Posts by Tom 13

Re: protect those cables from being switched off by local governments

Sod that. Before you get there you have to solve the problem of the non-government locals stealing the live cables for its scrap value.

Re: Dunno about warming

It has been middling so far but it's a very immature technology. Unlike wind and biofuels there are a lot of good reasons to expect it to improve rapidly over the next decade.

The 1970s called. Your license to use their mantra has expired.

Re: Shurely

So for a 50 pound per month service, you expect to receive the vendor to hold in escrow funds equivalent to what is being offered for sale?

Yes, we do. The insurance cost is negligible when properly allocated across time and all clients. Unless of course your company develops a history of such mistakes, in which case you have far more significant problems anyway.

Re: Journalistic Truth

No it's worse than that. You can print just about anything as long as somebody else said it, at least on this side of the pond. You Brits thankfully throw in a bit about not knowingly publishing defamatory claims, but even that is sometimes a low barrier.

Re: alike got wiped out during dotcomboomandbust1.0

[waves hand slightly]

These are not the busts you're looking for.

[waves hand again slightly]

You can invest safely now.

Re: whoever put it there manages to corrupt the iPod file system.

It's not so much corrupting the drive system per se, the problem is that what Real did circumvented the DRM thus circumventing the provenance of the music which at the time was a contractual requirement between Apple and the music vendors.

Would consumers have been better served had Apple and Real reached a mutual licensing agreement? Probably (on the order of 90% likely). Was Apple required to make such an agreement? I don't think so. And frankly I don't think this lawsuit addresses that question in anything resembling a sufficiently direct way to be valid. Real essentially engineered a malware vector to install their music on Apple's system. This case is claiming they were entitled to engineer the malware. It's too many of these shenanigans that got us to the DCMA here in the States.

Re: Confused about this case

Almost. At the time there was no communal DRM in the sense of the Blueray DRM. Each vendor produced their own and therefore inherently mutually exclusive DRM scheme. Real created a way to circumvent Apple's DRM and put their music onto the iPod. Real is asserting that because of Apple's monopoly position in the music player market, Apple had no right to keep them out, regardless of any contracts Apple might have had with music vendors. Which when put simply looks pretty damn silly and is why companies hire lawyers to confuse the issue.

Does this mean Jobs didn't use it as an excuse to viciously subdue competitors in the market space? No it doesn't. It means that because of other grants of monopolies (specifically IP rights to music), this vicious monopolistic behavior was perfectly legal. You can argue on moral/ethical grounds about whether or not that initial IP right ought to have been granted, but once the legal system accepts that such grants are legal, this is where you wind up.

Re: good news everyone

I have to disagree. If it's the PLC it can be swept under the carpet. What we need is a case that establishes that for something this big, the corporate veil is necessarily pierced, and the executive officers are joint and severally responsible for the damages. In fact, not only are the Target exexutives at fault, so are the same banks that are suing Target, and by the same logic.

THAT will get their attention.

Re: Huh?

Personally I've always considered Jobs to be a complete butthead. But I don't see a monopoly issue here.

Re: Replicants with no termination date?

Deckard had a very definite termination date in the PKD book.

Re: based on a book which was based on a deep philosophical

If by based on in the same sense as a Sean Connery James Bond film was based on the Ian Flemming book, yes.

Otherwise, epic fail.

Re: "Always leave them wanting more"

I thought that was the whole point that Rachel was a new model that had a normal human lifespan so Deckard could fall in love with her without the 'Highlander' syndrome and her implanted memories cushioned her from insanity..

See, this is why I HATE the movie. That was not the whole point. The whole point was to question what is the nature of being human. Deckard was human but might have failed the test he applied to a subject to determine if it was a replicant. Rachel was a replicant, but right up until she blew Deckard's brains out, seemed more human the he was. No she was not a new model. She was an illegal production. One with the safety of the limited lifespan removed.

Re: "Always leave them wanting more"

The movie does. The book doesn't. At least not the one PKD wrote as opposed to the one what's-his-name wrote as an adaption from the movie. The movie should have played with the same themes PKD does in the book. In some ways it is almost a better medium for it. But the theme is too dark to attract the kind of attendance Hollywood looks for in a movie.

Re: @AC "Even though the two follow up books weren't by PKD

PKD lived in his own very weird world. I find most of his novels painful to read, his short stories work better for me. DADES was one of the few that wasn't painful for me. I enjoyed it all except for the end, but the end was proper and supposed to be a gotcha moment.

All of which is just a lead up to saying:

I don't see how anyone can inhabit PKD's weird world for long enough to write something that meshes with what he's done. Hell, they couldn't even stick with the original ending in the first movie adaptation of his book. (Which actually made it quite clear Deckard wasn't a replicant.)

Re: Put down the pie

About 1/3 of my current body weight is excess. I haven't greatly changed my eating habits from the time when I was a teen and my weight was considered normal or a little under. What has decreased is the amount of exercise I get as part of my daily routine.

Re: Worth mentioning

I'm not sure what the situation is in the UK, but here in the US the solution I have to the smoking issues is:

1. Eliminate all tobacco specific taxes. (For those areas where it is applicable, I'd leave it in the regular sales tax regime.)

2. Eliminate all tobacco specific farming subsidies.

3. Eliminate all government regulation related to the buying and selling of tobacco, especially the bit where the tobacco companies get to hide behind government "safety" studies.

4. Let the markets and the courts sort it out.

I'm pretty sure after the courts ruled everyone involved in the tobacco selling chain was liable for lung, throat, and mouth cancers that were linked to tobacco use, it would cease to be an issue.

Re: New study shows dietary fat doesn't cause problems

I thought diabetes was always associated with carbs, not fat. Fat however has been associated with heart disease. So in order to reduce heart disease the health nazis went on a jihad against fat, which tended to increase diabetes. Diabetes does tend to lead to people being fat although I've never explored the exact relationship.

Re: due more to subsidies for US maize producers

No, it's the sugar import restrictions, which effectively double the price of sugar in the US relative to world markets. And it was the reason site by Coca-Cola Inc. when they did away with Coke original in favor of HFCS.

Re: seem to be having much the same rates of obesity.

What we do have in common is a rising standard of living and much less need to engage in physical activity.

Not data, but anecdote that I expect with a bit of research could become data:

When I was young in my last year of high school I topped out the scales at 133 pounds. When I was in college I added few, but still stayed under 140. For a 5' 6" guy, those are about right. These days I fight to get under 200. What's changed? Well in college I was still walking all day to classes and had a job that sometimes required me to get from one corner of campus to the opposite in less than 20 minutes. When I took the elevator is was usually because I was hauling equipment, the rest of the time the stairs tended to be quicker. Campus was about 1 mile on the long side, half on the short one. Now I drive to the train station which drops me off yards from my office building. I take the elevator to the 9th floor. Then I reverse the process to go home. Where after starting dinner I plop down in my recliner until it is ready, then eat in my recliner. Then I go to bed. Commute plus work runs in the neighborhood of 12 hours, so I don't feel much like doing anything else when I do get home. Weekend are chores on Saturday, which again mostly involve the car for grocery shopping, then laundry including a couple runs up and down two flight of stairs.

In short, I live an essentially sedentary life and I know it. I've tried a couple times to break out of it, but found myself getting sick when I did.

My roommate has a similar type of schedule, except she drives to work. Still mostly sedentary. From time to time she signs up for a weight watcher class or aerobics or some such which lasts maybe 6 months. No more than twice a week for the classes.

Re: Is it shady?

Yes. Sadly it use to be one of the few non-shady things MS could be counted on to maintain.

Major number revisions are to reflect major feature changes. These are supposed to be fully tested. These are expected to be sequential.

Minor number revisions are to reflect improvements and security fixes to the current major revision. These are supposed to be fully tested. These are expected to be sequential.

Point number revisions are to reflect other sort of changes to the code base. These may not be fully tested but are expected to have passed rudimentary tests run by the programming team. They are not expected to be sequential as they are used by the build team to track internal iterations of the program.

You're right that the rest of the industry has adopted Google's Chrome process (and I fault Mozilla for giving them covering fire). That doesn't mean it wasn't shady when Google started it. It doesn't mean it will be any less shady if everyone adopts it.