Oh yeah
It might as well be that much, really. I doubt it works that way (likely 500k max overall) but can you imagine the campaigns for lawsuits that'll come out of this? You'll have every pirate calling a lawyer.
74 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2009
This device should be throuroughly illegal, at least in a lot of circumstances it's used in. My local corner shop, right in the middle of a housing estate and with houses all around, manages to have this thing on 24 hours a day. It's RIGHT NEXT TO A SCHOOL, next to PEOPLE'S FUCKING HOUSES.
Ignoring the ridiculous antivirus restriction (see posts by other commentators!), this is just crazy because it's supposed to oppose the bad guys but actually creates a wonderful new opportunity - no need to hack PCs anymore, just hack government servers and you'll grab whatever you want from whoever.
Governments toot two horns. One claims (correctly, don't get me wrong) that companies collecting/releasing private stuff is evil. The other claims that unelected bureaucrats should be able to spy on our activities both online & offline with no regard for privacy just to catch paedophiles/terrorists/another-bad-group-that's-been-in-the-news.
How to stop people calling you evil:
Step 1: Promise to raise wages a lot to hopefully make life more tolerable for your worker drones that probably aren't committing suicide any higher than typical people in China but that people say are.
Step 2: Quietly as possible, shut down everywhere you're increasing wages, move elsewhere, have the new drones on the old rates (or even lower...), and make sure all the buildings are only one-story high.
"... You have a much more direct and intimate relationship with the internet and media and apps and your content. It's like some intermediate thing has been removed and stripped away. Like that Claritin commercial where they strip away the film. It's like that."
Yeah, all those lovely lego bricks everywhere. Regardless of what the church of jobs preaches, the only advantage to me of an iPad would be it's very long battery life being perfect for Atlantic flights - and even then the Macbook range easily suffices when you bear in mind takeoff & landing.
In units shipped, I expect you're perfectly right though I can't be bothered to check.
In aesthetics, originality (take completely revolutionising the smartphone market from what's now been shown to be piss-poor bred from little competition to a fairly competitive good market now), general features, etc etc, NO. It may have a dictatorial App Store/etc, but the fact remains the Phone itself is great.
From the article: 'The move is a mighty blow to services like Ad.ly and 140 Proof that were built to provide advertising on Twitter, but Costolo has urged third parties to find other ways of selling around the Twitter "timeline," its stream of 140-character mini-messages.
"Companies are selling real-time display ads or other kinds of mobile ads around the timelines on many Twitter clients, and we derive no explicit value from those ads," he says. "That’s fine. We imagine there will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline."'
The reality: We encourage devs to find new ways to make money using Twitter so we can monopolise their business if they're successful and so ruin your business.
Don't get me wrong - I fully realise that Twitter is, as should be expected, doing this because the VCs have grown a brain and have seen people making money from Twitter whilst Twitter frankly isn't and so are pressing for it to actually develop a business model - but in reality that's the truth of what he's saying.
So you see the continuing decline in honeybee numbers to be such a non-issue that El Reg shouldn't report on it, just because there's some crops that don't need them? Grow up and smell the coffee ... or actually since it's sometimes grown using Bees as pollinators* I guess you can't.
* According to http://gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/book/chap7/coffee.html anyway4
The issue (or perhaps more widely spouted theory, this isn't my idea) here is that whilst it was a commercial codec and no major threat to the rest of the market's royalty fees, there was no interest in the effort to kill it by actively buying up patents and studying others for possible use. WebM is currently in 1 day set for use on many internet sites - not sites that need DRM'd content to pretend that people can't steal it, but ordinary video streaming at least - and this means that, especially with Flash about to support/encourage WebM as well so taking away many DRM'd streaming sites, the potential for license fees for H.264 creators is severely slashed if not almost completely eliminated. They'll all have a particular interest in teaming up to use as many patents as they can to kill it.
The major hope here is that Google's had lawyers looking at patents for months and already has a defence already in the offing - which is likely to say the least bearing in mind how much they paid for the company in the first place and that rumour has long suggested that open web video was the major/only reason for the purchase.
I give them two weeks till the patent lawsuit is filed, and an absolute shitstorm of web campaigns/etc backing Google over this. I then expect the lawsuit going on for a couple of years, Google eventually winning by proving the patents used against are trivial (which is certainly true for many of them), the web proclaiming victory only being due to their campaigns even though that probably won't be true, and then a fairly good path for web video afterwards. Just my two cents.
Even stranger than what FB can get away with privacy wise is why on earth you get people filling out reams of personal info in the first place. If memory serves, when I signed up in order to reserve a vanity url (or whatever you call them) as soon as I logged in I had a prompt asking me to fill out more personal information than you'd probably agree to giving to your employer - pages of names, birthdates, emails, addresses, phone #s, urls, friends, location, and way more.
When Twitter asks for effectively 4 things - a unique username, your name, a location, and your email - I struggle to see why anyone would use FB. Yes, it provides image uploading etc - more for revealing everything about you - but at least Twitter has third-party apps for the like and to me is actually useful in finding various web dev resources and news.
I'd agree with this very much. To be frank, plain IT teachers tend to have little/no actual knowledge other than teaching how to use M$ Office and the like from my experience - to the point where, when asked to develop a basic site, if you (as I did...) code it manually with decent code you get accused of having stolen it from the internet. I spent about an hour trying to convince that teacher I actually made it myself, and in the end I'm still pretty sure he didn't believe me.
After trillion it's quadrillion then quintillion, etc etc. But yes, this whole drive to reduce the public debt will never actually happen as is needed under Labour - they'll get it down to what it was a few short years ago and say 'enoughs enough' without tackling it all. Personally I'm of the opinion that Britain MUST in future make sure that at least every second year it has a budget surplus come what may. That wouldn't atall be easy, but otherwise we're just starting a cycle of:
Gov hires loads more workers (from managers to the actual useful staff) --> Deficit gets really high --> Gov fires most useful workers but keeps bureaucrats --> Deficit reduces --> Gov hires --> ...
This guy deserved nothing to happen to him. I could understand him being arrested if he was on some sort of watch list/etc, but realistically this is just completely anti-free-speech. Are you really telling me that the Gov has nothing better to do but justify the 'war' on terror (in reality them doing everything they can to encourage/promote the 'major' terrorist threat in order to justify their jobs and dictatorial fascist powers (stop & search, detention without charge, ~cctv, crazy airport searches, no right to keeping encrypted data private, etc etc)).
Forget this guy, the people who [disclaimer: this is not intended as a libellious, terrorist-promoting, off-the-cuff or free-speech-supporting remark] have nothing better to do but deal with this are the ones who deserve to get prosecuted, lose their jobs, and be fined.
For years I'd always assumed Labour's rhetoric about only the wealthy caring about civil liberties was their usual tripe - a pack of lies designed to bring itself about - but recently it does seem that at least in my circle I'm the only one who sees anything wrong with Deep Packet Inspection, Interception Modernisation, indeed CCTV, traffic cameras, having to hand over encryption keys or being locked away, and indeed the ID Cards which everyone seems to forget *will* eventually become mandatory and their current voluntary state is simply so Labour can brush questions aside this election.
Seriously though, on my trip to college every day, we pass about 9 speed cameras - enough to lose your license twice and more over. A string of 4 are actually all within line of sight of each other - and this on a rather winding road. It's plain moneygrabbing - there's no real public bloody order purpose.