Posts by Paul 30 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2009
So looking up a disease or disorder means I've got it, does it?
If this model were accurate, I'm sure we could look forward to them charging whatever they liked prior to supplying this information to authorities. that's what they're there for, after all, the bastards. One thing I am heartily, heartily sick of is US imperialism via corporate growth. Facebook, Google etc, I am British, and therefore None Of Your Business! (Wish this were true.)
Anyone with any sense and certainly anyone in politics knows how jealously the Yanks quite rightly guard their first-amendment rights, and thus just how far (ie. nowhere) they'd go to censor the net on our behalf. So yes, this is utter grandstanding, time-wasting, only.
And the net was hardly created to avoid governmental authority, but to help scientists, at first, to communicate - its freedoms were a bi-product.
...the scene in Idiocracy where the 'lawyer' talks about having studied at Walmart University.
academics have been used to having some buying power for years, with book-publishing reps seeking course adoptions for textbooks from them. a logical leap to extend the principle to IT. this lot are just being rather stupidly obvious (and incorrect) about it.
I live alone so, barring avoiding the hazard of trailing wires, what would wireless do for me? It's the most overhyped thing going. Because it's comparatively easy to produce, sell etc, it seems to me the consumer has been unthinkingly led to it. If you're a busy household running a lot of connections at once, great. If you're a sad old billy-no-mates like me, using one machine at a time, it's like paying for a hotel's worth of facilities when you only need a room.
Smart fella (if not likeable): he has what, a year (?) in office, and after that he's not a student anymore. So he's alright, Jack. Then, with his brownie-points for having advanced the government's media-responsive anti-drink policies will have proved his colours, we can expect to see him get a research job inside Parliament, or even standing as a prospective MP. Is it in his interests to make things easier for students? Is it heck.
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." - Adolf Hitler, 'Mein Kampf'
Presumably there is a high likelihood that somewhere on streetview will be pictures of police officers carrying out anti-terror duties, even in plain clothes. Highly illegal fifth-columnist behaviour. The law is an ass - could Simon Davies somehow not use this to the advantage of his case?
Outraged - I disagree. I don't think the doctrine that one should ignore lesser evils because there are greater evils holds water.
Let me get this straight - auntie beeb gives licence-fee payers' cash to dodgy E European crooks, and we're supposed to be grateful? Never mind the IT angle, aren't we always being told by the government that patronising criminals - DVDs, drugs - goes to fund their other nefarious activities? Why is this any different? Never mind Ross/Brand, when it comes to grown-up scandals like the Gaza appeal and this, I wonder who the heck the beeb think they are.
Just to clarify, the guy from the Author's Guild is referring to the fact that book contracts subdivide textual rights, audio rights and electronic rights in various territories. This is obviously now a grey area in an age of digital files, and belongs to the era of audiobooks on cassette. These are copyright issues not patent issues, though, and not to be confused with the trolling at hand here. So you're fine to read a book to your kids, just don't record it and try to sell it.
Coat because you probably all knew this.
As with the legislation south of the border, I'm not the only one perhaps to detect a method in the poor quality of this law. The more confusing and ill-though-out it is, the more people will feel that they should police themselves. If they were serious about helping those who wish to remain law-abiding, they would issue a list of 'approved' sites, images or something. As with England, the agenda here is to generate confusion, one suspects, and an instinct to self-censor. On both sides of the border, these are laws that cry out for judicial clarification. The trouble is, some poor bastard's life will have to be ruined for that to happen.
Anyway, well done to The Reg for keeping the pressure up on this issue.
I've posted words to this effect before about this story, but they may be worth repeating. I used to drink in The Drapers quite frequently and it's quite a posh n. London gastropub - the sort of place where couples spread out the Sunday papers and people tuck in to nice nosh. So don't think there must be some rationale to where they choose to implement this policy. It looks like it's simply come up here because the pub's being refurbished. About a mile away you have a bunch of dodgy Arsenal pubs :-) whereas this one is in a quiet residential square.
I'm tied into a 12-month credit agreement with BT broadband. Fair enough, but a question raised for me is - what are the legal issues surrounding credit agreements where a situation subsequently comes to light that you are not ethically happy with - like Phorm? Does the law give me any greater right to consider that agreement void and to not owe the balance in cases where, though I am still happy with the terms and conditions and price as negotiated, a matter of principle has come to light?
I probably wouldn't leave BT as I'm otherwise happy with the service, and touch wood they have climbed down over Phorm, but it raises an interesting question about credit agreements. I'd be interested to know how empowered the consumer actually is under UK law.
Pierre, Tom, AC, Yeah, I wuz trolling. Needed to let off a bit of steam after reading that hopelessly naïve Jemima Kiss piece. Have a look at the link in my post and you’ll see what I mean. (Though I’m disinclined to generate hits for The Guardian – sorry – Autotrader.)
Funny how these freetard arguments invariably end up talking about the music rather than film industries, and I’m going to compound that: yep, the music industry is screwed, in part because it attempted protectionism for too long in a very myopic, ostrich-like way. Threatened and actual lawsuits meanwhile must have had industry prs clutching their foreheads and sending their CVs off to a less troublesome sector – like pharmaceuticals. They had twenty+ years of overpriced CDs as a cash-cow, mark-ups that benefited retailers too – big factor in Woolies’ lost profits, that.
So yes, they hastened their own demise by taking the piss – a more fairly priced product might have slowed the exodus to digital. And of course, they should have monetized it from the start, instead of resisting, but no one in those days foresaw relatively secure internet payment systems, and consumer confidence in them. Anyway, since the ‘home taping is skill in music’ days, the industry has never seen the shop-window value of peer-to-peer sharing in the way that other industries where you can’t duplicate the product – like books – do. For book publishers, word of mouth is a holy grail. They don’t see it as a bad thing when people lend each other the product because they know that wider seeds are sown by this. The music industry has been very foolish to see a pirate copy as necessarily a lost sale. Yes, it should have given to get.
Meanwhile, I also hate the new-found inflexibility of the once-holy PRS of all people, and the way that they are hassling small and medium businesses these days over music played in workplaces, just to add a revenue stream.
So no, I’m not sticking up for the music business – every recording artist ultimately realised that it is they who are paying for the champagne and flowers – but it is ridiculous to eulogise file-sharing sites as in some way heroic. This is just business – and very sharp business. TPB in particular are opportunists, not public servants. A plague on all their houses.
AC, I’m not sure which tide I’m supposed to be holding back – digital delivery is not in question, but surely the future is one of logged isps and secure payments rather than an experience like the Napster days.
Steve, freetards are just doing the work of telecoms giants. If I’m a fuckmuppet then you’re a furvert.
Aw, diddums, some nasty grown-ups want to stop you getting your fwee stuff?
Hilarious blog in The Guardian last week, holed by Reg's own feature on neo-Nazi links:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/23/pirate-bay-file-sharing
Worth reading to - or from - the end. Enjoy!
What cracks me up about these 'sticking it to the man' freetards is that they actually think that record and film companies are 'The Man', you know, the big nasty corporate one out to enslave and impoverish us all - as opposed to the IT infrastructure providers who supply the services they're happy to pay their monthly subs to. 'Information wants to be free, Man.' Yeah right, as long as you pay your ISP every month. But no, they'd still rather impoverish those in the creative media, because people in suits are, like, bad, right?
There are public safety issues too. In some cases it appears workers have been branded troublemakers because they had concerns over asbestos disposal etc. If those people have been added to the list for being potential whistleblowers, who know what jerry-built crap we are living and working in?
So maybe the lead poisoning has got to you ignorant idiots who say 'what's the problem?'
Just thinking about anything this government does is contraceptive enough - I couldn't feel less like sex afterwards.
Not a v tech-related point but there's also a wider debate about the usefulness of sex education as a whole, now that the social-science wonks are finally realising that Jade, Trish, Shaz, Tracey et al know all about the birds and the bees and are not averse to pregnancy since they weren't planning to head up to St Hilda's anyway, and can't wait for their own beautiful prince/princess daughters/sons so that they can feel their meaningless life has a noble purpose in the creation of other meaningless lives.
So maybe teen pregnancy isn't actually a problem, but a case of people exercising a self-determined right. (I'm talking about those legally old enough to have sex here.) If you do want to save The Treasury money, then cut the attendant benefits. If they still want to exercise that right, and fund parenthood themselves, then that's up to them.
Interesting to to hear a major British engineer like Noble, despite being contingent on investment, having the guts to observe the nonsensical quality of our having run down our manufacturing base under both Tory and Labour governments. We powerless plebs long thought it could not be right, but were pursuaded when finer minds than ours told us we didn't understand economics and that our great leap forward into becoming a nation of media and financial services was better for us all and not just a channel to private wealth for the few. Now it transpires that we had a point, Fred the Shred and his ilk are off to the Caribbean as fast as poss, and the media and financial sectors are in a feet-of-clay meltdown. Now it turns out money is just a promissory note after all, there's really no satisfaction in having been right.
I’d say she was bored because these pompous asses were evidently making no use of her obvious talents. Given that she has run rings around a supposed ‘marketing’ company, I’d say she has a bright future as a hack or flack. She’s clearly too good for them and they either didn’t have the imagination, or staffing budget, to use it. Basic hr – if someone is bored it’s because you are underutilising them. Although friends would still know where she worked, it sounds like she was discreet by the standards of FB. You go girl, as Oprah used to say. This company have been well and truly owned!
Does this therefore mean that new legislation/guidelines and the attitude of government/law-enforcement that views encryption as something to raise suspicions in itself (terrorism, fraud, illegal porn etc) will now have to be revised? I don't bank on that happening quickly. But if we're to use encryption for simple online security, then they must.
Before it closed for the refit, I was a regular drinker/eater in The Drapers (I'll leave the question of an apostrophe out of this). It's a typical n. London gastropub, rather immaculate, slightly camp and in a quiet and very posh N1 square well behind Liverpool Road or Upper Street, and about a mile away from any of the footy pubs around Arsenal. You know the kind of place - couples on a Sunday with the papers spread out on large wooden tables and sofas, and dinner on the way. I can't imagine it being a place you could deal drugs, either. So hardly the kind of 'trouble' pub where you might expect there to be some preventative/detection value in trialing CCTV, in case you were wondering. The antithesis of it, in fact.
Until it closed for renovations, I drank and ate regularly in the Drapers (won't digress into whether it should have an apostrophe). A more north-Londoney gastropub you couldn't wish to find. Rather spotless, quietly camp, set well off Liverpool Road in a quiet and rather posh N1 square, it's the last place you would ever expect trouble, and neither could I see it ever being a haven for drug dealing. So I can't see any public-interest justification for knowing who goes in and out. Just so readers know, in case they were wondering, this is nowhere near a football ground or even a main street. It's the precise opposite of the sort of pub you might expect to be a 'trouble' pub - as you might reasonably wonder if you read this article and didn't know the area.
bricks-and-mortar retailers in the UK and USA are scrabbling to get their online operations as good as possible, while the high street will go quieter (and maybe have a rent crash, which means that one day we might see a few more interesting, non-multiple stores returning). IMRG and other analysts come up with figs around 30 per cent for the increases in online sales for the last couple of Christmases. so why bother, especially if you don't make hardware for people to carry away - instead establish a well-marketed online retail presence and leave it at that. i'm puzzled.
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