Re: parlimentary grilling

"It would be interesting to see how shes voted for the various tax changes?"

Here you go, knock yourself out:

Voting record here

Re: Oh dear oh dear

"I rather like the idea that the law is what it says it is, not what people think it says."

Well, you better ask for all those judges to be sacked then. Oh, and the juries too.

The law has always been what people think it says. How could it be anything else?

Re: valid assumption? @Robert Long 1 re imagemagick

If you're still listening, here's how to make a triangle on a transparent background:

convert -size 100x60 xc:none -fill white -stroke black -draw "path 'M 20,55 L 25,10 L 70,5 L 20,55 Z' " triangle.png

Almost straight from the examples in the docs, except that I had to drop "none" in to replace the skyblue in the actual example. "xc:" (X-window Color) can be replaced by the somewhat more obvious and accurate name "canvas:" in more recent versions of IM, BTW.

Re: An open letter

"Either change the law to make these profits taxable or save us some money and shut the fuck up."

Amazon, and probably Google, are acting illegally. They are engaged in fraud by claiming that their UK business is a supplier of services to its Luxembourg company. It isn't; the whole business of buying a book from amazon.co.uk is carried out in the UK. Luxembourg is as irrelevant to the process of buying a book as it is to everything else.

I agree that all this yakking is pointless. People should be doing time and/or Amazon and co. should be finding that their IPs are blocked at a European level, or at least a national level until they stop engaging in these tax evasion activities. There are plenty of other places to buy books from, and there are other search engines than Google, so it's not really a big deal if they are held to account, IMO.

Re: An open letter

" Why stick around in the UK and pay our incredibly high taxes, when they can close down shop and move everything to ireland where it's cheaper for them"

In the case of Amazon, because they'd lose the £4bn in sales. I don't think the population of Ireland is going to take up that slack. Amazon need us much, much more than we need them.

Re: My chips are black, or modern slavery

"The only problem with this is that as soon as a robot becomes self aware it will have human rights."

We're about 500 years from that happening. AI has made no progress on anything like self-awareness and probably won't until we understand it ourselves.

Re: “advance the bold vision”

"it's a pull-down menu that has icons as well as words."

The problem in a nutshell. It has lots of icons which waste space and there are so many of them - all different - all with little fiddly labels that they create a visual jumble of pixel fog. On top of that, icons have no natural ordering (ie, alphabetic) so finding a rarely used function is a nightmare of wasted time and frustration.

Re: valid assumption? @Robert Long 1 re imagemagick

"imagemagick looks tremendously capable but it's so inconsistent and the documentation is laughable."

Imagemagicks documentation is excellent, I think. If you can't find an example of how to do what you I'd be very surprised.

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/draw/

Re: valid assumption?

"Do an automated resize or something from C:\destination\source_images\ to C:\destination\ and see if your original images still exist. The last time I did that my images were gone, really gone."

Should have used imagemagick :)

Re: Autodesk have been doing something similar for years

Autodesk probably ship a lot fewer units than Adobe is used to doing. Mind you, they may have to get used to shipping a lot fewer units.

Re: "Can Adobe justify shifting its Creative Suite to a contentious new licensing model?2

"I guess that you are an Adobe shareholder. To me, as an Adobe user, I very much doubt that they could justify the change."

I'm not sure that the farmer worries too much about justifying his actions to the sheep.

This move has, however, opened up a huge hole in Adobe's defences against competitors. The bar for a CS competitor has been lowered a great deal from "must be 10x better to have a chance" to something closer to "just has to open my files and let me do some reasonably decent work and save as PDF". Jesus, even Quark might stage a comeback.

Subscriptions rob a product of momentum because the user has to keep pushing it; a bought package serves as its own reason to not change, whereas the rented package keeps asking the user to justify the cost every single month. That only works when there's no alternative.

Re: They're both right.

"> XML. An arcane, in-efficient, bloated pile of crap

It's a fracking markup language described in a few pages."

Fair point, it's an arcane, inefficient, bloated pile of crap described in a few pages.

Re: Socialists!

"Hmm, the "enormous value" for culture trumps the rights of the individual?"

Sometimes, yes. I don't think this is one of them, though.

Re: At last

"I'm sorry , what? You think 6 BILLION euros is a "small" amount of money to spend on an experiment for one niche area of physics that hasn't produced much in the way of usable technology in 50 years??!"

Well, you're wrong about the usable technology issue and 6 billion spent over several years is a drop in the ocean compared to what we threw away in a moment on the banks and what we waste on nuclear weapons that will never be used, or indeed on building roads or high speed rail links which will be used but mostly for pretty trivial reasons.

Re: At last

"Science doesn't exist in a vacuum , its part of society and society has to foot the bill and therefor society has a say on whether its worth the money whether you like it or not."

If, at this point where we can fly to Australia, give children to unfertile couples, pack millions of working parts into half a square inch, see through objects, go to the bottom of the deepest ocean, and talk to our kids no matter where they are when we want to, "society" still thinks there's some question about the value of such small amounts of money being spent on science, then there is clearly a problem with society and I for one would be happy to point the finger at the aforementioned Tarot cards, astrologers, fortune tellers (and priests and imrans and rabbis) and all the other pedallers of lies and easy answers.

Re: @Kevin 6

"Google makes their work searchable so I would think it brings more customers than less..."

I'd say not, in my experience as a reader. I've never bought a book that Google threw up as a result of a search. I *have* read a bit I was interested in and moved on a few times.

Bottom line is that Google is making the real money out of this, which is why they did it. It's standard working practice for big Internet companies - get someone else to make the content for free and then sell it.

Re: Somebody PLEASE!!!!

"GIMP is not 100% PS compatible as it does not render 100% of PS's layers/objects/filters with 100% accuracy, 100% of the time; which would be a mandatory requirement to act as a PS replacement in a professional shop."

Well, it's a requirement today. In a few years, given that Adobe have just committed suicide, it won't be.

"Cloud" (ie, rental) computing was the norm in the 60's and it was shit then; it's still shit now.

Re: Somebody PLEASE!!!!

"A printers job is to reproduce the original as closely as possible. If your proof is shit, so will you print."

If I hand you an RGB photo (gosh, those are SO rare) and a colour profile and you can't get a decent CMYK then the problem is at your end.

"The soundstage came alive with incredibly accurate stereo imaging, although obviously this was due in no small part to the depleted uranium interconnects and the pineapple perched on the windowsill."

Classic hi-fi wank. You can actually put the pineapple anywhere and it has the same effect.

Re: Somebody PLEASE!!!!

"And you do CMYK properly?"

That's the printer's job, not mine. And I've not had any problems in the last decade. Spot colour is more of an issue than CMYK, really.

Photoshop is very over-rated - users tend to count the features it has rather than the features that they use/need. InDesign is a gem, though.

Re: Give me your money!

"Make no mistake, this is just a scheme to squeeze money out of the end users."

Yes, that's what he said: "cloud".

The whole POINT of cloud computing is to force a rental system on users.

Re: two points i disagree on...

"How do you balance copyright with privacy?"

Personally, I think copyright should be life or 14 years, whichever is longer. This allows everyone to have control of their own work while they live and also gives children a period to exploit their parents' work should the parent die soon after creating something.

The problem is defining "life" in a world where corporations are regarded as legal persons. Of course, we can solve that by saying that copyright is something that only a living human, or group of humans, can have.

Not going to happen.

Re: And if you thought the Outlook.com WEBSITE was bad........

Well, they're hardly going to encourage you to use something other than Windows, are they?

"Additionally, there are only a couple of flavours of Windows, Server and not-Server."

And, er, the other 10 flavours.

But, otherwise, yes MS has a huge advantage in that they have a large advertising budget and they have the monopolistic power to force their product onto almost every new desktop computer sold.

Where MS don't have that power, Linux is pretty well tied for users with iOS and is probably going to overtake that soon.

"With supporters like you, who needs Bill Gates?"

They're Don's trade secrets.

Re: Windows Desktop is from Venus, Linux Desktop is from Mars

"With supporters like you, who needs Bill Gates?"

Eadon isn't a Linux supporter - he's a parody account. I assume he's a Windows user of some ilk.

Re: Excuse me

"Metadata stripping is already illegal."

But nearly impossible to police.

Re: Fine

" this legislation simply allows works that have no identifiable owner to be used if the, yet to be created, regulator/licensing authority agrees that adequate attempts have been made to identify the owner."

But given how trivial it is to remove metadata or simply avoid ever having it, how can anyone prove that you didn't make adequate attempts? I can't think of any method even slightly effective against, say, a technically competent 15-year-old with a computer.

"Even if your work is 'accidentally on purpose' considered 'orphan' you do actually still retain the copyright to the work and can pursue the user for compensation or issue a take-down notice"

Well, as I say, there's not much chance of getting compensation as you won't be able to prove malice and if they've sold 10,000 copies of the image by the time you find them then not only will you not get compensated but you'll have 10,000 other people who think they own a legitimate copy and no way to tell a court any different.

It's a complete shambles of an idea and at the end of the day there was absolutely no need for it. I think one could make a reasonable case that this is a public-office corruption case waiting to happen.

Re: Probabliy better understood as...

"It's probably better understood as fascism, not corporate capitalism."

Not a lot of difference. Both boil down to "the strong take what they want; the weak take what they're given".

Thanks for that. While reading it I did find myself wondering if Gödel's theorem might apply to reality itself. The "universal constants" are the axioms and the mathematical relationships between them are the allowed rules of inference. Eventually we are bound to find some parts which can not, and can never be, reconciled.

Just a thought.

Re: unless...

Interestingly, one version of the Tardis (multiple writers = no consistency) is that it can only travel in ITS past. So Gallifrey is in our far distant future. This neatly avoids many paradoxes in that nothing that a Time Lord does affects their own future; they're always simply doing things that, potentially at least, were known to have been done already before they set out. The Time Lords can not change their own future except by acting in their present, just as we (think we) do; they can not travel forwards to see what effect decisions will have and thereby make different ones.

There is a vestige of this idea in that most Dr Who writers have stuck to the rule that the Doctor can only meet himself in extremely unusual circumstances which are dangerous to the structure of his own timeline. Aside from being a useful plot device rule, this can be seen as recognition of how much energy would be required to actually change one's own past by the transference of entropy from one "knowledge frame" to another and thereby alter the second frame, which is ultimately made up of all the states of matter in the universe.

Of course, most Dr Who writers don't worry about any of this and there's far from being a "one true" theory of Time in the show. Sadly, recent stories (particularly the dreadful stuff that Davis wrote) have in fact been overly concerned with the time travel aspect as a thing in itself and not so interested in just using time travel as a mechanism for getting the Doctor and his assistants into an interesting story.

Re: Death of investigative journalism...

"why was there no insight as to why hundreds of professional architects met in NY soon after 9/11, to claim that the twin tower collapse was a controlled demolition?"

Oh, I know this one! Because they didn't (and if they had then they would have been idiots).

Re: Hilarius stuff.

""BTW requiring a 2/3 majority of all MP's to change how a body is run makes it a damm sight tougher for any govt minster to change than slipping in the old "statutory instrument" into legislation."

and a damn sight less democratic too."

There's nothing democratic about parliament anyway, except a brief flurry of lip-service every five years before they go back to doing what the rich tell them to do.

Re: And yet, and yet ...

"The likes of GIMP and Inkscape are improving constantly but they're still a fair way from matching the amount of features in Adobe's software."

This is true but there's a bell-curve here and a hell of a lot of those features are aimed at the very thinest ends of that curve. GIMP and Inkscape cover the important stuff that gets most people what they need. If you're out on that end of the needs curve then Adobe are the go-to supplier. But you're probably not (even if you think you are).

Re: The wisdom of the crowd!

"Except that is demonstrably not true."

Well, shitpeadia would say that, wouldn't it?

Re: Uhh...

"Well yes, it seems that they want to encourage people to settle rather than take up the court's time"

Almost certainly, but there is a contradiction here with the general obsession in courts with case law. So, if you want to make a case into a precedent which helps other people in the future (which is possible the case here) then you HAVE to push through to a final legal decision. At which point the court claims that you've wasted its time.

Bloody lawyers.

Re: Scan, Copy & Paste

"All very good, but not the solution to my problems."

My God, Jim, it's a scanner, not a miracle worker!

Re: And yet, and yet ...

Also, Photoshop may be a "nice to have" for photographers, but it's not essential as a hundred years of photography shows. Take a good picture with the camera in the first place and post-production can be almost eliminated for a large proportion of the average photographer's output.

Layout is actually much more Adobe's stonghold than photography.

Re: And yet, and yet ...

"Unless, of course, you are claiming that ever server, every PC, every laptop, every mobile, every switch, every camera, every...you get the idea..."

The funny thing is that probably everyone of those might be running Linux. My laptop, desktop, mobile and camera certainly do. Some switches do too.

It's probably easier to tick all those items on Linux than anything else.

Re: Not paying for patents

"Just to point out that patents are not a product of the Medieval Ages, but of the Age of Enlightenment."

Not quite. Patent law, from the period you are referring to, is just a formalization of a system of government/monarch-granted monopolies dating back to at least the 1100's.