But I (the hypothetical I) am not responsible for those 10,000 copies. With my upstream, I might have uploaded 2, or maybe even 10 copies of the film at the most. If other people have then copied my copies, that's not my responsibility.
To use the Disney T-shirts being sold out of the back of a van analogy, that's like me reprinting the T-shirts, selling 10 of them from my van and then some of the people I'd sold them to making their own copies of my T-shirt and selling them from their vans. I'm not responsible for what they do.
I can switch to multiple monitors without logging out - I do have to use the resolution tool though. And Compiz crashes and it drops back to Metacity when I go to multiple monitors, so it's certainly not perfect. I think that's due to not having enough graphics memory though.
I disagree with you both, although this could be because I have a UK perspective on the issue. Over here, you can either buy "locked" phones, which typically come with a pay-as-you-go sim. Regarding these, I basically agree with you, the network has subsidised them heavily, so they're not really "your" phone.
On the other hand, you can get phones on contract. This involves signing up for a specified number of months, and possibly paying something up front. In this case, you're buying the phone, however you're essentially buying it on credit and paying it off over 12-24 months. In this case (at least over here) the phones generally come unlocked, so you can move to a different network if you wish, but you'll still have to pay your contract's monthly fee, even if you don't use the network.
In the latter case, I feel it's perfectly fair to consider the phone to belong to the customer. They've paid for it, and the service.
The other difference between the US and the UK is this ridiculous notion of crippled phones - over here, they might sometimes be locked to a network to cover the subsidy, but I've never had one which has had features deliberately disabled by the network which is what preventing you rooting the device basically amounts to.
My girlfriend's Corsa has the reverse left and up, like that, unlike my MX-5, which is right and down. I think I prefer the left and up style really, I feel like I'm less likely to try and put it in there accidentally as you have to pull a collar up, and it frees up space for a sixth gear (the 6 speed MX-5 has 6 right and down, and reverse further right and down, which strikes me as silly).
I have an HTC Desire, which when I first got it had a similar problem - to unlock it, you press the power button on the top then put your finger on the screen and slide downwards, which apparently my trouser pocket is quite capable of doing as well. Then you have the standard call-recent-numbers, or go-on-internet problems. After the second time it happened, I turned on the "draw a shape on this grid" security thing. I've set a pretty simple shape, but it's enough to stop it doing things I don't want it to. I'd quite like to turn off the initial slide as it's redundant now, but I've not got around to looking into whether I can.
You're exactly right. Free speech includes speech that you may personally find unpleasant or repulsive, but it should never be blocked or censored.
I remember seeing someone (an American) write a blog post a few years back where he posted photos of himself burning an American flag, and saying it was actually a really patriotic thing to do, because he was celebrating the freedoms he had in the US, and those freedoms include the freedom to burn his own flag. It was a slightly tortuous point, but I see where he was coming from.
Having just fitted remote central locking to my car, I've been having similar thoughts - perhaps have the "lock car" button on the keyfob trigger the door to unlock for a few seconds, using the standard "buzz someone in" type remote you get on apartment buildings.
Just trying to think if there are enough (or any!) situations where that might cause a problem.
Assuming sufficient range on the keyfob, also handy for letting friends into your house when you know they're coming! No more of that having to get up to answer the door nonsense.
Range is 300km on a full charge, and given a suitable power supply, it can go from flat to full in 10 minutes.
I don't know about you, but if I've just driven 300km, I'd be quite happy to wait 10 minutes before driving another 300. On top of that, you'd be charging it a lot less often - my typical car use is home to work and back most days, 10km. Visiting family, less than 100km each way. So, if I'm using it like this, I/never/ need to do one of their 10 minute charges because I'll plug it in every night. OK, on a residential 13A, 240V feed it'll take a few hours to charge, but so what? It'll be there overnight.
I rarely do journeys that long, and when I do, I'd be glad to take a break. 10 minutes isn't exactly a long time.
Also bear in mind that's a sports saloon - a car built for range rather than performance would potentially go a lot further on a charge. But even if it doesn't, even if the range was half that, it's still plenty.
Now we just need quantity sold to go up, so price comes down...
When I was at uni, one year they started passing registers round... This stopped when people starting writing random things on them, such as insults next to people's names, signing "mickey mouse" etc, but they said the reasoning behind it wasn't that they were intending to punish people who didn't turn up, as such, but if a student asked the lecturer for help near the exams, they were much more likely to get it if they'd been turning up to all the lectures.
I can sort of sympathise with that outlook - if the students can't be bothered to turn up to the lectures, they probably don't deserve as much help.
No, given that he said the PotC theme, I think he's referring to the PotC theme. Which plays about 4 minutes in (off the top of my head) as the missiles are launched and as they fly to their targets.
Isn't that the wrong way round? I'd say changing a tyre is significantly harder than checking oil/screenwash/rad fluid levels!
Granted, that could be because I haven't needed to change a tyre yet (although I do know how...), but I can't see it actually being/easier/ than checking fluid levels!
I agree in principle though - there are a lot of people using complicated equipment with no idea how it works or how to maintain it.
Also, points are much "fairer". There are a lot of people with enough money that they wouldn't care about a £60 fine every so often, but there are a lot of people who are poor enough that a £60 fine could mean they struggle to afford food... Whereas everyone has the same 12 points before they lose their license.
The alternative, I suppose, is to have fines as a percentage of income, like I believe at least one European country does, but that can be abused too, students with rich parents, bankers who've just been sacked and so on have a lot more money than their income would suggest.
That said, the current system's open to abuse too - I know someone who's currently still driving despite having 12 points because he claimed he'd have to close his company down and make everyone redundant if he lost his license. So they let him keep it.
Can you elaborate on how you can text safely in a moving vehicle that you are driving?
I basically agree with you - it's not safe to text while you're driving a moving vehicle. However these laws get applied too broadly - there was a case over here in the UK recently where someone got the standard penalty for driving whilst texting, however whilst he was in control of the vehicle, said vehicle was stationary in a traffic jam, with the handbrake on. If the vehicle you're in control of is stationary, then yes, I believe it is perfectly safe to write a text message.
And yet he was still charged under the "you can't use a phone when in charge of a vehicle" law.
My girlfriend bought a car for just under £100 when she first passed her driving test. Yes, it was a pile of crap, but it also got her from A to B with no problems for about 3 months. After those 3 months, it developed a hole in the petrol filler pipe, so she got rid of it, but still, that was £33/month for a car, which is pretty good.
I paid about £3500 for my car, for it to have the same monthly cost, I'd have to keep using it for about 10 years! (ignoring resale value, yadda yadda yadda)
They've only opened it up a little bit. Yes, they're using the Jabber protocol, which is fantastic 'cos I can now connect with Pidgin or Psi without any dirty hacks (although they've not quite implemented it properly... yet), but their server doesn't talk to other servers, which means alice@chat.facebook.com can't talk to bob@jabber.org unless bob makes a Facebook account, however bob can talk to charlie@jabber.debian.org (if Debian has a jabber server - I don't know).
So, it's still a walled garden, it's just using standard bricks.
I agree with you. Technically, a single unit is a cell (eg, D cell, AAA cell, etc), a battery is several cells put together to make single power supply (eg a 12V lead acid battery or a PP3 battery) and if you get several of those then they're batteries (eg, a box of PP3 batteries, two car batteries).
Its a waist of time to corect peoples grammer and speling. For all intensive purposes, your going to loose and not brake there bad habits irregardless of how you feal.
Point a... With the exception of moving a car in a drive, or something like that, I've never driven without my seatbelt on, and I've almost never been a passenger without a seatbelt on... It's just automatic! However, I have left my car unlocked a few times, sometimes through stupidity and forgetting and sometimes because I've left the roof down and there's no point.
I think I've been saved by the fact that a locked car and an unlocked car look essentially identical and people forgetting to lock their cars is rare enough that potential criminals just assume they are locked. Oh, and it helps that I never leave anything in the car...
I'm not so sure about that - my experience is that bigger things get bashed around more than small things...
My company produces two kits which are relatively similar in function, however one has around 8kg of lead acid batteries in, the other around 500g of lithium ion. The two kits have identical connectors on the outside, however the bigger ones come back with smashed connectors much much more often than the smaller ones. I think it's probably down to momentum - both kits get chucked onto tables, shelves and into car boots in a similar way, but the heavier one has enough mass behind it to do more damage when it hits.
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But I (the hypothetical I) am not responsible for those 10,000 copies. With my upstream, I might have uploaded 2, or maybe even 10 copies of the film at the most. If other people have then copied my copies, that's not my responsibility.
To use the Disney T-shirts being sold out of the back of a van analogy, that's like me reprinting the T-shirts, selling 10 of them from my van and then some of the people I'd sold them to making their own copies of my T-shirt and selling them from their vans. I'm not responsible for what they do.
I can switch to multiple monitors without logging out - I do have to use the resolution tool though. And Compiz crashes and it drops back to Metacity when I go to multiple monitors, so it's certainly not perfect. I think that's due to not having enough graphics memory though.
On the other hand, you can get phones on contract. This involves signing up for a specified number of months, and possibly paying something up front. In this case, you're buying the phone, however you're essentially buying it on credit and paying it off over 12-24 months. In this case (at least over here) the phones generally come unlocked, so you can move to a different network if you wish, but you'll still have to pay your contract's monthly fee, even if you don't use the network.
In the latter case, I feel it's perfectly fair to consider the phone to belong to the customer. They've paid for it, and the service.
The other difference between the US and the UK is this ridiculous notion of crippled phones - over here, they might sometimes be locked to a network to cover the subsidy, but I've never had one which has had features deliberately disabled by the network which is what preventing you rooting the device basically amounts to.
You can get back to the 50% score if you look at it as:
news [ ]
for nerds [x]
stuff [x]
that matters [ ]
My girlfriend's Corsa has the reverse left and up, like that, unlike my MX-5, which is right and down. I think I prefer the left and up style really, I feel like I'm less likely to try and put it in there accidentally as you have to pull a collar up, and it frees up space for a sixth gear (the 6 speed MX-5 has 6 right and down, and reverse further right and down, which strikes me as silly).
I have an HTC Desire, which when I first got it had a similar problem - to unlock it, you press the power button on the top then put your finger on the screen and slide downwards, which apparently my trouser pocket is quite capable of doing as well. Then you have the standard call-recent-numbers, or go-on-internet problems. After the second time it happened, I turned on the "draw a shape on this grid" security thing. I've set a pretty simple shape, but it's enough to stop it doing things I don't want it to. I'd quite like to turn off the initial slide as it's redundant now, but I've not got around to looking into whether I can.
It's actually "Land of the fee, home of the vague"
I remember seeing someone (an American) write a blog post a few years back where he posted photos of himself burning an American flag, and saying it was actually a really patriotic thing to do, because he was celebrating the freedoms he had in the US, and those freedoms include the freedom to burn his own flag. It was a slightly tortuous point, but I see where he was coming from.
Just trying to think if there are enough (or any!) situations where that might cause a problem.
Assuming sufficient range on the keyfob, also handy for letting friends into your house when you know they're coming! No more of that having to get up to answer the door nonsense.
Range is 300km on a full charge, and given a suitable power supply, it can go from flat to full in 10 minutes.
I don't know about you, but if I've just driven 300km, I'd be quite happy to wait 10 minutes before driving another 300. On top of that, you'd be charging it a lot less often - my typical car use is home to work and back most days, 10km. Visiting family, less than 100km each way. So, if I'm using it like this, I /never/ need to do one of their 10 minute charges because I'll plug it in every night. OK, on a residential 13A, 240V feed it'll take a few hours to charge, but so what? It'll be there overnight.
I rarely do journeys that long, and when I do, I'd be glad to take a break. 10 minutes isn't exactly a long time.
Also bear in mind that's a sports saloon - a car built for range rather than performance would potentially go a lot further on a charge. But even if it doesn't, even if the range was half that, it's still plenty.
Now we just need quantity sold to go up, so price comes down...
When I was at uni, one year they started passing registers round... This stopped when people starting writing random things on them, such as insults next to people's names, signing "mickey mouse" etc, but they said the reasoning behind it wasn't that they were intending to punish people who didn't turn up, as such, but if a student asked the lecturer for help near the exams, they were much more likely to get it if they'd been turning up to all the lectures.
I can sort of sympathise with that outlook - if the students can't be bothered to turn up to the lectures, they probably don't deserve as much help.
No, given that he said the PotC theme, I think he's referring to the PotC theme. Which plays about 4 minutes in (off the top of my head) as the missiles are launched and as they fly to their targets.
Granted, that could be because I haven't needed to change a tyre yet (although I do know how...), but I can't see it actually being /easier/ than checking fluid levels!
I agree in principle though - there are a lot of people using complicated equipment with no idea how it works or how to maintain it.
Also, points are much "fairer". There are a lot of people with enough money that they wouldn't care about a £60 fine every so often, but there are a lot of people who are poor enough that a £60 fine could mean they struggle to afford food... Whereas everyone has the same 12 points before they lose their license.
The alternative, I suppose, is to have fines as a percentage of income, like I believe at least one European country does, but that can be abused too, students with rich parents, bankers who've just been sacked and so on have a lot more money than their income would suggest.
That said, the current system's open to abuse too - I know someone who's currently still driving despite having 12 points because he claimed he'd have to close his company down and make everyone redundant if he lost his license. So they let him keep it.
I basically agree with you - it's not safe to text while you're driving a moving vehicle. However these laws get applied too broadly - there was a case over here in the UK recently where someone got the standard penalty for driving whilst texting, however whilst he was in control of the vehicle, said vehicle was stationary in a traffic jam, with the handbrake on. If the vehicle you're in control of is stationary, then yes, I believe it is perfectly safe to write a text message.
And yet he was still charged under the "you can't use a phone when in charge of a vehicle" law.
I'd never not sell you a double negative.
My girlfriend bought a car for just under £100 when she first passed her driving test. Yes, it was a pile of crap, but it also got her from A to B with no problems for about 3 months. After those 3 months, it developed a hole in the petrol filler pipe, so she got rid of it, but still, that was £33/month for a car, which is pretty good.
I paid about £3500 for my car, for it to have the same monthly cost, I'd have to keep using it for about 10 years! (ignoring resale value, yadda yadda yadda)
They've only opened it up a little bit. Yes, they're using the Jabber protocol, which is fantastic 'cos I can now connect with Pidgin or Psi without any dirty hacks (although they've not quite implemented it properly... yet), but their server doesn't talk to other servers, which means alice@chat.facebook.com can't talk to bob@jabber.org unless bob makes a Facebook account, however bob can talk to charlie@jabber.debian.org (if Debian has a jabber server - I don't know).
So, it's still a walled garden, it's just using standard bricks.
That is truly amazing. Funniest thing I've seen in ages, even if it does make me despair.
And as someone in the comment thread there said, "Lots of these people can vote"
I agree with you. Technically, a single unit is a cell (eg, D cell, AAA cell, etc), a battery is several cells put together to make single power supply (eg a 12V lead acid battery or a PP3 battery) and if you get several of those then they're batteries (eg, a box of PP3 batteries, two car batteries).
Its a waist of time to corect peoples grammer and speling. For all intensive purposes, your going to loose and not brake there bad habits irregardless of how you feal.
Point a... With the exception of moving a car in a drive, or something like that, I've never driven without my seatbelt on, and I've almost never been a passenger without a seatbelt on... It's just automatic! However, I have left my car unlocked a few times, sometimes through stupidity and forgetting and sometimes because I've left the roof down and there's no point. I think I've been saved by the fact that a locked car and an unlocked car look essentially identical and people forgetting to lock their cars is rare enough that potential criminals just assume they are locked. Oh, and it helps that I never leave anything in the car...
mini = 10^-3
micro = 10^-6
mini micro = 10^-9 = nano
Nano computers!
I'm not so sure about that - my experience is that bigger things get bashed around more than small things...
My company produces two kits which are relatively similar in function, however one has around 8kg of lead acid batteries in, the other around 500g of lithium ion. The two kits have identical connectors on the outside, however the bigger ones come back with smashed connectors much much more often than the smaller ones. I think it's probably down to momentum - both kits get chucked onto tables, shelves and into car boots in a similar way, but the heavier one has enough mass behind it to do more damage when it hits.
Homo nym? What is this faggot tree?