Posts by Shakje

Re: I've drilled the aerial out of my cards.

I will upvote you, you're a bit of a nutter, but also a bit of a legend when the machines take over.

Re: I'll bet we'll find plenty of other species too.

I'm interested in this research that shows that poverty and lack of education are genetic traits and not societal.

Re: Following a particular digital path?

Erm, what?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Net-DVD-Sandra-Bullock/dp/B00004CWUE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332762458&sr=8-1

Re: Ok, let's get some perspective here

Just reread this, breaking lol.

Apologies for English fail.

Re: Moderator attention….

"So because Google tels you that fascism is extreme right-wing, authoritarian, of intolerant views or practice, you are somehow taking an objective view?"

Oxford Dictionaries Online main definition:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fascism?q=fascism

an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.

Re: Re: MS Office isn't important

.net is good, you may not like it, but it's true. Especially as someone who was a C++ > C# advocate until I took the time to learn it, to make the assumption that people are "falling into a trap" suggests that there is no real advantage in using it at all, but if you compare development times, C# versions will almost always turnaround quicker. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the full standard is published. If someone wants to go and write their own version, they should be able to quite easily.

The reason VB developers got burned was because the language had major, major deficiencies (and since you'll clearly be wanting an example, how about "Runtime error 6"), and (as with C++.net, which did try this and essentially is a bit rubbish) and it would not have made logical sense to pigeon hole .NET functionality into the existing language.

Re: Thats easy

People who don't use apostrophes.

@TeeCee

But what if it's a borderline case where accessing the address book isn't core functionality but can offer added functionality to users?

E.g. Facebook. How many people are quite happy to trust FB (rightly or wrongly) to not do anything nefarious with their data, particularly their address book? And for all intents and purposes, it just saves you the time of adding your contacts manually, so why not allow the extra functionality for those who want it? But what if people don't want it to access their address book, but do want to update things easily on an app designed for their mobile? Do you honestly think it's good to get people into the mindset of "well it said that I could choose for it not to access my address book, so I'll just give it permission to so that I can install it"? It's far better to allow people to install apps and then prevent the usage of certain functionality if the user doesn't want it (on an OS level) rather than make the user decide between some functionality that they want, but something that they don't.

@Falcon

So you don't see that if something isn't being bought, it could actually generate more money if a lower price means more people buy it?

If you can't get it, here's a quick example:

Album costs £10 and 5 people buy it, price is reduced to £5 and 20 people buy it because it seems cheap, especially given its previous cost.

It doesn't surprise me at all that they cause price drops on average, an album has large sales in the first week or so, then drops off. As interest wanes you get a price drop, I don't see why an album would, under normal circumstances, or on average, ever go upwards.

@King Jack

Do you not see how those are different? Or are you just ignoring it?

On one hand you have Sky choosing who distributes their kit. I agree, that should be illegal because it's anti-competitive. It means that they have more receivers on shop shelves than competitors, so consumers have less choice.

On the other hand, you have Apple threatening to use another manufacturer. If they move to someone else, then it's not going to affect the amount of kit being produced, it's going to be the same amount of kit, for the same price, just manufactured by someone else. Why does it matter why they choose one manufacturer over another? What if they told a manufacturer that their prices were too high? Would that be as bad? It's essentially the same, it's just one company choosing one manufacturer because of certain criteria.

Look, if it was in a contract as an exclusivity deal, would you complain? Should there be no guarantee of exclusivity available? Is it unreasonable to broach this as a subject before spending money on drawing up lengthy agreements if it's a certain deal-breaker?

@Graham

I don't think that was supposed to be irony, I think that was Bono.

@Rameses

The problem, I would guess, is looking at it as a single study, rather than a process. The next question would be why. Why does working in a box limit creativity? Since we don't really understand the processes of the brain at all, never mind when it comes to things like creativity, any insight that provokes further research has to be a good thing.

It's probably also worth reminding people that the study showed that working in a cubicle might decrease creativity, not that this automatically means working in an open-plan office increases your work output. Perhaps it could be considered that a smaller office, with creative jobs such as illustration, design, development, might benefit better from an open-plan than a huge office with lots of distractions and unrelated jobs.

If the goal of the study is purely to show that working in a cubicle is worse than an open-plan, then you have a valid criticism, but that seems to just be a possible outcome, not the real goal, which would appear to be more along the lines of "what can influence creativity?" taking cues from phrases that have stuck in popular culture, perhaps for good reason, with an aim of understanding creativity better.

I also wonder how many people knocking the research have actually looked at the abstract to see what the justification was, an excerpt:

"These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances on body-mind linkages under the emerging vernacular of embodied cognition, we explored for the first time whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem-solving."

Personally, just me, I think that's quite a good idea for a study.

Erm...

"it's also disgusting". I find it hard to square with this, partly because whatever someone chooses to do in their own home with a sterile fluid from their own body is entirely up to them, and secondly because there's plenty of people who have to do things other than go to the toilet when they pee (commodes and catheters spring to mind). Not sure why you find it so disgusting to pee in a bottle rather than a bowl covered in germs?

@cornz1

I'll bite.

1) You're a star-nosed mole in a laboratory being stimulated to think you're at a computer.

2) If you're not, prove that. Put up or shut up.

3) Try reading what he said.

There's no such thing as unicorns, leprechauns, jabberwockies, dragons, or hell. I base that statement on the level of proof supporting each one, and as a statement that it's incredibly unlikely that any of them exist (I'll leave open a small possibility that they do, but for all intents and purposes that's the definition of saying something doesn't exist). Do you believe in unicorns? Can you prove that? If you can then there's no point discussing anything with you, if you can't and accept that they don't exist (or that the possibility of them existing is infinitesimally small) just apply the same logic to hell. If you want to believe that something exists without any rational reason to do so, go for it, but don't get all offended when people apply the same logic to it as they do to every other imaginary thing in the history of humanity (even in belief-circles it's a bit hit and miss what they believe about hell, and scripturally it's not got the best representation really).

The garden analogy

Both sides seem to have missed the point. On the one hand, taking physical items really is theft, it's not the same at all. This should be utterly obvious to anyone who can be bothered to actually think about it for a moment. On the other hand, the analogy of letting people see your garden isn't accurate either, because there's no loss incurred whatsoever.

It's far more like you spending ages preening your garden and making it look lovely, and then charging a tenner for people to wander around and look at it. If someone then visits your garden, and makes an absolutely perfect replica of it somewhere else and lets people visit for free, that's more in the ballpark. People who might have visited your garden decide it's easier to go to the free one instead, or that it's just too expensive to visit yours.

The difficulty is that this is a very simplistic view of human behaviour, in reality people might decide that they want to view your garden because it's the original. Or that they want to pay to view yours because they feel guilty about just looking at it for free. Or they decide to pay to visit your other gardens because of the experience of the free one. That is a little closer to the truth of it. Then imagine that with every person who visits your garden they also get far better service, they're taken around in a golf cart by you, explaining every inch of it, so the experience is actually better, but not everyone places that high a value on the experience (I would equate that to buying a physical album with box art etc.).

Let's also say that in order to stamp out these other gardens you screened a large presentation to the people who DID pay to go to yours all about how the other gardens were hurting yours before letting them in, and then you randomly picked some of them and threatened to hunt them down for stealing your ideas.

It's not a clear-cut argument either way, whatever some people would like to think (people who are on the freetard side who think it is tend to be doing so to justify their own actions, and those opposing it tend to like the idea that they are morally superior to someone), and that's why important questions about the way that music is distributed and the way that copyright law works have to be answered, rather than just taking one viewpoint and arguing it until you're blue in the face. I download things, as I've said before, and I don't do it that often. 90% of the things I download are things that I wouldn't pay money for (either I can't really afford it, or it's not something I would consider buying. Say about 40% of that I buy at a later date when things change (i.e. I can afford it, or I realise it's worth it after all), mostly because I like physical goods. The other 10% are things that I intend to buy, but want sooner, and there's no digital distribution service for them available, and usually I buy all of these things eventually. I accept that what I'm doing is technically wrong, but by doing this I really do buy more things at the end of the day.

So can we all just grow up a bit, and admit that it's a fuzzy issue, instead of trying to be all tabloid about it?

" I need commit none of those errors in order to despise anyone who flies that flag"

And that isn't grouping them together as one entity? Gotcha.

It's better to be right and have people actually bother reading what you said, the less polite you are the less likely that you'll have people spend time to look at what you've written and treat it without a prejudgement. I have no problem with being wrong, I like being corrected, but you haven't done this so far.

So there's no way...

that an app could take out Linux? Or OSX? Or could take out Android?

It's all very well getting angry about it, but if you can do it maliciously then you CAN do it by accident.OSes should look to minimise this sort of thing, but it won't protect you from stupid coders. Safari is more to blame than the OS, and it's a bit sad that the article takes the easy route to place the most blame on MS, rather than at least an equal footing.

But this is why...

You shouldn't simply decide based on what seems sensible to you

1) Whether quantum physics is a good model of reality

2) Whether government spending is historically good at reversing downturns in the USA

3) Whether bringing in immigrants can help create jobs

It's easy enough to make judgements about all three of these without knowing a single fact other than what you've seen in the media or heard anecdotally from a friend, but if you look at historical examples, evidence, and current research, you'll get a more informed opinion. Maybe bringing immigrants in won't create jobs, and there will be a study that comprehensively destroys this one, but just forming an opinion and assuming it's right because it seems more "sensible" to you doesn't make you a cynic, it just makes you uninformed.

I really wish there wasn't this weird push towards "common sense" thinking over anything else. It's idiotic that in this current day and age we should make any sort of assumption that common sense alone can help us explain complex issues like immigration, economics or science.

Semi-agree

I think that Karen Gillan is one of the few things that's right with Doctor Who (along with Matt Smith), although it's got a hell of a lot better since Russell T Davies left. You just have to look at Torchwood to see how small a fish he really is and how utterly incapable he is of making something which sits in that perfect zone between made-up things and realistic scenarios (my best example being that he has to make something up to find a mole in the FBI instead of just thinking up something plausible or a better plot device), or, for that, good dialogue.

Presumably

that's because if anyone decides to sue you for stealing films, they won't have a clue about dynamic IPs either.

@Alex Rose

Isn't that the truth. Here's what really happens:

1) Some users who don't know bugger all about security download an app and click ok on everything

2) They review app and say it's amazing

3) Users who might normally be more careful think that it's probably fine because lots of people reviewed it positively

4) Because they won't see adverse affects, these users become desensitized to the boxes asking for permissions (and because of just how often you have to click ok to install some things) and ignore them

And there you go, random shit being installed. Asking a user if they want something to do something doesn't make the system any more secure, the only way to almost guarantee security is to use the Apple model, but assuming that this is a bad thing as you probably do (I don't like the way that they treat developers, but for users it's a pretty good option in my opinion) then you'll just have to suck up the fact that permissions questions are a veneer of security to give people the idea that Android does something in their interest.

Whoah steady on

1) It's still not clear exactly what it keeps for sending. If it records things temporarily because it has to, then so be it. The reporting of it sounds varied, and I don't really know Android well enough to really get to the bottom of it, but it does sound like it just has a global hook on text entry, and then filters out the presses it gets back for the interesting ones. The fact that it stores those presses in RAM while it's processing them shouldn't shock anyone technical, or be cause for alarm.

2) It's installed by the carriers, so they will clearly whitelist the URL that it uploads to. You may notice a bit of a reduction in your data connection while it uploads, but it won't cost you a penny. If we take their guy at his word then it only uploads when the carrier asks it to. This doesn't sound particularly malicious.

All in all, it sounds like a poor design of some diagnostics software (probably so that it was easier to port), not an attempt to harvest data maliciously. Stop jumping the gun already.

@John I'm only dancing

What if the fuel that's used to create it is also charcoal? Recursion fixes anything.

But it depends on how much they already spent on marketing. Probably not as much as the Playbook mess, but still a significant amount I'd guess...

I was pretty sure..

they had already done an experiment that showed that entanglement operated inside the speed of light. It's just generally done at such a small scale because of the noise that it's kind of hard to measure.

SAN TA1

Seriously, what are the odds?

That's the point that Krauss makes though

None of the saucers mentioned in the article have motherships, they're the actual deep space vehicles. It makes no sense to design a deep-space vehicle to behave well in an atmosphere.

"However, short of some magical property that allows spacecraft entering a planet's atmosphere to avoid the normal laws of aerodynamic"

There's generally so many laws of physics ignored when people get onto the topic of alien spacecraft or future spacecraft in the media, what's a few more?