Posts by heyrick
1967 posts • joined Sunday 20th December 2009 13:24 GMT
Page:
“They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”
Want it said with a J? Then spell it with a J, twat.
It is completely logical to say GIF - hard G, like Google or gotcha or perhaps even the word it is supposed to represent, Graphics.
You say the acronym in full, Graphics Interchange Format, there is nothing in there that implies a soft-G pronunciation other than pretentiousness. Wiki expands on the reasoning: something to do with a peanut butter brand/advert (it, itself, spelled with a 'J', note) which would mean bugger-all to anybody not from America.
Re: Precedence for this?
There's a difference between a network and the police reacting together in the midst of a mass disturbance...
...and baking in back doors as standard.
Time to introduce protocols that actually ask you to verify...
...that the site you are connected to really is the site you think it is.
SSH to my server does, https to my bank doesn't. Sure, it has the name in green, but for how long can we trust this?
Re: I'm not so sure....
Who would you like the credit for that to go to? Kubrik? Kay? One of the doers who actually made it happen?
Why does there have to be any specific person to give credit to? You know, all around the developed world we have internet access fast enough to deal with streaming radio and some streaming TV (I can watch a fair few channels on my mere 2Mbit). But who takes the credit? Think before you answer as no matter how cool the networking kit, it would mean little without the millions of miles of phone lines, and ADSL probably developed or learned from ISDN which developed or learned from analogue modems which... you see? There are people/companies responsible for the jumps but it also needs history and it needs evolution. The credits are many. I imagine it is a similar story for the smart phone and tablet. Sure, Apple saw an opening in the market and they went for it, but this was aided greatly by the right technology being in place at the right time and somebody clever enough to join the dots. There have been earlier attempts, that have failed for a variety of reasons (poor resolution, poor UI, poor battery life, can't do anything other than the built-in apps, etc etc).
(i.e. the combination of hardware, software and immediacy)
Immediacy? What, you mean like it doesn't take forever to start up? I grew up in the '80s, my first computer took about half a second to go "burrrr" and after a brief pause, it went "beep!". The boot took less time than it took for me to sit down from reaching around the back to the power switch.
The early smart phones didn't make computing ubiquitous because users largely ignored the smart part.
Don't mix up smart phones with feature phones. I think you'll find that, asides from a collection of crappy J2ME interpreters on devices with amazingly poor screens (102x102, 256cols on one of my old phones), many of the feature phones basically didn't do much more than what it could do out of the box. I could savage my Nokia. I think a 6210i, but don't quote me on it. The J2ME wasn't bad, I could install OperaMini, however it used shared memory so the more Java applets I installed, the more crashy the phone became as memory it used for other stuff (like SMS) was no longer there. Then there is the email software that would only download one email before crashing due to a lack of memory (same even with no applets on the phone). Some feature phones were good, some were awful. Most, you couldn't do much with beyond the feature set built in. Ever tried reading a mere text file on one? Did the software crash if the file was >64K?
Perhaps the single biggest advance of the smartphone (of any flavour) is the concept of an app is not an afterthought hidden in some menu option, but right there on the front line. PDF readers, email, Amazon, MXPlayer, manga reader, map, browser, phone dialler and addressbook - the phone doesn't make any specific distinction. Everything can be given an icon and tapping on it makes it start. The built in stuff, the stuff you download, the stuff you might write. In this way, while you are running Apple or Android or what-have-you, you are able to customise the thing to your own personal tastes. Then throw in the notifications and the widgets. Who just emailed you? What time is it? What song am I listening to? Will it rain? All this stuff can be presented directly on your home screen(s) so you don't even need to start an app to look at it. The ultimate personalisation.
Re: "Historical inevitablility" yadda yadda.
I think your revising your memories to tell a story. Phones getting smaller, yes. Phones becoming computers no.
Exactly. Get your mind back to the eighties and concentrate really hard. A modern SoC with half a gigabyte on top is smaller than an 8K EPROM. I can look inside the EPROM's window and see the memory array inside. It is larger than the 16GB Flash chip inside a microSD card.
But it isn't just sizes. On my (VoIP) land line I can call pretty much anywhere, anytime, for free. If you lived in the UK in the '80s you might remember those little orange books with arcane dialling codes so you could call nearby places in different code areas without being hit for a national rate call (IIRC that was anything over 35 miles, but they must have counted miles by telephone wiring).
Do you remember Prestel? You could read a blocky teletexty 40x25 page of information and it would say "5p" in the corner of the screen? That didn't mean five pages, that meant you just paid 5 pence to look at that in addition to connection charges and time-on-the-line charges and frankly GPO telecom was horribly expensive. But at least you could pick up the phone and dial "00" to place an international call. Some places (hello Baltimore!) still needed operator assistance to call overseas.
On the other hand, these days we can get more information than we know what to do with in seconds. It is either "free" and mostly unlimited as part of a broadband package, or you'd get 200MB-1GB per month as part of a mobile subscription. Do you have any idea how much coin you'd drop on a 20MB SASI harddisc in the late eighties? This was an era when many kids loaded their games from cassette tape! Now we can fill one of those harddiscs in... about five minutes... with data pulled from all sorts of places on the planet.
You could buy a pocket television. Something like the Sony Watchman (itty bitty flat CRT but good enough resolution to read teletext on BBC2 on a screen just over an inch or two across!). If you were lucky you might be able to hook it to a video player, though often that meant a piece of wire wrapped around the antenna and tuning the television in to the signal (varying degrees of success). We probably would have mocked the hell out of somebody that said in 2012 it would be "normal" to dump dozens of full length feature films, a pile of animé, the contents of every tape and LP you own, and hundreds of documents on to a gadget with a full colour display on the front, a gadget that can be a movie player, a book, a tape deck, a camera, and a telephone. Oh, and it will power itself by a little battery inside that will give several hours of continual use, you can interact with it by prodding it with a finger, and the thing itself will fit inside a cigarette packet.
Once upon a time you kind of tended to give a wide berth to the crazies that walked around talking to themselves. They were either geniuses on the brink of a meltdown, or just plain crazy. Now you see grannies in the supermarket yacking to the air and you realise she's probably involved in a long discussion about beetroot with her husband who could care less but is no way brave enough to say that. That's not a hearing aid, it's a bluetooth earpiece!
But even better, nowadays I can walk into the middle of a muddy field in rural France in a place full of wheat and cows and bugger-all else worth mentioning for fifty miles in any direction, and watch NHK World live broadcast. Not so long ago (and much more recent than the eighties), it was harder to receive Channel 5!
A friend and I used to CB to each other. It was complicated and for getting good reception it involved tuning the antenna and caring about what sort of power supply the transceiver was connected to, and so on and so on. We used CEPT (PR27GB) sets as it was often a lot quieter than the 27/81 frequencies; except when the weather was such that we were swamped by excitable Europeans shouting at each other with equipment reaching a heck of a lot further than my 4W could ever manage. Who needs CB now? The cheap version is to buy a PMR radio - almost as capable and doesn't need a licence. Or, if you want to talk to people in other countries, you could use Skype or (once upon a time before they buggered it up) Google Talk, both of which permit not only voice discussion and sending files, but also slow and jerky but usable streaming video. You can see the person you are talking to. They could see me, standing in the muddy field, in the middle of nowhere.
So to wrap up, I think you'll find that much of the technology we take for granted was predicted, but it was predicted in science fiction books and future tech in an age where we will live in space in giant orbiting wheels (centifugal force for gravity). We haven't done so well on this front, perhaps mostly because our way of getting into space still involves sitting on a controlled (and sometimes not so controlled) explosion. But, yes, tiny handheld gadget that provides access to the world, affordable to the masses. We are so damn close to a real life Tricorder...
Re: sourgrapes
Same old same old.
I believe, when Apple is involved, this is called innovation.
Re: Their biggest crowd-driven maps app
It is good to tweak locations around where you live. The "road" to the east of me was a bumpy track across the muddy fields. Not something you'd want to take a car down. T'was nice to get that sorted out so navigation doesn't begin "turn right now"...
Re: Question.
An ARM coder, and I like the platform. Trying to wash the vomit that is x86 from my mind. Probably doesn't help that I learned a little bit of x86 in the days of segmented memory. ARM was like a breath of fresh air in comparison. Once you understand how it works, it is pleasant, but the while design is different to things like the x86 so you need to code in a way best suited to it...
Re: Additional Verification
A little extra checking may BE the hassle.
Who are you giving the information to? What will be done with it? What guarantee do you have that it won't be thrown out unshredded into a bin for easy harvesting by somebody? Is the person asking qualified or even authorised to be accepting this sort of information?
The customer does indeed need to wise up, but perhaps not in the way that you think.
Panic because
The ICO is toothless and pathetic but local to the country. An EU wide law, on the other hand, might mean prosecution in other parts of the EU and that may hurt after decades of nobody giving a crap and "lessons will be learned" rhetoric.
Oh well...
If I end up paying a tax on my smartphones, time to fire up the torrent client and get my money's worth!
Hang on...
"Spreading the net wider, the top 20 per cent of downloaders by volume is made up of 3.2 per cent of the over-12 internet-connected population, who are responsible for 88 per cent of infringements."
Hang on - moist of the infringements are done by a mere 3.2%?
Doesn't this kind of blow the whole "piracy is costing us beeeeeeeelions!" thing out of the water?
I was asked for this stuff to "register" my mobile phone with the provider
[in France, other jurisdictions may vary]
Apparently some anti terrorism excuse (isn't it always these days?). I said I would *post* a colour copy of my passport with "copie" written on it in board marker, and there is no way in hell they are getting copies of bank statements. And using email for this is not an option. I would havepointed out that other providers exist, but the girl I was talking to sent me the postal address by SMS while I was talking to her.
Re: Document Lock Out
Bring on the EU interoperability clause.
Re: In some regards, he has a point though
"But, all of a sudden, you are expected to spend 3 hour exams doing solid writing. It's not something you can just switch on..."
See icon.
The other day, spent forever and a day in a waiting room. I wanted to make a rough of an API so it would take form rather than being a jumble of conflicting ideas in my head. Now, I type all the time, this, emails, code. Pretty much the only handwriting I do is sign stuff or stick post-it notes on to things. I just couldn't face trying to write something complex using the draggy-swipey of a mobile phone. So I put 20p in the photocopier and copied two empty pages, borrowed a pen from the receptionist, and filled three sides of A4. There is something warm and inviting about an empty piece of paper; a sort of time where all the possibilities in the world lay before you. You can solve difficult equations, you can write a love letter, you can make a shopping list, or doodle a chick with manga eyes and a sword the side of a house fighting an army of rampaging mobile phones...
In short, yes, I turned on the ability to write for hours and hours. Those who cannot were probably never able to in the first place. And I fear that half-assed comments such as that by Mr. Walker will rob people of the ability to do even that much.
"If you jog 3 miles a day, 5 days a week, for 2 years, and then I ask you to run for 3 hours solid, do you think your body could do it? Muscles are trained over time."
I presume by running you mean full-on being-chased-by-zombies style running, instead of a gentle jog? I wonder how many people here would truthfully be able to leg it for three hours solid. I know I couldn't.
However, there is a world of difference between running (which requires muscle training to do well, but most of all shedloads of stamina and energy) and... writing. I can understand writing being tiring if you are the sort of person that presses so hard you leave tracks on the surface of the table, but that's because... "you're holding it wrongly" (boom!).
When was the last time your employers judged you on a piece of handwritten work?
They do basic analysis here in France. At my job interview the woman was getting flustered until I pointed out to her that not only did I teach myself to write [*], I am also not French so my style of writing would be quite different to anything she would be used to. It surprised me that such methods are being used to examine candidates, I guess nowadays the question would be "show me how much of a prat you are on your Facebook account".
* - American schools learn writing late, English schools learn early, I fell in the middle and as a dyspraxic left hander, the teachers just couldn't be bothered with a catcher-upper. For that I am eternally glad, as I seem to be one of the few lefties that writes "normally". My hand is rotated slightly anti-clockwise so I can write without dragging my hand through the ink. It seems almost everybody else turns their paper 90 degrees clockwise and their hand even further to write towards themselves which is insane and can only have been devised by the sort of person that would spout crap like "left handed people are in league with the devil", there's surely no solid justification for taking a person with difficulties writing and making it even harder...
I can't believe it!
If you can read French...
Same company, same story, different country. What is this, a game or something? How to kick the bereaved? Scum...
Ummm...
"he/she hasn't been deprived of that most basic human need: an internet connection. Cake? Let them eat Gmail. "
You do realise, I hope, that this comment makes you sound a bit of a twat? You can usually get online in a public library; it is becoming more and more necessary for interacting with the government, DWP, finding jobs etc. Just because somebody posts using a computer, doesn't necessarily mean they are blowing their minimal cash on telly and internet instead of, you know, food.
And in other news...
...five year old kid with a "My First Rifle" murders his little sister (the media likes the phrase "fatally wounded", but I tend to think of aim-shoot-bang as plain and simple murder (accidental, perhaps, but she's still a corpse)).
Icon says it all.
Shouldn't you...
...be including the water and fuel (gas?) into the £1/day?
Re: Good
I'm not "picking" on musicians. I suggested MP3 for two reasons - the first is that the usual sorts of fines and punishments for downloading songs doesn't exactly fit the crime (recall the Pooh Bear laptop fiasco - and that was for a failed attempt to download), plus MP3s are a lot more managable on the server side - as opposed to video which is not only vastly larger in filesize, but also comes with the hangup of numerous encoding formats in several different types of "container". That's why I chose MP3. Not to kick musicians.
However, certainly, I agree with you that people who create content (<cough>that would be all of us!) need to fight this as it is the slippery end of a steep slope.
Good
So now we need a server with upload capabilities. People can upload MP3s. All metadata will be stripped, and the files will be given sequential filenames and offered to download freely. 123456.mp3 might be a chart hit, Johnny Cash, or somebody's baby gurgling. Who knows? Who cares?
Let's see if those normally hyper protective of their rights feel the same as us when the shoe is on the other foot, eh?
As I said before
You'll want to be doing this for at least a month before you can fully appreciate how bad it can be living like that. You know, when your body's reserves have run out and you're actually trying to live on that sort of thing...
This would sound better...
...if I could long-tap articles on my phone to open several in new windows without it trying to take me somewhere like pubads.doubleclick.net for the first few times in each session. Normal tap works, long-tap does this thing...
Isn't it a little rich to disparage Google's rampant data collection while using those same services yourselves?
This is a flawed test
Kudos to you for trying; however a reasonably well nourished person can make it a week on penny bread, beans, and all the bargain bucket foods.
If you really want a test for science, do it for a month. You'll start noticing the difference after 2-3 weeks (depending on your build) and a week later you'll feel sluggish and it just doesn't improve as you start to realise just how crap the quality of the food if you think you can live on a pound a day. I would change the world "live" to "survive".
Re: Android Malware and Number of Infected Devices
Maybe the average Android user is a softer target than an iOS user? This doesn't mean that iOS is secure, just that it isn't being vigorously attacked (though a weak market model and crap permissions model don't help Android much).
Remind me, how many vulns does iOS have? Try this: http://www.cultofandroid.com/26133/android-main-malware-target-but-ios-has-more-vulnerabilities/
Just be glad the evil lulz crowd is gunning for Android, you Apple guys can live in peace . . . for now.
Vague
“I have not created anything of beauty in the last year”
Some might consider creating a child to be a thing of beauty, others might think a good algorithm expressed in the most concise code, others might perceive their graffiti to be a work of art. Questions like this are stupid.
Dear Dave
I went to boarding school in the mid eighties and the amount of smut available to a 12 year old would shock you. The playground is where I learned all the best swear words in three languages, plus such riveting things as the missionary position and how homosexuals of either type "do it".
Thus, either kids today are naive and stupid or your anti porn filter is naive and stupid. Pick one...
French and Germans are holding them back?
"and the product side dived 17 per cent, largely related to a one-off low margin deal."
While Europe may have economic issues that factor into company predictions, this reads to me like management want to try to pass the buck for difficulties arising from a bad contact. This is NOT the fault of the Germans, this is the fault of the person that inked and signed the contract.
Do you think activists are that stupid?
...to have a shiny phone with an address book packed with contact info of all their cohorts? What next, they'll all be signing into Latitude and sharing their location?
The simple, obvious, answer is that if you feel the need to maintain a level of privacy while passing through borders that are dubious (and these days I'd consider entering America to be the same too) then there are some things to do:
1. Buy a new phone. Some generic cheapo Android. If you're a fan of the big pomme, maybe look to eBay or classified adverts?
2. Blank the phone, install a generic blank SD card. Transfer your SIM if necessary (though you'll probably get better deals buying a SIM in the country you're visiting).
3. Install NOTHING.
4. Extract the apk files for the apps you can't be without and hide them uncompressed (one by one, not zipped up 'cos you can't guarantee to be able to unzip stuff) on some web space someplace.
5. After entering into the country, if you have any suspicions, use the option to reset your phone to factory defaults.
6. Buy/install SIM, make sure the phone part works. Then find some WiFi access and start downloading and installing the apps you need. This might lead on to protected archives containing vCards for your contacts, documents, and such.
Of course, Android is capable of that flexibility once the phone is unlocked from the carrier. Your mileage may vary with other types of phone...
"Facebook currently has a little over 1 billion users worldwide on all devices."
[citation needed]
And an accurate one at that, not FB's skewed statistics.
Oh, and for what it is worth, note the "on all devices". Well, I have logged in to FB on three phones (mobile website, never ever plan to touch the app on principle of it being uninstallable bloatware) and a computer. Does this count as one user or four? Hmmm...
Re: meh....
"If I'm washing-up, I can check the time, without getting wet hands on my phone."
Some of us live lives where the only thing of regular time-related importance is getting to work on time (alarm on phone to wake me). Breaks and lunch happen "about then". Finishing work happens "about then". Television programs are handled by my PVR and watched when I feel like it. Nothing else needs me to keep enough of an eye on the time to justify having a watch. As I'm using XP I can glance over and see it is 00:28 right now, but if that was tweaked to read "about half past midnight" then that would be plenty accurate enough.
"two explosions in the White House, one of which had injured Barrack Obama"
Dear Obama, piece lid before microwaving. That way it won't blow up.
Re: Punish them.
"I have said this before, but will say it again: These people will continue their relentless assaults on our privacy and freedom as long as it comes at no cost to them. We need to make the assault itself costly to them. They need to be put on notice that we are taking names and the penalty for assaults on the commons is to be, at the very least, disbarred from the commons."
Err... Are you talking about Anonymous or the politicians? Or both?
Re: Surely T&Cs cover this ?
"Anyone any idea what the UK position would be here, if a candidate declined to provide these details ?
Can RIPA be bent that far?
Posted in Yahoo! Axes! Yet! More! Products!
Why oh why...
Yahoo Mail (online) would be much more tolerable for me if it worked correctly on a netbook display instead of stuff going off the bottom of the screen (the older version works just fine). It is kinda like how the latest incarnation of YouTube no longer fits a 1024px display. All this clever scripting and they can't do something as simple as make the content fit the screen.
Bio fuel can kiss my. ....
When my dinky little three cylinder C1 struggles up moderate inclines when tanked up with 95 octane 10% ethanol, you KNOW something is seriously wrong. A C1 is hardly a performance car. It runs on 98 octane, as most of the 95 around here is E10. Frankly, I would not even use that crap in my mower.
Fail
Hadn't heard of this before. Went, on my mobile, looked for "Silver Street, Bridgwater".
(quote) The search returned no matches. Try removing numbers or shortening the name to the first five characters and try again.
Went to Google Maps. And looked at a map of the place I used to live.
Sorry Streetmap, but.......
Re: @JetSetJim - I remember streetmap...
"There are many other online mapping services, but they are simply not getting a look in because of Google's anti-competitive behaviour."
Why the hell shouldn't Google promote their own services on their own site? You are asking Google for a map; Google provides that, so they tell you. If you don't like, use another search engine!
What next, eh? Complaining that NatWest is abusive because you can't go into a branch to sort out a car loan with HSBC? Or Tesco is guilty of not selling Waitrose products?
Posted in The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Bizarre list
We must be in cloud cuckoo land - what list could possibly have a Spectrum and a Cray side by side?
Anyway - as sexy as the Cray may appear, do you realise just how many kilowatts it sucks? Fire that baby up and your neighbours will see darkness!
Meh.
"forcing users to choose the Chocolate Factory's map, email and video services." ... "whether the firm unfairly uses its search dominance to link to its own services, like Maps and YouTube, before others."
Map: Just looked in the app market store thingy. Orange makes a map application. This is preinstalled on my phone. I don't use it. A quick search brought up ViaMichelin.
Email: The stock email client is operational but simplistic. The best I can say is that it works. There's a more full-featured open source project, but it looks "complicated" (in that I don't want to spend forever and a day setting it up). I looked at the applications offered by Microsoft Corporation. Outlook wasn't one of the options, though Lync and "on{x}" (huh?) were.
Video: Given YouTube is the big video share site, it would make sense to have YouTube on the phone regardless of whether or not it was there in the beginning. However, in the interests of fairness I looked for others. I found "Vimeo" in seconds, and it said that the Vimeo app for Android was (quote)finally here(unquote) with an app dated January of this year. Is it Google's fault that there has been a working YouTube app for years already? Dailymotion goes one step further and has a player app and a kids version.
I looked for "video player" and MX Player was the first offering. Rightly so. Dailymotion was eighth. YouTube didn't even appear to be in the list. Ditto on the desktop computer, Googling for the same thing.
Maybe this is because YouTube is already built in? Oh my God - Google supplying an app for one of their services in their phone? Whatever next!?
Point is, apps exist for Android. There's a place where they all hang out. Be there, or forever languish in obscurity...
Footnote: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/apps Oh look, there's the Skype app featured quite prominently. Now who owns Skype, I wonder? Built-in apps: SkyDrive, Bing, etc. Pot Kettle BLACK?!?
Re: Unfair competition
"But in the long run I think, at least I hope, it is for the benefit of us, the consumers." - I doubt that.
I'm way too cynical to think common sense will step in for the benefit of customers.
Example. I deal with pounds, euros, and from time to time yen. It was useful to go to Google and type "123 jpy in eur" and when the search came back, there would be a little box below it that said what Google estimated the rate to be. Somebody complained. Now it just provides a bunch of links to other sites which invariably don't tell me until I've gone to the site, enabled scripting, and then entered my value again. Bloody palaver.
I want Google to do this sort of stuff. I want Google to provide its own services where appropriate. If I didn't want Google to do this, I'd use a different search provider. There are alternatives (but they're shit - seriously, compare Bing's maps sometime for starters...), the world doesn't begin with "G" and end with "e".
But no, rather than attempt to create something of equal value, it is far easier to whinge to the EU or anybody else who will listen because Google has the better product and that's a Bad Thing. Wah.
I fail to see how any outcome restricting Google from including their software will ultimately be better for the end user.
Re: Huh?
"Android is the dominant OS for portable devices (verging on a monopoly)." - Google might be privacy-invading sharks, but they're good at what they do. If Android didn't work and wasn't cheap then it wouldn't be adopted.
"It is not possible to remove Google apps (e.g. Chrome, Maps etc)." - it isn't possible to remove Facebook, or Timeline-thingy, or OrangeEtMoi, or the games that don't even work in my country (supplied by Orange France to a person in France, WTF?), or a dozen other things that I just can't get rid of. It gets worse - on the apps listing I can selectively hide my own app installs, but I can do sod all about the baked-in stuff.
"then it is monopoly abuse for Google to prevent the removal of pre-installed apps" - I agree with you. But not just Google (to be honest, I do wonder if the app lock is more Google or more the manufacturer/carrier?). You should be able to remove an unwanted app. Period. Bye bye stupid Orange Backup that has never been configured yet tries to sync my stuff (addressbook?) regularly and fails, and feels the need to tell me about it. Typical crappy Orange stuff. I can't even remove it, kill it, or stake it in the heart.
The Orange home screen on my phone (2011) was nice
But it was slow and you could literally see the battery dying as the home screen did nothing. Thankfully it was easy to revert to the normal one.
Oh, and if Sony is reading: I DON'T WANT GOD DAMNED FACEBOOK ON MY GOD DAMNED PHONE! Why can't we uninstall this crap?
Re: facepalm!!
"How does the saying goes again, about the security benefits of having many eyes looking at the source code?
...except that this wasn't the source code, but some admin stuff that should not have been publicly available.
What I don't get...
Nork is not a big place. You go messing with the world for the lulz, they're going to eventually mess back. Now while they might have a win under their belt when it was Americans slogging through the jungle, conflicts just aren't fought like that any more, and it seems like the regime is unstable enough that it may discover a dearth of allies...
Re: practicalities
"(b) it is made available to the public by a person and any of that person’s activities relating to the creation or the publication of the work take place within the United Kingdom.”"
Interesting. It doesn't explicitly state that it will archive .uk domains, rather domains in the UK (which they refer to as "UK published material"). This should in theory exclude .uk domains hosted elsewhere, but may bring in .com and .org and .net and anything else "within the UK".
My password protection is for development/test software, screenplays I'm letting selected friends test-drive, and other stuff that I want accessible to specific people, but not public. They are not getting copies. Just because it exists on a computer doesn't mean it has been "published"; some of the things have been read by three people on the entire planet (and I'm one of those people). If they are going to take that approach, then everything that exists with words in it (even private stuff, doctors reports and such) can be considered a "publication" and will need to be collected and archived. Do you still think this is sane?
Continue to downvote if you want, but this whole concept IS ill-conceived and retarded.
Re: Thoughts
"You don't understand copyright. You have been *given* the right over copies on the condition that the BL is allowed to store the material regardless of what you want/like."
In other words, "let's tweak a law so we can record a copy of everything without landing in trouble".
Consider this: The acts restricted by copyright in a work. (1)The owner of the copyright in a work has, in accordance with the following provisions of this Chapter, the exclusive right to do the following acts in the United Kingdom— (a)to copy the work (see section 17); (b)to issue copies of the work to the public (see section 18); [F44(ba)to rent or lend the work to the public (see section 18A);] (c)to perform, show or play the work in public (see section 19); [F45(d)to communicate the work to the public (see section 20);] (e)to make an adaptation of the work or do any of the above in relation to an adaptation (see section 21); and those acts are referred to in this Part as the “acts restricted by the copyright”.
(2)Copyright in a work is infringed by a person who without the licence of the copyright owner does, or authorises another to do, any of the acts restricted by the copyright.
In other words, I as the author of something have the right to provide it, or not. On the terms of my choosing. This is part of national and international agreements that just can't be arbitrarily modified. So, no, I do not believe that I have been given the "right" on the condition that the BL copies everything regardless. [further complication: my material originates in France and is uploaded to a .co.uk domain hosted in the United States... <grin>]
Actually, I don't care if they copy, it is the (re)serving that I don't appreciate.
The above, by the way, is from the Copyrights, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 - read it here (part 1, chapter 1, paragraph 16).
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Now, you may believe that this is a big storm in a very small teacup (yes, it is), however it introduces interesting precedent. Either a government institution can copy and then publicly reproduce copyrighted content without giving a damn about said copyrights; or the government is quite willing to modify copyright laws to allow the above to happen. Funny, citizen copies something they shouldn't (as a copyright infringement), it's a whole different story...
Thoughts
My stuff is released under a sort of licence. Essentially it is reminding you of copyright, but it also expressly forbids the content being served by a third party system while my website is still "live" (when I'm gone, it's no longer my problem). Secondly it prohibits in any case the modification of content for any purpose other than translation (especially the practice of detecting keywords and linking them to adverts). Those are the terms of distribution, Accept them or piss off, basically.
Secondly, given that recently a person was guilty of libel for retweeting a lie; I presume if somebody libels on their site and this turns up in the copy, the British Library will also be equally liable.
Thirdly, any terms and conditions imposed by the library will be groundless; they want to come get our content and copy it, so good luck making a disclaimer stick...
Fourthly, I assume it will obey robots.txt; if not it'll get blocked by IP on principle (or maybe I'll redirect them to their own website?).
Did they think this through?
