Posts by Maty

A force for good?

The thing about mobile phones that no-one expected was subvelliance.

Cops found that it was not so easy to break the law with members of the public photographing them, which was why they hurried to make photographing policemen on duty illegal.

With these glasses, every policeman who roughs up a member of the public, every councilman who fishes for a bribe, every sanctimonious politician who leaves a brothel will never know when their misdeeds will go on the record.

THEY have devices in place that make Bentham's panopticon look childish. We need something to watch them right back. However, like the camera phones, the authorities probably won't stand for it - they'll take the tech for themselves. If google glasses do become illegal you can bet an exemption will be given to 'responsible government agencies.'

He might be broke but ...

He can still pay in other ways. Five years in the Big House sounds about right.

How about ...?

Do you ..

1.) Drive a German car

2.) Wash down Indian curry with Belgian lager

3.) Go home and sit on a Swedish sofa to watch American shows on a Japanese TV?

4.) Despise foreigners

If you answered 'yes' to all the above, congratulations(?) you're a Brit!

Classic G.K. Chesterton

Feast on wine or fast on water

And your honour shall stand sure,

God Almighty’s son and daughter

He the valiant, she the pure

If an angel out of heaven

Brings you other things to drink,

Thank him for his kind attentions,

And pour them down the sink.

.....

When red wine had brought red ruin

And the death-dance of our times,

Heaven sent us Soda Water

As a torment for our crimes.

But ... games might help

How does our asshat senator not know that violent video games don't help the potentially violent?

It's not unusual to fantasize about violently letting rip though, being sane, most people don't actually do it. I had a very stressful workplace a decade ago which I reconstructed as a set in Doom. After a bad day at the office I'd sit down at the computer, frag the place and its monstrous occupants with a rocket launcher, then emerge from the study a much more relaxed individual.

So perhaps violent video games might allow the violent or distressed to harmlessly blow off steam. But I can't see any empirical evidence that they encourage them to take their activities into the real world. As a matter of interest the word 'amok' comes from people running that way in pre-xbox Malayan culture.

I'm still waiting for the first post that consists entirely of little rectangular boxes ...

This has nothing to do with paedophiles or terrorism and everything to do with the government wanting to control its citizens.

but ...?

If this is the first brain-controlled helicopter, how have helicopters been controlled up to now?

Another thought - '16 000 could be at risk'. This does not mean that 16 000 cases of abuse happen.

If 50% of those who 'could be' at risk actually are, and one in four of those at risk do suffer abuse then the reported statistic of 2,000 cases is actually in line with the scarier higher figure.

One suggestion ...

You know those scenic views that someone has plonked a fertilizer factory or whatever in the middle of?

It seems to me that one immediate usage of this thing - if they ever manage to scale it up - would be to make such eyesores and things like phone masts power pylons vanish from the landscape. We could have large chunks of what would look like 17th century England, except that cows keep bumping into invisible objects.

false logic

I'd agree the 'Merkin system of numbering floors was more logical if it actually was. However, if we are counting the number of floors in a house, and only that, then the first floor is the basement.

Many US houses have basements that include pool rooms, gyms, and a room for the grown-up son. So these count as 'floors' in every sense. And if we discount a level because it is below ground, then it's every bit as logical (or illogical) not to count the floor at ground level either.

The phone has no constitutional right to be answered.

Almost a year ago I got so tired of crap calls - usually during dinner or some equally inconvenient time - that I cancelled my land-line and got a mobe. Which I turned off.

I turn on when I need to use it (or call via Skype, which is cheaper). If people want to get in touch with me, they can use email and it will be dealt with when convenient. I mean how often is it essential for anyone to speak with you RIGHT NOW?

and so ...

Bird lovers have long blamed cats for the depletion of songbirds in residential areas. Yet the new kittycam studies show that cats don't hunt birds that often and aren't all that good at it anyway.

Now we have a study that shows that bird lovers themselves are part of the problem.

Ah .... the irony.

IE is not XP

Every now and then I use IE8, usually to check how a webpage I've built looks online, though emulators have gotten so good I hardly do even that any more.

This morning, as every morning, I fired up two computers at the same time, my own running XP, and a workmate's running Vista. I was answering my email before the Vista comp had got past the splash screen.

If Google ever did abandon XP I'd rather abandon google than downdate my computer to an inferior later OS.

I'm rather impressed

Here's people doing stuff online that a politician dislikes, and he hasn't called them child pornographers or terrorists. 'Racists and fascists' represents a welcome widening of the political vocabulary.

Well done, that man!

okaaay

I'm all for the Saudi royals trying to ban sex if this means they'll eventually go extinct.

But the ban against .hot seems a bit outré. You'd think they'd be able to cope with a bit of heat over there. Are the Canadians planning to object to .cold?

Nice to see MPs getting uptight about immoral tax avoidance. Pity they don't feel the same way about immoral expenses claims.

Hypocrites.

It works. That's all.

We periodically get content lifted from our websites. The people who do this generally aggregate our stuff with stuff lifted from other websites to make a composite 'site' of their own. They then sell advertising on that site. And no, they and the host (usually in the far east) won't take it down when you ask.

Generally these sites advertise on Google's adsense program. Informing Google that these sites are infringing copyright not only kills their main source of revenue (people finding the site via websearch) but Google also removes them from adsense, so it kills their income from the other side as well.

Not quite whack-a-mole. I'd compare it with weeding the garden. Sure the 'weeds' always come back, but what's the alternative? You have to do it periodically, not least because experience with one site we did not defend shows it was copied by sites copying the original infringing site and we quickly lost control of the content.

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

R.L. Stevenson 1850 -1894

RIP Scotty!

TMP - the root of all evil

The basic problem with driving (and many other aspects of life in the UK) is simply Too Many People. Everyone sees adverts for cars cruising down empty highways in beautiful scenery, and gets frustrated when reality hits at rush-hour in the rain just outside Birmingham.

Trouble is that most cars are built for those lovely empty highways. Until three-quarters of the UK population disappear down some celestial rabbit hole, it just ain't going to happen.

If you've ever driven in rural North America, you'll know the speed of the other traffic is not really relevant. It only happens every half-hour or so, and when you've got 250km to the next town anyway, slowing down for a minute makes zero difference.

And those are the circumstances in which most cars perform best. For England most people would be best off with a sort of electric bicycle with a large carrying capacity, because let's face it, most city cars only ever have to perform at that level. Too many people for it to be otherwise.

Look ...

By all means bash Murdoch - he would be doing the same to anyone else in his situation.

But I respectfully disagree with most of the criticisms of the Sun. No,it's not preferred reading for techies or Oxbridge dons. It's tailored for mass market reading, and is very popular on building sites.

I suspect that some who are criticizing the Sun have not actually read the thing to any extent. I've put in my time on building sites and read it regularly. It's a good product, technically speaking. Well produced, with a clear editorial voice and well-above-average proof-reading.

The point is, many - possibly most - people who read the Sun wouldn't switch to the Times or the Philosophical Review if the red-tops were banned. They'd just stop reading newspapers altogether.

Personally I prefer what readers here probably consider the lumpen proletariat to get SOME world and political information rather than none. If it takes a delivery vehicle like the Sun to do it, I can live with that.

a modest suggestion

Since business processes are patentable (like almost everything else in the good ol' USA) how about patenting patent trolling?

'The accused in this case has blatantly ripped off my client's technique for extracting money from people who have actually done the marketing and development ...'

I can't see this one working. If it's 'in the public interest' to hack private communications on an editor's say-so, then its open season on the inboxes of every MP, public servant and member of the judiciary.

After all, misdeeds on the part of any of the above affect the public interest, so journos are entitled to root around for what they can find, no?

I look forward to Murdoch explaining that to a judge.

Terrorists and paedophiles don't scare me half as much as the Home Office.

aaah ... Bell Canada

Bell Canada has a certain reputation among Canadian consumers.

Articles like this explain how the company got that reputation.

so let's see ...

Are we going to accept the principle that what you do on the net - legally in your own country - makes you liable for prosecution anywhere in the world that disagrees with that activity?

Thing is, though the US case is understandable, this is a dangerous idea. Just to use a random example, if someone in the USA makes a joking comment about the King of Thailand on his facebook page, he might now find his next holiday in Thailand longer and less pleasant than expected.

International travel is going to be so much fun if we all have to first compare our (legal) internet activities in the past against the laws of whatever country we might visit in the future.

As an example in Iran at the moment, a Canadian sits in jail awaiting the death sentence because he wrote a program which was used to upload porn onto the internet - though he did not do the uploading. (Ok, visiting Iran is a dodgy proposition at any time, but the guy had a sick father there. )

The US is exercising the same principle. That you are liable in their country for activity on the net which is legal in your own country.

Good intentions can set dangerous precedents.

Ut fueris dignior IT quam Latinus - de quo ipso ita tecum contendam. In veritam C++ Greacus novus est.

So there.

Well, all those toys gave us a fair amount of amusement.

I downloaded just the pictures, and we spent about an hour trying to figure out what each one was and how it worked. If you have no idea of the scale, some of these devices are not immediately intuitive.

And there we were thinking it was all about insert part A in slot B. Oh dear.

PS 'Like an industrial sander, and not in a bad way?' How? ... where? ... what ...?

We obviously need a dinosaur icon for types like me ...