But yes, I guess it's important to blame everyone equally so nobody's feelings are hurt.
This tripped my sarcasm detector; apologies if it was meant to be serious. Blaming everybody is exactly the problem - it ignores the fact that violent, extremist Muslims are a tiny minority of the Muslim population. Terrorists may be Muslim in most cases, but it does not follow that all Muslims are terrorists.
Yes, but that doesn't mean they are truly British, or loyal to the country.
Many indigenous Britons are not loyal to the United Kingdom as a single entity, myself included, but I'll admit that that's not quite the same thing once you consider the UK as a union of four nations.
It would mean you shoot people for listening to you because they 'stole' your ideas and your just trying to defend them. It would basically lead to the idea that thought itself must be regulated, as that is the only way to control ideas, which is all intellectual property is.
This reads to me like an excellent defence of patents. The whole concept of patents is that the ideas are out in the open, and the inventor can talk freely about their idea without worrying that they will have their idea pulled from under them by a larger competitor with more resources.
The alternative would be much as you describe, with inventors fearing to talk about their ideas lest they become public knowledge, and the inventor sees no return. It's a nasty world where NDAs roam free and lips are tight.
There's also the case of value. An idea might be intangible, but it obviously has value if it can generate a profit. There's also the real cost of intangible things such as technical and economic feasibility studies. An idea doesn't lead straight to a product, there is R&D involved. Here the cost is not tangible matter, but time and salaries.
The idea that only tangible things can have value is absurd. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that your house would still be worth the same amount after it had been knocked down - after all, all the material is still there. In reality, it is the architectural design of the house (an idea), and the man-hours involved in building it (time and salaries), that make up the bulk of its value.
Therefore, suggesting that you should be free to take my idea is tantamount to saying that you should be free to come along and knock down my house.
Likewise with this guy's video games...try playing something from 10 years ago, not even talking about the graphics, the user interfaces are unusable. Believe me, I've tried, it just plain doesn't work.
Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time was released 9 years and 6 months ago, which I think is close enough to 10 years to seriously weaken your argument. I happen to be playing through it right now, and (graphics aside) it still compares well to the best of today's games.
The key to the Zelda series is that the core gameplay elements haven't changed. Link's Awakening, OoT, Wind Waker, Minish Cap, Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass are all easily recognisable as of the same series. That Miyamoto has maintained this kind of consistency, while also maintaining such high quality and review scores, and on top of that making the transition from 2D to 3D almost seamlessly, is the best indication of how great the man is. Nobody else has managed all of the above.
I'm pretty sure Cliff Richard trotted out the old argument that artists need the income from their old stuff to survive. I imagine this to be expressed much like 'Allo 'Allo's Colonel Von Strohm, eyes bulging, red in the face, squealing, "That's my pension!"
The fact is that allowing artists to get rich while raking in profits from old creations is the opposite of what copyright was designed to do.
Personally I like the terms that Founders' Copyright allows, and don't see the need for anything longer.
IIRC a patent by default only lasts for four years, and has to be renewed after that, every four years, up to a maximum of 20 years.
Can anybody give any insight as to what the requirements are for a patent to be renewed? Is it just a case of bureaucracy and fee-paying, or is there some requirement, as suggested above, to prove that the patent is actually being used?
And if not, would the renewal point be a good mechanism for introducing such a requirement?
The 3G functionality in this device is there so that you can access the internet on the move. You'll be hard pressed to source a 3G chipset that won't do voice calls and SMS, so it makes sense for the manufacturer not to deliberately cripple the device by not providing this functionality.
Antarctica strikes me as a good model that could also be used for the moon, as both are uninhabitable and relatively hard to reach. Not sure if a ban on mining would be necessary though. Would it be possible for human mining actions to alter the moon's orbit? I'm guessing not. And there aren't any ecological issues to worry about.
I wouldn't worry about companies owning stars, they'd only be able to charge for starlight that left the star after the deeds were signed. We'll all be long dead before any of it actually reaches us.
My mum is a compulsive tidier-upper, and so many items went missing/were tidied away in my youth simply because they weren't either out of sight our nailed down.
This is less the case now. What's more the case is that my dad is frequently late for things because he spends 10 minutes before leaving running around the house cursing, swearing and demanding to know where his car keys are (usually blaming my mum for moving them, see above, before finding them in his jacket pocket).
By the way, my mum relies on hearing aids to live a normal life and continue in her job. If everyone had your attitude, she'd probably be functionally deaf and would find it much harder to communicate.
Only if the button is well built. A badly built button might click without that click actually registering.
This is my experience of the Nokia N95 that I use at work. It doesn't happen often, but it's frustrating when it does, because you're getting a false-positive haptic cue.
I might sound like an Apple apologist for this, but for this reason I'd have an iPhone over an N95. The iPhone makes up for its lack of haptics by using lots of visual cues. However it's a bit of a pity that Apple didn't use the built-in vibrate function to provide some haptic feedback, like the Wii does (to great effect) when you 'mouse over' items on the screen with the pointer.
You got yourselves pretty comprehensively invaded by Europeans in the sixteenth century though. And we did pretty much wipe out your population.
The problem with invading China with the intention of exterminating the population is that they're unlikely to abide by the 'no nuclear weapons' rule you made up. And if they're all going to die anyway, you've just removed the last reason they have for not launching: mutually assured destruction.
As far as I'm aware the US missile defence system isn't up and running yet (and hopefully never will be), but even if George Bush came over all Return of the Jedi and declared it Fully Operational in the middle of a battle, with so many American troops already in China doing this dirty work the missiles wouldn't even have to leave Chinese airspace to inflict massive amounts of American casualties. Which are politically unacceptable at home.
I'm not under any such illusions. As far as I know, Switzerland is the only country in the world with a system of government that resembles the true definition of democracy.
Parliamentary democracy is not ideal because it forces you to endorse every policy a party has, not just some.* This manifests itself particularly badly when one party has an overall majority in parliament. The first-past-the-post system currently used in Westminster makes this more likely, which is why I oppose it.
When there is no overall majority then things get interesting. In the Scottish Parliament, which uses the Additional Member system, we have a minority government at the moment which cannot pass legislation without the consent of the opposition parties. This means that the whole spectrum of Scottish public opinion can be represented in government.
The problem with trying to make this kind of politics a reality in Westminster is as much the electorate as the system or the politicians. Most people, come a general election, are quite happy to vote an unpopular government out rather than voting their preferred party in. In 1997, the incumbent Tory government was unpopular, so Labour won an outright majority in a landslide vote. Now, the Labour government is unpopular, and it is almost certain now that the Tories will win an outright majority in a landslide vote. Rinse and repeat.
My effort in my above comment was to try and persuade maybe one or two people not to automatically vote Tory due to Labour's unpopularity, otherwise the cycle will repeat itself again (of course, in Scotland we may well be offski in a few years, so it won't matter to us). The current system makes change more difficult, but it doesn't make it impossible.
* A concept Des Browne seems incapable of understanding. He insists erroneously that because unionist parties make up two thirds of the Scottish Parliament, Scots have already voted down independence.
You could go out and vote in the next general election.
I'd recommend voting Lib Dem, if only because the introduction of proportional representation to Westminster is a condition for entering into a coalition with them (in the event of a hung parliament). The current first-past-the-post system gives an unfair advantage to large parties and means that it's much easier for them to obtain a majority, even without a majority of votes. That in turn means that the smaller parties cannot get elected and means that voices like yours won't get heard if they don't conform to the party lines of the big three.
PR would mean that it's incredibly hard for governments to bludgeon on regardless through an entire parliamentary term with these kinds of idiotic policies.
I suspect he meant politicians from the Conservative Party. But then I don't think they have a policy of removing CCTV cameras. I don't think they have any policies at all at the moment, they seem to exist to spout rhetoric and give the current government a bloody nose.
Just because they oppose something now doesn't mean they'll take any action on it when they win the next election. They've made much political capital out of their criticism of the abolition of the 10p tax rate, but refuse to be drawn on whether they'd actually re-introduce it after the election. Their opposition to something now doesn't necessarily mean action down the line.
EMI wants to gain access to copies of files that users have on their MP3tunes accounts. Now, I'm assuming that you can't just go in and browse the list of files that a user has, otherwise they'd have shot themselves in the foot by arguing on privacy grounds.
So I'm assuming that EMI came along and said, "We want all the MP3s stored in user X's account." As it's unlikely that any user has an account filled 100% with EMI music, EMI would be given access to a significant amount of music from other labels, without the consent of the copyright holders. Which seems very hypocritical, even if it's legitimised by a court order.
By what definition is the freezing (or being pedantic, triple) point of water not cold?
The freezing point of water has a large effect on human behaviour due to the harmful effects that ice can have, so it makes sense for it to be zero rather than some arbitrary number.
A 1:2 ratio would have been quite nice, so that a screen would be the same ratio as a sheet of A4 paper (and by definition, the whole A-series).
For multiple-monitor setups, it would mean that you could take two 1:2 monitors, rotate them and end up with the same aspect ratio as one individual monitor.
Interesting argument about the food chain. I'm not so sure that we need to be concerned about the top end of the chain once humans are removed from it - we systematically kill any species that takes our livestock for its own use, so we would actually be helping some species that up until now we've seen as pests. Just as long as we don't get eaten ourselves, which shouldn't happen if there are enough cows around.
The question on my mind is, where do the nutrients necessary to grow meat vats come from?
...someone using your bandwidth costs you nothing...
Unless you're broadband package has usage caps (which, if you include 'fair usage policies', applies to most). Excessive bandwidth usage would eventually have a detrimental effect, due to ISP sanctions such as speed throttling or charges for out-of-package downloads.
Slashdot Mirror
This tripped my sarcasm detector; apologies if it was meant to be serious. Blaming everybody is exactly the problem - it ignores the fact that violent, extremist Muslims are a tiny minority of the Muslim population. Terrorists may be Muslim in most cases, but it does not follow that all Muslims are terrorists.
Many indigenous Britons are not loyal to the United Kingdom as a single entity, myself included, but I'll admit that that's not quite the same thing once you consider the UK as a union of four nations.
This reads to me like an excellent defence of patents. The whole concept of patents is that the ideas are out in the open, and the inventor can talk freely about their idea without worrying that they will have their idea pulled from under them by a larger competitor with more resources.
The alternative would be much as you describe, with inventors fearing to talk about their ideas lest they become public knowledge, and the inventor sees no return. It's a nasty world where NDAs roam free and lips are tight.
There's also the case of value. An idea might be intangible, but it obviously has value if it can generate a profit. There's also the real cost of intangible things such as technical and economic feasibility studies. An idea doesn't lead straight to a product, there is R&D involved. Here the cost is not tangible matter, but time and salaries.
The idea that only tangible things can have value is absurd. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that your house would still be worth the same amount after it had been knocked down - after all, all the material is still there. In reality, it is the architectural design of the house (an idea), and the man-hours involved in building it (time and salaries), that make up the bulk of its value.
Therefore, suggesting that you should be free to take my idea is tantamount to saying that you should be free to come along and knock down my house.
Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time was released 9 years and 6 months ago, which I think is close enough to 10 years to seriously weaken your argument. I happen to be playing through it right now, and (graphics aside) it still compares well to the best of today's games.
The key to the Zelda series is that the core gameplay elements haven't changed. Link's Awakening, OoT, Wind Waker, Minish Cap, Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass are all easily recognisable as of the same series. That Miyamoto has maintained this kind of consistency, while also maintaining such high quality and review scores, and on top of that making the transition from 2D to 3D almost seamlessly, is the best indication of how great the man is. Nobody else has managed all of the above.
I'm pretty sure Cliff Richard trotted out the old argument that artists need the income from their old stuff to survive. I imagine this to be expressed much like 'Allo 'Allo's Colonel Von Strohm, eyes bulging, red in the face, squealing, "That's my pension!"
The fact is that allowing artists to get rich while raking in profits from old creations is the opposite of what copyright was designed to do.
Personally I like the terms that Founders' Copyright allows, and don't see the need for anything longer.
IIRC a patent by default only lasts for four years, and has to be renewed after that, every four years, up to a maximum of 20 years.
Can anybody give any insight as to what the requirements are for a patent to be renewed? Is it just a case of bureaucracy and fee-paying, or is there some requirement, as suggested above, to prove that the patent is actually being used?
And if not, would the renewal point be a good mechanism for introducing such a requirement?
Spot on.
The 3G functionality in this device is there so that you can access the internet on the move. You'll be hard pressed to source a 3G chipset that won't do voice calls and SMS, so it makes sense for the manufacturer not to deliberately cripple the device by not providing this functionality.
Only because Thor Heyerdahl chose not to plant a flag.
Antarctica strikes me as a good model that could also be used for the moon, as both are uninhabitable and relatively hard to reach. Not sure if a ban on mining would be necessary though. Would it be possible for human mining actions to alter the moon's orbit? I'm guessing not. And there aren't any ecological issues to worry about.
I wouldn't worry about companies owning stars, they'd only be able to charge for starlight that left the star after the deeds were signed. We'll all be long dead before any of it actually reaches us.
My mum is a compulsive tidier-upper, and so many items went missing/were tidied away in my youth simply because they weren't either out of sight our nailed down.
This is less the case now. What's more the case is that my dad is frequently late for things because he spends 10 minutes before leaving running around the house cursing, swearing and demanding to know where his car keys are (usually blaming my mum for moving them, see above, before finding them in his jacket pocket).
By the way, my mum relies on hearing aids to live a normal life and continue in her job. If everyone had your attitude, she'd probably be functionally deaf and would find it much harder to communicate.
Only if the button is well built. A badly built button might click without that click actually registering.
This is my experience of the Nokia N95 that I use at work. It doesn't happen often, but it's frustrating when it does, because you're getting a false-positive haptic cue.
I might sound like an Apple apologist for this, but for this reason I'd have an iPhone over an N95. The iPhone makes up for its lack of haptics by using lots of visual cues. However it's a bit of a pity that Apple didn't use the built-in vibrate function to provide some haptic feedback, like the Wii does (to great effect) when you 'mouse over' items on the screen with the pointer.
You got yourselves pretty comprehensively invaded by Europeans in the sixteenth century though. And we did pretty much wipe out your population.
The problem with invading China with the intention of exterminating the population is that they're unlikely to abide by the 'no nuclear weapons' rule you made up. And if they're all going to die anyway, you've just removed the last reason they have for not launching: mutually assured destruction.
As far as I'm aware the US missile defence system isn't up and running yet (and hopefully never will be), but even if George Bush came over all Return of the Jedi and declared it Fully Operational in the middle of a battle, with so many American troops already in China doing this dirty work the missiles wouldn't even have to leave Chinese airspace to inflict massive amounts of American casualties. Which are politically unacceptable at home.
I'm not under any such illusions. As far as I know, Switzerland is the only country in the world with a system of government that resembles the true definition of democracy.
Parliamentary democracy is not ideal because it forces you to endorse every policy a party has, not just some.* This manifests itself particularly badly when one party has an overall majority in parliament. The first-past-the-post system currently used in Westminster makes this more likely, which is why I oppose it.
When there is no overall majority then things get interesting. In the Scottish Parliament, which uses the Additional Member system, we have a minority government at the moment which cannot pass legislation without the consent of the opposition parties. This means that the whole spectrum of Scottish public opinion can be represented in government.
The problem with trying to make this kind of politics a reality in Westminster is as much the electorate as the system or the politicians. Most people, come a general election, are quite happy to vote an unpopular government out rather than voting their preferred party in. In 1997, the incumbent Tory government was unpopular, so Labour won an outright majority in a landslide vote. Now, the Labour government is unpopular, and it is almost certain now that the Tories will win an outright majority in a landslide vote. Rinse and repeat.
My effort in my above comment was to try and persuade maybe one or two people not to automatically vote Tory due to Labour's unpopularity, otherwise the cycle will repeat itself again (of course, in Scotland we may well be offski in a few years, so it won't matter to us). The current system makes change more difficult, but it doesn't make it impossible.
* A concept Des Browne seems incapable of understanding. He insists erroneously that because unionist parties make up two thirds of the Scottish Parliament, Scots have already voted down independence.
You could go out and vote in the next general election.
I'd recommend voting Lib Dem, if only because the introduction of proportional representation to Westminster is a condition for entering into a coalition with them (in the event of a hung parliament). The current first-past-the-post system gives an unfair advantage to large parties and means that it's much easier for them to obtain a majority, even without a majority of votes. That in turn means that the smaller parties cannot get elected and means that voices like yours won't get heard if they don't conform to the party lines of the big three.
PR would mean that it's incredibly hard for governments to bludgeon on regardless through an entire parliamentary term with these kinds of idiotic policies.
I suspect he meant politicians from the Conservative Party. But then I don't think they have a policy of removing CCTV cameras. I don't think they have any policies at all at the moment, they seem to exist to spout rhetoric and give the current government a bloody nose.
Just because they oppose something now doesn't mean they'll take any action on it when they win the next election. They've made much political capital out of their criticism of the abolition of the 10p tax rate, but refuse to be drawn on whether they'd actually re-introduce it after the election. Their opposition to something now doesn't necessarily mean action down the line.
It was so nice of the 7th of July London bombers to blow themselves up on a date that we could all agree on.
Just about any video game shop. GameStation in particular have huge pre-owned sections.
EMI wants to gain access to copies of files that users have on their MP3tunes accounts. Now, I'm assuming that you can't just go in and browse the list of files that a user has, otherwise they'd have shot themselves in the foot by arguing on privacy grounds.
So I'm assuming that EMI came along and said, "We want all the MP3s stored in user X's account." As it's unlikely that any user has an account filled 100% with EMI music, EMI would be given access to a significant amount of music from other labels, without the consent of the copyright holders. Which seems very hypocritical, even if it's legitimised by a court order.
By what definition is the freezing (or being pedantic, triple) point of water not cold?
The freezing point of water has a large effect on human behaviour due to the harmful effects that ice can have, so it makes sense for it to be zero rather than some arbitrary number.
The 'odd' ANSI sizes have a different aspect ratio from the 'even' sizes. The A-series uses 1:sqrt(2) (which is what I meant above) throughout.
Yeah, I meant the square root of 2, not 2. Brainfart.
1:square-root-of-2 even. Slashdot stripped the &sqrt;
A 1:2 ratio would have been quite nice, so that a screen would be the same ratio as a sheet of A4 paper (and by definition, the whole A-series).
For multiple-monitor setups, it would mean that you could take two 1:2 monitors, rotate them and end up with the same aspect ratio as one individual monitor.
Interesting argument about the food chain. I'm not so sure that we need to be concerned about the top end of the chain once humans are removed from it - we systematically kill any species that takes our livestock for its own use, so we would actually be helping some species that up until now we've seen as pests. Just as long as we don't get eaten ourselves, which shouldn't happen if there are enough cows around.
The question on my mind is, where do the nutrients necessary to grow meat vats come from?
Unless you're broadband package has usage caps (which, if you include 'fair usage policies', applies to most). Excessive bandwidth usage would eventually have a detrimental effect, due to ISP sanctions such as speed throttling or charges for out-of-package downloads.
What about Northern Ireland?
(Yay for living in Scotland)
That does sound like something that an over-zealous open source activist might say.