Re: Allocated Au and Ag outside the banking sector + mining shares + thick skin + patience
Gold? Pah. Metals are still capricious. If you were going to peg a currency to anything physical, you should peg it to the Joule. Beneficial side effect is that it explicitly rewards energy efficiency.
Since 1993 you just need a British (or other EU member state issued) passport, and (not absolutely essential, but it helps) the ability to speak German.
"unless Uncle Clive sneaked loads of goodies (networking, HD video, etc.) into that tiny case three decades ago and never told anyone..."
To be fair, 31 years ago, nobody expected networking or HD video. Tellies didn't even have composite video inputs (for good reason: many of them employed live chassis, to save the cost of a mains transformer; and besides, nobody ever expected a TV set to be connected to anything other than an aerial in those days). Later, the Interface One would bring networking to the ZX Spectrum at very low cost (in theory, at least; I never knew anyone who actually had two of the things).
"but why does a Raspberry Pi-related story bring out the snarky comments...?"
Because the Raspberry Pi cannot run any version of Microsoft Windows. It is, therefore, quietly teaching people to become Evil Penguin Shagging Communists.
This is what you get when you rely for security on the user not having the Source Code to your software. Repeat after me: The only thing that should be assumed to be secret is the decryption key. If you think your software has any way to know it's not running under some sort of emulation, you might be interested in some beachfront properties in Staffordshire.
The only way out of this situation is legislation to require for Source Code to be made available to end users, always, no exceptions, ever.
Good point. But even nuclear fuel (which isn't renewable, but is looking increasingly like the only stop-gap measure available) will run out before the Sun does.
Analogue TV has already been turned off, meaning nobody is stuck with just five channels anymore. Ergo, there is no need for the BBC to keep programmes meant for the widest audience on BBC1 or BBC2.
About time too. Nobody else seems to have a problem with SI. I suggest as an interim measure we scribe a line at the 500ml. point on all our existing 568ml. glasses (which will give about a 13% oversize for those who like a head on their beer), and post up ready-reckoner charts so that pub customers can see they are not being cheated.
Let’s try a real-world example to show why SI just works: fixing 6 shelves in an alcove 2.28 m. high, evenly spaced and with the bottom shelf 1 m. above floor level. I’ll be using a commonly-available tape measure marked in metres, centimetres and millimetres, and an ordinary 8-digit calculator from a pound store. Key presses are in bold, figures displayed on the calculator are in italics.
2.28 [-] 1 [=] (get the height of the shelves plus the space above top shelf)
1.28
[÷] 6 [=] (divide this by the number of shelves)
0.2133333 (the spacing between each shelf and the next one)
[+] [+] (make this a constant for addition. Now, each subsequent press of the [=] key will add 0.2133333 to whatever is on the calculator’s display).
1 [=] (we marked the position of the bottom shelf at 1m. Now we want to start by adding 0.2133333 to 1, to get the position of the second shelf up.)
1.2133333 (mentally round this to 1.213 — the same precision as the tape measure — and mark the position of the second shelf on the wall)
[=]
1.4166667 (mentally round this to 1.417 and mark 3rd shelf. Note in passing that this calculator seems to be using more precision than it can display. This is not a bad thing.)
[=]
1.64 (mark 4th shelf)
[=]
1.8533333 (mark 5th shelf)
[=]
2.0666667 (mark last shelf)
[=] (one final time just to check; if all has gone to plan, we should get the height of the ceiling)
2.28 (Yay! Already time for a brew and a smoke, while you’re still fart-arsing about trying to subtract 3 ft. 3 3/8 in. from 7 ft 5 3/4 in. Hey, what was that noise? It sounded a bit like a space probe crashing …..)
Even if there was not already prior art for this, it would be obvious to anyone ordinarily skilled in the art, and therefore not meet the requirements for patentability in the UK. (Side question: presumably the UK authorities will offer no assistance to foreign authorities in question with something which supposedly infringes on a patent which is inapplicable in the UK?)
But there is prior art: An applet which displays a map of the layout of a computer's (physical, because that was what they had then) keyboard in various states of shift / ctrl / alt and allows you to copy characters to the clipboard by clicking on the virtual keys. Anyone but a drooling imbecile can see how obvious the extension of this principle to a touchscreen keyboard would be. Oh, and this prior art was more than long enough ago that if it was patented then, it would have expired by now.
So, for 10 points, can you guess which computer this was first seen on?
Well, it wasn't really a "raid" so much as a hard-sell sales pitch for some licence-auditing software they were selling. Being Windows-only, it wasn't going to be of any use to us anyway .....
"A small design start-up isn't going to have the >£7k it needs to buy legal copies of Adobe CS and Office for everyone."
No, but they can easily afford the £0 it would cost to buy legal copies of GIMP, Inkscape and OpenOffice.org for everyone. In case you missed the memo, using proprietary software is not mandatory -- no matter what Microsoft, Adobe and co. would have you believe.
"But not having the tools means no work is done, and there's a hole in the UK's economy which that start-up might have been able to fill."
But they do have the tools! They can use Open Source software, or even (shock, horror) manual methods. You know -- the way people used to do things before computers were invented.
If you don't want to pay for software, that's fine by me -- as long as you use software that people don't actually mind you not paying for.
It's easy to think, when you make a pirate copy of Microsoft Office, that they won't miss the money; that you aren't really doing Microsoft any harm. But there is an underlying, false assumption, and that is that the company whose product is being copied is the company which is suffering.
A pirate copy of Microsoft Office is not necessarily a lost sale for Microsoft. If piracy were eliminated altogether, so the choices were pay the price or go without, those users most probably would have bought not MS Office, but a less-expensive office suite which nonetheless fulfilled their requirements. A pirate copy of Microsoft Office is very probably a lost sale for one of Microsoft's competitors.
The fact that there is no such software around is due to piracy. Vendors of inexpensive office suites have already been put out of business by piracy. There may not be a single pirate copy of Cheap Office out there; but there doesn't need to be, as long as there are plenty of pirate copies of Microsoft Office.
And of course, Microsoft would rather Fred in the Shed was using a pirate copy of Microsoft Office to write letters, balance his finances and keep track of his CD collection, than a paid-up copy of anything else. Because if Fred in the Shed ever gets a job with a company, he will want them to buy him Microsoft Office because he already knows that.
Big software companies, by tolerating piracy, have effectively wiped out the competition.
If only that were true. BSA, FAST et al hate Free Software.
(Although it was kinda good getting raided as a 100% Free Software shop, just to see the look on the FAST guy's face when we said we did nothing to prevent people copying software from their workstations and would probably encourage it. Apparently, if you order two dozen motherboards, cases and HDDs and one boxed copy of Windows, you get raided.)
Actually, I think you will the Germans are better engineers than Brits or Americans, probably because they are not cluttering up their heads with the 25.4 times table.
There's an even easier way to stop bogus whiplash claims: Require properly-adjusted head restraints (you know, the things that are there to prevent whiplash) as an MoT condition. Anyone who claims for whiplash would then be admitting to driving an unroadworthy vehicle.
Re: Before anyone says "here comes big brother"...
"Plus, there's no reason why cars can't safely tail off the gas themselves when the driver pushes beyond the limit to stop them speeding."
No reason, as long as there is some way to tell the gadget when you get into a situation where the choice is literally "break the speed limit or crash", and it doesn't take an inordinately long time to put the vehicle into this mode.
Confronting the problem of population growth directly
Well, bribing people to remain child-free would be a reasonable start.
If you wait long enough, people tend to die all by themselves. You just have to make that sure new ones aren't being born at the same rate as the old ones are dying, and the population decreases all by itself.
Since human beings can't digest fossil fuels, every carbon atom in breath originally came from a plant or animal (which in turn got it from an animal or a plant); and every carbon atom in plants came from the atmosphere, by photosynthesis. Therefore, respiration is carbon-neutral: you are merely returning CO2 whence it originally came.
And since movies are often sent to cinemas in digital form nowadays, without incurring the cost of making so many film prints, then that argument has become considerably weakened.
By the way, TV series released on DVD often tend to be region-coded. All in all, it's a good job multi-region DVD players are so readily available (mandated in certain countries, even).
"They're not, though. 7Zip is LGPL. Freedom does not restrict what you are permitted to do, whilst the GPL and LGPL apply various conditions to their usage."
By which logic, people in a country where slavery is permitted are freer than people in a country where slavery is not permitted (and thus people are denied the freedom to enslave others).
Maybe the freest person in such a land would be more free than the freest person in a non-slave-owning country; but one must suppose that the average person would be a lot less free where slavery was permitted.
Similarly, a country whose government is not bound by a written constitution is not necessarily freer than a country where the government's powers are restricted by a written constitution.
The fallacy is to assume that the power (not freedom; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html) to do what licences such as the GPL do not allow would always be used in a benign manner. History has shown consistently that such expectations are naïve and unrealistic.
After all, whyever should anyone want the power to rob others of their freedom, if they were not going to exercise it?
Users have already got used to Microsoft telling them they are too thick to do anything beside point and grunt, and feel quite comfortable without the awesome power and boost to their productivity that could be had from communicating with a computer in a more nuanced, more expressive language. To the point where this sort of thing is considered a virtue.
(Having moved from Debian to Ubuntu, and subsequently discovered that the version of Brasero included with 11.10 is a bug-infested heap of toss, I ended up having to go back to the time-honoured method of using dd and growisofs for backing up DVDs. It's actually nowhere near as bad as it sounds, especially with the command recall and editing facilities offered by a modern shell. Given me an idea for a programming project, as well.)
At least 7-Zip, OpenOffice.org and VLC are not Freeware, but Free Software.
Free Software gives users four basic freedoms: The freedom to Enjoy using it for any purpose without let or hindrance (freedom 0); the freedom to Study how it works (freedom 1); the freedom to Share it with your neighbour (freedom 2); and the freedom to Adapt it to suit your own purposes (freedom 3). This requires for it to be released under a licence which permits these activities which the Law of the Land would ordinarily curtail, and with the Source Code (the human-readable form, as used by programmers) available to all users.
"Freeware" is software which is offered gratis, but without some or all of the above freedoms. Freedoms 0 and 2 can always be taken by force if necessary; but access to Source Code is what directly enables Freedoms 1 and 3 and in its absence, users may be hamstrung.
The term "Open Source Software" is often used as a mealy-mouthed, politically-correct alternative to "Free Software", since it (1) avoids potential confusion between £0 and freedom, and (2) avoids implying awkward things about non-Free software.
Whatever name you are going to call it, this drum needs banging, because people are still too keen to sell their freedoms until it is already too late.
Besides the fact that they committed offences under the Misuse of Computers Act with a rootkit that contained illegally-copied code, criminal damage to PlayStation 3 consoles and illegally demanded information from ISPs about customers using their own property in ways the Law of the Land explicitly says Sony cannot seek to prevent them from doing?
Now I must get my coat and back home via the tree outside my bedroom window. I left an LP on in there, with the balance arm up, so my parents will think I am still in .....
Competition in sports broadcasting works exactly the same way as competition for public transport.
The bus and train companies have carved up the map so each route is served by only one operator. You are entirely free to choose to travel with a different bus/train operator, or even use a different mode of transport -- as long as you are prepared also to choose a different destination.
Outlaw exclusivity deals altogether. Just because one broadcaster wants to show a match, shouldn't mean nobody else is allowed to. That way, broadcasters would have to compete fairly on their own merits.
Now that everybody has a digital TV (or no pictures) nobody is limited to just five channels anymore. There is room for at least the BBC and ITV to have their own dedicated sports channels.
None of which provides any good reason why "he" should be allowed to prevent anyone else from making another one just like it, provided that they use all their own materials.
Sounds rather like someone passed the wrong options to configure, or shipped a test version of the binary.
Logging even just incorrect passwords is a security risk in production, because the chances are it's just one incorrect character causing the problem -- reducing the search space considerably. You might need such a feature for testing, for sure, but not out in the wild.
You seriously have the gall to say "if I create something then it is mine", and then go off on one about a sense of entitlement?
Suppose you paint a picture. What makes it *your* picture, as opposed to belonging to the person (or the person responsible for the thing or event) depicted? Why doesn't it belong to the manufacturer of the paints you used? Or the original discoverer of the pigments in them? Or the manufacturer of the canvas, brushes or easel? How about the caveman who first discovered the concept of painting pictures? Because, after all, the picture you painted wouldn't exist without any of these people.
That is what I meant by "Nobody is an island." Everything that anyone ever does, depends on things that others have done before.
Any licence required to watch a DVD was already included in the original purchase price of the DVD. Once it is your property, nobody can restrict you from using it for its rightful purpose.
If you want to argue different, it's going to end up with Hollywood refunding the full purchase price of every DVD ever sold in countries with strong consumer protection laws, plus compensation for whatever can be claimed for and both sides' legal costs.
The movie studios are fully aware of all this, which is why they prefer to talk big and scary as opposed to showing their complete and utter lack of leg to stand on in court.
If you own the DVD, then you have an implied licence to watch the movie on it, as that is its Rightful Purpose. So nobody can legally prevent you from watching it, nor from performing any necessary step in the course of so doing.
Nobody is an island. All the fruits of all human endeavour rightfully belong to all of humanity. Progress is worthless unless it is shared by everybody.
The original purpose of copy"right" (one of the world's worst misnomers -- it is actually a privilege) law was to ensure that the Public Domain -- the body of work which may be freely used by anyone for any purpose, without let or hindrance -- would be continuously enriched by the creation of new works. This was done by granting authors a temporary monopoly over the use of their work, in exchange for the promise that the works created would eventually be added to the Public Domain. In those days, unscrupulous publishers were not above ripping off authors -- and most people lacked the wherewithal to copy books.
Sometime in the meantime, things changed. The content industry began to view copyright as a right as opposed to the privilege that it is, and developed a sense of entitlement. And the means to make copies of creative works became more readily available.
I don't think anyone could sanely argue against enrichment of the Public Domain as an end. What is questionable is the means by which that end is achieved.
It's time that the question was seriously asked: Is the grant of a temporary monopoly over a creative work still the best way to encourage the eventual contribution of new works to the Public Domain, or might this noble goal be better achieved by other methods?
Linux machines are most likely to be running Open Source applications, which don't generally bother with restricting users from doing what they want with their own property that they have bought and paid for with the fruits of their own effort, by hand or by brain. And even if they did, judicious insertion of a few comment marks is all it takes to un-restrict you.
Well, it will do that, if there was no Dolby on the original source programme to begin with!
It's a two-ended process. The recording is made with Dolby encoding, which -- by means of a non-linear transfer function -- gives a bit more emphasis to the frequencies where noise is most obtrusive. At the time of playback, the signal -- along with any noise it may have picked up -- is subjected to the inverse transfer function, undoing the deliberate distortion introduced in recording, and most of the noise disappears.
If you haven't got a Dolby decoder, turning down the treble control a bit will make it sound tolerable.
From the article:<blockquote>However, consent is not required for reproduction or the other actions in relation to the computer program if those acts "are necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction".<blockquote>Obtaining a copy of a program that you have a licence to use surely falls within the definition of "necessary in accordance with its intended purpose".
People's own devices are a mess of hardware, software ..... and malware.
Probably the best way to get "BYOD" to work is to put together a custom Linux distro on CD, USB stick and PXE boot server; which handles logins via YP and home folders on NFS. No files are stored on the user's machine, which boots into a known, clean environment. This still requires people to be using devices of a certain minimum specification, of course.
Licensing costs are nil; you just need a Microsoft-hating school leaver to help you set it up.
A friend of mine had some serious phun with BBC model B's in stores that also sold software.
He would take a box of 5.25 inch floppy disks, all but a few of which was labelled "Watford Electronics Compatibility checker". (Watford Electronics were a third-party supplier of peripherals; they made an improved disk system for the BBC, better than but slightly incompatible with the "official" Acorn upgrade and some software, especially games, would not work with it.)
So my friend would ask to "check" if a game would be "compatible" with his Watford disk system. Inserting the "compatibility checker" disk into the drive of a BBC computer and pressing shift+BREAK produced a fancy screen with a progress indicator; which then asked for the game disk to be inserted, thrashed the drive a bit, then asked for the checker disk again. After a series of such disk swaps came the dreaded announcement that the game was not compatible with the WE DFS. He would return the compatibility checking disk to the back of the box, and ask the shop assistant if he could compatibility-check another game. While the assistant was away fetching it, my friend whipped out the compatibility-checking disk from the front of the box (nobody ever noticed this blatant switch, which was done with no sleight-of-hand) and booted it up.
Again the compatibility-checking process would require several disk swaps, and again it would fail. And my friend would wander off, dejected, before the shop assistant could work out what had just happened right under their nose.
Oh, yes. Same thing used to happen with Beebs and sideways RAM boards. When you decide that E00DFS has fallen over and corrupted one disk too many for your liking and hoik out the sideways RAM board, this usually happens:
BBC Computer
Acorn DFS
Language?
And you end up having to stick BASIC in the adjacent socket, because the one it came from can no longer make sound contact with a normal IC pin.
Re: "...Acorn Series 1 - which had been designed by Sophie Wilson"
Well, now we're getting deep into trans* semantics.
There are several points you could consider to be the moment at which a person assigned male at birth becomes female. Obvious ones are: Completion of surgery; Beginning of surgery; Beginning of RLE; Hormone treatment kicking in; Beginning of hormone treatment; First time was addressed as "miss"; First time presenting as chosen gender; First time realised was transsexual; First time asked the question "Why can't I do X?". And almost anything in between.
Irrespective of whichever moment an individual trans* person chooses as definitive, and how they choose to handle events either side of it -- by treating their boy-self and their girl-self as two completely separate people, by retroactively claiming that things done by their boy-self were actually done by their girl-self, or whatever -- it's *their* choice, and not respecting it makes you sound passive-aggressive and antagonistic.
Also, because everyone is different, everyone's experience is different. Which means that what is right for one person may not be right for another.
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Re: Allocated Au and Ag outside the banking sector + mining shares + thick skin + patience
Gold? Pah. Metals are still capricious. If you were going to peg a currency to anything physical, you should peg it to the Joule. Beneficial side effect is that it explicitly rewards energy efficiency.
Cui Bono
Who exactly stands to gain from the break-up of the Euro anyway?
Re: How do you open an acccount in a German bank?
Since 1993 you just need a British (or other EU member state issued) passport, and (not absolutely essential, but it helps) the ability to speak German.
Re: "The ZX81 de nos jours..."
"unless Uncle Clive sneaked loads of goodies (networking, HD video, etc.) into that tiny case three decades ago and never told anyone..."
To be fair, 31 years ago, nobody expected networking or HD video. Tellies didn't even have composite video inputs (for good reason: many of them employed live chassis, to save the cost of a mains transformer; and besides, nobody ever expected a TV set to be connected to anything other than an aerial in those days). Later, the Interface One would bring networking to the ZX Spectrum at very low cost (in theory, at least; I never knew anyone who actually had two of the things).
"but why does a Raspberry Pi-related story bring out the snarky comments...?"
Because the Raspberry Pi cannot run any version of Microsoft Windows. It is, therefore, quietly teaching people to become Evil Penguin Shagging Communists.
Oh, I click on adverts on Facebook, alright
I click on the "X" and when prompted for a reason why I don't like it, I always answer "Because it is an advertisement".
The advertisements are served from Facebook's own domain, so I can't even block them.
Surely I am not alone in feeling I would sooner pay for the Internet than have to look at adverts?
Only one way out of this
This is what you get when you rely for security on the user not having the Source Code to your software. Repeat after me: The only thing that should be assumed to be secret is the decryption key. If you think your software has any way to know it's not running under some sort of emulation, you might be interested in some beachfront properties in Staffordshire.
The only way out of this situation is legislation to require for Source Code to be made available to end users, always, no exceptions, ever.
Good point. But even nuclear fuel (which isn't renewable, but is looking increasingly like the only stop-gap measure available) will run out before the Sun does.
From the article: "Running a developed economy only or mainly on renewables is wildly impractical"
So what are you proposing to do when fossil fuels are uneconomical to dig up, and renewables are the only source of energy there is?
So what's the problem?
Analogue TV has already been turned off, meaning nobody is stuck with just five channels anymore. Ergo, there is no need for the BBC to keep programmes meant for the widest audience on BBC1 or BBC2.
Re: metricating the auto world
And measuring distances in kilometres.
Long Overdue
About time too. Nobody else seems to have a problem with SI. I suggest as an interim measure we scribe a line at the 500ml. point on all our existing 568ml. glasses (which will give about a 13% oversize for those who like a head on their beer), and post up ready-reckoner charts so that pub customers can see they are not being cheated.
Let’s try a real-world example to show why SI just works: fixing 6 shelves in an alcove 2.28 m. high, evenly spaced and with the bottom shelf 1 m. above floor level. I’ll be using a commonly-available tape measure marked in metres, centimetres and millimetres, and an ordinary 8-digit calculator from a pound store. Key presses are in bold, figures displayed on the calculator are in italics.
2.28 [-] 1 [=] (get the height of the shelves plus the space above top shelf)
1.28
[÷] 6 [=] (divide this by the number of shelves)
0.2133333 (the spacing between each shelf and the next one)
[+] [+] (make this a constant for addition. Now, each subsequent press of the [=] key will add 0.2133333 to whatever is on the calculator’s display).
1 [=] (we marked the position of the bottom shelf at 1m. Now we want to start by adding 0.2133333 to 1, to get the position of the second shelf up.)
1.2133333 (mentally round this to 1.213 — the same precision as the tape measure — and mark the position of the second shelf on the wall)
[=]
1.4166667 (mentally round this to 1.417 and mark 3rd shelf. Note in passing that this calculator seems to be using more precision than it can display. This is not a bad thing.)
[=]
1.64 (mark 4th shelf)
[=]
1.8533333 (mark 5th shelf)
[=]
2.0666667 (mark last shelf)
[=] (one final time just to check; if all has gone to plan, we should get the height of the ceiling)
2.28 (Yay! Already time for a brew and a smoke, while you’re still fart-arsing about trying to subtract 3 ft. 3 3/8 in. from 7 ft 5 3/4 in. Hey, what was that noise? It sounded a bit like a space probe crashing …..)
Re: I DONT GET IT
I think it's kinda cute, that he's getting on the Internet with an Apple ][.
Re: No, it doesn't.
Someone or something that is ___ious is full of ___iety. For example, various; pious; anxious; obvious; obnoxious.
You'll be telling me next that the past tense of "breathe" is "breathed" as opposed to "brothe".
Does the USPTO have a non-obviety test?
Even if there was not already prior art for this, it would be obvious to anyone ordinarily skilled in the art, and therefore not meet the requirements for patentability in the UK. (Side question: presumably the UK authorities will offer no assistance to foreign authorities in question with something which supposedly infringes on a patent which is inapplicable in the UK?)
But there is prior art: An applet which displays a map of the layout of a computer's (physical, because that was what they had then) keyboard in various states of shift / ctrl / alt and allows you to copy characters to the clipboard by clicking on the virtual keys. Anyone but a drooling imbecile can see how obvious the extension of this principle to a touchscreen keyboard would be. Oh, and this prior art was more than long enough ago that if it was patented then, it would have expired by now.
So, for 10 points, can you guess which computer this was first seen on?
Re: With the BSA on your team...
Well, it wasn't really a "raid" so much as a hard-sell sales pitch for some licence-auditing software they were selling. Being Windows-only, it wasn't going to be of any use to us anyway .....
Re: @h4rm0ny
"A small design start-up isn't going to have the >£7k it needs to buy legal copies of Adobe CS and Office for everyone."
No, but they can easily afford the £0 it would cost to buy legal copies of GIMP, Inkscape and OpenOffice.org for everyone. In case you missed the memo, using proprietary software is not mandatory -- no matter what Microsoft, Adobe and co. would have you believe.
"But not having the tools means no work is done, and there's a hole in the UK's economy which that start-up might have been able to fill."
But they do have the tools! They can use Open Source software, or even (shock, horror) manual methods. You know -- the way people used to do things before computers were invented.
If you don't want to pay for software, that's fine by me -- as long as you use software that people don't actually mind you not paying for.
Who Piracy Really Hurts
It's easy to think, when you make a pirate copy of Microsoft Office, that they won't miss the money; that you aren't really doing Microsoft any harm. But there is an underlying, false assumption, and that is that the company whose product is being copied is the company which is suffering.
A pirate copy of Microsoft Office is not necessarily a lost sale for Microsoft. If piracy were eliminated altogether, so the choices were pay the price or go without, those users most probably would have bought not MS Office, but a less-expensive office suite which nonetheless fulfilled their requirements. A pirate copy of Microsoft Office is very probably a lost sale for one of Microsoft's competitors.
The fact that there is no such software around is due to piracy. Vendors of inexpensive office suites have already been put out of business by piracy. There may not be a single pirate copy of Cheap Office out there; but there doesn't need to be, as long as there are plenty of pirate copies of Microsoft Office.
And of course, Microsoft would rather Fred in the Shed was using a pirate copy of Microsoft Office to write letters, balance his finances and keep track of his CD collection, than a paid-up copy of anything else. Because if Fred in the Shed ever gets a job with a company, he will want them to buy him Microsoft Office because he already knows that.
Big software companies, by tolerating piracy, have effectively wiped out the competition.
Re: With the BSA on your team...
If only that were true. BSA, FAST et al hate Free Software.
(Although it was kinda good getting raided as a 100% Free Software shop, just to see the look on the FAST guy's face when we said we did nothing to prevent people copying software from their workstations and would probably encourage it. Apparently, if you order two dozen motherboards, cases and HDDs and one boxed copy of Windows, you get raided.)
Re: So why will cars in the US be smartest?
Actually, I think you will the Germans are better engineers than Brits or Americans, probably because they are not cluttering up their heads with the 25.4 times table.
Re: @Magnus_Pym If they really knew...
There's an even easier way to stop bogus whiplash claims: Require properly-adjusted head restraints (you know, the things that are there to prevent whiplash) as an MoT condition. Anyone who claims for whiplash would then be admitting to driving an unroadworthy vehicle.
Re: Before anyone says "here comes big brother"...
"Plus, there's no reason why cars can't safely tail off the gas themselves when the driver pushes beyond the limit to stop them speeding."
No reason, as long as there is some way to tell the gadget when you get into a situation where the choice is literally "break the speed limit or crash", and it doesn't take an inordinately long time to put the vehicle into this mode.
Re: Breathe...
Yes, but the thing is: the Earth had got quite used to all that carbon being *out* of the cycle.
Now it's coming back into circulation, things are changing. And not necessarily for our benefit.
Confronting the problem of population growth directly
Well, bribing people to remain child-free would be a reasonable start.
If you wait long enough, people tend to die all by themselves. You just have to make that sure new ones aren't being born at the same rate as the old ones are dying, and the population decreases all by itself.
Re: Breathe...
Since human beings can't digest fossil fuels, every carbon atom in breath originally came from a plant or animal (which in turn got it from an animal or a plant); and every carbon atom in plants came from the atmosphere, by photosynthesis. Therefore, respiration is carbon-neutral: you are merely returning CO2 whence it originally came.
Re: DVD Regions
And since movies are often sent to cinemas in digital form nowadays, without incurring the cost of making so many film prints, then that argument has become considerably weakened.
By the way, TV series released on DVD often tend to be region-coded. All in all, it's a good job multi-region DVD players are so readily available (mandated in certain countries, even).
Re: Being pedantic here .....
"They're not, though. 7Zip is LGPL. Freedom does not restrict what you are permitted to do, whilst the GPL and LGPL apply various conditions to their usage."
By which logic, people in a country where slavery is permitted are freer than people in a country where slavery is not permitted (and thus people are denied the freedom to enslave others).
Maybe the freest person in such a land would be more free than the freest person in a non-slave-owning country; but one must suppose that the average person would be a lot less free where slavery was permitted.
Similarly, a country whose government is not bound by a written constitution is not necessarily freer than a country where the government's powers are restricted by a written constitution.
The fallacy is to assume that the power (not freedom; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html) to do what licences such as the GPL do not allow would always be used in a benign manner. History has shown consistently that such expectations are naïve and unrealistic.
After all, whyever should anyone want the power to rob others of their freedom, if they were not going to exercise it?
Users don't want to be treated like adults
Users have already got used to Microsoft telling them they are too thick to do anything beside point and grunt, and feel quite comfortable without the awesome power and boost to their productivity that could be had from communicating with a computer in a more nuanced, more expressive language. To the point where this sort of thing is considered a virtue.
(Having moved from Debian to Ubuntu, and subsequently discovered that the version of Brasero included with 11.10 is a bug-infested heap of toss, I ended up having to go back to the time-honoured method of using dd and growisofs for backing up DVDs. It's actually nowhere near as bad as it sounds, especially with the command recall and editing facilities offered by a modern shell. Given me an idea for a programming project, as well.)
Being pedantic here .....
At least 7-Zip, OpenOffice.org and VLC are not Freeware, but Free Software.
Free Software gives users four basic freedoms: The freedom to Enjoy using it for any purpose without let or hindrance (freedom 0); the freedom to Study how it works (freedom 1); the freedom to Share it with your neighbour (freedom 2); and the freedom to Adapt it to suit your own purposes (freedom 3). This requires for it to be released under a licence which permits these activities which the Law of the Land would ordinarily curtail, and with the Source Code (the human-readable form, as used by programmers) available to all users.
"Freeware" is software which is offered gratis, but without some or all of the above freedoms. Freedoms 0 and 2 can always be taken by force if necessary; but access to Source Code is what directly enables Freedoms 1 and 3 and in its absence, users may be hamstrung.
The term "Open Source Software" is often used as a mealy-mouthed, politically-correct alternative to "Free Software", since it (1) avoids potential confusion between £0 and freedom, and (2) avoids implying awkward things about non-Free software.
Whatever name you are going to call it, this drum needs banging, because people are still too keen to sell their freedoms until it is already too late.
Re: why the hate?
"I really dont understand the hate about Sony."
Besides the fact that they committed offences under the Misuse of Computers Act with a rootkit that contained illegally-copied code, criminal damage to PlayStation 3 consoles and illegally demanded information from ISPs about customers using their own property in ways the Law of the Land explicitly says Sony cannot seek to prevent them from doing?
Re: What's Dave?
Upvoted for mentioning 405 lines.
Now I must get my coat and back home via the tree outside my bedroom window. I left an LP on in there, with the balance arm up, so my parents will think I am still in .....
Re: Competition on sports broadcasting
Competition in sports broadcasting works exactly the same way as competition for public transport.
The bus and train companies have carved up the map so each route is served by only one operator. You are entirely free to choose to travel with a different bus/train operator, or even use a different mode of transport -- as long as you are prepared also to choose a different destination.
Better, simpler solution
Outlaw exclusivity deals altogether. Just because one broadcaster wants to show a match, shouldn't mean nobody else is allowed to. That way, broadcasters would have to compete fairly on their own merits.
Now that everybody has a digital TV (or no pictures) nobody is limited to just five channels anymore. There is room for at least the BBC and ITV to have their own dedicated sports channels.
Re: Moving Beyond Copyright
None of which provides any good reason why "he" should be allowed to prevent anyone else from making another one just like it, provided that they use all their own materials.
Hmm
Sounds rather like someone passed the wrong options to configure, or shipped a test version of the binary.
Logging even just incorrect passwords is a security risk in production, because the chances are it's just one incorrect character causing the problem -- reducing the search space considerably. You might need such a feature for testing, for sure, but not out in the wild.
Re: Moving Beyond Copyright
You seriously have the gall to say "if I create something then it is mine", and then go off on one about a sense of entitlement?
Suppose you paint a picture. What makes it *your* picture, as opposed to belonging to the person (or the person responsible for the thing or event) depicted? Why doesn't it belong to the manufacturer of the paints you used? Or the original discoverer of the pigments in them? Or the manufacturer of the canvas, brushes or easel? How about the caveman who first discovered the concept of painting pictures? Because, after all, the picture you painted wouldn't exist without any of these people.
That is what I meant by "Nobody is an island." Everything that anyone ever does, depends on things that others have done before.
Re: @ myself and Downvoters
Any licence required to watch a DVD was already included in the original purchase price of the DVD. Once it is your property, nobody can restrict you from using it for its rightful purpose.
If you want to argue different, it's going to end up with Hollywood refunding the full purchase price of every DVD ever sold in countries with strong consumer protection laws, plus compensation for whatever can be claimed for and both sides' legal costs.
The movie studios are fully aware of all this, which is why they prefer to talk big and scary as opposed to showing their complete and utter lack of leg to stand on in court.
Re: Say NO! To DRM!
If you own the DVD, then you have an implied licence to watch the movie on it, as that is its Rightful Purpose. So nobody can legally prevent you from watching it, nor from performing any necessary step in the course of so doing.
Moving Beyond Copyright
Nobody is an island. All the fruits of all human endeavour rightfully belong to all of humanity. Progress is worthless unless it is shared by everybody.
The original purpose of copy"right" (one of the world's worst misnomers -- it is actually a privilege) law was to ensure that the Public Domain -- the body of work which may be freely used by anyone for any purpose, without let or hindrance -- would be continuously enriched by the creation of new works. This was done by granting authors a temporary monopoly over the use of their work, in exchange for the promise that the works created would eventually be added to the Public Domain. In those days, unscrupulous publishers were not above ripping off authors -- and most people lacked the wherewithal to copy books.
Sometime in the meantime, things changed. The content industry began to view copyright as a right as opposed to the privilege that it is, and developed a sense of entitlement. And the means to make copies of creative works became more readily available.
I don't think anyone could sanely argue against enrichment of the Public Domain as an end. What is questionable is the means by which that end is achieved.
It's time that the question was seriously asked: Is the grant of a temporary monopoly over a creative work still the best way to encourage the eventual contribution of new works to the Public Domain, or might this noble goal be better achieved by other methods?
Re: Say NO! To DRM!
Linux machines are most likely to be running Open Source applications, which don't generally bother with restricting users from doing what they want with their own property that they have bought and paid for with the fruits of their own effort, by hand or by brain. And even if they did, judicious insertion of a few comment marks is all it takes to un-restrict you.
Re: I hate DOLBY.
Well, it will do that, if there was no Dolby on the original source programme to begin with!
It's a two-ended process. The recording is made with Dolby encoding, which -- by means of a non-linear transfer function -- gives a bit more emphasis to the frequencies where noise is most obtrusive. At the time of playback, the signal -- along with any noise it may have picked up -- is subjected to the inverse transfer function, undoing the deliberate distortion introduced in recording, and most of the noise disappears.
If you haven't got a Dolby decoder, turning down the treble control a bit will make it sound tolerable.
Re: Linux
I smell troll.
Secondly, Ubuntu were one of the first to ship LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.org; and firstly, nVidia have never made a decent graphics card.
Hmm
Does "Close down GCHQ" feature in any political party's manifesto promises?
Re: Blimey
I was using "trans-misogyny" to mean "hatred of trans women". It's slightly more euphonic than "misotransgyny". Anyway, linky:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/03/06/a-beginners-guide-to-trans-misogyny/
Re: Blimey
Misogyny is unattractive. Trans-misogyny more so.
Quick Question ..... ?
I'm already running 11.10 on my laptop, because I wanted to get it up and running as quickly as possible. Is it possible to upgrade by
$ sudo sed -i 's/oneiric/precise/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo ( apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade )
or is Ubuntu not that similar to Debian ?
Important Words
From the article:<blockquote>However, consent is not required for reproduction or the other actions in relation to the computer program if those acts "are necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction".<blockquote>Obtaining a copy of a program that you have a licence to use surely falls within the definition of "necessary in accordance with its intended purpose".
Anyone could have foreseen that
People's own devices are a mess of hardware, software ..... and malware.
Probably the best way to get "BYOD" to work is to put together a custom Linux distro on CD, USB stick and PXE boot server; which handles logins via YP and home folders on NFS. No files are stored on the user's machine, which boots into a known, clean environment. This still requires people to be using devices of a certain minimum specification, of course.
Licensing costs are nil; you just need a Microsoft-hating school leaver to help you set it up.
Shop Demo Software Shenanigans
A friend of mine had some serious phun with BBC model B's in stores that also sold software.
He would take a box of 5.25 inch floppy disks, all but a few of which was labelled "Watford Electronics Compatibility checker". (Watford Electronics were a third-party supplier of peripherals; they made an improved disk system for the BBC, better than but slightly incompatible with the "official" Acorn upgrade and some software, especially games, would not work with it.)
So my friend would ask to "check" if a game would be "compatible" with his Watford disk system. Inserting the "compatibility checker" disk into the drive of a BBC computer and pressing shift+BREAK produced a fancy screen with a progress indicator; which then asked for the game disk to be inserted, thrashed the drive a bit, then asked for the checker disk again. After a series of such disk swaps came the dreaded announcement that the game was not compatible with the WE DFS. He would return the compatibility checking disk to the back of the box, and ask the shop assistant if he could compatibility-check another game. While the assistant was away fetching it, my friend whipped out the compatibility-checking disk from the front of the box (nobody ever noticed this blatant switch, which was done with no sleight-of-hand) and booted it up.
Again the compatibility-checking process would require several disk swaps, and again it would fail. And my friend would wander off, dejected, before the shop assistant could work out what had just happened right under their nose.
Re: The Atom was more a system 3
Oh, yes. Same thing used to happen with Beebs and sideways RAM boards. When you decide that E00DFS has fallen over and corrupted one disk too many for your liking and hoik out the sideways RAM board, this usually happens:
BBC Computer
Acorn DFS
Language?
And you end up having to stick BASIC in the adjacent socket, because the one it came from can no longer make sound contact with a normal IC pin.
Re: "...Acorn Series 1 - which had been designed by Sophie Wilson"
Well, now we're getting deep into trans* semantics.
There are several points you could consider to be the moment at which a person assigned male at birth becomes female. Obvious ones are: Completion of surgery; Beginning of surgery; Beginning of RLE; Hormone treatment kicking in; Beginning of hormone treatment; First time was addressed as "miss"; First time presenting as chosen gender; First time realised was transsexual; First time asked the question "Why can't I do X?". And almost anything in between.
Irrespective of whichever moment an individual trans* person chooses as definitive, and how they choose to handle events either side of it -- by treating their boy-self and their girl-self as two completely separate people, by retroactively claiming that things done by their boy-self were actually done by their girl-self, or whatever -- it's *their* choice, and not respecting it makes you sound passive-aggressive and antagonistic.
Also, because everyone is different, everyone's experience is different. Which means that what is right for one person may not be right for another.
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