Posts by JimC

@ Germany says no and sends in tanks. UK and France say "oh no not this again"

And the USA makes a killing selling new and secondhand armaments to everyone and ends up owning everything and making a full economic recovery. Not that anything like that has ever happened before...

Why Microsoft?

I wonder how much of the money they earn in Greece is subject to Greek taxation, or whether its all offshored to a handy tax haven... I can imagine tax authority shopping is not popular in Greece right now...

Re: Drop a tab / AC, obviously, in case Mum's reading.

> AC, obviously, in case Mum's reading.

And how do you suppose Mum watched it when it came out?

@anyone care to argue that the people do benefit from eternal copyright on Mickey Mouse

As is always said: follow the money.

At the moment we have Big Media attempting to enhance creators rights, and Even Bigger Advertising attempting to destroy them. Forget the stuff about individual freedoms and stuff, that's just to confuse the issue. Just follow the money.

If Big Media win then at least some of the money will filter down to creators, and we'll get more content, because what a Big media Exec really wants to do (apart from get rich) is to build and empire with more and more creative stuff, making him look better and better compared to other Big Media Execs

If Even Bigger Advertising wins, then we can look forward to a future in which creators hardly get paid at all, and we drown in endless mediocre home made junk plastered with endless advertising, because even bigger advertising Execs just want to get rich and build an empire by flogging more and more advertising on cheaper and cheaper content.

Neither view looks especially wonderful, but for Big Advertising to win looks a damn sight worse to me. I was never remotely in favour of so called big media companies who pay creators as little as they can get away with until it became clear that the alternative seems to be even bigger advertising, who want to pay them nothing at all.

> [in] a run down villa in Quito

waiting for the next revolution and a new US friendly government quite happy to get rid of the useless gringo and send him off to whoever wants him in exchange for a bit more foreign aid.

Re:Which of these is worse...

Well that depends, doesn't it. If undermining the authority of the monarchy results in a civil war where thousands or millions are killed, then I'd regard that as a good deal worse outcome than an amateur bomb plot.

Historically consitutional monarchies have been seen as providing useful checks and balances on the tendency of pure democracies to be taken in by demagogues with no aim or vision other than to get elected again, no matter how much long term damage they do to their countries in the process of pursuing a short term populist vision.

@copyright is more than the RIAA

Its one of life's little ironies that the most rabid opponents of copyright are often a subset of the enthusiasts for the Stallman freedoms, apparently blissfully unaware that copyright is all that makes the GPL possible, especially the redistribution restrictions, as RMS would doubtless tell them if they didn't have their hands over their ears...

But moving to a different time is useful

If power use is taken out of peak demand times and moved to off peak then the total generation capacity can be reduced. But personally I won't want my washing machine kicking in in the middle of the night and creating noise.

Hiking / Sailing context

is actully a particularly worthless americanism. The seppos also use it for the bizarre activity of hanging off the side of a larger boat in the "I'm so seasick I don't care any more" position head down with the body folded in half round the wire fence that goes round larger boats.

But its a significant issue, because there are medical problems, particularly knee damage, associated with hanging the body weight out of the side of the boat supported by these "toe straps".

Re: So how long...

If I believed in conspiracy theory and shills I'd wonder just hw much big advertising is paying, whenever copyright and creators rights are mentioned, people to post about what a wonderful favour big advertising is doing creators by ripping off their content for free...

Since when has the WWF been a group of Extremists?

Its quite a new development for WWF I think, but I haven't been paying attention. But it happens to a lot of these sorts of organisations. The really keen people tend to be the ones on the end of the bell curve, and they end up running things because they're the ones who put most commitment in.

Provided you share their world view the logic that "its more important to campaign to stop things going wrong than to act to fix things that have gone wrong" is impeccable. However by and large they still get the money in from people who think they are still shelling out to fix things, and don't share the world view, and that to my mind is somewhat dishonest.

See also...

- RSPCA

- RSPB

- National trust (less far along)

- OXFAM

add others to taste and personal bias....

Re: Had to break suddenly just the other day

Using break for brake appears to be a 19thC usage. If you look at, say, 19thC railway accident reports they use the ea spelling.

Re: recycle

I dunno, "up there" is an awfully big place isn't it? What's the area (never mind volume" of say the geosynchronous orbit space compared to the area of the planet? Can't be bothered to so the sums, but I suspect its a great deal of, well, space to go hunting the junk in. Bigger project than roaming the streets with the nag crying "any old iron"...

Signatures/ It doesn't fix the basic problem..

Banks haven't checked signatures in decades. It must be thirty years ago that a kid came into our shop with the cheque from his father to buy a new motorcycle (so reasonably serious money). We didn''t ask for a card: what point. Instead we insisted on waiting for it to clear, which it did . Two months later teh aggrieved father came to see us. The kid had stolen the cheque (messy divorce going on). The signature the kid had put on the card bore not the slightest resemblance to the father's but the bank had cleared it anyway.

But isn't that just an arrgument

against the essential dumbness of having a pair of mains transformers in every damn little unit? You wouldn't do that with a blade, so WTF do we do it with servers. To me an optional replacement for the PSU in the server units that's just a simple minimal distrubition board which takes a feed from a a triply redundant single PSU in each rack.

Re: Unfortunately, the UK courts are now in a bind

Ultimately the end can justify the means. Look at how many Germans we killed to stop Hitler. In real life its a question of least worst on balance. Turn it around... Can the means justify the ends?

Re: Ughh... Still shudder when I recall those days

I dunno, do you really understand the advantages of writing good readable source until you have spent a day trying to decipher something truly horrible? You can write decent structured code in Basic., its just that the temptation is not to, and like a number of temptations, if you give intoit you or someone else may suffer horribly in the future. Good lesson for life there really...