Posts by Charles Manning 3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
If people want to try to fit existing law to current technology, then they need to get a better grip on things.
Publish is surely equivalent to posting something on a blog/website etc.
Individual page serving to a punter is surely equivalent to the printing of a single newspaper rather than a re-publication.
With a virtual degree. I'll take them to vcourt. But I'll want real money though. Then when I'm done with that, I'll get all the vpeople that use your vsex aids and file a vclass action that they don't work.
Surely the whole idea of this second life thing is that you can have experiences unrelated to the real world. You can screw a hooker, rob a bank, rip off someone's IP, sue them, do whatever and it doesn't really matter because this is Second Life and just a fantasy.
Munchy Flower: Welcome to the fantasy of being ripped off!
This will get around all those stupidly crafted cellphone bans.
Instead of being sensible and legislating against getting distracted, far too many countries have legislated specifically against using cell phones while driving so that truckers and cabbies etc can still communicate while driving.
Two-way radio. OK.Tetra radio (looks about the same as a cell phone) is not a cell phone and so is OK.
Now you can use a VoIP handset and the plods can get stuffed.
In the past, the only real reason to go with MS was because everyone else did and you had to be running the same version of Word as your customers etc. That worked for MS in the past but is probably working against them now. Mass XP-squatting increases resistance to movement.
If businesses have a working solution then any move looks like real or potential cost and pain with no real gain.
IT folk have finally broken from their nose rings. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/MS" no longer holds true. Enough people got personally burned by Vista that that no longer works.
Any well run business expects some return on their expenditure. IT bosses asking to spend up huge without a compelling benefit just look stupid and get fired, particularly in the current economic conditions.
Even if Win7 is superior to XP and the latest Office is better than the last one, is there really enough to justify the movement? Where's the compelling feature set?
It's going to take a bit more than Gates and Seinfeld wiggling their bums on TV to get people to change.
Sheep only arrived with the WhiteManSourceOfAllEvil so these eagles would have had to go hungry for 500-odd years between the MaoriWhoCan'tDoAnyWrong clubbing the last moa to death and the arrival of sheep.
But there's no lack of other large prey around NZ South Island. Seals were, and still are, plentiful and easy as anything to catch.
Some of this is just plain rubbish, but there are shreds of truth too.
Linux pros:
* USB and BT devices tend to "just work" without having to load up drivers etc.
* No virus problems.
Linux cons:
* Some stuff really depends on software supplied by device manufacturers, and that's all Windows specific. Apps for driving web cams, for example.
* Ubuntu etc still tend to need hoop-jumping to get basic stuff like youtube working. Yup, in theory Ubuntu will automatically install the plugins but is doesn't always do so.
* Get something problematic like a mild disk corruption that needs an fsck and most people are stumped. You need a tame *nixer to fix that sort of problem.
If it could be tough enough to be thrown through a closed window or thin door then it could be fired from a grenade launcher which would be handy.
I suspect though it is only good for throwing through open doors.
Pissy little thing though. I wonder if it could actually get around well? Looks like it would be easily foiled by the smallest obstacle.
I have a smartphone and a Nokia 1100 (about as unsmart as it gets). After using the smartphone for a few months I'm going back to the Nokia.
Why? Well all the stuff I really want to do with a phone - receive or make a call - is way easier on the dumbphone. I very rarely have any desire to do web browsing etc on a phone. and it is easier to just do these on a computer.
Imitation proves nothing!
This thing won't be a real black hole (which would first eat the desk it is on top of, then the planet and with it any experimental results (unless those are first beeped off into space before the event horizon can lock them in)).
Nope. It is an imitation. In other words it shares some properties with a backhole, not all.
It is surely the non-imitated properties (earth eating gravity etc) that really count when trying to investigate the Hawking radiation. Just having a heavy black thing on your desk (a canon ball or equivalent) won't cut it.
Make that 256^65536 which is Quite A Bit More (TM).
One might argue that most of Microsoft's innovations have been legal and PR rather than technical. Not surprising given that Bill Gates is a drop out from law school, not engineering and most of his success was due to the guidance from his parents.
There's quite a lot of prior art from MS's main methods though. Take for example Thomas Edison:
* Take other people's ideas and present them as your own. Check.
* FUD: Edison electrocuted animals and lobbied to make the electric chair AC powered to promote his (crap) DC service. Check.
* Hostile corporate methods: Check.
That's what flash crowds are for. Get all the twankers together so that you up the kill rate.
But surely adding location info to the tweet will eat into those precious 140 characters? I guess it doesn't really matter since most tweeting is just narcissistic bollocks that can fit in 30 chars or less.
"41.556N,115.6W: Fuck I'm cool! Look at me!"
Scientists have generally avoided moral decisions as a way to avoid the guilt associated with the way their work is used. We just build the nuke, we don't decide who to drop it on.
Perhaps the same applies to robot help. Engineers & scientists just design the robot. It is up to the legal department to decide on what weasel words to print on the front of the device.
He is well recognized. How many people in computer science etc have not heard of Turing Test, Turning Machine, Turing Awards,...?
I bet more people know of Turing than know of Haskell, Ørsted, Tesla and many others.
The main reason he was not recognized was because of the hush-hush nature of the whole war effort. If anything, Turing perhaps got a disproportionately large recognition for his war efforts. There are a lot of other significant contributors to code breaking that nobody remembers at all. Perhaps some of that was because he was dead and out of the picture, thus taking the heat off others still bound by secrecy etc and just wanting to get on with their lives.
Sure, he got victimised for being gay, but that was a crime at the time and it would be ridiculous to give him a pardon without giving other gay people of the time pardons too. We can look back on the past with some condemnation, but we can't change the past.
Suggesting that Turing should get special pardon becuase of his contributions just sends the message that gay is bad, but we'll ignore it in Turing's case because of his contributions.
C is probably an OK choice. It is a very simple, and therefore verifiable, language.
C++ is way, way, more complex than C. Complexity means failures.
Modula2, erlang and other languages that help detect runtime errors, but that's not really a help: the system still fails. At least when your brakes fail you can die with the knowledge that it was an array bounds exception that killed you.
I've never bought weed, but the last transaction I saw was undertaken in the Transkei area of South Africa.
Purchaser produced R20 (approx 4 quid back then). Dealer disappeared for a while and came back with a plastic supermarket bag stuffed with weed and promised to bring the rest the next day (which he did - another plastic bag full).
Ignorance. Not manufacturer ignorance, but amongst the customers.
These machines are more about perception than real saving and the numerically illiterate also think that diesel is dirtier (from seeing too many sooty truck tailpipes). Therefore a petrol engine is used to improve the clean air image.
Cost of replacing the battery pack after a few hundred cycles?
Last time I figured out the costs, the amortised cost per mile of replacing a battery pack was almost as much as the cost of refueling a diesel engine.
The value of buying a hybrid comes from the greenie smugness and is not based on fact.
Obama + government commands that motor vehicle producers increase their **average** MPG.
Motor vehicle producers crank out one 230MPG car, with EPA onboard to agree to the bullshit calcs.
Throw a single 230 MPG offering into your car range and you've met all the average MPG requirements.
Too true.
AC 3August: You negotiated too. You signed up! Negotiate with your feet and walk out if you don't like the deal.
Negotiation is primarily a sales job.
Everyone knows you're nice and helpful. What you need to do is have hard verifiable numbers that you've contributed directly to the bottom line. That's what good sales people do and how they earn big dolla.
If your contribution saves the company $5M per year you have a far better negotiating position than being a random cog in the machine.
Different sectors are impacted differently. You can hire burger-flippers and salesfolk when you need them. Building company infrastructure and doing product R & D has a longer lead time so you need to hire up the IT etc staff now. As business confidence builds, companies want to rebuild ready for mainstream improvements that might still be quite a few months away.
Any company sitting on a cash mountain would have seen the recession as a great opportunity to keep up R&D spending and improving their position while their competitors had to cut staff and fall behind.
I'm all for research, but how about directing it towards something a bit more meaningful - like Earth.
Tectonic plates were only "proven" in the 1960s so it is naive to thing we really know that much about this planet. We know very little about the oceans etc.
WTF does anyone really get from going to the moon or Mars?
@Gangsta: Not taking anything away from them, but ... Faster.... well maybe that's because so few people are using it so it is hard to do an apples-to-apples comparason from the outside world.
It would be royally stupid to say that this is a response to bing. Development times are far too long to slap something like this together since bing showed its face.
"The Gates foundation is completely separate from MS. MS has nothing to do with the Gates foundation."
Bollocks!
Look at 2 minutes into http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVlnqnMHQ1c
NB how the Gates Foundation Handshaking is done in front of a Microsft banner.
Same deal when MS/Gates announced the Buffet contribution.
You'd think that the goodwill is worth $15 to MS...
When the salestards are having a hard time keeping everyone buying MS products, surely MS need all the goodwill they can get.
This sort of action only needs to result in a small amount of backlash (a lost Windows license here, a lost Word license there) to lose them lots more than this will actually bring in.
But MS is comprised of many distinct business units that compete within the corporation. The Office Live crew will grab their $15 even if it costs other business units $50+ in lost revenues.
"Media studies" etc. Easy to find lecturers (just ask any burger-flipper at McD). Easy to find students (lazy bastards who want a cruisy time while at university). Easy to assign homework(watch a couple of hours of TV and write a report on how many times there are food ads). Extra credits if you submit your report in text-speak or CtlC CtlV it directly from a blog, or send it in via twitter. No expensive equipment.
Degrees that actually help the economy, engineering and the like, are pretty much the opposite. Hard to find lecturers (they are all gainfully employed). Hard to find students (few have the qualifications & skills needed). Hard to assign and mark homework (need to read all those maths workings etc). Expensive equipment.
Now that many universities get their funding based on performance (measured by number of students they have, and the number of grads they crank out), no wonder they push the easy option
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