Our intranet looks like shit on standards-compliant browsers (including IE 10) because a lot of shortcuts were taken back in the IE6 days. That button helps to alleviate the problem.
Well spend some money and get it updated for browsers made this decade then.
A smarter way is for us to unite in disobedience to clearly unconsitutional laws, and drum up media sympathy.
A nice idea, but most of the american public will quite happily ignore you being repeatedly CS gassed until you pack it in and go back to work.
Has the new york cop who was filmed openly spraying women with CS gas simply because they were peacefully resisting what he wanted them to do ever been punished? Nope, because he was doing his job and doing his best to disburse the hippies as quickly as possible.
This sort of shit has been going on for years since the protests about Vietnam and will never change while very rich media owners (who also often own shares in industries benefiting from the thing being protested against) shape the public conciousness to the extent they currently do.
Android, even on devices with a locked bootloader, allows for installation of software from sources other than the Play Store.
Only if you turn that feature on. Most devices default to not allowing this and throw up a warning if you try and enable it. You are free to ignore the warning but then it is your own dumb fault if you screw up.
I just checked my Samsung Galaxy S3 and I never seem to have needed to allow the installing of untrusted apps after 6 months of ownership so I probably never will.
The real "problem" with Android is that Google leave the play store far more open than the Apple equivalent and force users to engage their brain even when installing stuff from the store. This is one of the things I actually like about Android since I have no problem doing some basic Google research any time I want to install an app.
The alternative is go the Apple way and find you are not allowed to install certain things just because Steve Jobs (or one of his successors) did not agree with whatever it is you wanted to install (like maybe a flash player). There might be very few apps withdrawn on a whim by some twat at Apple but if there is a single one then that is too many by my book.
Some people do not want to research any apps they install on their phone and want to be able to browse a limited list of apps and know that anything they see is perfectly safe and is being regularly vetted by Apple. For them an iphone is a good fit, that is just not me.
no thanks. as a professional web developer I often have to let my clients know that to "do that fancy ajax stuff" I need to use JavaScript, and if they want to retain compatibility with non-JavaScript browsers then it will cost them significantly more for their project. i then show them how their favorite sites like amazon, ebay, etc. will simply refuse to work without JavaScript enabled and they opt to still use JavaScript but refuse to support non-JS browsers.
If you did any sort of serious web development you'd also know how time consuming it is to include support for no-script crap.
As someone who has been a professional web developer for a decade or so I mostly agree with you, but you are neglecting accessibility.
Where I work we do a lot of work for government type organisations and they are not allowed to discriminate against people with disabilities. That means that they have to have sites that are usable by blind people using a screen reader (mostly jaws I believe). That means we waste thousands of pounds of taxpayers money on making amazing ajax websites that also degrade to a usable solution if you have JS disabled. Of that money wasted keeps me in beer tokens so I don't complain too loudly:)
There is one site we have where the core offering is selling e-learning courses reliant on a standard (called SCORM 1.2) that requires JS in order to launch the courses. Since the site is owned by a government body though (even though it makes a profit for that body) the site has to work in a screen reader. You just get all the way down to the product pages and find that almost every single product will not let you add it to your basket without JS. Of course the entire basket process works fine with no JS, as does the entire rest of the site as it all had to as part of the tender despite us mentioning what and utter waste of cash this was in the various meetings.
I've looked at freelancing before, and I could probably make more money by working at McDonald's on weekends than that.
Wrong!
The going rate for a development to hire is at least $500 per day. If you are able to talk to a client in a professional manner and find out what they need then work in an agile manner to deliver something they like then you can earn at least half that and still keep the client happy that they got a bargain.
I have only done this once though, and not through a website. One of my friends works as an eCommerce consultant or something and put me forward as someone who could rescue a project from a shitty mess of tangled code that nobody wanted to work on. I earned couple of grand over a few weeks for working evenings and weekends and realised I get burned out if I try and code full time all day then do more when I get home at night.
This is similar to the issue with ICE (internal combustion engine) where if it is really hot outside and you run the AC really high, you will drain the battery more. I think people need some more education as to the limitations of battery powered cars. It is probably not common knowledge that the heater in an all electric car uses the battery extensively vs. just blowing heat off of the radiator. Also, people need to shift their expectations based on the architecture of their vehicle. Some ICE engines need to be kept warm during extreme colds at night otherwise it can be very difficult to start them in the morning. Li-ion batteries do not like conditions outside of normal operating temperatures and charge rates; operating outside of those ranges will affect capacity and performance. In the end, the easy answer is probably for Tesla to set more conservative numbers for range when it is really cold or really hot outside.
Some old ICE cars have the opposite problem though. My mates old Fiat Panda would over heat if you got stuck in traffic on a hot day unless you put the in car heater on to take heat away from the engine. I remember many a hot July day driving back from uni with all the windows open and the heat on full blast.
Tesla got a copy of the script for Top Gear - written before they drove the car - and it had pre-planned a battery disaster.
Top Gear always has stupid crap like that in it. Its one of the reasons why I stopped watching it, they assume everyone is as thick as Clarkson.
I remember watching one of the pointless car v whatever races they were doing where it was posh sportscar car v light aircraft from somewhere in france to the UK. Obviously a light aircraft would win this since it can take a far straighter path and maintain a speed that would get you arrested in most places on the ground (100-120km/h). They came up with the idea of using a halfwit pilot (James May) who was not allowed to fly at night over the channel or something though so that the car won.
Everyone knows that if you had to go between southern france and london a plane would be the quickest choice if you could afford it. The plane winning would be dull TV so to make it interesting and also to appeal the braindead petrol heads who watch Top Gear marvelling over cars they will never afford they come up with a way for the car to win. Every episode where they did similar races was the same from what I remember.
WTF? Isn't it common sense to fully charge an electric car before embarking on a journey to test the car's range? This guy should be fired from the NYT.
Why?
Most readers of NYT want their existing beliefs confirmed to them, not to be challenged by new ideas in any way. This guy reviewed an electric car and came to the conclusion that they lack range and longevity and are unreliable. That is exactly what everyone already knows about electric cars, so the guy did his job and wrote an article that the readership liked reading. Why fire him?
For profit news media is not their to be informative, it is their to entertain you so you keep buying the product. Sometimes that coincides with being informative, sometimes it does not. Granted there are some news stories that they have to cover even if they are unpopular, but those are hard news pieces, not reviews of luxury items.
In this case I do not find it all hard to believe that the guy doing the review wanted to make sure he got the car to run out of juice as that was an important part of the story he wanted to write: that electric cars still lag behind the gas fuelled counterparts and this is the possible result. I think he is broadly correct in this point in that they have shorter range on a full charge, as batteries are heavier for the energy they store than gas is.
Tesla would have been constantly applying pressure to makes sure the car did not run out of gas by the side of the road. He needed this to happen though as it was a "feature" he wanted in his article. Of course he could have driven it in a way that did not happen, but he wanted it to happen to make his article interesting to read and entertaining.
Tesla were probably busting his balls though to stop him having an interesting feature in his article where the car ran out of charge. His review would have just been the same bland crap as all the others where the shorter range of the Tesla was mentioned, but without a nice real world example for people to easily understand.
Poor content? Compared to 90% of the bland shit that is produced by the other big commercial producers (Sky, HBO, ITV, etc) the BBC stuff is far better
I would disagree. In fact if I was legally allowed the option. I would cancel my TV license and subscribe to netflix which is less than half the price:)
They recognise that a great many people own a huge TV but don't actually use it for watching live TV so do not need a licence. If you are only interested in watching netflix just follow the link I posted above and stop wasting our time with your ignorance.
On another point, the BBC mentions the revenue from selling DVD and audio recordings -- the profit from this is £182M. That compares to £3606M of income from license payers, at £145.50 each, thus about 25M licenses are sold. If every licence-payer paid an extra £7 we wouldn't need to protect that content. (Have I calculated that correctly?)
(Other broadcasters with different funding models might still want this system.)
More importantly those that *pay* for the content should simply get unrestricted access to it. The fact that the BBC make 5% profit on what is for all intended purposes a tax, simply shows how poor the content is. As for being taxed higher for the privileged something, how about they get paid a little less.
Poor content? Compared to 90% of the bland shit that is produced by the other big commercial producers (Sky, HBO, ITV, etc) the BBC stuff is far better. It is also very different and be more likely to appeal to niche markets and be more experimental.
On top of that the news the BBC produces is what also makes it stand out. It might fuck up occasionally, but so does everyone. The important thing to my mind is that it is a news network not solely driven by the point of view of a single (exceedingly rich) proprietor.
"However, the BBC is unlikely to be able to use any such mechanism unless we feel that it is sufficiently secure that there would be the possibility of legal action in the event of bypassing it."
Not sure why you would defend the BBC, but that is pretty much the definition of a sanction. In fact it states quite clearly that the BBC is less interested in about how good the DRM is [they expect it to be broken], but whether anti-circumvention provisions is protected by law e.g. DMCA. It is just focused on stopping the people forced to pay for service in the UK having unrestricted access to the content they paid for.
The BBC has a rather bonkers idea about DRM anyway. For example, HD Freesat receivers are required to implemtn DRM on their output (i.e. HDCP on the HD output, no analogue HD output, etc.), even though the DVB-S signal they are receiving is transmitted in the clear anyway. All it does is inconvenience legitimate consumers - anyone planning on copyright infringement is going to find it more trivial to record the raw DVB-S stream rather than an HDMI stream anyway.
Similarly, iPlayer's DRM is so weak as to be completely useless, and yet they still use it and therefore insist on using the terrible Flash player instead of making the video streams available in a standard format that would work on all platforms. (The flash player is so bad that I invariably just use get_iplayer and then play it with mplayer).
BTW, get_iplayer does not bypass DRM since the BBC do not use any.
"get_iplayer, does the recording, indexing and searching of the iPlayer TV/Radio programmes and podcasts available. It can even stream the iPlayer TV programmes while recording them to mplayer, vlc or xine, etc. It does not circumvent any digital rights management security (see the BBC’s website on how to do that with the Windows-only DRM content they provide)."
I just loaded the example site, and it looks like just several lines of text with JavaScript disabled on the site. After enabling JavaScript, the site looks like it's supposed to, but is it really necessary to write a web forum that relies entirely on JavaScript to work? What ever happened to server-side processing spitting out dumb HTML pages and CSS styles? Most popular message board systems I've seen work perfectly without JS enabled, but others are very ugly (I'm looking at you, Disqus).
The problem is that the vast majority of real web users do not actually care what a site looks like with JS disabled, as they keep it enabled.
You guys with your insistence on no JS completely excludes jquery use and means everything has to work on completely refreshing the page every time you interact with it. Jquery and ajax creates an experience that is much quicker for most users since they only have to wait for very small amounts of JSON data to be sent to and from the server, and don't have to wait for the entire DOM to be reloaded from the server even though only a small part of it changed. Most users prefer this experience.
I actually agree that all decent websites should degrade gracefully when JS is absent as this is how most screen readers (for blind people) render sites. The thing is though that most developers do not care what the blind person view of their website looks like providing it is at least half way usable (often that usability is a mandatory requirement as all government funded stuff has to tick the accessibility box).
The number of real world users who insist on disabling JS seems to be a very low minority so don't be too surprised you are neglected by us web developers more and more. That way of creating websites is dead, and it simply is not coming back no matter how loudly you piss and moan as most people prefer the more modern Ajax feel.
I've almost _always_ been able to resell my games. Fallout 3 was late 2008, thats the last big bethesda game i can recall without drm. Aside from the past 5 years of drm bs, I'd say being able to resell is the norm. Though I guess if you're younger you may think it's always been this sucky.
Of course on consoles you are able to resell most games you buy, but that is only because they use a different approach to preventing piracy. In the case of consoles the use digital signature thingy in the console that prevents it running pirated disks without someone modding the console. They can do this by having code in the game that checks the disk in someway and if you remove that code the signature no longer matches to the console will not run the game.
Like it or not the companies who now produce games simply don't trust us not top pirate their product. They know they can't make it completely impossible, but they can make it difficult and that puts a large percentage of people off so they settle for that.
Whether this is right or wrong morally is largely irrelevant, it is what the publishers want to do.
If Steam is prevented from doing this in Germany (I very much doubt that will happen, since they tell you up front when you guy the game that you can't so it is probably a legal contract) then they will just find some other way of achieving a similar aim. Maybe they will go down the signed code route on their new Steam box instead.
Steam do not produce most of the games they sell in house, they just sell them. The game publishers were all talking about abandoning the PC a few years back due to piracy, Steam has used it's DRM to bring them back. If Steam (and Origin) are suddenly made illegal then when the next generation of consoles come out the game publishers will only release their product on them instead. Unless the threat of piracy completely disappears somehow some form of DRM will always exist now.
It is an easy problem to fix. Upon transfer the seller's copy is deleted and a fresh copy is provided to the buyer.
That of course is dependant on whether Steam are allowed to do this according to their contract with the people who created / distribute the game in question?
I would not be at all surprised if the who way Steam negotiates the very cheap prices they offer stuff for is that the publishes know the use a very restrictive form of DRM that prevents resale. That DRM may actually be a condition attached by the company who actually own the copyright on the game in question. Since many of the games bought through steam have a different form of DRM if bought on disk this is definitely the case for some stuff.
It will be funny if that is the case as this could just end up in Steam having to not sell those products in Germany in future.
Of course there are also the other companies that are following Steam's example now as well. Is Origin (EA's offering) any different in this regard?
You're confusing property with "intellectual property", these have nothing in common.
Sorry, I must have misunderstood you you said "actual property is not that important for free market". What did you mean by the two words "Actual Property"?
Forgive me for being a Brit so not really understanding what this is all about, but is it not the case that when you buy a phone in the US you are buying it for a small fraction of the actual cost (or being given it free) under the condition that you only use it on their network and hence pay for the calls to the people who subsidised the phone? That is how it works over here.
Yes, that's part of the justification for locking phones.
In the US, we also have the same rent-to-own system for paying for expensive electronic appliances and expensive furniture. Basically, in exchange for a subsidized appliance upfront, you end up paying over a two-year (or a three-year) period multiple times the normal retail price for that appliance. Of course for rent-to-own, only the people in the most extreme circumstances end up using that system, and the overwhelming 90% of the population wouldn't even think to enter a rent-to-own store.
For cell phones in the US however, we're not given much of a choice even if we pay the full unsubsidized price. Technically, I could unlock my Verizon CDMA phone, or I could pay full retail price for a Verizon phone, or I could wait until the two years are up and ask that they unlock it for me, but that phone still wouldn't work on any GSM network, nor would it work on the Sprint/Nextel CDMA network. That's how CDMA works. It's a form of proprietary technology lock-in. Once unlocked, the most I could do with it is use it with PagePlus Cellular, or may be with Boost Mobile (assuming Boost Mobile even lets me), but that's only because those two outfits are subleasing the same Verizon CDMA network.
The US is not like Europe. In Europe, the law says that all carriers must all standardize on the same technology. In the US, there is no such law. And even if I were to bring back a fully unsubsidized GSM phone from Asia, or Europe, my choices would be extremely limited in terms of US carriers that would even support that technology (and I'd be lucky for one to even cover adequately my normal geographical area).
Ok, so let me get this straight. If I emigrate to the US with my nice shiny new (unlocked, I bought it for £600 from expansys) Samsung Galaxy S3, I would be unable to go to a carrier an get a contract to use it on their network on a pay for calls only basis? Over here I can just use a pay-as-you go prepay account, do they not exist in the US?
If what you say is right then no wonder you are all complaining so much.
Also, we're acting defensively when we should be going on the offensive instead. Reinstating our rights to unlock our phones is not enough.
The locking of phones by carriers should be made illegal in the first place. Our airways are a public good. They're part of our public infrastructure. They're just like our public roads. As a society, we get to set the rules of the road, or update them as need be. The locking of phones may have been ok in the beginning, but this is a business practice that needs to stop right now.
Forgive me for being a Brit so not really understanding what this is all about, but is it not the case that when you buy a phone in the US you are buying it for a small fraction of the actual cost (or being given it free) under the condition that you only use it on their network and hence pay for the calls to the people who subsidised the phone? That is how it works over here.
Also, we have this weird system where the all the transmitters and infrastructure that the phone uses to relay calls and data over were paid for by a private company in the first place, not government. They use the call cost to recuperate that as well. And on top of this they actually have to pay government for the electrical spectrum they use as well.
I guess they could only use the calls to subsidise the infrastructure and make everyone actually buy their handsets upfront but over here that would be really unpopular with most people.
It is actually possible to but an unlocked phone here but nobody does because the decent phones are too expensive like that. I know they could be made a crap load cheaper but most people I know would not even want to pay $250 up front for a phone (an iphone5 costs about $207 to produce), they would rather pay a small amount every month to cover it instead.
I have a solution: the patent office should do a thorough examination of every patent application, in the order that they are received. If that makes the process too slow, then maybe the big dogs with their gigantic patent warchests should try paying their fucking taxes so we can afford to hire more patent examiners!
I love the idea, but there is unfortunately bugger all hope of them playing ball. it's cheaper for them to buy a politician or two than it is to pay tax.
If you ever bothered to read them you might know his name was spelt "Marx" not "Marks".
... or grew in a country that spells it "Marks" (surprising as we use the Latin alphabet just like the original, but that's probably because most communists who invaded us spoke russian natively).
Wow, wierd. In my country we pretty much always spell peoples names the way they were actually spelt be the person we are referring to and try and guess the pronunciation correctly based on country of origin so in my case I would try and pronounce his name in a slight german accent:)
I guess it is because we have so many foreign words and place names in our vocabulary already, the same thing that makes English such a sod to learn I believe.
Of course none of this changes my central point: That his writings actually do have a lot of truth in them, and that the communist system that was built later was only very loosely based on his ideas. I actually think it was more of a dictatorship than anything else that was ended up with after Stalin had his way.
The interesting thing I find though is your sig: "Copyright is not merely theft. As a form of censorship, it's a crime against humanity."
The concept of intellectual property (ie: copyright) is a cornerstone of capitalism, if you do not support it then you are probably more of a socialist than you realise. Or do you believe that capitalism should only apply physical items and resources but that ideas should always be communal?
Copyright was only really invented when the printing press was born and we suddenly had an easy way to replicate other peoples ideas cheaply. It was solely designed by capitalists who wanted ensure they had a way of monetising their writing or art. As we have developed the ability to replicate more and more things without the original creators involvement copyright has been naturally extended to those products too.
Within our lifetimes we may have the ability to do this for any physical product too, copyright will naturally be extended to cover this. This is essential to ensure that people who come up with books, music, films, software, etc are still able to make a living from their creations. The idea of only selling services based on freely available inventions is simply not enough to ensure people carry on inventing new stuff.
Some people argue that copyright should be more limited in term, and I believe the are correct. But in a capitalist system the concept of copyright must still exist in some form.
Of course I actually think we must ultimately out grow capitalism, which is the core of Marx writings that I agree with. Until then though, while any private property exists, the privately owned ideas (where they are shared for some monetary reward) must also exist or the people who do most to benefit society (by coming up with new ideas) will be the least rewarded.
The works of Marks and Lenin were pure lies even according to their authors.
If you ever bothered to read them you might know his name was spelt "Marx" not "Marks".
I actually think he has some very good points about labour, especially when taken in the context of the time he wrote in. Of course this is very different from saying any real world example of communism is a good system, since almost all examples of communist countries came about long after he was pushing up daisies.
I guess Marx is like anyone trying to do any sort of social commentary about systems they themselves are part of. They are not able to look through truly impartial eyes as they have invariably had both good and bad experiences of the system they are commenting on.
Make the patent offices liable for any patent that's later invalidated (ie. pay all the legal bills). It's the only way.
The problem with this idea is it makes the american taxpayer ultimately liable.
The patent office is basically underfunded and simply cannot afford to fully examine every patent filed and look for prior art in every case. Funding it to this extent would probably cost billions based on the number of patents file every year.
Even if you made the people applying for a patent pay for the process if the patent was found to be not valid, this would still involve the patent office needing far more money that it currently has.
Missed the part where it should run GNU/Linux? There are already cheap tablets for less than $100 (and not as cheap, but pretty close, and powerful, for less than $200). Add a keyboard and some base to use it as a notebook and you are mostly there.
Running Linux makes something more expensive as the hardware manufacturer can't fill the device with crapware that subsidises the cost.
The only reasonable explanation is really, really bad leadership.
Why would that be the only reasonable explanation? Windows 8 is the result of choices made by several engineers and designers. I bet there are lots of people inside Microsoft who have had their say on it, not only Ballmer or Sinofsky.
Because this is slashdot, hence it is important to blame whoever runs MS at the time, be it Balmer or Billy "Borg Boy" Gates.
Why suffer through all that shit? Just install Ubuntu/Mint. It's way easier because it's not that simple (read: dumbed down). Problem solved.
Seriously... some people just seem to love to suffer, as long as they don't have to actually lift their asses off the chair and change something.
I just installed Linux Mint and I love it. There is no way i would recommend it to someone who wasn't already comfortable with Linux though.
I had to go to actually work to make it work with my phone a galaxy s3. I also had to put some effort into getting it connected to my work (windows) vpn. Linux mint is great, but it is only ever going to be a fit for people who are comfortable googling for instructions to make something work for the moment. The just plug it in and it works crowd need to go elsewhere for the moment (ie, stick with Windows or Apple)
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Our intranet looks like shit on standards-compliant browsers (including IE 10) because a lot of shortcuts were taken back in the IE6 days. That button helps to alleviate the problem.
Well spend some money and get it updated for browsers made this decade then.
A smarter way is for us to unite in disobedience to clearly unconsitutional laws, and drum up media sympathy.
A nice idea, but most of the american public will quite happily ignore you being repeatedly CS gassed until you pack it in and go back to work.
Has the new york cop who was filmed openly spraying women with CS gas simply because they were peacefully resisting what he wanted them to do ever been punished? Nope, because he was doing his job and doing his best to disburse the hippies as quickly as possible.
This sort of shit has been going on for years since the protests about Vietnam and will never change while very rich media owners (who also often own shares in industries benefiting from the thing being protested against) shape the public conciousness to the extent they currently do.
Android, even on devices with a locked bootloader, allows for installation of software from sources other than the Play Store.
Only if you turn that feature on. Most devices default to not allowing this and throw up a warning if you try and enable it. You are free to ignore the warning but then it is your own dumb fault if you screw up.
I just checked my Samsung Galaxy S3 and I never seem to have needed to allow the installing of untrusted apps after 6 months of ownership so I probably never will.
The real "problem" with Android is that Google leave the play store far more open than the Apple equivalent and force users to engage their brain even when installing stuff from the store. This is one of the things I actually like about Android since I have no problem doing some basic Google research any time I want to install an app.
The alternative is go the Apple way and find you are not allowed to install certain things just because Steve Jobs (or one of his successors) did not agree with whatever it is you wanted to install (like maybe a flash player). There might be very few apps withdrawn on a whim by some twat at Apple but if there is a single one then that is too many by my book.
Some people do not want to research any apps they install on their phone and want to be able to browse a limited list of apps and know that anything they see is perfectly safe and is being regularly vetted by Apple. For them an iphone is a good fit, that is just not me.
no thanks. as a professional web developer I often have to let my clients know that to "do that fancy ajax stuff" I need to use JavaScript, and if they want to retain compatibility with non-JavaScript browsers then it will cost them significantly more for their project. i then show them how their favorite sites like amazon, ebay, etc. will simply refuse to work without JavaScript enabled and they opt to still use JavaScript but refuse to support non-JS browsers.
If you did any sort of serious web development you'd also know how time consuming it is to include support for no-script crap.
As someone who has been a professional web developer for a decade or so I mostly agree with you, but you are neglecting accessibility.
Where I work we do a lot of work for government type organisations and they are not allowed to discriminate against people with disabilities. That means that they have to have sites that are usable by blind people using a screen reader (mostly jaws I believe). That means we waste thousands of pounds of taxpayers money on making amazing ajax websites that also degrade to a usable solution if you have JS disabled. Of that money wasted keeps me in beer tokens so I don't complain too loudly :)
There is one site we have where the core offering is selling e-learning courses reliant on a standard (called SCORM 1.2) that requires JS in order to launch the courses. Since the site is owned by a government body though (even though it makes a profit for that body) the site has to work in a screen reader. You just get all the way down to the product pages and find that almost every single product will not let you add it to your basket without JS. Of course the entire basket process works fine with no JS, as does the entire rest of the site as it all had to as part of the tender despite us mentioning what and utter waste of cash this was in the various meetings.
I've looked at freelancing before, and I could probably make more money by working at McDonald's on weekends than that.
Wrong!
The going rate for a development to hire is at least $500 per day. If you are able to talk to a client in a professional manner and find out what they need then work in an agile manner to deliver something they like then you can earn at least half that and still keep the client happy that they got a bargain.
I have only done this once though, and not through a website. One of my friends works as an eCommerce consultant or something and put me forward as someone who could rescue a project from a shitty mess of tangled code that nobody wanted to work on. I earned couple of grand over a few weeks for working evenings and weekends and realised I get burned out if I try and code full time all day then do more when I get home at night.
This is similar to the issue with ICE (internal combustion engine) where if it is really hot outside and you run the AC really high, you will drain the battery more. I think people need some more education as to the limitations of battery powered cars. It is probably not common knowledge that the heater in an all electric car uses the battery extensively vs. just blowing heat off of the radiator. Also, people need to shift their expectations based on the architecture of their vehicle. Some ICE engines need to be kept warm during extreme colds at night otherwise it can be very difficult to start them in the morning. Li-ion batteries do not like conditions outside of normal operating temperatures and charge rates; operating outside of those ranges will affect capacity and performance. In the end, the easy answer is probably for Tesla to set more conservative numbers for range when it is really cold or really hot outside.
Some old ICE cars have the opposite problem though. My mates old Fiat Panda would over heat if you got stuck in traffic on a hot day unless you put the in car heater on to take heat away from the engine. I remember many a hot July day driving back from uni with all the windows open and the heat on full blast.
Tesla got a copy of the script for Top Gear - written before they drove the car - and it had pre-planned a battery disaster.
Top Gear always has stupid crap like that in it. Its one of the reasons why I stopped watching it, they assume everyone is as thick as Clarkson.
I remember watching one of the pointless car v whatever races they were doing where it was posh sportscar car v light aircraft from somewhere in france to the UK. Obviously a light aircraft would win this since it can take a far straighter path and maintain a speed that would get you arrested in most places on the ground (100-120km/h). They came up with the idea of using a halfwit pilot (James May) who was not allowed to fly at night over the channel or something though so that the car won.
Everyone knows that if you had to go between southern france and london a plane would be the quickest choice if you could afford it. The plane winning would be dull TV so to make it interesting and also to appeal the braindead petrol heads who watch Top Gear marvelling over cars they will never afford they come up with a way for the car to win. Every episode where they did similar races was the same from what I remember.
WTF? Isn't it common sense to fully charge an electric car before embarking on a journey to test the car's range? This guy should be fired from the NYT.
Why?
Most readers of NYT want their existing beliefs confirmed to them, not to be challenged by new ideas in any way. This guy reviewed an electric car and came to the conclusion that they lack range and longevity and are unreliable. That is exactly what everyone already knows about electric cars, so the guy did his job and wrote an article that the readership liked reading. Why fire him?
For profit news media is not their to be informative, it is their to entertain you so you keep buying the product. Sometimes that coincides with being informative, sometimes it does not. Granted there are some news stories that they have to cover even if they are unpopular, but those are hard news pieces, not reviews of luxury items.
In this case I do not find it all hard to believe that the guy doing the review wanted to make sure he got the car to run out of juice as that was an important part of the story he wanted to write: that electric cars still lag behind the gas fuelled counterparts and this is the possible result. I think he is broadly correct in this point in that they have shorter range on a full charge, as batteries are heavier for the energy they store than gas is.
Tesla would have been constantly applying pressure to makes sure the car did not run out of gas by the side of the road. He needed this to happen though as it was a "feature" he wanted in his article. Of course he could have driven it in a way that did not happen, but he wanted it to happen to make his article interesting to read and entertaining.
Tesla were probably busting his balls though to stop him having an interesting feature in his article where the car ran out of charge. His review would have just been the same bland crap as all the others where the shorter range of the Tesla was mentioned, but without a nice real world example for people to easily understand.
Poor content? Compared to 90% of the bland shit that is produced by the other big commercial producers (Sky, HBO, ITV, etc) the BBC stuff is far better
I would disagree. In fact if I was legally allowed the option. I would cancel my TV license and subscribe to netflix which is less than half the price :)
You are legally allowed the option moron. http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check/viewtopiccontent.aspx?id=TOP12&iqdocumentid=TOP12&WT.mc_id=r001
They recognise that a great many people own a huge TV but don't actually use it for watching live TV so do not need a licence. If you are only interested in watching netflix just follow the link I posted above and stop wasting our time with your ignorance.
On another point, the BBC mentions the revenue from selling DVD and audio recordings -- the profit from this is £182M. That compares to £3606M of income from license payers, at £145.50 each, thus about 25M licenses are sold. If every licence-payer paid an extra £7 we wouldn't need to protect that content. (Have I calculated that correctly?)
(Other broadcasters with different funding models might still want this system.)
More importantly those that *pay* for the content should simply get unrestricted access to it. The fact that the BBC make 5% profit on what is for all intended purposes a tax, simply shows how poor the content is. As for being taxed higher for the privileged something, how about they get paid a little less.
Poor content? Compared to 90% of the bland shit that is produced by the other big commercial producers (Sky, HBO, ITV, etc) the BBC stuff is far better. It is also very different and be more likely to appeal to niche markets and be more experimental.
On top of that the news the BBC produces is what also makes it stand out. It might fuck up occasionally, but so does everyone. The important thing to my mind is that it is a news network not solely driven by the point of view of a single (exceedingly rich) proprietor.
"However, the BBC is unlikely to be able to use any such mechanism unless we feel that it is sufficiently secure that there would be the possibility of legal action in the event of bypassing it."
Not sure why you would defend the BBC, but that is pretty much the definition of a sanction. In fact it states quite clearly that the BBC is less interested in about how good the DRM is [they expect it to be broken], but whether anti-circumvention provisions is protected by law e.g. DMCA. It is just focused on stopping the people forced to pay for service in the UK having unrestricted access to the content they paid for.
The BBC has a rather bonkers idea about DRM anyway. For example, HD Freesat receivers are required to implemtn DRM on their output (i.e. HDCP on the HD output, no analogue HD output, etc.), even though the DVB-S signal they are receiving is transmitted in the clear anyway. All it does is inconvenience legitimate consumers - anyone planning on copyright infringement is going to find it more trivial to record the raw DVB-S stream rather than an HDMI stream anyway.
Similarly, iPlayer's DRM is so weak as to be completely useless, and yet they still use it and therefore insist on using the terrible Flash player instead of making the video streams available in a standard format that would work on all platforms. (The flash player is so bad that I invariably just use get_iplayer and then play it with mplayer).
BTW, get_iplayer does not bypass DRM since the BBC do not use any.
http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer
From the link above:
"get_iplayer, does the recording, indexing and searching of the iPlayer TV/Radio programmes and podcasts available. It can even stream the iPlayer TV programmes while recording them to mplayer, vlc or xine, etc. It does not circumvent any digital rights management security (see the BBC’s website on how to do that with the Windows-only DRM content they provide)."
I just loaded the example site, and it looks like just several lines of text with JavaScript disabled on the site. After enabling JavaScript, the site looks like it's supposed to, but is it really necessary to write a web forum that relies entirely on JavaScript to work? What ever happened to server-side processing spitting out dumb HTML pages and CSS styles?
Most popular message board systems I've seen work perfectly without JS enabled, but others are very ugly (I'm looking at you, Disqus).
The problem is that the vast majority of real web users do not actually care what a site looks like with JS disabled, as they keep it enabled.
You guys with your insistence on no JS completely excludes jquery use and means everything has to work on completely refreshing the page every time you interact with it. Jquery and ajax creates an experience that is much quicker for most users since they only have to wait for very small amounts of JSON data to be sent to and from the server, and don't have to wait for the entire DOM to be reloaded from the server even though only a small part of it changed. Most users prefer this experience.
I actually agree that all decent websites should degrade gracefully when JS is absent as this is how most screen readers (for blind people) render sites. The thing is though that most developers do not care what the blind person view of their website looks like providing it is at least half way usable (often that usability is a mandatory requirement as all government funded stuff has to tick the accessibility box).
The number of real world users who insist on disabling JS seems to be a very low minority so don't be too surprised you are neglected by us web developers more and more. That way of creating websites is dead, and it simply is not coming back no matter how loudly you piss and moan as most people prefer the more modern Ajax feel.
Almost never?
I've almost _always_ been able to resell my games. Fallout 3 was late 2008, thats the last big bethesda game i can recall without drm. Aside from the past 5 years of drm bs, I'd say being able to resell is the norm. Though I guess if you're younger you may think it's always been this sucky.
Of course on consoles you are able to resell most games you buy, but that is only because they use a different approach to preventing piracy. In the case of consoles the use digital signature thingy in the console that prevents it running pirated disks without someone modding the console. They can do this by having code in the game that checks the disk in someway and if you remove that code the signature no longer matches to the console will not run the game.
Like it or not the companies who now produce games simply don't trust us not top pirate their product. They know they can't make it completely impossible, but they can make it difficult and that puts a large percentage of people off so they settle for that.
Whether this is right or wrong morally is largely irrelevant, it is what the publishers want to do.
If Steam is prevented from doing this in Germany (I very much doubt that will happen, since they tell you up front when you guy the game that you can't so it is probably a legal contract) then they will just find some other way of achieving a similar aim. Maybe they will go down the signed code route on their new Steam box instead.
Steam do not produce most of the games they sell in house, they just sell them. The game publishers were all talking about abandoning the PC a few years back due to piracy, Steam has used it's DRM to bring them back. If Steam (and Origin) are suddenly made illegal then when the next generation of consoles come out the game publishers will only release their product on them instead. Unless the threat of piracy completely disappears somehow some form of DRM will always exist now.
It is an easy problem to fix. Upon transfer the seller's copy is deleted and a fresh copy is provided to the buyer.
That of course is dependant on whether Steam are allowed to do this according to their contract with the people who created / distribute the game in question?
I would not be at all surprised if the who way Steam negotiates the very cheap prices they offer stuff for is that the publishes know the use a very restrictive form of DRM that prevents resale. That DRM may actually be a condition attached by the company who actually own the copyright on the game in question. Since many of the games bought through steam have a different form of DRM if bought on disk this is definitely the case for some stuff.
It will be funny if that is the case as this could just end up in Steam having to not sell those products in Germany in future.
Of course there are also the other companies that are following Steam's example now as well. Is Origin (EA's offering) any different in this regard?
You're confusing property with "intellectual property", these have nothing in common.
Sorry, I must have misunderstood you you said "actual property is not that important for free market". What did you mean by the two words "Actual Property"?
Forgive me for being a Brit so not really understanding what this is all about, but is it not the case that when you buy a phone in the US you are buying it for a small fraction of the actual cost (or being given it free) under the condition that you only use it on their network and hence pay for the calls to the people who subsidised the phone? That is how it works over here.
Yes, that's part of the justification for locking phones.
In the US, we also have the same rent-to-own system for paying for expensive electronic appliances and expensive furniture. Basically, in exchange for a subsidized appliance upfront, you end up paying over a two-year (or a three-year) period multiple times the normal retail price for that appliance. Of course for rent-to-own, only the people in the most extreme circumstances end up using that system, and the overwhelming 90% of the population wouldn't even think to enter a rent-to-own store.
For cell phones in the US however, we're not given much of a choice even if we pay the full unsubsidized price. Technically, I could unlock my Verizon CDMA phone, or I could pay full retail price for a Verizon phone, or I could wait until the two years are up and ask that they unlock it for me, but that phone still wouldn't work on any GSM network, nor would it work on the Sprint/Nextel CDMA network. That's how CDMA works. It's a form of proprietary technology lock-in. Once unlocked, the most I could do with it is use it with PagePlus Cellular, or may be with Boost Mobile (assuming Boost Mobile even lets me), but that's only because those two outfits are subleasing the same Verizon CDMA network.
The US is not like Europe. In Europe, the law says that all carriers must all standardize on the same technology. In the US, there is no such law. And even if I were to bring back a fully unsubsidized GSM phone from Asia, or Europe, my choices would be extremely limited in terms of US carriers that would even support that technology (and I'd be lucky for one to even cover adequately my normal geographical area).
Ok, so let me get this straight. If I emigrate to the US with my nice shiny new (unlocked, I bought it for £600 from expansys) Samsung Galaxy S3, I would be unable to go to a carrier an get a contract to use it on their network on a pay for calls only basis? Over here I can just use a pay-as-you go prepay account, do they not exist in the US?
If what you say is right then no wonder you are all complaining so much.
Also, we're acting defensively when we should be going on the offensive instead. Reinstating our rights to unlock our phones is not enough.
The locking of phones by carriers should be made illegal in the first place. Our airways are a public good. They're part of our public infrastructure. They're just like our public roads. As a society, we get to set the rules of the road, or update them as need be. The locking of phones may have been ok in the beginning, but this is a business practice that needs to stop right now.
Forgive me for being a Brit so not really understanding what this is all about, but is it not the case that when you buy a phone in the US you are buying it for a small fraction of the actual cost (or being given it free) under the condition that you only use it on their network and hence pay for the calls to the people who subsidised the phone? That is how it works over here.
Also, we have this weird system where the all the transmitters and infrastructure that the phone uses to relay calls and data over were paid for by a private company in the first place, not government. They use the call cost to recuperate that as well. And on top of this they actually have to pay government for the electrical spectrum they use as well.
I guess they could only use the calls to subsidise the infrastructure and make everyone actually buy their handsets upfront but over here that would be really unpopular with most people.
It is actually possible to but an unlocked phone here but nobody does because the decent phones are too expensive like that. I know they could be made a crap load cheaper but most people I know would not even want to pay $250 up front for a phone (an iphone5 costs about $207 to produce), they would rather pay a small amount every month to cover it instead.
And even actual property is not that important for free market, all that matters is that no one can deprive you of what you have.
With no legal concept of private property then how else do you prevent it?
I have a solution: the patent office should do a thorough examination of every patent application, in the order that they are received. If that makes the process too slow, then maybe the big dogs with their gigantic patent warchests should try paying their fucking taxes so we can afford to hire more patent examiners!
I love the idea, but there is unfortunately bugger all hope of them playing ball. it's cheaper for them to buy a politician or two than it is to pay tax.
If you ever bothered to read them you might know his name was spelt "Marx" not "Marks".
... or grew in a country that spells it "Marks" (surprising as we use the Latin alphabet just like the original, but that's probably because most communists who invaded us spoke russian natively).
Wow, wierd. In my country we pretty much always spell peoples names the way they were actually spelt be the person we are referring to and try and guess the pronunciation correctly based on country of origin so in my case I would try and pronounce his name in a slight german accent :)
I guess it is because we have so many foreign words and place names in our vocabulary already, the same thing that makes English such a sod to learn I believe.
Of course none of this changes my central point: That his writings actually do have a lot of truth in them, and that the communist system that was built later was only very loosely based on his ideas. I actually think it was more of a dictatorship than anything else that was ended up with after Stalin had his way.
The interesting thing I find though is your sig: "Copyright is not merely theft. As a form of censorship, it's a crime against humanity."
The concept of intellectual property (ie: copyright) is a cornerstone of capitalism, if you do not support it then you are probably more of a socialist than you realise. Or do you believe that capitalism should only apply physical items and resources but that ideas should always be communal?
Copyright was only really invented when the printing press was born and we suddenly had an easy way to replicate other peoples ideas cheaply. It was solely designed by capitalists who wanted ensure they had a way of monetising their writing or art. As we have developed the ability to replicate more and more things without the original creators involvement copyright has been naturally extended to those products too.
Within our lifetimes we may have the ability to do this for any physical product too, copyright will naturally be extended to cover this. This is essential to ensure that people who come up with books, music, films, software, etc are still able to make a living from their creations. The idea of only selling services based on freely available inventions is simply not enough to ensure people carry on inventing new stuff.
Some people argue that copyright should be more limited in term, and I believe the are correct. But in a capitalist system the concept of copyright must still exist in some form.
Of course I actually think we must ultimately out grow capitalism, which is the core of Marx writings that I agree with. Until then though, while any private property exists, the privately owned ideas (where they are shared for some monetary reward) must also exist or the people who do most to benefit society (by coming up with new ideas) will be the least rewarded.
The works of Marks and Lenin were pure lies even according to their authors.
If you ever bothered to read them you might know his name was spelt "Marx" not "Marks".
I actually think he has some very good points about labour, especially when taken in the context of the time he wrote in. Of course this is very different from saying any real world example of communism is a good system, since almost all examples of communist countries came about long after he was pushing up daisies.
I guess Marx is like anyone trying to do any sort of social commentary about systems they themselves are part of. They are not able to look through truly impartial eyes as they have invariably had both good and bad experiences of the system they are commenting on.
Make the patent offices liable for any patent that's later invalidated (ie. pay all the legal bills). It's the only way.
The problem with this idea is it makes the american taxpayer ultimately liable.
The patent office is basically underfunded and simply cannot afford to fully examine every patent filed and look for prior art in every case. Funding it to this extent would probably cost billions based on the number of patents file every year.
Even if you made the people applying for a patent pay for the process if the patent was found to be not valid, this would still involve the patent office needing far more money that it currently has.
Missed the part where it should run GNU/Linux? There are already cheap tablets for less than $100 (and not as cheap, but pretty close, and powerful, for less than $200). Add a keyboard and some base to use it as a notebook and you are mostly there.
Running Linux makes something more expensive as the hardware manufacturer can't fill the device with crapware that subsidises the cost.
The only reasonable explanation is really, really bad leadership.
Why would that be the only reasonable explanation? Windows 8 is the result of choices made by several engineers and designers. I bet there are lots of people inside Microsoft who have had their say on it, not only Ballmer or Sinofsky.
Because this is slashdot, hence it is important to blame whoever runs MS at the time, be it Balmer or Billy "Borg Boy" Gates.
Why suffer through all that shit? Just install Ubuntu/Mint. It's way easier because it's not that simple (read: dumbed down). Problem solved.
Seriously... some people just seem to love to suffer, as long as they don't have to actually lift their asses off the chair and change something.
I just installed Linux Mint and I love it. There is no way i would recommend it to someone who wasn't already comfortable with Linux though.
I had to go to actually work to make it work with my phone a galaxy s3. I also had to put some effort into getting it connected to my work (windows) vpn. Linux mint is great, but it is only ever going to be a fit for people who are comfortable googling for instructions to make something work for the moment. The just plug it in and it works crowd need to go elsewhere for the moment (ie, stick with Windows or Apple)