Posts by silent_count

How to speed up the process

We should make every bit of legislation include even a minor pay raise for pollies. Then we'd see legislation being passed so quickly they'd put the "Fast & Furious" franchise to shame.

Ok. Let's end this now. Google bought Waze for 1.3 billion. Does anyone think the people at Waze would have said "no" to 1.4 billion from Apple or MS or anyone else? Apple has a competing product and certainly had enough cash to make a higher offer but they chose not to.

The only way this is anticompetitive is in the same sense any acquisition is - it removes the acquired firm from the market.

I wonder if they could make..

... a moderately flexible forearm band whose outer surface is the touch screen, and:

- has a usable resolution.

- is rugged enough for the average consumer to wear/use.

- can have a thin and light enough battery so the whole device is like my mp3 player - so light you don't notice you're wearing it.

I doubt that bendable screen (or battery) tech is quite there yet but I could see something like this being popular.

The whole phone-in-a-wrist-watch thing will never be be more than a niche toy because the screen will never be big enough and it'll always be onerous to interact with due to it's size.

If the tables were turned

If it were a Chinese bloke who leaked info on the extent to which the Chinese government kept tabs on it's citizens before fleeing to the US, he'd be hailed as a courageous hero in the face of an oppressive government. He'd be doing the talk show circuit, garnering universal applause, and the yanks would sooner carpet bomb Hawaii than extradite him.

just 'cause

As an Aussie, I'm ok with Sony, Apple, et al gouging us just 'cause they can. However, turn-about's fair play, and all that. We should tax those same companies 99c in the dollar for whatever they charge above the US price. Why? Well. You know. Just' cause we can.

Shock news! Editor doesn't like it when people don't hire editors!

I will however concede his point that unedited writing tends to be less polished, but then almost everything on the internet is unedited . "Unedited" is not the same as "completely devoid of value" unless you're a fanatical grammar and or spelling nazi - which most of us aren't. And some of us are willing to give an aspiring authot the time of day even if they haven't received the blessing of a publishing house.

Not for nuthin'

Amongst the reference material I gathered while learning x86 assembly is a file called "386intel.txt", circa 1986, which is just as readable now as it was then. And, if it for some reason weren't, it would be trivial to write software to make it readable.

Not that I much care about future generations knowing the inner workings of ancient CPUs, but I guess the moral of the story is: create files in propriety formats at your own risk, if you care about them being readable in the future, that is.

I can see the future

Schadenfreude: (n) the reaction from the rest of the world after the Yanks start crying about "hostiles" using US government-mandated backdoors against them.

From the article: "As politicians pursue fairness [...]"

Sir Carr owes me a new keyboard.

Just incidentally, how many politicians choose to pay more tax than the absolute mimimum they're legally required to? Oh that's right, we're not talking about that are we. I wonder if they've ever heard the story about people in glass houses.

I can top that

From the article: "[VTOL] which *could* be in production by 2025."

Yeah, well then. My drug induced hallucination erm.. consumer grade VTOL *could* be in production by 2024. Get the headlines ready.

Waiting for answers

My questions are thus:

a) What will it cost? Maybe I phrased that badly. How much will it REALLY cost?

b) What will be delivered for that price tag?

c) Why is spending that amount on networking infrastructure better than:

c-1) letting the tax payers keep their share of (a)

c-2) improving our hospital or education systems.

c-3) housing the homeless.

I've yet to hear adequate answers from either side of politics. And I suspect that neither side can.

The Labour party threw it out there at the last election to demonstrate that they've got vision beyond, "vote for us 'cause we're not the Liberals". The Liberals bought into the game to show they've got just as much of this nation-building, "vision" stuff as the other guys. Neither party gives a shit about nation building, or broadband - they both care about winning elections. Now it's just another political football, with both sides saying they've got the best strategy to win the NBN game. Apparently nobody's asking if we should be playing the game at all.

Bog standard economics

1) Employers whine about lack of people who are skilled at producing $WIGITs

2) Government imports/schools educate more $WIGIT creators.

3) Larger pool of employees allows employers to drive down wages.

4) Less money spent on employing $WIGIT creators allows management to pocket excess...

5) profit!

If there really is a skills shortage, show me the corresponding increase in $WIGIT creators' wages. If you can't, then shut up about about the damn skills shortage.

One comment with no snark.

Well done them for giving their time to benefit a charity.

Just no

Sorry but, well meaning though they are, the ACLU is barking up the wrong tree with this one. The phone's owner should decides which ROM/OS version they run. The problem the ACLU should be attacking is impediments to the user (a) switching ROMs, and (b) switching carriers.

If the phone's owner could switch ROMs without fear of invalidating their warranty then issue of updating the OS gets taken away from the carriers - who have a vested interest in dragging their heels. As has been pointed out, why provide updates for free when you can make people buy a new phone to get the latest OS?

And if carrier lock-ins were made illegal, then the carriers would have to "differentiate" by providing timely updates rather than by shovelling crapware upon a captive audience.

lose-lose

However much the RIAA gains from "winning" this case, they lose in good will amongst their customers (assuming they had any to begin with).

I have no affiliation with ReDigi but it seems like they were trying to do the right thing by all concerned.

Encryption

Doesn't breaking even trivial encryption violate the DCMA? For example, the encryption used to send data to and from the mobile phone towers, and that protecting any data stored on the phone.

IANAL. I honestly don't know the answer but it seems they trot that line about breaking encryption out every time someone mods their console.

Welcome to OZ

We welcome your patient lawyers

for ours is a vast, sunburnt country,

with friendly people and sparkling shores,

and plenty of crocodiles, sharks, jellyfish, snakes and spiders,

which haven't been fed recently.

A city called "petabyte"

A petabyte of data has got to be predominatly "media" (audio/video) because there's no way average joe takes up that much space with, for example, emails, or source code or holiday snaps, or anything other than "media". So lets call it like it is: 0.95 petabytes of porn and 5 terabytes consisting of every thing they've ever written AND every picture or video they've ever taken AND every email they've either sent or received AND every program they've ever installed. And the thing about "media" is that it's essentially write-once - you're not going to be making changes to your "Terminator.avi", or "Billie Jean.mp3".

So my solution is to store your petabyte of data on tablets. Not the kind you buy from Dell or Apple. The kind make out of clay.

Build houses out of your wall-sized tablets. Arrange your kilobytes and megabytes into city blocks. Then offer them as free housing to the homeless, who then have a vested interest in making sure your data centre is secure. Sure, the read/write speeds would be terrible and it would be hideously expensive. On the plus side though, your data centre would end the world's homelessness problem. And you could use one house in that city to store a PC with a couple of 3TB HDDs to store all of the re-writeable/personal storage you'd actually use.

Is this for real?

Sandbox or not, I still can't believe they're serious about wanting browsers to download and execute arbitrary code. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, like maybe Google is getting their April Fools Day gag out of the way early this year.

Either that or this is going to wind up being the poster child for the phrase, "what could possibly go wrong?"