Posts by Mike VandeVelde
221 posts • joined Friday 9th March 2007 18:26 GMT
doesn't collect "any cell phone locational information,"
the quotes are in the wrong spot, it should be like this:
doesn't "collect" any cell phone locational information
kids these days
kids these days are making glow in the dark pigs, growing human ears on the backs of rats, building pocket supercomputers, virtual reality systems, wiring up a nervous system for the planet, building space stations and planning trips to the moon and mars.
kids these days are getting their heads cracked at protests against the wto, the war in iraq, the g8, the 1%, permitted free speech zones, kettled up into mass holding pens, denied permission to travel.
i wouldnt call kids these days docile.
kids will (hopefully) always end up laughing at whatever primitive clubs the old fogeys come up with to try and control them. things are getting strange for sure, but dont lose sight of the fact that nothing lasts forever. there are ways to tap into relatively recent innovations in communications, but faster and faster that will change. im doubtful that usa intelligence will ever again have as much access to global communications as they do currently.
I hesitate to say.....
but should Canada shoulder some of the "blame" here? We built one of the largest navies in the world during WWII, and we sank dozens of U-boats, and not a lot of people seem to be aware. North Atlantic Run and U-Boat Hunters by Marc Milner are fascinating reading. Cheers, carry on then :-)
Re: In Alexandria I seem to remember..
"How exactly did that turn out again?
Oh right the library was a central depository for all the world's information, meaning noone felt the need to independently keep track of it, and when it burned it set humanity back a century."
Sort of like Napster?
Re: As a publisher, Eric Flint has already addressed this issue...
"And yet when REM tried an experiment in voluntary pricing they got well and truly reamed - by their fans yet."
Radiohead released their album In Rainbows with voluntary pricing for the digital version. The physical CD that came out afterwards was still a chart topper.
Nine Inch Nails released their album The Slip under a non-commercial share-alike license, and still sold physical CD copies.
Beck released his "album" Song Reader exclusively as sheet music, obviously giving up royalties as he explicitly encourages everyone to play the songs themselves.
Some artists are experimenting, and I think it's fabulous. There's no guarantee that just because you create art it will make you rich. Just because one artist wasn't wildly successful with a particular approach does not mean that another artist couldn't find a way to make it work well. These are heady days, and we are still figuring out how the world will work beyond the inevitable demise of yesterday's culture hoarders. GAME ON! 8D
"I believe it's recently been rolled out in Canada"
http://thebankwatch.com/2008/10/28/chip-and-pin-canada-the-basic-flaw/
We've had them in Canada for years, not sure what you mean by recently?
You wear sunglasses indoors?
because its always sunny in doucheville
Re: Germ warfare
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/bioeweaponstestedus.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/canada-eyes-old-anthrax-tests/article1158608/
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5739&page=94
http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/reports-rapports/defoliant/index-eng.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
"an area in which MasterCard itself has already dabbled, with its PayPass system"
Seriously. "Dabbled"? My Mastercards have been PayPass enabled for years now. I almost exclusively use Interac, but I'm pretty sure that almost every terminal I've seen for years has accepted them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MasterCard#PayPass
http://www.mastercard.ca/cardholder-services/mobile-payments.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac
"Since its national launch in 1994, Interac Direct Payment has become so widespread that, since 2001, more transactions in Canada were completed using debit cards than cash."
critical path blanks
Up till when you can get your domestic fusion power plant like you get your fridge and electronics are got by the gallon and painted onto everything and the internet is a global full spectrum wireless hum with everything everywhere boosting the signal, well then we will look pretty silly with all our our utility poles (firewood?) and enormous piles of hazardous waste.
"going to happen more and more"
At current monthly subscription rates that must have been almost $0.25 worth of service we each lost there, no joke if they keep that up the whole economy will soon grind to a screeching halt! One less option for ignoring friends and family, on Christmas of all days when you all know we need it most!! Think of the children!!!
same on the wet coast
Wii would not start Netflix. Could look at the website on the pc, could not get account details to come up.
Re: Good!
Yeah great to know that a few giant corporations can crush something useful like this on a whim, while millions and millions of people have little to less than no effect on various trade agreements that actually are negotiated in secret and actually do cause any harm.
Posted in Nintendo shrinks Wii for Crimbo
Re: gamecube support was already abandoned
Uh, nope, it does not have the physical sockets for the Gamecube contollers / memory cards anymore.
Posted in Nintendo shrinks Wii for Crimbo
gamecube support was already abandoned
My original Wii no longer reads discs (it's basically a Netflix terminal for a TV now, with a few downloaded games on it). So I went and got a new one a few months back, since I could use a 4th controller and I have a medium sized stack of game discs and I have a rec room that could use it, and they're down to just $150. But when I got it home I discovered it didn't have Gamecube support. Can you even still get a Wii with the Gamecube support? So the Gamecube controller, the memory card, and the few games I had gone out and picked up are truly useless to me now. Not a huge deal but kind of annoying.
had to take a look through my fire hazard stacks...
Compute!'s Gazette, Ahoy!, Run, Info, Power Play, The Transactor, TPUG, Amiga World, Commodore Magazine. Compute!, Home Computing, Family Computing, onComputing. Sigh. Yes it was a Commodore household!
fantasy worlds
So then, if we simply abolish corporate income tax, then all products would sell for $0 and everyone would have a job and all government deficits would be eliminated? Who's living in a fantasy world? Idiot.
crap software is definitely a group effort
You have 2 camps of extremists. On one side are people who say quality will naturally evolve in the hive mind setting and any trying to force it is a waste of effort. On the other side you have people who say you should be able to launch big money lawsuits at Microsoft every time Windows crashes and wipes out their Powerpoint presentation. Most of us make our way in the real world, which is a vast grey area in between.
I really don't think the devs can be blamed, no matter how poor the quality. Most often someone else considered them acceptable and hired them, someone else produced the requirements (or not as the case may be), someone else set the deadlines, someone else made the decision to release.
Devs shouldn't do their own quality assurance anyway, beyond a bare minimum. How does that old saying go, any person can write software that is so sublimely elegant that he or she can't see any bugs in it at all.
Posted in Judge denies move to ban ad-skipping DVR
"spent on puffing it that could have been spent on making it a better product, or a cheaper one"
++
Capitalism was more efficient than communism (measured by stockpiles of nukes / subs / tanks / bombers / battleships / fortresses) for a period of time. Capitalism lasted a little longer than communism, but eventually it too collapsed - crush asphyxiated under the ever growing burden of corporate armies of advertisers and lawyers and bankers and lobbyists and multi million dollar executives.
Re: seems reasonable
If I rent a house to someone and they indulge in naughty activities there, am I legally responsible?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/03/09/calgary-landlord-growop-woes.html
Re: UK-Ireland-Holland-Bermuda
That's what "free trade" is all about, ain't it great?!
Because if a corporation doesn't like the local tax rate / regulations, they can just pack up and leave and set up shop in another country, you know the globalized free market. Just like if I'm a farmer in Mexico and I don't like the local wages, I can just pack up and leave and move to a country where the wages are better... right? Oh. Only the money flows freely, if the people flowed freely and wages equalized in a gloabl free market that would make obscene profits harder to come by and we just can't have that now can we.
Also nice how if a corporation is doing business, or even just planning on doing business, and a government changes or implements a regulation that might have an effect on future income, well with all these free trade deals it's getting more and more common that the corporation can sue the government to make up for the lost profits, because obviously if they planned on making that much money then that's guaranteed to be what would have happened if that pesky public health department / whatever hadn't got their fingers in and made the work less "efficient". Just like if government introduces a new user pay fee for service, or makes me go out and get a helmet to ride my bicycle or get a hands free device to drive with my cell phone, well that gives me a good legal case to recover my lost income.... right? Oh. I see, totally different, right.
Tariffs are protectionist and protectionism is baaaad mkay. Yay free trade! So now if I order something online from out of country, when it gets here there won't be any surprise tax / duty / brokerage fees to pay extra? Oh.
Corporations are persons. No they're not they're overlords with way more rights than the pathetic useless human parasites who should be thankful to have a chance to suckle at corporate tits.
hah never seen that before
500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
If you see them, show them this information:
J7hHB-byybsXtyljedqC4GDx8l3X.....
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/20-awesome-404-error-pages
"I am going to be hated for this comment."
... or simply ignored because of being totally empty of any useful or interesting content, and in a dickish way. Keep it up. Or not.
I always thought that with all the billions of dollars worth of gear that we are piling up around the solar system, that someone should be having a think about how possible it is that any of it is / could be useful for when there are eventually boots on the ground. A wound down Curiosity could be retrieved and stripped of scientific instruments and used for a dune buggy and / or to ferry supplies around. How many square meters of solar panels are lying around waiting to be dusted off and hooked to something useful? Maybe this drill could be used to bore wells for drinking water (if there is ice under there)? If there are any minor modifications that could be made to the tools we are sending there to make them more useful as ingredients for future human assembled what nots for the colony, and possibly save on what needs to be shipped along with those humans, well I hope someone is considering that kind of thing. Just a thought, it's all awesome anyway :-)
ps Unless these things are meant to end up as some sort of heritage sites? Would anyone be offended by recycling the Apollo landers into parts of a moonbase? What if it was China doing it? What are the rules for salvage on the *extremely* high seas? Would those still be considered property of the USA?
a response to piracy??
He releases sheet music, encouraging everyone to play his songs, instead of lawsuits left right and center for humming his tunes in the shower, and you twist it around into an attack on pirates? Yer doin a heckuva job there!!
Here is Beck's experience with the "music industry":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutations_%28Beck_album%29#Release
All you haters take a puff on this talent cannon:
"a proper picture of how JavaScript works"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_server-side_JavaScript_solutions
tax breaks for the needy
Does a company that makes a billion plus annually need any breaks?
Is pulling oil and gas out of the ground not a lucrative industry?
If the resource is left in the ground, will it get less valuable?
If it will get less valuable (believing that there will be a wild west of shale gas), then is it really a good idea to invest in exploiting these more expensive reserves?
If it will get more valuable, then aren't you cutting of your nose to spite your face with all your talk of jobs and economics?
Re: Forces me to revert to IE when I need those YouTube moment.
rely on herd immunity, become a cull candidate
it's a fine line
hip hip hoor... wait what?
Yes, because the hairy pale people from Europe during the renaissance are no different from cave men back in the stone age (excepting the magnitude of their brutality), right? Is that what you are trying to celebrate?
They were first as in here before France, England, Spain, etc. What part of that can you not understand? The guy who won the gold medal in the 100m dash isn't really first because you saw that guy training cross the finish line *days* earlier??
So in 50 years when the Chinese come to save us from wage slavery and topple our ridiculous sham of a democracy for us, you will kiss the ground in front of whatever mandarin the emporer appoints and be happy to have your offspring lifted from savagery, right? After all, people are people, progress marches on, and so on and so forth. If they wage horrible biological warfare on us, outlaw speaking English, forcibly take our children off to be civilized in boarding schools, make only token efforts to prosecute crimes against us and execute whole towns upon simple accusation of a crime by one of us, and all around treat us as sub human, well that will all be water under the bridge right? Nothing that hasn't happened before, who would we be to complain? Gah.
We were a couple months behind launching, but ours lasted until we decided to switch it off 10 years later ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Space_Agency#History.2C_mission_and_mandate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alouette_1
Cheers to everyone in every country for all the amazing work done in those heady days!
Posted in Welcome, friend, to Metroland
Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V
Am I the only one who vastly prefers Ctrl-Insert/Shift-Insert?
Re: I usually disagree with pretty much everything you have to say
If it drives Andrew into a fit, I usually assume it's something I might like. If Andrew says it's great, I usually go over it with a fine tooth comb to see where the catch is. Just kidding, it's all light entertainment ;)
So doing something to copyright to ease access to orphan works is just like invading Iraq. That's "analysis" for you! Some kind of Godwin's law for the 21st century? Thanks for that 8-D
I used to have quite a low opinion of marketers,
who knew it could go that much lower?? This article is batshit crazy, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin comes to mind.
"Adverts are not only here to stay, but they are proliferating"
I gave up on cable tv a year ago, been running adblock ever since I first heard of it. I'm sure I'm not in a shrinking demographic.
"Surely measuring the volume of comments relative to comments about other shows tells us more than trying to work out who likes the show versus who doesn‘t."
Sure ok, I have no public Facebook comments anyway so what do I care, fill your boots. Now quit while you're ahead.
"The 20 rule is that every person under the age of 20 in any particular US house leaves a TV on, when they leave a room. It is also the N+1 principle. In any given US home, however many people there are in the home at a given point, this many TVs are left turned on, plus one."
Nope, and nope. You're welcome.
"But beyond that, even if a comment on an actor is a poor one, it might be because he is a very well-acted villain, and surely that means a high level of engagement with the programme, not a low one?"
I think I just puked in my mouth a little. You want me to pay for cable TV, plus you want to fill some ridiculous portion of it with advertising, plus you want to hook me up to some kind of mind scanner to see if I'm "engaged"? And not just yes or no, but like really get to know me and individually interpret every utterance I make and put it on a scale of 1 to 1,000? Like fuck.
"Kids think: "I‘d better watch and or catch up with this programmeme, or else I won‘t have anything to say to everyone else and they will all tell me the plot.""
<shudder>
"other ways to measure engagement which may soon become available to us ... if both the TV and the companion device ... comment on it simultaneously on a social media site ... apps which listen to your screen ... search and recommendation elements ... metrics on how many programmes are watched all the way through ... underlying demographics on the household ... will have a high level of engagement, due to the high levels of calculated interest"
STOP! Just stop, for the love of all that's holy! The day when it is possible to have all that wired together, for the brain dead useless purpose of marketing no less, let alone for spooks who can at least pay lip service to national security, is the day I say so long suckers and head off to the woods to build me a survivalist bunker.
"Of course the reach of tablets needs to become almost universal, something we cannot count on until at least a five-year time frame."
Eh? You mean like shortly after everyone is wearing one of these?
http://www.google.ca/search?q=calculator+watch&hl=en&tbm=isch
"While Facebook does not play in this market, it actually has the edge, in that it could peep inside of every Facebook message even the private ones"
Shouldn't uttering that sentence, or even forming that thought be a capital offence??
"Actually if Facebook could simply leverage aggregated social media commentary in all walks of life..."
... then it could give us flying cars and robot butlers as well. I'm sure (ok hopeful) that regulatory bodies might have something to say about that.
"No-one is content to stay purely with eyeball counts any longer, so there is progress."
Did you really just say progress?!?!
"Putting adverts into programmes in real time, to the right people who are known to have an interest in a subject, who have the wherewithal to afford the advertised product and who are watching TV now, and perhaps even watching a programme on a similar subject, leverages advertising appeal by multiple dimensions."
Leverages advertising appeal from fuck right off (0) through to you did what to me OK now you and I have a serious problem (-1,000,000).
"Advertising appeal"
Like, military intelligence? Business ethics? Accurate estimate? Clean coal?
There is no kind of ad you can come up with, or delivery system for it, where the experience will make me think "gee that was a pleasant and useful way to spend my time, I'll have to do that again as soon as I can". Maybe you can make me chuckle, but even still all it really makes me think is "look there's another company with too much money to toss around, I sure would have to be dumb to give them even more". Noticeable/memorable ads are the same as big charitable donations or obscene management compensation, a bloody big blinking neon sign saying avoid this brand wherever possible it's obviously way overpriced.
learn from history
Chinese treasure ships found to be boring and abandoned, followed by several centuries of being raped and pillaged with their own fireworks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_ship
Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle, deemed expensive and unnecessary...
300,000,000 no votes required
I will eat my chair if that many unique people logged into facebook this month, or hell even this year. I'm guessing that a large fraction of their 900,000,00 "users" signed up, maybe even came back a few times in an effort to get something useful out of it, but totally abandoned it in quick order. Even if that still leaves more than 300,000,000 active users, even being generous with the definition of active, if you have someone who logs in once a month, could they even have found out about the poll in time to actually vote on it? And then once you cull all the accounts for people's pets and house plants that they set up to game the games with, you basically would need something over 100% of actual individual people who logged in last month to take the time to engage in the poll for facebook to even need to start thinking about a plausible way to ignore the whole thing. As it is now, they just say that's nice lessons learned onwards and upwards, and as it shall ever be.
Who cares anyway! I actually went and looked into it, and considering you basically have no privacy on facebook to start with, the changes they are putting forward don't really seem to give you any less privacy. I didn't even bother voting. Now I'm ashamed I even wasted the time on it, let alone coming out here and admitting to it. Now I'm off to do something else maybe even more mindless and hope it all fades away...
"and the UK ISPs want to know why they shouldn't get some licence-fee cash."
Does the BBC connect to the internet for free? I'd like to hear more about that, if there is a free connection available then where do I sign up?
"The people using service like Netflix that use a lot of bandwidth should be the ones paying for the bandwidth they use."
Sure, and they do. Unless you know of somewhere offering free internet connectivity, see above.
What's the difference between me and Google? So much data to transfer, so fast. The ISPs get in betweeen, and should charge whatever it takes to carry the traffic, with a little left over for network improvements. Why is that so hard?
My eyes have always glazed over whenever someone says "well they (usually content providers) are getting blah blah blah so they should pay". If they aren't paying, then explain how because I would also rather not pay. But nobody ever explains that part, so it's hard to get to the end of a story like this witout falling asleep. But I force myself to, because anyone who thinks I'll suffer anything like global corporation A making some sort of a deal with global corporation B to have my bits turn into second class citizens can fuck right off, so I try to keep my eyes open.
Re: So, the bird is the word
Posted in Music Biz: The Man is still The Man, man
"benefits of digital economy simply have accrued to giant brands like Madonna and Radiohead"
So what's changed then??
Let's say I am the mythical starving artist. I have a band. We played some local shows. We got noticed and a label signed us. We cut an album. All of our fans are 110% law abiding and would never dream of "stealing" our music. So a fan buys our CD. I get paid for that? Well no, because when I got signed apparently what I actually got was a huge loan, so it will be quite a while before a CD gets sold that actually sends some money back to me. So a fan gets our CD played on a loop at several local bars / clubs. I get paid for that? Well no, because the performance fees get divided out based on what's popular, and since my little CD gets no air time on the radio / MTV / whatever, I get 0%. I get a cut of the media levy? Nope, same thing. My CD goes ends up in the record company vault and my fans lose access to it, maybe the record company will milk it at some point in the future for some compilation or something, or let someone use it in advertising, maybe some day they send me a couple bucks after getting audited or something, if the fine print in my contract doesn't say I signed away too much.
So in order to prop up the industry that sorts through hundreds of millions of dollars every year and gives next to sweet fuck all to any artist I give a shit about, I pay tax on blank media, tax on any product sold anywhere any music is playing, inflated service charges to cover all the copyright infringment notice regimes, let people snoop on my internet traffic, taxes to the government to handle all the court cases, and if I have any money left over to buy a CD I still get gouged hollow for it. No thanks.
"I suspect many musicians, authors, etc would find the current situation slightly easier to take if those who don't pay for their work would stop trying to claim some kind of moral justification"
If I were to illegally download some music, I wouldn't feel like some kind of Rosa Parks sitting down at the front of the bus, I would feel more like if I stepped on an ant. Who cares. If you say because of that I should get a letter saying cough up thousands of dollars or go to court, or get my internet disconnected, THEN you will start hearing about why that is simply retarded. That is all.
wait... what?
"Liu is also estimated that based on a sampling of timesheets filled out by HP and subcontractors on the project that found $2.5m in time and material charges that as much as $50m in similarly unjustified costs might have been added to the ECTP contract by HP."
hehehehehe... he said firm.... hehehehe
"The security firm reckons a military sub-contractor was likely to have carried out the work than a intelligence agency."
Re: Open your wallets
It also has to do with the crown corporation BC Hydro being forbidden to build any more of its own new power stations. Instead small scale hydro is put in place by private companies, and BC Hydro signs lengthy contracts at inflated rates to purchase the power. I think there are something like $40 billion of those contracts lined up already.
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Hydro+awash+private+power/6605915/story.html#ixzz1uZzivKep"
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/6835-bc-hydro-in-extreme-financial-peril-due-to-campbell-private-energy-policy.html
Go capitalism!!
Re: So what's the solution?
My only regret is that I have but a single thumbs up to bestow!
The line seems to be that if there was an epidemic of common sense and all legislation regarding intellectual "property" was repealed world wide tomorrow, that all creativity would cease altogether immediately and we would spiral down into a dark and boring world devoid of any progress or entertainment value.
What a huge load of horseshit. How did we get to where we are today then? Only by the good graces of the "Intellectual Property Industry" in places like ancient China, Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, Rome?
I've always said, and I'll say it again: even if you penalized people for singing songs and telling stories and drawing pictures and inventing things, guess what it would be just like the unwinnable war on drugs, people would still do all of those things.
Anybody claiming that we would all be harmed by the total annihilation of American Idol, Backstreet Boys, Big Brother, Harry Potter, Survivor, 100s of millions of dollars to tell a story that was originally told with a 50c comic book or even more astounding Battleship, etc etc ad nauseum, well I'll bet you've got some "prime" real estate or a used car to sell as well.
I'll bet you a trillion dollars that I'll still be able to go down to the pub and see a live band, or go see a play at the theatre, or go down to the gallery and see some art, or find someone to tell me a story I haven't heard before. Or even more specifically be able to hire someone to create a logo for a business, or take photographs at a wedding, or sculpt a big ass statue of yours truly.
So toss a fucking match on it all already. This is a new age, if you have something to say you can send it around the world and back at the stroke of a key press, so get all the arthritic pablum rationing dinosaurs out of the god damn way. Whatever we end up with can't possibly be half as retarded as what we have right now.
"Green Peace boat burning gallons of diesel"
yeah look at all the smoke belching out of the thing, they recruit people for direct action and they end up shovelling coal into it:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/ships/the-rainbow-warrior/
retard.
cant believe nobody posted this one yet
Defense Tech 56895 Pepper Spray Aerosol Projector MK-9 Stream 1.3% 12 OZ
"When I feel threatened by students, no matter how unarmed, peaceful and seated they may be, I know that Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray has got my back as I casually spray away at point blank range.
It really is the Cadillac of citizen repression technology."
Re: UK Dumping Ground
"short term benfit in charging for storing other people's waste"
I was under the impression that the waste would need to be stored for quite a while? And will likely continue to be generated for the forseeable future as well? What kind of time frame are you thinking about?
Re: Learns How Much Enegery You Are Using
My power company says its all rainbows and unicorns:
http://www.bchydro.com/news/conservation/unplug_this_blog/2011/home_area_networks.html
hit me
<i>if I haven't been <s>struck</s> already...</i> aw hell <b>hit me agin</b>
<a href="http://www.imagepoop.com/image/1049/Be-Polite-Go-Fuck-Yourself.html">hypertext refefefefeference</a>
newfound respect for open source
"Microsoft, despite its newfound respect for open source, isn't about to seed the open-source market with its crown jewels."
Why would MS Office for Linux be open source?
$10 business card holder
So when you found the product you were looking for, was it in the sort of store that would be well served spending $$$$ to build a searchable/indexable website version of their catalog/inventory, to have someone create (and keep current!) a Facebook page, and to research Google Search & Maps and Bing and make sure that Sally's Stationary Store comes up right alongside Staples and Office Depot? That would get Sally what, the pleasure of knowing you didn't have to go too far out of your way to bring them your $10? There's money to be made giving Sally that hip feeling sure, but you could just sell her some wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men to put on the roof and get Sally a similar result, quite possibly even more people would notice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtespeLin2c
