Posts by Andrew Norton

Re: Wydenism in the UK: "Wydening" the Loopholes...

How is your horse doing?

Don't have a horse for everyday transport? You use a car? Do you keep to below 4mph (2mph in cities) and have a man with a red flag/lamp walking in front to warn others?

You don't?

But in driving a car you've enabled tech oligarchs to get their filthy paws on other peoples livlihoods and lives, and effected their property and labor and effort (which is labor).

BTW, since when is 'effort' rewardable?

And your argument is based on one premise - that you just 'saying' you did a dilligent search is good enough. Whatcha going to do when they say 'prove it'? At which point you're straight back to regular old 'infringing'.

Your outrage is based on a misreading of the law, expressed in a Daily Mail style outpouring of moral indignation.

Actually, the original writers died before it was even copyrighted.

IIRc, the tune was written by one sister in 1896, for a tune called 'good morning to you'. Then another sister came up with the birthday words a bit later.

In/around 1930, a THIRD sister copyrighted the song, after the other two were dead. It's her grandson that gets a significant portion of those royalties.

Of course, other evidence points to the copyright claims these days not being valid, so who knows.... noone wants to test it in court.

Re: Lessons you remember

We had similar after a 1st year class on the reactivity series.

half the class nicked either magnesium ribbon, or in one case, a chunk of calcium.

Next class was swimming, and guess where all the stuff ended up...

Yep the bottom of the school swimming pool

Re: Bootnote

@Ian

I remember when the SPECS system was installed around 2001 on the M62 near Warrington (the stretch near IKEA / Junction 9)

Was a stretch of 5-6 cameras for a few miles on the Liverpool side approach to the M6 covering 5-6 lanes.

Funny thing was, that for at least the first 7-8 months of operation, the widening work meant that at least one lane was on a contraflow. A crash barrier was in the way.

Also, at the time I was driving a volvo 340, the front mounting point for the number plate is under the front bumper, pointing slightly down (and it's quite common to 'nudge' the plate when parking in some kinds of bays, pushing it further from vertical) and I'm not sure on the 'range', but I can't see it being that easy for the cameras to read.

Re: Blocked? CENSORED.

Let's be honest, VCR's were mainly used for copyright infrignement. So what's the difference? I wish I could remember what the timeshifting rules were for the UK... I know it used to be illegal in VCR times...

Ah, IPO delivers

"Time-shifting

A recording of a broadcast can be made in domestic premises for private and domestic use to enable it to be viewed or listened to at a more convenient time.

This time-shifting exception does not however cover the making of recordings for placing in a collection for repeated viewing or listening. The making of a recording for purposes other than to time-shift a programme for your or your family is likely to be illegal."

So the dozens of tapes we all bought were not to keep (which is why there is absolutely NOT still a tape of the Tyson-burbeck fight, the Italian Job and the last episode of the Crystal Maze's first season - 10 crystals, but they got the 2nd rate prizes - on one tape in my dads house, next tot he tape of carry on abroad+behind, and 140 other tapes.

And that's why VCR's were banned, because they had these illegal uses going on...

Re: Build More Nukes

" Nuclear is only economic when heavily subsidised by government for the bomb program"

A large proportion of the costs of nuclear plants is due to excessive safety demands put in place by NIMBY's that don't understand nuclear technology. When the threshold for "leak" is so low, that it will be set off by a packet of brazilnuts, or a bunch of bananas or two, then you've got problems in your risk assessment, that's driving up costs.

I'll happily live near a nuke plant again (used to live near sellafield). Can't be worse than the <20 year old coal plant near me, which has now found to have given some local residents uranium poisoning. Don't remember ANY nuclear plant doing that, in fact....

Re: Solutions

" and facilities are state of the art, (60,000 or 70,000 seater stadiums for american football)."

Think bigger.

University of Georgia has a 92,746 seater stadium (that's bigger than Wembley or any in the UK) in a town the size of Exeter (about 100,000 residents, 1/3 of them students). UF (the university here) is only slightly smaller than Wembley (90,000) with a capacity of 55,548.

Also having stadiums bigger than Wembley are Louisianna State (92,542), UCLA (92,542), University of Southern California (93,607), then there's Soccer City in johannasburg, Camp Nou in Barcelona, and the Iranian national stadium, and the Melbourne Cricket ground (which takes us over the 100k seats line). Ready for more US Universities? University of Texas at Austin (100,119), University of Alabama (101,821), Ohio State University (102,329), University of Tennesee (102,455), [Mexico national stadium, 105k], Penn State University (106,572) and finally University of Michigan (109,901)

There's only two bigger in the world, one in India (Salt Lake Stadium) and the North Korean national stadium. Both of those countries have reputations for less than stellar infrastructure.

Want to know why US education is so bad? There's a starting point...

Re: Learns How Much Enegery You Are Using

Does it break it down by device? No.

Does it give you daily usage? no

Hell, It doesn't even tell them when the power is out (or for that matter, when it's back on)

We've had 9 power outages in the last 13 months, the longest was 3 days (when a tornado took out the sub station for our 'extension cord' last March). I only count outages of 10mins or longer mind.

I'm with Georgia Power, and got a 'smart meter' about 2 years ago.

It's actually harder for me to see usage. Before I could see how fast the disc spun, now it's a guess as to how long the lcd segment takes to move on to the next.

I wish they'd spent the money on upgrading the infrastructure. We're literally on an 'extension cord' from a town to the northwest, which means we get our power from upstate.

Funnily enough ,we have a hydro power station in the county. We're not linked to it. There's a massive coal plant (the biggest CO2 polluting plant in the US) about 20 miles south of us, we're not linked to it. There's another coal plant 15 miles east of that, we're not linked to that either. I just want power thay doesn't go out if it rains hard. Is that too much to ask?

Re: Re: I stopped watching years ago,

I stopped watching, I still SEE it every now and then.

Still a lot of procession stuff

not really

It could consider it a 'wayward province' but without the authority to do as it claims, such as grant TM rights. Or that any such rights are valid for that province only, just like how in the US, state law only applies to that state.

Re: Re: Let me add some food for thought here...

BUT did 7digital have as it's CEO a music producer who is also married to a Big Name Star(TM)?

MegalUpload does, with Alecia Keys' husband taking over as CEO a little over a month ago, it was he who got the artists on board for the MegaSong etc.

Makes a bit of a difference...

would require sealand to first be a country.

It is not.

Funny..

I personally have around 150 hours of audio on TPB, a few videos, OH, and a BOOK on there as of next week.

All legal for download, and perfectly legal for anyone to torrent. My relation to those files? Why... I created those files. from scratch.

I'm far from alone in this too.

There's about 150,000 torrents on ISOhunt that are the same, thanks to their partnership deal with Jamendo.

no....

they think they're the CRIA

Remember, the music industry group whose members COMMERCIALLY sold music for over 20 years, in violation of copyright, but 'kept it on a list', and then settled for just $45M

(or $150/song).

I'm surprised Andrew didn't mention the similarity, or had it slipped his mind....

Yeah, me too!

I bought an 8gb micro, WITH full size adapter for $8.99 on Friday, needed it for the new digital camera i'd bought, and I only buy micros now. That way they can go in my phones (all micro) or the digital vidcamera I already had (SD), and I wasn't sure if this was maxi or micro.

gotta love the flash media bins at the checkout at Microcenter...

Actually, it's been well documented that Polygraphs only work on people that believe polygraphs work.

Polygraphs don't work on those that understand the previous statement.

One of the best illustrations of how a polygraph works is at the end of The Fifth Elephant, where Dee is told to 'tell the truth'.

In reality though, it's the belief that the machine detects lies, that leads to the worry about telling a lie that can be detected, that makes your body indicators spike when you tell a lie. When you know that, you don't worry about being detected, so the anxiety of trying to 'beat' the machine doesn't happen and it tends not to register.

(also untitled)

I didn't 'disclose my association' with it, probably for the same reason I didn't disclose my association with the record industry, or the TV industry; I'm not CURRENTLY associated with them.

I resigned from the US party late last year over the actions of some of the officers, and the party, as it was, is being wound down, so it can be reformed with a new structure (to stop the issues I had problems with from happening again).

It's the same with my record industry work, I worked for a record company, in the late 90s (including the first year of Napster), as a copyright enforcer. I also did TV work, and event work. I don't mention that either, although it could be considered relevant, It's not the sole definer of who I am.

These days, the majority of my time is spent promoting a UK based distributed computing project - the Muon1 Distributed Particle Accelerator Design project, based at the RAL. In fact, I think I've sent two press releases to the Reg on it this year so far...