a virtual beer for anyone cool enough to spot that reference]. Similarly, an appropriate modicum of paranoia in our online behavior would prevent a bucketload of grief.
I haven't done it, but I suppose you can send any of your content to your phone as well.
You can indeed. I only use the phone as a reader occasionally, but I was gratified to see that Calibre interfaces just as readily with my Galaxy Nexus as with the Sony reader.
But on the book side, it seems many E-readers can easily read PDF and other formats which makes for easy licensing.
Yeah, and it was the wide range of supported formats that persuaded me to opt for a Sony reader. But as it turns out, I would still do the same even if that were not a factor. IMO the epub format is far superior to any of the others (fortunately.mobi and.lit formats can be converted by Calibre), since these files are so easily tweaked for better readability. I really dislike having to put up with PDF files on the device, since they are invariably prepared with silly page layouts that just don't work very well on the device's display.
The other good news about epub files is that it is so easy to strip DRM out of them. My rationale is that if I have paid for an ebook, I should be able to treat it exactly as I might a paper copy, i.e. lend it to family or friends.
This sounds like a great way to retire after I'm done with my current career!
Better make sure your skills are up to scratch. The guys who made it up to my property in TAS had been working with this kind of stuff for 20+ years. For all my earlier posts in this thread might have come across as whining about Telstra, I was and am. There is no other choice of provider here. But there are at least some of their guys with feet (and 4WD tyres) on the ground who have seriously good skills, and do their best to make an inadequate system work, and I salute them.
This is what I was referring to in my earlier post. Telstra owns most of the communications infrastructure in this country, and the record shows that so far they have done everything they can to avoid upgrading or even maintaining networks where there is no competition from other providers in a densely-populated metropolitan area.
Until a year ago, I was fortunate in being able to subscribe to ADSL2+ services in WA and subsequently SA, but here in TAS I am lucky to get a wireless connection (of sorts) to a tower 36km away. Any kind of physical connection is just out of the question. On the other hand, many households in other areas of the country can only access dial-up connections.
And if, as you say, people who work outdoors don't care very much what the clock says it makes even more sense to change what the clock says for the rest of us
Sigh. The arbitrary selection of a group to inconvenience doesn't really constitute much of a reason to to anything. Throwing one more specious argument into a topic almost entirely dominated by specious arguments doesn't achieve anything. But all this is wildly off-topic. Some fool hijacks a thread about saving power and uses it to push his opinion about daylight saving, and the/. lemmings happily follow.
So how about this, to derail the thread back on-topic:
If the aim is to save CO2 emissions by reducing power usage, why not just do it at the source? Shut the power stations down for an hour or so. Everybody can keep warm by jumping up and down yelling abuse at each other.
And never mind the "poorer" countries. Their biggest challenge will be Australia. Not because they cannot deliver a quality service, but because they will not.
I don't know. Communications satellites certainly existed back then, but I'll never know what calls were routed through them. The lag was nowhere near as bad as VOIP calls via satellite. I've done that, and the experience was nothing short of horrible.
Pseudonyms are important for a number of reasons, including protection from stalkers, rouge governments
While it seems that there is never going to be any likelihood of the existence of a French communist state, pseudonymity is much the same as anonymity, except that it confers (to anyone who cares enough to check) a discrete identity of the correspondent. It has value in the sense that it offers a track record with a more or less defined personality and set of values, while preserving a layer of protection by dissociation from one's "meat-space" identity. It also acts as a layer of trust, in the sense that BrokenHalo (for instance) might be less inclined to say something just for the sake of being wilfully inflammatory (though he has been known to be wilfully facetious) than an anonymous coward.
But (from TFS) the notion that "...it seems that rudeness and incivility is used as a mental shortcut to make sense of those complicated issues." might be an over-analysis. I would contend that some people just cannot resist the temptation to shout "Look at ME!", and are wholly incapable of making sense of any kind of issue. By way of evidence, I might cite the endless stream of victims, err, participants in so-called "reality-TV' shows where the only purpose for their presence is to be humiliated in front of an audience.
I'm missing [...] the full duplex, circuit-switched, not-laggy realtime conversations I used to have on a landline phone.
That depended on the distance involved. I grew up in an era when most phones had a rotary dial and a real bell that rang (now I settle for an mp3 recording of a 1960s post-office phone on my Android device), and it was quite common to get a noticeable lag on international calls. Not as badly as with some VOIP calls, but there nonetheless.
But if your call connected (which it always did except when lines became congested at Christmas-time), the line was yours until you ended the call.
Even back in the 1980s, with analogue mobile phones (glorified push-button POTS phones with no wire plugged into the wall), you very rarely got a broken connection. Now, at least 50% of mobile calls drop out before I'm ready (thanks, Telstra) and even VOIP isn't very reliable.
Another thing about the old POTS network was that without caller-ID display, there was an element of surprise involved in taking a call, so if you wanted to reject calls from anybody in particular, you had to reject them from everybody. Which probably makes for better manners.
Just a few years ago, I would have said that the iPod was by far the best portable music-playing device (despite my reservations about Apple and iTunes). And my ancient iPod Classic still beats my Android phone hands down in terms of sheer capacity. But now the phone's music player (in my case, PlayerPro) is vastly superior in every other aspect, and the iPod just sits on a shelf most of the time.
But I expect it may be a very long time before any other device takes the place of my Sony PRS-T1 ebook reader. There is a point where (at least for reading novels) any improvement on the technology is just tinkering at the edges.
I've always loved (D)SLR cameras, but I've found that I miss a lot more pictures if I insist on using them, since there are always times when I don't want to carry all that baggage around. So instead, I use my knowledge to concentrate on getting the best out of my phone's camera. Sure, the hardware has a lot of limitations, but if you pay attention and take a bit of care, you can often end up with pictures that are just as pleasing.
Can you use Android without serving yourself up to Google?
Yes. Best way is probably the hosts file, which means you need to root the device (not hard, especially if you get a Nexus device)
Is it true that you have to have a Google account to start up your phone?
You need at least a gmail account. But that doesn't mean you have to use it for anything else.
Can you (easily) install apps by just downloading them to your computer and then transferring to the phone?
Yes.
Do you have to give up your credit card info and name/address to sign up for the Google app store? (In light of the recent story that app developers get all your info, I don't know if I want every 2-bit app to get that info. The info itself could be worth more than the 99 cents for the application.)
Credit card number only if you download non-free apps. No address. If you're worried, use a pre-paid credit card.
Also, do free apps also get your personal information?
Sometimes.
Any hints or links re: using Android without the all-seeing eye?
See above...
Builtin app replacement recommendations?
GoLauncherEx for homescreens
Playerpro (music)
ChompSMS
K9 Mail.
I've been primarily a Slackware user since the mid-'90s (though until recently I ran Arch on my laptop), but occasionally I pull down a current version of Ubuntu just to see what I'm missing. However, I always find Ubuntu annoys me to the point that I end up blowing it away after a couple of hours.
Why is everyone calling Linux "Libre" all of a sudden? it has always been free, and will remain so. As for supporting binary blobs, they work as one would expect. All you'll see (if you're paying attention) is a whine about it tainting the kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
but why go public without just complaining to your agent/publisher/whatever first?
I don't know if this is what happened here, but the normal process is to email or phone the agent/publisher/whatever, and you get absolutely no response. Rather than wait for them to (maybe) consider returning a call, I might go public. Then someone at the agency/publisher/whatever says "oh fuck!" and then makes a conciliatory response. By that time, of course, it's too late, but whose fault is that?
That's news to me. I haven't lived in the UK for many years, but I remember my car being clamped on a few occasions. It never bothered me much, though. I used to be a blacksmith in another age, and I still have my tools. I just treated the clamps as a scrap metal donation. ;)
No-one really wants DRM except for some of the bigger and nastier corporations. And as TFS mentioned, it does nothing to make sure the artists get paid for their work.
The best way to ensure that is for them to either distribute it themselves or to sell it through one of the less-evil marketplaces (for instance Magnatune comes to mind). I personally prefer the former, since I like the warm fuzzy I get from the feeling that I am paying the artist directly, but I completely understand if they can't be bothered with the learning curve involved.
Said no one ever. 24h system more error-prone?
Well, I suppose it is. If you stop a 24-hour clock, it'll be right once a day. If you stop a 12-hour clock, it'll be twice as accurate. ;)
Bullshit. Most users are perfectly happy with the device [...] but sitting on a flaw for your egoistical reasons is a bad reason.
Hmmm. OK, so a minor correction here: most Mac users are happy with the device. Sure, Apple might have originally spearheaded the current smartphone genre, but they are now trailing in the dust of Google and Samsung because they have done no innovation whatsoever in the last 5 years, other than to make their product skinnier.
No beer for you. Sorry.
I have my doubts about the usefulness of changing passwords often. If your password is sufficiently strong, and there is no likelihood of inadvertently passing it on to a third party, you shouldn't need to change it that frequently. If the password can be scraped from the target system at any time, then you're fucked in any case. This is simply a reason to have an array of memorable (but strong) passwords for ranges of sites, where the smallest range is for critical things like banking(*) and the largest range is for inconsequential sites like Slashdot. ;)
.au) to have the servers supporting only the weakest passwords, limiting the number of characters and not accepting punctuation or whitespace.
* Ironically, banks always seem (at least here in
Since the system now requires users to choose passwords that aren't memorable
Not really. There are lots of ways of constructing a strong password while still making it memorable. For instance, one can take one of the (arguably) most memorable opening lines in a novel:
...and use that as Iwt4om81stb,aIwibwmcwAattahc2cm.
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
(Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers)
This is not one of my passwords, and it does seem pretty cumbersome, but I just pulled it out for effect. If any computer is sufficiently literary to deduce that password, it well and truly deserves the privilege of accessing my data.
I've only been saying that since, mwah, 1999 or so.
1999? That was only the day before yesterday. Get off my lawn, whappersnipper. ;)
Yea, I'd say that's actually the direction we're heading.
True, which is why we need to step back a bit. Yet another car analogy might apply here. We would all be safer drivers if we were strapped to the front of our cars like Aztec sacrifices [a virtual beer for anyone cool enough to spot that reference]. Similarly, an appropriate modicum of paranoia in our online behavior would prevent a bucketload of grief.
I haven't done it, but I suppose you can send any of your content to your phone as well.
You can indeed. I only use the phone as a reader occasionally, but I was gratified to see that Calibre interfaces just as readily with my Galaxy Nexus as with the Sony reader.
But on the book side, it seems many E-readers can easily read PDF and other formats which makes for easy licensing.
Yeah, and it was the wide range of supported formats that persuaded me to opt for a Sony reader. But as it turns out, I would still do the same even if that were not a factor. IMO the epub format is far superior to any of the others (fortunately .mobi and .lit formats can be converted by Calibre), since these files are so easily tweaked for better readability. I really dislike having to put up with PDF files on the device, since they are invariably prepared with silly page layouts that just don't work very well on the device's display.
The other good news about epub files is that it is so easy to strip DRM out of them. My rationale is that if I have paid for an ebook, I should be able to treat it exactly as I might a paper copy, i.e. lend it to family or friends.
This sounds like a great way to retire after I'm done with my current career!
Better make sure your skills are up to scratch. The guys who made it up to my property in TAS had been working with this kind of stuff for 20+ years. For all my earlier posts in this thread might have come across as whining about Telstra, I was and am. There is no other choice of provider here. But there are at least some of their guys with feet (and 4WD tyres) on the ground who have seriously good skills, and do their best to make an inadequate system work, and I salute them.
This is what I was referring to in my earlier post. Telstra owns most of the communications infrastructure in this country, and the record shows that so far they have done everything they can to avoid upgrading or even maintaining networks where there is no competition from other providers in a densely-populated metropolitan area.
Until a year ago, I was fortunate in being able to subscribe to ADSL2+ services in WA and subsequently SA, but here in TAS I am lucky to get a wireless connection (of sorts) to a tower 36km away. Any kind of physical connection is just out of the question. On the other hand, many households in other areas of the country can only access dial-up connections.
And if, as you say, people who work outdoors don't care very much what the clock says it makes even more sense to change what the clock says for the rest of us
Sigh. The arbitrary selection of a group to inconvenience doesn't really constitute much of a reason to to anything. Throwing one more specious argument into a topic almost entirely dominated by specious arguments doesn't achieve anything. But all this is wildly off-topic. Some fool hijacks a thread about saving power and uses it to push his opinion about daylight saving, and the /. lemmings happily follow.
;)
So how about this, to derail the thread back on-topic:
If the aim is to save CO2 emissions by reducing power usage, why not just do it at the source? Shut the power stations down for an hour or so. Everybody can keep warm by jumping up and down yelling abuse at each other.
Let the flames begin...
And never mind the "poorer" countries. Their biggest challenge will be Australia. Not because they cannot deliver a quality service, but because they will not.
I don't know. Communications satellites certainly existed back then, but I'll never know what calls were routed through them. The lag was nowhere near as bad as VOIP calls via satellite. I've done that, and the experience was nothing short of horrible.
If you can demand that a data aggregator give you all the data it has on you, what's to stop a dog from posing as you and demanding that information?
If your dog is capable of working out the value of £10 in dog money, then he can have that data, and welcome.
Pseudonyms are important for a number of reasons, including protection from stalkers, rouge governments
While it seems that there is never going to be any likelihood of the existence of a French communist state, pseudonymity is much the same as anonymity, except that it confers (to anyone who cares enough to check) a discrete identity of the correspondent. It has value in the sense that it offers a track record with a more or less defined personality and set of values, while preserving a layer of protection by dissociation from one's "meat-space" identity. It also acts as a layer of trust, in the sense that BrokenHalo (for instance) might be less inclined to say something just for the sake of being wilfully inflammatory (though he has been known to be wilfully facetious) than an anonymous coward.
But (from TFS) the notion that "...it seems that rudeness and incivility is used as a mental shortcut to make sense of those complicated issues." might be an over-analysis. I would contend that some people just cannot resist the temptation to shout "Look at ME!", and are wholly incapable of making sense of any kind of issue. By way of evidence, I might cite the endless stream of victims, err, participants in so-called "reality-TV' shows where the only purpose for their presence is to be humiliated in front of an audience.
I'm missing [...] the full duplex, circuit-switched, not-laggy realtime conversations I used to have on a landline phone.
That depended on the distance involved. I grew up in an era when most phones had a rotary dial and a real bell that rang (now I settle for an mp3 recording of a 1960s post-office phone on my Android device), and it was quite common to get a noticeable lag on international calls. Not as badly as with some VOIP calls, but there nonetheless.
But if your call connected (which it always did except when lines became congested at Christmas-time), the line was yours until you ended the call.
Even back in the 1980s, with analogue mobile phones (glorified push-button POTS phones with no wire plugged into the wall), you very rarely got a broken connection. Now, at least 50% of mobile calls drop out before I'm ready (thanks, Telstra) and even VOIP isn't very reliable.
Another thing about the old POTS network was that without caller-ID display, there was an element of surprise involved in taking a call, so if you wanted to reject calls from anybody in particular, you had to reject them from everybody. Which probably makes for better manners.
Just a few years ago, I would have said that the iPod was by far the best portable music-playing device (despite my reservations about Apple and iTunes). And my ancient iPod Classic still beats my Android phone hands down in terms of sheer capacity. But now the phone's music player (in my case, PlayerPro) is vastly superior in every other aspect, and the iPod just sits on a shelf most of the time.
But I expect it may be a very long time before any other device takes the place of my Sony PRS-T1 ebook reader. There is a point where (at least for reading novels) any improvement on the technology is just tinkering at the edges.
I've always loved (D)SLR cameras, but I've found that I miss a lot more pictures if I insist on using them, since there are always times when I don't want to carry all that baggage around. So instead, I use my knowledge to concentrate on getting the best out of my phone's camera. Sure, the hardware has a lot of limitations, but if you pay attention and take a bit of care, you can often end up with pictures that are just as pleasing.
Can you use Android without serving yourself up to Google?
Yes. Best way is probably the hosts file, which means you need to root the device (not hard, especially if you get a Nexus device)
Is it true that you have to have a Google account to start up your phone?
You need at least a gmail account. But that doesn't mean you have to use it for anything else.
Can you (easily) install apps by just downloading them to your computer and then transferring to the phone?
Yes.
Do you have to give up your credit card info and name/address to sign up for the Google app store? (In light of the recent story that app developers get all your info, I don't know if I want every 2-bit app to get that info. The info itself could be worth more than the 99 cents for the application.)
Credit card number only if you download non-free apps. No address. If you're worried, use a pre-paid credit card.
Also, do free apps also get your personal information?
Sometimes.
Any hints or links re: using Android without the all-seeing eye?
See above...
Builtin app replacement recommendations?
GoLauncherEx for homescreens
Playerpro (music)
ChompSMS
K9 Mail.
HTH
I'm a dissatisfied Ubuntu user
Well, you're obviously more patient than I am. ;-)
I've been primarily a Slackware user since the mid-'90s (though until recently I ran Arch on my laptop), but occasionally I pull down a current version of Ubuntu just to see what I'm missing. However, I always find Ubuntu annoys me to the point that I end up blowing it away after a couple of hours.
Why is everyone calling Linux "Libre" all of a sudden? it has always been free, and will remain so. As for supporting binary blobs, they work as one would expect. All you'll see (if you're paying attention) is a whine about it tainting the kernel.