Except you can't reboot a universe like Doctor Who, because they did not reboot the universe......
(Technically they did reboot the universe in a recent-ish story in the new Doctor Who series, but that was a plot device.)
Make your mind up, did they or didn't they reboot the universe?
Here's your helping hint : It wasn't a plot device, but a deliberate decision by Moffat. who respected RTD's work bringing Who back, didn't want to be tied down by Russell's vision.
RTD rebooted Who by using the nebulous off camera "time war", while Moffat DID quite literally reboot the entire universe, flicking a giant reset switch that allows him to ignore anything RTD did he doesn't like.
This is how good writers make a mythology their own. They reboot in such a way as to please the ubernerds that require canon while taking the characters off in directions unemcumbered by half century of cruft.
It won't be unique to each bank though. They will simply require you to provide the ID# assigned to you by Experian.
This ID# will effectively become the new SSN, and the problems will continue.
Until you make data security a legal requirement punishable by prison, you are going to see leak after leak. Making the leak of personal data a criminal offence is the only way to make it cost effective to have decent security procedures in place.
Bad news for the video games industry but it's not a total disaster. They get to benefit from a drop in corporation tax, and if they are smart, they'll take advantage of the 50K tax break for setting up a business outside of the SE hot zone.
All anyone such as Rockstar needs to do is open a new software house in Bradford, adjacent to and working with Rockstar Leeds for example and they get a reasonable tax break.
So while they've been kicked in the teeth, there are still some workable benefits to be had from the new budget.
If you've written a job description / contract that allows mediocre performance, then no, the employee cannot be fired. But that's the company's fault for writing a mediocre job description, that then needs to be honoured as all contracts should. You could write in a performance requirement, for example a sales target or a minimum allowable score in a 360 review, then you could fire them for an average performance. But again, this comes down to planning the job properly before you hire, because you can be sued for setting targets that are not achievable.
Contractors are more expensive than employees, and certainly in the UK at least, become classed as employees if you hire them for a year, and no you aren't allowed to keep hiring and firing the same people every 364 days. The other advantage to hiring employees is that they can't skip out on you, most people above burger flippers are required to give one month's notice before resigning, and senior staff can see that rise to 3 to 6 months.
Gutenburg wants to be able to scan orphaned works too. They have been campaigning legally for years. Gutenburg isn't a billion dollar advertising agency so can't afford the lawsuit that google pulled off. But now they are watching in horror as Google gets an exclusive deal meaning non profits such as Gutenburg and other libraries and archives are locked out. The law will never change now because congress will argue the problem is solved - Google is running it.
Imagine if instead of just indexing, Google stopped linking to the real website and just presented its cache. You'd never have access to the real site, just Google's copy of it. Imagine how happy webmasters would be then.
They aren't just indexing books, they are allowing them to be read online with Google adverts raking in the money. They have the exclusive right to do this, a monopoly gatekeeper. Books they don't approve of can simply vanish, books they do approve of, get an artificially high page rank, popular books get pay per view.
This sort of power over books should not be in the hands of any single company.
Once Google has an established monopoly there is nothing stopping them charging for access. They become the gate keepers to millions of books. Meanwhile their rivals a non profit making Project Gutenburg will be out of business because they used to scan orphaned works, and this deal prevents them from continuing.
This is not about laziness, Google just did this without bothering with permission, and then sent lawyers only billionares can afford in to steam roller an insane settlement, that no one else will ever be able to pull off.
Monopolies stop innovation and stop competition and in this case treat the talent like crap. It's a bad thing.
The writer retains the rights. Google came to an agreement with a guild that does not represent most writers to hand over EXCLUSIVE online rights to themselves even if the author didn't agree to it.
If the author doesn't like the deal, he needs to find out about it, and he may be living in isolation in a jungle somewhere, and then he needs to opt out by a deadline.
This completely screws other places offering free online books such as Gutenburg, because Google now owns the rights to pretty much all literature online. It's an EXCLUSIVE deal that means only google has the right to scan orphaned works. The only way anyone else can do it, is to scan the books anyway, and hope to win a billion dollar lawsuit from both Google and the Authors Guild.
To "help" authors make up their minds Google offered a bribe. Sign up before the deadline and get a share in the advertising revenue made from the orhpaned works, sign up aferwards and you don't get that benefit. Change your mind after a year or so, and it's too late. The data will be in the database permanently.
Google is trying to be a monopoly, and not a single piece of their behaviour appears to be concerned with authors, libraries and archivists. It's a disgrace and I look forward to them explaining the land grab of European author's rights to the EU.
I'm not convinced they did invent multi-touch first. I use a laptop powered by an N-Trig touch screen, which uses dual mode (pen, finger) ignores accidental touches (your palm) and implements gestures (two finger gestures allow you to scroll, zoom , one finger gestures move you back and forward etc).
Games with replay value don't get sold, gamers want to keep them to play again later. With no second hand copies available, people will have to buy new.
Games that are good enough get relaunched at half price as Platinum Games, which will see another boost in revenue as 20 quid is a price point where most gamers are prepared to buy new.
Games that have a long completion time - eg 30+ hours, or excellent online gameplay, result in gamers keeping them for quite some time before being sold back to game stores, which keeps that initial sales stream lasting longer than normal.
Games that have a short single player experience, or turn out to be not as good as the paid for review claimed, get sold back to the store as quickly as possible, and the publisher's revenue stream dies.
Gamers sell games to buy more games, they know you always get a better store credit price than cash price.
Gamers who buy second hand games, can't afford to drop 50-60 notes on the latest games. If these poorer gamers weren't keeping the second hand market strong, the price the richer gamers would be getting when they sell their games, would drop. This would mean they'd have less money to buy new titles.
50 - 60 notes is a lot of money to most people, even those that can afford it, can only justify it, because the game retains value and some of the cost can be reclaimed by selling it.
The market is working correctly, and any attempt to try and grab more market share by the publishers will back fire.
When the level of utilization changes, they are going to have to eventually upgrade the system. Eventually. This isn't going to happen overnight because of the costs involved. Should they have done it before? Maybe.
The problem at least in the UK is that 2-3 years ago most people were on 0.5MB ADSL and that was good enough for email and surfing for most people.
The ISPs then had a new product to sell - ADSL2, with speeds up to 8 Meg, and they advertised it like crazy and they promised Dad could read email, while mum was downloading showtunes from itunes, while Son was playing online games, and Daughter was downloading funny clips from youtube.
They wanted everyone to move to the new system and they deliberately hyped all the bandwidth hogging services as the reason you really should move to faster broadband.
Stupidly they fought for market share on price at the same time, some ISPs were offering free home broadband with your mobile phone price plan for example. At the time even pro consumer groups were saying the prices were too low and unsustainable.
So here we are a few years later, ISPs are shocked that people are using bandwith hogging services, they themselves promoted, and because of the price war, margins are too tight to widen pipes.
iPlayer has proven such a success there isn't a hope in hell of the BBC being made to stop the service and any money the BBC has to pay out, comes out of the licence fee, and that isn't going to happen either.
The ISPs dug their own grave and some aren't going to dig their way out.
Of course, they can be cut, but it would be a dedicated effort to do so.
Kensington Locks stop passers by stealing your laptop.
They do not stop thieves. I've seen a demonstration where the t-bar is prised out of the laptop in under 5 seconds with a screwdriver. Yes, the plastic case of the laptop around the lockhole will be damaged, but other than that, the laptop will be fine.
All the advertising blurb about the strength of the cable is nonsense, the weak point on all laptop security cables is the anchor which is just a hole cut in plastic.
They are good for keeping honest people honest, but are useless for protecting your laptop from a thief with a screwdriver.
They do a lot in the recycling arena. They make a big thing out of ensuring their equipment is recyclable and is moving to using non-dangerous/polluting means of making it. But in the UK at least macbooks appear to be flown in from China when ordered. I have no problems with building parts in China, but using planes to bring in individual orders rather than shipping by sea and storing them locally invalidates any recycling initative they do.
Have you complained about Radio 1's enhanced podcasts, only viewable on iPods?
If not, why not?
It is after all, a proprietary format, wholly owned and controlled by one company, which is why Creative and MS Mp3 players can't play the content.
The BBC is a multimedia company, experimenting and playing with many formats to see what works, and what is popular. That technological interest from a TV company should be celebrated not whined about.
Freeview isn't available to anyone without additional equipment.
Radios 5 through 7 aren't available on standard radio.
Radio 1's enhanced podcast broadcasts aren't watchable on Microsoft, Sony, or Creative MP3 players.
Requiring a Microsoft player on a standard run-of-the-mill PC as opposed to a player-agnostic format
What is the market share of MS in the UK? 80 - 90% at least? So isn't 'run of the mill' actually, a Microsoft machine? A standard run of the mill TV at the moment doesn't have access to BBC3 and BBC4, does that make freeview illegal?
Also note the beeb use the Apple version of enhanced podcasts to display images in their radio show podcasts, rather than the Windows Media version, so they are hardly in bed with MS.
Either we require the BBC to broadcast in a format everyone can view, in which case we are stuck in B&W 5:4 format, or we accept the BBC pushes multimedia to the edge, which means not everything will be viewable by everyone all the time.
I don't really like the idea of paying for a delivery method that is inaccessible to me.
You pay the same TV licence regardless of whether you have a radio or freeview decoder.
Did you complain when BBC3 and radio 6 were transmitted in a format that made it impossible to receive with standard equipment?
The BBC is a multi format platform. They are not required to deliver all content in a form every single TV owning person can receive. Otherwise everything from RSS feeds, to DAB, to enhanced podcasts to on demand digital weather forcasts are suddenly illegal.
Crash was the best magazine for the Spectrum gamer by miles. In fact, the talent writing and drawing that has never been surpassed by any gaming magazine since.
Over the years I had a Spectrum, c64, amstrad, amiga and ST, and nothing beat the sheer brilliance of the spectrum.
Hobbit, ant attack, deathchase, manic miner, jetpac, psst!, tir na nog, wheelie, and the ultimate spectrum game, Lords of Midnight.
Happy times, I shall be booting up an emulator tonight to celebrate.
Paul McGann counts. He was in a BBC production (unlike Peter Cushing's Dalek films) and so is an official regeneration. RTD has confirmed this.
The Doctor has control of the eye of harmony, one of the central elements to timelord power, with that he can gain additional regenerations. That's based on stories already written. Considering this is a science fiction series, where they solved the problem of a sick lead actor by inventing regeneration in the first place, there is probably an infinite number of ways they can "solve" the 12 regeneration problem.
Er, no. The reason regeneration exists is because William Hartnell became ill, forcing the BBC to recast the lead in one of the most imaginative bits of writing seen at the time.
It has nothing to do with actor's demands, Who was created as a cheap, live, TV serial that was supposed to educate people about history.
Back in the early 60's BBC actors were paid pretty workman like rates of pay, and certainly didn't command huge fees for being stars.
First the party in power has to write a law that makes it a crime to have such a name.
All they actually have to do is declare they have links to terrorism.
Then they can be placed under house arrest, restricting them to one room in their home for 20 hours a day - for years. They can be banned from owning a mobile phone, or getting internet access. They can be banned from travelling more the a couple of miles from their homes, and can even be ordered to phone the tracking service every 4 hours, even if that means having to wake up twice during the night, every night to make the call.
They can and are, doing this to people right now in 2007, without even their lawyer knowing what evidence is being offered for this because the evidence is allowed to be classified so secret, the legal profession can't even view it.
This also includes wiretaps where even judges aren't allowed to listen to the evidence.
The Magna Carta, I'm afraid has long since been destroyed.
The only difference between the average emergency room doctor's attitude to some of their patients and the cliched sysadmin's hatred of 'lusers' is the fact that doctors wear shirts and ties.
Slashdot Mirror
Make your mind up, did they or didn't they reboot the universe?
Here's your helping hint : It wasn't a plot device, but a deliberate decision by Moffat. who respected RTD's work bringing Who back, didn't want to be tied down by Russell's vision.
RTD rebooted Who by using the nebulous off camera "time war", while Moffat DID quite literally reboot the entire universe, flicking a giant reset switch that allows him to ignore anything RTD did he doesn't like.
This is how good writers make a mythology their own. They reboot in such a way as to please the ubernerds that require canon while taking the characters off in directions unemcumbered by half century of cruft.
It won't be unique to each bank though. They will simply require you to provide the ID# assigned to you by Experian.
This ID# will effectively become the new SSN, and the problems will continue.
Until you make data security a legal requirement punishable by prison, you are going to see leak after leak. Making the leak of personal data a criminal offence is the only way to make it cost effective to have decent security procedures in place.
Bad news for the video games industry but it's not a total disaster. They get to benefit from a drop in corporation tax, and if they are smart, they'll take advantage of the 50K tax break for setting up a business outside of the SE hot zone.
All anyone such as Rockstar needs to do is open a new software house in Bradford, adjacent to and working with Rockstar Leeds for example and they get a reasonable tax break.
So while they've been kicked in the teeth, there are still some workable benefits to be had from the new budget.
If you've written a job description / contract that allows mediocre performance, then no, the employee cannot be fired. But that's the company's fault for writing a mediocre job description, that then needs to be honoured as all contracts should. You could write in a performance requirement, for example a sales target or a minimum allowable score in a 360 review, then you could fire them for an average performance. But again, this comes down to planning the job properly before you hire, because you can be sued for setting targets that are not achievable.
Contractors are more expensive than employees, and certainly in the UK at least, become classed as employees if you hire them for a year, and no you aren't allowed to keep hiring and firing the same people every 364 days. The other advantage to hiring employees is that they can't skip out on you, most people above burger flippers are required to give one month's notice before resigning, and senior staff can see that rise to 3 to 6 months.
Gutenburg wants to be able to scan orphaned works too. They have been campaigning legally for years. Gutenburg isn't a billion dollar advertising agency so can't afford the lawsuit that google pulled off. But now they are watching in horror as Google gets an exclusive deal meaning non profits such as Gutenburg and other libraries and archives are locked out. The law will never change now because congress will argue the problem is solved - Google is running it.
Imagine if instead of just indexing, Google stopped linking to the real website and just presented its cache. You'd never have access to the real site, just Google's copy of it. Imagine how happy webmasters would be then.
They aren't just indexing books, they are allowing them to be read online with Google adverts raking in the money. They have the exclusive right to do this, a monopoly gatekeeper. Books they don't approve of can simply vanish, books they do approve of, get an artificially high page rank, popular books get pay per view.
This sort of power over books should not be in the hands of any single company.
Once Google has an established monopoly there is nothing stopping them charging for access. They become the gate keepers to millions of books. Meanwhile their rivals a non profit making Project Gutenburg will be out of business because they used to scan orphaned works, and this deal prevents them from continuing.
This is not about laziness, Google just did this without bothering with permission, and then sent lawyers only billionares can afford in to steam roller an insane settlement, that no one else will ever be able to pull off.
Monopolies stop innovation and stop competition and in this case treat the talent like crap. It's a bad thing.
The writer retains the rights. Google came to an agreement with a guild that does not represent most writers to hand over EXCLUSIVE online rights to themselves even if the author didn't agree to it.
If the author doesn't like the deal, he needs to find out about it, and he may be living in isolation in a jungle somewhere, and then he needs to opt out by a deadline.
This completely screws other places offering free online books such as Gutenburg, because Google now owns the rights to pretty much all literature online. It's an EXCLUSIVE deal that means only google has the right to scan orphaned works. The only way anyone else can do it, is to scan the books anyway, and hope to win a billion dollar lawsuit from both Google and the Authors Guild.
To "help" authors make up their minds Google offered a bribe. Sign up before the deadline and get a share in the advertising revenue made from the orhpaned works, sign up aferwards and you don't get that benefit. Change your mind after a year or so, and it's too late. The data will be in the database permanently.
Google is trying to be a monopoly, and not a single piece of their behaviour appears to be concerned with authors, libraries and archivists. It's a disgrace and I look forward to them explaining the land grab of European author's rights to the EU.
I'm not convinced they did invent multi-touch first. I use a laptop powered by an N-Trig touch screen, which uses dual mode (pen, finger) ignores accidental touches (your palm) and implements gestures (two finger gestures allow you to scroll, zoom , one finger gestures move you back and forward etc).
This tech has been around on tablets for years.
Games with replay value don't get sold, gamers want to keep them to play again later. With no second hand copies available, people will have to buy new.
Games that are good enough get relaunched at half price as Platinum Games, which will see another boost in revenue as 20 quid is a price point where most gamers are prepared to buy new.
Games that have a long completion time - eg 30+ hours, or excellent online gameplay, result in gamers keeping them for quite some time before being sold back to game stores, which keeps that initial sales stream lasting longer than normal.
Games that have a short single player experience, or turn out to be not as good as the paid for review claimed, get sold back to the store as quickly as possible, and the publisher's revenue stream dies.
Gamers sell games to buy more games, they know you always get a better store credit price than cash price.
Gamers who buy second hand games, can't afford to drop 50-60 notes on the latest games. If these poorer gamers weren't keeping the second hand market strong, the price the richer gamers would be getting when they sell their games, would drop. This would mean they'd have less money to buy new titles.
50 - 60 notes is a lot of money to most people, even those that can afford it, can only justify it, because the game retains value and some of the cost can be reclaimed by selling it.
The market is working correctly, and any attempt to try and grab more market share by the publishers will back fire.
Turn them into picture frames. http://repair4laptop.org/notebook_picture_frame.html
The ISPs then had a new product to sell - ADSL2, with speeds up to 8 Meg, and they advertised it like crazy and they promised Dad could read email, while mum was downloading showtunes from itunes, while Son was playing online games, and Daughter was downloading funny clips from youtube.
They wanted everyone to move to the new system and they deliberately hyped all the bandwidth hogging services as the reason you really should move to faster broadband.
Stupidly they fought for market share on price at the same time, some ISPs were offering free home broadband with your mobile phone price plan for example. At the time even pro consumer groups were saying the prices were too low and unsustainable.
So here we are a few years later, ISPs are shocked that people are using bandwith hogging services, they themselves promoted, and because of the price war, margins are too tight to widen pipes.
iPlayer has proven such a success there isn't a hope in hell of the BBC being made to stop the service and any money the BBC has to pay out, comes out of the licence fee, and that isn't going to happen either. The ISPs dug their own grave and some aren't going to dig their way out.
They do not stop thieves. I've seen a demonstration where the t-bar is prised out of the laptop in under 5 seconds with a screwdriver. Yes, the plastic case of the laptop around the lockhole will be damaged, but other than that, the laptop will be fine.
All the advertising blurb about the strength of the cable is nonsense, the weak point on all laptop security cables is the anchor which is just a hole cut in plastic.
They are good for keeping honest people honest, but are useless for protecting your laptop from a thief with a screwdriver.
It's a standard comedy genre in the UK. Fast delivery, fast edits, initially pioneered by Victor Lewis Smith in the 80's. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j39oSM9ppo
These days Charlie Brooker carries the torch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB70wuweyQI
Ben is brilliantly funny, but owes more to these two men than Monty Python.
Have you complained about Radio 1's enhanced podcasts, only viewable on iPods?
If not, why not?
It is after all, a proprietary format, wholly owned and controlled by one company, which is why Creative and MS Mp3 players can't play the content.
The BBC is a multimedia company, experimenting and playing with many formats to see what works, and what is popular. That technological interest from a TV company should be celebrated not whined about.
Radios 5 through 7 aren't available on standard radio.
Radio 1's enhanced podcast broadcasts aren't watchable on Microsoft, Sony, or Creative MP3 players.
What is the market share of MS in the UK? 80 - 90% at least? So isn't 'run of the mill' actually, a Microsoft machine? A standard run of the mill TV at the moment doesn't have access to BBC3 and BBC4, does that make freeview illegal?
Also note the beeb use the Apple version of enhanced podcasts to display images in their radio show podcasts, rather than the Windows Media version, so they are hardly in bed with MS.
Either we require the BBC to broadcast in a format everyone can view, in which case we are stuck in B&W 5:4 format, or we accept the BBC pushes multimedia to the edge, which means not everything will be viewable by everyone all the time.
Did you complain when BBC3 and radio 6 were transmitted in a format that made it impossible to receive with standard equipment?
The BBC is a multi format platform. They are not required to deliver all content in a form every single TV owning person can receive. Otherwise everything from RSS feeds, to DAB, to enhanced podcasts to on demand digital weather forcasts are suddenly illegal.
Crash was the best magazine for the Spectrum gamer by miles. In fact, the talent writing and drawing that has never been surpassed by any gaming magazine since.
Over the years I had a Spectrum, c64, amstrad, amiga and ST, and nothing beat the sheer brilliance of the spectrum.
Hobbit, ant attack, deathchase, manic miner, jetpac, psst!, tir na nog, wheelie, and the ultimate spectrum game, Lords of Midnight.
Happy times, I shall be booting up an emulator tonight to celebrate.
Only the first K9 was built by Marius, every subsequent model was built by the Doctor, and had a lethal laser weapon equipped as standard.
Apart from Leela the knife wielding savage, and K9, who the Doctor equipped with a laser pistol you mean?
Paul McGann counts. He was in a BBC production (unlike Peter Cushing's Dalek films) and so is an official regeneration. RTD has confirmed this.
The Doctor has control of the eye of harmony, one of the central elements to timelord power, with that he can gain additional regenerations. That's based on stories already written. Considering this is a science fiction series, where they solved the problem of a sick lead actor by inventing regeneration in the first place, there is probably an infinite number of ways they can "solve" the 12 regeneration problem.
Er, no. The reason regeneration exists is because William Hartnell became ill, forcing the BBC to recast the lead in one of the most imaginative bits of writing seen at the time.
It has nothing to do with actor's demands, Who was created as a cheap, live, TV serial that was supposed to educate people about history.
Back in the early 60's BBC actors were paid pretty workman like rates of pay, and certainly didn't command huge fees for being stars.
Then they can be placed under house arrest, restricting them to one room in their home for 20 hours a day - for years. They can be banned from owning a mobile phone, or getting internet access. They can be banned from travelling more the a couple of miles from their homes, and can even be ordered to phone the tracking service every 4 hours, even if that means having to wake up twice during the night, every night to make the call.
They can and are, doing this to people right now in 2007, without even their lawyer knowing what evidence is being offered for this because the evidence is allowed to be classified so secret, the legal profession can't even view it.
This also includes wiretaps where even judges aren't allowed to listen to the evidence.
The Magna Carta, I'm afraid has long since been destroyed.
Doctors have always insulted their patients in their notes .
More detailed list here .
The only difference between the average emergency room doctor's attitude to some of their patients and the cliched sysadmin's hatred of 'lusers' is the fact that doctors wear shirts and ties.