Posts by Michael Nidd

Works in Sweden too

According to someone who should know, ABBA chose stage costumes that could not possibly be used privately for exactly that reason.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/feb/16/abba-outfits-tax-deduction-bjorn-ulvaeus

Re: Why not use a Mexican Bank?

May also relate to the whole "reporting suspicious transactions" bit.

Re: MKaybe the post office didn't questions it...

And of course they never heard of any company called "UPS."

Is there any customer they might be less motivated to proactively help?

Re: anti-competitive practices.

You have spotted exactly the point. It's not natural to want to be competitive, it's natural to want to crush your opponents into dust if they are vulnerable, which is why "anti-competitive practices" are banned with government enforcement for the sake of retaining a robust free market. Just like it's natural for a boxer to want a horseshoe in his glove, so we make rules about glove composition and agree the sport benefits from these rules. The general consensus is that consumers would suffer if regulators did not detect and punish anti-competitive practices.

Re: I might watch it sometime

"first time a real (not novelization) set of books comes out after a movie"

That wouldn't be the case for the earlier books in the series. I read the first one twenty years ago, and liked it, but I agree that they are slow to come out. By the time the fourth was published, I had lost interest. According to the internet, Bantam released the third in 2000 and the fourth in 2005, which sounds about right, but it also looks like the HBO series was first broadcast in 2011.

Re: When is someone going to file a UK Class Action against M$

And if TTIP goes through?

@dan1980

... take this e-mail as symbolic of the 99 other up-votes I would like to give this comment.

With a little effort, generating those 99 other up-votes would usefully demonstrate the value of electronic voting.

Re: Mosaic

The main innovation over mosaic (that I remember) was that Netscape could display the text without waiting for all of the graphics to load. That made it massively more responsive. It seems like a simple idea (multiple simultaneous sockets and revise the layout as new objects are received) but that's why most people I know switched to Netscape. The main complaint was the unilateral extensions to HTML.

Re: Bribe developers with tee-shorts

From the first time someone drives a golf ball off the tee that's built into the shorts, their motivational power will be crystal clear.

Re: Prediction

That's where he's sacrificed speed for a genuine improvement on the programming approach. If you run a verified implementation of the algorithm, the output is disappointingly predictable; if you do it manually, the output becomes truly unpredictable. WIN!

Re: Where's the story?

Passwords should never be stored in plaintext anywhere. Not on a laptop with disk encryption, not on a server in a locked room behind two firewalls, not anywhere. It's not a question of how the list is protected; it just shouldn't exist.

Re: Informing of costs?

Suppose he did tell them immediately upon answering the phone that this call will cost 10p per minute, do you think they listen to anything you say during the first thirty seconds of one of those calls?

@RedneckMother

"sorry, but I STILL miss Gilda Ratner."

Radner. Me too.

Re: Prior art ?

> So, may or may not warrant a trademark, but what they're doing is definitely better than what everyone else is.

Actually, that would kill it. Something that gives a functional advantage cannot be trademarked. Patents are for useful innovations; trademarks are to distinguish something in the mind of customers. That's why the Coke bottle shape is a trademark, but an electric razor with three rotating heads is not (any more).

@Badvok

... when you stop paying for the storage, anything you leave in there can be disposed of by the storage company

I think this case is more like you paid for self-storage, and the self-storage company was closed down by the police for illegal activity involving some of the lockers. In those circumstances, the legitimate customers would expect to be able to collect their stuff.

I don't think this is about intellectual property. If he wants to sell photocopies or scanned images of the book, he's probably OK. From what I can see, the conflict is about the physical book. The statement refers to "items from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs." Who would get licensing royalties if images of the book are reprinted might be round two of the discussion.

As someone else once said

This research fills a much-needed gap in the literature.

Literal content is important

Not just sure that it hasn't been altered, but also confident that all the people who read it have seen the same thing. If you are sending an invoice in Euros, you don't want to find out that one reader had his viewer configured to automatically convert that to Yen at the current exchange rate, because your quote is for Euros. I know that sort of configuration would count as a bug, but it's a lot less likely when you send a PDF. For some things, what you actually said is more important than what you meant, and fewer filters/conversions is better.