Never paid a police officer?

Really?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1AJjnl2y8U

Colour

There are 8 colours used in the tapestry, making it 3 bit colour. For 8 bit colour depth, you'd need 256 colours.

So, the capacity calculation becomes (47 * 51,678.72 * 3) / 8 = 910.84 KB. Or 7.29 megabit.

Googling facts

Fact checking? Oh, the horror!

Saving

"The Treasury's own figures put the saving to be made from cancelling the planned tax break at £190m over the tax years 2011 to 2015 - not exactly a huge chunk out of the multi-billion pound national debt reduction plan"

It's still 190m quid that needs to be found somewhere. When you're skint, every penny counts.

RE: There are alternatives to Microsoft...

"It's sad that one OS can be so dominant that problems like this are just accepted. You have to have an AV to run on a "professionaly" written OS"

Take the sort of windows users who need antivirus every day to save them. Running as root, opening and running email attachments from strangers, accepting and running any file that supposedly comes from a friends message client and absolutely clueless about source code. Do you really believe they will be any better off with *nix? Under those conditions, I fail to see how nix could perform any better. It might actually do worse, as certain people who should know better tell nix noobs that they don't need antivirus and other stuff.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3601946

Replacing the entire operating system to solve an issue with one app for little to no other benefit is not professionalism, it's just fanaticism.

PS. The "IT community" you mention includes windows professionals. It isn't just made up of nix fanboys. There is not even a consensus that anything should "be done" about windows

Sounds familiar

No TV? Check.

No pictures of women? Check.

Assassination squads? Check.

U.S invasion of Israel to rid the country of those awful Taliban types? Not likely.

@ac 15:03

"he planed to kill King James I, his family, and most of the aristocracy."

Haven't you heard of regime change? It's all the rage these days.

Telepathic news feed

"Scientific explanations as to how the "BBC high-speed telepathic news feed" works are welcomed."

Close, but I think the word you're looking for is televisual. Before broadband, we used to have something like a CRT monitor (that's what we used before flatscreens) that could deliver full screen video news at regularly scheduled intervals. It could also deliver full length movies and other entertainment for free without the viewer being at risk of being sued.

There's a whole load of information available at the wiki museum, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television

RE: Petition closes soon

That petition is a bit wide ranging isn't it? Should someone be protected from extradition for murder simply because they have aspergers? Protected from extradition to countries where the extradition agreement is not one way? Protected from being extradited from their home countries to Britain?

It doesn't even mention the U.S in the petition, and the government has already given an answer to the one sided thing in a previous petition which addressed that charge specifically. http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18675 If you want another shot at it, http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ExtraditionLaw/

Suggestion

Any chance we can get a way to have line

breaks (<br>) without having a new

paragraph (<p>) added after each

line? Double

spacing is

so annoying!

Not aware?

"police are currently not sure if the man was aware the sexual assault was not a consensual act"

Given that he had no consent from his victim, it's hard to see how he could not be aware that it was non-consensual.

Javascript

This can actually be run without javascript, meaning that noscript will not protect you. http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history.cgi then click the link underneath to see that your visited sites are logged. Although that list only checks 6 sites, there's no reason it couldn't be combined with the 10,000 from startpanic.

The only thing in firefox that could protect you from this is the safehistory plugin, as it stops links being highlighted as visited unless you have followed that link from the linking domain before.

RE: Odd...

It works through CSS and JS, checking which links would show as having been visited rather than actually reading your history.

A list of the sites checked is at http://startpanic.com/db/db_en.txt and a readable code example of the technique is at http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-youve-been.html

So...

This has nothing at all to do with amendment 46 of the EC Telecoms Reform Package then? It's hard to believe that a government so in love with new legislation does not think a new law is the solution to everything.

RE: Prior art?

Never mind Vista, take a look at http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-UAAG10-20010912/guidelines.html#tech-configure-audio-volume, the W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 dated 12 September 2001.

1. Allow global configuration of the volume of all rendered audio, with an option to override audio volumes specified by the author or user agent defaults.

2. Allow the user to choose zero volume (i.e., silent).

Next week - Apple attempts to patent HTML.

Hmmmm

So the kings of patenting prior art assume that prior art will invalidate a claim? With their latest claim on volume control for browsers, I'd say it serves them right.

Legal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

Unless the contract between the advertisers and the host includes clauses about copyright infringing material, they (Attribute) will be convincing the advertisers to break their contract and acting in an illegal manner themselves.

Further, they already mentioned that they believe the DMCA creates liability for the advertisers once they are informed of infringing material. How do they become non-liable by continuing to pay the infringer as well as the artists? The content doesn't suddenly become legal because google throws a few pennies of ad revenue to the artists, and if they stop paying the infringer the ads will simply be pulled from the site.

RE: In my opinion

"I await the onslaught from other readers.... gulp"

So you should. Copyright infringement is not theft. One involves removing something from the owners possession, the other doesn't. It's not rocket science.

Downloading is not even a criminal offence in the UK. Check section 107 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The only thing a private user of infringing material can be prosecuted for is distributing "to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright". Everything else is a civil matter.

If it's a matter of ensuring jobs are kept, then I would like to know how you can afford to purchase every single DVD and CD offered for sale. Refusing to buy even a single thing they release (even if it is Hannah Montana: The Movie) reduces their potential profits and costs jobs. Conflating loss of potential profits with theft means you go to prison, along with everyone else in the country.

Meh

"Brain imaging showed that the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain. However, once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical pain. "

So scrap the idea that too much twitter use would leave you heartless, all your communications with the rest of the human race would have to be through twitter size chunks. Simply talking to anyone for more than 8 seconds can supposedly trigger these emotions.

On the other hand, their study only had 13 subjects. Drawing any conclusions about the entire human race from 13 people is likely to result in errors. What kind of conclusions would these guys jump to if they were given 13 guys with aspergers as subjects?

No title

"You may wonder how Spotify, which has a good reputation amongst rights holders thanks to its meticulous licensing, can afford to stream so much music while Google can't. Well that's because it hasn't burned through its venture capital yet. It also suggests that Google, like many billionaires, is extremely mean"

Or, if you actually know anything about spotify and youtube, you might not wonder.

Youtube hosts all content on its own servers and must pay the entire bandwidth cost each time you watch a video. Spotify doesn't, and uses your bandwidth to distribute songs to other users. http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/how_exactly_does_spotify_utilise_my_internet_connection

The second thing that sets these two apart is the content they are delivering. Youtube does video, spotify does audio. Video needs more bandwidth than audio, so it costs more to deliver.

As for the "extremely mean" comment, how exactly does that fit with the rest of your article? You're reporting that youtube actually costs google half a billion dollars, and call it a "failbucket" for not bringing in profits. Someone who stumps up half a billion dollars so that you can host videos is hardly mean. If you're implying that they should make a bigger loss and pay the PRS rather than simply pulling music, then I think that qualifies you as a freetard.

RE: Can someone explain?

Consumers would benefit from no longer being screwed by faceless corporations. Now you'd be able to put a name to the guy who's tickling your ring, and who wouldn't want Cliff Richard bending them over?

RE: Hmm, not sure

"I personally can't see a problem assigning 'ownership' of a piece of music to the artists concerned automatically. Then the artist(s) would 'license' (ideally for a limited time) the work to a record company."

Copyright ownership is automatically assigned to the creator of the work upon creation, so no change needed there. If they then choose to license the work to the labels for a limited time, they already have that right as well. What they are looking for is a legally protected right to prevent anyone selling their copyrights outright to labels, and thus force the labels to accept their time limited license. Without this protection, other artists who are willing to sell their rights permanently will simply "undercut" these artists. Would you pay for a house that you could only own for 35 years if you could buy one for life at the same price?

And then they turn around and talk about the "protectionist effort" of the labels.

PS: Thanks, Kelly, for leaving comments open. Makes a nice change to be able to comment on music articles.

Criminal prosecutions

Exactly how many downloaders have faced criminal prosecution for downloading? Sure, we have oink and his uploaders, but they're not your average downloaders.

So, saying that they are opposed to criminal prosecutions of downloaders is all a bit moot if there are no criminal prosecutions. I'd be much more interested to know where they stand on civil proceedings against downloaders. You know, the kind of cases brought by the RIAA and their equivalents.

RE: Which came first?

"So far we're OK, but they might get lucky and put two coherent thoughts together."

But from the look of things they couldn't put a database together, so we should be fine :-P

RE: @System

Nowhere did I say that a civil case needs to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. What I said was that it was up to the prosecution to prove the charges, whether beyond reasonable doubt or otherwise. If the prosecution fail to prove the charges to the required level, then a reply is not even needed.

If it was your original comment (hard to tell with anon), it would seem that you are ignorant of the law.

For starters, entering a plea of "not guilty" says that the defendant is refuting the charges. Whether or not the words "not guilty" are used in the closing arguments is irrelevant. And closing arguments is exactly where this quote is from. I think Gottfrids response of "Where is my ten million, please, I want it, where is it?" can be taken as a denial of the accusation at the time it was made.

Secondly, stating that the prosecution have failed to meet the burden of proof for a criminal case does not automatically open up the defendants to a loss in a civil case. It may well be that the prosecution failed to meet any legal standard of proof in their allegation. "It is not proved" doesn't mean "It can be proven at a lower standard" or "It happened but you can't prove it", it simply means what it says.

Thirdly, the prosecution seemed to be taking a wild guess at how much the site turned over in advertising revenue according to http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-day-10-calls-for-jail-time-090302 . This would likely fail even a "balance of probabilities" standard for evidence, unless the prosecutor is also qualified as an accountant and has in depth knowledge of server hosting and bandwidth costs as well as online advertising markets. Making wild-ass guesses is not the same thing as evidence.

So, no, using the words "it is not proved" rather than "it did not happen" cannot be used to nail them in a civil trial.

RE: Oh dear...

"It's just as well this is a beyond-reasonable-doubt criminal case, because in a balance-of-probabilities civil case, refusing to refute the claim would leave them wide open."

Not at all. In case you never noticed, trials in "civilised" countries place the burden of proof on the accuser, whether it's a reasonable doubt case or not. Imagine yourself accused of murder at a time when you were asleep in bed, alone, and thus lacking an alibi. Now try to imagine how you would prove your innocence from a holding cell and you might see why it's up to the prosecution to prove guilt rather than the other way round. Unless of course simply saying "I didn't do it" was enough to get you released.

RE: Evidence somewhere surely?

"they must have done even a minimal survey of the Pirate Bay links"

These are the same people who tried to present torrent files into evidence that didn't even use TPB as the tracker. So I'd guess they didn't :-P

Simple solution...

...ban these emo kids from watching any future Batman movies. Problem solved.

Forever is a long time

"Can this thing continue on forever with no tweaking, or will it eventually need an overhaul?"

Nope. Systems that use 32 bit signed integers for timestamps will start to fail in 2038 because signed ints use one bit for sign, leaving 31 bits for data. 2^31 is 2147483648, or approx 68 years.

At the very least, compilers and interpreters will need updating to use more bits for timestamps, and source code will need rewriting to use larger integers. Databases will also need converting to store the larger numbers. Underneath all that, everything from BIOS firmware to OS libraries will need rewriting to take account of the larger ints.

The basic method of adding one to a count every second can last as long as there are seconds to count, of course, but the size of the integer needed to store that info will never decrease, only increase.

RE: Maybe the Norwegians can negotiate with...

"there are still plenty of competent engineers/producers around able to use electrickery in the recording studio to hide their artistes lack of ability to actually sing in tune"

Hell, they don't even need to be able to stand upright judging by recent ads I've seen for "live" concerts by Lynard Skynard and the Rat Pack.