Posts by breakfast 1557 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007
Speedbumps seem like a good idea until you have some broken bones in your body and have to travel down a road with them on. Having just gone through this experience I'm now a much bigger fan of speed cameras.
I don't really see the big deal about speed cameras. If people don't want to drive within the law then why don't they just hand in their driving licenses? "Drive on the road and work within some rules" is a pretty simple deal, it's strange to me that so many people get confused by it.
The differences are several but the immediate one is that copyright protects your implementation, but a patent covers the process.
In software terms, copyright means that if you steal my source code you're in breach, if you write your own to do the same thing you're probably alright. But if I hold a patent on the process then any code that can be interpreted as doing the patented things could be in breach of my patent.
My own feeling is that maybe a half-way house would be better, a soft patent that behaves like a regular patent but only lasts for maybe 12 months ( possibly with the right to extend it if you can show you have brought an implementation of that patent to market ) before it times out.
Rather than working with real end users why not just pipe the output from the Twat-O-Tron straight into the input for the site? Same content, much time and effort saved.
That said, the bigotry is only about half the content - there's a lot of middle class pocket-lining as well and a few very well reasoned discussions. Interestingly you'll surprisingly often find a thought-through and interesting argument behind a title that sounds like it's going to be the wildest rantings of a boggle-eyed red-faced foaming lunatic.
A while back people got shouted at a lot for challenging the idea that the earth moved within space and was not the centre the universe, and yet it moved. Now they get shouted at for suggesting that releasing chemicals that provably cause atmospheric warming into the atmosphere will cause warming, and yet the atmosphere warms.
In both cases the religious view that allowed life to go on as normal was being challenged by empirical science and the scientific view was unacceptable because religion is the filter that most of us carry, one way or another, between our minds and the world. Eventually the science becomes undeniable and the religion has to shift a little to accept it.
I hope that science solves this whole energy problem, because I really don't see that society will and certainly politics can't. I hope and fear that ITER will work out - hope that the research there will enable clean, cheap energy so that we can have the energy rich future utopia that I think we would all like to see, fear that if a project based in France ends up saving our civilisation we will never hear the last of it.
If we can synthesise crude - and it's far from impossible that we will be able to in future - the important equation is the ratio of energy in to energy out. Crude oil pumped out of the ground has is about 1 barrel in to 7 out. Nothing else comes close to that and the simple economics mean that unless synthetic crude does it will be much more expensive. The Peak Oil claim is not that oil will run out, it is that supply cannot keep rising to match demand and consequently the price of oil will rise to the point that it is uneconomical.
I'm sure Tim Worstall could find a free market explanation for why supply and demand are outdated communist notions, but it seems coherent with my understanding of the world.
Biomass-derived crude, like the people grasping at abiotic oil generation or even biofuels to a significant extent, is a convenient blinker to save on having to worry about something that is out of our control. A lot of people seem happy with those.
Monbiot, cheerful fellow that he is, suggests that Peak Oil will simply result in people switching to much more harmful coal-derived fuels.
VAT going up another couple of percent, the continuing escalator and the upwardly fluctuating price of oil are going to be putting the price of petrol at the pump up past £1.30 pretty soon.
I think there will come a point where this presents a very serious problem for the british people and the government have to alleviate it somehow. I think a reaction like we saw in 2000 is to be expected...
He made claims that were within the rules but not within what was retrospectively decided to be the spirit of the rules.
Retrospective judgements are all well and good, and what he did was certainly unethical, but he wasn't short of a few quid to start with and here's a thing about people who are successful with money: They play the rules. They follow the letter of the rules and use any loopholes or wriggle space in that to maximise their own benefit.
Now on the one hand I would rather my politicians were ethical and upstanding in all matters. On the other, I would really like to have someone who can recognise loopholes and wriggle space in financial rules to be writing those rules...
That Adobe updater sits on my system constantly, using a steady 10mb or memory to do absolutely nothing.
Now I know that memory is cheap these days, but what possible use can it have for ten fricking megabytes the whole time? Maybe a bit of memory when it checks for an update, but the whole time?
It's an absolute bunch of cock.
I think OpenOffice could be a massive help to government. When tried the latest version a few weeks back to help my dad out with something, it turned out that the OpenOffice presentation thing, the one that is supposed to be like powerpoint, is absolute rubbish. Impossible to use, incomprehensible in behaviour and simply not worth the effort of involving oneself with.
All of which means that if it was adopted in government, the number of Powerpoint presentations would go right down and everyone could get on with doing useful things instead.
Pretty much a win, I would say!
I did think it somewhat ironic that the Conservatives were the ones with the "vote for change" posters, given what their name is supposed to mean.
Given that one has been trying to claim the middle ground from the left and the other trying to claim it from the right to the point that they are now almost indistinguishable, would a Lab/Con pact be more appropriate?
I once had a dream that I landed on mars and it had been terraformed and was mainly being used to grow strawberries.
I was picking strawberries as a student summer job at the time, so it was probably mostly about that, but perhaps my subconscious was offering me a small glimpse of our horticultural martian future which I, for one, welcome.
These guys are basically charlatans. But the trouble for people trying to build in a low energy/low carbon/world friendly way is that green building is still in its infancy and its something of a minefield finding materials ( this one is a bit dodgy, that one doesn't last very well, this other one works great but takes loads of energy to produce and transport ) let alone finding people with the expertise to use them and design for them.
So even if you're trying honestly to build something like that it's very hard to get right and you end up having to become an expert in a whole lot of fields because there just aren't the people who know about them in circulation yet.
Which means when you get Green Building organisations endorsing people like this, it *really* doesn't help.
>> For example I and my wife are both self-employed IT Consultants. Our business would collapse without an internet connection and should that happen through no misdeed of ours then "Distraint of Trade" legislation would apply.
I guess that if it happened through no misdeed of your own that would probably be something your ISP would be in a position to compensate you for, not really to do with this legislation is it?
If it happened because you were sharing copyrighted material then I guess that in the eyes of the law that is a misdeed and much like speeding or smoking dope, a lot of people might not feel that it's so terrible, but it is (now) the law. I'm not really clear on how this issue should be- as a content creator I rather like the idea of being able to benefit from my work, but I don't know that cutting people off for it is correct- but I do think that if you chose to ignore repeated warnings from your ISP until you got yourself cut off in this situation, you would be hard pressed to blame anyone but yourselves.
This is why the government should be handing out OS data and similar to citizens, because there are many simple projects that people can then put together with data like this because they want to or it is useful and that don't need massive government grants to create or run.
In fact for content like this, the government could be best to be sharing data and maybe offering a hand with hosting costs to some eligible projects then leaving well alone...
There's no point saying you'll change politics now, Mr Brown. You have had your chance and you couldn't persuade any of your corrupt ministers to lift a trotter or a snout from the money trough for long enough to do anything at all about the state of things even if you had wanted to. Which perhaps you would have if you hadn't been up to your eyes in the same trough yourself.
You should have acted a long time ago, because it was the right thing to do, not left it so late and then only acted because the newspapers told you to you tired pathetic man trudging through the closing days of a moribund and long-since ideologically bankrupt government.
If only the other side weren't equally contemptible I'd be looking forward to the outcome of this election, but when the change is from being smacked in the left side of your face with a frying pan to being smacked on the right side of your face witha frying pan it's hard to conjure up a lot of enthusiasm.
The Conservatives criticise the British Crime Survey as a source of data on crime because it doesn't include murder statistics.
This is because it is a survey of victims of crime. It transpires that murder victims are hard pressed to fill in surveys.
This notion is too complicated for the party most likely to be our next government to understand.
We're doomed.
There are some terrible projects out there, but it seems to me that where governments have really missed a trick is in creating unified and centralised systems where they could have just been working to create data interchange specifications and then allowed the market to provide solutions- as long as your different police forces/nhs trusts/whoever have systems that can interoperate in a standardised way it really shouldn't be government's job to tell them how exactly to do that.
I tend to think that politicians take a "let the market decide" attitude far too often with regard to things where there is no market or where the market will decide poorly, but in this case they really could have done a better job and probably saved money at every level.
That will have fuel up past the £1.20 mark pretty soon then.
Now I don't mind green taxation in principle, but the problem here is that the government is offering no alternative to driving. There is no useful public transport that comes close to going anywhere I need to go at the times I need to go there and there are no plans to change that or to make the transport comfortable if I was able to take it. If they're taxing to change behaviour, but they offer no way to actually make any changes, so it's basically just a way of stealing from the public.
The british people care a lot about fairness and I don't know how long we'll stand for that.
Easy to say, but when they run the physical line and particularly if you are in a rural area away from any cable provision it's easy to get fooled into thinking that if you use them for the bundle of services you will be up and running sooner and with less hassle. As my previous post on this topic indicates that is a mistaken belief because they are horrendous imbeciles, but that was the reason we chose them at the time.
Never again.
The prices are very much secondary with BT- what you're really paying for is quality of service.
When we moved in to the house my parents had been staying in- which had working broadband - we wanted to move the bill into our names and keep it running. Over the following two months BT routinely connected the internet for a couple of days then disconnected it and told us that the account didn't exist, they would whimsically put a stop on the account and then refuse to remove it. Every time the broadband was disconnected, in spite of the fact it was disconnected as a direct consequence of their immense bumbling incompetence, there was no imaginable way they could get it reconnected in less than ten working days. We went through three different telephone numbers before we were allowed to keep one, meanwhile the broadband account was associated with other numbers that we had been assigned and then inexplicably weren't assigned any more.
Every customer support person we talked to really wanted to help, but it appeared that none of them were allowed to talk to each other or to any other departments so every single phone call put us right back at square one.
Finally we got the broadband running on the right phone number and then it was cut off again because we had only sent them the direct debit details THREE TIMES and they had managed to lose them all.
I'll just point out that the line was working, with fully operational broadband and with nothing wrong with it right up until the point they started to "help" us, so there is no way that this was any kind of problem with the line. My personal view is it was a problem with an organisation who misidentified Kafka's "The Trial" as a how-to manual for customer interaction.
I honestly believe that BT offer the worst possible user experience and the most staggering technical and organisational incompetence I have ever been subjected to. A few years ago I was an NTL customer and thought it could get no worse, but BT really came through with that.
I'm sure investing that heavily in pure, high quality distilled idiocy cannot be cheap.
Just doesn't make sense that Software patents behave the same as all other patents. The field is just too quick for that- if it is to be patentable the patents need at the very least to time out in a fraction of the time to avoid these constant stultifying and pernicious lawsuits.
So we're now in a situation where an ice age is coming ( in a few thousand years at any rate) , the sun is zooming in ( or at least it's radiation is being bounced back into the atmosphyere to heat things up ) and in order to reduce dependency on fossil fuels it is likely to become increasingly a nuclear era?
We should look out for London drowning next, I guess.
Your argument that the BBC would not be created now is correct in that nobody would create it now. But if you're getting rid of the beeb for that reason you'd best get rid of the NHS while you're at it.
Maybe I'm just british and enjoy the old fashioned values of fairness that go with that, but I'm rather fond of both.
The site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consultations/departments/bbc/bbc-strategy-review/consultation/consult_view appears to be falling down a lot...
> An error was encountered while publishing this resource.
>
> ZODB.POSException.ConflictError
>
> Sorry, a site error occurred.
Maybe they need to move some of their web staff over to making sure the consultation works, huh?
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