Posts by h4rm0ny 4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008
I thought the Independent had really hit the slopes when it was bought by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev a couple of years ago (there's an extraordinary clip of him punching another guest off their chair on a talk show on YouTube: nice guy). But RE-hiring Hari? Bad enough that they hired ihim in the first place. He writes trite shite and has the ethics of a weasal.
I used to *like* that paper.
...but having had a look at the site and it's level of "professionalism", I'm going to cut the judge some slack here. In order to see if the judge has a bias, you're going to need a better test case than this because looking at this site, an unbiased judge would also probably rule against it.
Agree with your general point about a badly maintained Linux server being just as vulnerable as a badly maintained Windows server. But you are wrong to be making assumptions about Stratfor. I can't speak for their admin side but they're definitely not a "one-man show". They're pretty good at what they do - strategic forecasting. Shame about this, though.
"if you take away a large chunk of the production costs and the price doesn't change it is surely an indication that the market isn't free and fair."
As both products are available side by side (download and CD) and the price is similar, in this case it's an indication that most people didn't care much about the things that have changed. I personally can do without the clutter of the plastic. As people aren't flocking to buy CDs instead of MP3s (and in fact, the other way around), it's an indication that the convenience of instant gratification far trumps inlays and artwork. So as people's purchasing habits clearly demonstrate that they don't value the product less, and in fact seem to be preferring it, then why should seller's lower their prices? Keep in mind with inflation the way it is, any price staying where it is (and albums are slightly cheaper than they were I think), is actually a reduction in real terms.
So what you're saying is that the reason you pirate a movie is because you're "not happy" to pay the middle men and would only be happy to go around the director, the actors, the camera men, the catering staff, the studio owners, etc. and give them their appropriate share of your £10. (Hope you have a sharp knife to cut up all those fractions of a penny). And of course they will then go off and give an appropriate share of their earnings to the people who made the cameras, provided the studio space, ad infinitem. And for music, you want to go around giving your money to the artists, the sound engineers, the advertising people they employed to publicize their album, etc.
Or maybe you think the creators should handle every aspect of delivering their product themselves, from commissioning the CDs and arranging distributors to signing deals with digiral resellers? All sounds like a lot of work. It would probably be better for the creators if someone created a business handling this stuff for them. They could come to a mutually agreed arrangement with the creators to share the profits via some sort of contract.
Oh wait, you're not happy to pay "middle men", you are only happy to pay the "creators" of the film?
I expect an answer along the lines of proposing some sort of body that fulfills the role of the studios but which you choose to call something else.
Is it wrong to charge the same for the same product? CDs are just a transport medium for me. If I buy one, it's going to end up encoded as a high quality MP3 on my hard drive just the same as if I buy a download. The difference being that the download I can get immediately, don't have to bother ripping and I don't end up with the clutter of a CD around the place. Other people for various might prefer the CD, but to most of us, they are actually the same product delivered in two separate ways. Maybe people stuck in the past get hung up on thinking that they have been cheated by missing out on the bits of plastic, but I don't.
I hear the same outrage about ebooks sometimes - how dare they charge the same for an ebook as a physical copy? Well, the eBook is infinitely lighter and more convenient to me, so if anything I'm lucky I'm not charged more. We all have our preferences, but it's not "morally wrong" and "totally unjustifiable" to charge the same or nearly the same cost for what is effectively the same product or, in the case of ebooks, where there are plusses and minuses on both sides that cancel each other out.
I don't want to sound negative about this card. I actually get a warm glow reading about it. But I'm not really a gamer (have played about two in the last ten years), but I get the impression that games developers write primarily for the consoles and then port across an equivalent-ish version to the PC. And consoles are less powerful than a high-end PC + Graphics Card, so are games really making use of the power available in these cards? Correct me if I'm wrong.
I agree that it's a flaw in Windows. It seems the days of applications being able to crash the kernal aren't completely behind us yet. (Though imagine this being a headline ten years ago - everybody would shrug and say "it happens all the time" - this being on a news site is a sign of how far we've all come).
But does anyone still write viruses designed to crash your machine? I thought they were a relic of the old days when people wrote viruses just to be bitter or annoy you, instead of for profit by creating botnets and boosting your bank details. Aside from trying to destroy some poor Iranian centrifuges, I can't remember the last time I saw a virus doing actual sabotage. Do they still do the rounds?
I totally agree with your sentiment - the USA is perfectly capable of creating causus belli deliberately in order to attack a nation. They have done so multiple times. But they invent stories about Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators or Gaddafi supplying his army with viagra in order to better rape people (oh wait - that one was *our* national newspapers). But the USA doesn't invent stories that make themselves look stupid or weak. Bush signed off approval for CIA counter-government activities in Iran and Congress has approved huge funding for such operations. When Ahmadinejad said that the post-election protests were being whipped up by US agents there was a lot of truth to that. And if you want to find likely examples of US manufactured causus belli, look at the pretty silly and unlikely story about Iran trying to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in October. But having a massively expensive drone safely land itself in Iran and them not give it back, that just makes the US sound a bit silly and therefore is unlikely to be a conspiracy on their part. Plus they wouldn't *actually* want the Iranians to have one of their drones.
Most of the tea party want to extract the USA from most of its foreign adventurism. It's the Left wing and mainstream Republican that have been pro-war over the last decade. The further Right of the Tea Party have been quite against (a) further borrowing and (b) sending US soldiers to die in any more foreign wars.
Tossers, yes. But not the biggest bunch, as you describe them. Saudi Arabia and Qatar (both of which we directly and indirectly) support are significantly worse. The trouble with Iran is that they are not *our* tossers. The areas that Iran is worst on, tend not to be "repression" in the sense of government repression or putting down rebellions, etc. It's in the areas of backwards attitudes to harmless things like homosexuality. Ahmadinejad was actually fairly elected and with a bigger majority than our last several UK governments. Of course his power is limited by the Ayatollah - it's hardly a pure democracy. But it's not quite the totallitarian regime that it is portrayed as in the West. There are worse regimes - ones that we support. We're installing one in Libya as I type, for example!
Well you should care about what the cause is. Because if we get it wrong, we're more likely to drown than if we get it right. If the cause isn't AGW, then we'd be better off spending a few billion in helping people adapt to changing climate (moving, flood defences, whatever) than spending the same billions on combatting a misjudged cause. If we deduce that warming is going to level off, then we respond differently to if we think it's going to ramp up continually. It's downright weird that in the same paragraph that you say you don't give a shit about whether it is man-made or not, you argue that we should "just stop it as soon as possible". If you don't know the cause then it's much harder to stop something.
As to your advocacy of coal - even with modern technology, it's still less clean and more limited in quantity than nuclear power which is what we should be replacing ALL fossil fuels with.
I don't recall anything that said patents were supposed to be for smaller companies. Patents are patents - protection for your invention. We can argue over how long they should last but it should be the same rules for everyone, whether that is a lone inventor or a giant pharmaceutical company. And what about when a small party or individual chose to sell their patent rights to a large company? Would you legislate to disallow people to do this?
Patents should be granted far less than they are, that much I think everyone will agree on (except the patent office), but one rule for some and another for others, sounds like a How To for unfairness, arbitrariness and exploiting loopholes.
All things I noticed myself from being a Spotify Premium subscriber for over a year. Totally agree. But in addition to your list, their social networking bothered me. I already had a dislike of it's default broadcasting of everything I listened to and when. When it rolled out tighter integration with Facebook, I cancelled my subscription and told them exactly why.
It seems services for people willing to actually pay for them with cash, rather than by trading vast quantities of personal data for it, are a dying breed.
Increasingly though, you're being forced to hand over your data. For example, I blocked Google on my network to see what difference it made and found a number of websites could no longer be used. They outsourced searching of their site and captchas used for posting on their site, to Google. So you could sort of use their sites so long as you didn't want to leave a comment or search their articles. Another case is Disqus or other methods of outsourcing discussions on a site. Used to be that you could register on a site and leave a comment. Now its outsourced and if you register on one site, you visit a completely unrelated site and suddenly find you're already logged in under your Disqus identity. Instant loss of privacy!
Reebok, like Nike, do make some very nice quality running shoes. But they're the expensive ones. The bottom of the range stuff they make is really no different to the no-name bottom of the range stuff. Like Intel, they have the expensive stuff, and then the Celerons. Don't assume just because they make some very good expensive shoes, that the cheap ones are any better.
If you want some extremely good specialist shoes, by the way, check out the ones by inov8. No, I'm nothing to do with the company - I've just always liked their shoes a lot and they're worth a look if you want to be as fit as the lady in the ad. (Small print: some running may also be required).
Well it bloody should be then. Is it right that copies of a government minister's correspondence should be sent to an American company that explicitly monitors the contents? They should be using encrytion for all emails where possible and it should be handled by the government's own IT service. Not because you feel like signing up for things on the web.
As to "explain when I meet you", that's obviously because he doesn't want to put the reason in an email where it might be found. I.e. if it's not through official channels, there's a greater chance of it not coming to light through Freedom of Information requests. A bit like, well, how we can't get hold of his emails through Freedom of Information requests.
I will say what a vast number of Windows 7 users are already saying: If I can turn it off on the Desktop and still have something very similar to Windows 7, they can do what they like with Metro. In fact, if it means I can port code from one to the other, it's a plus.
The reason, in my armchair-opinion, is that tablets were overpriced. All of them, iPad included. But the iPad was trendy and well-known and had an 'I've got one' marketing pull. Like an expensive pair of shoes. I would lay good money that there are a tonne of iPads sitting on shelves and not used very much after the initial novelty value wore off. £400+ for a slab of mobile movie-watching and web-browsing... too much for most of us. So the iPad sold because it was the iPad, but the rest of the devices, whether they were better or worse, more open or less (well maybe not less), were assessed on actual cost-benefit. So when the Touch Pad hit its new price, everyone wanted one because that was the right price for it as far as customers were concerned. The iPad's rivals should have been marketed much cheaper in the first place. They would have slaughtered the iPad if so.
The article has it aright. Most of the people I talk to aren't especially concerned by Nuclear Power. Either they are educated on the subject, in which case they assess the risks against the realities of fossil fuel power and the current state of renewable energies, and generally find Nuclear favorable. Or else they're fairly ignorant on the whole subject and mostly just shrug and go along with whatever they're told by people who can sound like they know what they're talking about. One thing that seems pretty clear, is that there is no longer and instinctive anxiety at the word nuclear. People have even learned that nuclear power and nuclear bombs are different things.
GENERALLY. The problem is that there are still some disturbingly fanatical people who are incredibly noisy on the subject and try to shout down anyone who is either pro-nuclear or just mildly tolerant of it. And the senior bods at a lot of environmental bodies are these people. This Old Guard have a lock-down on senior positions in organizations like Friends of the Earth, the Green Party and numerous others. Most people are fine with nuclear power and most modern environmentalists at least consider it a reasonable option with some us shouting it from the rooftops as a vital tool that we must use more. But the Old Guard at the top of these organizations are just not dying fast enough. And they will fight tooth and nail to keep nuclear off the table. They're not even doing it out of ignorance anymore. Just read a Friends of the Earth publication and see all the little half-truths and slanders with which they try to dismiss the benefits of nuclear power which they are perfectly aware of.
If you're an environmentalist today, and many of us are these days just as a normal part of our beliefs, not something that we define ourselves by, then one of the most important things you can do, is try to displace the dinosaurs at the top of most environmental who pretend to speak for us before they lead us into a disaster. Renewable energy is important and should be used - solar towers, geothermal, tidal power, wind-power in some cases (not as a major part of our energy economy), but nuclear is vital right now. You do NOT want to live in an energy-rationed economy and wanting to is not a required trait of an environmentalist.
If Which want to be helpful, they should do a report on quality of service. I'm with Orange not because of cost, not because of idleness, but because all other services look equally grim. I've had voicemails arrive two days after they were left with Orange, texts appear a week later and their supposed 3G coverage and voice quality are appalling. I've asked around my mates but no-one seems to think very highly of their provider. One with O2 seems to think that's alright, so as there seems little room for it to get worse, I'll probably give them a try. But all I really want is to read a decent report on the quality of the service provided. Has everyone forgotten the "benefit" side of the cost-benefit equation?
"And 'h4rm0ny' how can it be excellent when to use it you have to buy landline minutes from BT (or some other company no ones heard of)"
What? Are you saying something can't be excellent if you need an Internet connection to use it? You must be sorely dissappointed with this whole email / WWW / IM / VoIP stuff they have these days.
You say that you "think" anyone who uses it will be disappointed. Well I use it and am very pleased with it. Set up is nice and integration with my existing systems has been smooth.
"How can it be excellent when you have to download an add-in to outlook to collaborate? Other products do this just as well but are sadly not included in this review."
It's not a 'review'. It's an article and interview about how Fujitsu are now offering a private version of Office 365. Having to download something doesn't disqualify something from being 'excellent'. Can I not call Firebug excellent because I have to download it? Though you're wrong, actually. You can use Office 365 without Outlook if you wish. I haven't seen any products "just as well", actually. Google's offering doesn't come close, imo.
You've come to this article with a lot of pre-conceptions about what the article should be and a lot of bias against the product. Calling it a "disaster"? Hardly.
Definitely the issue. I have an Office 365 account just to try it out and see how suitable it is. It's an *excellent* product and great for collaboration. I like it very much. But there are two things that are problematic. One is not having a completely encrypted connection and two is, as you say, US intrusion laws. Neither of these are intrinsic to the product itself so if Fujitsu are solving those problems, then this is great stuff.
I would willingly pay more if I could find a service provider that was non-shit. I'm with Orange now but I don't know of any other company that is better.My phone bleeped this morning to tell me I had two voice mails waiting. One from yesterday afternoon and the other from last week. Utter shite. Why am I with them? The same reason everyone else is with their service provider: we're all waiting for someone decent to move to.
You're right I think. Although I understood the mode output of turbines to be less than 3.6MW. But comparison to gas-fired power stations isn't ideal because although it is a *much* cheaper way of producing the electricity, it is something based on a diminishing resource which we need to get away from. A better point of comparison would be a modern nuclear reactor. Because the safety costs are so much, I don't think it comes in as cheap as the gas power station, but it's long-term and it's powerful and it still kicks wind turbines all over the place for cost, maintenance, life-span and power-output.
...then why not in the USA? China has the advantage of cheap labour. If robot technology is getting good enough that not even dirt cheap and overworked humans can remain cost-effective, then it might be that the domestic consequences of off-shoring will be in decline. Wont happen instantly of course, so the question is will the uptake of robot production kick in before Western manufacturing entirely collapses?
"Why should all that be dismissed because a bunch of oil lobbyists are funding research against the viewpoint of the majority of scientists?"
Anyone complaining about funding for scientists who dispute AGW is on shakey ground, given the truly staggering amount of grant money paid for research promoting AGW theories.
Scientific truth doesn't depend on money. But if people are going to argue that science done is invalid because those doing it have a profit motive in the results, then the pro-AGW faction would be by far the greatest culprit.
No, the BBC is in third place! The most "warmist-orientated site on the planet" is the Independent's web-site where they routinely delete comments that question AGW from relavent stories and if the whole trend of commentary is going against what they want (as once happened when Johann Harri wrote a piece that was so flawed even pro-AGW posters were criticising it), then they delete the whole thread of conversation and lock it so it can't reappear, pretending it never happened.
I think you're a little confused. DMCA (you got the letters in the wrong order) is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's about copyright infringement and circumvention of copyright and it isn't a 'Microsoft thing'. Part of that act allows you to request a site take down your copyrighted material if you find it on there. That's not a Windows thing. If you mean DRM which I'm going to presume you do, and that you think that Windows shouldn't support it, well I've come to disagree. I like to rent movies. I can now do so via BlinkBox. I click a button and can start watching, or I can download a copy in 20 minutes if I'm worried about buffering. I can do that because Windows 7 offers a DRM system. It's probably not unbreakable but I don't care - it's good enough for the content producers to be willing to rent me movies online. Refusing to support DRM in Windows would just remove a possible business model. Nobody has to use it, but it's there if we want. Not having to go to a store or wait for a DVD in the post is worth the downside of.... what was the downside for me again?
As to Windows Genuine Advantage, is that really a problem for anyone other than pirates? I bought my copy of Windows, installed it, it asked me to enter the licence key and to register itself with Windows HQ which I let it. And I was done. Must have taken about a minute.
Restrictive data formats? Well I can export from Word in a number of open standards any time that I want, just as I can export from Photoshop in photoshop's own format or something else, or from GIMP as something other than .xcf if I choose. I can even change the defaults so that *all* my documents save as ODF if I want.
Offering both ribbon AND menu? Possibe I suppose, but I really don't want to have the prospect of talking people through two different interfaces for the same program. And the reaction of most users to finding that there are TWO interfaces to a program would be one of bafflement. The ribbon has been around for years. I'm amazed there are still people who find it difficult to use, especially in the IT community. And if you don't find it difficult, then hasn't it done its job?
"They remind me of the car makers of Detroit, waiting till people buy what they make instead of making what people want."
You might want to look around - loads of people think Windows 7 is a pretty darn good job and we like it.
If governments or law enforcement feel that they have been publically humilliated (i.e. a bunch of "teenage" hackers getting good press), then you can be certain there will be arrests. Who they arrest, how useful those arrests will be, Heaven only knows, but you can be sure that they feel the need to arrest someone. After all, the government is a small number of people, the police are outnumbered by the hundred and the courts can't handle more than a dribble of civil discontent. What authority depends on is fear and respect. You can get away with all sorts of crimes, but if you are publically getting away with disrespecting authority, expect the hammer to fall.
On someone, anyway.
It ultimately comes down to a balance of power. Those who trust the police to be good, above petty human failings and always on their side are fine with them having a greater proportion of power over people. And all the rest of humanity looks at steadily increasing police power and feels anxious.
I can't think of a more insightful yet succint way of illustrating the populist nature of politics in Russia today than this and the way that the modern democratic system is subverted by image not content, much as the media theorist Neil Postman warned us about.
Though I do worry some of the more low-brow readers might mistake this for a cheap titillation.
Ah yes, those noted core elements of science: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Climatology. Wait, what? Climatology is only recently a booming field and is actually populated by scientists from all disciplines? So why declare that particle phycists explicitly doing climate research, with the goal of learning more about how the climate works, are not "climatologists" just because they happen to come from a Physics background.
Do you think, would you prefer, that climate science was somehow its own branch of science distinct from Physics, et al? That's not going to work.
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