Having read that list, I don't think any of them are likely to happen to me.
1. Unlikely. If my computer ever crashes, it does so for a reason. The software I am using has been independently audited. I've read the Source Code of some of it myself.
2. Unlikely. I know how to use locate.
3. Unlimited traffic. Static IP. Anything less is not a proper internet connection.
4. Bloody unlikely. I use a web browser, not a virus magnet. That's on top of an Operating System which is immune to viruses, spyware and adware -- by design.
5. I know how to turn off Bluetooth. So does anyone who has to pay for their electricity by the joule.
6. It's right there in the Terms and Conditions of my bank account: We will never ask you for personal information via the Internet. And it means what it says.
7. See 6. Anyway, there are only two ways my bank could add an "internet-enabled" service I'd actually use: let me take a photo of a pile of pound notes and coins, upload it and pay it into my account; or let me print pound notes on my own printer.
8. I don't buy software, I download it using apt-get. What is a CD key?
9. Bit far-fetched. Anyway, if anybody's going to be selling off the toner cartridges, it's me!
My standard method of dealing with christian propaganda {when crossing the street and scowling from a distance have failed to do the business} is to tear it up slowly in front of their face and give it back to them. I have tried to deconvert them; but if somebody's brain is already damaged enough for them to believe in imaginary friends, it's usually fruitless. And of course the problem you always face when you have an argument with a mental defective is that onlookers might not know which is which.
You forgot "color" and "favorites". And it still defaults to US Letter paper (216 x 279, used in USA) instead of A4 (210 x 297, used in every other country in the entire world) and AM/PM instead of VCR time.
You'd think they could get their shit together to send CDs to each country that defaulted to that country's specific settings (for instance, many Continental countries use a comma between the integer and the fraction -- a comma is easier to create than a dot when using a fountain pen, and it carried over into print.)
Nobody I know does pay for Microsoft software -- everyone I know (except my GNU/Linux-using friends) is using pirated copies of Windows, Office and various apps. No doubt this lets them feel like they're sticking it to The Man. However, someone must be paying for it, somewhere upstream. What gets me is, why aren't the organised crime gangs using a bit of copy-protection on their pirated warez to guarantee themselves a slice of the pie?
Yes, but you've already admitted that you're a special case (and you're knowledgeable enough to deal with stripping out the unnecessary stuff after the event). Most people just want to be able to install software on reasonably-modern hardware and have it work. If a package isn't in the distros' repositories, then they're going to have to build the source. Separate -devel packages just complicate that, because they are non-obvious.
f you could have bundle packages, you could install just the application and request the devel stuff if you wanted. Better yet, if you were packaging software for sale, you could include all the dependency packages in your application package and install whatever bits were missing.
Yes, that would be good. I've thought about it a few times. Basically, the CD you sell would have source packages (there's your 3 compliance) for absolutely everything it depended on except Linux, bash, gcc and common userland tools. If necessary, it would install all the latest versions of all required libraries in/usr/local/ before installing itself.
I'd also add that the REAL reason RPM is not as convenient as dpkg has absolutely nothing to do with RPM itself. The big deal is that each RPM-based distribution uses its own naming conventions for packages and the dpkg-based distributions adhere to a more coherent convention..... On Mandrake you might need a 'libwidget' package whereas the library might be included in the RedHat 'widget' package..... The insanity is a result of naming conventions.
Yes, indeed. Also, Debian's dependency-resolution assumes packages depend on packages, not on files.
Well, tiny independent developers have been blasted out of the Windows market by Microsoft's tolerance of piracy.
Let's have a hypothetical company, Mom And Pop Software (MAPS). MAPS make a simple office suite, CheapOffice, which retails for £50. It's more than good enough for writing letters, doing your day-to-day finances and organising your CD collection. The only black mark against CheapOffice is that it can't import MS Office documents perfectly; however, most of the time it makes a brave attempt.
Now consider a luser, John Thomas, who wants an office suite. His options are:
Buy MS Office for £500.
Buy MAPS CheapOffice for £50, saving £450.
Pirate MS Office, saving £500.
Pirate CheapOffice, saving £50.
What does John Thomas do? He gets a pirate copy of MS Office, on the basis that it's better to save £500 and get "what everybody else uses" than to save £450 and be legal, and beside which Microsoft can't possibly justify asking £500 for something that does the same as something you can get for £50.
The result is that even if nobody ever makes a single pirate copy of CheapOffice, MAPS go out of business in the end -- due to piracy.
Microsoft know this, of course. They have a big enough stack; they can afford not to rake in £500 per copy of Office in the short term, if it means squeezing competitors out of the marketplace in the long term. They don't have to compete on quality as long as they're competing on price.
APT has an easier time of managing dependencies than yum. That's because Debian's (well-thought-out) way of doing it was to have packages dependent upon packages, rather than specific files. And a package can provide more than one package. For instance, "www-browser" is a virtual package; there is no installable package called www-browser. But iceweasel, konqueror, links and so forth all claim to provide a package called "www-browser". Any application that needs a web browser (but doesn't care which one) only has to depend on www-browser. And so forth, and so on.
You can roughly emulate package dependency using specific files (or symlinks) within packages which are just there to deal with dependencies, but it's messy compared to a system designed properly from the outset.
Whatever you do with your new package format, please ditch -devel packages. Back in the day, there was a good reason to minimise package sizes; people were using dial-up connections, therefore charged by the byte, and had slow CPUs and limited storage. So packages were pre-compiled (i.e. the distro maintainer does./configure --with-this=ourformofthis --without-stuffwedontneed and make) to save you the CPU cycles; and the files you would not need just to use a package, only if you were trying to build something else to go with it, were separated out into a "developers'" package.
Nowadays we have broadband, CPU cycles to spare and plenty of GB of storage. Despite the size of the repositories, there will always be a need to build and install the odd third-party package. For someone who knows what they're doing, it's as annoying as hell to be told on the package homepage I need to have libfoo installed; then have the configure script conk out because libfoo-devel isn't installed. For a n00b, it's much worse, and can be a dealbreaker.
Separating out the -devel stuff was the right idea a few years ago; but today it is doing more harm than good. Please, let's have all the -devel files in with the main package. A user who really wants to keep everything trimmed down as lean as possible can always delete the files they don't need afterward.
Fair Dealing is whatever the courts determine it to be.
If you are unlucky enough to get arrested for a minor copyright violation (for that is a criminal matter in the UK) such as converting CDs to MP3, your defence would be that you were Dealing Fairly with the work in question. If the jury acquitted you, that would set a precedent and effectively legalise whatever it was you had done. And they aren't going to convict you -- if they did, they would almost certainly be incriminating themselves, since almost nobody has never "Dealt Fairly" with copyrighted material. I'd lay odds that the judge was listening to a home-recorded tape in his car on the way to court that morning.
Nobody has ever been, nor ever will get anywhere near a court of law for taping CDs that they own to listen in the car, or making MP3s from CDs they own (this cannot be anything but Fair Dealing, since it constitutes a Necessary Step in playing the CD -- which you have a common-law right to do by virtue of owning the disc -- on a device which you own but which happens not to be intrinsically capable of playing CDs). However, as long as such acts aren't the subject of inalienable statutory rights, there's a possibility that a bent copper could use a home-taped album between the seats of a suspect's car to get a warrant to search his home and plant evidence of a more serious crime. This is commonly called a "fishing expedition".
Unless the Old Bill already want you for something else, you won't get pulled for a minor copyright violation. If you do, it's the first sign that a more serious offence is about to be pinned on you (and for what it's worth, the copyright charge will be dropped between now and court).
Actually, the most appropriate thing to which sheet music could be readily converted would be a MIDI file; since both specify pitch, duration and voice. You could also convert MIDI back to a PostScript representation of the score.
I feel strongly that if you willfully create a life, you should be held responsible for it/them, and it shouldn't take a court order to make it happen.
I have a solution: retrospective abortion. If one party offers to pay for the kids to be put to sleep (even assuming it wasn't available on the NHS), and the other refuses, then they are allowed to live -- but become the sole responsibility of the one who said let them live.
At 100 degrees, water boils. In fact, in the mountains, it boils nearer 80 degrees. I would imagine they would turn to charcoal; though, as the moisture would be trapped in the wrapper, it would be soggy charcoal. OTOH in a temperate climate, even in a vehicle in midsummer, the temperature is unlikely to exceed 50 or 60 degrees. And I wouldn't be carrying a Snickers bar cos I'm allergic to peanuts.
Don't forget that in the summer, thanks to some idiot deciding it would be better artificially to fuck with everybody's clocks than just have businesses working 08:00 to 16:00 as opposed to 09:00 to 17:00, midday actually occurs at 13:00, not 12:00. So in summer, halfway between the hour hand and one is South. Approximately; though it's exact on the two aequinoxes.
A bad worker blames their tools and a bad boss blames their workers.
There's no denying that PHP has things wrong with it. It started out as a bastard son of Perl, tried to be a bit more n00b-friendly and tripped over its own cleverness. The beauty of Perl is its very inconsistency. The functions you use most have the shortest names, and there is no need to clutter things up with unnecessary brackets around arguments. Regular expressions, which you are going to use all the time, have a distinct syntax. Number and string data types can be interchanged with such wild abandon, there have to be separate operators for addition and string concatenation (JavaScript, I'm looking at you). There are constructs to populate arrays quickly. All things are subordinate to the goal of letting a programmer get a job done. Easy things are easy, hard things are possible. Perl is so broad-minded, it even has the Principle of Equivalence built in!
PHP lures you in, with obviously_named_function($par1, $par2)..... then trips you up with anotherobviouslynamedfunction($par2, $par1). You could say it's not all PHP's fault, as the functions originate from different shared libraries, and PHP is only providing an interface to them by their original name and with something like their original syntax. But it still smacks of laziness on the PHP developers' part. Short aliases for commonly-used functions (a context-sensitive editor can always expand them for the benefit of the anal retentive), and differently-named work-alikes for functions that take their parameters in a different order than you might expect, wouldn't have hurt. Would they?
Still, you've got two choices, I suppose. Learn to put up with the idiosyncracies or learn another language. And never forget the Principle of Equivalence; "All Means to the same End are equally valid", nor its corollary, "Means which are not equally valid serve different Ends".
That's why it took so long to get OpenOffice 64-bit clean. The original authors did a thoroughly sloppy job (shot through with the assumption that both address and data buses would always be exactly 32 bits wide; or at least that ints and pointers would always be the same size and therefore freely interchangeable) which only just worked, and hid their terrible programming behind an EULA which forbade access to the Source Code.
2.0 really didn't deserve that number -- it should have been 1.2. 2.0 suggests a much more thorough re-write than what actually happened (which was to use proper data types, pointers for pointers and ints for ints, in enough places that Writer wouldn't crash when doing any of the most obvious things). But bad version numbering -- and, for that matter, bad programming -- are exactly what you get when you let private firms do things that really ought to be regulated by the Ministry for Information Technology.
Gnumeric -- and for that matter, every spreadsheet -- is technically a VisiCalc clone.
The only new feature ever added to spreadsheets since they first appeared in the late 1970s was the removal of the "recalc row", "recalc col" and "recalc all" functions. They did what they say. When CPU time was expensive, there was a good reason not to use any more of it than strictly necessary; so after changing one or more values, you would force recalculation of only the cells affected by the changes.
Nowadays, instead of using a spreadsheet to create a formula to perform some mathematical operation, you are most likely to see someone adding up a column of figures with an idiot-calculator and typing the sum into the spreadsheet.
Oh yes it is. In fact, Gentoo is eminently suitable for corporate use. More strictly, it's a locally-created, Gentoo-derived distribution that's suitable for Corporate use.
In a corporate setting, you know exactly what hardware each machine has and what software it requires. Don't want staff plugging in USB sticks? Leave out USB storage support. Or, if you desperately need to use USB sticks for something, leave out FAT support; just reformat USB sticks as ext2 (NOT ext3! A +1, Insightful from my other account if you can explain why, no ACs) on a machine in IT. They work fine on Linux machines (even better than FAT, in fact, since ext2 supports long filenames, ownership and permissions right from the box); but Windows machines can't see any files.
You can compile exactly the applications you need, optimised to the motherboards you have, and make a CD set with just those binary packages.
And if you don't feel like doing this all this in-house, then you can almost certainly pay someone to do it for you -- and they will almost certainly charge you a lot less than SuSE or Red Hat, for a product that almost certainly matches your requirements more closely than SuSE's or Red Hat's.
The car doesn't have to know the road conditions; it only has to know what the engine's best operating range is (compile-time constants), what the present road and engine speeds are (sensors) and which pedals you are depressing (more sensors). From this, the logic is easy enough:
Accelerate hard, declutch, keep pushing gas pedal => change down a gear (to get better acceleration).
Declutch and let go of gas => change up a gear (engine needs to slow down when shifted to higher gear).
Brake and declutch => change down one or more gears according to road speed.
You, the human being, can then do the awkward part (keeping it all smooth).
If all digital TV programmes were broadcast scrambled, and every set required a viewing card to decode the transmission, then there would be no way for people to evade the licence fee. Also it would be possible to bill people for the hours they watched, which might be better suited to occasional viewers (families, soap addicts and film buffs would probably find it most economical to pay for an unlimited-hours card, but those who only watch the odd documentary might be better off paying just for what they watched). And it would be easy to stop the kids watching telly when necessary (just take out the card and the set doesn't work anymore).
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Having read that list, I don't think any of them are likely to happen to me.
1. Unlikely. If my computer ever crashes, it does so for a reason. The software I am using has been independently audited. I've read the Source Code of some of it myself.
2. Unlikely. I know how to use locate.
3. Unlimited traffic. Static IP. Anything less is not a proper internet connection.
4. Bloody unlikely. I use a web browser, not a virus magnet. That's on top of an Operating System which is immune to viruses, spyware and adware -- by design.
5. I know how to turn off Bluetooth. So does anyone who has to pay for their electricity by the joule.
6. It's right there in the Terms and Conditions of my bank account: We will never ask you for personal information via the Internet. And it means what it says.
7. See 6. Anyway, there are only two ways my bank could add an "internet-enabled" service I'd actually use: let me take a photo of a pile of pound notes and coins, upload it and pay it into my account; or let me print pound notes on my own printer.
8. I don't buy software, I download it using apt-get. What is a CD key?
9. Bit far-fetched. Anyway, if anybody's going to be selling off the toner cartridges, it's me!
10. Unlikely. I don't travel by air anyway.
My standard method of dealing with christian propaganda {when crossing the street and scowling from a distance have failed to do the business} is to tear it up slowly in front of their face and give it back to them. I have tried to deconvert them; but if somebody's brain is already damaged enough for them to believe in imaginary friends, it's usually fruitless. And of course the problem you always face when you have an argument with a mental defective is that onlookers might not know which is which.
You forgot "color" and "favorites". And it still defaults to US Letter paper (216 x 279, used in USA) instead of A4 (210 x 297, used in every other country in the entire world) and AM/PM instead of VCR time.
You'd think they could get their shit together to send CDs to each country that defaulted to that country's specific settings (for instance, many Continental countries use a comma between the integer and the fraction -- a comma is easier to create than a dot when using a fountain pen, and it carried over into print.)
Nobody I know does pay for Microsoft software -- everyone I know (except my GNU/Linux-using friends) is using pirated copies of Windows, Office and various apps. No doubt this lets them feel like they're sticking it to The Man. However, someone must be paying for it, somewhere upstream. What gets me is, why aren't the organised crime gangs using a bit of copy-protection on their pirated warez to guarantee themselves a slice of the pie?
Yes, but you've already admitted that you're a special case (and you're knowledgeable enough to deal with stripping out the unnecessary stuff after the event). Most people just want to be able to install software on reasonably-modern hardware and have it work. If a package isn't in the distros' repositories, then they're going to have to build the source. Separate -devel packages just complicate that, because they are non-obvious.
Let's have a hypothetical company, Mom And Pop Software (MAPS). MAPS make a simple office suite, CheapOffice, which retails for £50. It's more than good enough for writing letters, doing your day-to-day finances and organising your CD collection. The only black mark against CheapOffice is that it can't import MS Office documents perfectly; however, most of the time it makes a brave attempt.
Now consider a luser, John Thomas, who wants an office suite. His options are:
- Buy MS Office for £500.
- Buy MAPS CheapOffice for £50, saving £450.
- Pirate MS Office, saving £500.
- Pirate CheapOffice, saving £50.
What does John Thomas do? He gets a pirate copy of MS Office, on the basis that it's better to save £500 and get "what everybody else uses" than to save £450 and be legal, and beside which Microsoft can't possibly justify asking £500 for something that does the same as something you can get for £50.The result is that even if nobody ever makes a single pirate copy of CheapOffice, MAPS go out of business in the end -- due to piracy.
Microsoft know this, of course. They have a big enough stack; they can afford not to rake in £500 per copy of Office in the short term, if it means squeezing competitors out of the marketplace in the long term. They don't have to compete on quality as long as they're competing on price.
APT has an easier time of managing dependencies than yum. That's because Debian's (well-thought-out) way of doing it was to have packages dependent upon packages, rather than specific files. And a package can provide more than one package. For instance, "www-browser" is a virtual package; there is no installable package called www-browser. But iceweasel, konqueror, links and so forth all claim to provide a package called "www-browser". Any application that needs a web browser (but doesn't care which one) only has to depend on www-browser. And so forth, and so on.
You can roughly emulate package dependency using specific files (or symlinks) within packages which are just there to deal with dependencies, but it's messy compared to a system designed properly from the outset.
Warning: link in parent post's signature points to material which is homophobic and inflammatory.
Whatever you do with your new package format, please ditch -devel packages. Back in the day, there was a good reason to minimise package sizes; people were using dial-up connections, therefore charged by the byte, and had slow CPUs and limited storage. So packages were pre-compiled (i.e. the distro maintainer does ./configure --with-this=ourformofthis --without-stuffwedontneed and make) to save you the CPU cycles; and the files you would not need just to use a package, only if you were trying to build something else to go with it, were separated out into a "developers'" package.
Nowadays we have broadband, CPU cycles to spare and plenty of GB of storage. Despite the size of the repositories, there will always be a need to build and install the odd third-party package. For someone who knows what they're doing, it's as annoying as hell to be told on the package homepage I need to have libfoo installed; then have the configure script conk out because libfoo-devel isn't installed. For a n00b, it's much worse, and can be a dealbreaker.
Separating out the -devel stuff was the right idea a few years ago; but today it is doing more harm than good. Please, let's have all the -devel files in with the main package. A user who really wants to keep everything trimmed down as lean as possible can always delete the files they don't need afterward.
The internet without pop-ups is better than the internet with pop-ups. Therefore, pop-up blocking is a feature.
Fair Dealing is whatever the courts determine it to be.
If you are unlucky enough to get arrested for a minor copyright violation (for that is a criminal matter in the UK) such as converting CDs to MP3, your defence would be that you were Dealing Fairly with the work in question. If the jury acquitted you, that would set a precedent and effectively legalise whatever it was you had done. And they aren't going to convict you -- if they did, they would almost certainly be incriminating themselves, since almost nobody has never "Dealt Fairly" with copyrighted material. I'd lay odds that the judge was listening to a home-recorded tape in his car on the way to court that morning.
Nobody has ever been, nor ever will get anywhere near a court of law for taping CDs that they own to listen in the car, or making MP3s from CDs they own (this cannot be anything but Fair Dealing, since it constitutes a Necessary Step in playing the CD -- which you have a common-law right to do by virtue of owning the disc -- on a device which you own but which happens not to be intrinsically capable of playing CDs). However, as long as such acts aren't the subject of inalienable statutory rights, there's a possibility that a bent copper could use a home-taped album between the seats of a suspect's car to get a warrant to search his home and plant evidence of a more serious crime. This is commonly called a "fishing expedition".
Unless the Old Bill already want you for something else, you won't get pulled for a minor copyright violation. If you do, it's the first sign that a more serious offence is about to be pinned on you (and for what it's worth, the copyright charge will be dropped between now and court).
Actually, the most appropriate thing to which sheet music could be readily converted would be a MIDI file; since both specify pitch, duration and voice. You could also convert MIDI back to a PostScript representation of the score.
At 100 degrees, water boils. In fact, in the mountains, it boils nearer 80 degrees. I would imagine they would turn to charcoal; though, as the moisture would be trapped in the wrapper, it would be soggy charcoal. OTOH in a temperate climate, even in a vehicle in midsummer, the temperature is unlikely to exceed 50 or 60 degrees. And I wouldn't be carrying a Snickers bar cos I'm allergic to peanuts.
Don't forget that in the summer, thanks to some idiot deciding it would be better artificially to fuck with everybody's clocks than just have businesses working 08:00 to 16:00 as opposed to 09:00 to 17:00, midday actually occurs at 13:00, not 12:00. So in summer, halfway between the hour hand and one is South. Approximately; though it's exact on the two aequinoxes.
Lack of source code, thereby breaching freedoms One and Three, I'll guess.
We used to have one in the Magna Carta, the document that inspired your US Constitution. Or as GWB calls it, "Toilet paper".
A bad worker blames their tools and a bad boss blames their workers.
..... then trips you up with anotherobviouslynamedfunction($par2, $par1). You could say it's not all PHP's fault, as the functions originate from different shared libraries, and PHP is only providing an interface to them by their original name and with something like their original syntax. But it still smacks of laziness on the PHP developers' part. Short aliases for commonly-used functions (a context-sensitive editor can always expand them for the benefit of the anal retentive), and differently-named work-alikes for functions that take their parameters in a different order than you might expect, wouldn't have hurt. Would they?
There's no denying that PHP has things wrong with it. It started out as a bastard son of Perl, tried to be a bit more n00b-friendly and tripped over its own cleverness. The beauty of Perl is its very inconsistency. The functions you use most have the shortest names, and there is no need to clutter things up with unnecessary brackets around arguments. Regular expressions, which you are going to use all the time, have a distinct syntax. Number and string data types can be interchanged with such wild abandon, there have to be separate operators for addition and string concatenation (JavaScript, I'm looking at you). There are constructs to populate arrays quickly. All things are subordinate to the goal of letting a programmer get a job done. Easy things are easy, hard things are possible. Perl is so broad-minded, it even has the Principle of Equivalence built in!
PHP lures you in, with obviously_named_function($par1, $par2)
Still, you've got two choices, I suppose. Learn to put up with the idiosyncracies or learn another language. And never forget the Principle of Equivalence; "All Means to the same End are equally valid", nor its corollary, "Means which are not equally valid serve different Ends".
That's why it took so long to get OpenOffice 64-bit clean. The original authors did a thoroughly sloppy job (shot through with the assumption that both address and data buses would always be exactly 32 bits wide; or at least that ints and pointers would always be the same size and therefore freely interchangeable) which only just worked, and hid their terrible programming behind an EULA which forbade access to the Source Code.
2.0 really didn't deserve that number -- it should have been 1.2. 2.0 suggests a much more thorough re-write than what actually happened (which was to use proper data types, pointers for pointers and ints for ints, in enough places that Writer wouldn't crash when doing any of the most obvious things). But bad version numbering -- and, for that matter, bad programming -- are exactly what you get when you let private firms do things that really ought to be regulated by the Ministry for Information Technology.
Gnumeric -- and for that matter, every spreadsheet -- is technically a VisiCalc clone.
The only new feature ever added to spreadsheets since they first appeared in the late 1970s was the removal of the "recalc row", "recalc col" and "recalc all" functions. They did what they say. When CPU time was expensive, there was a good reason not to use any more of it than strictly necessary; so after changing one or more values, you would force recalculation of only the cells affected by the changes.
Nowadays, instead of using a spreadsheet to create a formula to perform some mathematical operation, you are most likely to see someone adding up a column of figures with an idiot-calculator and typing the sum into the spreadsheet.
And how many kWh of energy does it take to manufacture a new laptop, and dispose of it at the end of its useful life?
Oh yes it is. In fact, Gentoo is eminently suitable for corporate use. More strictly, it's a locally-created, Gentoo-derived distribution that's suitable for Corporate use.
In a corporate setting, you know exactly what hardware each machine has and what software it requires. Don't want staff plugging in USB sticks? Leave out USB storage support. Or, if you desperately need to use USB sticks for something, leave out FAT support; just reformat USB sticks as ext2 (NOT ext3! A +1, Insightful from my other account if you can explain why, no ACs) on a machine in IT. They work fine on Linux machines (even better than FAT, in fact, since ext2 supports long filenames, ownership and permissions right from the box); but Windows machines can't see any files.
You can compile exactly the applications you need, optimised to the motherboards you have, and make a CD set with just those binary packages.
And if you don't feel like doing this all this in-house, then you can almost certainly pay someone to do it for you -- and they will almost certainly charge you a lot less than SuSE or Red Hat, for a product that almost certainly matches your requirements more closely than SuSE's or Red Hat's.
The car doesn't have to know the road conditions; it only has to know what the engine's best operating range is (compile-time constants), what the present road and engine speeds are (sensors) and which pedals you are depressing (more sensors). From this, the logic is easy enough:
Accelerate hard, declutch, keep pushing gas pedal => change down a gear (to get better acceleration).
Declutch and let go of gas => change up a gear (engine needs to slow down when shifted to higher gear).
Brake and declutch => change down one or more gears according to road speed.
You, the human being, can then do the awkward part (keeping it all smooth).
If all digital TV programmes were broadcast scrambled, and every set required a viewing card to decode the transmission, then there would be no way for people to evade the licence fee. Also it would be possible to bill people for the hours they watched, which might be better suited to occasional viewers (families, soap addicts and film buffs would probably find it most economical to pay for an unlimited-hours card, but those who only watch the odd documentary might be better off paying just for what they watched). And it would be easy to stop the kids watching telly when necessary (just take out the card and the set doesn't work anymore).