Posts by Keep Refrigerated
580 posts • joined Wednesday 1st June 2011 15:50 GMT
Let's face it...
We're already under a global tyranny of having to carry passports when we want to travel beyond certain invisible borders.
Real freedom would mean real (pre-WW1) freedom of movement. A prison the size of a million football fields is still a prison.
Re: Several...
It definitely is conformation that was going on. Just repeating the same stuff, slightly different.
@Mr Jonno
And yet the EU has yet to address Microsofts dominance of the traditional 'desktop' and force OEMs to provide alternative OSes as a pre-installation option!
For me that would do a lot more good than forcing a search engine to provide extra hyperlinks, when navigating to a competitor is 2-clicks away.
Que Es Search?
I can only see (3) and (4) being relevant since Google is already doing (1) and (2) to a degree and it would only require a bit more tweaking.
I assume Foundem and the other MS proxies will not settle until they've drawn blood. They don't want a fair solution, they want Google to lose some serious cash - it's about hindering rivals after all, not about fair competition or the end user.
As long as I don't do a search for something I'm looking to buy and get offered Foundem as a valid result, or another search engine as a valid result then that's fair to me.
I suspect if Google was forced to start redirecting people to Foundem, only to duplicate their personal search efforts, Google would start to lose mindshare - and profits - rapidly (but not to Foundem - to Bing or DuckDuckGo or someone else).
Foundem? fuck 'em!
Translation Please!
LG Display said its operating profit was 151.3bn Korean won ($135m) in the first quarter.
And what is that in British £?
Because I checked, and yes El Reg is still serving from a .co.uk domain, I know we seem to have a recent flood of US readers and writers but if this rag starts going US centric I'm going to have to cut loose and join the Inquirer or something drastic.
Re: Copyleft... bullshit
So you want to work for free then? What is the point of writing any code if someone bigger is going to come along, take your code and sell it?
This is a good question and I'm going to attempt to answer it...
* If everything is public domain - people can take your code and sell it, but you can also take their code and
a) sell it,
b) use it,
c) improve it,
d) merge it back into your own source.
* Even if they take your code and produce none of their own for you to take, users will tend to focus on brand and trust. You can trade on your
a) brand - companies will come to you for original code.
b) trust - people will prefer to get source from you direct (free and supported), rather than pay a reseller.
And for those that still want to pay a reseller for your free public domain code, well they deserve to go bankrupt and probably soon would.
Props!
Forgot to mention in my first comment - props to El Reg for actually linking to Groklaw for once, rather than that troll Mueller.
Forgive me for being naive, but how can a company sue for infringement of some intellectual 'property' that hasn't even been established yet? How could any judge presiding this case not be embarrassed for their justice system is beyond me.
Is it not like sentencing a suspect, imprisoning them, then waiting to see the outcome of the police investigation to see if a crime was actually committed?
Re: Overly sensitive
Well if Militant Black Guy ever retires from Balls of Steel - I think we have his replacement Militant Black Woman right here.
Re: PCMCIA dongles?
I'm surprised she was even aware of how to use these hugely technical terms given she posted a 7-minute long technical instructional video on YouTube teaching how to... wait for it... plug in a HDMI cable to your laptop and display a 2nd screen on your monitor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=httuIXjGz0Y
Go ahead, try to make it through the whole video.
Re: computer crimes @WatAWorld
Because we put people in prison for 3 years for not picking up dog poop? Because altering a URL and then creating an automated script is a crime on par with forcing yourself upon a woman and subjecting her to a despicable assault such as rape?
People who think like you are the reason this world is so f**ked up.
Wot.. no outrage?
No outrage over yanks coming over and stealing British jobs? No lengthy discussion over the merits and drawbacks of the UK visa system or immigration quotas?
Come on Brits, we're really being shown up by our counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic, on account of our lack of patriotic zeal.
Re: Is this the 80s????
Just be glad they're not calling them "cyber leaders". I'll take the abuse of the term "digital" over "cyber" any day.
Re: Let's pretend the internet doesn't exist for a minute... bear with me...
Well that is the truth, someone can steal your number-plates and not just number plates, whole cars get stolen. But the difference once again comes down to cost-benefit.
Whilst it's trivial and would take less than 3 seconds to steal a print left on the street, even less time to Ctrl+C and copy an image - for a small amount of risk and storage space. It's a bit more risky to steal a car in that you can't hide it up your jumper and you can't hide it once it's in your possession (without paying a lot more than a picture for storage space).
That's even ignoring the fact that you can take a picture of a picture and you can create a slightly inferior copy that you can enjoy. You can't take a picture of a car and say now I have another slightly less quality car to drive!
So I'm not sure how you defeat my analogy? It just makes me think you didn't really read my comment and neither did those who upvoted you. Why even bother replying?
Re: sigh
It's not just sellers getting scammed - buyers too.
Anecdotal evidence I know, but I paid for something that never arrived and tried emailing and calling the seller. Eventually got Paypal involved and the seller sent Paypal a scan of a postage receipt... for a completely different name+address.
Paypal accepted that as evidence and closed the dispute. That was where my relationship with Paypal and eBay ended. Will never use them again.
Let's pretend the internet doesn't exist for a minute... bear with me...
You are a photographer, you spend money on a photo shoot, printing your photos. Then you take those prints and hang them out on the street and walk away. You then come back in 24 hours to see if anyone made an offer to buy one - but you discover they've all been stolen and no-one left any cash.
You still have the original film, of course, but you're miffed as to why someone would steal the high quality prints you left outside for the world to look at and offer to buy. Everyone you complain to thinks you're a bit daft.
Let's repeat the mantra of the internet again, if you don't want people to copy your digital property - don't put it on the web!
The internet is like a public street. If you leave something out there there's no guarantee that the public will behave in a trustworthy manner and not take it. So what you need to do is put out low quality prints, or use watermarks, or simply announce you have a gallery and registration and/or fee allows people to come in and look.
Watermarking images on the web these days is a trivial thing and if you're photographs are worth it then buyers will look past the watermark to see how decent the picture is and then be able to make an offer. Anyone who copies the watermarked digital file just looks like an idiot - and are usually called out on it without the owner needing to assert their rights. If anything it just creates more publicity for the original image.
As far as aerial photography goes. I call bullshit. There will always be a market for these, but the nature of how that market works is going to change. Governments and private entities will have a desire for aerial photography but they may find themselves commissioning work, rather than purchasing it at £10 an image.
Here's the second tired, old mantra: No-one owes you an income. You create income for yourself by finding skills or product people want, and selling it to them at a price optimal to marginal cost.
Whilst regulations exist to ensure employers and business contracts remain fair, it doesn't mean someone can't be let go from a job, and it certainly doesn't mean that the government must try to force people to use new more efficient technology in a less efficient way in order to preserve diminishing marginal utility.
Re: despite Microsoft offering customers deep discounts on Windows 8 upgrades
El Reg really needs a shovel icon!
Red Herring
Fragmentation again? Really El Reg, is it still 2010? I could have sworn we had a couple of New Years Eve parties between now and the last 'sky-is-falling' article about Android fragmentation.
Android fragmentation is, and always was, a red herring. Did anyone complain about fragmentation of Symbian all those years ago when Nokia was market leader and cranking out feature phones faster than duck farts? No, because back then phones were sold on features, the OS was irrelevant in most consumers minds.
iPhone raised the bar on feature phones, but was it really a smartphone? It was missing several 'smart' features that phones like Blackberry and Nokia had for years - MMS, removable battery, 3G, calendar to name a few. Remember on it's first release the app store wasn't even a desired thing - Steve Jobs actively resisted the idea. I don't think the simple shape of a phone is a deciding factor in whether it is a smartphone or not.
So then Android comes along and leverages the plasticity of Linux to make it an iPhone contender. At this point iOS has grown into a smartphone OS as much as Android Donut started out as one. It was at this point that people stopped thinking of phones based on their hardware features and started considering them the same way they did desktop and laptop devices - a piece of hardware that can run an OS.
Of course the problem is that OEMs had yet to come round to this way of thinking. They were still trying to promote their hardware based on features, rather than as suitable hardware for a smartphone OS. I think it's been a learning process for manufacturers to come around to the idea that they are no longer selling features, but capable hardware. I'd say the learning process is not yet complete but some seem to be learning faster than others.
It's not like desktop and laptop manufacturers are any better anyway. One could equally argue that all the different types of Windows OS pre-installed with crudware (e.g. OEM version, Norton Anti-virus, Hardware Utilities etc...) causes fragmentation but people don't call it that and seem to accept it as a given that Microsoft is quite happy for manufacturers to sell crippled versions of Windows.
Re: There's a reason for Geolocation lockouts.
This only ever made sense when media was a physical import like food, utensils and other commodities. This day and age geography is not a physical restriction to distribution unlike it still is to physical items.
Tell me, when the telephone was invented, did the post office lobby for laws forcing people to mail a letter before initiating a telephone conversation? Because that is what region encoding is - it's an arbitrary block to render technology almost useless.
What about the motor car? Do we still need a law that states someone should walk ahead of the car with a flag to warn people so they don't get run over?
Re: Obi Wan...
Luke, I am your PPID.
Avast!
Lovely bit of self-defeating irony from the CIAPC pirates - their blue pirate ship has clearly been sunk by the brown pirate ships six pounder!
A very informative cyber-article
Geez, maybe they should stop prefixing cyber- to everything and then at least one hurdle to recruitment would be eliminated, namely the embarrassment factor.
It's like someone advertising themselves as "Dad's Dance Club for Girls". it's just cyber-wrong.
Re: Err...
OK just going to play devils advocate here, but I'm pretty certain that since the dawn of time, when women have gotten together they've bemoaned the oafish traits of their hunter-gatherer partners. What equality of the sexes has done is just allow them to speak their views in the open.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, my grandmother and other women in my family have always equally lambasted their husbands at times and other times speak sincere admiration for them and all they do (just not in the same conversation) - it's not a new thing.
OTOH the women in your office don't seem the enlightened type - they sound like ladettes. I never talk about football or sex and if I talk about beer then it's always my favorite continental beers. But I have been around women like that occasionally, it can sometimes get uncomfortable but I look at it as a challenge to rise above it and be thankful I know classier women. Show a bit of class, they'll soon shut up or put up.
RAINZ considers protecting life worth less than protecting copyright?
To my knowledge (Google) an NZ speeding find is roughly $300. Now, these BT fines are very low compared to what RAINZ is asking but they're still higher than being caught speeding.
Setting aside the arguments for and against speeding as a cause of accidents. If we are to take the government on principal that speeding kills and therefore a speeding fine is a financial disincentive to prevent deaths through car accidents - what does that say about the level of fine for merely downloading or sharing a song? Filesharing is a more serious (dangerous) offense than dangerous driving in NZ?
Re: Einhorn's Ulterior Motif
"When you buy stock in a company, you must agree with the way that stock is managed"
TFTFY. Overall though I agree with your sentiment.
What makes me laugh is that if Apple is the depression-era grandma hoarding her cash, that must make Einhorn a greedy distant relative trying to convince her to change the will, no?
So someone's smelling the winds of change then?
It seems like slowly US government officials are discovering that their aggressive policy towards hackers (in the traditional sense), the technologically curious and activists for the free-flow of information is starting to cause a bit of stink... so much that it's causing even mainstream tech community to hold the US government in contempt.
This in turn makes recruitment harder if you're raising a generation that is not only technologically superior to you, but actually considers you a road-block to freedom. They won't want to work for the government because they mistrust the government, in turn the government starts to lose IQ points in it's collective mind-share as the old guard retire and die off.
Can the US government restore it's reputation? Possibly - does it have the tenacity to? Not with the current majority of politicians stuck with heads up their collective arses. It will take a major shift in how it interacts with the tech community, might be too little, too late by then.
Re: My Samsung Chromebook turned up last week!
I just bought one too, had to order online because they weren't in stock anywhere - but it only took 3 days.
I have 2 netbooks which got a lot of use, good for travel and troubleshooting in tight working space. But at the end of the day you're still booting a full OS and therefore if you're at home you may as well boot up your laptop in case you need something with a bit more power or screen real estate.
Jumped on the tablet trend, and suddenly I hardly need to boot a laptop anymore, but there's still some websites or apps that are more accessible on a desktop browser - which is where the Chromebook comes in as a great inbetweener device.
It takes a while to get your head around the concept, but after you get over the initial vapour-like feel you can get on with some useful work. Google Docs works very well offline.
I never really thought it would be useful to have a cloud OS that mostly depends on being connected but when I actually look at my outdoor laptop usage, I usually won't do anything until I've found a hotspot or use my phones 3g.
That said, the pro's of the Samsung S3 is it's price, light weight and 1.7Ghz which is just a little bit more oomph if I was going to load ChrUbuntu on it. This HP Pavilion seems to have the all drawbacks of Chrome OS and none of the benefits in terms of cost, weight or speed.
Why is it that OEMs still seem to completely miss the value in offering customers a chance to fully utilize their hardware? Why does HP seem to think Chromebook buyers will be willing to shell out an extra £80 for a slightly larger screen size?
If they offered a 64gb SSD and faster cpu at this price then I would have snapped one up for the opportunity to duel boot Linux - but they still don't get it!
Statistics...
What Vodafone doesn't tell you, is that it no longer includes time spent in the automated menu, or on hold, as part of the phone call.
Babies dumped in the streets...
So you are in favor of China's one child policy where girls are being aborted and poor families dump unwanted babies in the middle of street I take it?
Perhaps every country in the world needs to look at the scientific evolution of our species and see that human beings are inherently nomadic and migrated most the world quite freely up until 1905 - to keep out Jewish people (1960's for Commonwealth citizens - to keep out black people).
Ironically Lord Nelson would have considered the only limitations of immigration at the borders where the British Empire fought for expansion - every country that came under English control would have given the citizens of that country the right to be part of the commonwealth.
In Nelson's day, being pro-war meant being (in a sense) pro-immigration. Now we just seem to have empires that are pro-war, but none of the benefits.
Re: All blow over? Not likely
A better vector of attack less likely to get jail time is to fight back with comedy - a Fake Carmen Ortiz twitter account or something. Her family have already proven to be particularly sensitive to criticism... that's where to hit them - it would be personal, it would hurt a lot more, and it would be completely legal.
Re: Ughhh
I imagine that in the first two minutes he'll have darth vader go back in time 10,000 years and change history...
Lucas has already done enough changing of Star Wars history without the need for a time travelling Vader plot. In fact, imagine all the things Abrams could fix...
Han *DID* shoot first!
Jar Jar Binks wiped from existence
Jedi Council actually do something other than talk
Darth Maul as actual main recurring villain of the prequels
Re: It's all right, they'll never make it work...
I hate to admit it but I have to offer a counter-anecdote -
Contrary to my expectations, I found Skype improved on my Linux since Microsoft took over - far more stable than it ever was. Before MS it would regularly crash X, force kernel panics. It still occasionally dies mid-conversation, but at least now it doesn't take my entire desktop with it.
On the privacy stuff, yep that is rightfully a huge concern though, so hopefully they'll keep the pressure on until we get a decent response. I have attempted to move my family to alternatives with little success so far.
Re: As an aside
I was just thinking the same. Doesn't Greenpeace regularly practice "interfering with [the] activity" of companies they consider morally reprehensible?
How about government regulators? Oh I see, no danger there of interfering with corporate activities...
What the judge seemed to mean was (FTFY) "It's intolerable that where an individual or a group disagrees with a company they should be able to interfere with its questionable economic activities"
Anyway Paypal supports scams - I have first hand experience of being scammed through Paypal - as far as I'm concerned Anonymous didn't do enough damage.
Re: "so the models are evidently wrong"
Well of course there models were wrong, the dolphins are still here...!
Re: If I'm ever investigating off site backups, and services provided by a third party..
Yep, enjoying the irony-laced posts that state "I'm not trusting a cloud, I'll just stick with my trusty (3rd party maintained) data center and hire (3rd party) temporary servers if it goes tits up."
The main issue appears to be regulatory - countries like the US where your US-based 3rd party service is subject to government seizure on a whim. Otherwise many companies are already using it - just not calling it that.
CloudTM is a marketing term for providing a shiny, manageable GUI for this well-established industry norm.
It's amusing to watch...
Years of lock-in, becoming locked-out.
I believe that children are the future...
Any college that punishes curiosity, inventiveness and thinking outside the box in such a way, is not a college I'd want to send my children.
It's also becoming clear we live in a world where the first things we have to teach our kids is how to read, how to write, how to share and how to respond to legal intimidation.
Ahh the old, "you don't have kids" argument from authority fallacy...
If you don't have kids, which I'm currently willing to bet a months' salary you don't, then you have absolutely not the first beginnings of a notion of a clue of a breath of an idea what "taking responsibility" means.
I have yet to see a parent produce a license, an exam certificate, a government mandate or other type of document asserting their qualification to raise children.
Indeed the only skill needed seems to be getting it in the right hole and waiting around for 9 months or so.
Of course, I'm not disparaging all the hard work that decent people put in to being a parent - but I've seen enough of examples of the other kind that lead me to conclude that if there were a license for parenting, that it should be revoked.
So wind your neck in, and accept that plenty of childless yet responsible people interact with your darling offspring every day and manage not to strangle it, push it under a bus or cause it any amount of unnecessary pain. In return all they ask is that you do your part in raising a decent human being to join the rest of us and not expect them to rearrange their lifestyles around you and yours.
Re: 2 years ? I'd have moved
From TFA
About two weeks later he was awakened at 4 a.m. by a person prowling along the side of his house. Dobson followed a flashlight beam to his bathroom window. When he looked out, the person flashed the light in his face.
"I screamed at him, 'Who are you? Get out of my yard!' " Dobson said. "And he said, 'We're the police, open the door.' "
North Las Vegas cops had received a 911 call from a woman on a cellphone who was arguing with a man. The argument was escalating, but dispatchers weren't able to get a location from the woman.
They looked at the location of the phone and sent officers, who arrived minutes later at Dobson's house. He was taken outside to his front yard and searched. When officers realized the mistake, they apologized.
Dobson said he is grateful that he didn't confront the officers with a weapon.
"I would have been on the losing end, and it would have been because of that issue," he said.
Interesting anecdote, wouldn't you say?
Re: The real tragedy here
The guy who created the petition - Alex Jones - was recently interviewed with Piers Morgan on his show. Jones started going berserk and yelling about 1776. At one point I thought he was going to whip out a pistol right there and shoot Piers or just pistol-whip him to death.
Then I felt conflicted, I mean, if that had happened, would I have cheered, or would I have been saddened? I just don't know the answer...
I am in no way exaggerating!*
Just ban asterisks... that should reduce their ability to overstate their offer!**
^
^
^
^
* Yes I am.
** See title.
BIlls, bills and yet more bills is effectively sticking a plaster over what is clearly an infected wound.
When will they realise that they operate on the cancer and remove it? Stop granting patents on ideas, and grant them on demonstrable inventions... and no, swiping your finger on a touchscreen is not an invention!
Re: "HMV was too expensive to survive"
I saw the writing on the wall 10 years ago, in fact my only surprise is that they've lasted so long. I was just in a HMV the other day (browsing only) with the OH and remarked "These guys will be the next to go..."
I gave up on HMV (at that time) when I wanted an old TV series box set priced at £19.99. Since it was near Christmas I thought I'd wait for the sales. Said sales came and a new sticker was on the box "RRP £39.99 / Sale: £19.99". I cannot stand deceptive marketing and would prefer they just didn't call it a "Sale" at all.
Re: Easily done...
Maybe I should also mention, this was before I owned a satnav - I was using a mapbook and following signs.
Easily done...
OK, ok, I'm going to admit that on one such 12-hour trip I took to Zurich, at Strasbourg I used to hop across to the German side of the border and cruise the E35 all the way down. One time it was extremely late and dark and I took the North exit, got to Mannheim before I realised I was headed in the wrong direction.
Not quite a 2 day excursion, more like an extra 4 hours but still... now go ahead and laugh/downvote!
Odd
Noticed you didn't upvote either?!
Re: KISS = Keep it simple keep it stupid. Write Automated Test Cases
"but they're also denying 3rd party sites the ability to get traffic to keep those sites alive and well."
And that only makes sense if those sites have an entitlement to web traffic. Google is a 3rd party website that provides a list of other websites that it has indexed - conveniently for people who want an easy way to find other websites.
Google is not a public service, it's not paid for (for it's general list of results). Search engines used to operate on the basis that you submitted your website to their listing service, so if you weren't listed in e.g. Yahoo - tough.
As far as I know Google was the first to revolutionise that and automatically create it's index - it does not mean you are entitled to be listed - it just means they became the best at doing listings because they saved you the hassle of registering.
As someone who can remember Web 1.0, this kind of action just makes me want to bang my head on the desk.
They should just create a google.eu site for search with nothing on it. Anyone who wants to be listed has to fill in a form and wait 24 hours for Google to index it - like the good old days...
Re: Search results
Probably something to do with the fact that "Almunia's office told Google in mid-December that it must convince its rivals that it competes fairly in the web search market"
So, do you think Google is capable of convincing Microsoft and its proxies that it competes fairly? Or do you think this is handing a golden opportunity to Microsoft to basically settle a score with a competitor by getting them fined a few million €'s?
Let's not lose sight of the fact that Google is not blocking competitors. It provides a 'list' of relevant search results- by definition a list has a "1st" result and then is followed by others. How Google determines what should be first is entirely their own decision by their own algorythm - they are not charging for the service!*
This is fight to be No. 1 (or in Microsofts case, just to f*ck with a rival as usual) and rather than focus on competing for that spot, some competitors want Google to favour them.
*I believe Google was accused of doing something funny with advertising keywords too - there is where any EU investigation should be focused, if true - but not on a free service that doesn't actually charge anything.
Re: Disrespectful to investors
I'm not interested in defending Mark Zuckerberg but it's odd isn't it, the very mentality that built Facebook's success - that made investors want to invest - those investors are now saying he shouldn't have.
They seem to be saying, "Well done on fostering a culture that contributes to me making a lot of money. Now please stop doing that and focus on edifying us!"
Annoyed, in Kent
Great, a TV License grants the right to rant to your newspaper of choice... such a bargain!
But wait, since it's all "up front and known about" perhaps that means the BBC will answer to FIOA requests...?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/bbc_is_private_go_away/
That's a no as well then... up front my arse! If they want to be treated as a private organisation then let them do it without depending on a government granted monopoly handout.
